The reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamit II from 1876 to 1909 has long been considered a period of autocratic rule in which censorship was heavy, spies abundant, and public gatherings forbidden.Footnote ¹ Opponents of the regime famously fled to Egypt and Europe to pursue their political activities beyond its reach, while the Hamidian government created an atmosphere of fear, self-censorship, and restriction within the empire.Footnote ² Yet even with an eye to such oppressive conditions, recent work has begun to challenge the assumption that these circumstances necessarily foreclosed the possibility of public activism within the empire, pointing instead to the emergence of Ottoman public spheres that were, in many cases, permitted or encouraged (if also monitored and restricted) by the Hamidian regime.Footnote ³

While this research has brought to light new actors and arenas of public activity, a scholarly consensus continues to suggest that the period of Abdülhamit II's rule witnessed the narrowing of political possibilities in a different sense, through its promotion of a form of state patriotism that employed the vocabulary and symbolism of Islam in order to win the support of Ottoman and foreign Muslims alike.Footnote ⁴ This imperial strategy led to what one scholar has called the “slow whittling down of multiethnic, multiconfessional variants of Ottoman patriotism to the narrower scope of Ottoman Muslim patriotism.”Footnote ⁵ Gaining momentum following the Russo–Ottoman War (1877–78), which ended in Ottoman defeat and resulted in the loss of most of the empire's European territories along with a significant proportion of its Christian subjects, Abdülhamit II's Islamic politics focused on the Muslims who remained within the empire and now constituted approximately three-quarters of the imperial population.Footnote ⁶ The Hamidian regime increasingly chose to emphasize the sultan's role as caliph, or spiritual leader of Muslims worldwide—including those in territories recently lost to the empire—while also seeking to prevent separatist nationalism among Ottoman Muslims.Footnote ⁷

Abdülhamit II's use of religion for statist purposes was not merely an Ottoman response to military losses, however: it also found clear parallels in the political programs of other late 19th-century empires. Imperial monarchs such as Russia's Alexander III and the Habsburgs’ Franz Joseph similarly attempted to buttress their rule by creating an aura of sacredness around themselves and their domains.Footnote ⁸ Abdülhamit II's weekly processions to the Yıldız mosque for Friday prayer can thus be compared to Franz Joseph's participation in Catholic rituals such as public foot washing and Corpus Christi processions.Footnote ⁹ The implications of these developments for imperial subjects in each case should not be overlooked: not only did 19th-century tsars employ Christian Orthodoxy as a symbol for their own political legitimation but certain bureaucrats in the Russian government also linked conversion to the tsar's religion with loyalty to the state.Footnote ¹⁰ The intertwining of state religion and political allegiance in this manner had the potential to inhibit members of other faiths from claiming a place at the center of state-building projects.

This aspect of modern imperial politics has also drawn the attention of Ottoman historians, who have pointed to the exclusionary logic of Islamic Ottomanism. Hasan Kayalı has noted, for example, that while Abdülhamit II's Islamism did not “jeopardize the legal status and rights that the non-Muslims had gained under the secular Ottomanism of the preceding decades . . . clearly Hamidian ideology was exclusionary from a social and psychological point of view with respect to non-Muslims.”Footnote ¹¹ Şükrü Hanioğlu has suggested that this exclusion helped fuel opposition movements, which drew power from their ability to appeal to non-Muslims alienated by Abdülhamit II's Islamic Ottomanist project.Footnote ¹²

Other historians have interpreted this exclusion in terms of the shifting and increasingly fraught relationship between the Ottoman state and particular Christian communities in the empire more specifically.Footnote ¹³ Abdülhamit II's growing concern over the threat posed to Ottoman territorial integrity by imperialist powers and separatist nationalist movements was a driving factor behind his decidedly Islamic statecraft, which was intended to resist foreign encroachments into Ottoman affairs.Footnote ¹⁴ As different non-Muslim communities came to be associated with the expansion of irredentist movements or rival imperial powers, increasing numbers of Ottoman authors and bureaucrats began to regard them with suspicion, as “metaphorical foreigners.”Footnote ¹⁵ It was in this climate that negative portrayals of non-Muslims, especially Armenian and Greek Orthodox Ottomans, made their way into the Ottoman-language press.Footnote ¹⁶ Seen in this light, Islamic Ottomanism was not only a positive effort to forge ties with Muslims in the empire and beyond but also an attempt to separate out the internal outsiders from the rest of the imperial population.

