Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine by Alan Dowty

Author:Alan Dowty
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253038685
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter five

TRUTH FROM THE LAND OF ISRAEL

JEWISH FLIGHT FROM RUSSIA IN the late 1880s followed a familiar pattern: renewed persecution brought renewed emigration. There were few pogroms after 1884 and the number fleeing dropped, falling to under ten thousand a year. As before, most of these emigrants headed to Western destinations, not to Erets Yisrael/Palestine. The continuing infusion of new immigrants, necessary to the survival of the struggling settlements, was gravely threatened. Given the high rate of attrition among would-be settlers, without reinforcement the colonies would very likely wither and die.

But once again the persecutors came to the rescue. A series of new restrictions, added to ever-stricter interpretations of the 1882 May Laws, pushed out a new wave of embittered emigrants, many of them now ready to consider the Return to Zion as a solution to Jewish vulnerability and victimhood. In 1886 a heavy tax was imposed on the families of young men who failed to report for military service—often because they had (illegally) left the country. In July 1887 admission of Jews to secondary schools and universities was severely slashed and rigid quotas were reinstituted, hurting precisely those (the maskilim) who had most relied on this access to integrate into Russian and European society. In 1889, Jewish admission to private legal practice was almost totally cut off. Over the years, pressure mounted to expel Jews who had managed, during the period of Alexander II’s reforms, to gain permission to live in areas outside the Pale of Settlement. Most dramatically, in early 1891 the new governor-general of Moscow—Grand Prince Sergei Alexandrovich, brother of Tsar Alexander III—decreed the expulsion of most of the Jews who had achieved the hard-fought right to live in the capital city, forcing out some twenty thousand.

Fortuitously, this heightened push from Russia coincided with a temporary softening of Ottoman restrictions on Jewish entry into Palestinian districts. After Jewish businessmen were barred from entry in 1884, under the claim that Palestine was not a commercial zone, only Jewish pilgrims were legally permitted to enter the Mutasarriflik of Jerusalem, and only after making a monetary deposit to guarantee their departure within 30 days. But European powers constantly pressed the rights of their citizens under the capitulations and other Ottoman commitments, and in 1888 the sultan’s government agreed to allow Jews to settle in Palestine, provided they did so individually and not as groups.1 Another factor was the legalization of Hibat Tsion in Russia; the organization had operated without legal sanction, and thus with extreme caution, until this point. But in early 1890 it was recognized by the Russian government as the Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers and Artisans in Syria and Palestine (known informally as the “Odessa Committee”) and was able to publicize and mobilize its cause more openly.2

By the end of the decade Jewish emigration from Russia had tripled, and in 1891 it tripled again, to almost one hundred thousand within one year.3 As before, most found their way to Europe and the Americas but again

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