Before 1914 there was no “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” There was not even a hyphen. There was, instead, a vast, interconnected Ottoman and post-Ottoman world stretching from the Atlas Mountains to the Zagros, from Sarajevo to Aden, in which Jews and Arabs lived not as two rival nationalities facing each other across a border, but as two interwoven threads of the same fabric.
To understand what was lost in the twentieth century, we have to unlearn the nationalist map that was drawn over it. The map tells us that a Jew is a European and an Arab is a Muslim. The reality before 1914 tells us something completely different: the majority of the world’s Jews were not European at all, but Ottoman, Arab, Persian and North African. And the Arab world was not exclusively Muslim, but profoundly Jewish.
1. The Ottoman Ecumene: A System Built for Coexistence
The engine of this coexistence was not tolerance in the modern liberal sense. It was something older and in many ways more durable: the Ottoman imperial system.
Under the millet system, communities were organized by religion, not by ethnicity or language. A Jew in Baghdad, a Jew in Salonica, and a Jew in Sana’a belonged to the same millet, with internal autonomy over marriage, divorce, education and charity, but in daily life they belonged to their city. Their neighbors were not “Arabs” in the abstract. They were the spice merchant next door, the Muslim guild master they apprenticed under, the Christian customer who bought their textiles.
This produced a form of cosmopolitanism that European visitors constantly remarked upon with bewilderment. In the great port cities, you could hear five languages on a single street, and no one thought this was remarkable.
In this world, anti-Jewish violence of the kind that was endemic in Russia, Poland, Romania and France was extraordinarily rare. The pogrom was a European import. When it did occur in the Ottoman lands, as in Damascus in 1840 with the infamous blood libel, it was imported by European consuls and Catholic monks, and Ottoman officials and local Muslim notables often stood as witnesses for the defense of the Jews.
For most Jews, the empire was a refuge. After 1492, when Spain expelled its Jews, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II famously said of Ferdinand, “You call him a wise king who impoverishes his country and enriches mine,” and sent the Ottoman navy to bring Sephardic Jews to Salonica, Izmir, Istanbul, Aleppo, Beirut, Sidon, Jerusalem and Alexandria. They came speaking Judeo-Spanish, and within two generations they were speaking Arabic, Turkish and Greek as well.
By 1900, on the eve of the collapse, the numbers tell the story. Baghdad was roughly one third Jewish. It was the most Jewish city in the world outside of Eastern Europe. Salonica was majority Jewish. Aleppo had a Jewish community over a thousand years old. Jerusalem, inside the Ottoman sanjak of Jerusalem, had been majority Jewish since at least the 1840s, not because of Zionist immigration, but because of old Sephardic and Mizrahi families and a steady stream of religious pilgrims from Morocco, Iraq and Yemen who came to die and be buried on the Mount of Olives.
2. Cities of Fusion: Where You Could Not Tell Where One Ended and the Other Began
If you want to understand ethnic fusion, do not look at treaties. Look at cities.
Jerusalem and Jaffa: In late Ottoman Jerusalem, there was no Jewish Quarter and Muslim Quarter in the political sense we use today. There were neighborhoods organized by family and origin: Moroccans, both Jewish and Muslim, lived near each other because they shared dialect and cuisine. In the markets, Jewish silversmiths from Yemen worked alongside Muslim coppersmiths from Hebron, both using the same filigree techniques. In Jaffa, which was the modern port and boomtown, Jews and Arabs built the orange export industry together. The famous Jaffa orange was developed by Arab agronomists and marketed abroad by Jewish merchants from the same families who had been citrus brokers for centuries. The first modern Hebrew school in Jaffa hired an Arab Muslim teacher to teach Arabic, because every educated Jew in Palestine was expected to know Arabic. Ben Yehuda, the reviver of Hebrew, sent his own children to learn Arabic first.
