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Confronting minorization: colonial missionaries and Ottoman millets in the eyes of a Nineteenth Century Baghdadi Rabbi

2023; Routledge; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13530194.2023.2279333

1469-3542

Avi-ram Tzoreff,

Turkey's Politics and Society

ABSTRACTFollowing the Tanzimat reforms in 1839 the Ottoman Mashriq crystallized as a contact zone where different understandings of the reforms, citizenship, and collective identifications evaluated. While the European colonial powers enhanced an individualized understanding of religion and religious difference, the discourse that was enhanced by the Sublime Porte emphasized the meaning of the reforms as a component in the attempt to maintain the unification of the empire as a political unit, securing the various collective centers of identification of Ottoman citizens through the millet system. These discourses were reflected in various understandings of the local communities of their own status within the developing political framework. This article examines this contact zone through the discussion of the writings of one of the prominent figures of the Baghdadi Jewish community – R. Yosef Hayyim (1834-1909) – and the various ways in which he depicted the contested discourses of ”modernity”, citizenship and autonomy. While Hayyim negated the European emancipatoric model, which was resulted in the act of ”minorization” of the Jews, he adopted, though hesitantly, the Ottoman model of the Tanzimat. He saw this model as one that confronted the individualized understanding of religious difference and therefore guaranteed a certain degree of communal autonomy. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 37–90.2 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence toward the Jews and the Notion of Exile’, in Ari Joskowicz and Ethan B. Katz (eds.), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 276–298. For a broad analysis of the relegation of ‘religion’ to the personal domain as the basis for consolidating the status of the nation-state, see William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Gil Anidjar, ‘Secularism’, Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 52–77.3 Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire 1700–1922. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 65–72.4 Benjamin Braude argued that the millet system as an administrative framework did not exist prior to the nineteenth century and that the relationship between the empire and the groups it controlled were based entirely on ad hoc agreements that varied between different groups and places according to their needs. Karen Barkey opposed this view, claiming that it impedes an examination of the overall policy formulated by the empire from its early days regarding different internal groups as a tool for promoting stability. Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation Myths of the Millet System’, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1982), 69–88; Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 116.5 On the transition from millets to minorities, and the continuities and discontinuities between the Ottoman period and the colonial one, see: Peter Sluglett, ‘From Millet to Minority: Another Look at the Non-Muslim Communities in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Minorities and the Modern Arab World: New Perspectives, edited by Laura Robson (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2016), pp. 19–38; Heather Sharkey, ‘History Rhimes? Late Ottoman Millets and Post-Ottoman Minorities in the Middle East’, International Journal od Middle East Studies 50 (2018): 760–764.6 In this context see: Alda Benjamen, ‘Minorization and Pluralism in the Modern Middle East: Introduction’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 50 (2018): 757–759.7 Dimitrios Stamatopoulos, ‘From Millets to Minorities in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire: An Ambiguous Modernization’, in Steven G. Ellis et al. (eds.) Citizenship in Historical Perspective (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2006), 253–273.8 Barkey, Empire of Difference, 120.9 Vangelis Kechriotis, ‘The Modernization of the Empire and the Community “Privileges”: Greek Orthodox Responses to the Young Turk Policies’, in Touraj Atabaki (ed.), The State and the Subaltern: Modernization, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 54–58.10 Masayuki Ueno, ‘Religious in Form, Political in Content? Privileges of Ottoman Non-Muslims in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (2016): 408–44111 Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 7–12.12 Ussama Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 75–110.13 Nabil Al-Tikriti, ‘Ottoman Iraq’, The Journal of the Historical Society VII,2 (2007): 201–12.14 Regarding the affinities between imperial commercial interests and the London Society, with the millennialist discourse it advanced, see: Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 185–199; Reeva S. Simon, ‘The Case of the Curse: The London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews and the Jews of Baghdad’, in Reeva S. Simon and Eleanor Harvey Tejirian (eds.), Altruism and Imperialism: The Western Religious and Cultural Missionary Enterprise in the Middle East (New York: Colombia University Press, 2002), 45–66.15 Selim Deringil, ‘The Struggle Against Shiism in Hamidian Iraq: A Study in Ottoman Counter-Propaganda’, Die Welt des Islams 30 (1990): 45–62.16 Orit Bashkin, ‘“Religious Hatred Shall Disappear from the Land”: Iraqi Jews as Ottoman Subjects, 1864–1913’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 4,3 (2010): 305–323; Annie Greene, ‘Burying a Rabbi in Baghdad: The Limits of Ottomansim for Ottoman-Iraqi Jews in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Jewish Identities 12,1 (2019): 97–12317 Yitzhaq Avishur, 1995, ‘Literary revival and linguistic changes among the Iraqi Jews in the modern period (1750–1950)’, Mikedem U-Miyam 6 (1995): 235–254. (Hebrew); Orit Bashkin, ‘Why Did Baghdadi Jews Stop Writing to Their Brethren in Mainz? Some Comments about the Reading Practices of Iraqi Jews in the Nineteenth Century’ in Philip Sadgrove (ed.), History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries of the Middle East. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95–111; Lital Levy, ‘The Writings of Arab Jews and the Historiography of Hebrew Literature: A New Literary Geography’, Mikan 12 (2013): 210–227. (Hebrew); Annie Greene, ‘The Pioneers of Print in the Ottoman Province of Mosul’, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World 14,1–2 (2020): 51–68.18 Gökhan Çetinsaya, Ottoman Administration in Iraq, 1890–1908 (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 127–146; Joan R. Roland, The Jewish Communities of India: Identity in a Colonial Era (New Brunswick and London: Routledge, 1998), 15–28; Sarah Abrevaya Stein, ‘Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence of Empire’, American Historical Review 116:1 (2011): 80–108.19 David Rotman, ‘Tales of Wonder by Rabbi Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad: The Work in Its Literary and Historical Contexts’, Pe‘amim 109 (2007): 59–93. (Hebrew); Jonathan Meir, ‘Toward the Popularization of Kabbalah: R. Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad and the Kabbalists of Jerusalem’, Modern Judaism 33,2 (2013): 148–72; Michael Gross, Ben Yehoyada: Studies in the Commentaries of Rabbi Yosef Hayyim on the Talmudic Legends (Alon Shvut: Tevunot, 2019) (Hebrew); Rivkah Kadosh, The Literary Writings of Rabbi Yoseph Haim of Baghdad: Poetic and Socio-Ideological Aspects (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2021) (Hebrew); Avi-ram Tzoreff, ‘Acknowledging Loss, Materializing Language: Translation and Hermeneutics of Gaps in Nineteenth Century Baghdad’, Middle Eastern Studies (2022).20 According to Lurianic Kabbalah, one of the events that occurred during the creation of the world is the shattering of the vessels (shvirat hakelim), that is to say, the break of the receptacles of the divine light. This shattering was reflected in a reality which is blended of sparks of the divine light (nitzotzot), and the shells (qlipot), which are related to the side of impurity, in which worship is an act during which the worshipper redeems the sparks from the shells—this is a cosmic act of repairment (tiqun). Therefore, the identification of a historical phase as ‘lessening of the shell’ reflects a notion of a different, new time.21 Yaron Harel, Between Intrigue and Revolution: The Appointment and Dismissal of Chief Rabbis in the Communities of Baghdad, Damascus, and Aleppo, 1744–1914 (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 2007), 84–113. (Hebrew)22 Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13–15; Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf 1745–1900 (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 152–153.23 Julia Phillips Cohen, ‘Between Civic and Islamic Ottomanism: Jewish Imperial Citizenship in the Hamidian Era’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012): 237–55.24 During this period, the autonomy of the tribes in the provinces of Iraq was