Haim Nahum: A Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Politics, 1892-1923 (review)

124 SHOFAR Summer 1997 Vol. 15, No.4 Cuba's affluent elite during and after Castro's revolution, and by Iraq's Jews in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Michael M. Laskier Ashqe10n Regional College of Bar-Ilan University and Beit Berl College Haim Nahum: A Sephardic Cbief Rabbi in Politics, 1892-1923, edited with an introduction by Esther Benbassa. Translated from the French by Miriam Kochen. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1995. 204 pp. $39.95. There has been in recent years a number of books enlightening Judaic scholarship on . the history ofOttoman and Turkish Jewry. Some ofthis research has been understandably partisan: sometimes pro-Sephardi, sometimes pro-Turkish, but always based on the exploitation of new archival material. Much material remains closed in the Turkish archives, however. Still, what has been presented has opened possibilities for a new understanding of the central geographica110cus and its role in the return of a Jewish presence to the eastern Mediterranean shores. This important study of the fIrst and last elected chief rabbi of the Ottoman Caliphate during its period of dissolution adds a welcome new dimension to the forces in conflict during the seminal years preceding and succeeding World War I. The author has chosen a useful way to introduce her subject. Her introductory essay is a tightly written overview of the political career ofHaim Nahum, a clever but poor Jew from the provincial town ofMagnesia (Manissa, north oflzmir) who early linked his developing career with the Alliance Israelite Universelle in order to reach the apex of the only career open to him, i.e., within the restricted dhimmi political structure of the Ottoman rabbinate. Contemporary developments allowed (or forced) him to become a major spokesman for the host rulers to western Jewish organizations and to western governments. Three quarters ofthe volume consists of an edition (in translation) of the correspondence between Haim Nahum and the AIU, whose protege he remained to some extent throughout the period from 1892 to 1923. One would hope that a subsequent volume covering his years as chiefrabbi ofEgypt through the stormy years ofWorld War II and the post-1948 dissolution of the Egyptian Jewish community will someday follow. Haim Nahum successfully led the sinking ship of Ottoman Jewry through the storms of modernization and political chaos. AIU policies of exporting French nationalism and civilization into the Ottoman world conflicted with the emergence of Book Reviews 125 German Jewry's interests, following those of Imperial Germany, in the East. The Masonic Order and its Jewish counterpart, the B'nei Brith, added new challenges to his authority. The nascent Zionist movement spread throughout the Balkans and the Otto~ realm and awoke forces that the chiefrabbi could not control, even though he succeeded in establishing a modus vivendi with its international and occasionally local leaders during his career. But it was as Ottoman subject and later citizen that he performed his major diplomatic activities. Somewhat bewildered by western pressures and the forces of modernization, Ottoman and Turkish leaders-the Young Turks, the Committee of Union and Progress, and Kemal Ataturk himself-tried to rely on their age-old allies to represent, if not protect, their interests in the hostile environment of international diplomacy. Though his missions failed, nonetheless he served his masters well, and from this perspective he was able to leave a legacy of goodwill among Turkish nationalists that still bears fruit to the present. Within the Ottoman Jewish world, Nahum went on an important mission for the AIU in 1908 to the Falasha communities ofEthiopia. The correspondence (pp. 99-144) . throws as much light on conditions there as on the rivalry between the AIU and the proFalasha Committee ofJacques Faitlovich, who subsequently received the support ofthe rival Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden. He interceded on behalfof the Jews in Yemen, helped the refugees from the Balkan wars who fled to Ottoman territory, and, according to his own claim: "I rendered greater services to Zionism in my obscurity than the most fervent of them [Zionists]; and that, thanks to the policy I followed, I prevented the Jews of Turkey and Palestine from sharing the fate of the Armenians and Greeks" (p. 182). This study adds two...