 Migrants, Revolutionaries, and Spies

Surveillance, Politics, and

Ottoman Identity in the United States

David Gutman

Historians have long argued that efforts by the Ottoman state in the nine-

teenth century to create a unifying sense of Ottoman identity that superseded
ties of ethnicity and religion were a failure. After all, throughout the nineteenth
and into the early twentieth centuries, the empire steadily lost territory and
population to nationalist movements that aimed to carve (at least ostensibly) de-
mographically homogeneous, independent nation-states out of the multiconfes-
sional, multiethnic Ottoman Empire. This narrative often privileges ethnic and
religious identity as having primacy over all other identities an individual might
claim. Thus, attempts at creating an overarching Ottoman identity were doomed
to fail from the beginning, and the empire’s dissolution was merely the inevitable
result of its constituent ethnic and religious groups’ demands to each live in their
own independent state. This rather simple story arc misses the fact that individ-
ual identities are inherently multifaceted and fluid. As this chapter demonstrates,
for some non-Muslim Ottomans, religion and ethnicity were secondary to fac-
tors such as social class, political affiliation, and family background in shaping
their relationship with the empire and its government.
To the casual observer, Alexandros Mavroyeni, the Ottoman ambassador to
the United States from 1886 to 1896, seemed to embody many of the complexities
and contradictions of the Ottoman experience in the age of nationalism. After all,
he was a native-Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian diplomatic representative
of the world’s most powerful Muslim state. Scion of a prominent Istanbul family,
Mavroyeni’s father, Spirodon, was a Paris-educated medical doctor and the sul-
tan’s trusted personal surgeon. A talented and educated polyglot, Mavroyeni was
nevertheless keenly aware that he owed his prominent position in the Ottoman
diplomatic corps to his family’s long-standing close relationship with the sul-
tan. Indeed, Mavroyeni was a bit of a relic. For generations, elite Istanbul-based
Greek Orthodox families like the Mavroyenis, collectively known as Phanari-
ots after the neighborhood where they resided, had dominated important offices