“CONCerNING Our ARAb QuESTIOn”? • 119and as descendants of refugees from Christian religious intolerance
who found safety in an Islamic empire,^99 the Sephardim associated
not just the Ottoman regime nor even Muslims but Islam itself with
tolerance and respect. Consider these words, quoted approvingly by
ha-Ḥerut:
It is known that in all Christian countries, they hate the Jews with
the deepest religious hatred. . . . But the Muslim world has not
known such feelings and never will. Islam was born on the knees
of Judaism. these two nations [Jews and Muslims] are close to
one another in blood and language, and the religion of Islam is
filled with Jewish traditions. Because Islam recognizes all mono-
theistic religions, it is not possible to enroot in the heart of its
believers hatred and animosity toward the very nation that first
taught monotheism. this is the reason that the Jews living among
Muslims did not suffer religious persecution by Muslims such as
the oppression they experience in the Christian countries. the
Inquisition, the auto-de-fé and other horrors are entirely unknown
in the Muslim context.^100note the stark contrast between this laudatory language about Islam
and the derogatory words and tone the newspaper used regarding
Christianity. Whereas Christianity is an essentially bigoted religion,
it implies, Islam is fundamentally tolerant (this, in addition to racial
proximity, the shared “blood,” of Jews and Muslims). Christians and
Muslims have treated Jews differently because Christianity and Islam
are fundamentally different, explains the author, and ha-Ḥerut’s ed-
itor agrees. Because of this religious difference, anti- Zionism— or, as
(^99) See Cohen, “Fashioning Imperial Citizens,” 3. Cohen identifies a number of myths
developed by Ottoman Jewish elites to claim a special relationship between the Ottoman
state and the Jews. One of these myths is that “the Jews of Ottoman realms had been
mercifully received by the empire in 1492, when they had nowhere else to go.” Cohen
astutely draws our attention to the fact that this “picture necessarily excluded Jewish
communities who had lived in the area before the Ottoman conquest— such as Greek-
speaking Romaniot Jews of the eastern Mediterranean basin or the Arabic- speaking com-
munities spread across the empire— as well as those who had found their way to the
empire for reasons unrelated to the Spanish expulsion. In other words, this approach
allowed the Judeo- Spanish communities of the empire’s european and anatolian prov-
inces to stand in as a synecdoche for ‘Ottoman Jewry’ as a whole.” Ha-Ḥerut’s articles
might be understood as both participating in this ideological project and working within
the discourse already created by the success of the project.
(^100) ha-Ḥerut 3:45 (February 3, 1911), 2– 3.