Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
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Authors: Michelle Campos
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Muslims, Christians, and Jews
in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
Michelle U. Campos
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Campos, Michelle U. (Michelle Ursula), 1971-
Ottoman brothers : Muslims, Christians, and Jews in early twentieth-century
Palestine / Michelle U. Campos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-7067-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-8047-7068-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cultural pluralism—Palestine—History—20th century. 2. Group identity—Political aspects—Palestine—History—20th century. 3. Citizenship—Palestine—History—20th century. 4. Palestine—Ethnic relations—History—20th century. 5. Palestine—History—1799-1917. 6. Turkey—Politics and government—1909-1918. I. Title.
DS125.C26 2011
305.6095694'09041—dc22 2010033457
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/12 Sabon
eISBN: 9780804776783
For Tal and Noah
List of Illustrations and Tables
4. The Mouthpiece of the People
6. Ottomans of the Mosaic Faith
Figures
1.1 Street in the Old City of Jerusalem
1.2 Jaffa Road, the main boulevard of extramural Jerusalem (the New City)
1.1 Masses gathered in Jaffa for the proclamation of the constitution, August 1908
1.2 Public procession in the Old City of Jerusalem
1.3 Official ceremony in Jerusalem, August 1908
1.4 A banner bearing the revolutionary slogans “liberty, equality, fraternity”
1.5 Enver Bey and the “dawn of liberty”
1.6
The Revival of the Ottoman State
1.7 Enver and Niyazi, “the heroes who freed the homeland from despotism”
2.1 Abide-i hürriyet, the Monument of Liberty, Şişli, Istanbul
2.2 Al-madrasa al-dustūriyya al-wataniyya, the Patriotic Constitutional School, Jerusalem
3.2 Voting at Galatasaray Lycée (Istanbul), 1908
3.3 The opening of the Chamber of Deputies, 1909
3.4 Jerusalem MP Ruhi al-Khalidi
4.1 Khalidi Library, Jerusalem
4.2 Masthead of
Al-Quds
newspaper
5.1 Traditional public water fountain in the Old City of Jerusalem
5.2 Train station in Jerusalem
5.3 Diploma of the Grand Orient Ottoman
5.4 Freemasons in Palestine, 1906–15
5.5 Barkai lodge, new members by religion
Maps
1.1 Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1895
1.2 Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Ottoman Palestine, early twentieth century
1.3 Demographic distribution in Jerusalem's Old City neighborhoods,
1905–6
1.4 Demographic distribution in Jerusalem's New City neighborhoods,
1905–6
7.1 Jewish settlements and Zionist colonies in Palestine,
1882–1914
Tables
As with any project spanning many years from inception to completion, my book has benefited from the help of numerous institutions and individuals. My debt to them is enormous.
This research project received generous support from: the Fulbright Commission in Israel, the Social Science Research Council, the Palestinian American Research Council, Stanford University (the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Institute of International Studies, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies), Cornell University (the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the President's Council for Cornell Women, and the Society for the Humanities), and the University of Florida's Department of History. I thank in particular Ross Brann, my former chair at Cornell, and Joe Spillane, my current chair at UF, for their tremendous support for my work, in the form of travel grants, course reductions, and valuable writing time. My research for this book was also greatly facilitated by numerous librarians and archivists in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, France, and the United States, and I thank them for their invaluable assistance.
Over the years my work has benefited immensely from the feedback and aid of scholars, colleagues, and friends, including: Butrus Abu Manneh, Iris Agmon, Ida Altman, Joel Beinin, Hanna Berman, Johann Bussow, Linda Butler, Holly Case, Sherman Cochran, Brett de Bary, Louis Fishman, Haim Gerber, Eyal Ginio, Magdi Guirguis, Kim Haines-Eitzen, ‘Awad Halabi, Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Peter Holquist, Avigail Jacobson, Pieter Judson, Erdem Kabadayi, Reşat Kasaba, Dilek Akyalcin Kaya, Vangelis Kechriotis, Sarah Kovner, Gudrun Krämer, Sheryl Kroen, Jacob Landau, Mark LeVine, Joel Migdal, Montasir al-Qaffash, Richard Roberts, Aron Rodrigue, Avi Rubin, Kent Schull, Samir Seikaly, Seteney Shami, Sarah Stein, Salim Tamari, Baki Tezcan, Patricia Woods, and Mahmud Yazbak. My sincere thanks to all of them for their time and generosity, their insights and references, and their gentle criticism. I also thank Israel Gershoni and Charles Kurzman for their close readings of this work and for their enthusiastic support of the project. I am also extremely grateful to my editors at Stanford University Press: Kate Wahl, for believing in this project as well as for her keen eye and valuable feedback, and her very talented assistant, Joa Suorez; and Mariana Raykov, for shepherding it through the various stages of publication with good humor and a great deal of patience and skill.
