by Mark Mazower
The counter-revolution was quickly put down and Constantinople was soon under the control of the “Salonicans.” Suspected Hamidian sympathizers and plotters were arrested, and a more compliant government was installed. Abdul Hamid himself was forced by the revolutionaries to hand over power to his younger brother Reshad. At first he refused, believing he would be killed; then he learned he was to be sent into exile to the birthplace of the revolution. On the night of 28 April 1909 a special train from the capital pulled up at the military station outside Salonica’s city limits. Rumours had been circulating all day that the sultan—who had last visited the town as a child with his father, Abdul Mecid, half a century earlier—was arriving. Stepping down from the train, he spurned the automobile offered by General de Robilant, the Italian inspector of gendarmerie, and climbed into a hired landau instead. Escorted by thirty mounted gendarmes, he and his entourage rode through the backstreets of the Upper Town and along the avenue that ran by the sea beyond the White Tower before reaching his destination—the Villa Allatini—shortly before midnight. “Although a good many people were still in the streets in consequence of the illuminations that were in progress,” wrote an observer, “yet the passage of the cortege attracted remarkably little attention and gave rise to no sort of demonstration whatever.” “Half-awed amazement” was how the British consul described the public reaction. With time the awe decreased and the sultan became a tourist attraction. In 2002 one centenarian in Istanbul still recalled being taken as a boy by his father and glimpsing a stooped figure on a balcony in the distance through the railings. Salonican newspapers published unkind snippets of information about the comings and goings at the Villa Allatini, for like Napoleon in exile, the heavily guarded Red Sultan remained “an enigma and an object of curiosity.”8
His entourage was confined to his two small sons, three sultanas, four cadines, four eunuchs and fourteen other servants. In the capital, the rest of his staff were dismissed. The First Eunuch—the former Guardian of the Gates of Felicity—was hanged from the Galata Bridge, while the Second Eunuch, Nadir Agha, having won the faith of the Young Turks by showing them how to enter the treasury of Yildiz, remained alive to conduct visitors round the imperial palace which he knew better than almost anyone else. More than two hundred surplus members of the imperial harem were brought by carriage—more than thirty were needed—from Yildiz to the Top Kapi, to be met by their relatives and taken home. Elderly Circassian mountaineers were escorted to the palace where they scrutinized the faces of the unveiled women and tried to recognize daughters they had last seen years before.9
In the Villa Allatini the former sultan made no effort to escape. He passed his time doing carpentry, listening to his wives reading him the newspapers, and playing in the garden with his Angora cat. He demanded a Turkish rather than a European bath, and this was built for him. But his efforts to attend mosque were rebuffed with warnings that he might be assassinated. And when his brother, now Sultan Mehmed V Reshad, visited the city in 1911, no direct contact was allowed between the two men, although the new sultan did send his private secretary to enquire after his brother’s health. Abdul Hamid requested that one of his sons be allowed to study in Istanbul, and asked for information about a bag of jewels left behind on his departure from the Yildiz palace. Gradually he fell into a state of melancholia, irritability and incoherence. Even astrology and predicting the future through cards lost their charm. Perhaps it was just as well: otherwise the ex-sultan would have foreseen the disasters to come—the losses of the Balkan Wars, which virtually ended Ottoman power in Europe and brought him back to his final gilded cage in the Beylerbey palace in Istanbul; the First World War and its catastrophic consequences; the occupation of Istanbul itself by Allied soldiers only a few months after his death in 1918; and the ignominious end of the last sultan of the Osmanli line, who died in exile in San Remo pursued by his creditors.
