States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
244
States of Separation: Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
244Hardcover(First Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520292154 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/18/2017 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 244 |
| Sales rank: | 730,301 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
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States of Separation
Transfer, Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
By Laura Robson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Laura RobsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29215-4
CHAPTER 1
Origins
The idea that physical separation could serve as a solution to the problems of building a new world of nation-states arrived swiftly and dramatically on the global stage after the First World War. Transfer, resettlement, partition, ethnic engineering of various sorts became the solutions of the hour, as an international grab bag of diplomats, bureaucrats, nationalists, and refugees grappled with the astonishing collapse of the old empires and the problems of creating putatively representative systems of governance in the violently forged new nation-states of the Middle East.
Though its rise and broad acceptance seemed to happen rather suddenly, the concept of ethnic separation had some crucial precursors. Three major earlier iterations of protoseparatism arose almost simultaneously in the context of the late nineteenth-century encounters between the expanding British and French empires and the struggling Ottoman state: British and French communalizing policies in their colonies; the Zionist movement and a new discourse of Jewish ethnicity and nationhood; and ethnoreligious violence in the Ottoman-Balkan wars of the early twentieth century. All three of these phenomena, apparently disparate as they were, converged in the Arab Middle East as it was drawn into the spheres of European colonialism and Zionist ambition.
The peace agreements articulated and institutionalized these nascent concepts of ethnic separation. The new League of Nations was charged with overseeing and administering two major new international structures: the minorities treaties defining the rights of "minority" communities in the new nation-states of eastern Europe, and the mandate system giving Britain and France temporary right to rule over the former Ottoman Arab provinces. Both frameworks assumed ethnic nationalism as the basis for citizens' relations to the state and assigned the League the responsibility of policing the relationship between ethnicity, religion, and citizenship in the supervised territories of eastern Europe and the Middle East. By the mid-1920s, these earlier precedents had helped shape a new set of international structures that emphasized ethnic belonging as a fundamental aspect of modern statehood.
ETHNICITY AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE EUROPEAN EMPIRES
The rise of race science interacted with the massive expansion of European empire into Africa in the late nineteenth century, bolstering concepts of inherent, unchanging racial identities and feeding into political decisions to tie ethnicity and race to citizenship and nationhood. The pseudoscience investigating the biological basis of race concerned itself not only with colonial subjects but also, centrally, with the question of Jewish otherness. As Jews took an increased role in public life following the process of legal emancipation unfolding in nineteenth-century Britain and France, the question of racial and biological formulations of Jewish identity became a major topic in an emerging science of race, and many Jewish as well as non-Jewish scientists accepted the premise that there was a biological basis for political and social group characteristics.
By the late nineteenth century, this premise constituted one of the primary assumptions of late European imperial politics in both the colonies and the metropole. Public conversation about Darwin's theories of evolution unfolded alongside increased contact with Asian, African, and Middle Eastern populations understood as "primitives," particularly in the form of popular public exhibitions of racial and ethnic types. At the same time, a rising sense of white solidarity emerged from settler colonies from Australia to South Africa, as politicians and the public alike began to internalize the failures of eighteenth-century projects of cultural and political assimilation among colonized peoples. As the empires expanded, race consciousness became not only a legitimization of imperial rule but also a mode of governance in itself, structuring and limiting indigenous peoples' access to the colonial state.
British and French colonial officials accepted similar assumptions about the centrality and immutability of race, ethnicity, and religion, but created different political and legal systems around these ideas. First in India and then in Africa, British officials developed what they called a "status quo" policy: essentially, that imperial rule should seek to avoid major changes to cultural practice and particularly religious or ethnic difference, both because "native" forms of cultural practice were innate and unalterable and because such changes might unnecessarily raise resistance to colonial rule. As the noted Orientalist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and an important early figure in academic "Orientalism," wrote to the governor-general of India in 1788, "Nothing could ... be wiser than by a legislative Act, to assure the Hindu and Mussulman subjects of Great Britain that the private laws, which they severally hold sacred, and violation of which they would have thought the most grievous oppression, should not be suppressed by a new system, of which they could have no knowledge, and which they must have considered as imposed on them by a spirit of rigour and intolerance." Such views combined new modern conceptions of race (Jones was the originator of the "Aryan Theory," which posited the shared origins of Indo-European languages and gave rise to the concept of the "Aryan race") with practical strategies for governing large numbers of resistant colonial subjects.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British imperial law in India approached the problems of governing pluralistic populations by enshrining purportedly traditional communal divides in formal legal terms. Beginning in 1909, a series of laws governing legislative representation established separate electorates for Muslims and Hindus. In so doing, they created a new political landscape, making rigid new political categories out of previously more flexible social ones and defining Muslims and Hindus as essentially different, politically and culturally. In Egypt, British officials (and some Coptic nationalists) developed a similar concept of the Copts as the only true descendants of the ancient Egyptians — "uncontaminated by intermarriage with Arabs and negroes," as one enthusiast put it. Some imperial propagandists explicitly compared the Copts to India's Muslims, presenting them as a subjugated group requiring protection from a potentially oppressive majority and promoting the idea of separate Coptic representation. These concepts of colonial "minorities" often made explicit reference to European Jews, demonstrating how metropolitan unease over Jewish political participation could make its way into unrelated colonial contexts. The Copts, Egyptian high commissioner Eldon Gorst told Edward Grey, were unfit for executive administrative positions because they "played towards the [Muslim] peasant, the same part as does the Jew in Russia."
