“Next Year in Jerusalem“: Jewish Identity Concepts and Zionism Debates in the Transottoman Migration Society of Palestine between 1880 and 1925

Alexandra Gerykova
Together with the sub-project by Eveline Dierauff, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project focuses on debates in the first two decades of the 20th century on collective Jewish identity among Jewish immigrants from Russia to Jaffa/Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It shows how collective self-definitions of all social groups present in Palestine were redefined in translocal constructions of the near and distant “others”. As its main source the project analyses articles from contemporary local Hebrew newspapers that establish the collective identity of Jewish immigrants, but also elaborate on different outlooks between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim among them. In addition, these newspapers describe relations with Arabs and Christians, also observing from afar the escalating Jewish-Christian clashes in Russia and their repercussions. Furthermore, selected biographies and autobiographies of individual persons will be taken into account. These case studies lay out transregional debates of a society that was continuously changed by migration, particularly from Russia and the (formerly) Ottoman territories of South Eastern Europe. It was marked by the formation and fortification of new identity concepts as well as the transformation of national identity in the context of Ottoman constitutional patriotism after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.