regarded as a more significant issue by the imperial centre. See Ebubekir Ceylan, ‘Carrot or Stick? Ottoman Tribal Policy in Baghdad, 1831–1876’, International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 3,2 (2009): 170.25 Deringil, ‘Struggle against Shi’ism’, 51, 54.26 This article thus forms part of a broader trend towards greater recognition of the demands for autonomous and collective Jewish existence within the multiethnic empires. See for example: Abigail Jacobson, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 82–116; Dimitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New York: Yale University Press, 2018), 24–49.27 Bashkin, ‘Religious Hatred’, 309–316.28 ‘Abdullah Somekh, The New Zivchei Tzedek Responsa, (Jerusalem, 1885), Part C, 232 (Hebrew). See also: Bashkin, ‘Religious Hatred’, 310; Zvi Zohar ‘The Attitude of Rabbi ‘Abdullah Somekh to the Changes in the Nineteenth Century as Reflected in His Halakhic Writings’ Pe‘amim 36 (1988): 89–107 (Hebrew).29 For example, Obermeyer praised Somekh as someone ‘who loves modern civilization, reads the Jewish newspapers, and sends his offspring to the Alliance school here; and his grandson is [studying] in Paris at the Alliance teachers seminary’, Hamagid 20 (6), 14 Shvat 5536 (1875), 48. Regarding Obermeyer, see: Bashkin, ‘Why did Baghdadi Jews’, 97–103.30 Shelomo Bakhor Hosin, ‘Asia’, Hamagid, 22 January 1868, 27. (Hebrew). For more on Hosin, see: Lev Hakak, The Letters of Rabbi Shlomo Bekhor Hosin (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2005), 13–104 (Hebrew).31 Bashkin, ‘Religious Hatred’, 312. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire had generally maintained a positive attitude towards the empire since it opened its grates to the exiles from Spain in 1492. However, the language used by Chutzin and his specific references to the Tanzimat orders and the principle of equality between Muslim and non-Muslim citizens of the empire cannot be explained simply as a continuation of this approach. For a comparative analysis of the attitudes towards the empire among Ottoman Jews in two different periods, see: Katherine Fleming, ‘South Balkan Rabbinic Readings of Ottoman Rise and Decline: Eliyahu Kapsali of Crete and Yehuda Alkalai of Zemlin’, in Dimitris Tziovas (eds.) Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters Since the Enlightenment (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 101–113.32 Lital Levy, Jewish Writers in the Arab East: Literature, History and Politics of Enlightenment, 1863–1914 (Berkeley: PhD dissertation, 2007), 339–352; Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review 107,3 (2002): 768–96.33 M. Alper YalcinkayaLearned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 42–97.34 Deringil, ‘Struggle against Shi’ism’, 58.35 Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum, Sefer Yeitav Lev. Part 2 (Brooklyn: Jerusalem, 1965 [1875]), 8b.36 Yosef Hayyim, Sefer Ben Ish Hai: Drushim (Jerusalem, 1957 [1904]), 38. (Hebrew)37 Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Jews and Christians—Mutual Images (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), 25–34. (Hebrew)38 ‘Journal of Rev. Joseph Wolf’, The Jewish Expositor 10 (1825): 221–29; Avraham Ben-Yaacov, Yehudey Bavel misof tekufat hageonim vead yamenu, 1038–1960 (Jerusalem: Kiryat Sefer, 1979), 125–128. (Hebrew)39 ‘Journal of Rev. Joseph Wolf’, 229; W.T. Gidney, The History of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, From 1809 to 1908 (London: London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, 1908), 108–109.40 Simon, ‘The Case of the Curse’.41 Henry A. stern, Dawnings of Light in the East (London: Charles H. Purday, 1854), 48–49.42 Ibid, 46–47.43 Ibid, 52.44 This is in a similar way to what Cengiz Sisman coined as ‘ecclesiastical Imperialism’ in the case of the American missionaries amongst Ottoman Salonican Jews: Cengiz Sisman, ‘Failed Proselytizers or Modernizers? Protestant Missionaries Among the Jews and Sabbateans/Donmes in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire’, Middle Eastern Studies 51:6 (2015): 938–939.45 Ibid.46 Gidney, History of the London Society, 258.47 Not only the Jews, but rather several leaders of the Ottoman millets identified the proselytizing activities of the missionaries as a threat to their own millet. During this period, however, the Ottoman authorities did not take any step in order to regulate the missionaries’ activities, and rather preferred to maintain a ‘peaceful coexistence’ as Emrah Sahin argued. See: Sisman, Failed Proselytizers, pp. 937–939; Emrah Sahin, Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), pp. 