In the winter of 1910, the Salonikan Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Tribuna Libera published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers to decide where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: nationalism, assimilation, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press of the empire in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was “bordering on fratricide,” threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.1
La Tribuna Libera, 11 November 1910 and 25 November 1910. The Newspaper published the various responses it received from Jewish leaders and laymen alike over the next several months
In the years between the Young Turk Revolution and World War I, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire were on the brink of a real communal crisis, epitomized in the dilemma with which they were faced: what should be their role within the reforming empire, both as Ottoman citizens and as Jews? Like their neighbors, Ottoman Jews struggled to navigate the challenging new reality that promised universal rights and privileges for all of the empire's religious and ethnic groups at the same time that ethnic and proto-nationalist sentiments were on the rise. On the one hand, Ottoman Jews sought to stake a claim in the new Ottoman body politic, adopting Ottomanism as an ideology as well as actively participating in shaping the new Ottoman civic life. On the other hand, this period coincided with the community's progressive exposure to and reception of the ideas and institutions of European Zionism.
Ottoman Jews throughout the empire responded variously to these contradictory appeals. For many, Zionism was considered a betrayal of the “beloved” Ottoman homeland, particularly unjustifiable coming on the heels of civic enfranchisement and the optimistic new dawn promised by the revolution. Others, however, saw Zionism as both a legitimate expression of Jews' collective cultural aspirations and a fortuitous boon that would bring tremendous economic and social utility to their beloved empire, consciously divorcing their adoption of Zionism from the territorial-political aspirations of the European Zionist movement. Indeed, the historians Aron Rodrigue, Esther Benbassa, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein have argued eloquently for a unique “Ottoman Zionism”—one that stood distinct from European Zionism in its support for cultural Hebraism without the corresponding separatist political aims.2
Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue argue for additional causal factors for Sephardic support for Zionism: internal communal political rivalries and the reaction of the disenfranchised classes of the community. See Esther Benbassa, ha-Yahadut ha-otomanit bayn hitma
arevut la-tziyonut, 1908–1920 (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 1996); Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
A defining feature of Ottoman Zionism was this insistence on the fluid merger and reconciliation, rather than the clash or inherent incompatibility, of the aims of Ottomanism and Zionism.
While I take preceding scholarship on Ottoman Zionism as an important starting point, this article contributes to it in two directions. First, I bring to the forefront the broader Ottoman political and social context that shaped Sephardi Jews' understandings of both Ottomanism and Zionism: they were not closed, unchanging categories for Ottoman Jews but, rather, evolving in dynamic relationship not only vis-à-vis each other but also under direct influence of the fluid turn of events in the empire at large. In part, I argue that the increasing appeal of Zionism that emerges after 1908 among the empire's Sephardim was closely related to the failures of the Young Turk Revolution itself. Stated differently, Zionism did not gain adherents inasmuch as Ottomanism lost them.
While promising equality and promoting a form of Ottoman nationalism, the revolution's architects left intact much of the communal institutional framework of the millet system that promoted and upheld particularism. As a result, the post–1908 Ottoman Empire was characterized by rivalry among the empire's various ethnic and religious groups, and the relative rise or fall of one group vis-à-vis its competition was considered evidence of incomplete Ottomanism. It was precisely this failure of the empire to produce the expected fruits of “liberty, equality, and brotherhood” that came to weigh increasingly in the Ottomanism-versus-Zionism equation.3
For an in-depth study of this period, see my “A ‘Shared Homeland’ and Its Boundaries: Empire, Citizenship, and the Origins of Sectarianism in Late Ottoman Palestine, 1908–1913” (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., 2003).
Second, for Palestine's Sephardim and Maghribim,4
“Sephardim” refers to Jews whose ancestors fled or were expelled from Iberia by 1492 who maintained a distinct Hispanic culture, whereas North African Jews (known as Maghribim, some of whom were originally Sephardim) were Arabized in culture and language.
reconciling the demands of Ottomanism and Zionism was particularly acute. In contrast to their fellow Sephardim in other parts of the empire, the Palestinian Sephardim were surrounded by “practical” Zionism, witnessing immigration, land settlement, and the establishment of Hebraist nationalist cultural institutions. Some Palestinian Sephardim (including anti-Zionist ideologues) were even quite active as “practical Zionists” themselves, serving as middlemen in land purchases and as intermediaries for the immigrant Zionist community, provincial Ottoman government, and local Palestinians.
Thus, Palestinian Sephardim not only found themselves straddling Ottomanism and Zionism as ideological commitments. They also had to deal with the visible repercussions of the tension between the two—most notably, the rise of an Arabist movement and a proto-national Palestinian consciousness that emerged hand in hand with the altering landscape of the homeland. Intermittent clashes between Arab villagers and immigrant Jewish colonists, increasingly regular anti-Zionism in the Arabic press, and significant pressures to “prove” one's Ottomanism all contributed to the distinct response of the Palestinian Sephardi communities. The complex ways in which Palestinian Sephardi Jews negotiated these tensions alternately put them at odds with the official Zionist movement, Ashkenazi (European) Zionist immigrants in Palestine, fellow Ottoman Sephardim, Christian and Muslim Palestinian neighbors, Ottoman officials, and each other.
On the one hand, a significant component of the Palestinian Sephardim viewed Palestine as a “shared homeland” (moledet meshutefet) for both Jews and Arabs, and their activities and outlook reflected this. This is not surprising, given that Palestinian Sephardim were largely acculturated and integrated into local society, speaking Arabic, working and living with their neighbors, and accepting their place in the local-imperial system.5
For example, see the memoirs of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, Ya
akov Yehoshu
a, Elie Eliachar, and Avraham Elmaliach.
On the other hand, Sephardim insisted on preserving communal boundaries that were becoming increasingly “national” in nature. Thus, by the eve of World War I, the Sephardi community in Palestine was well into a process of socio-cultural “de-nativization” and political marginalization.
HAVIVA OTOMANIA—BELOVED OTTOMANIA
Into the 20th century, Sephardi Jews by and large regarded the Ottoman Empire with a great deal of gratitude and affection as their historical savior. The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II's open-arms policy toward the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish refugees in the 15th century was an integral part of Ottoman Sephardi collective memory, so much so that early-20th-century attempts by the Spanish government to renew its ties with Sephardi Jews were met with public scorn and disdain.6
For examples, see ha-Ḥerut, 19 August 1910, and the speech by Simha Solomon, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (hereafter, CAHJP), Jerusalem, IL/Sa/IX/14.
In addition, economic, social, and political competition from the Armenian and Greek communities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the 19th century had pushed the Jewish communities of the empire from their earlier privileged position. The consequence of this competition, argues the historian Hasan Kayali, was that “the Jews saw the best protection of their interests in making common cause with the Muslim elements within a secular and constitutional Ottoman state.”
7 Hasan Kayali, “Jewish Representation in the Ottoman Parliaments,” in Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Avigdor Levy (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1994), 511.
Both historic and socioeconomic factors easily translated into enthusiastic support for the July 1908 Young Turk Revolution, and the approximately 400,000 Jews of the empire were consistently among the most loyal supporters of the new regime.8
For the reaction of the Jewish community in Istanbul, see Esther Benbassa, “Les ‘Jeunes Turcs’ et les Juifs, 1908–1914,” in Mélanges offerts à Louis Bazin par ses disciples, collègues et amis, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Rémy Dor (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992).
The Young Turk Revolution promised sweeping political and social reforms, modernization, and universal rights. Among other things, the 1876 Ottoman constitution was reactivated; parliamentary elections were held; and equality among the religious communities was reaffirmed. Although the Ottoman sultan had at least twice previously declared equality among his subjects, those declarations had done little to dent the hierarchical confessionalism—or “institutionalized difference”
9 I take this term from Aron Rodrigue, “Interview with Nancy Reynolds,” Stanford Humanities Review 5, 1 (1996). Rodrigue states that “difference was not horizontally eradicated but vertically integrated into the political system.”
—that existed between Muslims and non-Muslims. Now, for the first time, citizenship rights matched this latest formulation, and there is extensive evidence indicating that a notion of Ottoman nationalism that transcended religious or ethnic variables was envisioned and articulated on the grassroots level.
In Palestine's major cities, public support for the revolution was profound, and it immediately set forth far-reaching political and social changes. More than a dozen new newspapers in Arabic, Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, and Greek served to give both forum and substance to the revolutionary Ottomanist public sphere. Far from the “ephemeral honeymoon” described by scholars, late Ottoman Palestine would grapple with the revolution, its opportunities, and its shortcomings, until the end of the empire itself.
