320 | Zionism in the Era of Ottoman Brotherhood
land agents and other intermediaries got into legal troubles and when there were
physical clashes between Zionist settlers and Palestinian villagers. When the set-
tlers were the aggressors, he attended to those imprisoned, represented them in
court, and paid off “blood money” reparations to the families of Arab victims;
when the settlers were the victims, he pressed for the full force of the law to pun-
ish the attackers and to deter future attacks.
Fluent in the language and customs of the Ottoman elite, Shlomo was an
ideal intermediary for the Zionist movement. In early 1909 Zionist officials in
Istanbul had been instructed to officially deny any separatist political aims of the
movement and to play up the compatibility of Zionism with loyalty to the Otto-
man state, both to Ottoman officials and to Ottoman Jews. By that point, how-
ever, prominent Ottoman Jews had already voiced extensive criticism of Zionism
in the Judeo-Spanish press. Jewish journalists like the Ben-Giat brothers of Izmir
and David Fresco of Istanbul took the lead in promoting a Jewish anti-Zionism
in the empire. According to Fresco,
The Ottoman Jews do not have, and will not have, another homeland other
than the Ottoman homeland. Every part of the national land must be sacred
to him without any difference.... To work against this truth is to betray the
homeland, betray the Ottoman Jews, since the land belongs to the Muslims,
to the Christians, to the Jews, all of them partners and related in the same
social tie, and when one insists on ignoring this truth then not only will he be
considered as disregarding the social tie through injustice, but also as a rebel
against the state and traitor to his partner brothers, and he will also cause
shame and dishonor and cause an awful hatred against the Jewish people in
the empire.In response, Zionist newspapers and organizations in the empire called for
Fresco’s excommunication, and the internal Jewish debate eventually became so
fierce that one Salonican newspaper fretted that the situation was “bordering on
fratricide.”
The Judeo-Spanish press was not alone in its coverage of Zionism and
anti-Zionism; the Arabic language press also actively reported on and debated
Zionism in the years before World War I. Shlomo did not hesitate to take on
a public role defending Zionist settlement in Palestine in the Arabic press of
Beirut, and he also fed his articles to others who agreed to publish them under
their own names. Shlomo’s articles were idealistic and defensive, emphasizing
claims about the loyalty of the Jewish settlers as well as the broad economic
contributions of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Typical of his language was
an article he published in the Beirut paper Lisan al-Hal in response to an article
that had appeared in an Istanbul-based newspaper, in which he argued that the
Zionists “love the government with a true love and only desire the advancement
of the Ottoman nation.”