Summary
Beinin’s term, in Chapter 2 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, for the millet identity of Jews (and other non-Muslims) in a multi-ethnic, multiconfessional empire: a worldview of protected religious community, autonomous institutions and cultural symbiosis inside a hierarchy, which blended with nationalism in Egyptian Jewish practice in ways “incompatible with the logic of the nation-state” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 514-533).
Details
- “This millet identity can be termed communitarianism: the worldview and self-perception of Jews (and other non-Muslims) living in a multi-ethnic, multiconfessional empire. There was a high level of toleration, communal autonomy, and cultural symbiosis among Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Individual Jews achieved high positions in the political and economic arenas in late Ottoman and monarchical Egypt. But Muslims occupied the leading military and political positions, and their right to do so was not seriously challenged” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 514-533).
- Until 1914 Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire and its Jewish residents were juridically a religious community protected by a Muslim state, governed by autonomous institutions under the millet system, with members consisting of those who accepted the authority of Jewish law (halakhah) as interpreted by rabbinical courts — though by the twentieth century few resorted to these courts except for personal status: marriage, divorce, adoption, burial and inheritance (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 514-533).
- The nation-state’s formal apparatus promised to abolish the hierarchy among religious communities; secular-liberal nationalist theory defined all citizens as equal members of the nation, “But by dividing citizens into a “majority” and “minorities,” secular-liberalism created new and somewhat less transparent forms of hierarchy” (Chapter 2, note 19). The legal autonomy of non-Muslims was not solely a colonial product: Egypt recognized the communal courts of all its religious communities until 1955, and “the state colluded in undermining its own sovereignty for over three decades because the authority of the Muslim shari’a courts derived from the same conceptual order that sustained the non-Muslim religious courts. Until Gamal Abdel Nasser, no political leader commanded sufficient authority to challenge it” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 514-533).
- “Egyptian Jews, like others trapped by the false promises of liberalism, blended elements of communitarianism and nationalism in practices and worldviews shaped by the European presence in the Middle East yet incompatible with the logic of the nation-state” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 514-533).
- The Karaites are the concept’s fullest case: their communal council’s archaic name (majlis milli) expressed their self-conception as an ethnic-religious Ottoman millet, and “by the 1940s, most Karaites had only partially assimilated the secular-liberal notions of citizenship and nationality recently introduced to Egypt. They saw themselves as a protected religious minority in a Muslim country, employed concepts and institutions derived from the Islamic cultural and political tradition, and regarded themselves as Egyptian in those terms.” Even the reforming youth of Al-Kalim, in urging national participation, acted from communal concern for the community’s image — “itself a form of communitarian sentiment” (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 534-574).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Karaites, Mutamassirun, Al-Kalim