This presentation of the Copts as a separate race akin to the Jews and requiring different imperial treatment soon expanded to include other non-Muslim communities. In particular, British imperial officials began to view Ottoman Armenians and Assyrians as examples of "original" Christians whose protection was incumbent on the European Christian powers. As an increased missionary presence across the Middle East coincided with a number of archaeological excavations of the ancient ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, and especially with the discovery of the Nimrud palace of Ashurnasirpal II in 1848, British enthusiasts drew on these recent discoveries of pre-Islamic Assyrian greatness to promote the idea that Assyrians were direct descendants of this ancient empire just as Copts were descendants of the pharaohs. "The present Assyrian," one missionary wrote in 1929, "does represent the ancient Assyrian stock, the subject of Sargon and Sennacherib. ... The writer has known men who claimed to be able to trace their own lineal descent from King Nebuchadnezzar." This racialization of religious difference, drawing partly on metropolitan interpretations of Jewish otherness, was becoming central to the nature of colonial rule across the British empire.
In the French empire, indigenous Jewish communities in North Africa became a particular focus of colonial efforts to establish the relationship between communal identity and political rights. Following the invasion and occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, the French government embarked on a systematic program to encourage French settlement on a mass scale. To attract colons (settlers), the colonial government appropriated 2,700,000 hectares of territory — nearly a quarter of Algeria's arable land — from indigenous Algerians and reallocated it to settlers for agricultural development. This ethnically based mass displacement, accompanied by mass murders of civilians that some scholars have viewed as essentially genocidal, foreshadowed the further development of a highly (and violently) ethnically conscious colonial policy.
In 1848, Algeria became the only French colonial space to be incorporated into French territory; settlers were recognized as French citizens and the government of Algeria reenvisioned as part of the metropolitan administration. Algeria's integration into the French metropolitan bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century institutionalized settler privilege by imposing French law, ending indigenous legal practices, and formalizing French citizenship rights for the colons. In 1865 the metropolitan government declared that French citizenship would be open to indigenous Algerians who were willing to convert to Christianity, declare their adherence to French cultural values, and publicly reject Arab or Berber ties. In practice, of course, few Algerians took up this option, leaving French citizenship and its attendant political, legal, and economic privileges almost entirely to the European settler population.
The newly formed Alliance Israélite Universelle now sought to apply this idea to Algerian Jews. Founded in 1860 by the French Jewish lawyer Adolphe Crémieux, the Alliance was initially intended to promote the cause of universal Jewish emancipation, particularly in the territories of eastern Europe now emerging as semi-independent nation-states. Almost simultaneously, the Alliance began to move in the imperial sphere as well, opening Jewish schools across French North Africa and Turkey and promoting acculturation to French metropolitan secularism. Its members — mainly highly educated French Jews committed to the principle of assimilation — advocated for extending the principle of Jewish emancipation to Sephardic communities under French colonial rule in the Maghrib. In 1870, the Alliance successfully pushed through what became known as the Crémieux Decree, which gave French citizenship to approximately 35,000 "native" Jews in Algeria without altering the second-class "indigenous" status held by Algerian Muslims and Berbers. The Crémieux Decree's redefinition of North African Jewish identity as carrying specific political rights thus legally differentiated Algerian Jews from their Muslim compatriots.
This development foreshadowed decades of colonial decision making across North Africa and the Middle East that would tie religious community to political rights and representation — often through violent dispossession, reallocation of territory, and forced evacuation practices developed with reference to race, ethnicity, and religion. It also suggested how in both the British and French imperial experience, anxieties surrounding Jewish assimilation and emancipation at home contributed to emerging concepts of race and governance in the colonies. As the nineteenth century wore on, these discourses gradually translated into structural enforcement of racial and religious difference in colonized spaces from Algeria to India, setting the stage for the international acceptance of geographical separation for different races, ethnicities, and religions. Indeed, such practices had important parallels in other settler colonial projects, including American expansion westward in the nineteenth century, German colonial settlement in southwest Africa, Dutch colonial policy in Indonesia, and British colonization in Australia and New Zealand.
