Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World The Roots of Sectarianism by Bruce Masters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 222 pages.)

Abstract

1n this interesting and well-researched book, Bruce Masters analyses the history
of Chris tian and Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire's Arab
provinces and how they fared within a Muslim majority and hierarchy. By
and large, this important study is a story of modernization, identity, and ecclesiastical
politics that focuses primarily on Christian communities in Aleppo,
Syria. The book's main themes are somewhat familiar: How Christian and
Jewish communities were in an advantageous position to benefit from
increasing European influence in the Middle East, and how a secular political
identity (Arab nationalism) emerged in the Levant. The book's value lies
not in its overarching thesis, but rather in the details of the story and the
impressive research upon which this well-crafted narrative is based.
Masters chronicles how the identities of Christians and Jews evolved
due to their increasing contact with western influences, or, as Masters labels
it, "intrusion." The status quo was forever transformed because many
Christians began to distance themselves, economically and socially, from
their Muslim neighbors. Masters, a historian who teaches at Connecticut's
Wesleyan University, contends that the western intrusion altered Muslim
attitudes toward native Christians. In the nineteenth century, local Christians
would serve for some Muslims as "convenient surrogates for the anger that
could only rarely be expressed directly against the Europeans."
Although the Arab provinces experienced serious sectarian strife in the
nineteenth century, these antagonisms were, by and large, absent in the ...