Class 2: Jewish Belonging in an Era of Empire and Revolution

The Jewish Question in an Age of Collapsing Empires

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews from Saint Petersburg to Istanbul and Tunis crafted diverse conceptions of their relationship with the state. Amid the convulsions and ultimate demise of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires, Jewish communities experienced both expansions and contractions of their rights and witnessed firsthand the limits of the promise of citizenship. Failed political reforms, wars, and European colonial expansion created an atmosphere of uncertainty that fostered both a sense of decline and new visions of the Jewish future. Amid shifting sovereignties and borders, debates over nation, nationality, and citizenship prompted Jews to articulate conflicting visions of belonging: the pursuit of a Jewish homeland, patriotism toward imperial states, demands for autonomy within multinational frameworks, and reliance on European protection.

Global Networks and Transnational Jewish Advocacy

By the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish communities across continents were more interconnected than ever. Advances in transportation and print culture enabled unprecedented mobility and the circulation of ideas. This was reflected in the rise of Jewish transnational advocacy and philanthropy, most notably the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), founded in Paris in 1860. Having secured rights in France, Jews there sought to safeguard their coreligionists abroad while embarking on a “civilizing mission” tied to French imperial expansion. Through a network of schools in the Middle East and North Africa, they aimed to “regenerate” Jews via acculturation into French culture.

Russian Jews and the Failed Promise of Citizenship

The Western model of emancipation promoted by French Jews, however, often clashed with the realities of imperial settings. Nowhere was this more evident than in tsarist Russia, home to the majority of the world’s Jews. There, Jews—a population inherited from the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century—lived under severe legal restrictions. Despite the integrationist impulses of some the tsars, the bulk of Russian Jews suffered under the yoke of a discriminatory legal status, best exemplified by their confinement to the Pale of Settlement, located on the empire’s periphery. Beginning in the 1880s, conditions worsened with new limitations on residence, property, education, and professions, while antisemitic violence escalated—stoked by fabrications such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903).

Responses to the enduring threat of antisemitism varied among East European Jews. Some embraced revolutionary socialism, others territorialism or Zionism. All offered alternatives to the Western Jewish model of individual rights and privatized religion. Diaspora nationalists [link to entry 9] and Zionists, though differing in their solutions, shared a critical view of “assimilation” as a failed strategy for dignity and security. Diaspora nationalists advocated for cultural autonomy within multinational states; Zionists pressed for sovereignty in Ottoman Palestine. These debates, unfolding against the rise of European Romantic nationalism and international negotiations over minority rights, shaped Jewish politics far beyond Eastern Europe, as deteriorating conditions spurred millions of Russian Jews to emigrate, especially to the United States between the 1880s and 1920s.

The Ottoman Empire and Imperial Citizenship

In the Ottoman Empire, the situation contrasted sharply with that of Russia. Many Jews, descendants of exiles and refugees from Spain and Portugal who had been welcomed by the Ottomans in the late fifteenth century,, saw themselves as deeply rooted and loyal to the empire, in part owing to this historical memory. Late nineteenth-century reforms granted legal equality to non-Muslims while preserving communal autonomy under the “millet” system, which allowed communities to have their own courts of law. The ideology of Ottomanism encouraged a shared belonging, across religious and ethnic lines. After 1908, a handful of Jews even entered parliament, strengthening the representation first established in 1876. Yet growing Jewish immigration to Ottoman Palestine, alongside rising separatist nationalisms, strained the boundaries of imperial citizenship. Some Ottoman Jews, like David Fresco, warned that Zionism posed a threat to the status of Ottoman Jewry, while others, such as David Isaac Florentin [link to entry 11], maintained that Zionism and Ottomanism were compatible.

War, Revolution, and the Redefinition of Jewish Belonging

World War I and the collapse of four empires dramatically altered the landscape. Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, ethnic and religious tensions escalated into mass violence, culminating in the Armenian genocide of 1915. Jews did not face the same fate but experienced uncertainty and fear that prompted mass emigration, primarily to the Americas and Western Europe. Russian Jews, for their part, briefly gained equality under the Bolsheviks, only to endure pogroms and mass killings during the civil war, fueling further emigration.

The emergence of new states in the wake of the war profoundly unsettled Jewish life. Hardened legal categories in a world of nation-states and new national identities left many Jews—and others—trapped between jurisdictions, stateless and unprotected, as illustrated by this British bureaucratic correspondence [link to entries 12–14]. Citizenship, once a promise, became an exclusionary boundary.