CHEERED ON BY the West, Abülhamid II (reigned 1876–1909) started out as a liberal reformer. In 1876, at the beginning of his reign, he promulgated a constitution, and in 1877 he opened parliament, carrying out the reforms the Young Ottomans had demanded. But in the wake of the most devastating war with Russia yet, he turned into a dictator one year later, suspending the constitution, murdering its author, dissolving parliament, arresting the opposition including members of parliament, jailing journalists, and exercising personal control over the empire. Faced with intense foreign pressure, debilitating power struggles among the elite, and an inability to obtain the financial resources to meet his goals, the sultan sought a way to strengthen and save the empire. He chose to do so through modern strategies infused with religious meaning, promoting himself as caliph in charge of a modernised Islam and an Islamised empire, and converting sectarian groups. He became a ruler who was as much a modernist who opposed the West as an Islamist who emphasised secular technical education.1 A champagne-tippling French speaker who played piano and loved Western classical music and comic opera—and built a theatre in his palace where they could be performed—Abdülhamid II was a sincere Muslim who sought to save the empire in his own modern, Islamist way.2 Chasing the opposition from the empire, he unwittingly sparked the formation of a group of revolutionaries called the Young Turks who would be the undoing of the empire.
After announcing the constitution and ushering in the first elected parliament in 1877, the empire suffered from the cataclysmic war of 1877–1878 with archenemy Russia. To understand the context and importance of this war, we need to bear in mind that the Ottomans and an ever-expanding Russian Empire had already fought seven wars since the eighteenth century. The most recent was the Crimean War of 1853–1856, which saved the territory of the empire but compelled the Ottoman regime to take out large loans from British and French banks, to which it became financially subservient. Along with interest on the loans, the Ottoman treasury had to pay back twice the amount borrowed.3 More important, the Crimean War ended with Russia humiliated and seeking revenge. Russia aimed to seize the Bosporus straits and liberate Orthodox-Christian-majority regions of Southeastern Europe from Ottoman rule.
It was the last Russo-Ottoman war, which took place from 1877 to 1878, that was the most consequential. It nearly ended the centuries-old Ottoman presence in Southeastern Europe. It caused a mass exodus of Muslims, traumatised by war, from the region into the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire. Most important, it induced a psychological shift among Ottoman elites, opening their eyes to the reality that the empire was vulnerable to foreign occupation of its core Roman provinces, which could lead to the downfall of the dynasty.
The war of 1877–1878 occurred amid rebellion and political uncertainty in the Ottoman Empire. Nationalist uprisings broke out in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Bulgaria in 1875. These were accompanied by the massacres of many Muslims, including new immigrant populations of Crimean Tatars and Circassians displaced by the Crimean War. In reprisal, Ottoman Circassian irregulars slaughtered tens of thousands of Bulgarians in April 1876. The massacres contributed to the loss of the Ottomans’ British ally. Reflecting Renaissance humanists’ depictions of the ‘barbarian Turks’, Britain’s Liberal prime minister William Gladstone published a best-selling pamphlet that year entitled Bulgarian Horrors. In it he argued that the Turks were ‘from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the trail behind them; and as far as their dominion reached, civilisation disappeared from view’.4 His political opponent, the pro-Ottoman Sephardic Jewish–born Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli, who was also disparaged in the pamphlet, argued against such sentiment to little avail.
As already related, a coup deposed Sultan Abdülaziz I in May 1876. Humiliated, he committed suicide and was replaced by his alcoholic nephew Murad V, who had close relations with the Young Ottomans but who had a nervous breakdown and was declared mentally unfit and replaced by his brother Abdülhamid II in September. Abdülhamid II promulgated a new constitution in December, aimed in part at dampening demands for independence or autonomy and foreign oversight of Southeastern European Ottoman territories.
