24 • cHAPTeR 1
red Slip policy)^31 and on land purchases by Jews, were haltingly en-
forced and largely ineffective whether due to Jewish evasion, Ottoman
corruption, or, as Ali ekrem Bey (Jerusalem’s Ottoman governor from
1906 to 1908) saw it, european consular interference and deception.^32
ali ekrem wrote to his imperial superiors in June 1906 that “because
of the particular importance which Jerusalem holds for the Christians,
it is natural that each one of the foreign countries ardently attempts
to increase the number of its citizens in the place, even if they might
be Jews.”^33 Other egalitarian imperial trends notwithstanding, the Ot-
tomans rulers of palestine were legally bound to discriminate against
Jews in terms of immigration and land purchase and thus necessarily
were concerned with intercommunal difference in Palestine.^34
the world in which al- Khalidi and Ben- Yehuda met, and the terms
of their encounter, were informed not only by the Ottoman tanzimat
of the previous century, but as important and more immediately, by
the intellectual and political transformations that led to the end of Sul-
tan Abdul Hamid II’s reign the year before the two Jerusalem leaders
sat together for their interview. In these transformations, we find im-
portant evidence of the rise of race- thinking in the empire. though it
is referred to as the Young turk Revolution, the overthrow of Sultan
(^31) For discussion of this policy, see chapter 2.
(^32) On the Ottoman government’s ineffectual attempts to limit Jewish immigration
and land purchasing in palestine, see Mandel, “Ottoman policy and restrictions on Jew-
ish Settlement in Palestine,” 328; Mandel, “Ottoman Practice as Regards Jewish Settle-
ment in Palestine.” According to Mandel, Ottoman resistance to Jewish immigration
to Palestine was motivated by the Sublime Porte’s fear of “the possibility of nurturing
another national problem in the empire” and by its desire not “increase the number of
foreign subjects, particularly europeans,” and even more specifically Russians, “in its
domains.” Mandel, “Ottoman Policy and Restrictions on Jewish Settlement in Palestine,”
- Mandel summarizes the development of the policies as follows: “the Government
placed restrictions on Jews entering palestine from 1882 onwards, which were designed
to prevent Jewish settlement in the country. One decade later, it also imposed restric-
tions against Jewish land purchase in palestine. Its opposition to Jewish settlement was
heightened in 1897 when the Zionist Movement . . . was founded; and in 1901 the
restrictions were against Jewish entry and land purchase in palestine were revised in
the form of consolidated regulations.” Mandel, “Ottoman Practice as Regards Jewish
Settlement in Palestine,” 34. On the various methods Jews used to bypass this policy,
including departing from Jaffa and reentering in Haifa or Beirut, see Kushner, To Be
Governor of Jerusalem, 68– 69.
(^33) this line is found in the the fascinating 1906 report written by ali ekrem Bey about
Jewish immigration in Kushner, To Be Governor of Jerusalem, 184.
(^34) For ali ekrem (similar, as we shall see, to Muhammad ruhi al- Khalidi), the pri-
mary motivation for Jews to come to Palestine in particular was their religious “fervor”
(taʿaṣṣub). Jerusalem, he wrote, “is the Jews’ precious paradise.” Ibid., 182. He under-
stood this population, which he surely recognized was not uniformly religiously obser-
vant, to be defined and driven nonetheless by their religion.