During the last decade, much of the historiography on the late Ottoman era has focused on reassessing on how non-Muslim communities were adopting Ottomanism out of a new sense of patriotism, especially following the 1908 Young Turk revolution. What might surprise some, is that this included avid Zionists from among the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine (both rural and urban), something that I bring forth in my upcoming book: Jews and Palestinians in the late Ottoman Era: Claiming the Homeland (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). This paper will move beyond Palestine and focus on range of Jewish settlements in Ottoman Anatolia, which were founded during the 1880s, under the reign of Abdulhamid II. While we know very little about the different settlements, such as Or Yehuda (near Akhisar) and Mesilat Tziyyon (once located on the land of today’s Istanbul neighborhood of Sultanbeyli), it seems that following the 1908 revolution, these communities became centers of Zionist activities. This paper will explore the founding of these communities and how they developed within the local politics of the Ottoman Empire. Further, it will demonstrate how Ottoman Jewish Zionists from Palestine envisioned the future of these communities within a greater project to create mass Jewish migration both to Ottoman Anatolia and Palestine. For this, they first would need to convince the Zionists in Berlin to adopt their project, something that they were eventually unable to do. However, despite this, these Zionists still believed that for the Jewish community in Palestine to develop, the address was in Istanbul, and the inclusion of the communities in Anatolia would play a major role in creating a Zionism connected to the Ottoman Empire. Their ultimate goal was to secure a future place for the Ottoman Jewish community within the political circles of Istanbul, where they could influence Ottoman policy on Palestine, with the aim of not receiving an independent state in Palestine, but rather Jewish autonomous homeland.