Yet, as much recent scholarship on civic activism in the Hamidian era has demonstrated, moving beyond a focus on the constraints imposed under restrictive regimes can allow new stories to surface. Here too, examples drawn from other contemporary imperial contexts offer fruitful points of comparison. As Robert Crews has shown for late imperial Russia, a well-developed body of scholarship on the conflictual relationship between the tsarist regime and the Muslims under its rule has tended to ignore evidence of extensive cooperation between the two during the same period. Although new legal codes implemented during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–55) “declared Orthodox Christianity the ‘preeminent and predominant’ faith of the empire,” they “also systematically backed other religions on the premise that ‘all peoples inhabiting Russia praise the Almighty God’ . . . and [pray] for the increase of the prosperity and strengthening of the power of the Empire.”Footnote ¹⁷ In this context, new conversionary and exclusionary pressures coexisted with claims that non-Orthodox communities had a defined place in the empire. Scholarship on the history of late Habsburg Jewry sheds further light on the issue. Rather than retreating from imperial events that were clearly Catholic in nature, Jews flocked to the center of Vienna during Franz Joseph's Corpus Christi procession and donated funds to the construction of the Votive Church in the capital.Footnote ¹⁸

As these examples suggest, a state's mobilization and public display of official religion did not always, or necessarily, prevent members of other faiths from identifying with that state. Yet this possibility remains largely unexplored. In the scholarship on the late Ottoman period, it has perhaps been obscured by the focus on Islamism's social and psychological exclusion of non-Muslims. Whatever the reason, the result is an overly linear narrative of the place of non-Muslims in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire, proceeding from their inclusion during the Tanzimat era from 1839 to 1876—which gave birth to a civic definition of imperial belonging—to their gradual exclusion on religious grounds in the Hamidian era.

This narrative is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the new forms of Islamic Ottomanism that gained favor in the final decades of the 19th century coexisted in tension with the civic version of Ottoman belonging developed during the Tanzimat era. In fact, universal definitions of imperial citizenship were never officially abandoned under Abdülhamit II. The regime as well as representatives of different religious communities in the empire continued to endorse the idea that all Ottoman citizens, regardless of religion, belonged equally to the imperial polity even when realities on the ground or policies adopted by the Porte seemed to suggest otherwise. Recognizing this allows us to see the competing definitions of Ottoman-ness that existed simultaneously as well as the choices, challenges, and tensions their coexistence entailed. It can also help us to understand the ways in which the relationship between universal and exclusive definitions of imperial belonging was often cyclical rather than linear: during moments of heightened tension or violence, civic definitions of imperial belonging might suffer, only to be revived after the immediate source of tensions had passed. Second, the responses of non-Muslims to Hamidian Islamism were more complex than existing scholarly portrayals suggest. While Abdülhamit II's use of Islamic rhetoric for political purposes undoubtedly alienated non-Muslim individuals and collectives in ways we have yet to fully explore, it is also the case that certain non-Muslims employed and modified the language of Islamic Ottomanism to their own ends during this period. Finally, the relationship of different religious communities and individuals with the Ottoman state was transformed in significant ways during the Hamidian era, sometimes at a dizzying pace, sometimes gradually. Thus, to speak of “non-Muslim” responses to Islamic Ottomanism may obscure as much as it illuminates. Such relationships were often uneven and complicated by the possibility that particular communities might gain favor with the government precisely as the position of another group became more tenuous.