Press accounts as well as memoirs relay that the Sephardi and Maghribi Jews celebrated in the initial public fêtes alongside elements of the Muslim and Christian Arab communities. According to one paper's account sent in by its Jerusalem correspondent, on the day Jerusalem's governor Ekrem Bey read the official declaration of the promised reforms, the Sephardim arrived with a Torah scroll cover, dancing and singing, waving swords, and shooting into the air. At one of the celebrations in Jaffa organized by the Jewish communities,
The service began, and the Sephardi rabbi went up on the stage and blessed the sultan, and everyone answered, “Amen.”… Abrevaya spoke in Turkish, about the great duty to Turkey [sic].“ From now,” he said, “I will no longer be embarrassed before Europe that I am a Turkish subject.”… Tables were placed among the crowd and speakers got up and down, and all the magical feelings were expressed without hiding. Clearly the Jewish speakers took a place at the front of the speakers, but much of what went on there was a general celebration, and most of the celebrants were not Jews. The atmosphere was so nice that even now, three days later, it is still felt.10
ha-Olam, 4 September 1909.
This early revolutionary excitement went hand in hand with the growing emergence of an Ottoman civil society in Palestine, comprising organizations (such as the Freemasons, chambers of commerce, and others) that sought to promote local reform and development within constitutional contours. Members of all three religions took part in creating a new social network that aspired to transcend communal boundaries and aimed at the economic, cultural, and political betterment of Palestine and the Ottoman Empire. This Palestinian Ottoman modernizing class came not only from the notables but also from the white-collar-middle to lower-middle classes, who had received liberal educations and belonged to the free professions, were attuned to the advances of the West, and were determined to advance the interests of their homeland. Christians, Jews, and Muslims of this stratum had studied in similar schools (where they acquired secular tools such as foreign languages, accounting, and geography), belonged in some cases to the same clubs, and worked and lived together. Regional and local government institutions took on greater importance and contributed to the growing sense of a purpose that transcended ethnic and religious particularity.
For their part, Sephardi and Maghribi Jews became eager participants in efforts to transform and modernize the empire. Within weeks of the declaration of the constitution, elements within the Jewish community began organizing to educate their co-religionists about the new constitutional regime as well as to mobilize them for participation in the upcoming parliamentary elections. In the first public meeting on the topic held in Jerusalem, hundreds of men and women gathered to hear Yitzhak Levi lecture on the constitution.11
Levi was born in Anatolia and had been a government agronomist before working for the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) and, from 1904 on, for the Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank.
Levi criticized the ancien régime, talked about the background of the revolution in Salonika, and read out loud relevant sections of the constitution, taking care to explain the significance of each passage to the crowd.
12 ha-Po
el ha-tza
ir, July–August 1908.
In his speech, Levi clearly embraced the Ottomanist ruling ideology, arguing that in the aftermath of the revolution, “we are all citizens of the Ottoman nation [ha-umah ha-Otomanit], and it is incumbent upon us to break out of our special associations.” He called on all Jews to learn Turkish and Arabic and to participate fully in Ottoman Palestinian public life. His speech must have been rousing, for several other Ottoman citizens present nominated Levi as the Jewish candidate for the Ottoman Parliament.
Although ultimately failing to earn one of three parliamentary slots, Levi initiated an extraordinary exchange between himself and the new governor of Jerusalem, Subhi Bey. First published in the Hebrew press in the fall of 190813
and later published as a bilingual French–Arabic pamphlet, Levi further fleshed out the contours of a liberal, reformist vision of Ottomanist Palestine, proposing a series of political and economic reforms to be enacted in the province and demanding the governor's accountability to the people. This is a unique document as it captures the new dynamics ushered in by the revolution, where pasha and citizen would be equally endowed with new rights and implicated with new responsibilities:
We are thirsty for progress and ameliorations…. The cities and the rural areas are in the saddest situation. With the exception of a very few areas, agriculture and breeding are almost abandoned everywhere. Industry and trade are hardly developed. The urban and rural administration leaves much to be desired. The legislation is full of obstacles. The court system and justice is far too blind in this country…. Before anything, Excellency, retain this well: if the people were nothing to date, it is decided [they will] be everything in the future.14
Israeli State Archives (hereafter, ISA), Jerusalem, 67/p533:1491; italics added.
Similar faith in the future of Ottomanism was expressed by Levi's political rival and fellow Jewish communal leader Albert Antébi.
15 Antébi was born in Damascus to an important rabbinical family. He was educated in Paris and worked in Palestine for the Alliance Israélite Universelle until World War I.
Although not utopian, Antébi clearly understood the transformative and modernizing potential of the revolution:
We are on a great journey to transform the entire social life of a degenerate and oppressed people, and to unify all these heterogeneous nations which to date have been driven by confessional beliefs made to divide and not to unite…. Freedom will undergo convulsions, equality will suffer crises, we will have a Moslem Parliament, moderate, reactionary perhaps, but we will preserve our constitution.16
Antébi to Henri Franck, 28 September 1908. He was director of the AIU's vocational school in Jerusalem: Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (hereafter, AAIU), Paris, Israel-VIII.E.25.
Antébi advocated a “sincere fraternity with the natives” that would promote industry, agriculture, commerce, development, and public services. Despite the fact that the Ottoman Jewish community was numerically a minority in the empire, “our weapon,” Antébi wrote to a colleague in the capital, “will be our principles, a sincere loyalty to the Ottoman homeland, collaboration devoted to political and economic regeneration and remaining true to the historic genius of our Judaism—tolerant, egalitarian, and compassionate.”
17 Antébi to Isaac Fernandez, Istanbul, 2 September 1908, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter, CZA), Jerusalem, CM434/13.
Such a view was to be echoed throughout the Sephardi Jerusalemite press (El Liberal and ha-Ḥerut, its Hebrew arm, and the rival newspaper El Paradizo). The inaugural edition of the newspaper El Liberal heralded the era “in which all the population of the empire trills with joy… which marks the beginning of a new life for all Ottomans.”18
El Liberal, 29 January 1909.
Throughout the period under discussion, the Sephardi press consistently supported the ideals of Ottomanism, and functioned as mouthpieces promoting Jewish participation in public life. Unlike the other Jewish newspapers that came out of Palestine that showed an only intermittent interest in non-Jewish affairs, the Sephardi newspapers were well informed about and concerned with Ottoman and Arab issues. They regularly featured articles on Ottoman political life as well as provincial administration and served as a bridge to the Turkish and Arabic-language press, often translating articles for its readership. As such, they were to serve as centrally important forums for public debates over the future of the community.
SEPHARDI OTTOMANISM AND ITS LOCAL ZIONIST CRITICS
The sincere pro-Ottoman expressions and activities of Levi, Antébi, and the Sephardi public at large posed a worrisome development to both the moderate and radical elements of the local European Zionist movement. According to Arthur Ruppin, head of the World Zionist Organization's Palestine Office in Jaffa, Sephardi Jews were not expressing sufficient Zionist fervor in the public demonstrations in the weeks after the Young Turk Revolution. Instead, they were acting as “Ottoman citizens of the Jewish faith.”19
Ruppin, 8 August 1908, CZA, L2/49I.
In fact, Ruppin reported, several Sephardi community leaders had gone so far as to prevent Zionist symbols from being displayed in public.
20 ha-Po
el ha-tza
ir angrily reported that at one parade in Jaffa, an important Sephardi community leader pulled the Zionist flag out of someone's hands and tore it up.
While Ruppin was merely annoyed at the Sephardim, their behavior and outlook provoked sharp rebuke from the radical elements among the new Russian Zionist immigrants in Palestine. Unlike earlier immigrants, these newcomers rarely took upon themselves Ottoman citizenship, and their orientation toward Jewish nationalism and Zionism was rather dogmatic. In a blistering public attack, Yosef Aharonowitz, the editor of ha-Po
el ha-tza
ir, derided Levi's Ottomanism, expressing deep concern that a Zionist official's own Zionism was in doubt. Like Ruppin, Aharonowitz declared that Levi and his allies were “assimilationists” and, furthermore, that Levi had divided the Jewish community between Ottomans and foreigners, another blatant example of the Sephardi Ottomanists' incomprehensible “limitless patriotism.” Most disturbing to Aharonowitz was the fact that, in his speech, Levi had claimed that “a new nation [umah] has been born in Turkey [sic], the Ottoman nation, and we all are sons of the same nation.”
21 ha-Po
el ha-tza
ir, July–August 1908.
“We the Jews,” Levi reportedly had said, “must leave behind our sectarianism; there is now no difference between Jew, Christian, and Muslim.” For Aharonowitz, this was an inexcusable exaggeration of civic equality.
