Cohen, J.P., Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era: [Review]

In 1916, a writer for an American Ladino serial expressed his wishful thinking about the future of the Ottoman state, writing that it “still exists and will exist for … a long time to come” (137). The same serial contained other similar statements that displayed the affinities of Ottoman Sephardic Jews in America. Coming from writers living away from the theater of war and enjoying freedom of expression, such statements should be regarded as genuine sentiments of Ottoman patriotism, as expressed in an Ottoman diasporic community. In this engaging book, Julia Philips Cohen reconstructs the process by which Ottoman Sephardic Jews learned the language of patriotism in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as part of a broader process of the emergence of a discourse of Ottoman imperial citizenship that affected Ottoman society in its entirety. The author's argument that the loyalty of the Sephardic Jews to the Ottoman Empire was a modern development entails a critical view of the common wisdom of a special centuries-old Ottoman-Jewish relationship, often viewed as a model of tolerance and coexistence. Expressions of this idea, abundant in Ottoman Jewish sources as well as in modern historiography, cultivate the image of the Ottoman domains as a safe haven for Jews, to be contrasted with experiences of religious persecutions elsewhere, especially in Christian Europe. Cohen is not the first historian to question this conception, which she defines as a myth (4). But rather than trying to prove otherwise, she reconstructs the paradoxes and tensions that came with Jewish responses to official Ottoman nationalism. Cohen's study adds to the scholarship on the history of Ottoman Jewry, but no less important is its contribution to the growing literature on the concept of citizenship in imperial contexts.