Class has long been a category of analysis for historians of the modern Middle East, although it has been largely neglected in recent decades with the gradual abandonment of Marxist or Marxist-inspired theories, and the advent of the Cultural – and other – Turns in Middle East Studies. This panel aims at renewing scholarly interest in class as an object of study by reframing it as social hierarchy, and synthesizing economic, social, and cultural theoretical models. Preferring the Bourdieusian concept of social hierarchy over social class allows for a focus on symbolic, cultural, social, and other kinds of capital, rather than just on an economic one, in understanding the different, everyday, ways of life (habitus) of different groups in Middle Eastern societies, while not decentering the underlying importance of economic power. Moreover, the social hierarchy framework allows for a fuller consideration of the performance of social status in different settings and daily interactions as a means not only for affirming it, but also for achieving it.
The four presentations in this panel examine the social hierarchy in very different societies across the region, and from different added perspectives. One presentation explores the establishment of the Persische Teppich Gesellschaft (PETAG) factories across Iran in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, revealing how a new social class developed around PETAG labor as a consequence of the entanglement between domestic industrialisation and global imperialism which the company’s actions represent. Moving to Istanbul and Izmir, the second presentation foregrounds the experiences of Sephardi petty traders, artisans, and guildsmen in the late Ottoman period. First recovering how they understood their position within the prevailing social hierarchy, the paper then points to how the world of petty trade, and everyday life more broadly, reveals previously uninterrogated zones of contact between Jewish and Muslim neighbors. The third presentation studies Jewish embourgeoisement in early 20th century Cairo: by focusing on the performance of their newly achieved social status in that city’s public places, it writes Jews back into the history of the Egyptian effendiyyah, and writes effendis back into the history of Egyptian cosmopolitanism. The final presentation focuses on the industrial and urban milieu in modern Egypt, and challenges the validity of class as a social category to study social hierarchy among individuals and groups in daily life. It suggests that organic concepts such as satr (cover) better capture how industrial workers and urban populations understood their social positionality.
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Dr. Alon Tam
The history of Cairo’s Jewish community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a history of migration and embourgeoisement. As a community of relatively recent immigrants to Egypt, moving up the social ladder shaped their habitus: their choice of occupation and business, their choice of education, their choice of neighborhood, the languages they chose to learn and speak, the social codes they chose to practice, how they worshiped and externalized their Jewishness, even their political choices. These choices also needed to be publicly performed, not only for affirming their social status, but also for achieving it. As the primary place for socializing and networking, there were no better places in which to perform that social status than the city’s coffeehouses: they were a crucible for the emerging Egyptian middle-class, or effendiyyah, during that time. Examining how Egyptian Jews partook in the social culture of those and other urban spaces in the capital shows the lengths that they went to in order to move up that social hierarchy and to integrate within that Egyptian middle-class. This paper argues that for Egyptian Jews, this embourgeoisement held a powerful promise of equality and assimilation, equally or even more powerful than official promises of equal citizenship, or nationalist and communist promises of religious-blind equality. Moreover, examining the performance of middle-class culture in Cairo’s coffeehouses shows that the so-called Cosmopolitan culture of the Egyptian Jewish bourgeoisie, in contrast to the notions of diversity and pluralism that it conjures, was rather robust and homogenized, and was part of, rather than stood against, Egyptian effendi culture. Thus, attention to social hierarchy and habitus has the strong potential of writing Jews back into the history of the Egyptian effendiyyah, and writing effendis back into the history of Egyptian cosmopolitanism.
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Dr. Hanan H. Hammad
Focusing on the industrial and urban milieu in modern Egypt, I challenge the validity of class as a social category to study social hierarchy among individuals and groups in daily life. I suggest that organic concepts such satr, literally and metaphorically means cover, as vague as it is, better capturing how industrial workers, and urban populations in general, understood their social positionality. Based on intensive archival research on one of the largest industrial compounds in modern Egypt, I argue that the concepts of working and middle class fell short from capturing the lived reality of daily life. Among the urban populations, boundaries based on socioeconomic status could be blurred and contradicted respectability based on reputation, visibility, and origin. On the other hand, industrial workers experienced rigid hierarchy based on their skills, positions, and origins. Although they were among the industrial workers, foremen and supervisors did not equate their positionality with blue-collar workers and aspired to be grouped with the afandiyya. Divisions among workers and their individual strategies for survival were ingrained in their daily life more than the drive for a collective movement based on working-class solidarity.
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Ms. Dina Danon
The literature on Mediterranean port cities in the late Ottoman period has focused disproportionately on both the foreign merchant class as well as local bourgeoisies. Yet such an approach sidelines much of the urban fabric, leaving many dynamics of city life uninterrogated. This marginalization is particularly the case for the Sephardi communities of the eastern Mediterranean basin, who in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly concentrated not in the global commerce of the Empire’s ports but rather in small-scale petty trade, artisanship, and manual labor. Drawing on unstudied archival material as well as newspapers in Ladino, this paper attempts to remedy this silence by foregrounding the experiences of petty traders, artisans, and guildsmen in the Sephardi communities of Izmir and Istanbul. Through an array of sources from everyday life such as guild agreements, inventories, newspaper editorials, and correspondence, I interrogate their discourse of attachment to an “esnaf,” a term borrowed from Turkish signifying both guilds as well as a broad array of middling and lower social classes. Tracking its increasing prominence in varied Ladino-language sources in the waning years of the Empire, I argue that the “esnaf,” with both its real and imagined boundaries, became a crucial category of belonging for Ottoman Sephardi Jews. It not only scaffolded their daily life, business interactions, and personal relationships, but animated their growing self-awareness as “working class” and ultimately undergirded their sense of what it meant to be “modern.” Furthermore, by prioritizing the esnaf and the spaces in which it is most visible, such as the street, the courtyard, and market-stall, the paper points to how a focus on socioeconomic class uncovers shared zones of contact between Jews and their Muslim neighbors that have until now remained unexplored.
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Ms. Fatemeh Masjedi
The European rivalry over Iran’s raw materials and human resources (cheap labor) took German entrepreneurs to the north-western city of Tabriz in early twentieth century, where they established the carpet weaving factory of Persische Teppich Gesellschaft (PETAG) as yet another project of global capitalism. The women, children and men who were employed there as weavers shaped a new range of carpet industry labor. From the social perspective, this industry introduced nomads and villagers to urban settled social life. The large carpet factory changed the image of carpet weaving as being a poor, family-oriented, regional industry. Along with this shift in the nature of manufacturing and trade, the social relations between weavers, masters, merchants and managers also transformed. By investigating the establishment and operations of PETAG’s factories in Iran, this paper reveals how a new social class developed around PETAG factories’ labor as a consequence of the domestic industrialisation and global imperialism that the company’s actions represent.
