LAUSR

Exactly 100 years ago, after local Ottoman representatives had raised the white flag, General Edmund Allenby, commander of Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, entered the Old City of Jerusalem on foot, in an attempt to project somemeasure of egalitarian respect, and possibly utilitarian humbleness, to the local occupied communities. It is hard to overstate the historical significance of this moment whereby four full centuries of Ottoman rule over Greater Syria finally came to an end. The decisive change in the imperial order fromOttoman-Muslim hands to British-European hands was slower to permeate social domains such as modes of dress, rules of etiquette or patterns of thought and reasoning amongstOttomanPalestinians, including Jews. While such elements of continuity occur in the four articles that comprise this Special Section, a rudimentary meta-historical note may be illuminating. The twenty-first century witnessed an unmistakable resurgence in the documentation and study of the histories, legacies, thought and experiences of Jewish communities in the Middle East during the Ottoman and European colonial periods. This has manifested itself in films and documentaries, conferences, curricula, new university courses and public discussions that have taken place in North America, Europe, Israel and the Arab World. A representative sample of the exciting scholarship involved in this expansion can be found in the bibliographies of the four articles (and thus does not bear repeating here). In my reading, one of the variables that explains the significant increase in scholarly interest in, and publications about, Jews in the Ottoman and colonial Middle East during the past decade or so is rooted in the socio-political context that surrounded the textual work Ph.D. students and young scholars have produced on these subjects. This can be explained as follows. Many of the contemporary scholars studying Middle Eastern Jews under Ottoman or colonial domination pursued their formative Ph.D. studies during the years of the Oslo peace process and its fatal disintegration, that is, from 1993 to, roughly, Israel’s 2009 aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Most were young, liberal-leaning, aspiring academics who in socio-political terms yearned for a better, more peaceful and more prosperous future for everyone living in Israel/Palestine. Their optimistic thrust was certainly evident until the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 but in many respects it lasted at least until September 2000, when the Palestinian Intifada erupted following Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif, accompanied by some 300 police and other armed personnel. The possibility that the exhausting, torturous conflict that has lasted over a hundred years between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine/Israel could inch towards its conclusion based on some political compromise was favourably viewed by many liberals worldwide, including graduate students dealing with the history of the Palestine/Israel question. Liberal-minded young academics were, and most likely remain, of the principal view that the Israel–Palestine conflict was neither a product of primordial collective identities that are “naturally” bound to clash and be hateful to each other, nor a religious conflict that rests, by definition, on a