312 | Zionism in the Era of Ottoman Brotherhood
glance in the pages of the multilingual Ottoman press shows. Hundreds of miles
to the south in Jerusalem, Shlomo Yellin’s elder brother David, a schoolteacher,
writer, and Jewish community figure, was also actively involved in the revolu-
tion’s aftermath, giving dozens of patriotic speeches in praise of the Ottoman
reforming state and the loyal Ottoman nation. In one speech given at around
the same time as Shlomo’s in Beirut, David underscored the bonds of Ottoman
nationhood in the language of kinship:
Thank God that tyranny and its men fell. Its replacement is unity and beauty
which caused the whole people of the homeland to be brothers in one en-
deavor—the success of the homeland and its people and the pride of mem-
bership in one family: the Ottoman family. And who among us does not
remember how the fire of brotherhood was kindled suddenly in the hearts
of all the Ottomans, and how the whole people experienced in one stroke the
holy feeling—the feeling of unity to endeavor for the good of the country (and
it is their country, all of them) and the success of the state (and it is their state,
without exception)?For the Yellin brothers, this Ottoman brotherhood would have been mean-
ingless had it not also embraced the empire’s approximately four hundred thou-
sand Jews; in their mind, Jews could and should benefit from the political liberties
offered them as Ottoman citizens while developing culturally and socially as Jews
in a multiethnic state. Furthermore, for the Yellins, this Jewish social and cul-
tural commitment was expressed through the ideas associated with the nascent
Zionist movement, such as the study and everyday use of Hebrew, Jewish com-
munal revival, and settling Jews in their ancestral Land of Israel. Although the
Yellins did not seem to see any contradiction between their Ottomanist and Zi-
onist commitments, in the last years of the Ottoman Empire the intersection of
the two would prove to be particularly fractious.
The Immigrant Generation
To better understand the Ottoman and Jewish contexts of David and Shlomo
Yellin’s adulthoods, I must briefly recount the family’s initial arrival to the em-
pire. According to the family memoirs, the patriarch of the Yellin family, David
Tuvia, a young Torah scholar and successful merchant from Lomza, Poland, ar-
rived in Palestine in 1834 along with his wife, Liba. Hoping to devote his days to
religious study, David initially settled the family in Safed, one of the four cities
holy to Judaism; however, upon his unwelcome discovery that most of the Ash-
kenazi Jewish residents there were Hassidim, proponents of a mystical sect of
Orthodox Judaism that had divided East European Jewry and to which David
Tuvia was vehemently opposed, the couple moved south to Jerusalem.
In the 1830s, the Jewish community in Jerusalem numbered around five
thousand souls, the overwhelming majority of them Eastern Jews. Since he had