Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (30 page)

In that same vein, many newspapers published regular appeals for donations to the Ottoman military fund. Listing people’s names with the amount of their donations gave papers the opportunity to publicly praise patriotic activities, but also introduced an element of competitiveness among the city’s readers. For example, when
Success
newspaper published a short notice from the head of the Ottoman fleet committee publicly thanking the Greek patriarch and priests for their sizable contributions to the fund and praising their “patriotic devotion [
amiyya wataniyya],”
he closed his note with an expression of confidence that this would inspire
the other religious institutions and officials of Jerusalem to show their own patriotic devotion in a similar manner. In another case in early 1910, in addition to acknowledging ‘Uthman al-Nashashibi for his sizable donation to the Ottoman navy,
Liberty
also took care to identify the four Jewish donors whose cumulative contributions matched al-Nashashibi’s. In this context, we can understand that when
Liberty
informed its readers about a benefit performance of Shakespeare’s works in Arabic by a Jewish theatrical group in Damascus, the proceeds of which would go to the Ottoman military, it did so not simply as a piece of news about Damascene cultural life but also to highlight a collective Jewish contribution to the patriotic effort.
⁴⁵

In other words, press notices about other communities and stories translated from other languages of the empire could be innocently informative, competitive in a friendly way, or provocatively challenging. The Ottoman constitutional parliamentary system was important not only for “Ottomania” as a whole but indeed for each of its ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. In the rapidly changing environment of the post-revolution empire, the ethno-religious groups in the empire worriedly and hurriedly worked to mobilize and strategize to ensure that their community was not left behind in the new political and social order. In fact, the need to preserve (or enlarge) the community’s position in a rapidly changing hierarchy made rivalry between communities a significant undercurrent of Ottomanist discourse. Rights and privileges were measured not only against absolute standards of Ottomanist civic identity, but also, more important, against those enjoyed by the other ethnic and religious groups of the empire.

Thus, newspaper reports about the constitution and new political rights often had the subtext of “keeping up with the Joneses.” For example, only weeks after the revolution, Avraham Elmaliach, a young Jewish journalist who would later edit both the Ladino and Hebrew
Liberty
newspapers, published an homage to the revolution while at the same time indicating that the new freedom of press would serve as a yardstick, not only to measure the renaissance of the Ottoman Empire, but also to ensure the Jewish role within it. As he wrote in “Rebirth of Our Empire”: “Our homeland has returned to rebirth…Freedom is the dearest thing to mankind, and therefore our brothers the Jewish people, residents of Turkey [
sic
], will endeavor through the freedoms given to us to bring closer all that is good and useful for our homeland…[Thanks to the freedom of the press,] we will demand our rights from their hands and they will know that there is an eye that sees and an ear that hears.”
⁴⁶

Indeed, the emergence of a free and flourishing press encompassed the dual imperative that Elmaliach articulated of “an eye that sees and
an ear that hears”—on the one hand, the press was a transparent source of knowledge and information that would bolster citizenship claims; on the other hand, however, the press could also facilitate or even empower competing claims and demands.

This struggle in Palestine ranged from the petty to the weighty. For example, invitations to the official celebrations on the one-year anniversary of the ascension to the throne of the new sultan Mehmet Reşat took on a distinctly political weight. The Jewish community of Jerusalem publicly complained that only three Jews had received invitations to the celebration, whereas Christians (“who are one-third the size of the Jewish community”) had received forty-three invitations. After complaining to one of the local government officials, the Jews were allowed to submit a list of Jewish notables to be invited.
⁴⁷
In another example, more significant because of its political implications, after reading that the Greek Patriarchate insisted on proportional representation during the 1914 parliamentary election cycle and was allegedly promised a number of representatives equal to the Armenians, the Jaffa chief rabbi, Ben-Zion ‘Uziel, wrote to a colleague that “this awakens my ambitions too to have our voices also heard as Jews and for us to also demand…to send representatives according to our numbers.”
⁴⁸

In the winter of 1909, the Ladino newspaper
Paradise
published a series of articles on the newly appointed Jewish representative to the administrative council, Rabbi Lieb Dayan. Dayan, who was put forth by the Ashkenazi community, knew neither Ottoman Turkish nor Arabic, which thus rendered him completely ineffective, the paper complained. Moreover, his boorish mannerisms made him a laughingstock in the council meetings. Instead, the paper urged, the Jews needed another representative on the council who would fight to defend Jewish rights as well as someone who would “redeem the Jews’ honor” that Dayan had sullied in front of the city’s other groups. The paper also demanded a second representative on the council “like the other peoples.” Indeed, several other newspaper articles as well as leading Jews who were called on to intervene with the government emphasized that two major Christian denominations in Jerusalem had two representatives each on the administrative council (one religious, one lay member), whereas the Jews only had one total. Later that spring, after the city’s Jews had failed to earn another seat on the administrative council,
Paradise
wondered out loud if the Jews were to blame for failing to awaken enough to demand their rights or if the government was to blame for failing to wake them.
⁴⁹

When the press was not sufficiently loud in its proactive defense of Jewish claims,
Paradise
turned to a new private organization called the Society of Ottoman Jews (SOJ; Agudat ha-Yehudim he-‘Otomanim). The
society proclaimed it would carry out propaganda in the press, civic education such as Ottoman Turkish and Arabic evening classes and translations of Ottoman laws, lobbying government officials, establishment of a free legal defense project, and citizenship (Ottomanization) drives. Viewed differently, its most frequent efforts were centered on ensuring that the Jews received their fair share in the new Ottoman polity. According to newspaper reports, the SOJ was quite active in Jerusalem in the half-year after the revolution, and its meetings at the Yohanan Ben-Zakkai and Ohel Moshe synagogues regularly drew hundreds of Jews.
⁵⁰