The conflict between Levi and Aharonowitz was a conflict between differing visions of Ottoman public life and its relationship to Jewish communal and Zionist national life. For Aharonowitz and the Zionist radicals of the so-called “New Yishuv,” participation in the new Ottoman political system was a good strategy, but it was devoid of any inherent value.22
Israel Kolatt, “The Organization of the Jewish Population,” in Studies on Palestine in the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975). Kolatt argues that the entire pro-Zionist yishuv in this period was “strategically” Ottoman, choosing to conceal their Zionist aims for a long-term strategy. This was certainly the strategy adopted by the Russian Zionists within the WZO, as detailed in Chana Weiner, “Ha-Mediniyut ha-tziyonit bi-turkiya ad 1914,” in Toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi bi-eretz yisrael mi-az ha-
aliya ha-rishona: ha-tkufah ha-
otomanit, vol. 1, ed. Israel Kolatt (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2000), but it does not apply to the Sephardi and Maghribi communities, even the Zionists among them.
In this utilitarian approach, the political enfranchisement of Palestinian Jews would allow them to push for separatist Zionist aims within the framework of the expected proto-nationalist campaigns for decentralization. They denounced ideological Ottomanism and derided the Jews' feelings of brotherhood—in their eyes, this was nothing more than a “tendency to be more Marxist than Marx.”
23 ha-Po
el ha-tza
ir, July–August 1908.
The new Zionist immigrants, who numbered several thousand of Palestine's approximately 50,000–70,000 Jews, largely saw their political future as distinct from that of the Ottoman Empire.24
Hovevei Zion reported that the number of Zionist immigrants (cumulative) was 10,986: ha-Ḥerut, 30 May 1910. Demographic statistics for late Ottoman Palestine are notoriously unreliable. Ottoman census records put the Jewish community in southern Palestine at around 32,000, although this does not include foreign citizens, which could bring the total Jewish population up to 50,000 by 1914. The Sephardi and Maghribi communities were a majority of the Jewish population until the 1880s, when they were irreversibly surpassed by Jews of European origin. In Jerusalem alone, the 1905 Ottoman census listed 6,800 Sephardi Jews and 1,100 Maghribi Jews with Ottoman citizenship (60% of the Jewish Ottoman population of the city), according to
Uziel O. Schmelz, “The Population of Jerusalem's Urban Neighborhoods According to the Ottoman Census of 1905,” Scripta hierosolytmitana 35 (1994). Safed and Tiberias were other important centers for Jewish life in the vilayet of Beirut.
In return, Ottomanist Sephardi Jews viewed these European Zionists resident in Palestine as troublemakers who threatened the communal equilibrium in the Ottoman Empire. While seeking to aid in absorbing immigrants who were victims of persecution in Russia and Romania, Sephardim feared for the political and social repercussions.
Early after the declaration of the constitution, Antébi had expressed his concerns about the danger of particularist Jewish interests, particularly of the foreign Zionist variety. Antébi thought that the Zionists would provoke a Muslim, nationalist, and anti-Semitic response based on their aspirations and tactics; a natural response to such provocations, he argued, was that “[i]f I was a Muslim Turkish deputy, I would take the first opportunity to agitate for restrictive measures against Jewish activity in Palestine.”25
Antébi to Franck, 17 November 1908, AAIU, Israel-VIII.E.25.
He also worried that “our German autocrats and Zionist reactionaries… will revive tsarist-kaiserly hegemony” in the community, as opposed to the Francophone, liberal, Ottomanist outlook he himself advocated.
26 Ibid. to president of the AAIU, 6 September 1908, CZA, CM434/13.
Instead, Antébi proposed:
I desire to make the conquest of Zion economically and not politically; I want to cherish the historical and spiritual Jerusalem and not the modern temporal one; I want to be a Jewish deputy in the Ottoman Parliament and not one in the Hebrew temple on Moriah…. The future is with the liberal Ottoman patriotic mission, active and devoted. All our Jews—and the colonists especially—must embrace it without delay and without reserve.27
Ibid. to Franck, 4 August 1908, AAIU, Israel-VIII.E.25.
This position earned Antébi the abiding hatred of the radicals of the Zionist movement, as well as the suspicion of the more moderate Zionist officials. The newspaper ha-Tzvi asserted that Antébi was “the greatest enemy of Zionism who cries that the Zionists are dangerous enemies of the Ottoman state,” and the editor of the paper, Itamar Ben Avi, launched a public campaign to discredit and isolate Antébi.28
A. S. Yahuda to Wolffsohn, 16 June 1909, based on ha-Tzvi, nos. 183–88, CZA, L1/29.
However, the Sephardi press (including the pro-Zionist papers) publicly supported Antébi, arguing not only that he was a significant contributor to the welfare of the Jewish community, but that he also expressed a legitimate Ottomanist voice; furthermore, the Sephardi press demanded a lawsuit against
ha-Tzvi, arguing that it was a newspaper of anti-Jewish atheists and provocateurs. On this issue, as on others, the Sephardi community did not walk hand in hand with the European immigrant Zionists. Instead, they had their own interests, concerns, and red lines that were shaped by imperial Ottoman, local Palestinian, and internal Jewish dynamics.
OTTOMANISM: THE CAMPAIGN FOR COMMUNAL EQUALITY AND RIVALRY
Crucially, the broad Palestinian attitude toward Ottomanism ranged from initial support for centralization and the collapse of communal boundaries to eventually seeing it as equality under a quasi-federalist banner, with each community earning a place at the table. The constitution endowed all tax-paying, male Ottomans equal political rights, but from the first parliamentary elections in the fall of 1908, these translated in effect into communal, millet rights.29
See Stojan Makedonski, “La Revolution Jeune-Turque et les Premieres Elections Parlementaires de 1908 en Macedoine et en Thrace Orientale,” Etudes Balkaniques 10, 4 (1974).
In turn, rivalry among religious communities became a significant undercurrent of Ottomanist discourse. Rights and privileges were measured not only against absolute standards of Ottomanist civic identity but, more important, against those enjoyed by the other religious and ethnic groups of the empire.
The rapidly changing political and social landscape made it necessary to ensure that one's community was not left behind. In that spirit, a grassroots organization called the Society of Ottoman Jews (SOJ) was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution. The organization initially defined its purpose as working for the cultural and civil incorporation of Jews into Ottoman imperial and Palestinian civic life, but in actuality its efforts centered on ensuring that Jews received their fair share in the new political reality. Archival documents speak of the organizers' clear intentions to use this new arm as a lobby with Jerusalem's governor.30
See letters from the va
ad ha-zmani and from David Yellin, 17 September 1908. CZA, A153/140.
Yitzhak Levi, David Yellin,31
Yellin was a noted Hebraist educator, the son of an Ottomanized East European father and a Baghdadi mother. Yellin was elected to the Jerusalem City Council in 1910 and later to the provincial council (meclis-i umumi). He was also a member of the Jerusalem branch of the Committee of Union and Progress.
and Haim Miklin were the main driving forces behind the organization. While the aims of the organization were to unite all Palestinian Jews with Ottoman citizenship irrespective of
edah (ethnic community), it was in fact a largely Sephardi and Maghribi organization. According to newspaper reports, the society was active in Jerusalem in the half-year after the Young Turk Revolution, and its meetings at the Yohanan Ben Zakkai and Ohel Moshe synagogues regularly drew hundreds of Jews.
32 El Paradizo, February–March 1909: El Liberal, 9 February 1909, 16 March 1909.
The society's aims, limitations, and even its guiding rhetoric all reveal an eager adoption of Ottomanism as a way to safeguard newly granted equal rights as well as to promote the growth of the Jewish community and to encourage its active participation in all aspects of Ottoman political and civic life. One of the aims of the SOJ was to unite the Jewish Ottomans of Palestine—and by doing so, to shape as well as represent the “Jewish Ottoman nation.” At the time, it was not really possible to speak of a united Jewish community that had succeeded in breaking through the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political barriers. As a result, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews were “like strangers.”33
El Liberal, February 1909.
Indeed, it was this incredible diversity and disorganization that prevented the Jewish community from consolidating its external political power (in elections, for example), on the one hand, while on the other hand allowing minority groups to fragment the community internally. Although the SOJ did not succeed in placing itself at the head of the Jewish community, it did highlight the perception that it was critical for the Jews to unite if they were to have any political clout whatsoever in the new reality.
Like many at the time, the SOJ used the language of dormancy to describe the Ottoman Jewish community. The revolution had succeeded in stirring the Jews' awareness to the need to involve themselves more actively in Ottoman life:
The renewed Turkey [sic] is reborn! All the peoples who are within it are showing signs of rebirth, everyone moves, sways, and unites according to the laws, in the name of the pillar of his rights, in favor of breathing fully from the political freedom…. And the Jews? We the Jews, to our sorrow…are too weak to take any positive step, any real action, any deed that will be for the good of the nation.34
Ḥavatzelet, 4 September 1908.