Indeed, during the mid-1890s, just as Ottoman Jews were finding new opportunities in government positions and public life, relations between the Ottoman state and its Armenian citizens were strained to a breaking point, after widespread massacres of Armenians across eastern Anatolia and the Ottoman capital. Tensions also grew between imperial authorities and Greek Orthodox citizens in this period, as the conflict over Crete turned into a full-scale war between the Kingdom of Greece and the empire in the spring of 1897. As historian Carter Findley has noted, it is likely no coincidence that the position of Armenian and Greek Orthodox officials in the Ottoman state bureaucracy began to decline during this period—slowly, throughout the decade, in the case of Armenian civil servants, and precipitously, after the war with Greece in 1897, in the case of Greek Orthodox state employees.Footnote ¹⁹

It was within this context that Jews encountered a new flexibility in Ottoman public spheres and patriotic discourse.Footnote ²⁰ Much as Robert Crews has argued that the 19th-century Russian state's treatment of Muslim citizens “varied according to the vicissitudes in educated Russians’ anxieties about . . . other groups,” Ottoman Jews found new favor with the Porte and with Ottoman Muslim elites during the final years of the 19th century, just as the loyalty of other communities was increasingly questioned.Footnote ²¹ Responding to these developments, many Ottoman Jews attempted to distance themselves from those now deemed suspect by the regime, opting to claim their special affinity with Muslims and with the Islamic politics of the Hamidian regime. Yet, throughout the same period, they also continued to publicly endorse more universal definitions of imperial belonging and a vision of enlightened sociability based on a civic model of Ottomanism, hosting charitable dances and donating to libraries, schools, and clubs belonging to Ottomans of all faiths.Footnote ²² As the 19th century came to a close, Sephardi Jews across the empire increasingly found themselves torn between their investment in the status quo and peaceful relations with their neighbors on the one hand and the reality of increasing political polarization and violence on the other.Footnote ²³

OTTOMAN JEWS AND THE ARMENIAN MASSACRES IN ISTANBUL

A report penned by a certain V. Gerson of Istanbul to the President of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris offers an unusually candid picture of the private deliberations of an Ottoman Jew concerned with assuring that his community remained in good standing with his government. In September 1896, Gerson wrote to the French Jewish organization's central committee with a report he found troubling: Jewish notables of the Ottoman capital intended to circulate a statement to European newspapers in response to rumors that Jews had been involved in the violence perpetrated against Armenians in the city a few weeks earlier. The aim of such a statement, Gerson explained, was to offer incontrovertible proof “that the Jews of our capital behaved bravely and honestly during the recent massacres undertaken by Kurds and Lazzes against the poor Armenians of Hasköy.” Although he believed the intentions of the statement's writers to be entirely noble, he wrote: “The most basic caution should counsel the Jews of the empire not to say or publish anywhere the fact that they aided Armenians, people the Ottomans consider, perhaps with some justification, to be traitors, ingrates and anarchists.”Footnote ²⁴ Despite his ambivalence toward his Armenian compatriots, whom he described as both unfortunate and unruly, the position Gerson advocated could not have been clearer: whatever Jews had done to aid the Armenians of the city that summer, announcing those efforts would compromise the position of Jews in the empire. “Aiding traitors is not the work of a patriot,” he warned. If the Jews of the capital had such statements published—even if they did so far beyond the reaches of Ottoman territory—the news was bound to upset “the Ottomans” and possibly even spur them to take revenge. Who could know what might befall the Jews should a new massacre occur?Footnote ²⁵

Just one month before Gerson wrote these ominous words, in August 1896, large-scale massacres of Armenians had shaken the capital. The immediate trigger of these events was an action by members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Hai Heghapokhakan Dashnaktsutiun) who placed bombs throughout Istanbul and held up the Ottoman Bank in an effort to make their demands for Armenian rights known to the world, killing and wounding dozens in the process. Within hours, large mobs armed with clubs, iron bars, and knives beset the city, murdering Armenian residents and pillaging their property. Although official bulletins published in the wake of the violence called on Ottomans of all classes and religions to get along, warned against vigilantism, and threatened to punish anyone who dared to disobey, the massacres lasted two days before the authorities intervened and put an end to the killing.Footnote ²⁶ Contemporary commentators and historians have attributed the attacks on Istanbul's Armenian population alternately to “angry mobs from the lower classes of the capital,” “Kurds and Lazzes,” or “softas [Islamic theology students] and Mussulman roughs.”Footnote ²⁷ While some scholars insist that the mobs were “disorganized and excitable Muslim . . . rowdies” and “religious extremists,” the suggestion of different sources that the attackers carried uniform clubs has led others to surmise police involvement.Footnote ²⁸ Although government estimates set the Armenian death toll at just over 1,000, most foreign accounts suggest that many thousands of Armenians were killed over the two-day period.Footnote ²⁹ Among the areas hardest hit was the neighborhood of Hasköy, which was also home to large numbers of the city's Jews, including many of its poorest.