OTTOMANISM
THE YOUNG TURK REVOLUTION started out as an assertion of the values of cosmopolitan loyalty to the empire over the divisive power of nationalism. It replaced the old version of Ottomanism—shared allegiance to the person of the sultan—with one which stressed common participation in a constitutional government acting in the name of the “People” or the “Ottoman nation.” Today it is easy to wonder at the naivety with which the population rejoiced at the CUP’s triumph. But the ideology of what was officially termed the Unity of the Elements (Ittihad-i Anasir) seemed attractive for a time, especially in places like Salonica where nationalism offered no sure future for either the Muslims or the Jews.10
The trouble was that the CUP’s Ottomanism hid competing and contradictory impulses. For some, the restoration of constitutional government was an end in itself. For others it was a way of warding off Western meddling and a means of reasserting Ottoman sovereignty and the dignity of the state. Some wanted to dismantle the capitulations which immunized foreign residents from Ottoman law and to replace the numerous privileges enjoyed by different communities with a single source of authority. For the Christians on the other hand, it made no sense to abolish their privileges unless they were allowed a greater say in the running of the state. The CUP itself talked the language of liberalism and representative government; yet in its origin it was a conspiratorial organization, modelled on the example provided by underground Russian and Bulgarian revolutionary committees, and with an equally suspicious attitude towards the forms of parliamentary democracy. Following the success of the revolution, its instincts led it to act as puppet-master behind the scenes rather than to form a government of its own, for its leaders regarded parliaments as instruments of symbolic importance to be shaped and guided by those who held real power. In October 1909 it decided to cease operating as a secret society; in practice, its behaviour did not change.
At first there was a widespread desire to give it a chance. Although some of its Muslim opponents disliked its secularism—in the spring of 1909, for instance, an opposition “Mohammedan Committee” was formed in the town of Serres by a group of hodjas, theology students and teachers—many more Muslims supported its defence of the constitution. Macedonian komitadji, hoping for a social upheaval which would give more power to the peasantry, saw the CUP and the continued existence of the empire as the only alternative to falling under the tyranny of Greece or Bulgaria. The Patriarchate looked to the preservation of its traditional privileges (which it would lose if the empire disappeared) and some Greek deputies argued that only an Ottoman constitutionalist framework would safeguard the Orthodox communities scattered throughout Asia Minor. Several Greeks in Salonica echoed this line, demanding support for the CUP and even joining its ranks. When one of the city’s main Greek papers came out for the CUP—there were rumours of bribes and subventions—the community was deeply split.
Soon, however, it was clear that the CUP did not have the solution to the empire’s problems. Indeed these became altogether more serious when, in a sudden series of humiliating body-blows, Bulgaria declared its independence, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia, and Cretan insurgents proclaimed union with Greece. The new government was shocked by its territorial losses and clamped down hard in the Macedonia vilayets, for if these were lost, it would mean the end of five centuries of Ottoman rule in Europe. Greek, Bulgarian and Serb national organizations were outlawed, new laws were passed against brigand bands and the population was ordered to hand in its arms.11
THE NEW TURK
BY 1910 THE IDEOLOGY OF OTTOMANISM had more or less collapsed as a way of holding the empire together, and as nationalism spread among its Christian population, it gained ground among Muslims too. Arguments between Ottomanists and Turkish nationalists had been raging within the ranks of the CUP for some years. But who, or what, was a Turk? Although Europeans had been talking about “Turks” for centuries, it had not been a term much used within the empire. The ruling language was an amalgam of Turkish, Arabic and Persian, with a smattering of Greek, Slavic and Italian, and its ruling class—like all imperi
al ruling classes—included individuals from an astonishing array of different backgrounds—Albanian, French, Venetian, Arab, Jewish and Circassian. Mehmet Nazim—better known as the great Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet—was descended on his mother’s side from the Polish Count Borzenski and from the German Huguenot Karl Detroit, who left Hamburg as a poor cabin-boy and rose to become a field marshal of the Ottoman army. If “Turk” meant simply Muslim, then in the Balkans alone, there were Albanian, Cretan, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Jewish and other Muslims in addition to a scattering of Sudanese slaves, Egyptian market gardeners and the long-established peasant descendants of nomadic Turcoman tribes.