The time had come, according to the SOJ, to “strengthen our status here, to defend our rights, to demand our rights and claim them, and to prepare our people” as new participants in the government.
The society promoted five aims in its founding protocol: (1) to spread knowledge of the laws of the land among Jews; (2) to defend the civil and political rights of all Jews; (3) to defend the personal rights of members of the society; (4) to appoint Jewish representatives in every state institution; and (5) to increase the number of Jews who were Ottoman citizens (including registering those without any other citizenship or protégé status).
35 To those ends, the society actively undertook citizenship drives (Ottomanization, or
hitotmanut),
36 On the failure of mass Ottomanization efforts, see Avraham Elmaliach, Eretz yisrael ve-suriya be-milhemet ha-
olam ha-rishona, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: n.p., 1927).
promoted civic education such as offering evening classes in the Turkish language and providing Hebrew translations of Ottoman laws, and promoted participation in elections.
The most significant effort taken by the SOJ, however, was the establishment of a free legal-aid unit that would protect Jewish rights. In a flyer made up to appeal for donations in establishing this legal-aid unit, the SOJ appealed to the sense of uncertainty and vulnerability that underlay the transition to the constitutional period. “Which of you, dear brothers, does not feel the need for a Jewish lawyer in Jerusalem?” the society asked, citing the growth of the Jewish community in Jerusalem and, as a result, the rise in complaints against it. As the SOJ told its members, “We suffer here because there is no one with strength and talent to demand a trial; there is no one to defend our souls and property and prosecute our insults and fight for our honor.”37
In the aftermath of the arrest and sentencing of a Jewish baker, the Jewish lawyer Malchiel Mani of Hebron was commissioned by the SOJ.
38 El Paradizo, 23 March 1909.
Thus, the SOJ became the address of communal defense, and the organs of the Sephardic community often appealed to the society to intervene to correct injustices or to stand up for the Jewish community. In this atmosphere of increasing rivalry over each community's civic status, born in the uncertain aftermath of attempted mandated equality, even favors shown to certain communities took on the appearance of inalienable rights. Under the headline, “Honor de los judios!” El Paradizo recounted an incident in March 1909 when the SOJ intervened to demand a performance by the Ottoman military band for the Jewish holiday of Purim, since the band had performed for a previous Christian holiday. The reason for this demand, the author wrote, was “so that we will not be considered less than the Christians, we who are many more than they in the city. Forward, brothers, a little bit of force and everything can be accomplished in order to save our honor before everything!”39
El Paradizo, 12 March 1909.
From the beginning of 1909, the SOJ was repeatedly pressed to speak out against the growing number of anti-Zionist articles appearing in the Arabic-language press, and its leadership was urged to establish an Arabic newspaper to “show how much good our brothers bring to their patria, and how great is the part that the Jews take in the economic development of Palestine.”40
El Liberal, 23 March 1909.
In fact, the SOJ's leadership had close ties with the local Zionist movement, and it quickly shed its purely Ottoman agenda and began to concern itself with the foreign national Jews in Palestine, as well.
41 ha-Tzvi, vol. 25, no. 130, Spring 1909.
Indeed, this tension between its civic mission (protecting the rights and promoting civic involvement of Jewish Ottomans) and its particularist mission (protecting Jews of all nationalities) would figure prominently in polarizing the Sephardic community and in elevating tensions between Jewish Ottomans and their neighbors.
In a scathing editorial published in the Sephardic newspaper ha-Ḥerut, a writer taking the pen name “Ottoman” blamed the organization for losing the bulk of its membership due to its involvement in the Chief Rabbi affair (known as “el pleyto”) on behalf of the Panijelista camp (supported by the conservatives, the Ashkenazim, and the Zionists). Furthermore, he blamed the SOJ for installing partisan members on the Jerusalem City Council in the 1910 elections and for “mix[ing] us up with haters of the Muslims.” The author closed his article by declaring, “[T]hus, in the name of many of the Ottoman Jews, I hereby notify the SOJ that it has no right and justice to speak in the name of all the Jewish Ottoman people [am] in Jerusalem.”42
ha-Ḥerut, 4 February 1910.
The combative and aggressive attitude of the SOJ had resulted not only in its loss of legitimacy within the community but also in dire consequences for the people the society was supposed to protect. In an incident in which three Jews were sentenced to three weeks in prison, the intervention of the SOJ on their behalf caused the president of the tribunal to change the sentence to three months instead in response to “the creation of this Jewish society formed to intimidate us.”43
Antébi to Franck, 19 November 1909, AAIU, Israel-IX.E.27.
Antébi dismissed the organization, saying, “this Jewish Ottoman Palestinian society is incapable of naturalizing a single Jew or of delivering a single prisoner, but it has engendered anti-Semitism.”
44 As quoted in Elizabeth Antébi, L'homme du Sérail (Paris: Nil Éditions, 1996), 371.
By the summer of 1910 it finally was declared illegal.
45 ha-Ḥerut, 24 August 1910.
Despite its short life, the SOJ reflected some important currents of Sephardi Ottomanism—an eagerness to participate actively in the new Ottoman order with a concurrent nervousness about intercommunal rivalries and shifting political alliances, all against the backdrop of a real political and social vulnerability. Its failures also illustrate the weaknesses of the local Sephardic community. While the Sephardim themselves were largely Ottoman citizens, they were unable to prevail on the collective of immigrant Jews to adopt Ottoman nationality. They were also unable to build lasting political coalitions with their fellow Ottoman citizens. Furthermore, while the specific Zionism of the leadership was extremely controversial and contributed to the alienation of its membership, the Sephardi community was not strong or cohesive enough to guide the political direction of the Jewish community in Palestine. While the Sephardim would adopt certain aspects of Zionism that they found acceptable and ignore others they found undesirable, they would never have an influence on changing the political contours of the local Zionist movement or on neutralizing the growing clash with the local Arab population.
ZIONISM AS HEBRAISM
The Zionism of the Ottoman Sephardim was strongly shaped by cultural Hebraism and a Jewish collective consciousness, and Hebraist clubs and societies formed the bulk of grassroots Zionism in the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1903, the Jerusalem schoolteacher Avraham Elmaliach had founded Tze
irei Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Youth) to promote Hebrew as a spoken language among the city's young people. They offered free Hebrew lessons in the evenings and aided in efforts to start the first Hebrew preschool. According to Elmaliach, the organization involved about one hundred youth, including the future Ladino and Hebrew publishers, writers and translators Ben Zion Taragon and Shlomo Cherezli.
46 Interview with Avraham Elmaliach, Oral History Project—Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 17 December 1963.
These Hebrew-oriented youth were the main leaders of the “renaissance spirit” among the Sephardim. Hebraism was a response to perceived communal stagnation—a call to modernize the Jewish community while at the same time incorporating an authentic element of Jewish culture and identity. The Sephardim emphasized Hebraic and Judaic cultural and social renaissance, and while acknowledging the need for immigration to Palestine for persecuted Jews, there was no illusion that this was a necessary or desirable course for Ottoman Jewry itself. They argued that in turning to the Ottoman Empire, with its long tradition of tolerance and hospitality, European Jews were seeking a refuge and in return would bring it utility and material benefits concurrent with Ottoman interests. “The Zionists do not want to overcome or to conquer,” Elmaliach stated in his later role as editor of El Liberal; rather, “they are searching for a shawl, a coat, a place of rest.”47
El Liberal, 5 February 1909.
As a result, some Ottoman Jews insisted on the absolute compatibility between their Ottomanism and Zionism, claiming that Zionism was a real contribution to the rest of the Ottoman umah (nation). The rebirth of the Jewish people in its cultural, social, and economic dimensions would work to the benefit of the empire at large. This convergence of Ottoman and Jewish interests was duplicated in the language used by the press and was a central component of its outlook. The Sephardi press pushed a specifically Jewish–Palestinian–Ottomanist agenda, one that blended imperial outlooks with local Palestinian concerns, as well as a “national Jewish” outlook sympathetic to the Zionist movement while subtly distinguishing a divergent path. Sephardi Ottoman Palestinians had complex commitments and interests that were not neatly reconciled and that would have a direct implication for their sense of self and community.
For example, in the Sephardi Hebrew daily newspaper ha-Ḥerut, the editors, journalists, and readers often used the term “umah” interchangeably to signify the Sephardi Jewish community, the Jews of Palestine, the Jewish people in general, the people of Palestine, and the Ottoman nation broadly. That is to say, the people-nation was envisioned alternatively in ethno-linguistic terms, ethno-religious terms, civic-regional terms, and civic-imperial terms. It should therefore not be surprising that their political ideologies and activities might support these varying commitments at different times.