Almost immediately, competing claims arose concerning the role Istanbul's Jews had played in the violence.Footnote ³⁰ The version of events suggesting that Jews had aided their Armenian neighbors (the version Moise Gerson hoped to suppress) is corroborated by various eyewitness accounts. Two separate sources tell of Jews in Istanbul who offered their tefellin (phylacteries, or leather boxes worn on the arm and head during prayers) to their Armenian neighbors in order to disguise them as Jews amidst the violence.Footnote ³¹ Another source spoke of a “patriarchal old Jew” of Hasköy who hid thirty-one Armenians in his house while “valiantly refusing admittance to hordes of infuriated Turks.”Footnote ³² A Jewish man by the name of Aboab reported from Cairo that the owners of various Jewish-run department stores in the Ottoman capital had helped their Armenian employees escape on ships bound for Port Said.Footnote ³³ Still others suggested that hundreds of Jewish families had come to the rescue of the persecuted Armenians during the massacres and that Jewish individuals donated large sums to the ravaged Armenian community after the violence subsided.Footnote ³⁴

Yet other sources suggest that there were also Jews who helped the attackers find their victims and then joined in the pillaging of Armenian homes.Footnote ³⁵ A report lodged by the Armenian patriarch to the Ottoman government requested state funds to repair Armenian homes pilfered by Jews following the massacres.Footnote ³⁶ This version of events made its way not only to Ottoman authorities but also to the New York Times, which suggested that in the aftermath of the attacks in Hasköy, “much of the plunder was found in Jewish houses.”Footnote ³⁷ It also appeared in the account of a Jewish woman who lived in Istanbul's Peri Paşa neighborhood during the massacres and who recalled that “two lower class” Jews from her quarter had taken part in the looting, adding that they were subsequently “ostracized by their neighbors” and that “no good ever came to them because they were cursed by the stolen goods.”Footnote ³⁸ The stories of Jewish looters who took part in the pillaging of Armenian property in the Ottoman capital also surfaced in an editorial issued by a Ladino serial of Sofia. Unburdened by the pressures of censorship within the empire, the Bulgarian Jewish author critiqued David Fresco, the director of the Ottoman Ladino newspaper El Tiempo of Istanbul, writing that when “some derelict Jews threw themselves upon the poor Armenians of Istanbul, plundering from them at the hour when they were being hunted down, [the director] . . . did not open his mouth to condemn this act of barbarism.”Footnote ³⁹

It was precisely this type of public condemnation that Jewish leaders in the Ottoman capital hoped to combat by circulating refutations in the foreign press of any Jewish involvement in the 1896 attacks on Armenians. Some did this by focusing exclusively on the stories of the Jews who had sheltered Armenians in their homes and schools amidst the attacks, while also trying to explain away any reports of Jewish wrongdoing by suggesting that those Jews who had joined in the plundering of Armenian homes were impoverished porters forced to carry the goods by the mobs who invaded their neighborhoods.Footnote ⁴⁰ Others took a third position. Suggesting that Jews neither aided the Armenians of the city nor joined the attackers, one letter sent to London's Jewish Chronicle denied Jewish involvement in the events altogether. According to the author of this piece, in Istanbul's Halıcıoğlu district not a single Jew ventured out onto the streets during the days of the massacres. Any claims to the contrary, the author asserted baldly, were mere rumors dreamt up by Armenian revolutionaries.Footnote ⁴¹

