Julia Phillips Cohen, Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern

Abstract

One of the main promises of the modernizing Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century was the creation of a new civic order whereby the subject communities – particularly Christians and Jews – would be treated as equal imperial citizens irrespective of their religious and ethnic affiliations. It was expected that the promises of this new order would further cement relations between the state and its subjects. The available research suggests that this promise of equality was not welcomed by the empire’s Muslim elite. The responses of other communities – i.e. Orthodox Greek, Armenian and Jewish – to these modernizing reforms, however, have not been studied in detail.