Karl Popper on Jewish Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

This paper re-contextualizes Karl Popper's thought within the anti-nationalist cosmopolitan tradition of the Central European intelligentsia. It argues that, although Popper was brought up in an assimilated Jewish Viennese household, from the perspective of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah tradition, he can be seen to be a modern day heterodox Maskil (scholar). Popper's ever present fear of anti-Semitism and his refusal to see Judaism as compatible with cosmopolitanism raise important questions as to the realisable limits of the cosmopolitan ideal. His inability to integrate an understanding of Jewishness in his cosmopolitan political ideal resulted in his strong opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel. By comparing Popper's positions with those of Hermann Cohen, another neo-Kantian philosopher, I argue that although their solutions fall short in certain respects, their arguments have continuing purchase in recent debates on cosmopolitanism and the problem of the integration of minority groups. In addition, the arguments of the Jewish Enlightenment thinkers offer important insights for the current debates on minority integration and xenophobia.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Thomas Carlyle's Calvinist dialogue with the nineteenth-century periodical press

This article signals at a dearth of critical engagement with Thomas Carlyle's Presbyterian heritage resulting from the received whiggish narrative of his Calvinism as unenlightened, anachronistic, and backward-looking. It proceeds to challenge this view by examining closely Carlyle's creative use of key Calvinist concepts in his cosmopolitan and enlightened dialogue with the contemporary periodical press over British and European cultures. Carlyle is shown to be an adept purveyor both of the Edinburgh Magazine's enlightened idiom and of Blackwood's morally conservative and artistically cosmopolitan agendas, while also making creative capital of the Anti-Jacobin's powerful Gothic imagery and of the critical verve of the Westminster Review. The main addressees of Carlyle's reading of the signs of the times, I argue, are contemporary Whigs. Carlyle's depiction of Macaulay as a ‘spiritual hippopotamus’ spells Carlyle's broader critique of the modern lack of imagination of the spiritual which sponsors deterministic religious and secular readings of reality. Carlyle displays his enlightened Calvinist perspective in discussing the French Revolution through such key Scottish Enlightenment concepts as free will, conscience, civilisational and moral progress, and divine providence. Insightful and creative use of his inherited Scottish Calvinist heritage characterises Carlyle's open, cosmopolitan reading of the signs of the times.     

Cartographical evidence of efforts to develop Acre during the last decades of Ottoman rule: did the Ottomans neglect the city?

Using dozens of Ottoman maps from the Central Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, the article challenges the prevailing standpoint regarding the historical-geographic process that took place on both sides of the Bay of Acre/haifa during the last decades of the Ottoman period, and led to Haifa’s emergence as one of the most important port towns in the eastern Mediterranean, and concomitantly to Acre’s demise and negligence. To date, the few researchers who have dealt with this process, especially from the viewpoint of Haifa’s local history, have viewed the Ottoman regime as a passive force that did not act to preserve the status or economic strength of Acre, the regional headquarters, the province’s capital city and the region’s most important town for many years. We argue that the central Ottoman government in Istanbul did not perceive the process of Acre’s demise and Haifa’s rise as a deterministic process. Official Ottoman maps drawn at the request of the imperial centre as early as the 1880s show that plans existed to develop Acre and its region. These plans, even if only partially implemented, would have clearly contributed to preserving Acre’s status over Haifa. The Ottomans attempted to preserve the geo-strategic status of Acre and its importance and made plans to upgrade various infrastructures in the town’s vicinity, which might have changed processes related to physical conditions and powerful technological advances. This approach, which is based on the belief in the human ability to confront and deal with deterministic geographic and physical conditions, seems to have been the foundation of Ottoman planning in the case of Acre. The Ottomans’ capacity to implement these plans was very limited, however, and they eventually had to acknowledge this reality. Thus, Acre was reduced to its formal status as the capital of an Ottoman administrative district until the end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine. In a way, its fate was not very different from that of other traditional centres of Ottoman rule along the eastern Mediterranean coast, whose importance diminished at that time, while new centres that were more cosmopolitan and connected to developments overseas came to power.     

Strange associations: Elizabeth Bowen and the language of exclusion

Since The Last September was first published in 1929, the novel's style has been a major source of controversy amongst Elizabeth Bowen's critics, many of whom align the work with reactionary feeling among the Anglo-Irish community in early 1920s Ireland. This longstanding view ignores, I think, a complex but critically overlooked aspect not only of The Last September but also of Bowen's many opinions about the novel form: the author's fascination with the language of exclusion. In this essay I argue that Bowen's use of literary devices in The Last September that rely on exclusion – including ellipses, euphemism, rumour, overheard conversation, narrative digression, and lying – dramatise the ways in which war disorients figurative language and, in so doing, subverts and transforms the apparently stable metaphors through which the Anglo-Irish sought to reconcile events occurring in September 1920, that fitful last September of the Republic's colonial ties to England, with their historical role as settler-colonialists in Ireland. Further, Bowen's experimental style disorients the reader, thereby undermining any confidence in the legitimacy of Ascendancy protocol, or the morality of British colonialism, or the militant expression of Irish nationalism, and leads instead to an emergent, though ultimately unfulfilled, cosmopolitan vision of late modernist Ireland.     