Against such attempts to create the impression of Jews' neutrality, more than one observer explained Jewish involvement in the massacres as overtly political acts. They had “sided with the Turks against the Christians,” according to a British source.Footnote ⁴² The antisemitic press of Germany, which picked up (and embellished) the story of Jewish involvement in the violence with no small dose of satisfaction, claimed that the Jews who carted off the possessions of the victims had done so in part because of their hatred of Armenians, with whom they were in economic competition, but most of all because they had “wanted to make a good impression with the Turks.”Footnote ⁴³ Even some of those who sought to discredit the rumors spoke in similar terms, trying to deny the Jews' “supposed support of the Turks against the Armenians.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet, while publicly Jews met with and refuted claims that they had been on the “side” of the Ottoman Muslims—and thus also of the government—privately Gerson suggested that the opposite interpretation was also possible: having sheltered Armenian Ottomans against the wrath of the massacring mobs, Jews might be judged to have placed themselves on the wrong side of the dividing line that increasingly separated “true” Ottomans from the rest.Footnote ⁴⁵ Responding to what he believed to be the expectations of Ottoman patriotism at this moment, Gerson counseled silence. Even if Jewish communal leaders could not control how their co-religionists had acted during the August massacres, they could more carefully craft their position after the fact.

Within a matter of months, Jewish communal leaders appeared to revert to positions more in line with the civic model of Ottomanism, founded on expectations of cooperation among Ottomans of all confessions. By late October, Moshe Halevi, the acting chief rabbi of the empire, announced publicly that “many hundreds of persecuted Armenians” had found refuge in Jewish houses. It was true, he noted, that some Jews had ended up with items pillaged from Armenian homes, but he insisted that they had purchased them unknowingly. After learning of the provenance of the stolen goods, the relevant parties had returned the items through his person to the Armenian community.Footnote ⁴⁶ Equally notable was the fact that the Jews who donated to the Armenians of the capital in the wake of the massacres chose to do so publicly, ensuring that Jewish names would hold an important place on the lists of donors. The Jewish-run Allatini firm of Salonica was prominent among them.Footnote ⁴⁷

In early 1897—just half a year after the massacres of Armenians—El Tiempo, Istanbul's leading Ladino-language newspaper, reported that Jewish communal figures had gone to greet the newly appointed Armenian patriarch during his trip to an Armenian orphanage in the neighborhood of Hasköy.Footnote ⁴⁸ The paper took this opportunity, as it often did on the occasion of an official visit by leaders of one Ottoman community to another, to declare the meeting as proof of the excellent relations that existed between Armenians and Jews. Yet the visit was clearly less a reflection of idyllic relations between the two communities than an attempt to repair them. Given the meeting's location in the neighborhood of Hasköy—one of the principal sites of massacres the year before—such an interpretation would not have been lost on readers.Footnote ⁴⁹ Istanbul's Jewish press gave few hints of such a possibility, however, instead selecting and publishing stories that could help reinforce a sense of shared Ottoman civic identity among their readership now that the “troubles” were over.Footnote ⁵⁰

Still, like other inhabitants of the empire, Jews lived with a pronounced fear that politicized violence might engulf their neighborhoods. This left them attempting a precarious balancing act. Over-identification with the state held the prospect of worsening their relations with their Christian neighbors and undermining the civic-Ottomanist work their communal leaders had undertaken for decades to forge ties of solidarity with imperial citizens of other faiths. At the same time, evidence of alliances with groups now deemed suspect by the Ottoman government meant potentially alienating themselves from the authorities or from the city's Muslim population, thus jeopardizing their attempts to make a place for themselves within the Islamic Ottomanist politics of their time.

As much as different Ottoman Jews attempted to prove their loyalty and to adapt themselves to the changing political landscape of the empire during the late Ottoman era, it was no simple task. Jews across the empire faced the challenge of proving that they were not internal outsiders at the very moment when thousands of Jewish pupils were attending foreign schools in the empire, particularly those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle.Footnote ⁵¹ They also sought to show that they held no aspirations for national separation as the Zionist movement was preparing to make its international debut in the form of the first World Zionist Congress scheduled for the summer of 1897.Footnote ⁵² In their efforts to navigate these tensions, Ottoman Jewish elites searched for ways to continue their public endorsement of the ideal of an all-inclusive Ottoman citizenry while also attempting to keep “suspect” groups at arm's length and to bind their fortunes with those of Ottoman Muslims and with the state.