In April 1877, Russia declared war after the Ottomans refused their demands for Bulgarian autonomy. The Ottomans remembered it as the War of ’93, as it was the year 1293 in the Muslim calendar. As with previous Russo-Ottoman wars, this conflict was fought on two fronts, at either end of the Black Sea in eastern Anatolia and in Southeastern Europe. On the eastern front, 55,000 Ottoman soldiers faced a Russian force twice that size, while on the western front the Ottomans outnumbered their opponents 180,000 to 160,000.5 No matter the number of forces at their disposal, the Ottomans faced defeat on both fronts. Their forces were spread across a wide theatre, there was a lack of communication between military commanders, the battles were directed from Istanbul rather than the fronts, soldiers lacked provisions and munitions, and the Ottoman Black Sea fleet was nowhere to be found.6
On the western front, the Russians crossed the Danube into Romania and with their Bulgarian allies chalked up many victories, committing atrocities against Muslim villagers and townspeople and forcing a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from Southeastern Europe who were then resettled in Anatolia. After a seven-month siege, the Russians finally took Plevna in Bulgaria in December. Thereafter the Russians marched unhindered through Thrace, taking Edirne in January 1878. By March Russian troops had reached San Stefano, twelve kilometres from Istanbul (today’s Yeşilköy, the location of Atatürk Airport). The Ottomans had to agree to an armistice to stop the Russians from marching on Istanbul, destroying the dynasty, and reestablishing an Orthodox empire in its place.
The Treaty of San Stefano, signed on 3 March 1878, gave Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro independence, provided autonomy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were occupied by Austria-Hungary (which the Habsburg Empire was renamed in 1867), and created a large, Russian-occupied Bulgaria stretching from the Black Sea to the Aegean and including Macedonia and Salonica. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were expelled from Bulgaria. In the wake of the war and over the course of the next three decades nearly one million Muslim migrants fled the Balkans for the Ottoman Empire.7 The Russians had recouped their losses from the Crimean War. The fate of the Ottoman Empire, the eastern question, was the common concern of all European states, especially those opposed to Russian expansion. Alarmed by the Russian gains contained in the treaty, Britain and Austria-Hungary compelled Russia to accept in July 1878 the Treaty of Berlin instead, whereby Russia’s military-political gains from the war were restricted. As a price for its diplomatic intervention, Britain demanded Cyprus from the Ottomans. Russia remained in control of much of northeastern Anatolia, where Sultan Abdülhamid II agreed to undertake reforms ameliorating the condition of Armenians. Half of Bulgaria, including Macedonia, was returned to the Ottomans. But the Ottomans had lost one-third of their territory.
The outcome of the war was especially detrimental to the Ottoman claim over Southeastern Europe. As the Southeastern European provinces gained autonomy or independence and half a million Muslim refugees immediately resettled in the remaining Ottoman domains, the empire’s territory became less European and less Christian. The refugees’ new ruler would promote their bond to him as Muslim leader.
In the aftermath of the war with Russia, Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution and parliament. This action was met with two armed coup attempts—one fomented by Young Ottomans, the other by Freemasons—attempting to replace the sultan with his now sober, calm predecessor, Murad V. Both failed. In 1881 Abdülhamid II arrested leading reformers, including the author of the constitution, Midhat Pasha, and sentenced them to death for the murder of Sultan Abdülaziz I, who had committed suicide. The sultan commuted their punishment to life imprisonment in the Hijaz, Arabia, but had them murdered soon after.8
Abdülhamid II then replaced liberal reforms with a completely new formula for saving the empire: proto-Muslim nationalism. The sultan sought to reinvigorate the institution of the caliphate and thereby unite all world Muslims under his authority. He emphasised his status as caliph rather than as mere sultan, something not seen since the sixteenth century, when Suleiman I was the first sultan to adopt the title.
