A Virtuous and Commercial People?: Rethinking the Eastern Mediterranean Middle Classes
Panel 225, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, October 13 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
The debate regarding the formation and early experiences of middle-classes in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th c. has already a history of its own. Inspired by a similar literature that appeared in the earlier decades within the context of world-economy approaches, it explores the emergence of groups of professionals, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats. These groups share economic interests, civic principles or cultural claims; expand in all relevant spheres of urban life, (at the expense of or in conjunction with the already established elites); and struggle to forge their hegemony -certainly cultural but occasionally political as well. Needless to say there are immense differences between these developments in western Europe (a problematic category itself) and the emergence of middle classes in the geographical area this panel focuses. The purpose, however, is not to plunge into a pointless, euro-centric discussion about the incompatibility of terms and conditions, similarities and dissimilarities, models and variations. Rather, it aims to rethink the Eastern Mediterranean middle classes from the vantage point of multiple modernities and as part of a broader, transnational, even global, process of middle-class formation. The panel will therefore take advantage of the particular forms of plurality that the civic and cultural institutions offer in this region, at an era where the latter is politically dominated mostly (but not only) by the Ottoman rule, and will investigate different conceptual possibilities that can be linked, however ingeniously, to one another: One that connects port-cities (Smyrna, Salonica, Istanbul, Alexandria); another one that connects communities (Greek Orthodox, , Jews, Turks, Donme) and rethinks their importance as agents of middle-class formation beyond the problematic concepts of 'compradore', 'intermediary' or 'entrepreneurial' bourgeoisie; and a third one that brings together different aspects of discourses, institutions, and practices, (the arts, religion, business and moral codes), or moves more broadly along the lines of gender, ethnicity, locality and trans-Mediterranean links. The participants to the panel move themselves across varied national and academic contexts and the areas they study are also diverse. However, whether they focus on religion, music, or commerce, whether they investigate interrelations between members of diverse ethno-religious groups in one city or the aspects of intra-communal interaction in different cities, are inspired by a set of questions that always draw connections between the particular case study, the different localities, and a broader methodological and even epistemological agenda.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Michelle U. Campos
-- Chair
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Dr. Vangelis Kechriotis
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Toufoul Abou-Hodeib
-- Discussant
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Dr. Merih Erol
-- Presenter
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Dr. Paris Papamichos Chronakis
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Dario Miccoli
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Vangelis Kechriotis
The last decades of the Ottoman era in the Easter Mediterranean were marked by intensive demographic and social mobility especially in the urban centers. In an atmosphere of rapid appropriation of western cultural codes, the local elites dominating the diverse ethno-religious communities found it increasingly more difficult to channel new expectations and the resulting resentment in ways that would not jeopardize the existing order. In this respect, among the Greek-Orthodox, the role of the Church was paramount. It has been argued that the Tanzimat bureaucrats while attempting to secularize the structures of representation actually relied on the ecclesiastical hierarchy from the Patriarch of Constantinople at the top to parish priests locally to implement the values and principles of the reformed Empire. Its representatives used their enhanced status in order not only to convey to higher echelons the concerns of their congregations but also in order to disseminate ideas and practices that were not only related to faith. This resonates perfectly with was has been described as the revival of religion and morality in that era both among Muslims and non-Muslims, the state institutions non-withstanding. It can also be perceived as a response to the increasing impact of missionary activity. This paper, based on ecclesiastical publications in Istanbul and Smyrna, (more specifically Ecclesiastical Truth, the official organ of the Patriarchate and Ieros Polykarpos, the latter’s equivalent in Smyrna, as well as a series of publications by Smyrna Metropolitan Vassilios) argues that the church’s encounters with contemporary middle class values triggered new perceptions of the relation between the former and its congregation, always bearing upon issues of morality and order. It further aims to substantiate the view that the alliances that occasionally took place at a local level between ecclesiastical prelates and newly emerging lay elites inspired by middle-class perceptions of social order are not only based on expediency. The similarities in the discourses employed lead me assume that many church leaders have very consciously taken upon themselves the mission of saving their flock not only in the afterlife but also in the present one, providing the middle classes with the perfect ally in their attempt to social engineering and forging a hegemony based on a new urban morality that becomes a metaphor for a culture perception of the nation.
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Dr. Paris Papamichos Chronakis
Recent historiography on late Ottoman port cities moves across two distinct currents of analysis. The first, a cultural-historical one, focuses on questions of urbanity and explores the impact of modernity on social space, the emergence of new social groups, interethnic coexistence and conflict, and eventually on the restructuring of communal and urban identities among those cities’ emerging middle-class strata. A second current explores the port cities from a socio-economic perspective as economic hubs integrating the Ottoman Empire as a periphery in the capitalist world economy. Despite their important contributions, these two currents rarely enter into dialogue with each other while both of them also seem to pay only scant attention to the principal historical agents, namely the merchants and entrepreneurs of the late Ottoman port cities.
