Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (45 page)

Not to be dissuaded, in June 1913 Nissim Malul appealed to his fellow Sephardi Jews in the pages of the Hebrew newspaper
Liberty
, articulating his vision for Jewish-Arab coexistence.
¹⁹
In his first article, Malul explained that the study of Arabic was not like other languages, neither in pedagogical terms (Arabic was more difficult, the accent was hard to master) nor in terms of this language's relationship to the Jewish community. According to Malul, if the Jews in Palestine desired to be a people on its own without taking Arabic seriously, they would
cut themselves off from the rest of the Ottoman Empire and would not be considered a people who reside in it: “If we desire to root ourselves here in the mode of the land of the past and of the future, then we must learn the language of the land and think in it more than we do in the other languages,” Malul warned. According to him, “it is a crime to teach our youth those languages that cause them to leave the land and live in exile and build their futures there…. [In that case] it would be better to return to the ways of the ancestors who came just to be buried here.”
²⁰

Malul directly responded to his Ashkenazi Zionist critics who were concerned that by learning Arabic the Jews would assimilate with the Arabs and therefore “lose” their collective identity, or nationalism. However, Malul said,

those who speak out against learning Arabic or the teachers' association do not understand nationalism other than in name. There is no necessary condition for the nationalist to know his language [sic!—editor]—the nationalist is a nationalist in his feelings but not in language [!—from the editor], he is a nationalist according to his nationalist acts. If we say there is no nationalism without language, as Rabinowitz does, then we say to our brothers in Europe who work for the good of the Erez-Israeli community, many good people at the head of whom is Max Nordau, [we say to them] that they are not nationalists because they do not know Hebrew.
²¹

Instead, according to Malul, language and nation were not necessarily constitutive of each other.

Malul's concluding remarks offered his readers the most damning evidence to date of his cultural and political commitments to the Arab world that, he believed, coexisted with his equal commitments to the Jewish people. “If we desire to be the inheritors of Rabbi Yehuda Ha-Levi and the Rambam, to follow in their paths,” Malul wrote, “then we must know Arabic and mix with the Arabs [?!—editor's note] like they also did [?—editor's note]. In the role of a Semitic nation we must base our nationalism in Semitism and not blur with European culture, and through Arabic we can found a real Hebrew culture. But if we bring into our culture European foundations then we will simply be committing suicide.”
²²

Immediately following Malul's third article, the editor of
Liberty
, Haim Ben-'Atar, published his response to the part of Malul's writing that he found objectionable: specifically, his comments on the centrality of Hebrew to Jewish nationalism. Ben-'Atar asserted that while “there is not one of us who does not acknowledge the urgency of studying the Arabic language—the language of the land—…or the necessity of teaching it to our sons,” Arabic could never replace Hebrew as the primary
language of the Palestinian Jews. In fact, the Palestinian Arabs did not want the Jews to assimilate or mix with them.

Ben-'Atar invoked the lessons of Jewish history from the Babylonian exile to the modern day to show that “mixing with another people, even if it is also Semitic, endangers the status of the existence of our people.” Furthermore, Ben-'Atar made the distinction between writing in the contemporary language, as Rabbi Saʻadia Gaon and others did, and mixing with the Arabs, which they did not. The Hebrew language was absolutely critical to the Jewish national renaissance, according to Ben-'Atar; besides reviving Hebrew, there was no other method through which to erase the exile and its Tower of Babel. According to Ben-'Atar, the Jewish community must manage to teach Arabic as a necessary language while at the same time keeping its culture distinct.

Malul's stand on this question was in the minority, even among the Sephardi community. For the rest of the Sephardi Jews active in the Hebraic public sphere, the “shared homeland” of civic universalism they advocated did not rely on a shared language or nationhood. For Malul, however, the lessons of the growing Arabist movement were clear: to have a place in the civic nation, Jews had to switch their affiliation from Ottomanism to Arabism.
²³
As Malul realized, by the time Shimʻon Moyal finally succeeded in establishing the long-awaited Jewish-Arabic newspaper
Voice of Ottomanism (Sawt al-'Uthmaniyya)
in 1914, the civic Ottomanist dream was past obsolescence.