Reflecting Islamic piety by forbidding the display of Abdülhamid II’s likeness, his regime promoted Islamic symbols related to the sacredness of the sultan caliph in public spaces, especially by having the imperial monogram appear on public buildings across the empire.9 This was part of a process to build loyal subjects through the proselytization of what it deemed the correct interpretation of Islam. Imperial Islamic generosity and greatness included guaranteeing the security of the pilgrimage to Mecca for all Muslims, assisted by the Ottoman Hijazi railway that ran from Damascus to Medina and the Hijazi fleet that protected the coast of western Arabia. The efforts were intended to demonstrate that Abdülhamid II was a pious sultan who was protector of pilgrims and custodian of the holy shrines.10 He sent emissaries to distant Muslims in Africa and China. He made references to the first generations of Muslims, such as through the acquisition and display of holy relics and the calligraphic rendering of Muhammad’s and the first caliphs’ names in the ancient Hagia Sophia, once the greatest church in Christendom and now the largest Friday mosque in Istanbul.11
Abdülhamid II sought to modernise Islam. The Hanafi school of Sunni Islamic law, one of four main interpretations of Sunni law that had exclusive doctrines and practices, was emphasised as the ‘official belief’. This was no coincidence, for Hanafism recognised the legitimacy of a strong and able ruler who protected Islam and upheld Islamic law, as Abdülhamid II styled himself, rather than believing that legitimacy was via descent from Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe.12 Ottoman sultans’ only claim to legitimacy was by might and rendering justice, not through genealogy. The empire standardised and regularised Islamic legal rulings, publishing a codification and disseminating it across the empire. The effort met with resistance in areas such as Iraq and Yemen, where scholars favoured other legal schools or had different local legal customs.13 The regime also sought to monopolise and control sacred script, such as by distributing its own version of the Qur’an. It prevented the publication and importation of Qur’ans from Iran and Russia, whose Muslims were not seen as loyal to the Ottoman caliph.14
The regime engaged in what it considered a modernising and civilising mission against peripheral populations.15 It aimed to settle, integrate, control, and make useful tribal groups while ensuring religious conformity, targeting rural Albanians, Kurds, and the Bedouin, the nomads of the desert. The sultan wished to enlighten by converting to his understanding of Sunni Islam religious groups deemed heretical, such as Yazidis, Shi’is, and Alevis—the descendants of the Red Heads and the supporters of the Safavids in the sixteenth century. The Alevis did not strictly adhere to Islamic law, did not place primary emphasis on the Qur’an, and did not fast during Ramadan but during the Shi’i holy month of Muharram. They did not take the pilgrimage to Mecca but to their own saint shrines in Anatolia and Iraq.16 The effort to convert people—who believed in a saintly, divine Ali and the revolutionary ideas of Ibn Arabi and Sheikh Bedreddin—to a different version of Islam was often accompanied by violence, including massacres.17 The regime’s actions were similar to the Americanisation of Native Americans and their settlement and conversion in the American West in the same era. There was also an increase in the conversion of Ottoman Christians to Islam.18
The sultan sent out preachers who acted as missionaries and built schools and mosques in Albania, Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen where tribal Albanians, Arabs, Bedouin, or Kurds, and Alevis, Yazidis, or Shi’is predominated. Alongside modern sciences, the new Hamidian schools emphasised religious curricula focused on Hanafi Sunnism. The regime educated the sons of leading families in new schools in Istanbul, such as the Imperial School for Tribes, and sent them back to their home regions, hoping they would compel their compatriots to be civilised, loyal Ottomans and Hanafi Sunnis, as they themselves had become.19 But these policies targeting socially or religiously marginal groups were largely unsuccessful.20
Women’s public role remained at the centre of debates about modernisation. The Hamidian regime was conservative and modern. The late nineteenth century witnessed calls from men and women to improve women’s status in society, especially in education and employment rights. The way was led by men such as Namık Kemal and Şemseddin Sami, author of Women (1882). Sami envisioned societal progress as being dependent on the education and training of women.21 Yet these writers advocated liberty only within the limits allowed by Islam. There may not yet have been any Ottoman suffragettes. But there were patriarchal feminists—including the Hamidian regime, which opened teachers’ colleges for women and primary, secondary, and technical schools for girls. There were also women who advocated better education and more opportunities for themselves.