THE OTTOMANIST CRITIQUE OF ZIONISM
From the point of view of the central Ottoman government, it is clear that while it viewed political Zionism as a threat to its central authority and to the communitarian status quo in Palestine, it also did not consider most of its Jewish citizens to be these kinds of Zionists.48
For more detailed studies of the Ottoman government's official response to the Zionist movement as depicted in the archives of the Zionist movement, see Neville Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); and Weiner, “ha-Mediniyut ha-tziyonit.”
In fact, it is within these contours that Ottoman officials initially looked benignly on Zionism, emphasizing that as long as the Jews did not carry their Zionism in the political direction, they would continue to be considered loyal Ottomans.
49 ha-Ḥerut, 19 November 1909.
They viewed political Zionism as a danger imported by European, and largely Russian, Jews, supported by meddling European governments. During the spring 1911 debate on Zionism in the Parliament, Grand Vizier Ibrahim Hakki Pasha declared publicly: “Jewish Ottoman citizens who have never deviated even one inch from Ottomanist convictions will not be suspected of sharing views and fantasies of a few witless Zionists whom they themselves consider to be madmen.”
50 As quoted in Kayali, “Jewish Representation,” 513.
Rıza Tevfik Bey, a leading member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), was considered a close friend of the community and spoke often to Jewish organizations in the capital.51
Rıza Tevfik Bey studied at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Edirne and was said to speak Judeo-Spanish like a Sephardi Jew: ha-Olam, 3 March 1909.
He is reported to have supported Zionism to offer a shelter for persecuted Jews, due to the financial and labor capital it brought into the empire. He is quoted in the Jewish press as saying, “[W]e are lacking strong workers, honest people who busy themselves more with agricultural labor than with the politics of revolution.”
52 In this line of thought, “[Palestine] will be turned into a rich and fertile province that will lead to the success of Turkey [
sic].”
53 However, this approval was conditional, as he pointedly reminded his Jewish audiences: “if the Jews are moderate, the government will not oppose bringing them into the empire. But we do not need to forget that if the Jews make out of Zionism a political question…then a Jewish question will be created in Turkey [
sic] and its outcome will be very bitter.”
54 This argument over the character and aims of Zionism and its subsequent implications for Ottomanism stood at the crux of a series of protracted and bitter debates that took place in the Judeo-Spanish press, spanning from Salonika and Anatolia to Palestine and Egypt. On one side stood the Ottomanist Zionists who claimed that Ottomanism and Zionism were perfectly or very nearly compatible. On the other side stood Sephardi Ottomanist anti-Zionists—namely, Antébi in Palestine and prominent journalists in other parts of the empire such as David Fresco, Avraham Galante, and Alexander Ben-Giat.55
Editor of Meserit in Izmir.
This anti-Zionist group believed quite simply, in the words of Ben-Giat, that “Zionism is contrary to Ottoman patriotism.”56
Several other prominent Ottoman Jews denounced the Zionist movement in the Jewish and non-Jewish press. The Izmir poet Reuben Qattan wrote to
El Liberal to remind readers, “[B]efore everything we should live Ottoman lives, cultivate the language of the Ottomans, form an integral part of the Ottoman nation, and sincerely love the Ottoman patria.”
57 According to Qattan, “[W]e are Ottomans and nothing else.” If the Jews were to turn to work within the Ottoman Empire, they would be a factor for progress and prosperity in the land. “To work and to die for Turkey [
sic]—that should be our only and sacred duty.” But continuing to turn toward Zionism, Qattan warned, would be a “catastrophe” for the Jews, a forecast shared by others.
58 In Qattan's view, Zionism is not like lighting a match on Shabbat but, rather, like working on Yom Kippur—a far more unjustifiable and unpardonable sin.
In response to this early wave of Ottomanist anti-Zionism in the Sephardi press, the pro–Zionist Ottoman supporters denied that Zionism had any anti-Ottoman aims or repercussions. El Liberal derided Ben-Giat and sarcastically wrote that he “is showing himself more patriotic than Dr. Rıza Tevfik Bey, than Emmanuel Carasso [a Jewish Member of Parliament (MP) from Salonika], than Señor Nissim Mazliach [a Jewish MP from Izmir] and others who have all declared themselves in favor of Zionism, and he shows that he understands better than others what Zionism is.”59
Within weeks, a semiorganized campaign had sprung up to boycott the newspaper of the “enemies of Zionism” Alexander and Moshe Ben-Giat.60
Distributors refused to sell their newspaper, and even small communities joined in the struggle. “Long live the boycott! Down with the reactionaries!” crowed
El Liberal at the news. “They represented Zionism as a revolutionary organization, with unjust aims against the government. Miserable Ben-Giatim!” According to the paper, the consequences of the Ben-Giats' attack was already being felt—Armenian and Greek journals lately ridiculed and attacked Jews and Judaism, presumably inspired or emboldened by the internal Jewish feud.
Reuben Qattan's article, however, was considered a heavier, unexpected blow, since he was a renowned poet who wrote of his love toward Zion. In blunt language, El Liberal's editor Haim Ben-
Atar asserted that Qattan had no real sense of Zionism: “Zionism is in no way a contradiction to Ottomanism. On the contrary, the Jew can, thanks to glorious liberty, be a Jewish-Ottoman nationalist, like one can be Greek-Ottoman, Albanian-Ottoman, Armenian-Ottoman, and so forth. Our movement can go together with Ottomanism.”
61 Ibid., 10 September 1909.
In the end, Ben-
Atar urged Qattan to rethink his opposition and join hands with the Zionists, who would always be “faithful servants to our dear Ottoman patria!” The Jerusalem writer Yehuda Burla also jumped into the debate. According to Burla, Qattan did not understand that the Ottoman Zionists proposed national Zionism, not political Zionism (ha-Tziyonut ha-le
umit lo ha-medinit), and because of that distinction, enemies of Zionism did not see the Jewish people's needs clearly. “In short,” Burla wrote, “it will become clear to us how we must be Ottomans and something else in addition.”
62 ha-Ḥerut, 28 September 1909.
These verbal sparrings in the press were only a prelude to the virulent attacks that would later focus on David Fresco, labeled by ha-Ḥerut the “most dangerous internal back-stabber.”63
Fresco, as the editor of the Istanbul-based Judeo-Spanish mass newspaper
El Tiempo, was extraordinarily influential in the Ottoman Jewish world and came out squarely against the Zionist movement in September 1909. Fresco attacked the basic premise of Zionism, fiercely denying that the Jews were a nation/people (
am), saying they were a religious community (
edah) only. In a series of articles titled, “Is Zionism Compatible with Ottomanism?” Fresco accused Zionism of being primitive, exclusivist, utopian, and exploitative.
64 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “The Creation of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish Newspaper Cultures in the Russian and Ottoman Empires” (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., 1999), 117–18.
His sharpest criticism was aimed at the foreign Zionist representatives in Istanbul and the rest of the empire, who he said were “inciting” the Ottoman Jews against their religion and state:
I think the central leadership of Zionism is committing a huge crime in its desire to drag the Ottoman Jews after their crazy movement…. [T]he Zionist shelter must be in Turkey [sic] itself, and because of that Ottoman Jews cannot participate in this movement without being traitors in the eyes of their friends who belong to the other peoples….
The Zionist leaders, citizens of foreign countries, have no fear. They send emissaries to Turkey [sic] to spread their ideas among the Ottoman Jews and acquire members for their movement, without thinking for a second of the great damage they could cause them, because they will be considered traitors to their homeland.65
ha-Ḥerut, 19 January 1910.
He also accused the Zionist movement of deliberately watering down the true Zionist program for public consumption. In fact, Fresco's accusations had a great deal of truth to them, and one scholar has argued that the Zionist leadership generally sought to “camouflage at the time the political character of Zionism.”66
Weiner, “ha-Mediniyut ha-tziyonit,” 274.
The Zionist movement's official representative in Istanbul, Victor Jacobsohn, advised the movement's headquarters in Germany that “the most important thing is to stress that we do not have any separatist intentions, nor do we intend any plans for political action in the land.”
67 Jacobsohn to Wolffsohn, 14 January 1909, CZA, Z2/7.
This was translated into the official public-relations line for the Zionist movement among Ottoman Sephardim that would appeal to their desire for “creating a shelter, a cultural center for the Jewish nation in Palestine, [to work for] their rejuvenation in economy, physique, intellect and morality.”
In fact, this was reinforced by the Palestine-based Ruppin, who argued that it was best to set aside Zionism when approaching Ottoman Jewry, instead appealing to their “nationalist feelings” by promoting Jewish history associations, literature, sports, Hebrew-language courses, lectures on the Jewish colonization of Palestine and the Bezalel Art Academy, and other such Hebraist efforts.68
Ruppin to Wolffsohn, 15 July 1911, CZA, Z2/636.
