Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World

Abstract

1n this interesting and well-researched book, Bruce Masters analyses the history of Chris tian and Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces and how they fared within a Muslim majority and hierarchy. By and large, this important study is a story of modernization, identity, and ecclesiastical politics that focuses primarily on Christian communities in Aleppo, Syria. The book's main themes are somewhat familiar: How Christian and Jewish communities were in an advantageous position to benefit from increasing European influence in the Middle East, and how a secular political identity (Arab nationalism) emerged in the Levant. The book's value lies not in its overarching thesis, but rather in the details of the story and the impressive research upon which this well-crafted narrative is based. Masters chronicles how the identities of Christians and Jews evolved due to their increasing contact with western influences, or, as Masters labels it, "intrusion." The status quo was forever transformed because many Christians began to distance themselves, economically and socially, from their Muslim neighbors. Masters, a historian who teaches at Connecticut's Wesleyan University, contends that the western intrusion altered Muslim attitudes toward native Christians. In the nineteenth century, local Christians would serve for some Muslims as "convenient surrogates for the anger that could only rarely be expressed directly against the Europeans." Although the Arab provinces experienced serious sectarian strife in the nineteenth century, these antagonisms were, by and large, absent in the ...