Baghdad and Basra: Baghdadi Jews were not a minority living among Arabs. They were Arabs. They were Arab in the fullest cultural sense. Their Arabic was the prestige dialect of the city. The greatest exponents of modern Iraqi classical music, the maqam, were Jews: the brothers Saleh and Daoud al-Kuwaity. Their music was played at Muslim weddings and in Muslim homes, and to this day it is considered quintessentially Iraqi. Jewish traders from Baghdad controlled the entire trade route from Basra to Bombay to Singapore. Their business letters were in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic written in Hebrew letters, because the language was the same. When you read the geniza records or the commercial archives of the Sassoon family, you cannot tell from language alone whether the writer is Jewish or Muslim. Surnames overlapped completely. A family named Attar, Haddad, Najjar, could be Jewish or Muslim. They shared the same tribal confederations, the same coffee rituals, the same proverbs.
Aleppo and Damascus: The Halabi Jews of Aleppo were one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, claiming descent from King David’s general Joab. Their liturgy, the Aleppo Codex, was written in the same Arabic calligraphic tradition as the Qur’an. Their synagogue, the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, was built in the same courtyard style as a mosque, with a fountain for ablutions. Jewish and Muslim mystics studied together. The Kabbalists of Safed and the Sufis of Damascus exchanged texts in the sixteenth century and continued to do so into the nineteenth. In Aleppo, the Jewish bakers baked the flatbread for both communities on Friday afternoon, because the Jewish Sabbath began earlier. The Muslim bakers returned the favor on Friday morning.
Alexandria and Cairo: In Alexandria, the model of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism reached its peak. The great Jewish families, the Mosseris, the Aghions, the Adeses, were Egyptian patriots who funded Egyptian nationalism against the British, built mosques as well as synagogues, and spoke French at the club, Arabic at home, and Hebrew in prayer. In the Cairo Geniza, discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, we found a thousand years of daily life in which Jews sued each other in Muslim sharia courts because they trusted them more than their own rabbinic courts, Muslims left deposits with Jewish bankers for safekeeping when they went on Hajj, and Jewish doctors served as court physicians to Muslim rulers for eight hundred uninterrupted years, from Maimonides under Saladin to the last Jewish doctor to the Khedive.
What you see in all these cities is not tolerance as distance. It is fusion as intimacy.
3. The Anatomy of Fusion: Language, Food, Music, and Blood
This fusion was ethnic, not just cultural. The distinction we make today between “Jew” and “Arab” as separate ethnic groups would have been incomprehensible to most people before 1914.
Language: The majority of Jews in the world before 1914 spoke Arabic as a first language. Not Hebrew. Arabic. Their sacred language was Hebrew, just as Muslims’ sacred language was classical Arabic, but their street language, love language, business language, curse language, was Arabic. Judeo-Arabic literature is one of the great literatures of the Arab world: Saadia Gaon, Maimonides, Judah Halevi all wrote their major philosophical works in Arabic. In the nineteenth century, Jewish newspapers in Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo were published in Arabic. When Eliezer Ben Yehuda wanted to create modern Hebrew words for everyday objects, he borrowed the Arabic root, because he knew his audience would understand it intuitively.
Conversely, Palestinian and Syrian Arabic is full of Hebrew loanwords from centuries of Jewish life, especially in agriculture and law.
Music and Food: You cannot separate Jewish and Arab music in this period. It is the same modal system, the same instruments, the same quarter-tones. A Jewish wedding in Sana’a and a Muslim wedding in Sana’a used the same musicians, often the same Jewish musicians, who played for both. The food is even more telling. The cuisine that is now marketed as “Israeli food”, hummus, falafel, shakshuka, sambusak, kubbeh, is Arab Jewish food, developed over a thousand years in Arab kitchens. The Sabbath dish chamin, slow cooked overnight, is the same as the Arab dish hamin. The Jews of Iraq ate masgouf on Friday night, just like their Muslim neighbors. The Jews of Morocco ate couscous on Friday, just like their Muslim neighbors.