As a result of their exposure to this Hebraist Zionism, the Palestinian Sephardim refused to recognize any connection with the political Zionism that Fresco described.
Ha-Ḥerut demanded that, despite all the good Fresco had contributed to Ottoman Jewish life in the past, he should be banned from the community.
69 ha-Ḥerut, 21 January 1910.
Zionism had no political aim that could harm Turkey, the editor maintained. Furthermore, Fresco's Zionist enemies claimed that his anti-Zionist tirade was nothing more than greedy self-interest. Along with several other Jewish and non-Jewish newspapers across the empire,
El Tiempo was subsidized by the Zionist movement. For eight months before his attacks, Fresco had received 200 francs per month in exchange for committing to work for the good of the Zionist movement, defined as promoting Jewish entry to the Ottoman Empire and Palestine and cancellation of Ottoman restrictions, and the revival of Hebrew.
70 He had agreed to print all articles he received, provided they were “suitable to the unity of Turkey”: ibid., 26 November 1909.
The Palestinian Sephardim refused to engage with the substance of Fresco's (and others') criticism, which quickly turned beyond the abstract betrayal of or utility to the Ottoman homeland and shifted to address the very real impact it would have on the other residents of Palestine. Fresco reminded his readers that Jews should neither sanctify nor monopolize Palestine, making it clear that doing so would only result in conflict between Jews and Arabs and between Jews, Christians, and Muslims:
The Ottoman Jews do not have, and will not have, another homeland other than the Ottoman homeland. Every part of the national land must be sacred to him without any difference…. [W]e the Jews do not have and never will have any other political ambition except for the Ottoman homeland.
To work against this truth is to betray the homeland (!!), betray the Ottoman Jews, since the land belongs to the Muslims, to the Christians, to the Jews, all of them partners and related in the same social bond…. All the Ottoman Jews and Arabs are related to each other and it is incumbent upon us to prevent this rebellion, to ban this disgrace and to take refuge from the catastrophe that can erupt on our heads.71
Exclamation points were inserted by the editor: ibid., 23 November 1910.
More pointedly, Fresco argued that the Eretz Israeli (Palestinian) delegate to the previous Zionist Congress in Hamburg had warned that “even the fallāḥ reads Die Welt,” and thus, any Palestinian peasant was aware of the Zionist movement's call to buy land for Jews in Palestine.72
Die Welt was the official newspaper of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). This criticism would result in Ruppin's advice to the WZO to keep discussions of Palestine out of the Congress's plenary sessions (which were open to journalists), instead reserving them for the more private executive committee meetings: Ruppin to Wolffsohn, 15 July 1911.
According to Fresco, it was only logical that the peasant would want to defend his homeland and organize against the Jewish occupation that would only worsen his status. “Today, the
fallāḥ defends himself with words, but tomorrow he can move from words to deeds, and then that will be a great sorrow not only to the Jews of Palestine but also to all Syria and maybe even also to the entire empire.”
73 ha-Ḥerut, 30 November 1910.
ZIONISM AS AN ERETZ ISRAELI COMMITMENT
Fresco had raised an important component of the conflict that hitherto had received little critical coverage in the Sephardic press: the repercussions of the “practical Zionism” being implemented on the ground. In fact, many of the leaders and followers of the Sephardic and Maghribi Ottomanist movement in Palestine—including the Chelouche brothers, Shim
on and David Moyal, Albert Antébi, Avraham Elmaliach, Yitzhak Levi, the Manis, Matalons, Nissim Malul—were also quite active in the local Zionist scene as land agents, teachers, lawyers, and intermediaries. These men saw their activities as contributing to the broader economic, social, and cultural development of their homeland. Helping to establish new agricultural communities, public-works development, and trade were all considered good for both the Jewish community and the Palestinian community at large. As such, their “practical Zionism” was primarily an Eretz Israeli commitment, a promotion of local progress and development within the broader Ottoman reform and modernization program.
74 Michael Laskier has referred to the commitment of Albert Antébi as “pro-palestinienne”: Michael Laskier, “Avraham Albert
Antebi: Prakim bi-fo
alo bi-shnot 1897–1914,” Pe
amim 21 (1984).
However, it was precisely this issue that would bring them into conflict with the local populace in Palestine.
Antébi is a perfect case in point. Although he was vigilantly anti-Zionist in political and ideological outlook, in practice he helped the Zionist movement a great deal. As he put it, “[W]ithout practicing utopian Zionism, I have consecrated all of my time, all of my faculties, and every beneficial matter for Jewish activity.”
75 Antébi to Dizengoff, 11 June 1909, CZA, CM434/13.
In addition to his post with the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) post, he worked for the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) in an official capacity and unofficially with the Anglo-Palestine Bank. The Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization often turned to Antébi in moments of need, despite its own suspicions toward him.
76 On the Palestine Office's deliberations on Antébi as a difficult but indispensable partner, see letter, 15 July 1912, in CZA, L2/26II; and Palestine Office to Jacobsohn, 2 June 1914, CZA, L51/96.
Yet regardless of his extensive Ottomanist résumé, Antébi's Zionist activities earned him the opprobrium of his neighbors. He admitted that “my excommunication by the Zionists is similar to that which the Ottoman government and my Muslim co-citizens direct against my Jewish activities.”
77 Antébi to AIU president, 24 June 1909, CZA, CM434/13.
Indeed, he was referred to as the “agent of the colonizers [
wakīl rijāl al-istimār]” by the Arabic-language newspaper in Jerusalem, al-Munadi.
78 More than any other issue, the sale of land to Ottoman Jews in the service of Zionism made the Sephardim's Ottomanist commitments suspect to their neighbors. From the first decades of Zionist settlement in Palestine, Zionist colonization societies were able to purchase land largely due to the intervention and assistance of the local Sephardim. Avraham Moyal, a Maghribi Jew, served as the local representative of the Odessa-based group Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) until his early death in 1885; his brother Yosef Moyal assisted the Bilu settlers and was, along with Aharon Chelouche (from Oran, Algeria) and Haim Amzalek (from Gibraltar), considered a “pioneer” in Jewish land purchase (referred to as “redemption of the land [geulat ha-eretz]”).79
Joseph Glass and Ruth Kark, Sephardi Entrepreneurs in Eretz Israel: The Amzalek Family, 1816–1918 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 126.
The series of Ottoman land sale restrictions for foreign Jews, particularly as a result of local pressures, made the role of Ottoman Jews even more critical to the viability of the Zionist enterprise, but it also left their activities more subject to criticism by their fellow citizens. After the al-Fula land-sale controversy in 1910, 150 Jaffa Arabs sent a telegram to the Ottoman government and various newspapers demanding an end to Zionist immigration and land purchase: “[T]hey particularly protested against the purchase of land by Ottoman ‘men of straw’ on behalf of the Zionists.”80
Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 107.
As a result, Muhaddi Bey, the local Jerusalem governor, announced in 1912 that he was banning further land purchase by Jews, including those who were Ottoman subjects. The newspaper ha-Ḥerut published two interviews with Muhaddi Bey about the new ban on land purchase.81
ha-Ḥerut, 12 and 14 November 1912.
As it turned out, the new ban was the result of local initiative alone and did not originate in the capital. When pressed about the ban's applicability to Ottoman Jews, Muhaddi Bey cited the role of Sephardi land agents and middlemen in Zionist land purchases as justification for the new policy:
[W]e cannot sell to people, despite the fact that they are Ottoman, who sell land to foreigners…. The Jews here are not agriculturalists and workers of the land, and most of them, if not all of them, are merchants, industrialists, warehouse owners and shopkeepers, writers, or clerks in different offices. They do not have any kind of belonging to the land. And because of that, if they purchase land it is not for them but for others, for the foreign immigrants who come here or for foreign settlement companies.82
The exchange between Ben-
Atar and Muhaddi Bey was heated at times. Ben-
Atar protested that a number of Ottoman Jews were engaged in manual labor, that Muslims and Christians were allowed to make investments in land without actually working it themselves, and that the land restriction violated the constitutional rights of Ottoman Jews. In the end, the governor insisted that Ottoman Jews were allowed to purchase a courtyard or a warehouse, but that “those Jews… have no business with farming.”
Opposition in the Jewish community to the new ban was swift and sharp, but while it wanted to demand its rights equal to the other Ottoman citizens, the Balkan War in the background reminded the community of its need to prove its loyalty to the empire. Eventually, the Jaffa Jewish community's General City Council (va
ad ha-
ir ha-klali) sent a telegram to the capital, emphasizing its patriotic support for the war effort while carefully reminding the government of its duties to treat all citizens equally.
