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In the winter of 1910, the Salonikan Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Tribuna Libera published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers to decide where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: nationalism, assimilation, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press of the empire in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was "bordering on fratricide," threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.
In the years between the Young Turk Revolution and World War I, the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire were on the brink of a real communal crisis, epitomized in the dilemma with which they were faced: what should be their role within the reforming empire, both as Ottoman citizens and as Jews? Like their neighbors, Ottoman Jews struggled to navigate the challenging new reality that promised universal rights and privileges for all of the empire's religious and ethnic groups at the same time that ethnic and proto-nationalist sentiments were on the rise. On the one hand, Ottoman Jews sought to stake a claim in the new Ottoman body politic, adopting Ottomanism as an ideology as well as actively participating in shaping the new Ottoman civic life. On the other hand, this period coincided with the community's progressive exposure to and reception of the ideas and institutions of European Zionism.
Ottoman Jews throughout the empire responded variously to these contradictory appeals. For many, Zionism was considered a betrayal of the "beloved" Ottoman homeland, particularly unjustifiable coming on the heels of civic enfranchisement and the optimistic new dawn promised by the revolution. Others, however, saw Zionism as both a legitimate expression of Jews' collective cultural aspirations and a fortuitous boon that would bring tremendous economic and social utility to their beloved empire, consciously divorcing their adoption of Zionism from the territorial-political aspirations of the European Zionist movement. Indeed, the historians Aron Rodrigue, Esther Benbassa, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein have argued eloquently for a unique "Ottoman Zionism"--one that stood distinct from European Zionism in its support for cultural Hebraism without the corresponding separatist political aims. A defining feature of Ottoman Zionism was this insistence on the fluid merger and reconciliation, rather than the clash...