WHAT WAS CRITICAL HISTORY? A READING OF RICHARD SIMON'S HISTOIRE CRITIQUE DU VIEUX TESTAMENT

The roots of our modern critical historical attitude are usually set in one of the following phenomena: (1) the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns; (2) the establishment of historiography as a scientific discipline; and (3) the newly gained awareness of anachronism. However, these accounts either neglect the normative character of the above‐mentioned phenomena or operate with an a priori definition of “critical history,” which leads them to retrospectively attribute the concept of “critique” to historical realities that have not used the term to denote their attitude toward or their treatment of the past. Rather than starting from an a priori definition of what “critical history” is, I propose to inquire into what “critical history” was at the moment when it was first conceived as such—namely in Richard Simon's Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. I will begin by presenting Simon's conception of critique, which entailed: (a) a grammatical and philological treatment of the text in question; (b) a historical and cultural contextualization of this text; and (c) a specific type of judgment to be applied to what is written therein. Since this last aspect constitutes the key to understanding critique's attitude toward the past, I will, in the second part, focus my attention on the notion that plays a pivotal role in the exercise of “critical judgment,” that is, on the concept of tradition. Last, I will propose that since Simon's critical history does not seem to be completely autonomous in relation to its object, the roots of our modern call for normative autonomy vis‐à‐vis the past should be sought with the authors whom Simon opposed in his work, but from whom nonetheless he inherited the term critique: Protestant authors such as Scaliger, Casaubon, and Cappel.     

Prousa/Bursa,a city within the city: chorography,conversion and choreography

Abstract

Narratives on the birth of the Ottoman city of Bursa, the first capital of the Ottomans, known to the Byzantines as Prousa, highlight its early Ottoman identity. Although Bursa represents one of the richest legacies of early Ottoman architecture, the city's urban fabric has suffered from several fires and earthquakes that resulted in heavy restorations and remodellings. The first aim of this paper is to discuss the textual and visual evidence for the built environment in the early fourteenth century and, second, to offer commentary on the Ottoman attitude toward Byzantine architecture in an effort to unearth the Byzantine substrata of Ottoman Bursa. In the service of the latter goal, this article debunks the Ottoman-centric views. With the aid of drawings of Bursa's upper city that predate the 1855 earthquake we may begin to visualize a city far less uniform in character, in which the Byzantine legacy both endured and informed the construction and urban design practices of the ascendant Ottomans.     

On “Natural” Uncertainty: The Philosophical Underpinnings of Uncertainty in Economics,with Special Reference to Knight and Strauss

Abstract

While current discourse has failed and will continue to fail to adequately integrate uncertainty into economic theory, this work explores how political philosophy can provide a better understanding of uncertainty. Specifically, political philosophy can answer most of the questions posed by Frank Knight's proposition of uncertainty in economic theory. In elaborating on Knight's reservations relating to Pragmatism, this work suggests that Knight's approach might well be revised to more adequately embrace the recent developments in American philosophy, especially those suggested by Leo Strauss. Significantly, it can be argued that Strauss provides a stronger foundation for the proposition of uncertainty in economic theory than Knight's application of Pragmatism around 1921. An understanding of uncertainty, which is based on Strauss, might be referred to as “natural” uncertainty, and this form of uncertainty may provide a point where political philosophy might begin to gain some traction within economic theory.     

Reassessing Kant's geography

This article offers a critical reassessment of Immanuel Kant's lectures on Physische Geographie and his contribution to geographical thought more generally. There are a number of reasons why this reassessment is needed: the lectures are finally about to be published in English translation; careful philological work in German has exposed how corrupted the standard text of the lectures is; and philosophers are finally beginning to critically integrate an understanding of the Geography into their overall assessment of Kant's work. English speaking geographers will therefore soon have access to the lectures in a way that they have not done before, but they need to be aware both of the problems of the edition being translated and the work philosophers have undertaken on their situation in Kant's work and their impact. More broadly, the reassessment requires us to reconsider the position Kant occupies in the discipline of geography as a whole. The article examines the history of the lectures and their publication in some detail; discusses Kant's purpose in giving them; and looks at the way in which he structured geographical knowledge and understood its relation to history and philosophy. In terms of the broader focus particular attention is given to the topics of race and space. While these lectures are undoubtedly of largely historical interest, it is for precisely that reason that an examination of them and Kant's thought more generally is of relevance today to the history of the discipline of geography.     