83 Arieh Yodfat, “Va
ad ha-
ir ha-klali li-yehudei yafo u-p
eulotav ba-shanim 1912–1915,” in Vatikin: mekḥkarim be-toldot ha-yishuv, ed. H. Z. Hirschberg (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1975), 246– 47.
Antébi was called on to negotiate with the government, and he and Muhaddi Bey eventually agreed that land sales could be carried out to Ottoman Jews not known to be working with the Zionist settlers, whose names would be submitted in advance for approval.
84 Laskier, “Avraham Albert
Antebi,” 115–16.
Despite the local governor's acquiescence, however, public opinion was still against land purchase by suspect Ottoman Jews. Aharon Eisenberg, a European Jew who had taken Ottoman citizenship when he immigrated, was accused of improperly purchasing land and was labeled in the pages of Filastin as a “false Ottoman.” In response, the Jewish press reminded its readers that Eisenberg's son was an Ottoman army officer on the Balkan battlefront who had even attained the distinction of ghāzī. As the paper put it, “If this gentleman and his father are not considered Ottomans, who then are the Ottomans?”85
ha-Ḥerut, 26 December 1912.
This response in the Jewish press to the Arab press was a direct result of the program of members of the local Ottoman Jewish community to place themselves at the forefront of mediating between the Zionist immigrants and the local population. While the official Zionist community showed little concern for appealing to the local population, from 1908 on, several Sephardic initiatives were discussed that would challenge the contours of the public debate taking place about the Jewish community and Zionism. In 1911, Shim
on and Esther Moyal, frequent contributors to the Arabic-language press under the pen names Abu and Umm al-Khalil, called a public meeting for like-minded people who sought rapprochement with their Arab neighbors.
86 Moyal was the son of Yosef Moyal, a wealthy oil and soap merchant in Jaffa who had arrived as a child with his family from Rabat. The younger Moyal was educated in Beirut and Cairo, studying medicine but also involving himself in journalism, translating Pirkei avot into Arabic, and affiliating himself with the circle of
Abdullah Nadim. His wife, Esther Izhari, was from Beirut and was also a prolific journalist and translator at the turn of the 20th century.
As Moyal stated, “[O]ur Hebrew national ambitions do not oppose [the Arabs'] own ambitions, and we have the ability to work with energy and a devoted spirit for the shared homeland.”
87 From “Mikhtav hozer el ha-adonim ha-yekarim uha-nechbadim,” as quoted in Ya
akov Roi, “Nisyonoteihem shel ha-mosdot ha-tziyonim lehashpi
a al ha-
itonut he-aravit be-eretz yisrael ba-shanim 1908–1914,” Zion 3–4 (1967): 222.
The following year, the Moyals, Nissim Malul, and about a dozen other Arabic-speaking Jews in Jaffa established the Society for Arabic Printing (“to disseminate the news of how the Jews have worked for the good of the homeland”88
ha-Ḥerut, 18 November 1912.
) and
ha-Magen (the Shield) to defend the Jews from press attacks as well as to foster understanding between Arabs and Jews.
89 Other known members of ha-Magen included David Moyal, Yehoshu
a Elkayam, Yosef Amzalek, David Hivan, Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, Ya
akov Chelouche, Avraham Elmaliach, Moshe Matalon, and Farha Simcha Chelouche. Many of these men and women had been educated in Beirut and Cairo, and their weekly meetings were conducted in Arabic: see Mordechai Elkayam, Yafo-neve tzedek (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1990); and Hanna Ram, ha-Yishuv ha-yehudi bi-yafo: mi-kehila sfaradit le-merkaz tzioni, 1839–1939 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 1996).
While the members of ha-Magen had internalized the traditional Zionist justifications for why the Arab community should welcome the Zionist movement (namely, that the Arabs had advanced economically and technologically thanks to Zionism), they did so for the “betterment of the shared homeland [ha-moledet ha-meshutefet], materially and spiritually.” “Here, finally,” Elmaliach wrote, “we have come to the moment when we can work together with our brothers… for the development of their land and our land [artzam ve-artzenu].” Most explicitly, Elmaliach pressed the Arabs and Jews to work together for “moledetam u-moledeteinu—their homeland and ours.”90
Tel Aviv Municipal Archive (TAMA), file 8, folder 729.
Significantly,
ha-Magen's vision was not one of exclusive ownership or rights to Palestine. Rather, it declared joint ownership and responsibility between Jews and Arabs.
91 A number of Jews wrote articles for the Egyptian and Syrian Arabic press, often “explaining” Zionism and Zionist projects. Rashid Khalidi harshly dismisses these Arabic-speaking Jews active in Palestine as sheer propagandists, but it is important to differentiate the divergent motivating factors as well as the shades of Zionism that existed at the time in Palestine. For example, one of the men Khalidi criticizes, Nissim Malul, was active in Jewish–Arab joint projects and supported Arabist reformist aims, one of two known Jewish members of the Hizb al-Lāmarkaziyya, the Arab Decentralist Party active in Greater Syria in 1913–15: see Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 132.
Some within ha-Magen took this territorial and civic sharing a step further, toward advocating a more totalizing political-cultural merger between Jews and Arabs. Nissim Malul, for example, had pushed for intensive Arabic-language study for Jewish youth as an important precondition to fully integrating the Jewish community, which he argued was in danger of becoming a “separate people” within Palestine, the Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East, much as Jews had become in Spain, Portugal, and Russia.92
See the debate in ha-Ḥerut, 20 April 1913, 17–19 June 1913.
Rather than the Hebraist mission dominant within the Zionist movement in Palestine, Malul argued,
If we desire to be the inheritors of Rabbi Yehuda ha-Levi and the Rambam, to follow in their paths, we must know Arabic and mix with the Arabs [?!] like they also did [?]. In the role of a Semitic nation we must base our nationalism in Semitism and not blur with European culture, and through Arabic we can found a real Hebrew culture. But if we bring into our culture European foundations, then we will be simply be committing suicide.
The editors of ha-Ḥerut objected to Malul's characteRızation (“history shows us that mixing with another nation [umah], even if it is also Semitic, endangers the status of the existence of our people”), but the most vociferous attack came from Malul's boss at the Palestine Office's Press Bureau, Avraham Ludvigpol, who argued that, “in our land, in the place of our renewal, his voice rings in our ears like the echo of people with a strange and foreign voice which we did not imagine or pray that we would hear.”93
Ludvigpol, Rabinovich, and other members of the European Zionist community considered Malul evidence of a dangerous “trend among Sephardi Jews toward assimilation into Moslem culture.”
94 See the discussion in Yosef Gorni, “Attitudes to Arab–Jewish Confrontation as Reflected in the Hebrew Press: 1900–1918,” Zionism 1 (spring 1980).
THE LIMITS OF REFORM AND THE APPEAL OF ZIONISM
The nature of the Sephardi community's commitment to Ottomanism was based on the rule of law and the ideal of civic equality, but it was also a product of and limited by the increasing rivalry that sought to measure each community's relative importance in the new Ottoman body politic. Developments among the other communities in Ottoman Palestine—especially their growing calls for Arab autonomy and opposition to the Zionist movement—coupled with a profound disappointment in the failure of the Young Turk Revolution to bring about true equality between Ottomans, Ottomanism as an ideological commitment and worldview among the young Sephardi and Maghribi Jews was slowly eclipsed by the strengthening Zionist movement.
The disappointing lack of true equality in the Ottoman Empire, along with the rise of intercommunal conflict in Palestine, led El Liberal to link overtly the failure of Ottomanism with the surging popularity of Zionism. Challenging the basic slogans of the 1908 revolution—liberty, equality, and brotherhood—the press upbraided the local administration and fellow citizens for pushing the Jews toward Zionism. “The rise in anti-Semitism in the Arabic press—is this fraternity? The Red Note for Jewish immigrants into Palestine—is this equality? In fact, if the Jews had known real liberty they would not be turning to the ‘mortal enemy’—the Zionist movement.”95
El Liberal, 22 October 1909.
In 1909, complaints had begun to appear in the Jerusalem press about the limited impact of the revolution for the betterment of the Jewish community. By the first anniversary of the revolution in July 1909, the celebrations had already taken on a muted and tense tone. In addition to participating in the official government celebrations, the Jews held their own, separate celebrations in which the Arabs did not participate, with a more overt Zionist presence. According to one newspaper account, the Jaffa Arabs watched the Jews on parade and cursed them, saying, “[H]ere are those dogs who want to rule our land.”
96 The correspondent Ben-Avraham continued, “If [only] our young brothers had seen how the many Arabs united and wanted to tear the Zionist flag at the moment of its raising by the gymnasia students.”
