Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (39 page)

Not to be dissuaded, ‘Araktinji again appealed to the GODF, stating that the founders of Moriah had acted improperly in founding a lodge on their own. He also asserted that language problems had been one of the catalysts to the defection, since many of the Temple of Solomon members did not know French, and several of the defectors apparently did not know Arabic.
⁹⁹
Furthermore, most of the Temple of Solomon members had been initiated under the GODF order through Barkai, and as a result, the GODF owed them special consideration. Finally, according to ‘Araktinji, the main instigator of the defections, the French banker Henri Frigere, had promoted personal animosity among Jerusalem's Freemasons, and in order to mend the growing rifts in Palestinian Freemasonry, ‘Araktinji demanded that he be transferred elsewhere in the empire.
¹⁰⁰

In their defense, the founders of the Moriah lodge wrote again to the GODF, this time indicting not only the members of Temple of Solomon from whom they split, but also the Jaffa-based lodge Barkai and all “indigenous” Freemasons. According to Moriah,

The indigenous Turkish and Arab element is still unable to understand and appreciate the superior principles of Masonry, and in consequence, of practicing them. For the majority, Freemasonry is probably only an instrument of protection and occult recommendation [?], and for others an instrument of local and political influence. The work of the lodges consists primarily of [illegible text]…and recommendations, not always unfortunately, for just causes and in favor of innocent Freemasons. The rest does not exist and cannot exist because the indigenous know
only despotism, from which they suffer for long centuries, and their instruction is very undeveloped, and is not prepared to work with a disinterested aim for humanity and justice.
¹⁰¹

This situation, according to Moriah, had caused a deadlock in lodge work, since the “indigenous” lodge members reportedly vetoed suggestions of the second faction. Naturally this letter also reveals a racist and patronizing attitude not unfamiliar in colonial Masonic circles: “natives” could not be expected to truly understand Masonic principles as “Europeans” did. Furthermore, while proposing universalism on the one hand, Masonic lodges in practice expounded a very Eurocentric—and in the case of the GODF, Francophone—view of the modern liberal man. The irony, of course, is that only Ottomans who were already exposed to and open to European language, ideology, or manners sought out membership in European lodges. Members of a certain class and cultural milieu sought fraternity and legitimacy in this very European institution, precisely because of all it represented—cosmopolitanism, liberalism, modernity, and acculturation to a changed global setting. Regardless of whether or not they
already were
all these things, Ottoman Masons certainly
aspired
to be them.

Yet, revealing an inherent tension in the modernizing class's orientation toward Europe, the core indigenous Temple of Solomon lodge members were suspicious of the two Frenchmen (Frigere and Drouillard) and their influence over the other defectors. Frigere reported that the Temple of Solomon leadership “persuaded the other Freemasons that our lodge [Moriah] was created with the aim of facilitating the descent of the French into Palestine…and other stupid stories, which can appear ridiculous by far, but which were not, considering the particular situation of Turkey [sic], without a rather pressing danger.”
¹⁰²
Of course, during this period the Ottoman Empire had recently fought several wars, one against Italy over its annexation of an Ottoman province (Libya), and the other against Greece and Bulgaria over the Ottoman regions of the Balkans—both of which it lost. Furthermore, longstanding local resentments against the privileges accorded foreigners in the empire under the Capitulations as well as the arrogance of European consuls who repeatedly demanded passing warships to intimidate and control the local population also weighed into the equation. As a result, anti-European suspicions and sentiment were understandably running particularly high.

Interestingly, by the next year the local Masons' depiction of the split had changed slightly. Barkai Venerable ‘Araktinji wrote to the GODF complaining that the Moriah lodge had been based on a failed bid for leadership of the Temple of Solomon lodge (in other words, a petty personal political struggle), and that moreover, it harbored Zionists, a fact
which had hardened the position of its external opponents and brought about its own internal critics. “We have gone twice to Jerusalem to appease the hatred and reconcile the brother members of both lodges and we have succeeded only slightly.…Our brothers in Jerusalem are the high functionaries of the government, they are the notables (though well- educated, nonfanatics) who fear being viewed derisively in the eyes of their compatriots and [therefore] prefer to move away from their Freemason brothers, the Zionists.”
¹⁰³

According to ‘Araktinji, the members of Temple of Solomon would have liked to have joined a GODF-sponsored lodge in Jerusalem had Moriah not undercut them. He recommended again that the GODF withhold its support for Moriah and arrange for the professional transfer of Frigere, which would eventually open the way for reform and reconciliation between the Jerusalem lodges. In ‘Araktinji's optimistic view, “the balance at the time of the elections will be right and our brother Zionists will be more useful in secrecy and more content though the majority of the lodge would be notable natives and senior officials of the government, at least the name of the lodge ceases being a Zionist lodge and will be respected more in the eyes of the population of Jerusalem.”
¹⁰⁴