Family and Blood: Endogamy existed, but it was religious endogamy, not ethnic endogamy. Jews married Jews and Muslims married Muslims, but genetically, the communities had mixed for millennia through conversion, adoption, and concubinage. Genetic studies of Iraqi Jews, Moroccan Jews, and Yemeni Jews show they cluster closer to their Muslim Arab neighbors than they do to Ashkenazi Jews from Poland. The Cohanim of Yemen share paternal lineages with the Hashemites. The Sephardic families of Jerusalem, the Valeros and the Meyuhas, have family trees that include Muslim converts in both directions. Physical anthropologists in the nineteenth century, who loved to measure skulls, complained that they could not tell a Jew from a Muslim in a Baghdad market by appearance alone.
In short, what existed before 1914 was not two peoples. It was one Arab-Ottoman cultural world with two faiths living inside it, deeply interpenetrated.
So what broke it?
4. The First Mirror: Zionism as European Nationalism
Zionism, in its political form, was not born in Baghdad or Aleppo. It was born in Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Basel. Its founders, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Leon Pinsker, were profoundly European men responding to a European problem: the failure of European liberalism to accept Jews as Europeans.
Herzl’s famous epiphany during the Dreyfus Affair in Paris was that assimilation had failed. The Jew would never be accepted as French or German. Therefore the Jew must become like the French and Germans: a nation with a state, an army, a flag, a colonial project.
From the beginning, political Zionism adopted the language of European nationalism wholesale. It spoke of “a people without a land for a land without a people,” a phrase that could only be uttered by someone who had never been to Jaffa market. It spoke of “making the desert bloom,” as if the citrus groves of Jaffa and the olive terraces of Hebron did not already bloom. It spoke of “negating the Diaspora,” which for a European Jew meant negating the ghetto, but for an Arab Jew meant negating a thousand years of rooted, proud life in Baghdad and Andalusia.
Crucially, early Zionism saw itself as part of the European civilizing mission. Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes asking for a charter to colonize Palestine in the same way Rhodes had colonized Rhodesia. At the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Herzl described the future Jewish state as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism” in the Middle East. This was not a statement about Islam. It was a statement about being European.
When Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine before 1914, the old Yishuv, the Arab-speaking, religious Jewish community that had lived there for centuries, was often horrified. They wrote petitions to the Ottoman Sultan warning that these new secular, Yiddish and German-speaking nationalists, who refused to learn Arabic and who wanted to build separate, exclusively Jewish labor colonies, would destroy the ancient coexistence. The Arab Jews of Jerusalem called them “the Ashkenazim who know not the land.”
Zionism did not intend to destroy Jewish-Arab fusion. But its intellectual DNA made it inevitable. It required Jews to stop seeing themselves as part of the Arab East and start seeing themselves as a transplanted Europe. It required Arabic-speaking Jews to become Hebrew-speaking Israelis. It turned a religious identity into a national identity modeled on the very nationalisms that had persecuted Jews in Europe.
5. The Second Mirror: Islamism as Reactionary Nationalism
On the other side of the mirror, at exactly the same time, a parallel philosophy was being born, also in response to European imperialism, also adopting European ideas of the nation-state while claiming to reject them. This was Islamism.
Classical Islam, like classical Judaism, was not a nationalism. It was a universal, multi-ethnic, multi-legal civilization. An Ottoman Muslim could be Albanian, Circassian, Arab, Kurd or Bosnian. Identity was defined by religion and by loyalty to the Sultan-Caliph, not by ethnicity.
But as European powers carved up the Ottoman Empire, a new generation of Muslim thinkers, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, and later Rashid Rida, began to argue that Muslims had fallen behind because they had abandoned “true Islam.” By the 1920s, this would become formalized by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood and by other movements across the Arab world.
Islamism, like Zionism, took a religious civilization and reshaped it into a modern political ideology. It took the classical concept of the umma, a community of believers that explicitly included Jews and Christians as protected peoples, and redefined it as a political nation that must be purified and defended against outsiders. It took the classical concept of jihad, which was primarily an internal spiritual struggle and secondarily a regulated warfare with extensive protections for non-combatants and People of the Book, and turned it into a permanent political struggle against Western influence.
