The Jews of the Arab World

Support for Political Ottomanism and a Vision of Arab Renaissance

If we think not in terms of the Ottoman Empire but in terms of the Arab world, matters grow complicated. On the one hand, in the Arab Levant, political Ottomanism enjoyed if anything greater general support than in the northern core of the empire; Muslim Arab elites from Beirut to Baghdad chafed less at Ottoman rule than, say, at the empire’s Armenians or Greek subjects, and no robust secessionist Arab nationalism was yet to be seen. Thus, political Ottomanism among Jews in the Levant—including in the unique space of Palestine—was something that connected them to their Muslim neighbors. 

At the same time, in those Arab cities both within and beyond Ottoman rule where a self-consciously modern Arab culture was blossoming and finding support in a growing, modernized middle class, a few Jewish intellectuals began to forge relations with Muslim and Christian Arab intellectuals committed to a largely suprareligious vision of “Arab renaissance.” Only in the interwar period would Jewish involvement in modern Arab culture become mainstream (albeit never majoritarian) in Baghdad and Cairo. Before World War I, it remained a small dispensation and, like Jewish Westernization, was not seen as a challenge to the state.

Jewish Status in the Arab World

Other trends complicated Jewish status in the Arab world, both Ottoman and non-Ottoman. Even where European rule did not extend directly, imperial power was not limited to the “soft” power of cultural influence. European states worked assiduously to extend their authority in the region by offering substantial extraterritorial legal status to elite individuals and their families in exchange for economic and political support and service—something the Ottoman state had been forced to accept. 

Middle Eastern Jews—and even more so Christians—seem to have taken these offers up disproportionately, or at any rate extensively. In a place like Cairo or Alexandria, virtually every elite Jewish family had clear ties to one or another European power; there and even more so in Palestine (the Holy Land, to European Christendom), even non-elite Jews were able to draw support from consuls competing to patronize them, as well as an alphabet soup of Western Jewish organizations eager to “regenerate” them.