8 - Majority–Minority Relations

Summary

WITHIN the Ottoman empire's vast kaleidoscope of national, ethnic, and religious groups, Syria was itself a smaller mosaic. The majority of its Muslim population was Sunni, but other religious streams including Shi^˓ites, ^˓Alawites, and Druze were also represented. The Syrian Christian population was similarly divided, consisting of Latins, Maronites, Greek Orthodox, eastern sects, and, in the period under study, Protestants as well. The Syrian Jewish population, by contrast, displayed much greater homogeneity than either the Muslims or the Christians, especially after the disappearance of the Damascus Karaite community in the late eighteenth century. While relationships between different groups of Muslims—and, indeed, different groups of Christians— were not always harmonious, the divisions between Muslims and Christians, and between Muslims and Jews, were even more pronounced.

Jewish–Muslim Relations

An interesting feature of the relationship between the Muslim majority and the Jewish minority in Syria, and indeed elsewhere in the Ottoman empire, is the scarcity of references to Jews in Arabic works and in the expanding nineteenth-century range of Arabic newspapers. While this would not be surprising if the Jewish community had played only a marginal or insignificant role in Ottoman society, this was certainly not the case for Syrian Jewry. Until 1875 a thin stratum of wealthy Jews comprised the economic backbone of the local regime, profoundly influencing the economy through its involvement in banking, the setting of exchange rates, and the value of government bonds. The significant attention paid by foreign sources—such as Christian accounts of travels in the East—to the Jewish community in general, and their amazement at the enormous wealth and local economic power of some Jewish families, stand in stark contrast to the silence of the Arabic sources.

One scholarly viewpoint attributes this phenomenon to Muslim animosity towards their Jewish neighbours. From this perspective, nothing but hatred and jealousy could possibly explain the overlooking of the Farhi family ‘in all the Arabic and Turkish literature of the period’.4 But this argument, grounded in a limited number of sources that exhibit narrow-mindedness, bitterness, and envy of the Jewish bankers’ success and status, is inadequate. If hatred were indeed the explanation, we would rather expect the contemporary Arabic literature to be replete with similar anti-Jewish outbursts. As this is not the case, therefore, it is the sources cited in support of this argument that must be regarded as exceptional.