Ehud R. Toledano

Ehud R. Toledano

Ehud R. Toledano is professor of Middle East history at Tel Aviv University and the current holder (since 2007) of the University Chair for Ottoman & Turkish Studies. His areas of specialization are Ottoman history (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), and socio-cultural history of the modern Middle East.

Family

Toledano descends from the Toledano family branch that was exiled from Toledo, Spain in 1492 and thereafter spent about a century in Salonika, then under Ottoman rule. Early in the seventeenth century, the family moved to Fez and later to Meknes in Morocco, and then migrated to the Galilean town of Tiberias in Ottoman Palestine during the first half of the nineteenth century. Toledano’s grandmother hailed from the Abulafia family, which settled in Hebron early in the sixteenth century following the Spanish exile. The head of the family, Rabbi Hayyim Abulafia, was invited to serve as rabbi of the Ottoman city of Izmir in the 1730s. He was later asked by the Governor of Galilee, Zahir al-Umar, to return to Palestine and reestablish the Jewish community in Tiberias, which he did in 1738. The title of Hahambaşı Vekili (Deputy Chief Rabbi, de facto leader of the community in Galilee) was hereditary in the Abulafia family until the end of the Empire, and the last to hold it was Toledano’s maternal great uncle R. Y. H. Abulafia. Toledano’s grandfather, Rabbi Baruch Toledano, was a Halachic scholar who published—among other books and articles—an edited translation of Tanhum of Jerualem’s Al-Murshid Al-Kafi (originally written in Judeo-Arabic). His great uncle, Rabbi Jacob Moses Toledano, was Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv and Minister of Religious Affairs in Ben Gurion’s cabinet. Professor Toledano’s uncle, Shmuel, served as deputy head of the Mossad and advisor on Arab affairs to three Israeli Prime Ministers—Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin, and was a Member of the Knesset (Parliament).

Biography

Toledano was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. He completed his BA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1974) in Islamic history and Arabic language and literature, did an MA at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (1975), and received his PhD from Princeton University in Near Eastern studies (1979). His dissertation dealt with the Ottoman slave trade and its suppression, 1840-1890, and was later published by Princeton University Press (1982). He spent a year as a doctoral fellow at the American Research Institute in Turkey (Istanbul, 1977–78) and was a post-doc fellow at the American Research Center in Egypt (Cairo, 1979–80), following which he began teaching at Tel Aviv University (1980 to the present).

Over the years, Toledano authored and edited eleven books and published dozens of articles in leading academic journals (see below for full list). At Tel Aviv University, he also served as director of the Graduate School of Historical Studies (2004-2008), and as a member of the University’s board of directors (2005–2009). Toledano was senior associate member at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford (1986–87), senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (1993–94), Maurice Amado Visiting Professor and regular visiting professor at UCLA (2000–02).

Among his students are internationally accomplished scholars such as Professors Dror Ze’evi, Gabriel Piterberg, Dafna Efrat, Tal Shuval, Mira Tzoreff, Michael Nizri, Avner Wishnitzer, and Omri Paz.

Public service

From 1984 to 1995, Toledano served on think tanks and personal advisory teams to Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. In 1997 he was appointed as Ambassador to Turkey, but due to a diplomatic dispute did not actually serve. During the 1980s and 1990s, he regularly contributed opinion pieces to leading newspapers in Israel and provided Middle East analysis on various radio and TV stations. Over the past few years, he has been occasional commentator on a popular Channel 10 News magazine, public broadcasting services, and select newspapers both in Israel and in Turkey.

Research

Toledano’s work centers on three main areas of research: Enslavement and the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the formation and emergence of Ottoman-Arab elites in the Middle East and North Africa between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; and the socio-cultural history of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East.

