Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (2 page)

After establishing the centrality of notions of imperial nationhood for the late Ottoman experience, I then trace the myriad ways in which Ottoman Palestinian citizens of all faiths exercised their newly claimed and evolving citizenship rights (
Chapters 3
and
4
). Ottoman citizens studied and cited the constitution and other revolutionary “sacred texts” that endowed them with political power, and they utilized a variety of tools to exercise and preserve that power. One of those was participation in a months-long, empire-wide boycott against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in response to its October 1908 annexation of the former Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The boycott promoted Ottoman patriotism and the perceived unity of the Ottoman nation, and cemented the popularity of the CUP's local branches as vectors of mass political mobilization. Also, in preparation for the Ottoman parliamentary elections held in the fall of 1908, Ottoman citizens continued their engagement with understanding political representation and rights at the same time that the structural balance between individual and ethno-religious group
(millet)
rights was challenged. Beyond the imperial level, Jerusa- lemites sought to act out their new claims to imperial citizenship on the urban stage as well, linking together broader discourses about imperial reform and modernization with local visions of progress and cooperation. Locally run institutions like the chamber of commerce and Freemason lodges became important sites for enacting the claims of civic Ottomanism.

And yet, making imperial citizens out of such a heterogeneous population spread out over three continents was not an uncontested process; among the significant challenges of the Ottoman imperial citizenship project were the divergent, indeed sometimes opposed, meanings that it had for the empire's population. Central among those tensions was the one between the universalizing discourse and impulse of civic Ottomanism—the premise that all citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity, were partners in the imperial project—and the very real constraints and challenges to this universalism. The last part of this book (
Chapters 5
-
7
) examines the various competing “citizenship discourses” that registered uneven application of imperial rights and obligations as well as public allegations of relative privileges and shirked duties. The multilingual press, for example, provided a platform for centripetal
and
centrifugal visions of imperial citizenship, exemplified by the press debate over the mandatory conscription of non-Muslims and the genre of the “open letter.”

Because identity and political practice were deeply intertwined, by shifting our analysis to imperial citizenship we can see imperial multi-ethnicity
in a new light—not solely as a significant component of imperial collapse or a predictor of rising nationalisms, but rather as a constitutive force in the struggle over imperial political membership, collective belonging, and identity. As the Ottoman imperial citizenship project incorporated elements of liberal, communitarian, republican, and ethnic models of citizenship, each “citizenship discourse” had distinct visions of the imperial collective, its relationship to other collectivities (religion, ethnic group, local province), and the nature of citizenship rights and duties.
¹⁵
The rise of particularistic ethnic, religious, and regional identities and interests—like Zionism, Arabism, and a Palestinian localism—reflected struggles over the contours of imperial citizenship and the boundaries around the “Ottoman nation.” In other words, rather than plotting the empire's demise, the prewar Ottoman public by and large was preoccupied with envisioning, claiming, contesting, and implementing what it meant to be an imperial citizen.

In short, by analyzing the diverse Ottoman “citizenship discourses,” practices, and identities in play in the years before World War I, this book shows how ethnic and religious minorities both tapped into
and
were excluded from the Ottoman imperial citizenship project. In contrast to the dominant image of increasingly (indeed, inherently) independent and clashing trajectories of Ottoman center and Arab periphery, my project illustrates Arab and Jewish provincials' active participation in and engagement with the imperial state, not their sidestepping or dele- gitimization of it. Lastly, my relational approach to the social history of Palestine's various religious communities, which illustrates the high degree of interconnectedness and embeddedness of Arabs and Jews at the turn of the century, argues that the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was not immanent, but rather erupted in dialectical tension with the promises and shortcomings of “civic Ottomanism.”

