Introduction | 15but this commitment was somewhat compromised by their support for Zionism.
In the end only David lived to see the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the
subsequent rise of the Arab-Zionist conflict. He was exiled to Alexandria dur-
ing World War I along with other Zionist leaders, and in the wake of the Balfour
Declaration and the establishment of a Zionist-friendly and British-controlled
Palestine Mandate, he proposed the establishment of separate municipalities in
Jerusalem drawn along sectarian lines. Not only had the Ottoman Empire died
but so too had the dream of Palestine as a state for all its citizens.
***Combined, the chapters reveal an immense amount about the convoluted, con-
tested, exclusionary, and simultaneously inclusive nature of the development and
evolution of what it meant to be Ottoman during the empire’s long existence.
They demonstrate that identity is not static but dynamic and that Ottoman iden-
tity transformed according to individual, regional, cultural, political, and impe-
rial interests and exigencies.
Notes
. See Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out, 1–50.
. Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity.’”
. Hacking, Historical Ontology, 100.
. Yosmaoğlu, “Counting Bodies, Shaping Souls.”
. Daston, “The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects,” 6.
. Isom-Verhaaren, “Shifting Identities”; Isom-Verhaaren, Allies, 72–74.
. Soucek, “Rise of the Barbarossas,” 246–248; Brantôme, Oeuvres complètes, 2:67–69,
5:398–405. Bennassar and Bennassar call the Barbarossa brothers “Islamicized Greeks” and
consider Hayreddin to have been a “Greek of Lesbos.” Bennassar and Bennassar, Les Chrétiens
d’Allah, 232, 267, 366.
. Aldo Gallotta, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., s.v. “Khayr al-din (Khidir) Pasha
Barbarossa.”