Campos 243which appeared in Arabic and Turkish. As a result the Arab literate classes
in Palestine relied on the Egyptian press that they received uncensored via
the foreign post, or the highly regulated papers of Damascus, Beirut, and
Istanbul. The situation among Palestine’s Jewish residents was not much
better, despite the benign neglect with which the government treated the
issue of non-Muslim printing. A handful of Hebrew newspapers were
produced in Palestine, while Judeo-Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic and other
newspapers were imported from the region or beyond. With the revolu-
tion of 1908 and the subsequent announcement of the restoration of the
constitution and abrogation of the strict censorship laws, the local press
in Palestine—as elsewhere in the empire—exploded.^22 In Palestine, in the
half-year following the revolution, at least sixteen new Arabic-language
newspapers were established; between 1909 and 1914, another eighteen
Arabic newspapers emerged.^23 In addition to this booming Arabic press,
several new Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, and Greek newspapers also appeared
in Jerusalem and Jaffa.
e impact of these new papers was astounding. It helped to occa-Th
sion an unprecedented transformation of the late Ottoman Palestinian
public sphere, by expanding both the “public” and its “sphere” of activ-
ity. First, whereas before 1908 the “literate consumers” of Palestine were
numbered and fairly homogeneous, the explosion of newspapers after the
revolution further expanded and democratized the reading public.^24 The
new local press emerged out of and addressed itself to the new effendiyya
strata—those Muslims, Christians, and Jews who had been educated in
the preceding decades under new conditions, were attuned to the changes
taking place throughout the empire, and were hungry for new outlets of
information and expression. The annual subscription rates of the press
were certainly within the means of the salaried and independent middle
classes.^25
urthermore, as the historians Ami Ayalon and Rashid Khalidi have F
pointed out, newspapers were often read out loud and passed from hand
to hand. “One educated person equipped with a single newspaper copy
could transmit its contents to many others, amplifying its impact mani-
fold.”^26 In Palestine, there is evidence of this, most sharply in the form of
editorials denouncing the local practice of “recycling” newspapers among
friends, depriving the press of valuable revenue, if not readers. Other