Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (40 page)

The conflict between Levi and Aharonowitz captured in microcosm the conflict between differing visions of Ottoman public life and its relationship to Jewish communal life in Palestine. For Aharonowitz and the Zionist radicals of the self-proclaimed “New
Yishuv,”
participation in the new Ottoman political system was a good strategy, but it was devoid of the inherent value it had for Ottomanist Jews in Palestine.
¹⁹
For these instrumentalists, participation in imperial public life was desirable only inasmuch as it would allow Palestinian Jews to push for Zionist separatist aims. Unlike earlier Jewish immigrants, these newcomers rarely took upon themselves Ottoman citizenship, and their outlook toward Jewish nationalism and Zionism was rather dogmatic. In short, they denounced ideological Ottomanism and derided the feelings of
brotherhood born of the revolution as one-sided efforts of the Jews—as they saw it, a “tendency to be more Marxist than Marx.”
²⁰

However, these newly arrived immigrants, who numbered less than several thousand of Palestine's approximately fifty thousand to seventy thousand Jews, by no means represented the entire Zionist community.
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On the contrary, they represented a small faction even within the Palestinian Zionist settlers, a point that the anonymous correspondent “Jaffan/Yafoni” made in the official Zionist newspaper
The Globe (Ha-ʻOlam). “[The Young Worker
] wants to present the ‘truth from Erez-Israel' but instead it presents truth as it sees it, or rather as it wants it to be,” Yafoni complained, highlighting the paper's advocacy of “radical” views on Hebrew labor.
²²
Despite their minority status back then, the voices of
The Young Worker
have been magnified in retrospect because of the leading role that the socialist Zionist parties took in the history of (post-Ottoman) prestate Palestine and later, in the leadership of the state of Israel.

Other Ashkenazi Zionist immigrants had a different orientation to the Ottoman state and their role in it. Eliʻezer Ben-Yehuda, a Russian Jew who had immigrated to Palestine in the early 1880s and who would be known as the “father of modern Hebrew” for his linguistic contributions, exhorted his fellow Ashkenazi immigrants to take on Ottoman citizenship—as he urged readers in his newspapers
The Deer
and
The Observation
, “Jews, be Ottomans! [
Yehudim heyu ‘Otomanim!].”
This call was echoed by David Yellin, whose father had been a member of the Jerusalem City Council in the second half of the nineteenth century. “We the Jews can enjoy this freedom like the other citizens…and we need to do this: every single person will be an Ottoman citizen, and will encourage others to be Ottomans as well.”
²³

Ben-Yehuda and his son Itamar Ben-Avi welcomed the revolution and reforms as critical for the development of the empire as a multiethnic and modern entity, strengthened by its diversity if held together by overarching civic bonds. As Jews, the civic identity which they understood as central to the revolution was the very thing which enabled them to feel a part of the changes taking place.

Turkey [sic] is an empire made of many peoples. Every people in Turkey [sic] preserves its peoplehood [
‘amamut
], speaks its language, knows its culture and nationality that is special to him. But despite that, we all, according to the basic constitution, are Ottomans, sons of one state, equal all of us in the responsibilities and rights in civic and public life.…The basic constitution does not demand from anyone to give up his private people-hood, his personal culture or language. But all of us together must from now on participate in the general feeling, the
general good of the state for everyone together, and all work together in peace and quiet for the general good of the state.
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Rather than an expression of assimilation, however, Ben-Yehuda explained that this commitment to imperial citizenship allowed him to live out his Hebrew nationalism:

