Defining Neighbors Read online

  In the mid-nineteenth century, however, under external pressure from Europe, the Ottoman government, led by the bureaucrats of the Sublime Porte, took a number of steps to equalize the rights and duties of the empire’s population; the new legal reforms passed in this regard were known as the Tanzimat (“Reorganizations,” 1839–1876).18 The Ottoman Law of Nationality of 1869, for instance, formally changed the legal categories used by the Ottoman government. No longer would the government define those within its boundaries as Muslim, dhimmī (i.e., Christian and Jew), and non-Muslim foreigner. Now the official categories were ecnebī (foreign national without regard to religious affiliation) and Ottoman (including “non-Muslim Ottomans”). For these reasons, the Tanzimat are often regarded as a major effort to secularize the empire by undermining certain legal distinctions based on religion.

  Though the Tanzimat exemplified “a general inclination toward a more secular conception of the state,” according to historian Hanioğlu, this inclination was realized only partially. Among the notable exceptions to the secularist reorientation, the sharīʿa (Islamic religious) courts were maintained; indeed, they outlasted the empire itself.19 This meant that people distinguished themselves, and were distinguished by others, according to their religions when they were engaged in certain legal matters.20 Moreover, in the late nineteenth century those groups that wished to gain a greater degree of autonomy within the Ottoman system, on Ottoman terms, did so on the basis of religion. In 1870, for instance, the Bulgarians appealed to the Ottoman authorities for recognition not as ethnic Bulgars, explains Hanioğlu, “but as a distinct religious community in the traditional mode,” headed by an ethnarch in Istanbul.21 Religious categories thus remained central to the way the empire related to its subjects even in the Tanzimat era.

  In fact, in certain respects, religion became even more central to the empire’s relationship with its diverse populations, and these populations’ relationships with one another, beginning in the nineteenth century. It was during this period that the various European states, increasingly eager to seize parts of what they believed to be a crumbling empire (or at least to keep their European rivals from doing so), began more aggressively to claim to represent particular non-Muslim elements among the population of the Ottoman lands. The French claimed the right to protect the empire’s Catholics; the Russians to protect the Greek Orthodox; the British to protect (at various times) Russian Jews, Druze, and Copts.22 Outside governments, that is, established their influence in the Ottoman Empire through their focus on or exploitation of religious difference, notwithstanding any Ottoman imperial desires to minimize the importance of such difference since the age of the Tanzimat.

  At times, non-Muslims were not only protected but also granted certain economic advantages owing to their association with Europeans. By the terms of the so-called Capitulations, a set of ad hoc agreements between the Ottoman Empire and various European powers, Europeans in Ottoman territory were generally exempted from Ottoman taxation, a privilege that was sometimes passed on to elements of the Ottoman religious minority with which the European power associated.23 This economic inequality—effectively favoring non-Muslims over Muslims—bred resentment and, along with other factors, intercommunal tensions. As historian Ussama Makdisi puts it, “just as the Ottomans were moving away from a vaguely defined millet system, in which the Sunni Muslims were treated as socially and culturally superior to other communities of the Empire, and were moving toward a more integrative form of government, the Europeans favored and intervened on behalf of the Christians.”24 When violence ultimately arose between local Christians and Muslims, as it did, for instance, in Mount Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century, Europeans interpreted the events as “sectarian” conflict and evidence of the need further to intervene and protect the empire’s Christians. As Makdisi argues, “the beginning of sectarianism did not imply a reversion.” Rather, “it marked a rupture, a birth of a new culture that singled out religious affiliation as the defining public and political characteristic of a modern subject and citizen.”25

