Rethinking the yishuv: late-Ottoman Palestine’s Jewish communities revisited

ABSTRACT

This article argues for a significant revision in the understanding of Jews in late-Ottoman Palestine: from a model of a singular community (the yishuv) to a model of multiple communities, embedded within local, regional and global networks. The conceptualization of Palestine’s Jewry is reappraised, from the Jerusalem School to recent literature. Despite acknowledging their ethnic and linguistic diversity, the historiography has long portrayed Palestine’s Jews as a sui-generis community, a Jewish microcosm united in its unique attachment to Eretz Israel. It was studied as part of Jewish history, in isolation from its Middle Eastern context. In contrast, recent Relational Studies stressed Jewish connections to the Arab and Ottoman environment in Palestine. The article examines the self-perception of Jewish communities as plural and heterogeneous, through a survey of early Hebrew press. It traces the genealogy of the term yishuv, from an ideological project of revival and colonization in the 1860s, to an imagined pan-Jewish national community after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. This shift was boosted not only by Zionism and Jewish diaspora influence, but also by Ottomanism. Even then, Jewish communities in Palestine continued to operate separately in a highly fragmented manner well into the British Mandate period.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Yair Wallach is a Lecturer in Israeli Studies in the Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East, SOAS, University of London.

Notes

1. To give a concrete example: in the library of SOAS, University of London, one of the richest libraries on the Middle East in the UK – the number of books listed under the subject “Jews Palestine” (811), surpasses the combined number of books catalogued under the subject of Jews in all other countries of the Middle East and North Africa, from Iran to Morocco (696). Checked on November 2015.

2. The seventeen volumes include almost all countries in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Italy, Greece, Ethiopia, Georgia and Bukhara. See <https://www.ybz.org.il/?CategoryID=481>, accessed 14 November 2015.

3. Shalom Chetrit's history of Mizrahi struggle in Israel, for example, dedicates only a few pages to Yemenite and Sephardi Jews in pre-1948 Palestine (Chetrit 2010).

4. In Jerusalem, there were two “general” Jewish old people's homes, one affiliated with Ashkenazim and the other with the Sephardi community. See Hatzefira, July 31, 1905, 4.

5. The most successful of such unification attempts was in Jaffa, with the establishment of the “City Committee of Jaffa Jews” which included representatives of all local Jewish congregations. But the committee was active for only short periods and disintegrated frequently (Ram 1996). A Zionist-inspired “Eretz-Israel Assembly” (Haknessiya Ha’eretz yisra’elit), encompassing Sephardim, progressive Ashkenazi Orthodox, and Zionists, convened only once in 1903 (Kniel 2000, 254–255). In addition, Ashkenazi congregations failed to establish a consensual Orthodox Ashkenazi leadership and operated separately until the war (Eliav 1981; Friedman 2001).

6. The work of Cohen (1984) is an exception in this regard.

7. See, for example, the 1909 essay “Our duties as Jews and as Ottomans”, in Cohen and Stein (2014, 215–222).

8. These seven writers are Avraham Elmaleh, Nissim Malul, Benzion Uziel, Hayim ben Kiki, David Avissar, Elie Eliachar, and David Sitton. Ester Moyal moved to Jaffa from Lebanon in 1894, and Avraham Abbas moved from Damascus in the 1930s.

9. For examples, see front page articles on Yishuv Eretz Hakedosha, in Halevanon, March 27, 1877, April 11, 18, and 25, 1877; Yishuv Eretz Yisrael in Halevanon, May 2, 9, and 16 1879.

10. Hashkafa, December 27, 1905; Moriya, May 9, 1911, June 7, 1912.

11. See, for example, the correspondence of the Ottoman Governor of Jerusalem Ali Ekrem Bey (Kushner 2005)

12. On Jewish mobilization in Jerusalem in the 1912 Ottoman Parliamentary elections, see Der Matossian (2014, 111–112).

13. The Hebrew language activist and publisher of several Hebrew newspapers, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, used the term yishuv before 1908 in reference to the project of colonization, or as a general term for population. After 1908, however, he used it increasingly to refer to all Jews in Palestine (overwhelmingly urban and non-Zionist) as a single national-territorial group. As one example among many, see reference to the Hebrew yishuv (Hayishuv ha'ivri) in his article calling for a Jewish national federation in Palestine, Hatzevi, May 6, 1909.