RELIGION, ETHNICITY, AND MIXING IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND PALESTINE

No longer the glorious, expanding state that inspired fear among its rivals and admiration among their intellectuals, by the early twentieth century the Ottoman Empire, long derided in European capitals as “the Sick Man of Europe,” had suffered numerous territorial losses, economic contraction, and internal unrest and fragmentation. For a Europe that idealized and normalized the homogeneous nation-state (at the same time, not coincidentally, that it conquered overseas territories and peoples), the Ottoman Empire, home to dozens of religious sects, languages,
and ethnic groups, was an anachronism. As G. F. Abbott, a British war correspondent dispatched to Istanbul in early 1909, dryly noted: “The Ottoman nation has been compared, for variety of ingredients, to an omelet. Yet, unless the political epicures are sadly at fault, it lacks the first essential of that dish, for, though stirred and beaten for centuries, the ingredients still refuse to mix.”
¹⁶
Another foreign correspondent likened Ottoman subjecthood to conscription: “the Greeks, Armenians and Albanians are Turkish subjects because they have to be.”
¹⁷

At its base, this sentiment reflected a deterministic understanding of ethnicity where ethnic groups were not only assumed to be fixed and unchanging but were also attributed with political salience. In other words, “Turks,” “Arabs,” “Bulgars,” and “Serbs” were seen as closed demographic groups with inherently competing political interests.
¹⁸
As a result, throughout the nineteenth century, the European Great Powers—Austria- Hungary, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia—directly interfered in Ottoman domestic politics, promoting Christian separatism in the southeastern European provinces of the empire (today's Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the Balkans) where the aim was no less than to “drive the Turk back to Asia.”
¹⁹
This went hand in hand with outright European occupation of parts of the empire in North Africa, the Caucasus, and central Europe.

For the Ottoman state, however, population diversity was a product of, and a powerful testament to, successful empire building. The eponymous founder of the dynasty, Osman, had consolidated his power in Asia Minor in the late thirteenth century through alliance and intermarriage with local Turkic tribes and Christian principalities. As the empire spread throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa, later sultans continued to integrate their diverse subjects into the state. Among the early Ottoman troops there are examples of Christian
ghazis
(so-called holy warriors) fighting in the sultan's armies, and the Christian youth
(devşirme)
taxed into imperial service, though converted to Islam, rose to important political and military positions in the service of the state. After the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, Sultan “Fatih” Mehmet (“the Conquerer”) retained the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church and strategically moved Jews into the city to replace the fleeing Byzantines. Decades later, in 1492, when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, Sultan Beyazit II famously welcomed the exiles to Ottoman shores.

The point of this recounting is not to argue that the Ottoman Empire was a multicultural paradise, for it surely was not. As an Islamic empire it maintained an “institutionalized difference” between Muslim and non- Muslim subjects which was accentuated—or indeed erupted—in times of
crisis.
²⁰
Non-Muslim populations were organized, counted, taxed, legislated, and otherwise “marked” according to their confessional or ethno- confessional communities. At the same time, however, non-Muslim communities were allowed a tremendous degree of self-governance and autonomy in the realms of communal institutions and religious law, and comparatively speaking, the status of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire was far better than that of non-Christians in Europe.
²¹
There were numerous non-Muslims of high political status in the state, such as the Greek Phanariots or the Armenian
amira
class. Furthermore, economic conditions and contact with European co-religionists increasingly favored the
embourgeoisement
and Westernization of Christian and Jewish communities, particularly in the port cities of the empire, so much so that, on the whole, non-Muslims' socioeconomic position was far more stable and enviable than that of Muslim peasants and workers in the empire.
²²

As a result, it is misleading historically to look at religion as the only, and perhaps even the central, dividing factor in Ottoman history; class and status were clearly no less relevant. Instead, the Ottoman state throughout much of its existence looked upon ethnic and religious diversity among its subject population and state officials in an altogether pragmatic fashion; it did not care about their “identity” per se. As one scholar has written, for most of its history “the Ottoman state was neither seeking to meld together the separate communities nor consciously planting the seeds of further divisions among the subject peoples of the empire.”
²³

