The rich Muslims, the effendi, who owned a great deal of land in Palestine, whether they lived in Jerusalem or not, had a lot of influence with the local administrator of those lands. The most important of the local administrators, appointed by Constantinople, was the Sultan. There was also a lot of attention paid to Palestine in Constantinople the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

The newly established Jewish farm settlements were paying proper wages to the Muslims who worked for them. The rich Muslims, the effendi, had never done that. That was one of the reasons they had become so rich by exploiting the poor, ignorant, peasant Muslim farmers, the fellahin.

The effendi very often forced these peasant farmers off the land because they found that the Jews were able to come up with ridiculous amounts of money to buy what was frankly, appalling land. Still, as the old legal warning goes, caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Poor Muslim peasant farmers started to be expelled from their land by the rich Muslim landowners more and more often from about 1880 with the increasing number of Jews wanting land to star farms. 

Where did these Jews get their money? Some came from other Sephardic Jews living in Muslim countries. There had long been a duty on Jews living away from the Holy Land to send what money they could to the Jews who were actually in the land.

But the real money especially came from the fabulously rich Jews in Europe, like Baron Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, being able to pay the extortionate prices that the effendi found that they could ask for and get it. This fact alone kills the argument that the Jews were no worse off living under Muslims than living under Europeans. There were ways to the top for Jews in Europe. One Jew, Benjamin Disraeli, was the prime minister of England, in 1868 and again from 1874 to 1880. Jews were certainly singled out as being different, but there were none of the crushing religious practices that had seen the Jews. This is seen in the report from the British ambassador in Jerusalem, W.T. Young to Viscount Palmerston on 13 May 1839 when he wrote:

The spirit of toleration towards the Jews is not yet known here to the same extent it is in Europe. . . still, the Jew in Jerusalem is not estimated in value much above a dog. . . .

But selling the land to the Jews at an enormous profit, was a two edged sword for the effendi because they were losing their lowly paid peasant farmers to the Jewish farmers, and if they wanted to keep them, they were being forced to pay their peasant farmers more than ever before.

But there was one thing that united the effendi and the fellahin and that was their common religion, Islam. More importantly the beliefs of that religion had, for almost the time that the Jews had lived in countries ruled by Muslims, and to this very day shaped how Muslims saw, reacted to and treated the Jews and that is what I’m going to talk about in this programme.

Tag words: Muslims; the effendi; the notables; Ottoman Empire; peasant farmers; the fellahin; Holy Land; Benjamin Disraeli; W.T. Young; Viscount Palmerston; the Bible; the Torah; Moses; Leviticus 19:34; Deuteronomy 10:19; Exodus 22:21; Hermann Cohen; Sodom; Genesis 19:4-5; Quran; the Hadith; Mohammad; angel Gabriel; Nessim Joseph Dawood; Surah III v.112; Surah II v.96; Surah II v.90; Surah III v.181; Surah III, v. 117-120; Surah IV, vv 160-161; Surah IV, v 46; Surah IV, v 101; Surah V, v 51; Surah V, vv 62-66; Surah II, vv 71-85; PLO Charter; Bernard Lewis; Islam in History; PJC McGregor; Arthur Rupin; Sultan Mehmet V Rashid; Ha Lebanon; Habazeleth; Zionist movement; Theodor Herzl; Max Norda; Zikhron; Petach Tikvah; Rishon; Arab Revolt; TE Lawrence; David Lean; Lawrence of Arabia;