Between "beloved Ottomania" and "the land of Israel": The struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palistine's Sephardi Jews, 1908-13

In the winter of 1910, the Salonikan Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Tribuna Libera published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers to decide where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: nationalism, assimilation, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press of the empire in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was "bordering on fratricide," threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.