Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (23 page)

In recognition of the huge gap between the number of Jews with Ottoman citizenship and the total number of Jews living in Jerusalem, immediately after the announcement of upcoming elections voices within the Palestinian Jewish communities as well as international Jewish communities repeatedly called on foreign Jews living in Palestine to renounce their foreign citizenship and to adopt Ottoman citizenship, a step which would bolster the political power of the local Jewish community.
⁶⁸
The newspaper editor and noted Hebrew linguist Eli'ezer Ben-Yehuda, himself an immigrant from Russia who had taken on Ottoman citizenship, repeatedly called on his readers: “Jews, become Ottomans!” This formal drive for Jewish Ottomanization (known as
hit'atmenut)
would become timelier and much more pressing in the early months of the First World War, but in 1908 the campaign was ad hoc and informal and therefore had little time or chance to succeed.

The second demographic blow to the non-Muslim communities in terms of the parliamentary elections concerned the taxpayer requirements of the Ottoman election law. Compared to other liberal parliamentary democracies at the time, the taxpaying requirement was completely in line with international norms, but nonetheless, its implementation—and the specific determination of what constituted a “taxpayer”—would have a disproportionate impact on the empire's non-Muslims. Early reports claimed that those who paid the mandatory military exemption tax for non-Muslims
(bedel-i askerî
) or the mandatory work-service tax
(‘amaliyya)
would be included.
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Since it was imposed collectively upon the non-Muslim communities, the military tax had a high degree of compliance and therefore would have resulted in the highest number of non-Muslims participating in the elections. It was also rumored that those paying the tax on the free liberal professions and crafts
(temettü
would qualify for voting rights; this also would result in a high non-Muslim enfranchisement, given their overrepresentation in the white-collar liberal professions. In the end, however, it was decided that only those who paid property tax
(vergi)
on a home or store registered in their name would be eligible to vote.
⁷⁰

Empire-wide, this definition of taxpayer disenfranchised workers, agricultural laborers, nomads, and others. Because the Old City of Jerusalem was exempt from
vergi
tax, the Cabinet decided on September 16, 1908, that Jerusalemites who possessed real estate could vote. However, while recovering the rights of Jerusalem property owners in general, this restriction severely curtailed the voting rights of non-Muslim Jerusalemites
in particular, since many of them rented apartments from landlords or from religious communal bodies. Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem rented out apartments owned by the Greek Orthodox and Armenian patriarchates, for example, and the Sephardi Jewish custom of subletting apartments limited their numbers as well.
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In short, relatively few Jews and Christians in late Ottoman Jerusalem were property owners. To give an example of the radical effect of basing electoral rights on property taxes rather than on the military-exemption taxes, according to one newspaper report, whereas Jerusalem had approximately ten thousand
bedel
-paying citizens, less than four thousand
vergi
-paying citizens were eventually given the right to vote. For the Jewish community of Jerusalem, the net decrease went from four thousand bedel-paying Jews to eleven hundred vergi-paying Jews.
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The Jewish Ben- Yehuda family protested the decision in their newspaper
The Observation
, saying that the definition of taxes should be “defined by justice, not by law”; in their view, a just definition would include both the ‘
amaliyya
and the
bedel
, either of which would enable more Jewish citizens to take part in the election. Another Jewish merchant in Jaffa from the Matalon family suggested that all the Jewish
temettu
payers should protest the decision.
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As we can see in
Table 3.1
, Jews and Christians were the most negatively affected by the election rules and their voting numbers were diminished quite dramatically. Despite the fact that Christians and Jews together formed the majority of the Jerusalem Ottoman population (21,519, or 66 percent), due to property restrictions they were the minority in the 1908 elections. Of the approximately four thousand Jerusalem voters eligible to participate in the 1908 elections, the majority
(approximately twenty-three hundred, 58.6 percent) were Muslims, followed by eleven hundred Jews (28 percent) and six hundred Christians (15 percent). In other words, there was a significant overrepresentation of Jerusalem's Muslim Ottoman citizens as voters and a notable underrepresentation of the city's Christian and Jewish citizen voters.
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The numbers are even starker when we consider the relative rate of enfranchisement: nearly half of all Muslim Ottoman men in Jerusalem had the right to vote in the elections, compared to 17.5 percent of Jerusalem's Ottoman Jews and only 14.6 percent of Jerusalem's Ottoman Christians. Although the statistics available to us for areas outside of Jerusalem are even less complete, in Jaffa, only 112 Jews and 800 Christians (3 percent and 23 percent, respectively, out of 3,463 total voters) had the right to vote.
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At the same time, the overall enfranchisement of Jerusalem's Ottoman citizens (8.3 percent of all Ottoman citizens, or 26 percent of Ottoman males in the city) placed this corner of the empire, at least, on par with its European contemporaries. In the 1890s, for example, about 7 percent of Austro-Hungarian urban citizens had the right to vote; after Italy's electoral reform of 1881, 6.9 percent of the population was qualified to vote.
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Although we do not have comprehensive population or voting data for the other districts in the province, looking at the statistics from the larger Jerusalem district in
Table 3.2
, we see that with the exception of Bethlehem, which had a large Christian population, the other electoral
districts had relatively high levels of voter enfranchisement. Overall, almost a third of Ottoman males in the Jerusalem province had the right to vote in 1908.

