Passports for Refugees: Algerians in Palestine in the 1890s

This paper explores the issues of citizenship and identity raised by questions of the rights and obligations of Algerian refugees settling in Northern Palestine and Southern Syria in the 1880s-1890s. Clustered around Acre, Haifa, Tripoli, and Beirut, the response of the Ottoman state to the demands of new communities in an already fragmented social and political environment reveals much about the limitations of Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism.

Much has been written about Jewish, Bosnian, and Circassian immigrants to Palestine in the nineteenth century, but the Algerians provide a fascinating case-study of the limitations of the Ottoman open-door policy to Muslim refugees. The Algerians carried French passports and were part of a number of waves of North African migration to the Ottoman provinces. They requested a number of rights from the Ottoman authority, notably the right to purchase land, and the right to allowances to build their communities. This brought them into conflict with local villagers and landowners, which saw the Ottoman Refugee Commission and local authorities stepping in. They sought Ottoman citizenship but simultaneously requested exemption from military service. The Ottoman state was wary of the interference of the French diplomatic and consular authorities, who weighed into matters from time to time. In this sense, the Algerian refugees occupied a similar legal space to immigrant Jews, albeit with the added institutional support of the Ottoman Refugee Commission.

Examining requests for Ottoman passports by 129 Algerian residents of a village near Tiberias in 1893, including an Arabic petition of the refugees themselves, this paper considers how the refugees themselves viewed citizenship and what becoming an Ottoman meant, and what the cache of documents on Algerian refugees reveals about the documentary regime for passports and citizenship in the late Ottoman state.