Kurdish nationalists and non‐nationalist Kurdists: rethinking minority nationalism and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1909

ABSTRACT. Recent scholarship has begun to nuance the idea of Ottoman decline, but few works have attempted to see nationalism outside of the dominant decline paradigm. By addressing the emergence of Kurdish nationalism in the late Ottoman period, this paper questions the idea that imperial disintegration and nationalism were inherently intertwined; and challenges not only the mutually causal relationship that has been emphasised in literature to date, but also the shape that the ‘nationalist movement’ took. Using archival sources, the Kurdish‐Ottoman press, travel literature and secondary sources in various languages, the present paper will illustrate how the so‐called Kurdish nationalist movement' was actually several different movements, each with a differing vision of the political entity its participants hoped to create or protect through their activities. The idea of Kurdish nationalism, or Kurdism, may have been present in the minds of these activists, but the notion of what it meant was by no means uniform. Different groups imbued the concept with their own meanings and agendas. This study demonstrates that most ‘nationalists’ among the Kurds continued to envision themselves as members of the multi‐national Ottoman state, the temptingly powerful rise of nationalism in their day notwithstanding. The suggestion has important implications for students and scholars of nationalist movements among other non‐dominant groups, not only in the Ottoman Empire but in contemporaneous empires such as the Habsburg, and in later states like Iraq, Rwanda and Sudan. The present study further questions the received wisdom that multi‐ethnic entities are a recipe for disaster. It proposes that a joint effort to rethink what we know about minority nationalism may involve not only a reconceptualisation of the very terms we use, but perhaps an accompanying shift in approach too.     

‘Eastern History with Western Eyes’: E.A. Freeman,Islam and Orientalism

E.A. Freeman is remembered today as a confident proponent of English superiority, whose historical writings were distorted by mid-Victorian prejudices in favour of the Aryan race. This perspective privileges some of Freeman's ideas and works above others, and obscures the complexities of his view of the past which only fully emerge through an examination of his two neglected works on the East: The History and Conquests of the Saracens (1856) and The Ottoman Power in Europe (1877). In analysing Freeman's obscure Oriental volumes this article uses the insights of Edward Said who argued that the West exploits the East according to contemporary exigency and consistently represents the Orient as ‘other’. It demonstrates that Freeman composed the Saracens and Ottoman Power in direct response to Britain's support of the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War and Eastern Crisis, and re-arranged the past to represent the Turk as distinct from, and inferior to, the West. Freeman's account of the distinctiveness of the Orient, however, suggests the need to revise literature on Western approaches to the East which has assumed that antagonism towards Islam declined in the modern period, or was masked behind narratives that purported to be secular and objective but which continued to empower Europe and subjugate the Orient. Juxtaposing Freeman's narratives on Western and Eastern history, I argue that his association of Christianity with European progress and Islam with Eastern barbarism is key to understanding his deep fear of cultural contact with the Orient. Far from bolstering the strength and power of the West vis-à-vis the East, Freeman's account of the fearful barbarity of the Islamic Orient is underpinned by his belief in an anti-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, conspiracy that threatened the West with degeneration and recapitulation.     

Greek nationhood and ‘Greek love’: sexualizing the nation and multiple readings of the glorious Greek past

The paper addresses the ways in which the idea of homosexuality has been expelled from local dominant narrations about the Modern Greek nation and seeks to culturally frame this historical erasure. The ancient past and Ottoman rule are viewed as the two key moments of negotiating (and repeatedly placing in oblivion) any link between ‘Greekness’ and homoeroticism. Placing this institutional silence in juxtaposition to multiple Western readings of ‘Greek love’, the study provides ethnographic instances that reveal the appropriations of the Western gaze and moments of breaking the silence about Greek homosexuality. Selected individuals and cultural locales serve as terrains of negotiating the present-day Greek state's façade as cosmopolitan, Western and post-modern. On the one hand, Greece is perpetually re-constituted as a topos, appropriate(d) for projections of varying versions of history-telling from Western and local agents alike; on the other hand, homoeroticism is being negotiated through consecutive articulations of Greekness in past and present tense.     

Aretos yacni Sevdâ: The Nineteenth Century Ottoman Translation of the ‘Erotokritos’

Abstract

The popularity of Vincenzo Cornaro's Erotokritos among Cretan Muslims is well known. In the nineteenth century even the Ottoman authorities of the Island took some interest in this work, and the then Ottoman Governor General, the Epirot Sava Pasha, allocated 3,000 francs in 1887 to the local scholar Antonios Giannaris who had been assigned by the Cretan General Assembly to prepare an edition of the text.     

