Between "beloved Ottomania" and "the land of Israel": The struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palistine's Sephardi Jews, 1908-13

International Journal of Middle East Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 461-483

  Campos, Michelle U ^a  

^a Cornell University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

HISTORY;

ASIA; EURASIA; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 33644930824     PISSN: 00207438     EISSN: 14716380     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020743805052165     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. La Tribuna Libera, 11 November 1910 and 25 November 1910. The newspaper published the various responses it received from Jewish leaders and laymen alike over the next several months.
2. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue argue for additional causal factors for Sephardic support for Zionism: Internal communal political rivalries and the reaction of the disenfranchised classes of the community. See Esther Benbassa, ha-Yahadut ha-otomanit bayn hitma'arevut la-tziyonut, 1908-1920 (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 1996)
3. Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
4. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
5. For an in-depth study of this period, see my "A 'Shared Homeland' and Its Boundaries: Empire, Citizenship, and the Origins of Sectarianism in Late Ottoman Palestine, 1908-1913" (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., 2003).
6. "Sephardim" refers to Jews whose ancestors fled or were expelled from Iberia by 1492 who maintained a distinct Hispanic culture, whereas North African Jews (known as Maghribim, some of whom were originally Sephardim) were Arabized in culture and language.
7. For example, see the memoirs of Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, Ya'akov Yehoshu'a, Elie Eliachar, and Avraham Elmaliach.
8. For examples, see ha-Herut, 19 August 1910, and the speech by Simha Solomon, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (hereafter, CAHJP), Jerusalem, IL/Sa/IX/14.
9. Hasan Kayali, "Jewish Representation in the Ottoman Parliaments," in Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Avigdor Levy (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1994), 511.
10. For the reaction of the Jewish community in Istanbul, see Esther Benbassa, "Les 'Jeunes Turcs' et les Juifs, 1908-1914," in Mélanges offerts à Louis Bazin par ses disciples, collègues et amis, ed. Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Rémy Dor (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1992).
11. I take this term from Aron Rodrigue, "Interview with Nancy Reynolds," Stanford Humanities Review 5, 1 (1996). Rodrigue states that "difference was not horizontally eradicated but vertically integrated into the political system."
12. ha-Olam, 4 September 1909.
13. Levi was born in Anatolia and had been a government agronomist before working for the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA) and, from 1904 on, for the Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank.
14. ha-Po'el ha-tza'ir, July-August 1908.
15. ha-Tzvi, 9 October 1908.
16. Israeli State Archives (hereafter, ISA), Jerusalem, 67/p533:1491 italics added.
17. Antébi was born in Damascus to an important rabbinical family. He was educated in Paris and worked in Palestine for the Alliance Israélite Universelle until World War I.
18. Antébi to Henri Franck, 28 September 1908. He was director of the AIU's vocational school in Jerusalem: Archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (hereafter, AAIU), Paris, Israel-VIII.E.25.
19. Antébi to Isaac Fernandez, Istanbul, 2 September 1908, Central Zionist Archives (hereafter, CZA), Jerusalem, CM434/13.
20. El Liberal, 29 January 1909.
21. Ruppin, 8 August 1908, CZA, L2/49I.
22. ha-Po'el ha-tza'ir angrily reported that at one parade in Jaffa, an important Sephardi community leader pulled the Zionist flag out of someone's hands and tore it up.
23. ha-Po'el ha-tza'ir, July-August 1908.
24. Israel Kolatt, "The Organization of the Jewish Population," in Studies on Palestine in the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Ma'oz (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1975). Kolatt argues that the entire pro-Zionist yishuv in this period was "strategically" Ottoman, choosing to conceal their Zionist aims for a long-term strategy. This was certainly the strategy adopted by the Russian Zionists within the WZO, as detailed in Chana Weiner, "Ha-Mediniyut ha-tziyonit bi-turkiya ad 1914," in Toldot ha-yishuv ha-yehudi bi-eretz yisrael mi-az ha-'aliya ha-rishona: Ha-tkufah ha-'otomanit, vol. 1, ed. Israel Kolatt (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 2000), but it does not apply to the Sephardi and Maghribi communities, even the Zionists among them.