These Ottoman feminists’ views were expressed in women’s newspapers and magazines. The Ladies’ Own Gazette, published between 1895 and 1909, boasted editors and writers who were almost all women. There was also a journal for adolescents, and a publishing house that produced monographs on gender issues.22 The earliest writers were women of the Ottoman elite, mostly daughters of government officials educated at home or in the palace, such as the first Ottoman woman novelist, Fatma Aliye. Within a few years the writers included schoolteachers and businesswomen from the new women’s fashion industry and recognised pedagogues such as Ayşe Sıdıka, author of The Principles of Education (1899). The sultan served as patron of the Ladies’ Own Gazette, which promoted women’s education in order to support the conservative aims of making women into better mothers, better wives, better Muslims, and loyal Ottoman subjects. The journal accordingly displayed anti-European and anti-Christian attitudes.
Not only did Ottoman Muslim women launch a women’s movement, but so, too, did Kurdish and Armenian women.
The Armenians who lived in the same eastern Anatolian region (called by Armenians western Armenia) as the Kurds (who called it northern Kurdistan) had the misfortune to demand autonomy with foreign oversight.23 They complained of depredation, double taxation, land confiscations, and insecurity. When he signed the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, the sultan agreed to reforms to improve their condition. His aim was to solve the eastern question by avoiding a pretext for further foreign intervention. On the ground, Armenians continued to face violence from Kurds. The Kurds, because they stood at the frontier with the rival Safavid and then Qajar empire in neighbouring Iran, had for centuries been largely tolerated and given autonomy by the empire. Local chiefs and princes had been granted authority to rule so long as they recognised the sultan as sovereign and contributed their armed forces to his military campaigns. Left largely to their own devices, the Kurds were dominated by autonomous princes, ruling landlord families, their peasant clients (tribes or confederations), and religious leaders (Sufi sheikhs). Yet the Kurds were also subject to forced settlement, taxation, and oppression by the Ottomans. Proposed supervision of the Armenians by the British and the Russians during Abdülhamid II’s reign, coupled with Armenian demands for autonomy, rankled the sensitivities of Ottoman statesmen and made them turn to the Kurds.
Abdülhamid II aimed to exercise better control over his empire. One area of especial concern was the eastern frontier with Russia. As a result of the war of 1877–1878, Russia occupied the former Ottoman provinces of Ardahan, Batum, Doğubayezid, and Kars. Northeastern and southeastern Anatolia were sensitive regions for the imperial centre. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottomans had settled tribes and nomads and decreased the power of and then eliminated Kurdish chiefs and provincial notables on the frontier, such as in northern Iraq and near Diyar Bakir.
In the late nineteenth century, the Ottomans suppressed the established Kurdish ruling princes. This led to direct Ottoman rule in these areas for the first time but also to more upheaval in the countryside. The old established chiefs and princes had maintained law and order in their respective regions. Now there was a free-for-all, as other tribal groupings fought over control of villages, agricultural land, and pastures. This had major implications for the people of the region, including the Armenians and Assyrians, which in turn encouraged Russian, British, and later American intervention.
In the absence of the princes, sheikhs grew in political influence as mediators among Kurds. Many were affiliated with Sufi orders, whether Bektaşi or Nakşibendi. Especially during the reign of Abdülhamid II, the Ottomans viewed the Kurds as a force for suppressing Armenian nationalists. Armenians outside the empire founded nationalist organisations: the Social-Democratic Party of the Bell (Hnchakian, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, 1887) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun, founded in Tbilisi, Georgia, 1890), which agitated for autonomy or independence through their newspapers, education, and propaganda, and for armed struggle including assassinations, revolts, and terrorism.24 The Ottomans supported the Nakşibendi sheikh Ubaydallah of Nihri (near Hakkari, in southeastern Anatolia) in his military campaigns in the east against the Russians, against Iran, and against local Christians in the 1870s and 1880s. Ubaydallah’s declarations have caused scholars to label him the first Kurdish nationalist. He had told the British that ‘the Kurdish nation… is a people apart’ and the Kurds ‘want our affairs to be in our own hands’.25 Yet he also declared loyalty to the sultan, who supported him in attacking his enemies.
