Abstract
In 1856, Ottoman Jews were emancipated by an Islamic empire under semi-colonial circumstances. It is perhaps no wonder that Ottoman Jews’ path to emancipation has yet to be properly integrated into narratives of modern Jewish history. Scholarship in the field has long focused on Jews’ experiences of citizenship in Western and Central European nation-states rather than the empires to their east. This essay suggests that turning our gaze to this story’s unfolding in Ottoman territory opens up new vistas, both challenging our assumptions about the centrality of the “Jewish Question” in post-emancipation landscapes and exposing neglected similarities between Ottoman and other Jewish experiences in the modern era.
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Notes
- 1.
Case, The Age of Questions.
- 2.
Some, such as a member of the Armenian National Assembly in Istanbul named Nazaret Shahbazian, were inclined to refer to this as the “Armenian Problem,” as he did during a August 4 [old style], 1878 session. Others referred to the “Armenian Question,” as was the case of Nubar Pasha, prime minister of Egypt, who submitted a petition to the delegates of the Great Powers gathered in Berlin with the title “Mémoire sur la question arménienne.” For each of these references, respectively, see: Atenagrutiwnk’ azgayin zhoghovoy, 86 and “Documents Arméniens,” La Haïasdan 3–4, 5–6. My thanks to Armen Manuk-Khaloyan for references to Armenian-language uses of the term, and for our interesting exchanges on this topic more broadly.
- 3.
Already by the mid-1890s, in the midst of widespread massacres of Armenians across eastern Anatolia and the Ottoman capital, certain observers claimed that Sultan Abdülhamid II himself had suggested “that the Armenian question must be settled not by reform but by blood.” Deringil, “‘The Armenian Question is Finally Closed,” 369. Emphasis mine. Literature on both the massacres of the 1890s and the Armenian genocide is now extensive. For a recent survey, see: Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else.”
- 4.
For Russia’s Jewish Committee, established in 1840, see: Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia, 83.
- 5.
See, for example, Michal Rose Friedman’s essay in this volume.
- 6.
It bears noting that Jews can be said to have pondered their own version of an “Eastern Jewish Question” during this period. Yet this was largely the product of European Jews’ preoccupation with “uplifting” and “civilizing” their coreligionists in Islamic lands, not a broader preoccupation of Ottoman state or society. On this other kind of “Jewish Question” in the empire, see Rodrigue, “The Emergence of the ‘Jewish Eastern Question,’” in his French Jews, Turkish Jews, 1–24 as well as Yaron Tsur’s contribution to this volume.
- 7.
See, for example, Cohen and Stein, eds., “Ottoman and British Officials Spar over Protection of the Jews [ca. 1840],” 115–18, which cites concerns about how acceding to a British proposal to protect the empire’s Jews might encourage Russian claims on the empire’s Orthodox Christians as well as French and Austrian claims over the empire’s Catholics. Even in Palestine, the interference and presence of foreign Christians was arguably of equal, if not greater, important to imperial authorities at the mid-century than was that of the settlement of foreign Jews: before the rise of Zionism later in the century, Ottoman authorities principally considered non-Ottoman Jews in the region as the potential pawns of the Great Powers. Friedman, “The System of Capitulations and its Effects on Turco-Jewish Relations in Palestine, 1856–1897,” in Kushner, ed., Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, 280–93.
- 8.
“Saloniko,” La Epoka, October 2, 1876, 1.
- 9.
Ziya Karal, Tarihi, vol. 5, Nizam-ı Cedit ve Tanzimat Devirleri, 266–72.
- 10.
A similar pattern has been documented in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, when the term zimmi (Ar. dhimmi)—once used to refer to Jews and Christians alike—came to designate Christians alone. Ben-Naeh, Jews in the Realms of the Sultan, 102.
- 11.
“Fatos diversos,” La Epoka, 31 July 1876, 3.
- 12.
“Las reformas en Turkia y nuestra komunita,” El Tiempo, 3 September 1876, 1–2.
- 13.
“El progreso de los judios en Turkia,” La Esperansa, 6 January 1876, 1–2.
- 14.
From the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman state entrusted various administrative positions to a group of Orthodox Christians known as Phanariots, who served the Ottoman state both as dragomans and governors of the empire’s Danubian principalities. Philliou, Biography of an Empire. This arrangement swiftly fell apart following the outbreak of the Greek Revolution in 1821, after which time Armenian Ottomans increasingly rose to positions of prominence in the empire, gaining the moniker of the “loyal millet” once suspicions of Orthodox Christians’ nationalist aspirations had been ignited. On Armenians as the empire’s “loyal community” (millet-i sadıka) throughout much of the nineteenth century, until their own relations with the Ottoman state deteriorated during the final decades of the nineteenth century, see: Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, 96; Suny and Göçek, eds., A Question of Genocide, 25.
