Project Details
Projekt
"Next Year in Jerusalem”: Jewish Identity Concepts and Zionism Debates in the Transottoman Migration Society of Palestine between 1880 and 1925.
Applicant
Professor Dr. Stefan Rohdewald
Subject Area
Modern and Contemporary History
Term
from 2017 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 353595765
In immediate continuation of and to finish a sub-project, the application aims to analyze the debates in Hebrew-language newspapers that appeared in the Transottoman society of Palestine in the late Ottoman era and later under the British mandate between 1880 and 1925. The focus is on debates on the “Jewish question”, in which a relocation of Jewish identity and Sephardic-Ashkenazi or Jewish-Arab relations were negotiated. In the center of interest are newspapers published in the cities of Jaffa (as the capital of the Zionist movement and the emerging Hebrew-speaking culture) and Jerusalem (as the only city in Palestine with a Jewish majority that also had a high level of sacred capital for all three book religions) The urban spaces of these two cities offered ideal conditions for Transottoman mobility in the context of the increasing immigration of Jewish arrivals from all directions and their interdependencies with other groups of Jews and non-Jews at the same time.The period in the history of Palestine from 1880 to 1925 is characterized by profound changes in the political and demographic field: the immigration of Jews to an increasing extent, especially from the Russian Empire in response to the increasing anti-Semitism in eastern parts of Europe, the growth of Zionism, the flourishing of national identity schemes and the political changes that the First World War brought with it, followed by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, and finally the submission of Palestine to the British mandate. In the immediate continuation of the first application, the focus of the project investigates Transottoman debates triggered by these developments in intellectual circles in the medium of newspapers: on their pages they found a public platform on which actors of various beliefs and views developed and negotiated their positions. Here, overarching and differentiating identities were created in the local and transregional context of the consolidating Transottoman migration society.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
