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Defining Neighbors
Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter
By Jonathan Marc Gribetz PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-5265-9
CHAPTER 1
Locating the Zionist-Arab Encounter: Local, Regional, Imperial, and Global Spheres
When Muhammad Ruhi al-Khalidi and Eliezer Ben-Yehuda sat together that Saturday in October 1909, they met in Jerusalem. Where, though, was Jerusalem in the autumn of 1909? Attempting to answer this seemingly simple question is in fact a complicated task, and the challenge highlights the numerous geographical, social, cultural, political, and intellectual levels of encounter that are studied in this book. The following pages place Jerusalem in its local setting in Palestine, and Palestine more broadly in its Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and European contexts. As we shall see, the categories of religion and race employed by the communities of Palestine in their mutual perceptions are best understood within these multiple contexts.
Jerusalem, Palestine, and the Holy Land
When late nineteenth-century Jewish nationalists began to immigrate to the land they viewed as their biblical and/or historic patrimony (they generally called it the Land of Israel or Palestine interchangeably), the region was governed by the Ottoman Empire, which, but for a decade earlier that same century (1831–1840), had ruled the area since 1517. Under the Ottoman regime, there was no official, administrative unit called Palestine (nor, for that matter, the Land of Israel). The region had officially been named Palaestina under the Romans in antiquity and Jund Filastin after the Arab conquest until the Mongolian invasion, and there was a land legally called Palestine after the demise of the Ottoman Empire in the Great War, when the country was under British Mandate. Between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries, however, the region's rulers did not treat it as a separate political or administrative entity, and it was not formally called Palestine. In other words, notwithstanding the increasingly common scholarly preference for the term "Late Ottoman Palestine" (a term I also use in this book), al-Khalidi's native and Ben-Yehuda's adoptive city of Jerusalem was, more precisely, in the larger territory the Ottomans named—forgive the confusion—Jerusalem, or in Ottoman and Arabic, al-Quds.
Jerusalem had not always been the name of an independent Ottoman administrative unit. Though the idea had been proposed earlier, this was an innovation fully enacted by the Ottomans only in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century, the region we know of as Palestine (today's Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip) was part of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Syria, three sanjaks (districts) of which were Acre (in the north), Nablus (in the center), and Jerusalem (in the south). Due in part to their recognition of the growing international (especially European) significance of Jerusalem and the interests of powers beyond the empire in the Holy Land, the Ottoman central authorities in Istanbul, seeking to maintain a closer grip on the region, finally separated the sanjak of Jerusalem from the vilayet of Syria in 1874. The Jerusalem region was given the special status of a mutasarriflik, a district whose administrators answered directly to the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul rather than to the governor of a province. In 1887 the remaining two sanjaks of Palestine—Acre and Nablus—were also separated from the vilayet of Syria, though they were joined not to the mutasarriflik of Jerusalem but rather to the newly established vilayet of Beirut.
Thus when we think of al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda's Jerusalem as having been located in Late Ottoman Palestine, in Ottoman administrative terms we mean the mutasarriflik of Jerusalem as well as the sanjaks of Nablus and Acre. That Palestine was not a single administrative unit is important for our purposes because recognizing that it was part of several provinces and the way in which it was integrated into a vast empire highlights the extent to which this region must be understood in its broader Ottoman context. Considering wider events and changes in the Ottoman Empire is critical for fully comprehending phenomena in these three small Ottoman districts.
"Late Ottoman Palestine," though, is more than a convenient but inaccurate shorthand for the distinct regions of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. For the primary subjects of this book, namely, the residents of these Ottoman regions and their contemporaries in the Middle East and Europe, Palestine (or the Land of Israel) as such was indeed a meaningful unit. In other words, to acknowledge the lack of political boundaries around a land called Palestine is not to imply that such boundaries, however imprecise and flexible, did not exist in people's minds. Moreover, noting the absence of official borders should not be taken to suggest that an "imagined" territory is any less significant historically than one that was politically, legally, or sovereignly bound. This was, after all, the "Holy Land" as understood by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, those within the land and, no less, those far beyond its imagined borders. Its general territorial contours were known to Jews and Christians from the Bible and to Muslims from the Qur'an and later Islamic commentary.
