The late nineteenth century offered a number of opportunities to Ottoman non-Muslims interested in finding new paths of integration into Ottoman state and society. Among these was the prospect of adopting the self-description of “Ottoman,“ a term that was extended to all imperial subjects in the Ottoman constitution of 1876. Yet, this new option coexisted with other, competing definitions of Ottomanness that treated the categories of Ottoman, Muslim, and—in some cases—Turk, as synonymous. Thus, although various non-Muslim individuals sought to identify themselves as ‘Ottomans’ by the late nineteenth century, this did not prevent them from simultaneously identifying themselves as something other than “real” Ottomans in other instances, when they reserved the term exclusively for Muslims. This pattern has been identified in the case of different Ottoman Christian groups, but not yet explored as a pattern of Ottoman Jewish experience. In this paper, I propose to analyze the emergence of this paradoxical situation among various Sephardi Jewish communities within the context of late Ottoman developments. In doing so I follow the lead of gender historian Joan Scott, who has suggested that the principal paradox of the modern French feminist movement was its “need to both accept and to refuse … difference.” Late Ottoman Jewish communities found themselves in a similar position. Myriad Jewish communal leaders attempted to communicate the ideal of Ottomanism and the value of an individual Ottoman identity to their coreligionists, while also speaking through communal infrastructures and in corporate terms. An analysis of the ways in which they negotiated these tensions, I suggest, reveals a mediated and paradoxical form of Ottomanism that is worthy of our attention as we explore the changing dynamics of Ottoman identity and allegiance in the modern period.