Candidate Platforms

In addition to the nuts-and-bolts procedural aspects of the election, newspapers attempted to educate the Ottoman populace about the historic election's broader legislative and political aspects. Among the central concerns was the type of men to be elected to the parliament and the work that they proposed to carry out there, and as a result the press provided candidates with a platform to reach their would-be constituents, and provided other leading intellectuals and organizations the opportunity to publicly endorse or challenge candidates.

The press sought to identify those men who were representative of the new spirit of the times, in other words, liberals committed to the constitutional revolution, or, conversely, to warn readers of men who opposed the constitution. For example, a “Proud Damascene” revealed that at a public meeting of the Liberals' (Ahrār) party in the city, most of the candidates were “men of the old government and partisans of tyranny,” including men who had been denounced by the populace after the revolution. As well, he noted that the
Al-Shām
newspaper had published a list of the leaders of the ‘Ilmiyya (Scholars') party, “which included men without knowledge or learning.” There also were reports that in Nablus a party of anticonstitutional conservatives was organizing to participate in the elections.
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And yet, Proud Damascene remained optimistic: “Dear reader, do not think the general elections will go like this—thank God the past gave useful lessons to the people.”

Given this backdrop, the CUP selected candidates for its list in regions throughout the empire. In Beirut it endorsed Suleiman al-Bustani with a clear warning to the populace: “We must not take those who do not comprehend the meaning of personal liberty and freedom of deed and freedom of sentiment and thought and behavior.” Likewise, one individual endorser, Zakaria Nasuli, urged his compatriots to vote wisely: “Every thinker should ask and consult on what reform is. It is a matter of the advanced nations and we the Ottomans will have a bright future and a happy era, God willing.”
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Other candidates declared their political identification with the new regime publicly, like Jurji Hurfush, who declared that “my feelings have long been ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity,' and my sect has always been ‘the love of homeland is an article of faith.'” Nasuli invoked this patriotic hadith and praised individuals who saw “homeland as a sacred word.”
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Since they were to be “deputies of the nation,” press editorials and candidate platforms supported the idea that the parliament needed men who were committed to public service. The empire needed men who understood the “public good [
al-ma
a
a al-'āmma],”
and who were committed to the “benefit of the state and the nation” and the “holy service to the nation and the beloved homeland” rather than to their own greedy interests.
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The contemporary Ottoman discussion of “public good” utilized a term,
maṣlaḥa
, with a long tradition in Islamic civilization. As we will see, while at times this was a creative overlapping of multiple systems of meanings, at other times it would introduce new tensions to the electoral process.

In addition to notions of public service, candidates' professional experience, their familiarity with the laws and administration of the empire, and their knowledge of languages were all highlighted. For example, Suleiman al-Bustani was publicly praised by his friend Rafiq al-'Azm as “the best from among the men of the homeland who will represent the people.”
Ottoman Union's
editor emphasized al-Bustani's multidisciplinary knowledge as well as his mastery of Turkish, Arabic, Greek (both ancient and modern), English, French, German, and Italian.
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