As part of this effort to improve control of the Ottoman east, in 1890 Abdülhamid II instituted the Hamidiye light cavalry regiments made up of Kurdish troops. Their mission was to suppress dissent, whether by Kurds or Armenian nationalists, in Kurdistan, the term the Ottomans used for the region of Anatolia, Syria, and Iraq where Kurdish people predominated. The establishment of the Hamidiye was also meant to boost Kurdish loyalty to the sultan, in part by increasing the religious ties between Turks and Kurds.26 The sultan emphasised that they were Muslim brothers, despite their historic, linguistic, national, and social differences.
Modelled on the Cossacks of the Russian Empire, the Hamidiye officers were sent for training in Petrograd, which was remarkable, considering how Russia was their enemy. The aim was to transform the Kurds, a local power challenging imperial control, into an arm of royal authority. The effort was envisaged as a civilising project, a way to settle and command barbaric tribes that had only recently revolted against the empire. It was supposed to be an effective way to govern, tax, and conscript members of this parallel state in a region long autonomous from central control and then use them to manage the other dangers.
Crimes against property were part and parcel of ethnic cleansing. Pastoral Kurds were settled by authorising them to usurp the lands of Armenian farmers and villagers, often by force.27 The process deprived Armenians of their means of subsistence, forcing them to migrate. Subject to expropriations, hundreds of thousands of Armenians fled the region for the cities of western Anatolia. In the context of Armenian revolts in southeastern Anatolia in Sasun (1894), Zeytun (1895–1896), and Van (1896), several hundred thousand other Armenians were massacred from 1894 to 1896 as a form of collective punishment by local Kurds, Hamidiye units, and regular Ottoman troops in the six eastern provinces of Bitlis, Diyar Bakir, Erzurum, Mamüretülaziz, Sivas, and Van.28 Forced migration and massacres in eastern Anatolia contributed to an Ottoman project of demographic engineering, replacing Christians with Muslims. Tens of thousands of Muslim Circassian refugees who had been expelled from their own homelands by Russia were settled in the region amid the remaining Armenians, further Islamising it.
These policies put material resources into the hands of Muslim refugees and the local Kurds, buying their loyalty. It was effective in stamping out Kurdish rebellion and in co-opting the local power-holding Kurdish nobles and sheikhs. But the creation of the regiments and the arming of Kurds dispossessed Armenians of their lands. It increased tensions between Kurds and other Muslims and between Kurds and Armenians and other local Christians such as the Assyrians, leading to tragic consequences then and in later decades.
During these massacres of Armenians, mass conversions took place. Both the massacre of Ottoman Christian subjects and their rapid mass conversion to Islam under such circumstances were unprecedented in Ottoman history. Thousands of Armenians converted to Islam to save their lives because they were afraid of the Kurds, especially the Hamidiye cavalry.29 Government officials in the provinces blamed ‘savage’ Kurds for the violence that compelled the conversions. Most of these Armenians converted back to Christianity after the violence subsided in 1897. Apostasy was no longer a capital offence. Yet for the many abducted Armenian children and young girls who were raped and married off, there was no going back. They became part of the Kurdish population.
For the deaths of his Christian subjects and for his dictatorship, Abdülhamid II became a bogeyman in the rest of Europe and the empire. His paternalism and piety, however, compared to those of his Austro-Hungarian and Russian contemporaries, and the Ottoman Empire was not the only place experiencing unrest. Russia was also plagued by riots and pogroms against an ethno-religious minority, in this case Jews, in the same era.
When Abdülhamid II suspended the parliament in 1878, he chased the opposition from the empire. They coalesced in Paris as the Young Turks. Like the Carbonari in Italy, they were members of a secret society promoting revolution and constitutionalism. In 1884, the regime was responsible for the murder of the author of the constitution that the sultan had promulgated and then abolished, Midhat Pasha. News of such atrocities was amplified by the sultan’s own exiled Ottoman critics in the major Western and Central European capitals.
Outrage in Europe also fed on the fact that Abdülhamid II proved a strong sultan, something not seen in centuries. He promoted an image of himself as a descendant of nomadic, warrior sultans. He emphasised the dynasty’s Turco-Mongol and nomadic-warrior origins and promoted its alleged descent from the Oğuz tribe. He restored the tombs of the first two sultans, Osman and Orhan, in Bursa, and rebuilt the tomb of Osman’s father, Ertuğrul, in Söğüt.30 At an annual ceremony, Turks dressed like Turco-Mongol nomads rode into Söğüt, singing, ‘We are soldiers of the Ertuğrul regiment’, and then played Mongolian polo.