  The net effect of the Tanzimat period on the empire’s focus on religion and religious difference is thus ambiguous: in certain respects the Tanzimat diminished this focus while in other regards the reforms and the response to them actually heightened it.26 This ambiguity is well illustrated in the issue of Ottoman military conscription for non-Muslims. Among the Tanzimat reforms, for the first time non-Muslims technically became subject to the Ottoman military draft. Including Christians and Jews in the army was meant to remove an important area of separation and distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims in the empire. There was not, however, an immediate influx of non-Muslims into the Ottoman army, as non-Muslims were offered a legal escape from the military: they were permitted to pay an exemption fee, the bedel-i askeri. As the exemption fee option was widely exercised (indeed, it effectively replaced the repealed poll tax on non-Muslims),27 with only rare exceptions, the change had few practical implications, and thus the legal, military distinctions between Muslims and non-Muslims persisted.28 Moreover, as we shall see, when, after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, Ottoman authorities sought in greater earnest to draft non-Muslims into the imperial military,29 the men were called on to appear at separate drafting stations on different days, according to their religiously defined community: Christian young men to gather in this location on Tuesday, draft-age Jews to assemble in that building the following Thursday, and so on. In other words, even in an act aimed explicitly at eliminating distinction based on religious difference in the empire, that distinction could effectively be magnified.30

  Intercommunal difference was certainly on the minds of the Ottoman governors of Jerusalem in particular during the Late Ottoman period. Whereas Jews were generally permitted to immigrate to the Ottoman Empire, since the first years of Jewish nationalist immigration to Palestine in the 1880s the Ottomans attempted to limit the influx of Jews into the Holy Land. These efforts, including legal restrictions both on the length of Jewish visitors’ stays in Palestine (the so-called Red Slip policy)31 and on land purchases by Jews, were haltingly enforced and largely ineffective whether due to Jewish evasion, Ottoman corruption, or, as Ali Ekrem Bey (Jerusalem’s Ottoman governor from 1906 to 1908) saw it, European consular interference and deception.32 Ali Ekrem wrote to his imperial superiors in June 1906 that “because of the particular importance which Jerusalem holds for the Christians, it is natural that each one of the foreign countries ardently attempts to increase the number of its citizens in the place, even if they might be Jews.”33 Other egalitarian imperial trends notwithstanding, the Ottomans rulers of Palestine were legally bound to discriminate against Jews in terms of immigration and land purchase and thus necessarily were concerned with intercommunal difference in Palestine.34

  The world in which al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda met, and the terms of their encounter, were informed not only by the Ottoman Tanzimat of the previous century, but as important and more immediately, by the intellectual and political transformations that led to the end of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s reign the year before the two Jerusalem leaders sat together for their interview. In these transformations, we find important evidence of the rise of race-thinking in the empire. Though it is referred to as the Young Turk Revolution, the overthrow of Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908 was designed rather to reinstate the Ottoman Constitution and parliamentary system that had been created more than three decades earlier, at the end of the Tanzimat period in 1876 just before they were suspended when Abdul Hamid II ascended as the new sultan. The precise aims and true effects of the revolution are sources of sustained scholarly debate.35 During the period itself, however, many perceived a Turkist ethno-national particularism among the revolution’s leaders and ideologues, even as the revolution promised “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Justice.”36

  When, for instance, the Young Turk intellectual Yusuf Akçura identified the ideological options he saw available to the Ottoman administration in 1904 (namely,
Pan-Ottomanism, Pan-Islamism, and Pan-Turkism), he insisted that it would be best “to pursue a Turkish nationalism based on race.”37 Between 1904 and 1907, the Young Turk journal Türk published a plethora of articles on race theory and the Turkish race, and its editors used the language of race in arguing for the Turkishness of various Turkic groups.38 In 1907, for instance, the journal noted that “currently some learned Azerbaijanis comprehend that they are racially Turkish, and that sectarian differences, such as those between the Sunni and Shiite sects” had been exaggerated by opportunistic Muslim rulers.39 Though the platform of the Young Turk political party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), guaranteed “complete liberty and equality irrespective of race and sect,”40 Muslims not of Turkish origin, let alone Christians and Jews, were disturbed by what they saw as the CUP’s true agenda of “Turkification.” Regardless of whether these suspicions were warranted, race-thinking was part of the Ottoman discourse, especially in the years surrounding the Young Turk Revolution. To understand how al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda conceived of one another, then, it is critical to appreciate the religious elements of the Ottoman system as well as the rise of racial discussions in the period of their encounter.

