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ABSTRACT
This article explores the interaction between the Sephardi community of Jerusalem and other Jewish communities in the diaspora and the Holy Land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Looking at several moments of interaction and tension, it shows how the competition for raising and allocating funds raised in the diaspora in support of the Jewish communities in Palestine contributed to the emergence of what is called here "sub-ethnic" Jewish identities, often pitting the Sephardim of Jerusalem, who were Ottoman subjects, against Jewish immigrants from non-Ottoman lands in Europe and North Africa.
Key words: Palestine, philanthropy, ethnicity, diaspora, Sephardim
Sephardi Jewry is often understood as an entity, as a clearly bounded group, and Sephardi ethnicity is often defined in one way or another in relation to the Iberian origins of the group, rather than as a social construct with malleable and fuzzy boundaries. 1 The most common definition of who the Sephardim are, the most common description of Sephardi "identity," is based on a concept of origin and descent. The Hebrew dictionary of Eliezer Ben- Yehudah, for example, defines Sephardi (Sfaradi) as "a native of Sepharad, i.e. Spain, [or] a descendant of the Jews of Sepharad."2 According to the logic of this definition, there are Jews who are Sephardim "proper," and then there are those who are commonly but mistakenly referred to as Sephardim but are "really" something else, namely the Jews of the Middle East or the Muslim world more generally (referred to as Mizrahi Jews in modern scholarship).
One way to deal with the difficulty is to historicize notions of "Sephardiness." Sarah Abrevaya Stein, for example, writes that
[A]s a historical term, "Sephardi" described the Jewish descendants of the practicing Jews and conversos who fled or were expelled from the Iberian peninsula. . . . In exile from Sepharad . . . those Jews found new homes in the Ottoman and Dutch empires, in Western Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, where they tended to remain discrete ethnic communities.3
She further suggests that "the conceptual and historical intertwining of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries had roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,"4 a proposition that I do not think holds true for nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine. Another approach, most recently...