Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (review)

Sectarianism is a theme that has been assiduously ignored by several generations of Middle Eastern scholars. There are multiple causes for this: on the one hand, scholars who are working to unravel Orientalist visions of Middle Eastern cultures harbor concern that attention to religious difference would reiterate the assumption that religion has been the primary engine of change in the region or, worse, a force of insurmountable stasis. On the other hand, nationalist historians have eschewed the subject of religion out of a fear that this historical category would disrupt their otherwise tidy narratives. Finally, there are scholars of the region who have preferred to avoid the political muddle that any mention of religion seems to invite.

Thankfully a new generation of scholarship on the Middle East is turning to the theme of sectarian identity and to the question of its invention, nature, or rejection. Among them is Bruce Masters’ Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, a work thatconsiders the complex ways in which non-Muslim identities in the Arab Middle East evolved over the course of the Ottoman Empire’s four-hundred year rule of the region.

Masters argues that beginning in the sixteenth century, in contrast to other periods of Middle Eastern history and other regions of the empire, “a religiously ordained cosmology lay at the heart of the psychological world-view of each of those who inhabited the Ottoman Arab provinces. Religious faith served as an internalized anchor to each individual’s sense of broader community and as the primary signifier of his or her identity and to those outside it” (p. 5). This state of affairs was enabled by the social hierarchy established by Muslim law and by the institutional indifference of the Ottoman and Muslim elite to the affairs of individual religious communities (at least until the mid-nineteenth century). Combined, these factors produced a relatively peaceable environment in which non-Muslims could—and indeed did—thrive.

However, neither the reality of coexistence nor the meaning of sectarian identity would remain fixed in the region. On the contrary, Masters argues, non-Muslim identity in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt would be shaped by the intervention of European merchants and missionaries, by the actions and ambitions of Christian and Jewish merchants, by official reconfigurings of religious identity as nationality in the mid-nineteenth century, by the emergence of conflict between Christians and Muslims later in the century and, finally, by the development of the philosophies of Ottomanism and Arabism.

A significant portion of this book is focused on the rise of a Christian commercial bourgeoisie and on the ties that some of these Christians (those in Aleppo, in particular) developed with European merchants and missionaries. This population incurred the hostility of their Muslim neighbors in the late nineteenth century, Masters suggests, in great part because of the wealth they had incurred over the course of the previous hundred years. This was a sign that religious and commercial identity had intertwined for the region’s Christians, a dynamic that (perhaps ironically) allowed them to embrace Ottomanism and then Arabism in the early twentieth century without fear of contradicting or undermining their sectarian ties.

Not so for certain of the region’s Jews, Master’s proposes: for twentieth century Iraqi Jewry, for example, “communal identity. . . remained as it had been at the start of the Ottoman period, vested in their religious identity” (p. 193). In this instance, as elsewhere in this volume, Master’s treatment of Christians in the Ottoman Arab provinces is more subtle and convincing than is his treatment of the region’s Jews, who are in his rendition oddly more vulnerable to cultural stagnation than other of the region’s non-Muslims. Language may be one obstacle here; the kinds of sources on which Masters relies another (he by and large excludes intra-communal documents from his purview, which might well tell a more nuanced story of Jewish responses...