In fact, the notion of a place called Palestine, as a single entity, was especially meaningful precisely in the fin de siècle period. Three phenomena sparking renewed interest in the Holy Land during this period are worth highlighting here: the dramatic increase of European Christian missionary activity (especially in the wake of European intervention in response to Muhammad Ali's conquest of the Levant);10 the rise of Zionism, a Jewish nationalism that focused its ambitions on Erez Yisra'el (typically translated into European languages by Zionists themselves as Palestine);11 and the beginning of a distinctly Palestinian identity among the land's Arab majority. The primary location of the encounter analyzed in this book, then, may indeed be called Palestine.
Jerusalem, the Ottoman Empire, and Intercommunal Difference
Ben-Yehuda and al-Khalidi's Jerusalem was not only the central city of the district that shared the city's name, or of an imagined place called Palestine; it was also part of the Ottoman Empire. That this encounter took place within this vast, if shrinking, empire is hardly incidental to this story. Ben-Yehuda wished to interview al-Khalidi, after all, precisely because of the latter's political role in the Ottoman Empire. But to understand how the encounter between al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda, and the communities they represented, was conceived, the Ottoman imperial context is critical far beyond the particulars of al-Khalidi's parliamentary position. The way in which people relate to one another is informed (though of course not wholly determined) by the systemic, structural categories offered by the societies in which they live. Put somewhat differently, how a state formally defines its subjects necessarily affects how the people themselves define and relate to one another, even as the influence may not be unidirectional. Moreover, it is in periods when the formal definitions are challenged or in flux that one may expect to see the relationship between legal definitions and informal perceptions most acutely, and the era surrounding the period of study in this book was perhaps the most significant such moment of flux in Ottoman history.
For most of its history, the Ottoman Empire formally defined its diverse subjects by their religions. Through an arrangement that eventually came to be known as the "millet system," the Ottoman government related to its various religious minority populations via their religious leadership. It was once imagined that each millet's religious leader in Istanbul had always been the representative of the community throughout the empire, such that, for instance, the Istanbul hahambasi (chief rabbi) represented all the empire's Jews from the earliest years of Ottoman Jewish history. More recently scholars have discovered that the system was, until the nineteenth century, much more localized and ad hoc, in contrast to the later claims of centralization and stability. This important historiographical revision notwithstanding, the fact remains that imperial authorities defined Jews, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, and of course Muslims in religious terms. In a society in which the state formally distinguishes between its communities based on religion, we might not be surprised to find that the communities themselves perceived their neighbors in religious terms as well.
In the mid-nineteenth century, however, under external pressure from Europe, the Ottoman government, led by the bureaucrats of the Sublime Porte, took a number of steps to equalize the rights and duties of the empire's population; the new legal reforms passed in this regard were known as the Tanzimat ("Reorganizations," 1839–1876). The Ottoman Law of Nationality of 1869, for instance, formally changed the legal categories used by the Ottoman government. No longer would the government define those within its boundaries as Muslim, dhimmi (i.e., Christian and Jew), and non-Muslim foreigner. Now the official categories were ecnebi (foreign national without regard to religious affiliation) and Ottoman (including "non-Muslim Ottomans"). For these reasons, the Tanzimat are often regarded as a major effort to secularize the empire by undermining certain legal distinctions based on religion.
Though the Tanzimat exemplified "a general inclination toward a more secular conception of the state," according to historian Hanioglu, this inclination was realized only partially. Among the notable exceptions to the secularist reorientation, the shari'a (Islamic religious) courts were maintained; indeed, they outlasted the empire itself. This meant that people distinguished themselves, and were distinguished by others, according to their religions when they were engaged in certain legal matters. Moreover, in the late nineteenth century those groups that wished to gain a greater degree of autonomy within the Ottoman system, on Ottoman terms, did so on the basis of religion. In 1870, for instance, the Bulgarians appealed to the Ottoman authorities for recognition not as ethnic Bulgars, explains Hanioglu, "but as a distinct religious community in the traditional mode," headed by an ethnarch in Istanbul. Religious categories thus remained central to the way the empire related to its subjects even in the Tanzimat era.
In fact, in certain respects, religion became even more central to the empire's relationship with its diverse populations, and these populations' relationships with one another, beginning in the nineteenth century. It was during this period that the various European states, increasingly eager to seize parts of what they believed to be a crumbling empire (or at least to keep their European rivals from doing so), began more aggressively to claim to represent particular non-Muslim elements among the population of the Ottoman lands. The French claimed the right to protect the empire's Catholics; the Russians to protect the Greek Orthodox; the British to protect (at various times) Russian Jews, Druze, and Copts. Outside governments, that is, established their influence in the Ottoman Empire through their focus on or exploitation of religious difference, notwithstanding any Ottoman imperial desires to minimize the importance of such difference since the age of the Tanzimat.