As for Moriah, in addition to the opposition it had raised among fellow Masons, it also faced a great deal of persecution by the local “clerics,” especially the French among them. For this the lodge blamed the French consul and vice-consul in Jerusalem, along with a French priest, for striking a sharply anti-Masonic tone, and went so far as to ask that they be replaced. In repeated requests to the GODF to intervene with the French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d'Orsay, Moriah pointed out that not only did the local French officials act in a way that would not be tolerated in secular France, they were also negligent in their duties and were neglecting French interests. In order to convince the GODF, the Moriah members pointed out that French commerce and trade had declined from first place in Palestine ten years prior to fifth place.
¹⁰⁵

The upstart Moriah lodge is the only Palestinian lodge that left a record of its activities and projects, although as they were only proposed to the GODF we have little way of knowing to what extent their plans were actually carried out. At any rate it is interesting to note that among the projects it seriously proposed were the following: the opening of a “scientific, sociological, and philanthropic library” for the use of lodge members; opening a dispensary under the aegis of the French Consulate in Jerusalem to provide free medical care to newly enfranchised Moroccans under French protection; encouraging the establishment of a French society to compete for concessions providing electricity and electric tramways for Jerusalem; and opening a secular school in Jerusalem.
¹⁰⁶

Of all its proposed projects, the most ideologically Masonic was the establishment of a secular
(laique)
school in Jerusalem. We have already seen that virtually all of the schools in Palestine were private and confessional, and even the Ottoman state school system educated only Muslim students in reality.
¹⁰⁷
In an effort to gain popular support, the Moriah lodge published an article in a local newspaper and led a delegation to meet with the French consul in the city to request the establishment of a French secular secondary school. The consul said he would recommend to the ministry that a congregational high school be established instead, a proposition that was not welcomed, according to Moriah, from either the French or Masonic point of view. “From the French point of view,” Moriah complained, “the solution of the Consul is not good because all the Greek, Arab, and Jewish elements who are the most numerous will never come to a religious school, and it is precisely this element which is aimed at. From the Masonic point of view, we would lose an excellent occasion to attract with our ideas the rising generation which could bring about a serious blow to religious omnipotence in our city.”
¹⁰⁸

The Moriah lodge presented a petition signed by 316 heads of families representing 622 children in support of the establishment of a French lay school.
¹⁰⁹
By the next year, however, there had been no progress on the matter of the school, although there were similar Masonic proposals gaining steam in both Beirut and Alexandria. A report in the Arabic press of French plans to establish a scientific school of higher education in Palestine along the lines of the American University in Beirut came to naught, as did Moriah's suggestion that they establish a school for “rational thought” in Jerusalem.
¹¹⁰

By 1914, the members of the Moriah lodge had modified their initial Francophone elitism and requested permission to establish an Arabic-speaking lodge; while acknowledging they wanted to keep the “homogeneity and brotherhood” of their French-speaking lodge, they recognized that doing so kept out individuals who did not know French well enough to join.
¹¹¹
The GODF responded that while they did not object to occasional meetings in Arabic, as necessary, they concluded by reminding them to take “the greatest prudence with regard to the initiation of the indigenous laymen.”
¹¹²

With the outbreak of the First World War, however, all three Palestinian Masonic lodges ceased activity, so Moriah was unable to carry out its plans for an Arabic-speaking branch. Barkai also was shut down during the war, and its Venerable ‘Araktinji and other lodge members were expelled to Anatolia. In 1919 ‘Araktinji returned home to find the lodge headquarters in shambles. From 1920 to 1924 the lodge was closed down yet again due to Jewish-Arab clashes in the aftermath of the Balfour
Declaration and subsequent establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine, which was predicated on recognizing a “Jewish national home” in Palestine at the expense of its Arab inhabitants. With the 1929 riots in Palestine most of the remaining Arab members of the lodge left to join all-Arab lodges, and by the 1930s mixed Jewish-Arab Freemasonry lodges in Palestine were a thing of the past, another pillar of coexistence toppled by the rising nationalist conflict.
¹¹³

Whereas heterogeneity in the Ottomanist context enabled mixed Masonic lodges to flourish as long as they assumed a shared outlook, the seeds of sectarian and national discord nevertheless infiltrated the supposedly sacred Masonic order. Masonic lodges and individual Masons did not live separate from Ottoman Palestinian society, but rather were deeply integrated into it, and as such were sensitive to the balance between Ottomanism and particularism, Ottoman patriotism and European influence, and the growing intercommunal rivalry which is the subject of the following chapter.

