THE REIGN OF ABDUL HAMID II OVER THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Sultan Abdul Hamid II, 1880s, courtesy, Wikipedia

For Jews, friends in the international community, whether a head of state or the common man, are few and far between. That’s not to say that Jews have no friends. In fact, contrary to what I just stated, Jews have many friends. On the other hand, this also produces a quandary. What if a world leader has maintained a very close relationship with Jews but were tyrants to other peoples, such as the leaders of the American south who also held African slaves, or Napoleon who also persecuted and expelled the Huguenots from France, or even today when there are many friendly heads of state with atrocious human rights records. For this posting, I have decided to focus on the Ottoman Empire’s last sultan Abdul Hamid II who reigned from 1876 to 1918, a period of profound change and turmoil within the empire. He was known to love, admire, and protect Jews, and in the constitution of 1876 proclaimed the equality of all Ottomans subjects before the law. In the national assembly of 1877 three of the deputies were Jews, and they also held two seats in the senate, two in the council of state, and even the position of secretary of the council. In 1883, when a fire devastated the Jewish quarter at Haskeui, in Constantinople, the sultan subscribed £T1,000 for the relief of those who had been left homeless, and placed certain barracks at their disposal. Since 1887, Jews would serve as American ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire, beginning with Oscar Straus who was later succeeded by Solomon Hirsch. Upon Hirsch’s appointment, the grand vizier in his address of welcome said, "I cannot conceal the satisfaction it gives me to see that for a second time your country has called a son of Israel to this eminent position. We have learned to know and esteem your coreligionists in our country, which they serve with distinction." The fact that the masses of Jews, especially in the large cities, lived in poverty in cramped, dirty quarters, were due not to the legal discriminations against them, but to the general economic condition of the country and to the poverty and ignorance caused by the despotic rule of centuries. Indeed, all classes of society were affected. In addition, the anti-Semitic blood libel accusations often originated from certain segments of society. Hardly an interval of more than two or three years went by when such an accusation was not made such as the serious outbreak that occurred in Izmir in 1903. But the Ottoman government was always quick to punish the guilty.

As Abdul Hamid was protecting Jews from harm, in the 1890s, he fomented massacres against the Armenian community, the indigenous people of the southwestern Caucasus and, what is today, northeastern Turkey. Known historically as the Hamidian massacres, these killings culminated in 1915 with the Armenian genocide, not to mention the attempted genocide of the Assyrian Christians, the indigenous people of Mesopotamia before it became the Arab-occupied country of Iraq. Throughout all this, the Ottoman forces were often aided by many of the Kurdish tribes who would participate in the massacres. (The Kurds were the indigenous people of what is now northern Iraq, western Iran, and southeastern Turkey.) So how are Jews to react to such a close friend as this? This article will not attempt to answer that question, maybe because that question could be a separate posting of its own. The reader is certainly invited to comment below.

Upon his accession to the Ottoman throne, Abdul Hamid invited his former teacher, the prominent Sufi Sheikh Muhammad Zufir al-Madani, to Constantinople. Al-Madani came from Libya, from the lands of the indigenous Berbers in Arab-occupied North Africa. Early in his reign, Abdul Hamid had to contend with rebellions in the Balkans, and a war with Russia (1877-78) in which the empire was defeated. On the other hand, this was also a period of expansion in the Land of Israel. Beginning in 1878, Jewish agriculture in the ancestral Jewish homeland entered into a period of expansion beginning with the founding of Petah Tikvah, approximately 11 miles east of Jaffa, which became known as the mother of modern Jewish settlement. At the same time, new, mainly Jewish, neighborhoods were established around Jerusalem. By 1881, several hundred Jews from Yemen established their own Jerusalem neighborhood of Kfar Hashiloah, or Silwan to the Arabs. They were followed the next year by the arrival of Russian Jews, in a wave known as the First Aliyah, who made their way to Jaffa and then established the farming community of Rishon l’Tzion to the south of the city on lands purchased by the Montefiore Fund. The activities of the French Jewish educational society Alliance Israelite Universelle were also a major factor in improving the lot of the Jews, not just in Israel, but throughout the empire. But even though Abdul Hamid’s administration was very friendly, he did not look favorably on Jews coming to settle in Israel. There were enough nationalist rebellions in the empire already. A largely Jewish region, he felt, would just add to that. So a law was enacted where a Jew could not stay in Israel for more than three months. This law was ultimately challenged later in the year when the diplomatic offices of the United States were invoked in obtaining permission for a group of Russian Jews to settle there.