- 15.
Cohen, Becoming Ottomans.
- 16.
For a fascinating account of the clandestine revolutionary activities of Ottomans of various background, see “Young Turks’: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian ‘Brothers’ Shape a Revolutionary Movement [ca. 1900s],” in Cohen and Stein, eds., Sephardi Lives, 207–210.
- 17.
Barnai, “Blood Libels in the Ottoman Empire of the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” in Almog, ed., Antisemitism Through the Ages, 189–94.
- 18.
Dumont, “Jewish Communities in Turkey during the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century,” in Braude and Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, vol. 1, 223.
- 19.
Nor were Jews exclusively on the receiving end of blood libels. In 1792 Jews in Basra accused local Armenians of ritual murder. On this, see Yaron Tsur’s chapter in this volume.
- 20.
“Hidushim ajenos,” Jurnal Israelit, 3 Nisan 5621 (14 March 1861), 4.
- 21.
“Novetas de Kushta,” Jurnal Israelit, 29 Tishri 5621 (3 October 1861), 3.
- 22.
“Novetas de Kushta,” Jurnal Israelit, 6 Heshvan 5622 (10 October 1861), 2.
- 23.
“Novetas de Kushta,” Jurnal Israelit, 29 Tishri 5621 (3 October 1861), 3.
- 24.
“Echos de la ville,” Le Journal de Salonique, 11 February 1897, 1.
- 25.
“Hidushim de Kosta,” Jurnal Israelit, 14 Tevet 5621 (27 December 1860), 3.
- 26.
“La lingua del pais,” El Nasyonal, August 31, 1877, 3, emphasis mine.
- 27.
For more on the invention of this holiday, see Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, Chapter 2.
- 28.
This focus on 1492 also tended to efface the history of the native Jewish communities of the empire, such as Greek-speaking Romaniot Jews of Ottoman Southeastern Europe or the Arabic-speaking communities of the Ottoman Middle East and North Africa.
- 29.
Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, 319.
- 30.
Indeed, the absence of a “Jewish Question” in the country was no guarantee that one might not arise in the future. Sultan Abdülhamid II is said to have remarked on more than one occasion that he wanted to prevent Jews from settling in Palestine so as to avoid creating a Jewish Problem—or, as he put it at one point, a “Second Bulgarian Question” in the empire. Friedman, “The System of Capitulations,” 284, 286; Deringil, “Jewish Immigration to the Ottoman Empire,” in Rozen, The Last Ottoman Century, Vol. 2, 145.
- 31.
For more on this author’s ruminations, see: Cohen, Becoming Ottomans, 74–75.
- 32.
Cohen and Stein, eds., Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 225.
- 33.
Fishman, “Understanding the 1911 Ottoman Parliament Debate on Zionism,” in Ben-Bassat and Ginio, eds., Late Ottoman Palestine.
- 34.
See also Türesay, “Antisionisme et antisémitisme dans la presse ottomane d’Istanbul à l’époque Jeune Turque”, 147–78 and Ozan Ozavci’s essay in this volume.
- 35.
For recent studies of the Dönme, see: Baer, The Dönme; Şişman, The Burden of Silence.
- 36.
Kedourie, “Young Turks, Freemasons and Jews,” 89–104; Kemâl Öke, “Young Turks, Freemasons, Jews and the Question of Zionism in the Ottoman Empire,” 199–218.
- 37.
Michelle Campos, “Freemasonry in Ottoman Palestine,” 37–62; idem, Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine; Sommer, Freemasonry in the Ottoman Empire.
- 38.
Brodkin How Jews Became White Folks. American Jews’ path to privilege, and whiteness, was not a straight one, however. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Jews found that their Protestant neighbors considered them members of a broader “Caucasian family,” an approach that changed again with the arrival of much larger numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe and the Middle East starting in the late nineteenth century. On this: Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness.
- 39.
For a trenchant relational analysis of the function of claims of American Jews’ ‘model minority’ status, see Freedman, Klezmer America.
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Cohen, J.P. (2020). A Model Millet? Ottoman Jewish Citizenship at the End of Empire. In: Green, A., Levis Sullam, S. (eds) Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_9
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