This political pragmatism, to a certain extent, was born of demographic realities. For the first centuries of its existence, the Ottoman Empire had a majority non-Muslim population, and the dynasty was careful to forge favorable alliances with adjoining Christian principalities. By the sixteenth century, the split between the Muslim population and the non-Muslim population in the empire had flipped to approximately 6040.
²⁴
On the eve of the end of empire in the early twentieth century, after substantial territorial losses in southeastern Europe bled the empire of many of its Christian subjects, the Ottoman population of almost 21 million was still approximately 25 percent non-Muslim (consisting of about 5.3 million Christians and Jews).
²⁵
In addition to this religious mix, the Ottoman population was even further divided ethnically and linguistically, with Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Bulgars, Circassians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Serbs, Turks, and other groups in residence. Ethnic stereotypes and jokes existed, but for the most part ethnic mixing was just another factor of imperial life until the nineteenth century.
²⁶

As a result of this demographic reality, in many parts of the Ottoman Empire, in particular in the Balkans, western and eastern Anatolia, Mount Lebanon, and the many mixed cities and towns of the empire,
the various religious and ethnic groups lived together on a daily basis. In 1906-7, the population of the empire's capital and largest city, Istanbul, consisted of about 50 percent Muslims, 20.4 percent Greek Orthodox Christians, 7 percent Armenian Christians, 5.5 percent Jews, and 15 percent European foreigners.
²⁷
Salonica, the third-largest city in the empire, had a population that was 38.9 percent Jewish, 29.1 percent Muslim, and 25.3 percent Greek in the 1913 Greek census, a year
after
thousands of Jews and Muslims had fled the city with the departing Ottoman forces.
²⁸

In each locale, Muslims, Christians, and Jews developed distinct relationships that were shaped by residential patterns, economic situations, and a wide variety of cultural factors in addition to the policies set in place by the Ottoman state. In these mixed towns and cities, religious and ethnic groups often lived in the same neighborhoods (sometimes even in the same apartment building or courtyard), belonged to the same craft guilds, worked and shopped in the same markets, went into business together, and frequented the same cafés and law courts. The popular tradition of visiting the tombs of holy men and saints further bridged the religious gap and brought Muslims, Christians, and Jews to pray together for divine intercession.
²⁹
In other words, the physical proximity of different religious groups could, and often did, lead to familiarity and even solidarity.
³⁰

However, proximity also bore the potential for conflict, and times of crisis such as plagues or wars often revealed the fragility of intercommunal relations. A cholera epidemic in Baghdad in 1889–90, for example, set off a wave of Jewish-Muslim clashes in that city. There were also more systemic struggles over scarce resources, and Ottoman subjects of all three religions fought over real estate, competed economically, and occasionally clashed physically.
³¹
Throughout the mid-nineteenth century there were several intercommunal riots in the Arab provinces of the empire, culminating in the I860 civil war in Mount Lebanon. In short, the Ottoman record on intercommunal relations was neither one of peaceful coexistence nor one of intractable violence, although elements of both were certainly present. Rather, relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews were inexorably linked to political, economic, and social factors that stemmed from local, imperial, and global geopolitical concerns.

In many ways, the region of Palestine was a microcosm of the challenges facing the empire at large. Divided between two major administrative seats in Jerusalem, covering the southern half of the country, and Beirut, which administered the northern half, Palestine underwent all of the same transformations that took place in other Ottoman provinces, albeit at its own pace and to a degree determined by local factors. Palestine was very much a part of Ottoman administrative reforms as well as
of the economic trends of the nineteenth century—the commercialization of agriculture, the incorporation of province and empire into the world economy, the rise of coastal trade, and the commoditization of land. These economic changes precipitated several important social developments, namely, the emergence of a large landowning class with strong patronage and other ties to rural hinterlands and the rise of minority merchant communities in the cities. Intellectually and ideologically, Palestinians also grappled with the same questions of religious reform, intellectual fermentation, and the pulls of imperial, local, and communal identification and solidarity.