Spanning debts both professional and personal, my heartfelt thanks go to Shana Bernstein, Shira Robinson, and Celka Straughn for their constructive feedback on this project as well as their overall intellectual and emotional support during the past many (!) years of my life. Thanks also are due to Celka for graciously and reliably procuring various newspapers and pamphlets for me from the Harvard Library over the years.
Finally, it is only fitting that I thank my family. My mother, Rosita Buendia, and my father, Sergio Campos, placed a strong emphasis on the life of the mind and gave us all freedom and support to follow our dreams, even though mine always took me so far from home. My siblings Yvonne, Sandra, Suzette, Adam, and Linda have given moral, material, and logistical support throughout the difficult years of study, research, and writing. Tamir Sorek has read and discussed more versions of this book than I'm sure he cares to remember; he has been a tireless intellectual sounding-board and critic who has strengthened my work immeasurably. I thank him for this, but more importantly, for the rich life outside of the text that we share with our sons.
In the spring of 1909, a young Jewish lawyer by the name of Shlomo Yellin addressed a gathering of Ottoman notables in Beirut. Born and raised in the Old City of Jerusalem, Yellin was the quintessential polyglot Levantine: he spoke Yiddish with his Polish father, Arabic with his Iraqi mother, Hebrew with his Zionist older brother, and Judeo-Spanish with his Sephardi Jewish neighbors; he wrote love letters in English to the schoolgirl niece he later married, and he jotted notes to himself in French. At the same time, the fez- and suit-wearing “Suleiman Effendi” was the perfect Ottoman gentleman: at the prestigious Galatasaray Imperial Lycée in Istanbul, he studied Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian language, literature, translation, and calligraphy; Ottoman and Islamic history; hygiene, math, science, philosophy, geography, and French literature. After a brief stint at a German university, Yellin graduated from the Ottoman Imperial Law Academy with certification in Islamic law, Ottoman civil and criminal law, and international commercial and maritime law.
1
On that spring day, Yellin's Ottoman Turkish-speaking audience likely consisted of members of the local branch of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP; the so-called Young Turks), the underground political party which had carried out the July 1908 Ottoman revolution. Yellin was a member of the Beirut CUP branch, and he later dedicated two pamphlets “in profound admiration” to the movement. Undoubtedly, some members of the audience also belonged to one of several local Freemason lodges to which Yellin had earlier submitted an application for membership while extolling Masonic support for the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Whatever their institutional affiliation, what is certain is that Yellin's audience of white-collar
effendis
, or gentlemen, like himself—lawyers, doctors, businessmen, journalists, school teachers, clerks—were fellow Ottomans who were as committed to and concerned about the future of the “Ottoman nation” as he was.
2
“The noble Ottoman nation,” Yellin told his audience, “is made up of different groups who live together, who for the sake of the homeland [
vatan
] have shaped themselves into one mass.” He continued:
In the Ottoman Empire the different peoples are equal to one another and it is not lawful to divide according to race; the Turkish, Arab, Armenian, and Jewish elements have mixed one with the other, and all of them are connected together, molded into one shape for the holy
vatan.
Each part of the nation took upon itself the name of “Ottoman” as a source of pride and an honorable mark. The responsibility and [illegible] of our holy
vatan
must be our sole aim, and it is necessary to be ready every second and every minute to sacrifice our lives for it…. Now we keep [the homeland] deep in our hearts as a basic foundation of our national education. The life of the homeland is bound up with that of the nation.”