LESSONS IN OTTOMAN ALLEGIANCE IN THE MIDST OF WAR

In the spring of 1897, war erupted between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Greece over the status of Crete, where Greeks from the mainland had joined local Christian islanders in revolt against Ottoman rule.Footnote ⁵³ Reports of clashes on the island appeared in Ottoman Jewish newspapers, driving home a point that would not have appeared as news to their readers: despite the Ottoman Jewish elite's efforts to foster harmonious intercommunal relations, tensions between different religious groups continued to exist on the ground and resurfaced now in this time of trouble. Violent confrontations between Christians and Muslims were recorded in cities across the empire, from Scutari to Ankara to Izmir.Footnote ⁵⁴ Some of these clashes manifested explicitly as religious conflicts, such as in Scutari, where rumors spread that Christians had defamed a local mosque, or in Salonica, where Muslims allegedly ripped off the armbands of Red Cross personnel because of the cross they bore.Footnote ⁵⁵ Participants in these scuffles appeared to be reenacting on their own streets the war between the Greek and Ottoman armies on the battlefield.

Although much of the violence recorded in the empire during this period occurred between Christians and Muslims, Jews were also caught up in the politicized atmosphere of wartime, just as they had been during the massacres of Armenians in Istanbul the year before. In Crete, the Greek press accused the island's Jews of identifying the houses and shops of Christians to Muslim Cretans in search of revenge for the Greek Orthodox uprising against Ottoman rule.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Salonica, Jews and Muslims harassed a group of Greek prisoners of war who passed through the city.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Izmir, Urla, and Chios, Jews' celebrations of Ottoman victories reportedly provoked the ire of the local Greek Orthodox Christians, who boycotted Jewish businesses and threatened Jewish porters who dared pass through the wrong part of town.Footnote ⁵⁸

As the conflict escalated, the focus of Ottoman suspicions turned toward the empire's Greek Orthodox population.Footnote ⁵⁹ Ottoman officials expressed concerns that Greek insurgents from across the border would arm Ottoman Christian populations and provoke them to rise up against the empire.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although various Greek Orthodox communities and individuals publicly pledged their support for the Ottoman war effort, hundreds of Greek Orthodox young men—Hellenic and Ottoman citizens among them—were reported to be leaving the empire's shores in order to volunteer for the Greek army.Footnote ⁶¹ The Porte took measures to prevent its nationals from decamping to Greece while ordering individuals holding Greek citizenship to either leave Ottoman realms or renounce their legal status as Hellenes.Footnote ⁶² According to available population statistics, this measure affected as many as 25,000 Greek citizens resident in the city of Izmir alone.Footnote ⁶³ The ecumenical version of Ottoman belonging was thus put to the test once again: officially, the Hamidian regime continued to differentiate between its own Greek Orthodox citizens, whom it suggested remained loyal, and citizens of the Kingdom of Greece, considered as hostiles throughout the duration of the war. Yet various communications from the time suggest that this distinction was not always so clear.Footnote ⁶⁴ In this context, fraternizing with Greek Orthodox Ottomans—something that might have been interpreted as an expression of civic Ottomanism just a few months earlier—now threatened to make the position of Jews suspect. Jewish communal leaders responded to this dilemma with ambivalence. They advocated patriotism by encouraging their co-religionists to support the war effort in myriad ways and to pray for sultan and state.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet at the same time they reacted to, propagated, and attempted to work out subtler messages conveying different and competing definitions of Ottomanism.Footnote ⁶⁶