Enslavement and the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Toledano published three books on this theme. His early work laid down the basics of the slave trade into the Ottoman Empire: kinds of work the enslaved were forced to do, hierarchy among types of enslaved persons, prices paid for them, customs duties levied upon entry into the Ottoman domains, the slave dealers, and the British attempts to have the Ottoman government suppress the traffic in enslaved Africans. He explored the gap between military-administrative elite slavery, domestic slaves in households, and agricultural enserfment-enslavement. His later work attempted to recover voices of enslaved persons, look at the enslaver-enslaved relationship as a coerced attachment, and examine what happened when trust was violated by the enslavers; it also looked at agency and resistance by the enslaved. More recently he has explored the reasons for the fact that Muslim-majority societies generated limited antislavery argumentation and had weak abolitionist movements, if at all.

The emergence of Ottoman-Arab elites in the Middle East and North Africa

Building on the work of other scholars in the field, Toledano outlined in a seminal article published in 1995, the processes through which Ottoman imperial elites in the provinces were being localized and the Arabic-speaking elites were being Ottomanized in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. These dual processes created Ottoman-Local elites that centered around the household, the basic unit of networking throughout the region. Political, social, economic, and cultural goods were moving through those networks, which tied the provinces to the imperial center and transformed the modes by which the Ottoman Empire was being governed in that period. During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, a hegemonic household emerged in each of the major provinces, bringing to the fore the House of Mehmet Ali in Egypt, the Azms in Syria, the Husaynis in Tunisia, and the Eyyübizades in Baghdad, among others. Later, some of these households would serve as the precursors of the monarchies that ruled the new nation-states of the Middle East and North Africa until the rise of military regimes in the second half of the twentieth century. This historical trajectory, based on internal processes rather than solely on external, European impact, Toledano argues, offers a plausible alternative to the now-defunct Decline Paradigm in Ottoman history.

Socio-cultural history of marginal groups

The history of disprivileged groups in Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies of the Middle East, mainly Egypt, forms the third area where Professor Toledano has worked. Here, he looked at the life lived by women, the poor, the criminals, day laborers, street entertainers, prostitutes, and the enslaved. He studied Nizami (reformed) and Sharia court records in order to tease out the social practices of such groups, and attempted to offer an interpretation that reflects the voices and actions of individuals on the margins of urban society. In this vein, he has recently edited a collection of articles on African diasporas in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean worlds, which looks at how the Africans’ enslaved pasts have affected their identity in the modern era.

Selected works

Monographs

• Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression 1840-1890, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. ISBN 978-069-105-369-1
• Ehud R. Toledano, Osmanlı köle ticareti, 1840-1890, Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1994 (Turkish translation of The Ottoman Slave Trade). ISBN 978-975-333-009-1
• Ehud R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ISBN 978-052-137-194-0
• Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998. ISBN 978-029-597-642-6
• Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-128-173-538-6
• Ehud R. Toledano, Suskun ve Yokmuşçasına: İslâm Ortadoğusu'nda Kölelik Bağları, Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2010 (Turkish translation of As If Silent and Absent). ISBN 978-605-399-137-3
• Ehud R. Toledano, New Turkey's White Revolution: A Decade of AKP Rule (in preparation).
• Ehud R. Toledano, The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites in the Middle East and North Africa, 17th-19th Centuries (in preparation).

Editing

• Member of the Editorial Panel, Mediterranean Historical Review, London: Frank Cass (now Routlege), 1985-1996.
• Israel Gershoni and Ehud R. Toledano (eds.), Cultural Processes in Muslim and Arab Societies, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993/4 (3 volumes): Vol 1, “Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” Poetics Today, 14/2, special issue (Summer 1993); Vol 2, “Modern Period I,” Poetics Today, 14/3, special issue (Fall 1993); Vol 3, ”Modern Period II,” Poetics Today, 15/2, special issue (Summer 1994).
• Ehud R. Toledano (ed.), African Communities in Asia and the Mediterranean: Identities between Integration and Conflict, Halle, Germany: Max Planck Institute and Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2011.