The end of the Ottoman era during World War I brought about a widespread “unmixing of peoples,” and the formerly heterogeneous, multiethnic, multireligious empire was reshuffled to reflect the prerogatives of the homogenizing nation-state.
²⁴
In Palestine, this process of “unmixing” had already begun as part of the Zionist project since the interdependence of Jews and Arabs threatened the nationalist imperative. In 1914, for example, Zionist functionary Arthur Ruppin complained that the Jews of Jaffa were regrettably less willing to display Jewish national solidarity, an attitude that he blamed on the fact that they lived in mixed neighborhoods with Arabs.
²⁵

As well, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which promised British support of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, was the ultimate undermining of the “shared homeland” ideal, instead inverting the precarious social balance in favor of the minority Jewish community and the Zionist movement's exclusivist Hebraic nationalism. By the 1920s, David Yellin, the former member of the Jerusalem City Council and Ottoman Administrative Council who had given countless patriotic speeches on behalf of civic Ottomanism, proposed the establishment of separate municipalities in Jerusalem along sectarian demographic lines.
²⁶

THE ARAB NATION AND THE IMPERIAL DIMENSION

There is still a glamour hanging over the word “Constitution,” and public speakers can still move the populace by declaiming high sounding sentences about liberty and union; but under it all there seems to be a growing feeling of resentment against the way the central government is treating the Arabic people, and a feeling that this much talked about liberty and equality is more visionary than real.
²⁷

Stanley Hollis, U.S. Consul General of Beirut

In 1911 the U.S. Consulate in Beirut made the above assessment of local Arab attitudes toward the Ottoman revolution and the Ottoman central government, indicating that public dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of the revolution stood side by side with a developed Arab ethnic consciousness. As we know from the contemporary press as well as from other historical sources, by this time an Arabist movement had emerged, and the Arabic-language press both documented and exacerbated tensions. While earlier scholars have seen this Arabist movement and mobilized Arabic press as evidence of an Arab nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, a simplification that has been justly critiqued by revisionist historians, it is important to understand the Arabist movement and sentiments within a broader Ottoman imperial politics of multiculturalism as well as against a growing critique of civic Ottomanism.

First, Arabism played up a cultural and ethnic consciousness that tapped into the broader imperial setting and an awareness of—bordering on rivalry with—the other ethnic groups in the empire. The earliest Arabist organization, the Ottoman Arab Brotherhood Society, was founded in Istanbul in the fall of 1908 to defend the constitution, bring together the races, promote equality in the Arab provinces, promote collective and individual aid, and spread education in Arabic. Numerous Arabic language newspapers were supportive of the society's aims, including its namesake in Istanbul,
Al-Mufid
in Damascus, and
Ottoman Union
in Beirut, and within months there were reports of affiliated committees sprouting up in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias, as well as in Tripoli, Beirut, Damascus, Basra, and Baghdad. The historian Hasan Kayali has argued that many of the society's founders were former members of the Hamidian regime who hoped to maintain their position in the new constitutional regime by establishing themselves as protectors of Arab interests, and within the first few months, the brotherhood took on an anti-CUP tone.
²⁸

Indeed, the society was shut down by the Ottoman government in the spring of 1909 because of alleged ties between the organization and
the Damascus branch of the counterrevolutionary Muhammadan Union. And yet, we cannot simply relegate its activities to anti-CUP mobilization, or its membership to ancien regime holdouts. The branches of the Ottoman Arab Brotherhood were engaged in cultural activities and were active in promoting an Arab ethnic consciousness. In Jerusalem the founding members of the branch included the mayor, Faidi al-'Alami, as well as the Christian educators and journalists Nakhla Zurayq, Khalil al-Sakakini, and Hanna al-'Issa.
²⁹
Al-Sakakini, we should note, joined the Ottoman Arab Brotherhood within days of being inducted into the Jerusalem chapter of the CUP.