Amiel, a participant in the Jewish parade, wrote in to contradict the initial report published in the newspaper that the parade members had been received “with honor”; they were in fact ignored both at the officers' club and at the CUP club and eventually were greeted only because of the intervention of two Jews, the “famous” military officer Halperin and Shim
on Moyal, a member of the CUP.
97 As Amiel noted, “My good friend said it well that the parade remind[ed] her [instead] of a funeral procession.”
Some months later, an incident emerged involving a drunken, homeless Jew by the name of Shlomo who allegedly had insulted the police and Islam and subsequently was arrested and beaten by the police and Arab passersby in the Old City of Jerusalem. When he reached the jail, one of his eyes was swollen shut from the beatings. The Sephardi press responded in outrage:
After all this, there are people who think that there is liberty for all, there are those who say that all have the rights of equality, those who notify us that we live with our neighbors in brotherhood…. [T]his is intolerable! When the constitution was proclaimed in Turkey (sic) and the word ḥurriyya rang out, our joy was great, very great, thinking that we would finally… be able to breathe a pure and free air… [but] our situation has gotten worse! Yes! Worse! Before, our lives were secure, our interests were not trampled and our dignity was not trespassed, while now they insult us, they mistreat us, they trample us daily, and they look to calumny us always under the name of “liberty”!98
El Liberal, 5 November 1909.
While they appealed to the government, the Jews were urged to unite in solidarity. If that were to happen, the outraged citizen wrote, “The government will see there is no more patient and docile, no more obliging and faithful, like the Jewish element.”99
Another angry reader wrote in that, after fifteen months of freedom, the Jews were still passed by for positive changes, and “our situation gets worse by the day, just because we are ‘Jews.”’ “If we are good enough to pay taxes and burdens, go to the army and spill our blood on our homeland, then we should also enjoy the rights of the government. Then the police will have to defend our lives and property like that of the other citizens without difference to religion and race.” According to the author, 3,000 Jews and the chief rabbi had already appealed to the government to investigate the matter of the abuse of Shlomo. “If everything is done and the government defends us so that our lives are secure from the accusing masses, then we [will] know that the freedom, equality, and brotherhood given to us were not just empty words but according to law and deed.”100
ha-Ḥerut, 5 November 1909.
In this vein, some Palestinian Ottoman Zionists argued that the relationship of Ottoman Jews to Zionism was similar to that of the other minorities' relationships to their ethno-national movements. The renewed attacks by Alexander Ben-Giat against the Zionist movement in Izmir led to a defense of the Zionist movement as a valid civic expression of Jewish Ottoman rights, in line with the rights of other Ottoman minority groups. Indeed, refusing the Jews the right to express their Zionism was considered unfair, if not illegal, for every other national group in the empire was allowed its collective self-expression. As ha-Ḥerut wrote,
Only the Greeks and Bulgarians and Armenians and also the Albanians have the right to be called by the name of “nationalists.”… Only they can work for their people [am] and their language with their heads held high and openly! Only they can show their origins, declare their nationalism, and raise their heads! And because of that no one will raise against them the call of betrayal of the homeland, no one will dare say to them that they want to conquer lands of the empire…. [B]ut, we the Jews, we have to be different from them, to be denied that right.101
While seeking to normalize Jews within the Ottoman Empire, the Sephardi Palestinian press sought equality with the other ethno-national groups—legal, representative equality, to be sure, but also the right to ethno-national expression. Of course, this logic was strange, given that by the 1910s the imperial loyalty of these ethnic and religious groups had been called into question repeatedly and had led to significant clashes with the Ottoman government. The editors, writers, and readers of ha-Ḥerut could not have been blind to this, for domestic political affairs of the empire were covered in great detail in the newspaper, including Albanian and Druze rebellions, massacres of Armenians, and Greek demands for political privileges.
The rise of the decentralist movement in the Arab provinces of the empire was another challenge to the logic and appeal of Ottomanism. The Palestinian Sephardi press had sympathized with growing Arab claims against the CUP while at the same time rejecting the anti-Zionist accusations of the movement as solely the product of “incitement” by Christians and foreigners.102
See the complaint filed by the General Organization of the Colonies in Judea to the Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum, June 1910, CAHJP, HM2/8645; ha-Ḥerut, 4 November 1910; Ruppin to Wolffsohn, 15 July 1911, CZA, Z2/636.
The contradiction of commitments evidently was not apparent.
CONCLUSION
The Sephardi Ottomanist Zionist Palestinians were crystal clear on their view of national Jewish life in Palestine as being under the Ottoman umbrella, side by side with their Arab neighbors. Indeed, the classic dichotomy of “loyal minority” or “irredentist nationalist” fails to capture their competing and overlapping sympathies and interests. Intellectuals, community leaders, and youth activists came out on all sides of the debate, ideologically committed to Ottomanism and Zionism and working within the confines of institutions that sought to reconcile the two even while accelerating their clash.
Sephardi notions of a “shared homeland” in Palestine converged with the Ottomanist discourse prevalent in the empire after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, when a civic identity began to take root throughout the empire. This notion was also made possible by the historically close cultural and social relations of indigenous Jews and Arabs, which frequently was a source of exasperation to the Zionist movement. As late as 1914, for example, the Zionist functionary Arthur Ruppin complained that the Jews of Jaffa were regrettably less willing to display Jewish national solidarity, which he blamed on the fact that they lived in mixed neighborhoods with Arabs.103
Cited in Ruth Kark, Jaffa, a City in Evolution: 1799–1917 (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1990), 109. The preceding year, the Palestine Office had drawn up plans to establish a separate Jewish commercial center in Jaffa to draw Jewish merchants and customers away from the main commercial street: CZA, L51/4.
Likewise, the Palestinian Sephardi press consistently supported joint Jewish and Arab labor (instead of “Hebrew labor,” the exclusivist call of new immigrants), because, “[T]o say that one did not want Arab workers was in contradiction to wanting to bring [Jews and Arabs] closer together.”
104 Elmaliach, Oral History Project, 23 February 1964. Ruppin and other functionaries also considered calls for Hebrew labor dangerous and certain to elicit “dire consequences”: see Ruppin to Zentralburo, 28 July 1912; report by Dyk, n.d., CZA, L5/70.
Yet there were very clear limits to the possible success of this model. From the earliest moments after the announcement of elections to be held for the Ottoman Parliament in 1908, civic participation was inextricably linked to communal competition, and civic participation became a way to ensure one's own communal power within the ever changing social landscape. In conflicts with the local Ottoman governor over land sales and in libel proceedings against the Arabic press, members of the Palestinian Jewish community spoke in the language of rivalry, using phrases such as “our national honor,” “our national rights,” and “standing the ground like the other nations.” Both Jews and Arabs in Palestine sought group legitimacy from the Ottoman government, asserting that their activities, unlike those of their rivals, were compatible with (and even beneficial to) Ottomanism.
In many ways, the essence of this conflict between Ottomanism and Zionism extended beyond the specificities of the Jewish–Arab conflict over Palestine. The shifting and contested linkage between civic universalism and ethno-national particularism was a product of the complicated empirewide process of reenvisioning political reform, civic enfranchisement, and communal boundaries in the post-1908 period. By the eve of World War I, the Ottomanist vision had suffered perhaps irreversible damage, and the rise of Arabist movements in Palestine after the loss of most of the empire's European territories and Christian population in the Balkan wars further highlighted the difficulty of forging a coherent unifying imperial identity.
The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the issuance of the Balfour Declaration irreversibly altered the political horizons of Sephardi Jews in Palestine: the British Mandatory regime's support of the Zionist movement not only meant a stamp of legitimacy for Zionist hegemony in Palestine; it also brought about the political disenfranchisement of the Sephardi community within Jewish communal institutions as well as vis-à-vis the Mandatory authorities. Throughout the Mandatory period, some Sephardi intellectuals and activists in Palestine, such as Eliyahu Elyashar, struggled to revive the expectations and responsibilities concurrent with a “shared homeland,” seeking to bring together Jews and Arabs and to moderate the political Zionist program. But their activities and commitments were to be of ever diminishing significance.
Author's note: Research for this article was supported by generous grants from the SSRC-NMERTA and Fulbright (2000). I thank the organizers and participants of the workshop “The Ethnic Break-Up of the Ottoman Empire” held at the Second Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting (2001) of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, and particularly Reşat Kasaba and Sarah Abrevaya Stein for their helpful comments on a much earlier version of this essay. I am also grateful to Joel Beinin, Aron Rodrigue, and Tamir Sorek for their valuable feedback and to Celka Straughn for her assistance in finding missing copies of La Tribuna Libera.
%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
