Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World

Abstract

1n this interesting and well-researched book, Bruce Masters analyses the historyof Chris tian and Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire's Arabprovinces and how they fared within a Muslim majority and hierarchy. Byand large, this important study is a story of modernization, identity, and ecclesiasticalpolitics that focuses primarily on Christian communities in Aleppo,Syria. The book's main themes are somewhat familiar: How Christian andJewish communities were in an advantageous position to benefit fromincreasing European influence in the Middle East, and how a secular politicalidentity (Arab nationalism) emerged in the Levant. The book's value liesnot in its overarching thesis, but rather in the details of the story and theimpressive research upon which this well-crafted narrative is based.Masters chronicles how the identities of Christians and Jews evolveddue to their increasing contact with western influences, or, as Masters labelsit, "intrusion." The status quo was forever transformed because manyChristians began to distance themselves, economically and socially, fromtheir Muslim neighbors. Masters, a historian who teaches at Connecticut'sWesleyan University, contends that the western intrusion altered Muslimattitudes toward native Christians. In the nineteenth century, local Christianswould serve for some Muslims as "convenient surrogates for the anger thatcould only rarely be expressed directly against the Europeans."Although the Arab provinces experienced serious sectarian strife in thenineteenth century, these antagonisms were, by and large, absent in the ...