Ottoman Attitudes toward the Modernization of Jewish Education · 25associations, mutual-aid societies, and reading clubs. The AIU became,
thereby, a major factor in shaping the worldview of Ottoman Jewry. The
graduates of the AIU schools and those who subscribed to its ideology
were known in the Jewish community as “Alliancists,” and by the late
nineteenth century they had emerged as a major opinion group. In sev-
eral important areas, the AIU’s ideology overlapped with that of the
Young Turks. Many of the Alliancists became active in the ranks of the
Young Turks or were close to them. Following the Young Turk Revolu-
tion of 1908 and the reconvening of the Ottoman parliament, three of the
four Jews serving in the new Chamber of Deputies—Emanuel Carasso,
Vitali Farraggi, and Nissim Masliyah—were graduates of AIU schools
and members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the main
Young Turk group.^35
Under the Young Turk regime, many Jews held important positions
in the Young Turk movement and in the government. Of all the Otto-
man minorities, the Jewish community was the only one to provide the
CUP with a frontline leader, Emanuel Carasso, and an important ideo-
logue, Moise Cohen Tekinalp.^36 Other Jews held important positions in
the government. For example, Ezekiel Sasoon served as undersecretary
in the Ministry of Agriculture and subsequently in the Ministry of Com-
merce; Nissim Russo held an equally important position in the Ministry
of Finance; Vitali Stroumsa became a member of the Supreme Council for
Financial Reform; and Samuel Israel (Izisel) was chief of the political sec-
tion of Istanbul’s police force, a most sensitive and powerful position.^37
Modern Jewish schools received the support of successive Ottoman
regimes throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because
they advocated basic principles that were commonly shared by the re-
forming bureaucrats of the Tanzimat period, Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, and
the Young Turks. And these principles were modernity, patriotism, and
loyalty to the state.
Notes
- Nicholas de Nicolay, The Nauigations, Peregrinations and Voyages Made into
Turkie by Nicholas de Nicolay... , trans. T. Washington (London, 1585; reprint,
New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 130b; Joseph Nehama, Histoire des Israélites de
Salonique (Salonica: Librairie Molho, 1935), 4:57; Shmuel Avitsur, “Safed: Center
of the Manufacture of Woven Woolen in the Fifteenth Century” Sefunot 6 (1962):