The proposed paper aims to bring these two currents together and offer a more systematic account of the historical experience of late Ottoman port-city merchants. Introducing the category of the ‘port merchant’, it will focus on the Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Ottoman Turkish, and Donme merchants of Salonica as shapers of the middle-class, interethnic, and civic character of the city’s elite. The establishment of a local chamber of commerce in 1882 provided the institutional framework for the coming together of a multi-ethnic group of prominent merchants delineating its boundaries anew. The paper will map their involvement in a broad web of weak and strong, open and close networks. It will be argued that the Chamber empowered the merchants in two ways. On the one hand, it provided a neutral space for the cultivation of internal links between them. These links were based on the shared notion of a common business and civic ‘interest’ that elevated the entrepreneur to the Salonican par excellence. On the other hand, the members of the Chamber benefited collectively from the external links each one of them individually contributed as part of numerous and overlapping associational, communal, municipal, business, and kinship networks. Institutions and/as networks thus facilitated group formation among the merchants of Salonica. At the same time though, they also determined this group’s internal hierarchies, placing the Donme rather than the Jews at the top and marginalizing the Greek Orthodox. The formation of a middle class identity in Salonica had therefore clear professional connotations and was in a constant interaction with the communal and civic identities concurrently being shaped.
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Dr. Dario Miccoli
On 3 June 1916, a huge crowd gathered at the station Zizinia of Alexandria to take part to the funeral of baron Jacques de Menasce – one of the most prominent members of the city’s Jewish community. The funeral procession, wrote the newspaper La Réforme, was composed of men and women of the most diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds mourning, as if they all belonged to “the same family”, the loss of “a true Egyptian”. But who where these men and women and to what kind of family did they belong? And then, what did it mean to define as “a true Egyptian” a man that held Austro-Hungarian citizenship and whose brother was a personal friend of the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann? Taking this forgotten and apparently meaningless funeral ceremony as a starting point, my paper – which will be based on a range of sources derived from French and Israeli archives – will reconstruct the cultural and gender imaginary of turn-of-the-century Alexandria and of the local Jewish middle and upper classes in particular. I will illustrate how a modern Alexandrian Jewish identity was publicly displayed, and in which ways this reflected shifting approaches to gender, family, and nationhood. To do so, I will first concentrate on the introduction of an innovative ceremony of bat mitzvah by the city’s chief rabbi in 1901 in cooperation with the local branch of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Secondly, I will move to the analysis of the local consequences of World War One in terms of urban sociability, gender relations and philanthropic endeavours. While opting for a local and micro perspective, my paper would like to demonstrate that the city of Alexandria, and its Jewish milieu, were deeply embedded into a wider trans-Mediterranean space that included Jews, Muslims, and Christians and that – influenced by both Ottoman legacies and colonial modernities – extended from Alexandria to Salonika, Smyrna and Beirut.
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Dr. Merih Erol
This paper addresses the complexity of being Greek Orthodox in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It looks at questions of imperial belonging, supranational and national identities in the Ottoman Empire, especially focusing on its Greek Orthodox middle class. It explores how music relates to national, religious, and class identities in Stanbuliote Greek Orthodox urban groups in the nineteenth century. It treats identities not as singular, given, and constant categories, rather as multiple and in flux. The paper examines the entangled developments of those identities and the practices involved, within the context of the mid-nineteenth century imperial reforms and their impacts on the millets, the penetration of European patterns and Western cultural impact, and social class formation. To give an example, class and national identities were intertwined in the activities of the voluntary societies and associations which were founded by the Greek Orthodox middle-class. And music was significant both for the imagination and assertion of national identity, and for the articulation of class identity.
In the last decades of the empire, hybrid, converging, and conflicting identities were part and parcel of the mixed and mingled populations of major Ottoman cities which some historians have tended to refer to as the phenomenon of ‘cosmopolitanism’. One of the aims of the paper is to open up a discussion over this term, and as opposed to the colonial or semi-colonial framework with which the term has been almost exclusively associated, to point to the internal and indigenous social and cultural fermentations which did not necessarily derive from an increased Western impact on the different levels of the society.
As a remarkable space of hybrid practices, inter-communal interaction, collaboration and debate, the paper finally focuses on discussions over musical heritage between Ottoman Greek and Turkish musicians at the turn-of-the-century where inclusivist and exclusivist identity discourses met and clashed with one another.