25. ha-Po'el ha-tza'ir, July-August 1908.
26. Hovevei Zion reported that the number of Zionist immigrants (cumulative) was 10,986: Ha-Herut, 30 May 1910. Demographic statistics for late Ottoman Palestine are notoriously unreliable. Ottoman census records put the Jewish community in southern Palestine at around 32,000, although this does not include foreign citizens, which could bring the total Jewish population up to 50,000 by 1914. The Sephardi and Maghribi communities were a majority of the Jewish population until the 1880s, when they were irreversibly surpassed by Jews of European origin. In Jerusalem alone, the 1905 Ottoman census listed 6,800 Sephardi Jews and 1,100 Maghribi Jews with Ottoman citizenship (60% of the Jewish Ottoman population of the city), according to 'Uziel O. Schmelz, "The Population of Jerusalem's Urban Neighborhoods According to the Ottoman Census of 1905," Scripta hierosolytmitana 35 (1994). Safed and Tiberias were other important centers for Jewish life in the vilayet of Beirut.
27. Antébi to Franck, 17 November 1908, AAIU, Israel-VIII.E.25.
28. Ibid. to president of the AAIU, 6 September 1908, CZA, CM434/13.
29. Ibid. to Franck, 4 August 1908, AAIU, Israel-VIII.E.25.
30. A. S. Yahuda to Wolffsohn, 16 June 1909, based on ha-Tzvi, nos. 183-88, CZA, L1/29.
31. See Stojan Makedonski, "La Revolution Jeune-Turque et les Premieres Elections Parlementaires de 1908 en Macedoine et en Thrace Orientale," Etudes Balkaniques 10, 4 (1974).
32. See letters from the va'ad ha-zmani and from David Yellin, 17 September 1908. CZA, A153/140.
33. Yellin was a noted Hebraist educator, the son of an Ottomanized East European father and a Baghdadi mother. Yellin was elected to the Jerusalem City Council in 1910 and later to the provincial council (meclis-i umumi). He was also a member of the Jerusalem branch of the Committee of Union and Progress.
34. El Paradizo, February-March 1909: El Liberal, 9 February 1909, 16 March 1909.
35. El Liberal, February 1909.
36. Havatzelet, 4 September 1908.
37. Ibid., 24 August 1908.
38. On the failure of mass Ottomanization efforts, see Avraham Elmaliach, Eretz yisrael ve-suriya be-milhemet ha-'olam ha-rishona, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: N.p., 1927).
39. AAIU, Israel-IX.E.26.
40. El Paradizo, 23 March 1909.
41. El Paradizo, 12 March 1909.
42. El Liberal, 23 March 1909.
43. ha-Tzvi, vol. 25, no. 130, Spring 1909.
44. ha-Herut, 4 February 1910.
45. Antébi to Franck, 19 November 1909, AAIU, Israel-IX.E.27.
46. As quoted in Elizabeth Antébi, L'homme du Sérail (Paris: Nil Éditions, 1996), 371.
47. ha-Herut, 24 August 1910.
48. Interview with Avraham Elmaliach, Oral History Project - Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 17 December 1963.
49. El Liberal, 5 February 1909.
50. For more detailed studies of the Ottoman government's official response to the Zionist movement as depicted in the archives of the Zionist movement, see Neville Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)
51. and Weiner, "ha-Mediniyut ha-tziyonit."
52. ha-Herut, 19 November 1909.
53. As quoted in Kayali, "Jewish Representation," 513.
54. Riza Tevfik Bey studied at the Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Edirne and was said to speak Judeo-Spanish like a Sephardi Jew: ha-Olam, 3 March 1909.
55. ha-Herut, 30 July 1909.
56. Ibid., 8 June 1909.
57. Ibid., 30 July 1909.
58. Editor of Meserit in Izmir.
59. El Liberal, 14 May 1909.
60. Ibid., 27 August 1909.
61. Ibid., 3 September 1909.
62. Ibid., 14 May 1909.
63. Ibid., 11 June 1909.
64. Ibid., 10 September 1909.
65. ha-Herut, 28 September 1909.
66. Ibid., 26 December 1910.
67. Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "The Creation of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish Newspaper Cultures in the Russian and Ottoman Empires" (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif., 1999), 117-18.
68. ha-Herut, 19 January 1910.
69. Weiner, "ha-Mediniyut ha-tziyonit," 274.
70. Jacobsohn to Wolffsohn, 14 January 1909, CZA, Z2/7.
71. Ruppin to Wolffsohn, 15 July 1911, CZA, Z2/636.
72. ha-Herut, 21 January 1910.
73. He had agreed to print all articles he received, provided they were "suitable to the unity of Turkey": Ibid., 26 November 1909.
74. Exclamation points were inserted by the editor: Ibid., 23 November 1910.
