4 | Living in the Ottoman Realm
This type of reductionism also privileges confessionalism—the identifica-
tion of individuals or groups based on their religious beliefs—over all other types
of relationships and identities. But religious identity has not been equally salient
everywhere and in every historical era, and a foregrounding of religious identity
may reflect our current world situation more than it does the other periods we
seek to understand. Identities are complex and ever changing, and they are not
mutually exclusive. An individual living in Ottoman lands was not only a Jew
but also a resident of a particular village and region and someone of a particular
profession or trade, for example. There are many ways to identify oneself and be
identified, and these include place of origin, current residence, heritage, ethnic-
ity, occupation, race, religion, sexual preference, and gender, to name only a few.
In other words, identity is inherently slippery and difficult to pin down. Scholars
risk mistaking their categories of analysis for actual practice; therefore, identity
studies must be carefully defined in relation to time and place and must be em-
pirically substantiated with evidence of which identifications were most salient
in any given case.
Individuals formulate their identities in response to the question “Who are
you?” posed explicitly or implicitly by an outsider or someone from a different
group. We historians studying the past are asking, “Who were you?” of the people
we study. While analyzing the responses of living people to this question is dif-
ficult, when we turn to the past the challenges increase exponentially, because we
are often attempting to answer this question indirectly through the analysis of
documents that rarely address our questions directly. We might not even under-
stand the answer once we have found it, because the terms that we are using have
meanings that have evolved over the centuries. The response to “Who were you?”
is thus contingent on who has asked the question, when and where the question
was asked, and what the questioner was trying to ascertain. Consequently, we
should not be surprised when attempting to define who a person was produces a
variety of responses. A person may be defined by any number of attributes, and
determining which was the most salient influence at a given time or in a given
place is vital for understanding the answer.
Lorraine Daston, a historian of early modern science, provides a useful defi-
nition of salience: she states that salience “might serve as shorthand for the mul-
tifarious ways in which previously unprepossessing phenomena come to rivet
scientific attention—and are thereby transformed into scientific objects.” In
other words, criteria of inclusion and exclusion that are essential for trying to
determine categories of identity are not static or fixed over time and place. Spe-
cific cultural and political circumstances transform the criteria of inclusion and
exclusion that are essential for understanding identity. A specific context brought
these criteria to the attention of historians, and the process of analyzing them
turned them into concrete objects of study. This is not to say that these categories