The Jewish Question at the Heart of Ottoman Liberalism

Liberalism did not historically emerge except through a movement back and forth between the logic of the nation-state and the logic of empire. The British Empire, especially at the height of its expansion over the course of the nineteenth century, provided the space in which the most prominent liberal tradition could arise, both at the level of thought and at the level of policy. The model of the minimal state found its most effective application in one of the great paradoxes of the Victorian age: the management of a vast empire with the least possible degree of direct governmental intervention, relying instead on naval power, the free movement of capital, and indirect rule in the colonies.

Whether in the metropole or in the colonies, Britain relied on a lean bureaucratic apparatus: around fifty thousand employees in the British Isles by the beginning of the twentieth century, and only a few thousand to administer the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent. This stood in contrast to France, the “state of officials,” with its seven hundred thousand civil servants. The British Empire rested on a seemingly mad idea: that the sea could serve as a substitute for bureaucracy.

Britain did not experience the same rupture and hypocrisy that France lived between its nation-state and its empire. It did not pose to itself the question of the conditions under which Nigeria or India might be integrated into the British Parliament. France tried, in vain, to reconcile the principles of the French Revolution with its colonial expansion, even if it did so through the violence of the so-called “civilizing mission” directed at colonized peoples. Britain, by contrast, left them to a kind of self-civilization that might be provided by the imperial space of communication, governed from afar.

The vitality of historical liberalism lay in its oscillation between these two domains: the nation-state and empire. Liberalism ceases to be itself when it severs its relation to either one. To judge liberalism by the standard of theoretical coherence, or by the standard of perfect correspondence between ideas and their applications, is to do it an injustice. Liberalism is a set of traditions and exercises in adaptation, in applying more than one standard at once. For nineteenth-century liberals, it was better to restrict suffrage to property owners. Those who owned nothing, they believed, could not freely express their share in collective decision-making. It was in this suspicion of the masses, this fear of majority tyranny and mob rule, that liberalism took shape.

British liberals of the nineteenth century were fierce defenders of private and public liberties at the center of the empire, while supporting a form of enlightened despotism in India. Yet this contradictory history of liberalism cannot be held entirely against it. Its “genius” lies precisely in the way it networked these countless tensions: between the concern for individual liberty and the impossibility of securing liberties for everyone at once.

Much attention is often given to the contradiction between nationalist thought and the thought of the nation-state: the idea that nationalism, when pushed to excess, can no longer be satisfied with the existing limits of the nation-state and seeks, for example, to expand them. The problem with overemphasizing this contradiction between nationalism and the nation-state is that it tends, in turn, to confine liberalism to being merely the “way of life” of the nation-state: a bundle of rights centered on private property, free exchange, the rule of law, and the limitation of power by power. But liberalism, when left solely to the logic of the nation-state, dries up and suffocates. The imperial space is its formative vessel.

For this reason, too, the only historical liberalism in the history of the Middle East and the Balkans is Ottoman liberalism. The paradox is that it was born bureaucratic. Unlike Britain, where liberalism emerged through the cross-fertilization of aristocracy and bourgeoisie, Ottoman liberalism was born in the corridors of the Sublime Porte. The effendi was the first liberal. Mustafa Reşid Pasha (1800–1858) stands as the clearest embodiment of this paradox. This seasoned diplomat was the author of the manifesto of the Tanzimat, the Gülhane Edict of 1839, which guaranteed all subjects security for their lives, honor, and property.

The history of Ottoman liberalism has, to a certain extent, not yet been written. Historical studies of the Tanzimat and Ottoman reformers are numerous, and many of them are excellent. Yet they tend to divide into two approaches: one that reduces the Tanzimat to the dominance of a “borrowed” Westernizing impulse, and another that explains it as a feverish desire to strengthen the state and its apparatus. What receives less attention is that Ottoman liberalism combined the utmost caution—the anxiety that no reform should take a “revolutionary” turn—with the utmost utopianism, as in the language of “Ottoman citizenship,” or of an Islamic-Christian-Jewish Ottoman nation, multinational in composition. This was not an anticipation of the formation of nationalisms and their departure from the Ottoman fold, beginning with the Greek War of Independence; rather, it was an attempt to resist that process.

The idea of a plural “Ottoman nation” was the most “revolutionary” face of a movement intensely concerned with remaining under control, issuing its foundational texts from the head of the empire, from within the state apparatus itself. This continued until Sultan Abdul Hamid overturned the constitution, pushing the reformers into opposition and exile, and giving rise to the Young Turks, who soon split between the Committee of Union and Progress and the decentralist “liberals,” the most prominent of whom was Prince Sabahaddin, who found himself at odds with every regime: with his uncle Abdul Hamid II, with his former comrades, and later with Mustafa Kemal.

The only historical liberalism in the history of the Middle East and the Balkans is Ottoman liberalism.

What obstructed the formation of a “cosmo-Ottoman nation” was that it convinced neither Muslims nor Christians in the empire, albeit for contradictory reasons. There were, however, groups on which the reformers placed their hopes. One was the Greek Phanariot bourgeoisie in the capital, which was at once integrated into diplomacy and administration through posts held by its sons, including the office of Grand Dragoman across successive generations, while also maintaining quasi-feudal landed ties in the Romanian principalities. Another was the Armenian millet, often praised after the separation of Greece as the “loyal millet.” Its internal constitution of 1863 bore the marks of the Tanzimat era, limiting the authority of the clergy within the community. The Jewish millet, too, was affected by the Tanzimat in the direction of reducing rabbinical authority. Among its members, the Camondo family could be described as the Rothschilds of the East.

Yet the “secularizing” path of the Armenian millet soon led to its transformation into a national project that collided with an Ottoman Empire increasingly marked by an ethno-Turkish character. The lights of the Phanariots, meanwhile, dimmed between Ottoman suspicion of them, the wound of the massacre that befell them in 1821, and the treatment they received from the newly independent Balkan nations, which regarded them as agents of the Sublime Porte. By the late nineteenth century, there remained no community within the empire more faithful to the idea of the “Ottoman nation” than the Jews.

Among non-Muslims, the Jewish millet had the strongest material and moral interest in the survival of the Ottoman space. This did not necessarily contradict the ideas of the Zionist movement, which did not exert itself much in trying to understand that Ottoman Jews lived a Jewish question of another kind: the paradox of becoming the last non-Muslim Ottoman millet without a European state serving as its patron. For this reason, too, until 1912, Salonica was the only major city in the world in which Jews formed a majority, and it was a concrete embodiment of “realistic Ottoman liberalism.” The port closed on Saturdays in respect for the Jewish Sabbath. Ladino—the Judeo-Spanish language—was the language of commerce and the street in many parts of the city.

Greek and Bulgarian nationalists saw the Jews of Salonica as “agents” of the Ottomans and as an obstacle to the “purification” of the city. In the Islamic counterpart to this equation, a conspiracy theory spread that the Jews of Salonica—and the Islamized Jews of the Dönme—had played a central role in the overthrow of Abdul Hamid and in dragging the sultanate toward ruin.

For this reason, the rise and disappearance of Ottoman liberalism are tied to the existence of an “Ottoman Jewish question” that has often been pushed aside. To a large extent, it was the question of the only millet in which the idea of a shared “Ottoman nation” could be meaningfully accepted.