  JERUSALEM BETWEEN BEIRUT AND CAIRO

  Even as al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda’s city was by the late nineteenth century technically, politically separated from Greater Syria and instead designated as part of the independent Ottoman mutassariflik al-Quds, Jerusalem remained within the intellectual and cultural orbit of the northern Syrian centers of Beirut and Damascus. This integration was especially pronounced in the period of the fin de siècle, when the Syrian cultural sphere expanded and became linked with that of Egypt, particularly with intellectual circles in the cities of Cairo and Alexandria. In this period, known in Arab and Middle Eastern intellectual history as the Nahḍa (the renaissance or reawakening), many important journalists, authors, scholars, and activists from Syria moved south to Egypt. In Egypt, a society ruled since 1882 by the British, these (mostly Christian) Syrian transplants escaped Ottoman censorship and joined forces with local Egyptian intellectuals to produce, among other things, widely read and highly influential scientific and literary Arabic journals, some of which were first created while the editors were still in Syria. Though fin de siècle Jerusalem was hardly an intellectual capital on the order of Beirut or Cairo, Palestine’s geographic centrality between Syria and Egypt meant both that intellectuals from north and south passed through Jerusalem and that the literary and cultural elite of Arabic-reading Palestine were necessarily engaged with the ideas generated and published in the centers—including al-Khalidi, who wrote on occasion in the Nahḍa journals.

  Locating Jerusalem within the Syria-Egypt cultural orbit highlights other ways in which race was on the minds of intellectuals in al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda’s city. Perhaps the most formative experience for one circle of Nahḍa figures—the editors of the journal al-Muqtaṭaf—was the controversy over Darwinism at the Syrian Protestant College (SPC) in 1882. This crisis, known alternatively as the “Darwin Controversy” or the “Lewis Affair,”41 began when Edwin Lewis, a young American physics instructor at the SPC, delivered a speech at the college’s commencement that the college administration deemed to be overly sympathetic to Darwinian theory. In fact, Lewis’s speech, given just over two decades after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), did not unequivocally advocate for the scientific merits of Darwinism. “As for the adequacy of this doctrine,” Lewis said, “we cannot at the moment make a final judgment, since many aspects still need investigation, evidence, and thorough examination before arriving at any judgment.”42 Notwithstanding such caveats, Lewis’s speech was summarily condemned by the more conservative forces in the missionary school and ultimately led to Lewis’s ouster from the faculty.

  Only inflaming matters from the perspective of the college administration, al-Muqtaṭaf—a journal based at SPC and edited by two of the college’s instructors—Published Lewis’s speech, thereby providing it with a far larger audience than that which had originally heard it at the commencement ceremony.43 An extended discussion ensued in the pages of al-Muqtaṭaf about the speech and about Darwinism, a theory the editors (if not Lewis) found compelling. In 1884, in the wake of this affair, the editors were dismissed from their positions at the college. Within months they migrated and transplanted their journal to Cairo, where during an earlier visit in 1880 they had been warmly received and discovered the popularity of al-Muqtaṭaf among intellectuals in Egypt.44

  Upon reestablishing itself in Cairo, al-Muqtaṭaf continued defending Darwin’s theory and some of the social implications that were drawn from it.45 While notions of race predated Darwin, many understood Darwin’s theory scientifically to explain human variation and the existence of human races. Darwin used the term “race” in The Origin of Species (the extended title of which includes “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”), though he did so, as scholars Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott explain, “only in the broad biological use of the word,” not in the sense of races of humanity. Later, though, in his The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin more carefully considered the implications of his theory in a chapter “On the Races of Man.”46 While even in The Descent of Man Darwin expressed uncertainty about how to account for races among humans, Social Darwinists perceived a clear link between “natural selection” and human racial hierarchies.47 Given its role in the traumatic transplantation of al-Muqtaṭaf to Egypt, Darwinism and ideas associated with it took on a central place in the thought and identity of the journal, its editors, and ultimately its many readers.

