Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine

Notes

165 notes introduCtion 1. The astonishing longevity of this notion became once again evident in 2007 with the appointment of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the position of special envoy of the “Quartet on the Middle East.” 2. The sanjak (district) of Maʿan, primarily in what is now Jordan, included part of Palestine’s Negev Desert; this sanjak reported to the vilayet (province) of Syria. For details on the provincial Ottoman administration of Palestine see Carter Findley, “The Evolution of the System of Provincial Administration as Viewed from the Center,” in Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, ed. David Kushner (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 1986), 3–30. 3. Justin McCarthy puts the figures for Palestine’s Arab Christian population in 1914 at 79,734, out of a total population of about 722,143. The Jewish population, including noncitizens, was about 60,000, putting Jews at approximately 8 percent of the population , with the remainder Muslim Arabs.The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 10. 4. This is of course a much-simplified summary of the nature of the millet system. It has been written about extensively; for more detailed discussions see Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982); Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Youssef Courbage and Phillipe Fargues, Chrétiens et juifs dans l’Islam arabe et turc (Paris: Fayard, 1992); and Xavier de Planhol, Minorités en Islam: Géographie politique et sociale (Paris: Flammarion, 1997). Also see descriptions in broader histories of the empire like Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Halil Inalcik, Donald Quataert, and Suraiya Faroqhi , eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, 2 vols. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004); Fadil Bayat, Al-dawla al-ʿuthmaniyya fi almajal al-ʿarabi: Dirasa tarikhiyya fi al-awdaʾ al-idariyya fi dawʾ al-wathaʾiq wa-al-masadir al-ʿuthmaniyya hasran (Beirut: Markaz dirasat al-wahdah al-ʿarabiyya, 2007); and Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (New York: Perseus, 2005). Halil Inalcik, “The Status of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch under the Ottomans,” 166 notes to Pages 5–6 Turcica 21–23 (1991): 407–436, offers a periodization of the history of the millet system with regard to the relationship between the Ottoman state and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. 5. It fell under special administrative arrangements by which it was allowed an agent to the Ottoman government and particular rights to internal self-government. This position resulted primarily from the claims of France to be an international protector of Roman Catholics and from formal agreements to this effect between the French and the Ottoman sultan. 6. In 1850, responding to pressure from the British ambassador Sir Stratford Canning , Sultan Abdulmecid proclaimed the Protestants a “separate community” with the legal rights attaching to that status. They were not a millet in the fullest sense, however, as the Protestant “agent” to the sultan was a lay Armenian without the religious authority that his Orthodox, Armenian, and Catholic counterparts had. Chapter 5 of the present volume presents the ramifications of this status in detail. For a useful exposition on this process see Vartan Artinian, “The Formation of Catholic and Protestant Millets in the Ottoman Empire,” Armenian Review 28, 1 (Spring 1975): 3–15, and H.G.O. Dwight, “Translation of the Ferman Granted by Sultan Abd-ul-Mejeed to His Protestant Subjects,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 4 (1854): 443–444. 7. For discussions of the various effects of the tanzimat on the Arab provinces see Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Itzchak Weismann and Fruma Zachs, eds., Ottoman Reform and Muslim Regeneration (London: Tauris, 2005); Donna Robinson Divine, Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994); Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Moshe Ma’oz, Ottoman Reform in Syria and Palestine, 1840–1861: The Impact of the Tanzimat on Politics and Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); B. Abu-Manneh, “Jerusalem...