In the winter of 1910, the Salonican Judeo-Spanish newspaper
La Tribuna Libera
published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: assimilation, nationalism, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was “bordering on fratricide” and threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.
¹

In the years between the 1908 revolution and World War I, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire were on the brink of a real communal crisis. For one, questions over changing communal leadership led to a series of power struggles in cities all over the empire, from the capital in Istanbul, to symbolically important Jerusalem, to even relatively small Jewish communities such as Tiberias and Beirut. These power struggles centered on issues related to the modernization of Ottoman Jewry in favor of a younger generation of reformist
(maskilic)
rabbis who were considered reflective of the times as well as more accountable to their flocks.
²

At the same time, Ottoman Jewry was faced with the same dilemma that confronted their neighbors: what would be their role within the reforming empire, as Ottoman citizens but also as Jews? This chapter focuses on the very complex crossroads at which Sephardi Jews in Palestine found themselves at the end of the Ottoman Empire—straddling Ottoman universalism and Jewish particularism. On the one hand, Ottoman Jews sought to stake a claim in the new Ottoman body politic, embracing the ideological aims of the revolution and seizing the tools of Ottoman citizenship. And yet, this period also 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 both as a legitimate expression of Jews' collective cultural aspirations and as 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.
³
However, both Ottomanism and Zionism were evolving ideologies and practices rather than unchanging beliefs, and the events which took place throughout the empire in those years sharply defined the contours of both. In part, I argue that the increasing appeal of Zionism that emerged after 1908 among the empire's Sephardim was closely related to the perceived failures of Ottomanism and incomplete universalism. Stated differently, Zionism did not gain adherents inasmuch as Ottomanism lost them.

For Palestine's Sephardi (Iberian) and Maghribi (North African) Jewish communities, 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 Jewish immigration, land settlement, and the establishment of Hebraist nationalist cultural institutions firsthand. 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, but 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 protonational 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.

“HAVIVA ‘OTOMANIA”—BELOVED OTTOMANIA

Into the twentieth 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 Beyazit II's open-arms policy toward the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish refugees in the fifteenth century was an integral part of Ottoman Sephardi collective memory, so much so that attempts by the Spanish government to renew its ties with Sephardi Jews were met with public scorn and disdain.
⁴
In addition, economic, social, and political competition with the Armenian and Greek communities in Anatolia and the Balkans in the nineteenth century had pushed the Jewish communities of the empire from their earlier privileged position. The consequence of this competition, argues one historian, 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.”
⁵
Both historic and socioeconomic factors easily translated into enthusiastic support for the Ottoman revolution, and the approximately four hundred thousand Jews of the empire were consistently among the most loyal supporters of the new regime.
⁶

According to various accounts, the Sephardi and Maghrebi Jewish communities celebrated alongside the Muslim and Christian Arab communities, while Ashkenazi Jews by and large remained outside the public gatherings.
⁷
According to Gad Frumkin, the young Ottoman Ashkenazi journalist who observed the celebrations, many Sephardim and Maghrebim mixed with their Arab neighbors, eating sunflower seeds and drinking lemonade together while listening to the military band performing patriotic songs.
⁸

As early as the first day of the official celebrations, the Sephardim had projected themselves into the public scene, arriving with a Torah scroll cover, dancing and singing, waving swords and shooting into the air “in the Eastern style.” The Torah scroll was decorated with silver and gold ornamentation on top and was followed by youth carrying swordlike lances. When the Jews passed by the army, reports stated that “the soldiers raised their swords and weapons in salute.” Jews also participated in the popular speeches that took place in the heady days and nights of August (addressing the crowds in Hebrew, Arabic, and even on occasion, “jargon,” i.e., Judeo-Spanish), and the parades through the city's markets and neighborhoods, where they reportedly carried an Ottoman flag as well as the flags of Zion and the Torah.
⁹

At one celebration in Galilean Safad, Simha Solomon explained the Jews' support for the empire and for the new constitutional regime. “Sirs
and brothers! As a constitutional-Ottoman Jew it is my desire to express the relationship of the Jews to the Turkish constitution.…This day is sacred to all the different nations who reside in the lands of the Ottomans…holy of holies to us the Israelite people.”
¹⁰

At the same time, Solomon pointed out that after the revolution, the traditional “gratitude” for Ottoman government “generosity” had no place in the liberal political spectrum. Instead, a sense of equality and entitlement would come to serve as linchpins of the Jewish Ottomanist agenda as the terms of debate changed dramatically, from that of “tolerated
dhimmi
[non-Muslim]” to “equal partner.” On this basis Ottoman Jews were renewing their covenant of loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and its dynastic head, the sultan. In other words, as long as the Jewish community believed in the empire's good will toward upholding the constitution and rule of law, it was committed to participating in the new Ottomanist project.