Sephardi journalists and communal leaders began to speak less often of harmonious relations and more of the hardening line between those they portrayed as the friends and enemies of the empire. Editorials marked the rebels of Crete as “Christian brigands” who deserved to be treated like “bandits,” while the Muslims who fought against the Christians of the island became noble defenders of the Ottoman cause.Footnote ⁶⁷ In other instances, both the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the island appeared as victims in the pages of the empire's Ladino press. As had been the case during earlier conflicts, including the Russo–Ottoman War (1877–78), these reports portrayed Ottoman Muslims and Jews as refugees fleeing the violence of the battle zones and retreating into the Ottoman interior together.Footnote ⁶⁸ Ottoman Jewish journalists thus pointed their readers toward the confluence of their own interests and experiences with those of Ottoman Muslims. Without making the comparisons explicit, Jewish journalists wrote of how Muslims around the world found new opportunities to unite around the figure of the sultan as caliph while noting that Jews outside of Ottoman territory honored the sultan in remarkably similar ways. During and after the war, Ladino papers reported that Muslims in India and Sephardi Jews in Vienna held public prayers for the Ottoman state, sending first their donations from afar and then their congratulations to the imperial army as it emerged victorious from the conflict in late May.Footnote ⁶⁹ They also told of Bosnian Muslims who had crossed into Ottoman territory to fight for the cause of the Islamic empire not long after running articles on Jews of Ottoman origin who had found their way to the front from Paris and Vienna.Footnote ⁷⁰

In some accounts, Jews and Muslims came to stand in for the whole of Ottoman society. A report sent to El Tiempo in Istanbul by a Jewish correspondent from Izmir offers a striking example. Opening with the subtitle “Among the Jews,” the article described the various forms of patriotic activities undertaken by the city's Jewish population then turned to a description of Ottoman patriotism, subtitled “Among the Muslims,” before coming to an abrupt end. “In short,” it concluded, “all of the different communities of our city are proving that they are at the height of their patriotic devotion.”Footnote ⁷¹ Despite his assertion that he spoke of “all of the different communities” of Izmir, the author of the article neglected to mention any community other than Jews and Muslims—leaving out, among others, the local Greek Orthodox population, which by many accounts represented the single largest religious community in the city.Footnote ⁷² Though it is impossible to know the author's reasons for taking this approach, his discursive erasure of Christians appears to have been symptomatic of the Ottoman Jewish press's selective representations of reality: he mentioned only those communities whose collective and uninhibited expressions of patriotism perfectly matched his ideal. This narrative allowed Jews to earn a special symbolic place at the side of their Muslim compatriots, but to the exclusion of other communities. El Tiempo's Izmir correspondent was hardly alone in taking this approach. Although Ottoman Jewish leaders and journalists had long expressed their desire for the camaraderie of all Ottoman religious communities, in wartime they now spoke more frequently—sometimes exclusively—of Jews and Muslims when discussing Ottoman patriotism. They also increasingly referred to their “Muslim brothers” as their compatriots, thus effecting the discursive erasure not only of Ottoman Christians but also of women.Footnote ⁷³

Both during and after the war of 1897, Ladino publications of the empire employed the language of Islamic Ottomanism. El Tiempo ran a story on “The Death of a Brave Man,” which honored the life of an Albanian Muslim “religious martyr,” a term the article glossed in Turkish as şehid. The man had died fighting the Greeks at Domokos, Jewish readers learned, thus sacrificing his life “for his religion and country” in the final battle of the war.Footnote ⁷⁴ The paper also issued an article entitled “The Caliphate,” which explained to its Jewish audience that the Qurʾan obligated Muslim allegiance to the sultan-caliph. The Ottoman state was the only remaining Muslim power in the world, the article continued, and as the seat of the caliphate, the vitality of the Islamic faith depended on the empire's continued existence.Footnote ⁷⁵

As Jews in the Ottoman capital and beyond read of the empire's soldiers and martyrs on the battlefields, the war intruded into their lives in other, subtler ways as well. Functions and balls boasting guests of all backgrounds were increasingly replaced by “patriotic events” in a narrower sense, such as those dedicated to wounded soldiers and Cretan refugees.Footnote ⁷⁶ Reports on these new gatherings now tended to mention only that Muslims had been in attendance.Footnote ⁷⁷ Another change came as the Ottoman Jewish community of the capital began to shift the focus of its sponsored activities from Jewish charity to efforts dedicated to the “general good.” Given the political turn toward Islamic definitions of Ottoman identity, coupled with the new strains caused by the war with Greece, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that Jewish visions of the “general good” became increasingly entangled with that of Ottoman Muslims specifically.

