Campos|321Shlomo also defended the immigrant Zionists who were either already Otto-
man citizens or who would willingly become Ottoman citizens, in part because
the institution that Yellin represented, the JCA, did require its settlers to take on
Ottoman citizenship. However, the JCA settlers were by that stage a minority
of the larger Jewish immigrant population, and most of the newer Jewish im-
migrants took advantage of local corruption and inefficiency to simply overstay
their pilgrim visas and remain in Palestine illegally, meanwhile keeping their
foreign citizenship and benefiting from extraterritorial privileges. This is what
led the Haifa-based newspaper al-Karmil, a vocal critic of the Zionist move-
ment, to comment sarcastically, “Suleiman Effendi [Shlomo Yellin] says that the
farmers in these colonies are all Ottoman subjects, and we believe him, since
most of them have identity papers in their hands and foreign passports in their
suitcases . .. [but] how many of them remained Ottomans when they were called
up for military service?”
With this, al-Karmil’s editor Najib Nassar raised an important criticism that
took center stage in the debate over Zionism in the final years of the Ottoman
Empire’s existence. Legal definitions of citizenship were not enough to be consid-
ered a part of the Ottoman nation; instead, Ottomans were judged by the extent
to which they contributed to the broader public good of the nation and state.
Against this backdrop, then, it is perhaps not surprising that Shlomo seemed
unable or unwilling to truly address the concerns about the impact of Zionism
expressed by some of his fellow Ottoman Jews, not to mention his non-Jewish
classmates, colleagues, and fellow citizens. Shlomo died prematurely in the sum-
mer of 1912, and he did not live to see the breakup of his beloved empire or the
escalation of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine. As a result, we cannot guess
how his own political commitments, Ottomanist and Zionist, might have shifted
with the changing realities of the empire.
His brother David, on the other hand, continued to play an important role in
Ottomanist, Zionist, and Jewish communal politics throughout the end of Otto-
man rule over Palestine. At the outset of World War I, David helped raise funds
for the imperial Red Crescent Society and worked as a Hebrew-language censor
for the government. In 1917, however, he was banished to Damascus by the Otto-
man military governor Cemal Pasha, reportedly over his participation in the 1913
Zionist congress and along with other Zionist leaders resident in Jerusalem. By
the time of the establishment of the British Mandate over Palestine in the early
1920s, David Yellin, the former member of the Jerusalem city council who had
given countless speeches on behalf of civic Ottomanism and a shared universal
Ottoman nationhood, proposed the establishment of separate municipalities in
Jerusalem based on sharp (but nonexistent) sectarian demographic lines. Not
only had the Ottoman Empire died by that point, but so too had the dream of
Jerusalem as a city of all its citizens.