3–37.48 Gidney, The History of the London Society, 259–260.49 Ibid; Thomas D. Halsted, Our Missions: Being a History of the Principal Missionary Transactions of the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews, from its Foundation in 1809, to the Present Year (London: William Macintosh, 1866), 346.50 Gidney, The History, 300–302.51 Halsted, Our Missions, 348.52 Ibid, 349.53 Ibid, 472–473. These years were characterized by a shift in the Ottoman authorities’ relation to the missionary societies, which turned from a peaceful coexistence to a policy of containment and vigilance. This shift was more prominent in the North-Western parts of the empire, in Anatolia and the Balkan. In the Arab provinces, where the Ottoman state was less powerful, the missionary societies enjoyed less authorization. Sahin, Faithful Encounters, p. 24.54 Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire, 10–15.55 Yosef Hayyim, Sefer Imrei Binah (Jerusalem: 1908), 101b-102a. (Hebrew)56 This creative position is reminiscent of an argument raised by young Ottoman intellectuals who criticized the Eurocentric model of modernization advocated by Ottoman officials and the absence of Islamic knowledge from this cultural framework. The Ottoman intellectuals also specifically referred to the potentially violent applications of the new technologies. See: Yalcinkaya, Learned Patriots, 98–123, and particularly 107.57 Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashana 8b.58 Yosef Hayyim, Sefer Bnayahu (Jerusalem: 1905), 46a. (Hebrew)59 It is interesting to examine the similarities between Hayyim’s perception of messianism and the Shi’ite perception of redemption, particularly as this was defined at this time in Ottoman Iraq. Some of the mujtahidin in Ottoman Iraq were among the critics of actions taken by the Qajar state, both during the tobacco crisis of 1891–1892 and through their support of the adoption of a constitutional system of government in Iran in 1907. These positions reflect the traditional tendency of Twelver Shi’ites to reject any attempt to allow the ‘ulama to apply their potential political power to its full extent, thereby facilitating political manoeuvring within the Sunni political frameworks while maintaining an ambivalent attitude towards these. The above positions also highlight the restructuring of this paradigm in light of the political changes in the Ottoman Empire and the Qajar kingdom. Regarding the position of the mujtahidin in Iraq, see: Çetinsaya, Ottoman Administration, 99–126.60 Genesis 12:5.61 Gidney, History of the London Society, 107–108, 257.62 Makdisi, Age of Coexistence, 88–110.63 Regarding the importance of the idea of a Jewish return to the Holy Land in English Millenarist thought, and the affinity between this idea and British imperial policy, see: Bar-Yosef, Holy Land, 182–246.64 Yosef Hayyim, Sefer Da’at u-Tvunah (Jerusalem:1911), 2a. (Hebrew)65 Uri Safrai,‘The Work of the Heart’ in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah (Beersheva: PhD dissertation, 2016), 101–107.66 Hayyim, Sefer Da’at u-Tvunah, 5b-6a.67 Salo Wittmayer Baron, ‘Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?’, The Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 526.68 John Paul Himka, ‘Dimensions of a Triangle: Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Austrian Galicia’, Polin 12 (1999): 25–48; David Engel, ‘A Young Galician Jew on the Anti-Jewish Boycott in Congress Poland: From the Earliest Writings of Salo Baron’, Gal-Ed 19 (2004): 29–56. (Hebrew); Rachel Manekin, ‘Being Jewish in Fin de Siecle Galicia: The View from Salo Baron’s Memoir’, in Hava Tirosh Samuelson and Edward Dabrowa (eds.), The Enduring Legacy of Salo W. Baron (Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2018), 81–98; Avi-ram Tzoreff, ‘Laughter, Empire and Transnationalism: Galicia as the Background for the Transnationalism Concept in R. Binyamin’s Thought’, in Bohadana Lushaj et al. (Eds.), What Remains from Galicia? Continuities—Ruptures—Perspectives (Vienna: University of Vienna Press, 2023).69 Adam Mestyan, ‘A Muslim Dualism? Inter-Imperial History and Austria-Hungary in Ottoman Thought, 1867–1921’, Contemporary European History 30 (2021): 479–480.70 Ibid, 491–495. In this context see also the multinational Marxist perception developed by Otto Bauer and Karl Renner: Efraim Nimni, ‘Nationalist Multiculturalism in Late Imperial Austria as a Critique of Contemporary Liberalism: The Case of Bauer and Renner’, Journal of Political Ideologies 4:3 (1999): pp. 289–314.71 Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 31–65.