From the surviving Ladino and Hebrew press we see that individuals or groups in the Jewish community often appealed to the SOJ to intervene to correct injustices or to defend the Jewish community. In the aftermath of the arrest and improper sentencing of a Jewish baker, the Sephardi Jewish lawyer Malchiel Mani, of Hebron, was commissioned by the SOJ to “defend the interests of the Jewish public of our city without anyone having to pay a cent,” in order to protect the Jewish community from injustices which happen every day because “people do not know the laws.”
⁵¹
In a flyer made up by the SOJ asking for donations to establish this legal aid unit, they appealed to the sense of uncertainty and vulnerability that underlay the transition to the constitutional period. “Which of you, dear brothers, does not feel the need for a Jewish lawyer in Jerusalem?” they asked, citing the growth of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, and as a result, the rise in complaints against them. As the SOJ told its members, “we suffer here because there is no one with strength and talent to demand a trial, there is no one to defend our souls and property and prosecute our insults and fight for our honor, in every instance.”
⁵²

In this atmosphere of increasing rivalry over every community’s civic status born in the uncertain aftermath of attempted mandated equality, even favors shown to certain communities appeared to reflect the inalienable rights of the emerging Ottoman body politic. Under the headline banner of “Honor de los judios!”
Paradise
recounted an incident in March 1909 where the SOJ intervened to demand an Ottoman military band performance for the Jewish holiday of Purim since the band had performed for a previous Christian holiday. The reason for this demand, as the author wrote, was “so that we will not be considered less than the Christians, we who are many more than they in the city…. Forward, brothers, a little bit of force and everything can be accomplished. In order to save our honor before everything!”
⁵³

In another instance, when several poor Jews who could not pay the military exemption tax were mistreated by Ottoman soldiers, the leaders of the society complained to military headquarters and the soldiers subsequently “made sweet” to the men. However, the SOJ’s countless efforts to
get the “red note” canceled did not meet with success for several years.
⁵⁴
Along with the chief rabbi in Istanbul, Haim Nahum, it also unsuccessfully petitioned to change a tradition that prevented Jews from walking down the street adjoining the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem or from ascending more than five steps at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. In another incident, where three Jewish vagrants were sentenced to three weeks in prison, the intervention of the SOJ on their behalf caused the president of the tribunal to increase the sentence to three months, in response to “the creation of this Jewish society formed to intimidate us.”
⁵⁵

By that point, the SOJ was identified with the Zionist movement, and as a result by 1910 it lost the bulk of its membership, its legitimacy within the non-Zionist Jewish community, and the good favor of the local government. Albert Antébi dismissed the organization, saying “this Jewish Ottoman Palestinian society is incapable of naturalizing a single Jew or of delivering a single prisoner, but it has engendered anti-Semitism.”
⁵⁶
In a scathing editorial published in the Hebrew newspaper
Liberty
, “'Otomani” blamed the organization for “mix[ing] us up with haters of the Muslims,” and declared, “Thus in the name of many of the Ottoman Jews I hereby notify the SOJ that it has no right and justice to speak in the name of all the Jewish Ottoman people in Jerusalem.” By the summer of 1910 the SOJ finally was declared illegal.
⁵⁷

With the rapid fall of the SOJ, the Jewish press returned to other channels for pressing for their rights “like the other Ottomans.”
⁵⁸
The Ladino and Hebrew newspapers frequently published open letters to the Chief Rabbi of the empire, Haim Nahum, as well as to the four Jewish members of the Ottoman parliament, calling for their intervention with the government. More often, however, the pages of the press themselves increasingly monitored and documented the failures of Ottomanism.

INTERCOMMUNAL RIVALRY II: THE PRESS AS BAROMETER OF OTTOMANISM

The historian Palmira Brummett’s fascinating study of the Istanbul satirical press captures the role played by that medium in documenting the gap between the aspirations of the new regime and its shortcomings. She argues that, in contrast to the earnest treatment of the revolutionary era one found in the “serious press,” the satirical newspaper
Kalem
, for example, depicted a “vision of revolutionary chaos and parliamentary malaise.”
⁵⁹
Other satirical papers expressed repeated disillusionment with the new regime. In a similar function, if far more earnest in tone, throughout the revolutionary period the press in Palestine became a platform
for depicting and decrying “violations” or shortcomings of reform, and usually were followed by calls for mobilization to the powers-that-be, whether to local Ottoman officials or to the imperial government in the capital via chosen intermediaries. For example, one scholar who was familiar with the Jaffa-based newspaper
The News (Al-Akhbār)
characterized its concerns as “the deeds and misdeeds of the government officials, freedom and actions against it, and the failure of reforms.”
⁶⁰
Other newspapers would carry out similar functions.

Within a few months of the revolution, the press was documenting abuses and persistent elements of the ancien régime. The Judeo-Spanish press bewailed the return to “the times before liberty.”
⁶¹
In essence, the Ottoman Jewish community in Palestine measured the success of liberty and the Ottoman revolution by its own standing vis-à-vis the other religious communities. In 1909, complaints began to appear quite loudly in the Jerusalem press about the limited impact of the revolution in bringing about the betterment of the Jewish community. By the fall of 1909, two incidents rattled the Jewish community in Jerusalem and called into question the basic premises of Ottomanism.