LOcATING THe ZIONIST-ARAB eNcOUNTeR • 19took place within this vast, if shrinking, empire is hardly incidental to
this story.^13 Ben- Yehuda wished to interview al- Khalidi, after all, pre-
cisely because of the latter’s political role in the Ottoman empire. But
to understand how the encounter between al- Khalidi and Ben- Yehuda,
and the communities they represented, was conceived, the Ottoman
imperial context is critical far beyond the particulars of al- Khalidi’s
parliamentary position. the way in which people relate to one another
is informed (though of course not wholly determined) by the systemic,
structural categories offered by the societies in which they live. Put
somewhat differently, how a state formally defines its subjects nec-
essarily affects how the people themselves define and relate to one
another, even as the influence may not be unidirectional. Moreover, it
is in periods when the formal definitions are challenged or in flux that
one may expect to see the relationship between legal definitions and
informal perceptions most acutely, and the era surrounding the period
of study in this book was perhaps the most significant such moment of
flux in Ottoman history.
For most of its history, the Ottoman empire formally defined its
diverse subjects by their religions. through an arrangement that even-
tually came to be known as the “millet system,”^14 the Ottoman gov-
ernment related to its various religious minority populations via their
religious leadership. It was once imagined that each millet’s religious
leader in Istanbul had always been the representative of the community
throughout the empire, such that, for instance, the Istanbul hahambaşi
(chief rabbi) represented all the empire’s Jews from the earliest years
of Ottoman Jewish history. More recently scholars have discovered
that the system was, until the nineteenth century, much more local-
ized and ad hoc, in contrast to the later claims of centralization and
(^13) as Yuval Ben- Bassat writes, “in order to embed the discussion on proto- Zionist- arab
encounters in palestine at the end of the nineteenth century into a broader historical con-
text, it is important to examine the Ottoman framework in which Jewish- arab relations
unfolded.” Ben- Bassat, “Beyond National Historiographies,” 112. While my study focuses
on texts found in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, I have learned much from several
recent scholars who have begun mining the Ottoman archives for Ottoman- turkish lan-
guage materials concerning the arab- Zionist encounter. See, for instance, Ben- Bassat,
“rural reactions to Zionist activity in palestine before and after the Young turk revolu-
tion of 1908 as Reflected in Petitions to Istanbul”; Fishman, “Palestine Revisited.”
(^14) the turkish word millet comes from the arabic millah, a Qurʾanic term of Aramaic
origin. The term, according to Bernard Lewis, originally meant “a word” and came to
represent a group that accepts a particular word or revealed book. In the Ottoman em-
pire, explains Lewis, “it became a technical term, and was used for the organized, recog-
nized, religio- political communities enjoying certain rights of autonomy under their own
chiefs.” See Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, 38– 39. See also ayalon, Language and
Change in the Arab Middle East, 19– 21.