3
At the center of Yellin's narrative was the first-person plural—”we Ottomans”—the Ottoman nation united in spirit and in purpose. Yellin's Ottoman nationalism was not distant or official, but rather emphasized an intimate emotional link between individual, collective, and state, reflected in phrases such as “our beloved nation” and “lover of the homeland.” His Ottoman nationalism also tapped deeply into religion as inspiration, legitimization, and sacralized form, in many ways becoming a civic religion: he repeatedly invoked the “sacred homeland,” and his challenge to his audience to sacrifice themselves for the homeland used terms of martyrdom that were stripped of their traditional Islamic context and reinvested within an Ottoman national framework.
4
At the same time, Yellin's Ottoman nationalism was tightly linked to the new constitutional regime and nascent notions of Ottoman imperial citizenship. The CUP had succeeded in carrying out a “new conquest” of Istanbul, ushering in a “new era” free of absolutism, where the “holy constitution” linked the individual to the reforming, constitutional state.
5
Also, Yellin viewed Ottoman citizenship as a contract between individual citizens and social groups. In other words, for Yellin and his audience, despite their differences in religion, in ethnicity, and in mother tongue, there was no doubt that they were all believing and practicing Ottomans, connected to their fellow countrymen in the far corners of the empire by territory, law, history, and by the mutual expectations and responsibilities of imperial citizenship.
Situated in the aftermath of the 1908 Ottoman revolution, which briefly transformed the empire from an absolutist state into a type of liberal parliamentary democracy, Shlomo Yellin and his Beirut audience were direct products of and witnesses to the challenges and accomplishments of their beloved empire. The Ottoman state had at various points throughout the previous century implemented numerous important changes and reforms, known as the Tanzimat—revamping the state
bureaucracy and legal system; embarking on an ambitious program of building, education, and public works; and promoting loyalty and identification among its diverse population. The fact that Yellin and his companions were educated in modern state institutions resulted in their being literate in numerous languages, including the official language of the state, Ottoman Turkish; fostered a familiarity with fellow subjects of different faiths, ethnicities, and regions; and led to their loyalty to and identification with the state.
At the same time, precisely because of their education, literacy, and travels, they were no doubt aware of the diminished role of the Ottoman Empire in global politics, of its uneven absorption into the world economy, and of the numerous political cross-winds which were blowing in other parts of the world. Thus, even while basking in the glow of revolutionary promise, modern citizens like Yellin and his audience were optimistic but worried about the future of the empire—how it would reform internally, how it would catch up with Europe, and what role the empire might play in a world wracked by revolution, colonialism, and the challenges of a modern age.
6
This book examines the meaning of liberty, citizenship, and public life in the last Islamic empire. While building on earlier studies of the revolution and the late Ottoman reform tradition, this book is an innovative study of the struggles over the content and contours of imperial citizenship and nationhood on the eve of the end of empire. At the core of the Ottoman revolution is what I call “civic Ottomanism,” a grassroots imperial citizenship project that promoted a unified sociopolitical identity of an Ottoman people struggling over the new rights and obligations of revolutionary political membership. By tracing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews became imperial citizens together, I put forward the view of the Ottoman nation, not simply as an “imagined” or discursive imperial community, but as a shared field of social and political interaction and contestation.
7
This study shifts between the imperial capital in Istanbul, which often set the pace of events and attitudes, and the region of Palestine, hundreds of miles to the south and in some ways a world away, all the while paying attention to developments in other regions and provinces of the empire. Too much of Ottoman history has been written from the vantage point of one corner of the empire alone, often determined along post- World War I nationalist lines. Instead, this study shows how permeable imperial space often was: in addition to soldiers and commodities, people and ideas flowed freely between countryside and city, between province and capital, and between provinces themselves.
With the explosion of the free press in all the languages of the empire,
the character and scope of political participation broadened dramatically beyond just the state bureaucracy or provincial notable families, and the new white-collar middle-class of teachers, clerks, and journalists entered into the public arena. Ottoman subjects
(teba‘)
claimed their new revolutionary rights and entered into the Ottoman
polis
as imperial citizens
(muwātinūn
, Ara.;
vatandaşlar
, Ott. Turk.), marking their substantive transformation from passive beneficiaries or victims of imperial policies to active partners shaping the course of imperial reform.