75. Die Welt was the official newspaper of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). This criticism would result in Ruppin's advice to the WZO to keep discussions of Palestine out of the Congress's plenary sessions (which were open to journalists), instead reserving them for the more private executive committee meetings: Ruppin to Wolffsohn, 15 July 1911.
76. ha-Herut, 30 November 1910.
77. Michael Laskier has referred to the commitment of Albert Antébi as "pro-palestinienne": Michael Laskier, "Avraham Albert 'Antebi: Prakim bi-fo'alo bi-shnot 1897-1914," Pe'amim 21 (1984).
78. Antébi to Dizengoff, 11 June 1909, CZA, CM434/13.
79. On the Palestine Office's deliberations on Antébi as a difficult but indispensable partner, see letter, 15 July 1912, in CZA, L2/26II;
80. and Palestine Office to Jacobsohn, 2 June 1914, CZA, L51/96.
81. Antébi to AIU president, 24 June 1909, CZA, CM434/13.
82. al-Munadi, 29 July 1912.
83. Joseph Glass and Ruth Kark, Sephardi Entrepreneurs in Eretz Israel: The Amzalek Family, 1816-1918 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1991), 126.
84. Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 107.
85. ha-Herut, 12 and 14 November 1912.
86. Ibid., 14 November 1912.
87. Arieh Yodfat, "Va'ad ha-'ir ha-klali li-yehudei yafo u-p'eulotav ba-shanim 1912-1915," in Vatikin: Mekhkarim be-toldot ha-yishuv, ed. H. Z. Hirschberg (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1975), 246-47.
88. Laskier, "Avraham Albert 'Antebi," 115-16.
89. ha-Herut, 26 December 1912.
90. Moyal was the son of Yosef Moyal, a wealthy oil and soap merchant in Jaffa who had arrived as a child with his family from Rabat. The younger Moyal was educated in Beirut and Cairo, studying medicine but also involving himself in journalism, translating Pirkei avot into Arabic, and affiliating himself with the circle of 'Abdullah Nadim. His wife, Esther Izhari, was from Beirut and was also a prolific journalist and translator at the turn of the 20th century.
91. From "Mikhtav hozer el ha-adonim ha-yekarim uha-nechbadim," as quoted in Ya'akov Roi, "Nisyonoteihem shel ha-mosdot ha-tziyonim lehashpi'a al ha-'itonut he-aravit be-eretz yisrael ba-shanim 1908-1914," Zion 3-4 (1967): 222.
92. ha-Herut, 18 November 1912.
93. Other known members of ha-Magen included David Moyal, Yehoshu'a Elkayam, Yosef Amzalek, David Hivan, Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, Ya'akov Chelouche, Avraham Elmaliach, Moshe Matalon, and Farha Simcha Chelouche. Many of these men and women had been educated in Beirut and Cairo, and their weekly meetings were conducted in Arabic: See Mordechai Elkayam, Yafo-neve tzedek (Tel Aviv: Ministry of Defense, 1990)
94. and Hanna Ram, ha-Yishuv ha-yehudi bi-yafo: Mi-kehila sfaradit le-merkaz tzioni, 1839-1939 (Jerusalem: Carmel, 1996).
95. Tel Aviv Municipal Archive (TAMA), file 8, folder 729.
96. A number of Jews wrote articles for the Egyptian and Syrian Arabic press, often "explaining" Zionism and Zionist projects. Rashid Khalidi harshly dismisses these Arabic-speaking Jews active in Palestine as sheer propagandists, but it is important to differentiate the divergent motivating factors as well as the shades of Zionism that existed at the time in Palestine. For example, one of the men Khalidi criticizes, Nissim Malul, was active in Jewish-Arab joint projects and supported Arabist reformist aims, one of two known Jewish members of the Hizb al-Lāmarkaziyya, the Arab Decentralist Party active in Greater Syria in 1913-15: See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 132.
97. See the debate in ha-Herut, 20 April 1913, 17-19 June 1913.
98. ha-Herut, 27 June 1913.
99. See the discussion in Yosef Gorni, "Attitudes to Arab-Jewish Confrontation as Reflected in the Hebrew Press: 1900-1918," Zionism 1 (spring 1980).
100. El Liberal, 22 October 1909.
101. ha-Herut, 27 July 1909.
102. Ibid., 2 August 1909.
103. El Liberal, 5 November 1909.
104. Ibid., 5 November 1909.
105. ha-Herut, 5 November 1909.
106. Ibid., 30 December 1910.
107. See the complaint filed by the General Organization of the Colonies in Judea to the Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum, June 1910, CAHJP, HM2/8645
108. ha-Herut, 4 November 1910
109. Ruppin to Wolffsohn, 15 July 1911, CZA, Z2/636.
110. Cited in Ruth Kark, Jaffa, a City in Evolution: 1799-1917 (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1990), 109. The preceding year, the Palestine Office had drawn up plans to establish a separate Jewish commercial center in Jaffa to draw Jewish merchants and customers away from the main commercial street: CZA, L51/4.
111. Elmaliach, Oral History Project, 23 February 1964. Ruppin and other functionaries also considered calls for Hebrew labor dangerous and certain to elicit "dire consequences": See Ruppin to Zentralburo, 28 July 1912; report by Dyk, n.d., CZA, L5/70.