The following year, the Arab Literary Club was established in Istanbul. Both the Arab Literary Club and the Arab Ottoman Brotherhood framed themselves squarely within the Ottoman Empire. For both groups—as well as for many, and perhaps even most, of the individuals affiliated with them—the Arab nation
(al-umma al-ʻArabiyya)
and the Ottoman nation
(“al-umma al-'ʻUthmāniyya”)
were perfectly compatible and logical forms of self-identification. A notice in a Jerusalem newspaper in 1911 praised the local chapter of the Literary Club for its national devotion and patriotism, after it held a performance about the love of homeland which benefited injured soldiers and the education of orphans.
³⁰

In essence, leading Arab Ottomans were promoting themselves as integral constituent elements of, and even vital partners to, the imperial project. In this regard we should look at the activities of many Arab intellectuals in the years before World War I as players in an imperial multicultural politics. Many other ethnic clubs and societies were established in the year immediately following the revolution, such as the Greek Political Club, Serbian-Ottoman Club, Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Bulgarian Club, Jewish Youth Club, Lovers of Anatolia, Albanian Union, and the Kurdish Mutual Aid and Progress Society.
³¹
While some of these organizations (such as the Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Armenian clubs) aroused the suspicions and concerns of provincial officials, with accusations ranging from support for decentralization to stashing a secret arms cache and promoting ethnic nationalization, the others had clear integrationist purposes. The Kurdish Mutual Aid and Progress Society, for example, proclaimed as its purpose to “consolidate Kurdish ties with the Ottoman state while protecting the constitution as the only way for progress and explaining to those Kurds who are not aware of the virtues of the constitution that it is responsible for the happiness of the people and also compatible with the great rules of Islam.” In addition, the society pledged to work to improve Kurdish-Armenian relations and to unite the disparate Kurdish tribes and confederacies.
³²

Language revival and literary expression flourished among all the communities of the empire. Hand in hand with calls for promoting the learning of Ottoman Turkish among many groups that were not sufficiently literate in Ottoman, publication in ethnic languages increased, and in many cases became politicized as a marker of equality in the empire. For example, both Greek and Armenian communities requested that their languages be recognized as official languages alongside Ottoman Turkish, a suggestion which caught the attention of Arabists in the empire. However, the CUP was opposed to language multiculturalism on an official or state level. In the words of the editor of the pro-CUP newspaper
Tanin
, Huseyin Cahid, “to allow different languages in government would be setting up a Tower of Babel and would lead to decentralization.”
³³

Although the CUP actually did little to change the status quo vis-a-vis language, nonetheless there were accusations lodged against it that it was attempting to “Turkify” the various elements of the empire. In fact, defense of the status of the Arabic language became a cause celebre during this period. Already in 1910, concerns were being expressed about the status of Arabic versus Ottoman Turkish. As the Palestinian paper
Success
wrote, “many people are writing and worrying about the Arabic language these days…. There is anger that our brothers the Turks are trying to kill the language by spreading the official language among our notables and public, and in our offices and clubs and schools and groups.” Rather than retreating to Arabic purity, however,
Success
decided to publish itself as a bilingual newspaper that would be “a shared service to the two groups—those two languages must be sisters sharing in the service of the nation and the homeland.”
³⁴

These complaints about language Turkification went hand in hand with other complaints about the shortcomings of the revolution. In the public commemorations of the revolution in the summer of 1911, for example, the mood documented in
Palestine
was of a weary cheerleader, criticizing the lack of sufficient reforms while continuing to aspire to the ideals of the revolution. At the same time, among non-Muslims and Muslims alike, faith in civic Ottomanism was tested by a perceived imbalance between the communities, one that found expression and succor in the press of the period. For example, at the official celebrations in 1911 at the CUP headquarters in Gaza, a local religious scholar spoke out, calling on the “sultan of the Muslims and the Islamic kingdom as well as the Muslim forces to reject the other races [
nabdh baqiyat al-‘anāsir
]” of the empire. According to the newspaper account, this caused the reproach of another scholar, a member of the CUP, who instead called for the unity of the races and faithfulness to the Ottoman Empire according to its Ottomanist mission.
³⁵