Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (43 page)

By that time, relations between the official Zionist movement and the anti-Zionist Jewish leadership in Istanbul, on the one hand, and Ottoman officialdom, on the other, had deteriorated dramatically. In a meeting attended by Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum, the four Jewish members of parliament, several members of the Istanbul Jewish communal council, and several members of the CUP, it was conveyed that in terms of Zionism, “in the ministry the good will they formerly had for us is completely changed. It is no longer mistrust but something that can be called close to animosity. They do not want to hear any more about Jewish immigration—whether in Jerusalem or Mesopotamia, or even in Konya. The leading circles that before were for us are now against us.”
⁸¹

Mazliach stated that he had seen Riza Tevfik Bey with Ottoman Turkish translations of the Basel Program, which the Arab members of parliament took from him to read. Sasson, the Jewish MP from Baghdad, informed the group that the Arab parliamentarians were under a tremendous amount of pressure from their electorate and notable backers to oppose the Zionists forcefully. According to Fresco, who sent a report of the meeting to the Istanbul Zionist office, the Jewish MP spoke in “meaningfully sharp and pessimistic words.” Fresco concluded by saying he hoped this information showed them “that the propaganda of Zionism in Turkey [
sic
], especially as it is now operated, can only be a great misfortune for the Jews of Turkey [
sic].”

Although no doubt Fresco felt vindicated by the turn of events, the debates between
Liberty
and
El Tiempo
did little to engage the substance of the accusations—
Liberty
was adamant in maintaining that Ottoman Zionists were unstintingly loyal, with great “devotion in spirit and body of the Ottoman Jews to their homeland ‘Ottomania.”
Liberty
rejected a reader's suggestion to hold an Ottoman Jewish “national meeting” of communal leaders to debate Zionism—rather, it preferred simply to declare opponents “enemies of Israel.”
⁸²
Throughout 1911, the fight between the two camps raged on in Istanbul, with press and legal actions going back and forth, but there was little resolution.
⁸³
What was clear, though, was that Zionism was not an intellectual exercise—it was a movement creating facts on the ground. The next front in the battle would move from Istanbul to Palestine.

THE SALE OF PALESTINE AND THE LIMITS OF OTTOMAN ZIONISM

Fresco's outspoken attacks on Zionism found resonance throughout the empire; in Palestine the local spokesman for an Ottomanist anti-Zionism was Albert Antébi. Early after the declaration of the constitution, Antébi had expressed his own concerns about the danger of particularist Jewish interests, especially the foreign Zionist variety. Much like Fresco, Antébi viewed these European Zionists who were resident in Palestine as troublemakers who threatened the communal equilibrium in the Ottoman Empire. A natural response to such provocations, “if I were a Muslim Turkish deputy,” he argued, would be to “take the first opportunity to agitate for restrictive measures against Jewish activity in Palestine.”
⁸⁴

In Antébi's mind, the only path to economic and cultural regeneration was through a broad unity with the Muslims and Christians in Palestine: “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.”
⁸⁵

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. Damascus-born and Paris-educated, the Francophone Antébi was the prototype of the assimilated Sephardi Jew. The Hebrew newspaper
The Deer
called Antébi “the greatest enemy of Zionism,” and the editor of the paper, Itamar Ben-Avi, launched a public campaign to discredit and isolate him.
⁸⁶
However, the Sephardi press, including the pro-Zionist papers, rallied behind 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. Instead, the Sephardi press demanded a lawsuit against
The Deer
, arguing that it was a newspaper of anti-Jewish atheists and provocateurs.
⁸⁷

Ironically, although Antébi was vigilantly anti-Zionist in ideology and political outlook, in practice he helped the Zionist movement a great deal. As he himself put it, “Without practicing the utopian Zionism, I have consecrated all of my time, all of my faculties, and every beneficial matter for Jewish activity.”
⁸⁸
In addition to his main position as director of the AIU vocational school and beyond his side activities in the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce and Commercial Society of Palestine, Antébi also served as an intermediary in land sales, mediated between Jewish colonies and Arab villages in periods of clashes, and repeatedly intervened with local Ottoman officials in matters of importance to Jews. He worked for the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) in an official capacity, and unofficially with the Anglo-Palestine Bank. The Palestine Office also frequently turned to Antébi in requesting aid despite its own misgivings toward him.
⁸⁹

Despite his extensive Ottomanist activities, Antébi's aid on behalf of Zionists earned him the opprobrium of his neighbors. As he admitted, “My excommunication by the Zionists is similar to that which the Ottoman government and my Muslim co-citizens direct against my Jewish activities.” Indeed, the Arabic-language newspaper
The Crier
referred to him as the “agent of the colonizers [
wakīl rijāl al-ist‘imār].”
⁹⁰

Indeed, more than any other issue, it was the sale of land to Ottoman Jews in the service of Zionism that made their Ottomanist commitments suspect to their neighbors. In the first decades of Zionist settlement in Palestine, Zionist settlement companies were able to purchase land frequently due to the intervention and assistance of the local Sephardim. Sephardi and Maghrebi Jews of the most prominent families were active in assisting the Barons de Rothschild and de Hirsch in acquiring lands for Jewish settlement. Avraham Moyal served as the local representative of the Russian society Lovers of Zion (Hovevei Zion) until his early death in 1885. His brother, Yosef Moyal, assisted the “Bilu” settlers and was considered a “pioneer” in Jewish land purchase, along with Aharon Chelouche, Haim Amzalek, and Yosef Navon. Later generations of Sephardi land agents included the lawyer David Moyal (Yosef's son), Moshe Matalon, David Yellin, and Yitzhak Levi.
⁹¹

