Campos 241it is internally organized, how it maintains its boundaries and relatively
greater internal cohesion in relation to the larger public, and whether
its separate existence reflects merely sectional interests, some functional
division of labor, or a felt need for bulwarks against the hegemony of a
dominant ideology.”^11 This is the kind of analysis that can help clarify the
scope, size, dynamics, and interaction of multiple publics.^12
e press in late Ottoman Palestine is a microcosm for exploring Th
the creative and conflictual process of articulating various complemen-
tary and competing public selves: Ottoman, Palestinian, Arab, Jewish,
Christian, Muslim. As a result, the press was significant not only because
of the content in its pages, but also for the way in which it became a vital
actor in the public arena at a moment when the first-person plural—
“we”—was undergoing dramatic expression and transformation.
The post-revolutionary Ottoman public sphere was built on the axis
between the civic (universal) and the communal^13 —and the relationship
between the two was essentially “overlapping and interwoven.”^14 To a cer-
tain extent, the tension between the two was a creative one, part of the
dialectic that is unarticulated and unexplored in Fraser and Eley’s con-
flictual model, and rendered fleeting in Mah’s view. On one level, the late
Ottoman public sphere aspired to be an Ottomanist and Ottomanizing
public sphere^15 which accommodated overlapping membership based on
religious, ethnic, and regional differences. In turn, these particularistic
publics recognized the hegemony of the civic Ottomanist public sphere in
the very act of constructing themselves.
art of the dynamism of this process of constructing the “we” was P
due to the fact that in the late Ottoman Empire, “communal” delineations
were themselves heterogenous, porous, contextual constructions. People
could participate in more than one public and their membership in vari-
ous publics could overlap, recalling Partha Chatterjee’s formulation of
“fuzzy communities.” According to Chatterjee, the fuzziness marked “the
sense that, first, a community did not claim to represent or exhaust all the
layers of selfhood of its members ...” so that “one could, obviously and
without any contradiction, belong to several ... not simultaneously but
contextually.”^16
s one example of this contextual identification of groupness and A
we-ness, the Jerusalem-based Sephardi Hebrew newspaper ha-Herut used