But what is the meaning of the term Ottoman?…It is not the name of a nationality, nor of a race, nor of a people in the natural meaning of the word. Ottoman is not a synonym for Turk. No! God forbid! It is a political term, and no more.…So the phrase “Jews, be Ottomans” does not mean Jews, be Turks! Or Jews, be Arabs!…In Hebrew the meaning is thus: Jews, be citizens of the state you live in! Jews, enjoy the political rights of the land of freedom in which you live and in which you wish to live national Hebrew lives, without giving up anything of your nationalism!.…Jews, be like the Arabs, like the Greeks, like the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire!…Speak Hebrew, but…be citizens of the Ottoman Empire, in order that you can be Hebrews in the land of your fathers.
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Ben-Yehuda's attitude was not a radical position, for even before the institutionalization of the Zionist movement, early Zionist settlers were encouraged to take on Ottoman citizenship. This was an outcome of Ottoman government policies which did not favor the settlement of foreign citizens who would push for special privileges and rights accorded to other foreigners under the Capitulation system. As a result, the colonists on the early agricultural colonies
(moshavot)
were required by the sponsoring philanthropist Baron Edmund de Rothschild and his administrators to adopt Ottoman citizenship.
²⁶
After the failure of Jews to elect a candidate or otherwise influence the course of parliamentary elections in the fall of 1908, Ruppin, the leading Zionist official in Palestine, also adopted the position that Zionist immigrants should take Ottoman citizenship.

Indeed, from the early months after the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution in July 1908, the Zionist movement in Europe placed increased importance on the Ottoman Empire—first, as the object of their diplomatic efforts to secure eventual Jewish autonomy, and a distant second, as the site of Zionist education and mobilization among the Jewish communities in the empire. In 1908, the ZO established an unofficial office in Istanbul under the management of Victor Jacobsohn, with the aim of lobbying the Ottoman government and overseeing Zionist mobilization throughout the empire.
²⁷
In both respects the movement was to make some minor advances, but its overall failures either to win over the government or to mobilize the masses to the Zionist program by the eve of World War I were intimately related.

From the outset, the Hamidian government had been suspicious of the Zionist movement and its intentions toward the territorial integrity
of the Ottoman Empire, and rightly so: the Zionist movement operated under the premise that it would seek a charter from the Ottoman sultan for Jewish autonomy in Palestine, known as the Basel Program.
²⁸
The last Hamidian governor of Jerusalem, Ekrem Bey, who left Jerusalem in August 1908, had written to the capital that the Russian Jewish immigrants in Palestine were a “dangerous element,” and that Jewish immigration overall was a threat to the empire.
²⁹
Over a thirty-year period, the Ottoman government repeatedly implemented a series of laws aimed at preventing Jewish immigration to the empire and banning land sales to foreign (and occasionally Ottoman) Jews.

With the 1908 revolution, the Zionist movement reevaluated its strategy. In the fall of 1908, the Zionist movement had articulated three main axes from which to operate: (1) to secure a role for the Zionist movement within the Ottoman political spectrum, preferably using Ottoman Jews for this effort; (2) to gain government and Jewish support within the empire, for which it would be necessary to narrow the expressed goals of the movement; and (3) to promote public relations (the press) on behalf of their goals.
³⁰
At the same time, the Zionist movement was struggling with an internal political crisis over the direction of the movement—political-diplomatic (“Herzlian”) Zionism or active (“practical”) Zionism, in other words creating facts on the ground in Palestine.

Throughout this reevaluation, the proscribed role of Ottoman Jewry in carrying out the Zionist agenda was never clearly defined. On the one hand, some Zionist officials argued that the Jews of the empire should be “awakened” to help the Zionist movement in its diplomatic efforts.
³¹
Indeed, the Zionist officials in the Istanbul office met with prominent Ottoman Jews, including the four Jewish members of parliament, important Jewish governmental advisors, and Jewish representatives of organizations and communal institutions. The ZO wanted to gauge the individuals' orientation toward Zionism—to enlist friends in the Zionist cause and to try to neutralize the potential damage foes could do to the movement.
³²

In its appeal to high-ranking Ottoman Jews, the Istanbul office carefully spun the goals of the Zionist movement to be more in line with what it perceived to be within the range of acceptability—Zionism within the boundaries of Ottoman patriotism. In its official communication with the Jewish MP Nissim Mazliach and Nissim Russo (secretary to the minister of the interior), the ZO presented its goals as “creating a shelter, a cultural center for the Jewish nation in Palestine, [promoting] their economic, physical, intellectual, and moral rejuvenation.”
³³
As such, the ZO assured the Ottoman gentlemen that the Zionist movement sought to work within the new Ottoman constitutional parliamentary
framework. Ottoman Jews, the ZO assured Mazliach and Russo, had a noble role in the Zionist movement, and would thus serve both the Ottoman homeland and the Jewish people.

