“No Longer Abroad”: Ottoman Palestine in the Russian–Jewish Imagination, 1908–14

In a 1912 article that appeared in an imperial Russian Jewish newspaper, a Zionist who had recently moved to Palestine from Russia wrote that the Yishuv – the Jewish minority society of Ottoman Palestine – “is no longer abroad.” He clarified: “each of us has friends, acquaintances, family, or townsmen in the Land of Israel. We exchange letters, they come back to visit, and there is a great deal published [about the Yishuv] in the [Jewish] newspapers [in the Russian Empire].” This paper examines the inter-imperial networks of exchange and movement between the port cities of Odessa and Jaffa, which made it appear to Russia’s Jews as though the Yishuv was familiar and knowable from afar.

In this paper, I discuss how and in what forms the Yishuv entered the Russian-Jewish public sphere as a coherent social category in the years just before WWI, which saw an unprecedented flow of people and goods, as well as information and commentary, between Ottoman Palestine and the Pale of Settlement, or the western borderlands of Tsarist Russia where nearly of the empire’s Jews resided. Using archival and published primary sources, I will highlight such practices as tourism, fundraising for Zionist colonization, and the consumption of goods made in Palestine’s Jewish colonies, as well as the discursive sphere of travel literature, and reporting and commentary in the mass-circulation Yiddish press. While only a small minority of Russia’s Jews became members of Zionist organizations, I argue that by WWI, the Yishuv as a particular way of picturing and talking about Ottoman Palestine had firmly entered the Russian-Jewish public imagination, made possible by an increasingly interconnected world of empire.