116 naor ben-yehoyada
subjectivity (“offended” by the honor syndrome), nationalism was probably the most
controversial and least popular stripe on the banner of modernity.
As the Mediterranean opposite of nationalism, the image of cosmopolitan port
cities became an object of paradoxical nostalgia for a moment that emblematized
a certain image of modernity—urbaneness, refinement, and inter-cultural co-existence
and conviviality—yet this co-existence collapsed, violently, with the spread of
“modern” nationalism in the post-Ottoman littoral. Rather than adhering to lin-
guistic uniformity, cosmopolitans claimed to find their way in three and more
languages: domestic, urban, administrative, business, and political. Against the
national imperative of cultural-political isomorphism, the close proximity of
ethnically- and religiously-diverse groups created shared pedagogic institutions
and public spaces. Applied to the turn of the twentieth century, this tolerance was
supposed to serve as a multicultural safeguard for the national or religious minor-
ities of labor migrants in Europe against rising xenophobia and the national
policies it promoted.
The identification of coexistence with multicultural tolerance, however, has more
to do with the turn of the twentieth century than it does with the nineteenth. Ivo
Andrić’s “Letter Dated 1920” makes this clear:
When in Sarajevo you lie awake all night long in your bed, you hear all the sounds of the
night. Ponderously and implacably, the clock on the Catholic cathedral rings two o’clock.
A minute later (seventy-five seconds exactly, I counted), in its somewhat feebler but still
penetrating tone, the clock on the orthodox Cathedral rings “its” two o’clock. A little
later, the clock tower on the mosque of the bey in turn rings with a harsh and distant
tone; it rings eleven o’clock, a ghostly Turkish eleven o’clock, conforming to the odd
calculations of countries situated on the other side of the earth. The Jews do not have a
clock that rings, and only a cruel god knows what time it is for them at this moment, an
hour that varies, depending on whether they are Sephardic or Ashkenazy. So, even at
night when everyone is asleep, in the detailed account of sleep’s slack hours, the differ-
ences that divide the sleeping people are awake. People who, upon awakening, are joyful
or suffer, eat or fast according to four different and opposing calendars, and who say their
prayers to the same heaven in four languages of different churches. This disparity,
sometimes visible and open, sometimes invisible and hidden, always looks like hatred
and is sometimes confused with it. (quoted in Bromberger, 2006: 94–95; see also Catlos,
this volume)It is this combination of accentuation of cultural difference with the urban
maintenance of coexistence that stood at the heart of this world. Rather than the
hospitality and tolerance of the hegemonic national group towards its resident
minorities (late-twentieth century labor migrants in Europe), here the ethnic and
religious mosaic and its accompanying “narcissism of minor differences” were
conditioned by the lack of any such hegemony. It is an ironic twist of history,
therefore, that the clearest examples of cosmopolitanism come from the heyday of
European colonial encroachments on the Ottoman littoral before the Great War,
whereas the lessons scholars seek to draw from these cosmopolitanisms address
the other side of the sea, from southern Europe to the industrial and economic
centers of twenty-first century Europe.