Rebellions continued however. In Arab-occupied Egypt, Abdul Hamid mishandled relations with Urabi Pasha, Arab rebel leader who led a revolt against the Khedive Tewfik Pasha in 1882. During the revolt, Egypt’s indigenous Copts were divided: their close affiliation with Europeans angered many Arabs and sometimes made them a target, but the deep rivalry between Coptic and Syrian Christians, the indigenous people of Syria, led many to align themselves with other “Egyptian” rebels. The Coptic Patriarch Cyril V, lent his support to the revolt when it was at its peak, but later claimed that he was pressured into doing so. ʻUrabi and other leaders of the revolt acknowledged the Copts as potential allies and worked to prevent any targeting of them by nationalist Arab Muslims, but they were not always successful. Urabi was victorious in the rebellion and he became “prime minister” of Egypt under Tewfik but was soon overthrown by the British which gained de facto control over the country even though it was technically still part of the Ottoman Empire. Soon, other North African territories were lost. Over time the hostile diplomatic attitudes shown from Britain and also France caused Abdul Hamid to gravitate towards their national rival, Germany. This produced an interesting international situation. Turkey, Germany, Britain, France, and the United States were all friendly to Jews at the time. However, the latter three supported Jewish settlement in Israel while the former two did not. Matters came to a head in 1888. The Lubrowsky brothers, two naturalized American citizens, were expelled from Safed in accordance with the three-month law. Letters of protest were sent not only from the government of the United States, but also from Great Britain, and France. In spite of US protests, no permanent settlement of the question was ever arrived at. But the Turks did announce that the restriction applied only to Jews arriving in Palestine “in numbers”. It would take many years afterwards before the law was abandoned.

The ʿAmmiyya, a revolt in 1889–90 among the Druze of the Arab-occupied Djebel Druze region of southern Syria, and other Syrians, mainly Arab settlers, against the excesses of the local “Syrian” sheikhs, led to capitulation to the rebels' demands, as well as concessions to Belgian and French companies to provide Beirut and Damascus with a railroad between them, to be built partly on ancient Phoenician Maronite lands.

In 1897, war broke out with Greece and the empire emerged victorious. However, in the following year, an Anglo-Egyptian Arab joint task force took over Sudan, the ancient lands of the Nubians, long considered part of Ottoman Egypt. From that point and until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Britain maintained a strong military presence in both Egypt and Sudan, as well as in strategically located Cyprus. In 1898, the Ottoman-German alliance culminated with the state visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II. When he visited Israel, he became host to a deputation of Zionists, with Dr. Theodor Herzl at its head. The Kaiser politely turned down Herzl’s request for support and so Herzl appealed directly to the Sultan. Using the metaphor of Androcles, he offered to pay down a substantial portion of the Ottoman debt (150 million pounds sterling in gold) in exchange for a charter allowing the Zionists to settle in Palestine. But even with this offer, he was unsuccessful. In 1899 a significant German desire, the construction of a Berlin-Baghdad railway, to be built partly on ancient Assyrian and Syrian Christian lands, was granted. Beginning in 1904, there were disturbances in Mesopotamia and Yemen. In 1908, the Hejaz Railway was inaugurated. Two years later, construction began on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway.

With the growing power of the British and French in North Africa, war with Italy in 1911, and wars in the Balkan territories the following year, Abdul Hamid grew increasingly pan-Islamic. He issued a call to Muslims in Europe to unite into one polity. This threatened several European countries, namely Russia with its large Tatar and Kurdish populations, and France through its new colony of largely Muslim Morocco. With the outbreak of the world war, Britain formally annexed those territories in which it already had a presence, in response to Ottoman participation on the side of Germany and the Central Powers. The outbreak of the war spelt the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the reign of Abdul Hamid II who remained loyal to his German friends and allies throughout. At the very end of his reign in 1918, as the empire was losing the war, he provided funds to start construction on the strategically important Constantinople-Baghdad Railway and the Constantinople-Medina Railway, making the trip to Mecca for the Hajj more efficient. After he was deposed, the construction of both railways was accelerated and completed by the Young Turks.