At one public lecture held to explain the constitution to his coreligionists, the Jewish parliamentary candidate and Galatasaray graduate Yitzhak Levi argued that in the aftermath of the revolution, “we are all citizens of the Ottoman nation and it is incumbent upon us to break out of our special associations.” He called on all Jews to learn Ottoman Turkish and Arabic and to participate fully in Ottoman Palestinian public life.
¹¹
Similar faith in the future of Ottomanism was expressed by Levi's political rival and fellow Jewish communal leader Albert Antébi. 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 Muslim Parliament, moderate, reactionary perhaps, but we will preserve our constitution.” Despite the fact that the Ottoman Jewish community was numerically a minority in the empire, “our weapon,” Antébi wrote, “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.”
¹²

Jews participated widely in the new institutions established after the revolution—in the branches of the CUP, in Masonic lodges, and in their own civil society organizations. In Istanbul a group of Jewish patriots established the Ligue nationale des juifs de l'Empire Ottoman whose aims were to attain “intellectual and moral perfection and the material and social elevation of the Jewish nation in the empire so it can particis
pate usefully in public life. Its principle preoccupation is to maintain the liberties granted to the people on the 24th of July by the handing-over by force of the constitution of 1876 and the improvement of the latter by legislative means. It strictly recommends to its members to fraternize with all the co-citizens of the other races and religions.”
¹³
Similarly, the Israelite Ottoman Committee, originally founded by Avraham Galante in Cairo as the Israelite Committee of Egypt, aimed to show the Jews the benefits of the constitutional system and to promote faith in equality among all the Ottoman peoples.

In Palestine, in addition to the Society of Ottoman Jews discussed earlier, Shimʻon Moyal established the National Israelite Society (NIS) in Jaffa, whose aim was to work to defend the constitution from internal threat and betrayal.
¹⁴
At the time, its twenty-seven members sent a telegram to all the high offices in Istanbul demanding that Sultan Abdülhamid II step down, that he be tried in court, and that he return the money he allegedly stole from the imperial coffers. Upon the ascension to the throne of the new sultan, the NIS held a celebration for the reading of the official
ferman
, followed by rousing speeches in Hebrew, Arabic, and Ottoman Turkish; it also sent a telegram congratulating the new sultan and promised to support the government “as long as it upholds the constitution.” Since the CUP in Jaffa had moved to establish local civilian militias to keep order, the NIS mobilized eighty Jews from the four main ethnic communities as well as two women to volunteer for the Red Crescent Society. For their loyal efforts the NIS received official thanks from the Jaffa deputy governor and the CUP.

THE ZIONIST CRITIQUE OF OTTOMANISM

The sincere pro-Ottomanist expressions and active participation of the empire's leading Sephardim posed a worrisome development to both the officials and “civilian” ideologues of the Zionist movement. According to Dr. Arthur Ruppin, the local representative of the Zionist Organization (ZO) who headed the Palestine Office in Jaffa, the Sephardi Jews were not expressing sufficient Zionist fervor in the public demonstrations in the weeks after the revolution, but rather were acting as “Ottoman citizens of the Mosaic faith.” In fact, Ruppin claimed, several Sephardi community leaders prevented Zionist symbols from being displayed, and one Zionist newspaper complained that they went so far as to tear a Zionist flag from the hands of a parade participant.
¹⁵
In the eyes of the Zionist movement, the assimilationist tendencies of Ottoman Jewry should be blamed on the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU), the French
philanthropic society that had established a network of schools throughout the Middle East in the nineteenth century with the aim of “civilizing” Middle Eastern Jewry.
¹⁶
Through the AIU's vocational and primary schools, it had imparted a Francophone cultural outlook at the same time that its philosophy was to keep Ottoman Jewry squarely rooted in their homeland. The official Zionist organ in Hebrew,
Ha-'Olam
, warned about the voices of Ottoman assimilationists who could have potentially dire consequences for the Zionist movement: “They are saying what is familiar to us: Zionism is betrayal of your homeland. The Ashkenazi Zionists are the foreigners, and we are true to our homeland and empire.”
¹⁷

This official worry about the political preferences of Ottoman Sephardim was magnified among the radical elements of the Russian socialist Zionists newly arrived in Palestine. Their newspaper,
The Young Worker (Ha-Poʻel ha-
a’ir)
, published a blistering public attack against Yitzhak Levi and his expressions of Ottomanism. Yosef Aharonowitz, the editor, derided Levi's Ottomanism, expressing deep concern that a Zionist official's own Zionism was in doubt. Levi's sins, in their eyes, were numerous. First, Levi had made a distinction within the Jewish community between Ottomans and foreigners. Most disturbing to
The Young Worker
, however, 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.”
¹⁸
“We the Jews,” he reportedly said, “must leave behind our sectarianism, there is now no difference between Jew, Christian, and Muslim.” And yet, as the editor noted, Levi's own campaign to be elected to the Ottoman parliament was inconsistent with his ideology. If we are all part of “the great Ottoman nation,” Aharonowitz challenged, why was there a need for a specifically Jewish representative in the Ottoman parliament?