This was clearly the case with Ottoman Jews' campaigns to assist the Muslim refugees of Crete, a cause that also garnered a great deal of attention in Ottoman Muslim circles.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although Jews fled the island during the conflict as well, the Ottoman Jewish press did not announce any parallel program to come to their aid. The task of providing for the Cretan Jewish refugees arriving in different cities of the empire fell mostly to foreign Jewish philanthropies, especially the Alliance Israélite Universelle, while Ottoman Jews appear to have focused their energies more on the “common cause” of aiding Muslim refugees from the island.Footnote ⁷⁹ That Jews may have been shifting their philanthropic patterns away from Jewish charity during the war was suggested obliquely in several notices published in the Ladino press, which lamented the sorry state of Jewish institutions and their lack of funds at the same time that Jewish communal efforts were being directed toward aiding Muslims from Crete.Footnote ⁸⁰ Although the capital's Jewish press offered no explicit discussion of what these choices meant, its pages often brought the potential slippage between “Ottoman” and “Muslim” into relief.Footnote ⁸¹

Just how entangled religious and imperial categories could become is demonstrated by a series of press reports on an Ottoman women's organization formed in Istanbul to provide for soldiers wounded during the war.Footnote ⁸² Though articles issued by El Tiempo encouraged Jewish women across the empire to support the new endeavor, they initially referred to the organization as a “Committee of Muslim Ladies” that was “composed of women from the highest ranks of Muslim society.”Footnote ⁸³ The Ladino press was hardly alone in identifying the society as a Muslim one: the Ottoman-language women's periodical Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete similarly introduced the organization as an Islamic Ladies’ Society (Cemiyet-i Muhtereme-i Muhadderat-ı İslamiye) during the same period.Footnote ⁸⁴ The fact that these reports used the term “Muslim” in the committee's title did not stop El Tiempo from calling on its female readers to join the group or from praising the efforts of those who did. The paper issued various reports about the activities of “Madame Elias Pasha,” the wife of the Jewish military doctor and Sultan Abdülhamit II's private ophthalmologist, who figured prominently among the committee's members; other Ottoman, French, and Ladino papers of the empire similarly recorded the donations she secured for the organization from celebrated foreign philanthropists.Footnote ⁸⁵ There is ample evidence that scores of other Ottoman Jewish women contributed directly to the society: both during and after the war, their names regularly appeared among the lists of donors to the committee printed in the Ladino, Ottoman, French, and English press of the imperial capital.Footnote ⁸⁶

While the designation of the organization as “Muslim” likely served as a marker of the actual religious identity of the majority of the committee's founding members, in the pages of El Tiempo it also became a flexible and symbolic term that did not bar Jews' belonging. Remarkably, Ladino reports continued to refer to the society as Muslim even after articles in the empire's Ottoman- and French-language press as well as official reports about the group's activities all came to define the committee in more ecumenical terms, as an Ottoman women's organization (Muhadderat-ı Osmaniye Cemiyet-i Hayriyesi; Comité des dames ottomanes).Footnote ⁸⁷ Still, the title of “Muslim” may not have been an entirely comfortable one for Jewish journalists or their reading publics; after some time, El Tiempo experimented with calling the charitable organization by other names.Footnote ⁸⁸ For a short time, it chose the rather bulky label of “The Society Established by Madame Şükrü Bey, Daughter of the Grand Vizier.”Footnote ⁸⁹ By late June, it finally exchanged the term “Muslim” for “Ottoman,” referring to the group as the “Committee of Ottoman Ladies for the Wounded,” also noting the presence of Ottoman Christian women in the society for the first time.Footnote ⁹⁰

It would be easy enough to conclude that these changes show how Jewish journalists reporting on the society had recognized the incongruity of calling the organization—in which Jews and Christians had played an active role—a Muslim society and that they had finally solved the problem. Easy enough, perhaps, but not wholly accurate: a few weeks after apparently having “settled” on designating the group as Ottoman, as various other press reports from the empire had done, El Tiempo reverted to the original appellation that marked the society as Muslim.Footnote ⁹¹ The terms, as well as the concepts they represented, remained in flux. Ottoman Jews, like other Ottomans, simply lived with the tension.