The main issue—how to define a Turk—was explored by the Salonica-based Turkish nationalist Tekin Alp in a series of articles in 1912 on The Nature and Historical Development of the Turkish National Movement. According to him, a mere three years earlier, Ottoman Turks had regarded themselves “simply as Mohammedans and never considered their nation as having a separate existence. The Anatolian peasant took the word ‘Turk’ as synonymous with Kisilbash (one who wore a red fez). Even among educated classes there were persons who did not know that members of the Turkish race were living outside Turkey.” Popular consciousness changed with the triumph of the CUP and supported its effort to base the empire on the creed of Ottomanism. But as the “Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbians” gradually returned “to their mountains and their arms, to resume their struggle against Turkish authority,” the dream of Ottomanism was dispelled. Some at this point advocated Pan-Islamism—“the union of all the Mohammedan elements in the kingdom”—but their arguments were shaken by the rising of Muslim Albanians and by revolts in the Arab peninsula. These developments strengthened the position of those who “regarded the Turkish element as the saviour of the Ottoman Empire.” In CUP circles, Tekin Alp went on, this idea had gathered ground and was propagated through Salonican newspapers which preached the “foundation of a new language, a new literature and a new purely Turkish civilization.” The old Arabic and Persian elements in Ottoman Turkish would be eradicated and its literature consigned to the past. Ziya Gökalp, often regarded as the founding father of the nationalist movement, had settled in the city where he was the first man to teach sociology in the Ottoman empire. He inspired youthful intellectuals, armed with ammunition drawn from the European theoreticians of romantic and racial nationalism; they founded journals and clubs to promote the use of Turkish and tried to ignore the political limitations of their nationalist vision in a multi-national empire.12
Tekin Alp, though a far less important figure than Gökalp, had been in the thick of these discussions, and had made the transition himself from Ottomanism to Turkish nationalism. Subsequently he became a productive intellectual in the interwar Turkish republic. In a work he published in 1928, he preached the Turkification of minorities in Turkey on the basis of patriotic commandments such as: Turkify your names! Speak Turkish! Mingle with Turks! All of this was very much in keeping with nationalist ideology around the world. But one thing about Tekin Alp is worth mentioning: it was not his real name. For this apostle of Turkish nationalism had been born into an orthodox Jewish family in nearby Serres in 1883, and it was as Moise Cohen that he had been known when he first went to Salonica to study to become a rabbi: indeed one of his brothers eventually became rabbi of Serres. So the story of Turkish nationalism is more complicated than appears at first sight and raises the question of how the Jews of Macedonia—in the face of growing Greek and Slavic nationalism, and the rise of the CUP—also chose to define their political identities and fortunes.
JEWS, ZIONISTS AND TURKS
THE YOUNG MOISE COHEN was active within the city’s branch of the CUP since, like many Jews there, he initially saw Ottomanism as the perfect expression of his community’s interests. Few Jews believed they would be better off in one of the Christian successor states than they were in an empire where their loyalty made them trusted, and none can have thought that Salonica in particular—the city they dominated—would develop to their benefit if it became part of Greece or Bulgaria. The rise of Balkan nationalism thus increased the intensity of the Jews’ identification with the Ottoman state. Indeed, Jews from Thessaly had made their way into the city in the 1890s after the latter province was handed over to Greece, and Jews from Bulgaria had resettled in Constantinople and Smyrna. Cohen was therefore preaching to the converted when he wrote articles promoting the idea of harmony between Turks and Jews. In May 1910 he established a Ligue d’Ottomanisation in the city.
