Rethinking the yishuv: late-Ottoman Palestine’s Jewish communities revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues for a significant revision in the understanding of Jews in late-Ottoman Palestine: from a model of a singular community (the yishuv) to a model of multiple communities, embedded within local, regional and global networks. The conceptualization of Palestine’s Jewry is reappraised, from the Jerusalem School to recent literature. Despite acknowledging their ethnic and linguistic diversity, the historiography has long portrayed Palestine’s Jews as a sui-generis community, a Jewish microcosm united in its unique attachment to Eretz Israel. It was studied as part of Jewish history, in isolation from its Middle Eastern context. In contrast, recent Relational Studies stressed Jewish connections to the Arab and Ottoman environment in Palestine. The article examines the self-perception of Jewish communities as plural and heterogeneous, through a survey of early Hebrew press. It traces the genealogy of the term yishuv, from an ideological project of revival and colonization in the 1860s, to an imagined pan-Jewish national community after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. This shift was boosted not only by Zionism and Jewish diaspora influence, but also by Ottomanism. Even then, Jewish communities in Palestine continued to operate separately in a highly fragmented manner well into the British Mandate period.