Jewish Imperial Allegiance and the Greco-Ottoman War of 1897 · 43the community or some of its representatives. Yet this was not the expla-
nation offered by the sources of the time. Rather, they pointed only to the
will of these Jewish youths to serve their country and to their deep sense
of Ottoman patriotism.^52 As there seems to be no evidence of the use of
coercion at this moment, and as it is well known that Jews elsewhere in
the empire were being accepted as volunteers within the ranks of the
Ottoman army without becoming Muslims, the occurrence of such large-
scale conversions appears all the more perplexing.^53
Indeed, the leaders of the Jewish community in Izmir had great dif-
ficulty formulating either an explanation or a response to the news. Per-
haps not surprisingly, and much as the Salonican Jewish press had done,
most of the local Jewish newspapers stayed silent on the subject. La Buena
Esperansa, the oldest Ladino periodical of the city, was the only local Jew-
ish paper to respond: it dedicated a short section to the topic, although
the notice was hidden within its pages and without a subheading of its
own. The editors did not hide their dismay or their thinly veiled criti-
cism of the choice of these youths who had left their community: “It is
being said by [various Ottoman] journals that all of these conversions
have been animated by the patriotic sentiments of those who desired to
serve among the ranks of the Ottoman army as volunteers. In reality, we
are unable to explain the motives which obliged these youths to abandon their
religion, since they were perfectly able to serve their homeland without any obli-
gation to convert.”^54 As a testament to this, the paper offered the example
set by young Jewish men elsewhere in the empire: “We are aware that in
Salonica and in the area of Bursa various young Jews have enlisted them-
selves as volunteers in the army, while still holding fast to the religion of
their forefathers.”^55
Here, it seems, the Jewish population had taken the vision of an Ot-
toman patriotism which knew no bounds as well as a sense of solidarity
with Muslims to new extremes. As for the Jews enacting this form of
identification, perhaps they felt they were simply pushing such patriotic
projects to their logical conclusion. For the leading elites of their com-
munity, however, the disturbance at the train depot in Salonica and the
group conversions in Izmir represented the excesses of the very loyalty
and patriotism they had been trying to foster all along.
Finding their messages distorted and misread, they approached with
silence the troubles that now cast such a long shadow at the height of the
1897 war with Greece. In the end, Ottoman patriotism and identification