Mapping the Racial Terrain of Ottoman Sephardic Travelogues

But one should have mercy on a city like this and poor people like these … that they should have the peace and blessing to go every Sabbath to pray, and to teach their sons Torah and how to write. Because without this, they will grow up like savages in the desert.¹

In 1866, Abraham Rosanes, a Sephardic rabbi from Ottoman Bulgaria, embarked on an extended expedition in Palestine, dispatching reports of his travels to be published as a serial in the Prussian Hebrew newspaper Ha-Magid. Like many nineteenth-century travelogues, Rosanes's account provides ethnographic and racialized depictions of those he encountered on his journey. Here, in describing the impoverished Jews of Nablus, he fears that "they will grow up like savages in the desert" without prayer, knowledge of the Bible, and literacy—for Rosanes, all markers of a civilized man. This paper examines racializing discourses within two Sephardic travel accounts from Ottoman Palestine: Rosanes's 1866 Masa'ot he-ḥakham ha-Abir and Jacob Shaul's 1896 Impresiones de Viaže en Palastina, which appeared in the Izmir-based Ladino newspaper, La Buena Esperansa. These travel accounts offer a lens through which to rethink some of the historical and analytic entanglements of race and Orientalism; putting the literature on Orientalism in conversation with critical race theory enriches our reading of both these texts and their larger context.²

Scholars have noted how Orientalism functions as one type of racism. Attending to race can help us to position the dynamics of Orientalism within a more global frame, both historically and analytically. Eschewing the language of race obscures the extent to which the Ottoman Empire was, by the second half of the nineteenth century, in the throes of a global racial hierarchy. As scholars have noted, the dominant criterion for civilization at the time was race, which served as the reference point for ethnographic texts that sought to discern, describe, and assess levels of savagery or civilization.³ On an analytical level, as Geraldine Heng cogently demonstrates, the use of race enables different tools and analyses.⁴ It reveals key connections, for instance, between Orientalism and other forms of racism, not only on the part of European Orientalists, but also among Ottoman Orientalists, including anti-Black racism in the Ottoman Empire, as scholars like Eve Troutt Powell have demonstrated. But it also brings out more global connections; when we talk only of Orientalism, we risk provincializing the Ottoman Empire by segregating these dynamics from broader, more globalized dynamics of racism. By applying race as an explicit analytic, we can see how racializing discourses carried across religions, time periods, and geographical contexts.

These travelogues unfold against the backdrop of major political, structural, and cultural upheavals across the empire. In the wake of the Tanzimat reforms, which empowered lay leadership at the expense of the clergy, a new coterie of lay leaders challenged the erstwhile rabbinic elite within Sephardic communities. They established schools and newspapers that advanced European languages and ideas; both Rosanes and Shaul contributed to these reformist efforts to reshape their communities. In Ottoman Palestine, as part of efforts to centralize control and raise revenues, the state established a new provincial administration in the 1860s. This new administration worked to impose Ottoman rule of law, stimulate agricultural production, settle Bedouin communities, and secure the borders against potential British incursions.⁵ Extending Ottoman rule in the region required new infrastructure; the state built new government buildings, roads and railways, telegraph and ferry lines that linked the local economy to regional markets. The advent of direct Ottoman rule and the creation of such infrastructure helped to facilitate travel and the arrival of figures like Rosanes and Shaul.

Abraham ben Israel Rosanes (1838–1879) was part of a pioneering generation of Jewish intellectuals who moved in Enlightenment circles, both locally and internationally.⁶ He was born and raised in Rustock, in Ottoman Bulgaria, to a wealthy and well-connected Jewish family, which helped make it possible for him to undertake the long and expensive journey to Palestine.^7...