20 • cHAPTeR 1
stability.^15 this important historiographical revision notwithstanding,
the fact remains that imperial authorities defined Jews, Greek Ortho-
dox, armenians, and of course Muslims in religious terms. In a society
in which the state formally distinguishes^16 between its communities
based on religion, we might not be surprised to find that the commu-
nities themselves perceived their neighbors in religious terms as well.^17
In the mid- nineteenth century, however, under external pressure
from europe, the Ottoman government, led by the bureaucrats of the
Sublime porte, took a number of steps to equalize the rights and duties
of the empire’s population; the new legal reforms passed in this regard
were known as the Tanzimat (“Reorganizations,” 1839– 1876).^18 the
Ottoman Law of Nationality of 1869, for instance, formally changed
the legal categories used by the Ottoman government. No longer would
the government define those within its boundaries as Muslim, dhimmī
(i.e., christian and Jew), and non- Muslim foreigner. Now the official
categories were ecnebī (foreign national without regard to religious af-
filiation) and Ottoman (including “non- Muslim Ottomans”). For these
(^15) Scholars have questioned to what extent the millet system was indeed a “system”
(rather than an ad hoc set of practices) when it actually was instituted (in the early
years of the empire or in the nineteenth century) and when it was dissolved (during the
tanzimat or at the end of the empire). See Braude and Lewis, Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire. One direction for future scholarship in this area is to use these revisions
to understand how this imperial system informed and affected intercommunal relations.
One wonders whether Jews and arabs in the Late Ottoman period viewed each other in
different ways from their predecessors given the evolving ways in which religious com-
munities related to the empire. the case of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in palestine
suggests that Jews and arabs in the Late Ottoman period may have come to view each
other in terms that at least in part mimicked the religious basis of the communal struc-
tures imposed by the Ottoman state. at the same time, it also reveals how extra- Ottoman
influences, such as european race- thinking, could simultaneously penetrate communal
consciousness in this era.
(^16) “Distinction” is not necessarily equivalent to negative “discrimination.” Notwith-
standing the tanzimat reforms of the mid- nineteenth century, though, there were cer-
tainly areas of discrimination as well. For a discussion of intercommunal relations in
the Ottoman empire and the forces of distinction, see Quataert, The Ottoman Empire,
1700– 1922 , 174– 79.
(^17) Further complicating this study is the fact that, as Quataert puts it, “ethnic terms
confusingly often described what actually were religious differences.” In the Balkan and
Anatolian lands, for instance, “Ottoman christians informally spoke of ‘Turks’ when in
fact they meant Muslims. ‘Turk’ was a kind of shorthand referring to Muslims of every
sort, whether Kurds, Turks, or Albanians (but not Arabs).” Ibid., 175. As I will demon-
strate in my analysis of hebrew newspapers, Late Ottoman Zionists sometimes appeared
to use the term arab when they actually meant Muslim.
(^18) See “The Tanzimat era” in Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. For
a variety of theories explaining the Ottoman motivations for the Tanzimat, see Quataert,
The Ottoman Empire, 1700– 1922 , 65– 68.