Facing sustained negative publicity, the Hamidian regime engaged in image management in Europe and North America.31 The telegram, rail, and printing press, and the presence of so many foreigners in the empire—journalists, diplomats, businessmen, travellers, and missionaries—made events and developments well-known to the outside world, for good or bad. The image-obsessed Abdülhamid II was well aware of this fact and sought to change his image in world opinion. He did so by engaging in damage control and positive brand projection.
Ottoman embassies bribed the authors of newspaper articles, theatre plays, and operas to change how they wrote about the Ottomans. They paid other authors to write positive accounts and ghostwrote fluff pieces.32 They published a journal depicting the West as violent and degenerate, covering lynchings and poverty in the United States and Englishmen murdering their mistresses.33 The sultan amassed a huge collection of news clippings, keeping an eye on everything written about him in the foreign press and seeking revenge on those who had written supposed slights. Abdülhamid II sought to rebrand the Ottoman Empire through propaganda efforts, not by changing its practices or stopping the massacres. Protecting the human rights of his subjects rather than violating them would have been a surer path to changing his regime’s image. Nevertheless, forgotten is the fact that some of the most ardent supporters of Abdülhamid II’s propaganda efforts were Jews.
While relations between the dynasty and Ottoman Christians worsened despite the Christians’ newfound rights, Jews demonstrated anew their devotion to the sultanate. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Jewish chroniclers and intellectuals had engaged in an internal dialogue, praising the sultan in messianic terms for having defeated the Jews’ enemies and oppressors, the Byzantines and Catholics, for having conquered Jerusalem, and for having gathered Jews in the Holy Land. They saw these as signs of the arrival of the messianic age. After the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi in the mid-seventeenth century, they ceased referring to the sultan as the messiah. In the nineteenth century, they revived the old trope and made their praise of the sultan public for different reasons.34
Yet Jews now faced a momentous decision. The nineteenth century had witnessed the execution of the heads of the three leading Jewish families, largely because of their connections to the Janissaries. The same epoch saw Greek independence, the rise of Greek and Armenian nationalist movements within the empire, the independence of Southeastern European states, and the nationalist sentiments of Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The Jews could either turn to their own nationalist movement—Zionism, which few Ottoman Jews supported—or choose to forget the still-lamented trauma of the unjust murders of their leaders in 1826, seek reconciliation with the dynasty, and side with the empire to become allies against Christians. The Jewish leadership took the latter path. Numerically smaller, economically weaker, and with a worse public image than that of the Armenians or Greeks, Ottoman Jews sought a way to make themselves appear useful, loyal, relevant, and reliable to the sultan.35 Their investment in positive patriotism meant publicly declaring their loyalty to the empire and condemning Ottoman Christians as traitors.
In 1892, on the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Jews expelled from Spain, Ottoman Jewry planned their first public ceremony celebrating the ‘welcome’ given them by Ottoman sultans and expressing their gratefulness for Ottoman Muslim ‘tolerance’.36 Unlike their medieval predecessors, the nineteenth-century Jews did not focus on the sultan, who was seen as a tool of the divine plan and not actually possessing any human agency to act. Instead, they presented all Ottoman Muslims (Turks), and not merely the sultan, as tolerant. It was to be a public performance of patriotism, of fealty to the empire and the ruler. In the end, it consisted not of empire-wide public processions, however, but the reciting of special prayers in synagogues and the sending of telegrams to the sultan.37 Nonetheless, it was a public declaration that the Ottoman Jews had turned over their services to the state, openly siding with Abdülhamid II against his enemies, the Greeks and Armenians of the empire.