8
Ottomans throughout the empire received and interpreted the revolutionary language, rhetoric, and symbols disseminated by the dominant political forces, but they
also
produced their own set of meanings and countermeanings, both on the streets and in the press. In developing a view of Ottoman citizenship as a mass social movement that takes into account the desires, strategies, and agency of the empire's new citizens, I explore the ways in which Ottomans took seriously the promise of political change and contributed actively to shaping its meaning.
9
Ordinary Ottomans, from Salonica to Jerusalem to Baghdad, exercised new political rights and responsibilities, tackled the challenges of ethnic and religious diversity within the body politic, and debated the future of the empire and their role within it. Among the questions that preoccupied them were: Who was an “Ottoman” and what bound the “Ottoman nation” together? What would political liberty, reform, and enfranchisement look like? What did being a “citizen” entail, and how would rights and duties be distributed equally? What role would religion and ethnicity have in the body politic and in the practice of politics in this multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual Islamic empire?
I analyze these public articulations of and engagement with the revolutionary slogans of “liberty, equality, fraternity, and justice” (
Chapters 1
and
2
). Memoir and newspaper accounts relate that on the streets and in the press, Ottoman Palestinians translated these tropes from the French and Iranian revolutions to their own imperial and local settings, and common citizens employed the spectrum of these ideas for individual and collective purposes. Intellectuals such as the parliamentary representatives from Jerusalem and Beirut, who both published chronicles of the revolutionary thinking, tell us that the Ottoman citizenship project drew on both Western liberal and Islamic notions of liberty, justice, consultation, public good, and accountability. These themes were further developed in the press and other popular media. For example, under the banner of freedom-liberty
(hurriyya
, Ara.;
hϋrriyet
, Ott. Turk.), the revolution served as an inspiration and legitimizing force for the rebellion of peasants against their landlords as well as for the mobilization of Greek- Orthodox Christian, Armenian, and Sephardi Jewish communities in
Jerusalem against their ecclesiastical leaderships in favor of increased representation and “modern” leadership.
The revolutionary slogans of “equality and brotherhood” were premised on an ideology of belonging to a unified Ottoman people-nation. In Palestine as elsewhere throughout the empire, Muslims, Christians, and Jews adopted the viewpoint that the Ottoman nation was comprised of all the ethnic, religious, and linguistic elements of the empire bound together in civic, territorial, and contractual terms. They proclaimed and performed their Ottoman-ness in the streets in public celebrations and on the pages of newspapers in all the languages of the empire: as one proud Ottoman declared in the Jerusalem press, the empire's diverse religious and ethnic groups had entered into the “melting pot of the constitution” and emerged as “pure bullion, the Ottoman nation.” At the same time, this civic Ottoman nation was in dialogue with more primordial imaginings based on Romantic notions of blood and soil as well as on religious and ethnic notions of peoplehood.
By illustrating the deep resonance and widespread nature of a professed Ottoman imperial nation, this book challenges entrenched historical narratives about the role of ethnic nationalisms in the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
10
More broadly,
Ottoman Brothers
suggests an original process of forming universal collective identities in empires. To date, scholars have been uneasy theorizing imperial citizenship and nationhood, instead focusing on presumably inevitable
anti
-imperial nationalisms. According to a view dominant among European diplomats and travel writers in the nineteenth century—a view that was stated in history books until quite recently—multiethnic, multireligious empires like the Ottomans were “prisons of nations” eventually undone by the natural nationalisms of their subject peoples; they were not legitimate nations in and of themselves.
11
Furthermore, as the nation-state emerged as the primary model for European statecraft, “empires” and “nations” were not only depicted as mirror opposites, but in fact their essential opposition was seen as being constitutive.
12
In other words, by the turn of the twentieth century, empires were considered holdovers of a previous age, ill equipped to meet the modern demands of a changed geopolitical environment—a view that rendered imperial change invisible and loyalty to empire unintelligible. And yet, as a recent volume dedicated to a comparative study of the “end of empire” has argued, the objective distinctions between empire and nation are murky, at best; indeed, “empires” often acted like “nations,” and vice versa.
13
Indeed, this process of imagining, articulating, and acting as an imperial collective took a great deal of conceptual, ideological, and even linguistic work, and along the way the Ottoman “imperial-nation” took
on forms and discourses that in many ways echoed “traditional” (nation- state) nationalism.
14