Interacting,sharing and bonding: ‘notes of personal experience’ by nineteenth-century women travellers

As early as the seventeenth century, women have been going from one corner of the world to the other recording their experiences and reasons for publishing. Exploring, working and residing in regions of the East considered ‘safe for dynamic men only’ (Smith 1887, Through Cyprus, Author of ‘Glimpses of Greek life and Scenery, etc’. London: Hurst and Blacket), western women interacted with the peoples of Ottoman society, enjoying their warm and generous hospitality. Their gender allowed them to study, learn and become experts in areas where men had no access: the Ottoman harems, women's daily life, social gatherings and celebrations. Western and eastern women discuss harem slavery, marriage, adultery, childbirth, abortion, divorce, religion and women's rights. In reconsulting primary sources and focusing on the writings of nineteenth-century British women in Asia Minor (Turkey), this article contributes additional evidence on women's alternative representations or less degrading gaze, while revealing a patriarchal system's domestic-social reality that was founded on the institution of slavery. In other words, it differs from other studies in spotlighting the accounts that are illustrative of the polyethnic synthesis of the Ottoman households, i.e. the discourse on the multiethnic harem slavery institution, which distinguished Ottoman society, so as to provide a bigger picture and inspire new discussions.     

The Failure of ‘Liberal Developmentalism’: The United States's Anti-Communist Showcase in Guatemala, 1954–1960

This article examines the British involvement in the reorganisation of the Ottoman Empire's customs service. The study focuses particularly on the role of Sir Richard Crawford, who was appointed as a consultant to the Ottoman customs administration in 1909. In doing so, the article sheds fresh light on the position of European advisers as well as on British commercial diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire during the years preceding the First World War. This topic warrants further historical research as previous studies have not considered Crawford's position and the progress of the customs reform in detail. He introduced some important reforms, but proved unable to solve the complex question over the porterage service or to increase customs revenue as much as had been anticipated. War and revolution as well as the consequent disruption of trade; the vast geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire; and opposition from local and international stakeholders to his reforms explain to some extent why Crawford was unable to modernise the customs service as effectively as had been planned. In addition, Crawford's professional background and his personal characteristics were in some ways incompatible with the requirements of the demanding diplomatic world of Constantinople.     

Dressing a City’s Demeanour: Ottoman Costume Albums and the Portrayal of Urban Identity in the Early Seventeenth Century

The costume album remains an invaluable tool in revealing how patrons organised and catalogued their constantly expanding world through dress. Considering the success of the costume book as a booming market product in early modern Europe and its response in the bazaars of Ottoman Istanbul in the early seventeenth century, the topic warrants further examination of how these books shaped literate society’s perceptions of other cultures. Two early costume albums illustrate a compelling dialogue concerning the population of Ottoman Istanbul, both commissioned in bazaars by foreign travellers: the Warsaw Album of the Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie (BOZ 165), and the Peter Mundy Album currently residing at the British Museum (Add. 23880/1974-6-7-013). My paper assesses how these books create contrasting portrayals of power and social diversity in the Ottoman Empire by using depictions of dress as windows into cultural mores. I explore how each book attempts to form a city portrait through its compilation of characters and dress in the albums. With these sources, I highlight how the joint efforts of Ottoman artists and foreign patrons offer a surprising range of interpretation, despite their mass-produced reputation in scholarship. This study highlights the considerable role of the European compiler as a curatorial agent in this process.     

Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie

History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.     

“The good Dr. Lippe” and Herzl in Basel, 1897: A translation and analysis of the Zionist Congress's opening speech

Dr. Karpel Lippe of Jassy, who gave the opening speech at the first Zionist Congress, has been largely ignored in histories of Zionism. This article introduces an English translation of his speech. Lippe helped to legitimate “Congress-Zionism” by connecting it to earlier forms of Jewish activism. His address exposes tensions arising from the Basel meeting, including Ottoman suspicion, relations with the Orthodox, and conflicts over organizational priorities. Insisting upon his and his country's priority in the movement's history, Lippe's oration suggests an alternative perspective on early Zionism and raises broader questions for the historiography of nationalism.     

‘A common law of nations’: Giuseppe Mazzini's democratic nationality

The aim of this article is to analyse the theoretical origins and character of Giuseppe Mazzini's idea of the nation and the wider tensions within nationalist thinking. In particular I will ground Mazzini's idea of national self‐determination on his distinction between rights and duties and finally his republican (and in this sense political, not ethnic) view of the nation‐people. It will emerge that, even if Mazzini shared a voluntaristic idea of the nation, he none the less had a clear perception that the argument of popular consensus needed to be limited (and legitimated) by normative principles, which for him were true democratic principles. Mazzini's originality and modernity lay in his capacity to avoid being a universalist in the old cosmopolitan sense without becoming a relativist. He faced the tension between universality and national identity by making the former concrete and inclusive: universality meant humanity which revealed itself through and within each nation, and was synonymous with democracy. Democracy at home is the premise for democracy abroad: this is Mazzini's legacy.