Bankers into Bureaucrats

Ottoman Non-Muslim Elites in Syria/Palestine after the Imperial Bankruptcy

الملخص

In this article, I explore the nature of the belonging of non-Muslim elites in the Ottoman Empire in its latter decades, by looking at their career options and trajectories. I explore the growing involvement of Damascene merchant- bankers in Ottoman provincial administration following the imperial bankruptcy of 1875. Drawing on the records of civil servants (sicill-i ahvâl defterleri), located at the Ottoman State Archive in the Istanbul Archives, I examine the “administrative biographies” of several members of the Jewish Farhi family, who served as local governors from the late eighteenth century. I argue that through lifetime careers in the empire’s fiscal administration, local merchant families managed to maintain their power—even if only partially— despite the crises of that period. For these families, this process entailed a host of new social and political roles, which tied them even closer to the state than before. Finally, I discuss the biography of Abdu Farhi, who worked as a local wakil for the Jewish Colonization Association in southern Syria after retiring from the provincial bureaucracy. I use Abdu’s case to rethink the place of local Jews in the changing socio-political landscape of fin-de-siècle Syria/Palestine, from an imperial perspective and away from common Zionist narratives.