At times, non-Muslims were not only protected but also granted certain economic advantages owing to their association with Europeans. By the terms of the so-called Capitulations, a set of ad hoc agreements between the Ottoman Empire and various European powers, Europeans in Ottoman territory were generally exempted from Ottoman taxation, a privilege that was sometimes passed on to elements of the Ottoman religious minority with which the European power associated. This economic inequality—effectively favoring non-Muslims over Muslims—bred resentment and, along with other factors, intercommunal tensions. As historian Ussama Makdisi puts it, "just as the Ottomans were moving away from a vaguely defined millet system, in which the Sunni Muslims were treated as socially and culturally superior to other communities of the Empire, and were moving toward a more integrative form of government, the Europeans favored and intervened on behalf of the Christians." When violence ultimately arose between local Christians and Muslims, as it did, for instance, in Mount Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans interpreted the events as "sectarian" conflict and evidence of the need further to intervene and protect the empire's Christians. As Makdisi argues, "the beginning of sectarianism did not imply a reversion." Rather, "it marked a rupture, a birth of a new culture that singled out religious affiliation as the defining public and political characteristic of a modern subject and citizen."
The net effect of the Tanzimat period on the empire's focus on religion and religious difference is thus ambiguous: in certain respects the Tanzimat diminished this focus while in other regards the reforms and the response to them actually heightened it. This ambiguity is well illustrated in the issue of Ottoman military conscription for non-Muslims. Among the Tanzimat reforms, for the first time non-Muslims technically became subject to the Ottoman military draft. Including Christians and Jews in the army was meant to remove an important area of separation and distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims in the empire. There was not, however, an immediate influx of non-Muslims into the Ottoman army, as non-Muslims were offered a legal escape from the military: they were permitted to pay an exemption fee, the bedel-i askeri. As the exemption fee option was widely exercised (indeed, it effectively replaced the repealed poll tax on non-Muslims), with only rare exceptions, the change had few practical implications, and thus the legal, military distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims persisted. Moreover, as we shall see, when, after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, Ottoman authorities sought in greater earnest to draft non-Muslims into the imperial military, the men were called on to appear at separate drafting stations on different days, according to their religiously defined community: Christian young men to gather in this location on Tuesday, draft-age Jews to assemble in that building the following Thursday, and so on. In other words, even in an act aimed explicitly at eliminating distinction based on religious difference in the empire, that distinction could effectively be magnified.
Intercommunal difference was certainly on the minds of the Ottoman governors of Jerusalem in particular during the Late Ottoman period. Whereas Jews were generally permitted to immigrate to the Ottoman Empire, since the first years of Jewish nationalist immigration to Palestine in the 1880s the Ottomans attempted to limit the influx of Jews into the Holy Land. These efforts, including legal restrictions both on the length of Jewish visitors' stays in Palestine (the so-called Red Slip policy) and on land purchases by Jews, were haltingly enforced and largely ineffective whether due to Jewish evasion, Ottoman corruption, or, as Ali Ekrem Bey (Jerusalem's Ottoman governor from 1906 to 1908) saw it, European consular interference and deception. Ali Ekrem wrote to his imperial superiors in June 1906 that "because of the particular importance which Jerusalem holds for the Christians, it is natural that each one of the foreign countries ardently attempts to increase the number of its citizens in the place, even if they might be Jews." Other egalitarian imperial trends notwithstanding, the Ottomans rulers of Palestine were legally bound to discriminate against Jews in terms of immigration and land purchase and thus necessarily were concerned with intercommunal difference in Palestine.
The world in which al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda met, and the terms of their encounter, were informed not only by the Ottoman Tanzimat of the previous century, but as important and more immediately, by the intellectual and political transformations that led to the end of Sultan Abdul Hamid II's reign the year before the two Jerusalem leaders sat together for their interview. In these transformations, we find important evidence of the rise of race-thinking in the empire. Though it is referred to as the Young Turk Revolution, the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908 was designed rather to reinstate the Ottoman Constitution and parliamentary system that had been created more than three decades earlier, at the end of the Tanzimat period in 1876 just before they were suspended when Abdul Hamid II ascended as the new sultan. The precise aims and true effects of the revolution are sources of sustained scholarly debate. During the period itself, however, many perceived a Turkist ethno-national particularism among the revolution's leaders and ideologues, even as the revolution promised "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Justice."
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Excerpted from Defining Neighbors by Jonathan Marc Gribetz. Copyright © 2014 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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