Given this strong support for Ottomanism, it is not surprising that many of Salonica’s Jews were unsympathetic to the idea of Jewish nationalism, nor that emissaries of the new central European creed of Zionism found the going hard there. In 1908 the energetic Zionist ideologist Vladimir Jabotinsky came to Salonica and called for Jews in the Ottoman empire not to follow the errors of their Austrian brethren; they must show that they were proud of their own culture and cultivate a sense of Jewish nationhood:
As a flower with petals, Turkey today as a garden and the Turkish Empire as a gardener must assure all flowers can conserve their own sweetness and flourish. The Turkish people have proven their spirit of tolerance for religions. When they will learn that nationality has also to be tolerated, they will also respect this.13
But Salonica’s Jewish elite did not need an Ashkenazi outsider to lecture them on communal self-pride and although some members of his audience believed it was possible to combine Ottomanism and Zionism, most did not. The chief rabbi, Jacob Meir, who arrived in 1907 from Palestine—the first-ever not to have been born in the city—was sympathetic, and the following year a breakaway group founded a pro-Zionist newspaper. But a deep sense of allegiance to the empire and its rulers was still the norm. Moise Cohen himself attended the Ninth World Zionist Congress in Hamburg the following year and tried to explain to his audience why he did not share their beliefs. When the future David Ben-Gurion came to study in Salonica, the local Zionist movement was in the doldrums. According to one of his biographers, although he found the city enchanting, he was “as a Zionist ill at ease,” and he left after several months.14
In fact, had some Salonica Jews had their way, there would have been no Jewish colonization of Palestine at all. They did not oppose the idea of settlement, just the Zionists’ choice of destination since they believed that Jewish immigration, properly directed, could bolster their own position in Macedonia. In Salonica Jews predominated; but in the countryside they were few and far between. Colonization could help change that. At the time of the 1891 Russian pogroms, Abdul Hamid had sounded out the chief rabbi about the merits of settling Jews en masse in the empire. Although an organized policy did not materialize, east European Jews continued to arrive in Istanbul and Salonica. The prominent journalist Saadi Levy, editor of the Journal de Salonique, entertained the idea of resettling colonists in Macedonia itself and Moise Cohen even advocated the policy at the 1909 Zionist Congress, though the bulk of the delegates can hardly have been pleased to hear it.15
In CUP circles, too, Jewish immigration was being discussed as part of a broader scheme for solving the Macedonia problem through demographic engineering. The decline of Ottoman power had been accompanied for at least a century by the immigration of waves of Muslim refugees—more than one million of them—uprooted from their old homes. Latterly, thousands had been arriving from Bulgaria, Serbia and Crete, many settling in the city. After the Habsburg annexation of Bosnia, the 1909 Austro-Turkish peace settlement guaranteed the religious rights of Bosnian Muslims and made the sultan, as caliph, responsible for their welfare. But some in the CUP saw the Muslims of the lost provinces as a national rather than a religious resource and an official CUP committee proposed encouraging them all to leave their homes. If sufficient numbers emigrated into the empire, they could be used to colonize Macedonia and increase the proportion of non-Christians.16
On the eve of the 1909 Zionist Congress, Nazim Bey, a senior figure within the CUP, told a Jewis
h journalist that two hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims were ready to emigrate “at the first signal,” and suggested that within a short space of time more than one million Muslim settlers might be brought into Macedonia—not only from Bosnia, but also from Bulgaria, Romania, the Crimea and central Asia; Jewish colonists, he went on, would be a welcome addition. Romanian Jewish farmers were to be settled in the Vardar valley and subsidized: five thousand had already arrived and there was room for more “right up to the doors of Salonica itself.” “Upon this Judeo-Muslim project,” he told the journalist, “rested the life or death of European Turkey.” Lobbied by senior Zionist officials, the CUP repeated its line: it was opposed to the idea of Jewish colonization in Palestine and the national aspiration this represented but Jewish settlers were a different matter entirely in places where they would not predominate. To Jabotinsky, Nazim gave this response: “There are no Greeks and no Armenians, we, all of us, are Ottomans; and we would welcome Jewish immigration—to Macedonia.” The Zionists were disheartened by such ideas, not least because they appeared to meet with approval in Jewish circles in Salonica itself.17
The CUP policy was already in its early stages. In Kosovo and Skopje several thousand Bosnian immigrants were being prepared for rural resettlement. Nazim Bey purchased land for them in Macedonia. In November 1910 the first seven hundred families passed through Salonica en route to the slopes of Mount Olympos: hundreds more were not far behind. The new arrivals took over common lands and drove out Christian peasants; Bulgarian and Macedonian groups objected bitterly, but could do nothing except bide their time until they got their chance for revenge. Only Habsburg counter-propaganda to persuade Bosnian Muslims to stay, and the latter’s own reluctance to leave their homes, limited the success of the CUP’s scheme.18 Yet they were only a little ahead of their time. In just a few years, Balkan states would be pushing populations around on a huge scale, the Habsburgs and their way of thinking would vanish, and Macedonia would indeed be colonized, though not by Muslims or Jews.