And just as Zionism needed to erase the Arab Jew, Islamism needed to erase the Arab Jew as well, but from the other direction. If the Arab world was now defined as exclusively Muslim, then the Jew, even the Arabic-speaking Jew whose family had lived in Basra since the Babylonian exile, became a foreigner, a dhimmi at best, a Zionist agent at worst. The old pluralism, in which a Jew could be fully Arab and fully Jewish, became impossible in Islamist thought.
It is critical to note that before 1914, Islamism was still a small, elite intellectual current. Most Muslims in Cairo, Baghdad or Damascus were not Islamists. They were traditional Ottoman Muslims who went to the shrines of saints, celebrated the birthdays of Sufi masters, and visited their Jewish neighbors on holidays. But the intellectual seeds were planted. The idea that Islam and modernity were incompatible unless Islam became a political state was now in circulation, mirroring the Zionist idea that Judaism and modernity were incompatible unless Judaism became a political state.
Both philosophies, though they saw themselves as mortal enemies, were twins. Both were born in the late nineteenth century. Both were responses to European colonial humiliation. Both took a universal, cosmopolitan religion and turned it into a narrow, European-style nationalism. Both required the invention of a pure past that had never existed. Both needed to destroy the lived, messy, hybrid reality of the Ottoman Levant in order to create their new, pure nation.
6. How the Bond Was Sundered
The sundering did not happen overnight in 1914. It happened over the next fifty years, in stages.
First came the British and French mandates after World War I. They codified religion as nationality. For the first time, on identity cards in Palestine, Iraq and Syria, you were forced to be either a Jew or an Arab. The category “Arab Jew” disappeared bureaucratically. Schools were segregated by mandate policy. The French in Syria privileged minorities against Muslims, and the British in Palestine privileged separate communal development, breaking the old integrated guilds and municipal councils.
Second came the politicization of immigration. Under the Ottomans, Jewish immigration to Palestine had been religious and small, and it had been absorbed. Under the British, it became national and political, with the stated goal of creating a Jewish national home in a land where Arab nationalism was simultaneously being promised. Now every Jewish newcomer, even if he was a pious Moroccan who wanted only to pray, was seen by Arabs as a soldier of Zionism, and every Arab protest against British colonialism was seen by Jews as an attack on the Jewish home.
Third came the mutual atrocities that neither tradition had previously known. The 1929 riots in Hebron, where a centuries-old, Arabic-speaking Jewish community that had nothing to do with Zionism was massacred by rioters inflamed by Islamist and nationalist propaganda, and the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad, where a similar ancient Jewish community was massacred after Nazi propaganda was spread by Rashid Ali’s pro-Axis, Islamist-inspired government. These events were not continuations of old Ottoman coexistence. They were ruptures, made possible precisely because the old Ottoman framework that had protected both communities had been destroyed by nationalism.
Finally, after 1948, came the great population exchange that completed the work of the twin philosophies. The new state of Israel, founded on Zionist principles, could not accommodate Arab culture. It required Mizrahi Jews arriving from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco and Egypt to abandon their Arabic names, their Arabic music, their Arabic language, and Hebraize themselves. Arabic became the language of the enemy. Simultaneously, the newly independent Arab states, many now influenced by Islamist and Arab nationalist thought, expelled or pressured their Jewish populations to leave, stripping them of citizenship and property, declaring that a true Arab could not be a Jew.
Thus the fusion was torn apart from both sides. Jews who had been Arabs became Israelis. Arabs who had been part of a pluralistic world that included Jews became Muslims defined in opposition to Jews.
The tragedy is that the people themselves never wanted this divorce. When Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel in 1950-51, many wept, not with joy, but with grief for Baghdad. They wrote songs about the Tigris that Israelis thought were about the Jordan. When Palestinians fled or were expelled in 1948, they left keys with their Jewish neighbors, both expecting to return, because that is what neighbors had always done.
Before 1914, a Jew and an Arab in the Levant were not two peoples meeting for the first time. They were cousins, often literally, who had argued over business, prayed in adjacent buildings, and shared the same jokes for a thousand years. The twin philosophies of the twentieth century, Islamism and Zionism, both brilliant, both tragic, both European in origin despite their anti-European rhetoric, taught them to see each other as strangers.
We live with the consequences of that lesson to this day.