  Moreover, as Omnia El Shakry has shown, among the intellectual, scientific fin de siècle Arabic journals, al-Muqtaṭaf was not alone in its interest in race-thinking. Jurji Zaydan published articles about race in his contemporaneous journal al-Hilāl,48 and in 1912 he also wrote an entire book on the subject of race, Ṭabaqāt al-umam aw as-salāʾil al-bashariyya (Classes of the Nations, or Races of Man).49 Zaydan’s study explores the origins of human races and analyzes the various qualities (physical and spiritual) purportedly associated with each.50 Race, then, was part of the intellectual, cultural, and philosophical worldview of turn-of-the-century Arabic journals, both reflecting and informing their broader readership’s interests in this means of conceiving of humanity and human difference.

  Questions of race were not merely of academic or theoretical interest in fin de siècle Egypt. Rather, as Eve Troutt Powell has demonstrated, racial thinking was pervasive in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt as Egyptians conceived of their role in dominating the Sudan (ruled by Egypt from 1821 until 1885 and again, under the British, beginning in 1899).51 Even before the British conquest of Egypt in 1882 and certainly during the British occupation as well, the discourse concerning Egypt’s role in the Sudan—its “civilizing mission”52—was articulated in racial terms. “In late-nineteenth-century Egypt,” Powell contends, “writers and nationalists were acutely aware of the discourse on race being conducted in western Europe, and they used it to frame their various perspectives about the Sudan and its people.”53 Racial thinking was a central part of the ways in which intellectuals and others to Palestine’s north, in Syria, and south, in Egypt, categorized and conceived of themselves and of others. When the Jerusalem of al-Khalidi and Ben-Yehuda is understood in this Nahḍa nexus, it is unsurprising to discover that these men’s communities also employed racial modes as they perceived one another.

  JERUSALEM AND EUROPE

  Finally, in numerous ways both real and imagined, Ben-Yehuda and al-Khalidi’s Jerusalem was linked to Europe. In a personal sense, these two individuals were partly European: Ben-Yehuda and many of his fellow Zionists in Jerusalem were born in Eastern Europe, while al-Khalidi had studied in Paris and served as the Ottoman consul general in the south of France. Intellectually, culturally, even linguistically (the conversation was likely conducted in French),54 their encounter in Jerusalem was one
critically informed by, even inseparable from, Europe.

  Jerusalem, and Palestine more broadly, were the focus of immense European attention in the fin de siècle. This attention is evident, of course, in Zionism, the European-born Jewish nationalist movement directed at Zion (the mountain that serves as a synecdoche for both Jerusalem and the entire Land of Israel). European interest is also apparent, though, in the communities of European Christian missionaries, educators, and consuls that settled in Palestine in this period. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, numerous European countries, including Britain, Prussia, France, Austria, Russia, Italy, Greece, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, established new consulates in Jerusalem.55 Also beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the end of the Ottoman period in Palestine, European Protestant missionary communities established themselves in Jerusalem.56 These missionaries founded and staffed schools, hospitals, and other institutions that served the needs of the often impoverished communities of Palestine. By Ottoman law, Christian missionaries were prohibited from proselytizing Muslims. Instead, they focused their missionizing efforts on the Jews (through, for example, the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews) and on local members of other Christian denominations (such as Greek Orthodox and Catholics).57

  The presence of these missionary groups in Late Ottoman Jerusalem has a number of important implications for this book. First, given the intensive and sustained missionary activities in Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, Palestine during this period cannot be seen in isolation from Europe. That European powers exercised political influence through these Christian missions is widely acknowledged, as is the fact that the missions themselves reflected this political influence. More important for our purposes, though, because the missionaries were technically limited in their permitted targets of proselytization, they were by necessity conscious of and invested in religious difference among Palestine’s population. This institutionalized sensitivity to religious distinctions for a powerful group in Palestine was clearly recognized by Palestine’s various religious communities and, as a result, played its own role in sustaining, or even magnifying, such distinctions. Moreover, owing to the threat (and also the promised educational, cultural, economic, and of course religious rewards) of proselytization by European Christians, religion in Late Ottoman Palestine was a highly sensitive subject. This, too, suggests that for all communities in Palestine, far beyond the missionaries themselves, religion was a central concern.