3
“Zeal and Noise”
Jewish Imperial Allegiance and the Greco-Ottoman War
of 1897Julia Phillips CohenThis chapter explores how Ottoman Jews’ manifestations of patriotism
during the empire’s 1897 war with Greece affected their relations with
their neighbors, both Christian and Muslim. It does so by examining the
cases of two Ottoman port cities situated in the eastern Mediterranean
basin, each with a sizeable Jewish population.^1 The first section of the
chapter concentrates on the Jewish community of Salonica, an Ottoman
city perched at the top of the Aegean, where—by a number of accounts—
Jews constituted the single largest demographic group in the urban fab-
ric.^2 The second section shifts the focus to Izmir, also an Aegean port
city, with a Jewish population about a third the size of Salonica’s Jewish
community.^3 There, Jews found themselves living as a minority in a city
with much larger Muslim and Christian populations.^4
Needless to say, these demographic differences made the circum-
stances each community faced distinct. Yet the backdrop of an Ottoman
state framework lent the Jewish communities of Salonica and Izmir many
structural similarities as well. In part because they considered their em-
pire an Islamic state, Jews in both places came to express a pronounced
sense of identification with local Muslims and even with Islam per se
during the late Ottoman era, a trend that intensified as hostilities erupted
with Greece in the spring of 1897. Although this occurred as a result of
both strategic and spontaneous acts of self-positioning, ultimately, as
war beckoned and tensions grew in the early months of 1897, the Jewish