A NEW SEPARATIST MODEL: THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY ZIONISM
Such ideas were not the purview of British and French colonial officials alone. By the turn of the century, the emerging Zionist movement had not only begun to superimpose a politicized nationalism on European Jewish communal identity but also to propose physical separation as a solution to Europe's "Jewish problem," in ways that reflected and interacted with colonial concepts of ethnic geographies. By the time of the First World War, Zionism had developed a small-scale but concrete ideology and practice of removal and transfer that spanned the European and Ottoman spheres.
The idea of mass European Jewish transfer to Palestine originated in Russia and eastern Europe as a response to the often violent anti-Semitism of the tsarist regime. As Jewish emigration out of Europe — particularly to the United States — became a tide, some Jewish thinkers began to consider the idea of collective relocation to Palestine, with the idea of manifesting some form of Jewish nationhood. By the mid-nineteenth century, even before leaders like the Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl had begun to formulate Zionist goals for a Jewish state, French and British Jewish activists had already begun to discuss financing for mass settlement in Palestine for persecuted Russian Jews. By 1897, when Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, a small group of Zionist activists had begun to articulate the goals and approaches of the new movement in more specific ways. They sought to solve Europe's "Jewish question" through two primary tactics: a nationalization of Jewish identity and a literal, physical repositioning of that nationhood elsewhere.
Herzl argued that this nationalization represented the natural outcome of Jewish emancipation: "It could not have been the historical intent of emancipation that we should cease to be Jews, for when we tried to mingle with the others we were rebuffed. Rather, the historical intent of emancipation must have been that we were to create a homeland for our liberated nation." Removal from Europe was as central to his vision as resettlement in Palestine. Writing privately in his diary, Herzl was already considering other options for the transfer of Europe's Jews: "I am thinking of giving the movement a closer territorial goal, preserving Zion as the final goal. The poor masses need immediate help, and Turkey is not yet so desperate as to accede to our wishes. ... Thus we must organize ourselves for a goal attainable soon, under the Zion flag and maintaining all of our history claims. Perhaps we can demand Cyprus from England, and even keep an eye on South Africa or America — until Turkey is dissolved."
Following a failed attempt to interest the German government in intervening with the Ottoman state on behalf of Zionist interests, Herzl turned his attention and energies to looking for allies in Britain. Zionism had already attracted some interest and sympathy there, particularly among evangelical Protestants; the Jewish Chronicle, based in London, was the first to publish Herzl's major proposals, and Herzl had good relations with a number of Jewish leaders there. So in 1899, the Jewish Colonial Trust (the Zionist bank founded to fund settlement efforts) established itself in Britain, and the following year the Zionist congress was moved from Basel to London. Diplomatic efforts to interest the British government in the project of Zionism slowly started to bear fruit.
British interest in Zionism rested on three principles: unease with the Jews as an element in British political and economic life, evangelical Protestant interest in claims over the "Holy Land," and — perhaps most crucially — a sense of the possibilities Zionist settlement opened up for imperial expansion. The turn of the twentieth century saw many Britons expressing a discomfort with Jews as prominent actors in the British political sphere, viewing them as a potential threat to the racialized hierarchies of the liberal imperial order. The well-known critic of imperialism J.A. Hobson gave voice to this anti-Semitic feeling in his description of developments in South Africa in 1899, suggesting that the whole of the mining industry there had fallen into the hands of German Jews coming into South Africa via England: "Many of them are the veriest scum of Europe. ... These men will rig the politics when they have the franchise. Many of them have taken English names and the extent of the Jew power is thus partially concealed. I am not exaggerating one whit." Anxiety over the possibility of impoverished eastern European Jewish refugees flooding into Britain also contributed to this unease, leading in 1902 to a "Royal Commission on Alien Immigration" to investigate Jewish migration and, three years later, the passage of the "Aliens Act" introducing restrictions on immigration to the United Kingdom. Anti-Semitism of this nature overlapped with a rising evangelical Protestantism that viewed Jews as potential targets of mission activity and was fascinated with the "Holy Land," where biblical archaeology and early mass tourism were beginning to intersect to make political claims for Western Christian interests.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from States of Separation by Laura Robson. Copyright © 2017 Laura Robson. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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