In 1892, the leaders of the Ottoman Jewish community presented its members as loyal and useful. Reflecting the long-held utopian view, they argued that the Ottoman Empire was the first ‘open land to receive all the oppressed who desired tranquillity’.38 The empire was a ‘refuge’ where Jews ‘benefited from the freedom of religion’. The Jews were ‘true citizens’ capable of ‘making the country flourish’. These leaders proclaimed that all Jews, all around the world, were indebted to the Ottoman dynasty, which was the first to ‘love’ them. They urged world Jewry to ‘forever recognise’ the Ottoman Empire and ‘express the most profound respect for everything bearing the name “Ottoman”’.39 Aron de Joseph Hazan, a community leader from İzmir, promoted the 1892 quadricentennial commemorating the arrival of Iberian Jews. He proclaimed that the Ottoman dynasty had given Jews refuge from ‘the tyranny of the Spanish government and European barbarism’, obliging Jews to declare their gratitude publicly.40 According to Hazan, doing so would offer ‘absolute proof of the profound gratitude we feel towards the Ottoman government’ and serve as a retort to Ottoman Muslim ‘anti-Semites who accuse us of being ingrates and who claim that we are not true patriots’.41
Jews were put to the test only four years later. First, anti-Jewish racism was voiced by Muslims in print. Then on 26 August 1896 several dozen members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation armed with bombs and revolvers, desperate to avenge the recent massacres and to bring the plight of Ottoman Armenians to the attention of the whole of Europe, stormed and occupied the Ottoman Bank in Galata, Istanbul. While after fourteen hours the surviving revolutionaries were allowed safe passage out of the country, Istanbul Armenians were not so fortunate. What ensued was a massacre of thousands of Armenians by Kurds and Turks.42 Jews responded as a model minority with claims of affinity with Muslims. Some Jews participated in the violence against Armenians, attacking them and looting their homes or assisting the mobs in finding victims.43 Other Jews saved Armenians by giving them prayer books and prayer shawls so they could pass as Jews.44 Jewish leaders in Istanbul considered publicising the fact that Jews had endangered their own lives to save Armenians. But the Jewish leadership decided to suppress reports of this aid, worrying about what it would mean for their alliance with Muslims against a common enemy, Ottoman Christians.
Ottoman Jews’ propaganda efforts were echoed by those of Theodor Herzl in Vienna, the founder of political Zionism. The leaders of the Zionist movement wished to gain Abdülhamid II’s support for establishing a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. Herzl believed that if the Zionists assisted the sultan on the Armenian issue, the sultan would support the Zionists. In 1896, believing in conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish control of the media, the sultan suggested to Herzl that he marshal ‘Jewish power’ on the Ottoman Empire’s behalf so as to dampen international outrage regarding the massacres. As he related in his diary, Herzl responded, ‘Excellent!’45
Abdülhamid II had demanded that Herzl convince the European press ‘to present the Armenian question in a fashion friendly’ to the Ottoman Empire.46 Fearing that the massacre of Armenians in Istanbul would lead to the deposition of the sultan, which would mean the end of the Zionist dream, Herzl used all his contacts, as Zionist leader and as journalist, to try to turn the public relations tide in the Ottomans’ favour in Europe.
In Western Europe, Abdülhamid II was labelled the ‘red sultan’ on account of the massacres. He was usually depicted with a hooked nose and bloodstained hands in political cartoons in the Western press. Despite the atrocities, Herzl sought to rouse public opinion to support the sultan.47 He also aimed to counter Western European Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslims and the Ottomans, as Abdülhamid II was considered abroad as an indolent debaucher, a sexualised Oriental despot lording over his harem. A widely circulated cartoon of the sultan portrayed him smoking a water pipe, his face a composite of nude women.48
These drawings of a bloody or sexualised Abdülhamid II are widely known. They reflected the fanciful depictions of the Ottomans that had been circulated in the rest of Europe for centuries. But it is important to pause the chronological narrative of the story of the Ottoman dynasty to see how Ottoman images of themselves and the people they ruled, and other European representations of the Ottomans, had changed. For what is little known is that, like other European colonialists at this point in history, the Ottoman ruling elite harboured prejudiced and racialised views of the various populations they oversaw, especially nomads, Kurds, and Arabs.