Confronting minorization: colonial missionaries and Ottoman millets in the eyes of a Nineteenth Century Baghdadi Rabbi

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following the Tanzimat reforms in 1839 the Ottoman Mashriq crystallized as a contact zone where different understandings of the reforms, citizenship, and collective identifications evaluated. While the European colonial powers enhanced an individualized understanding of religion and religious difference, the discourse that was enhanced by the Sublime Porte emphasized the meaning of the reforms as a component in the attempt to maintain the unification of the empire as a political unit, securing the various collective centers of identification of Ottoman citizens through the millet system. These discourses were reflected in various understandings of the local communities of their own status within the developing political framework. This article examines this contact zone through the discussion of the writings of one of the prominent figures of the Baghdadi Jewish community – R. Yosef Hayyim (1834-1909) – and the various ways in which he depicted the contested discourses of ”modernity”, citizenship and autonomy. While Hayyim negated the European emancipatoric model, which was resulted in the act of ”minorization” of the Jews, he adopted, though hesitantly, the Ottoman model of the Tanzimat. He saw this model as one that confronted the individualized understanding of religious difference and therefore guaranteed a certain degree of communal autonomy.