Were Ashkenazim “European”? Thinking Through the Racial Ambiguity of Ashkenazim in Palestine

The migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern and Central Europe to Palestine in the second half of the19th century, put a growing number of Ashkenazim in direct encounter with the Ottoman authorities, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, and with (Muslim and Christian) Palestinian Arabs. This encounter has often been described in the scholarship in racial and civilisational terms. This categorisation pits Europeans (Ashkenazim) against Orientals (Sephardim, Ottomans and Arabs), in what others have described as the clash between colonial settlers and natives. And yet how were these encounters racialised by the relevant participants and by external observers? Did Ashkenazim understand themselves to be European? Were they understood in this way by locals, by the Ottomans, and by diplomats of their origin countries? What role did the physical difference, sartorial code, and habitus play in such racialisations? And how did it relate to Jewish and Arab self-understandings and self-fashioning, and dominant race theories of the day, which categorised Jews (including Ashkenazim) as a Semitic race?

In this paper I will examine these questions, arguing that European self-consciousness was not a starting point, but rather one that developed among Ashkenazim arriving or living in Palestine, and was manifested in ambiguous and contradictory ways.