Preempting their detractors, the Zionist officials stated:

If in certain circles Zionism is still considered as a separatist aspiration that could constitute a danger to the Ottoman Empire, this is a monstrous madness, they are only the confused spirits or the slanderers who disfigure and falsify our idea in such a manner. Zionism does not have anything in common with separatist tendencies against the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, which correspond by no means to the real interests of our nation. [We must] reassert the perfect loyalty of our idea and demonstrate that its realization is in harmony with the interests of your beloved homeland.

In order to answer any lingering questions about the matter, the president of the ZO, David Wolffsohn, personally reassured the Ottoman Jewish notables further of Zionism's benign and limited aims. He already had been prepped by Jacobsohn that “the most important thing is the emphasis that we have no separatist aims, no plans for political action in the land.”
³⁴
Wolffsohn then wrote to the Ottoman Jews:

I know that in Turkish circles, even the most enlightened, Zionism is known in the form of a movement that wants to found a Jewish state in Palestine, with separatist aspirations and as a consequence will constitute a danger to the Ottoman Empire…. In my capacity as president of the Executive Committee of the ZO, I affirm completely and officially that Zionism does not have anything to do with these tendencies, which from our point of view not only are unrealizable but by no means correspond to the real interests of the Jewish people.
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Declaring that “all political aspirations are completely foreign to us,” Wolffsohn limited the Zionist movement's concrete aims to increasing Jewish immigration to Palestine and repealing the ban on land sales to Jews there. Through these aims, the Zionists would bring about the “material, intellectual, moral, and social development which will be good for the new Turkey [sic]
.”

Based on this official description of the Zionist movement, both Russo and Mazliach initially informed the ZO that they “consent[ed] to the Zionist idea, in the precise form in which Mr. Jabotinsky presented it to us on December 27 [1908]. We are ready to work for this idea.”
³⁶
They agreed to help lobby the Ottoman parliament, the CUP, and the press, in order to spread understanding of the Zionist goals (which they requested in writing, in order to present it to the Young Turks “in an uncontestable manner”). Within a few months, Mazliach and Russo had met with several Ottoman and Jewish officials.
³⁷

However, despite the Istanbul office's persistent lobbying of prominent
Ottoman Jews, Jacobsohn was indifferent to the Jewish masses of the Ottoman Empire, who he did not think would be “useful” to the Zionist movement.
³⁸
Other Zionist officials, most prominently Wolffsohn, considered the empire's four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand Jews entirely irrelevant to the Zionist program. For his part, Wolffsohn continued to pursue a Herzlian policy of direct diplomacy with the Ottoman state, meeting personally with Ottoman officials.
³⁹
In fact, as public criticism emerged in 1909 over the tensions between Ottomanism and Zionism (as we shall see below), the Zionist leader Max Nordau told Ottoman Jews who voiced criticism to stay out of internal Zionist affairs—in effect disenfranchising them from the very movement which sought to speak and act in their name.
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OTTOMAN ZIONISM I: CULTURAL HEBRAISM

Zionism, to the extent that it existed among Ottoman Sephardim, was strongly shaped by cultural Hebraism and a Jewish collective consciousness, and in fact Hebraist clubs and societies formed the bulk of grassroots Zionism in the Ottoman Empire. As early as 1903, the Jerusalem schoolteacher Avraham Elmaliach had founded Ze'irei Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Youth) to promote Hebrew as a spoken language among the city's young people. They offered free Hebrew lessons in the evenings and aided in efforts to start the first Hebrew preschool. According to Elmaliach, the organization involved about one hundred Sephardi youth, including the future Ladino and Hebrew publishers, writers and translators Ben-Zion Taragon and Shlomo Cherezli.
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