In the spring of 1909 two officials of the Ottoman Ministry of Justice were sent to Palestine, and the new governor of Jerusalem, Subhi Bey, was ordered to comply with the 1904 government decision to forbid land sales to foreign Jews, even those residing in Palestine. Antébi blamed
the renewed government oversight on Zionists who had insisted on registering land in the names of foreign Jews rather than in the names of Ottoman Jews as had been the custom. On his own initiative, Subhi Bey decided to continue allowing land sales to Ottoman Jews. The new grand vizier, Hilmi Pasha, suggested that if Subhi Bey could devise a plan that would safeguard the rights of Ottoman Jews and yet stop immigration from Romania and Russia, “we shall willingly encourage the economic development of Ottoman Jews and abolish the restrictions.” Albert Antébi worked with Subhi Bey to devise a plan to do just that.
⁹²

However, yet again, in May 1910, the British consul in Palestine reported that foreign Jews were being prevented from purchasing land; the following month, the Zionist office reported that it was impossible for Ottoman Jews to buy land as well. After the al-Fula land sale controversy in the spring of 1910, 150 Jaffa Arabs sent a telegram to the Ottoman government and various newspapers demanding an end to Zionist immigration and land purchase. As one historian has noted, “they particularly protested against the purchase of land by Ottoman ‘men of straw' on behalf of the Zionists.”
⁹³
In the aftermath, bans on land sales to foreign Jews were reinforced and land sales to Ottomanized Jews would only be possible after a residence of fifteen to twenty years.
Liberty
responded in the language of citizenship:

This ban that affected especially the Jews in Erez-Israel saddens us greatly because it comes from the enlightened Ottoman government that always opened her gates to our people and was like a merciful mother to them, like to all the nations. This ban would have caused us great sorrow in the Hamidian period, but in this period of freedom and equality—[how much greater is our sorrow!]. When the rumors of the ban were rife, we did not want to believe it, and even after we received official notice it was difficult for us to believe it, but at any rate, we were forced against our wishes to believe it.
⁹⁴

In the spring of 1911, various government officials in the north reinforced existing bans on land sales to Jews, including issuing warnings against the transfer of lands from Ottoman Jewish citizens to foreign Jews.
⁹⁵
In 1912, the local Jerusalem government announced that it was banning further land purchase by Jews, including those who were Ottoman subjects. Opposition in the Jewish community to the new ban was swift and sharp. Members of the Jewish community's Jaffa General City Council (vaʻad ha-ʻir ha-klali), including the Sephardi chief rabbi in Jaffa, Ben-Zion ‘Uziel, discussed the ban on November 14 and debated a response. The council members were well aware of their position: while they wanted to demand their rights equal to the other Ottoman citizens, the Balkan war in the background was an incentive to prove their loyalty to the empire. Nonetheless, they spoke in the language of “defending the
honor of our people,” “our national rights,” “separating the Jews from the other nations,” and “standing ground like the other nations.”
⁹⁶

The Hebrew newspaper
Liberty
published two interviews held with Muhdi Bey, then governor of Jerusalem, about the new ban. As it turned out, it was the result of local initiative alone and did not originate in Istanbul. When pressed about the ban's applicability to Ottoman Jews, Muhdi Bey cited the role of Sephardi land agents and middlemen in Zionist land purchases as justification for the new policy. “[The law forbids]…those Ottomans who buy land in their names for the foreign Jews who arrived in our land to settle here. In recent days such things have taken place…which is against the law.”
⁹⁷
Muhdi Bey also informed the paper's editor, Ben-‘Atar, that employing foreign Jews on one's own land was against the law.

Ben-‘Atar returned to government headquarters two days later to discuss the case of Yosef Elyashar, an Ottoman Jew who had tried to purchase three dunams of land from Fahmi al-Nashashibi, also an Ottoman citizen, but had been prevented by Muhdi Bey. The exchange between Ben-'Atar and Muhdi Bey was heated at times. Why, asked Ben-'Atar, had the paperwork for Elyashar and al-Nashashibi been denied, despite the fact that Elyashar was a member of the city council and an Ottoman Jewish notable? Muhdi Bey's response was as follows:

We 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 if not all of them are merchants, industrialists, warehouse owners and shopkeepers, writers or clerks in different offices. They do not have any sense of belonging to the land. And because of that [fact], if they purchase land it is not for themselves but for others, for the foreign immigrants who come here or for foreign settlement companies that, according to the old laws, have no authority to settle [here].
⁹⁸

But, Ben-‘Atar protested, there were a number of Ottoman Jews who were engaged in manual labor; Muslims and Christians were allowed to make investments in land without actually working it themselves; and furthermore, the land restriction violated the equal rights of Ottoman Jews. In the end, the governor asserted that Ottoman Jews were allowed to purchase a courtyard or a warehouse, but that “those Jews…have no business with farming.”

On November 14, the Jewish City Council sent the following telegram to Istanbul:

At the moment when our hearts spill blood over the disaster of our homeland and at the hour of unity of all the sons of the homeland it is necessary to increase the honor of the Ottoman Empire—there are officials who differentiate between
brothers through orders and commands against a part of the citizenry, orders that are against the constitutional law and against uprightness.…An order like this separates the Jews for the worse and brings a divide between the citizens, which is a dangerous thing, especially in a time like this. We protest against such an injury against the rights of the Ottoman Jewish citizens and request that this illegal order be canceled immediately, and we hope that through this the unity and peace will forever [conquer] our enemies and result in the success of our great government.
⁹⁹

In the end, Albert AntAntébi was again called upon to negotiate with the government. In addition to protesting Muhdi Bey's formulation that Jewish merchants could not speculate in land, Antébi's appeal to the Jerusalem governor emphasized the civic rights of Ottoman Jews, their contribution to the Ottoman state, and the importance of progress for Palestine.