Rethinking the yishuv: late-Ottoman Palestine's Jewish communities revisited

My article seeks to rewrite our understanding of Jewish communal organisation and self-perception in late Ottoman Palestine. I am building on the rich scholarship of the last 15 years to question the categories in use. My arguments can be summed in the following manner:

1. Jews in late Ottoman Palestine are best understood as communities in the plural, not a single community. Indeed, this is how they understood themselves: a diverse social landscape, marked by differences in customs, language, communal organisations and political outlook, alongside common religious denominators and practices of cross-ethnic solidarity. These Jewish communities were far more integrated in the social landscape of Arab Palestine than much of the historiography would like us to believe.

2. Actors such as the Ottoman authorities, Jewish diaspora philanthropic organisations, European Imperial agents, Arab elites, and European Zionists - encouraged and demanded from local Jews to think of themselves and act as a single body - in some cases - or alternatively, and more often, as many communities.

3. "Yishuv" was originally an ambiguous term referring to Jewish population, and was not specific to Palestine. However, once it was invested with modern meaning of "Colonization", the term connotes new understanding of Jewish Ashkenazi presence and mission in Palestine. This mission fused the redemptive-messianic and the settler-colonial into a single project. However until 1917 and even later, the bulk of Palestine's Jews, of all ethnic Jewish communities, were urban and far from the rural colonists in spirit and affiliation.  

4. The 1908 revolution in the Ottoman Empire was pivotal in encouraging Jewish communal elites to think of themselves as a single national community. Pious Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Non-Zionists and Zionists of many shades, newcomers and long-standing communities, understood the potential of claiming national status in the new Ottoman "family of nations". It is then - and only then - that we see "the Yishuv" born as an imagined "Hebrew community" which theoretically bound all Jewish congregations in Palestine, regardless of differences of communal organisation, ethnicity, language, and religious practice. This was a vision, a concept, not a social reality: these acute differences persisted, and the "Yishuv" never became a social reality before the 1930s, as argued by Hillel Cohen in 1929.

Thus, on the one hand my article rejects the anachronistic historiographic categorisation that imposed unity on the plural landscape of Palestine's Jews before the British Mandate; or the idea that they represented a national "avant garde" for Zionism. But on the other hand, it shows that perceptions of Jews as an imagined national community in the Ottoman family of nations were to be found in the post 1908 context.