The Near and Middle East (1828–1971 CE)

Empires in Decline, Nations in Transition, and Oil in Ascendancy

Geography & Environmental Context

The Near and Middle East includes three fixed subregions:

• The Near East — Israel, Egypt, Sudan, western Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, southwestern Turkey, and southwestern Cyprus.

• The Middle East — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, eastern Jordan, eastern Saudi Arabia, and northern Oman.

• Southeast Arabia — southern Oman, eastern Yemen, and the island of Socotra.

This vast region links the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Caspian Basin, bridging Africa, Europe, and Asia. It is dominated by deserts and highlands, punctuated by fertile river valleys (the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates) and strategic straits — the Suez Canal, the Bab el-Mandeb, and the Strait of Hormuz — that define global trade and geopolitics.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

Aridity remained the defining condition. The 19th century brought episodes of famine and epidemic following droughts in Egypt, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. Irrigation schemes and canal building, such as the Suez Canal (opened 1869) and the Assiut Barrage (1902), transformed riverine agriculture. Petroleum exploration and urban expansion in the 20th century accelerated desertification and water demand. Monsoon moisture sustained oases in Oman and Yemen, while seasonal Nile floods continued until the Aswan High Dam (1960–70) reshaped the river’s ecology.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Agrarian bases persisted in the Nile Valley, the Fertile Crescent, and the Iranian Plateau, producing wheat, cotton, dates, and fruits.

• Nomadic and pastoral tribes in Arabia, the Levant, and Sudan maintained camel and sheep herding, adapting to modern markets.

• Urbanization surged in Cairo, Istanbul, Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, and Jeddah, intensified by European trade and oil wealth.

• Port cities—Aden, Basra, Kuwait City, Manama, and Doha—grew into nodes of global commerce.

Technology & Material Culture

European imperial penetration introduced telegraphs, railways (notably the Hejaz Railway, 1908), and modern weaponry. In the 20th century, oil extraction and refining brought pipelines, tankers, and industrial zones. Traditional crafts—carpets, calligraphy, metalwork, and ceramics—remained vital symbols of identity. Concrete architecture and Western education transformed cities, while mosques and bazaars continued as cultural anchors.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Trade routes: The Suez Canal reoriented world shipping; the Persian Gulf became an oil artery.

• Pilgrimage: The Hajj connected Muslims globally through Mecca and Medina.

• Migration: Rural–urban drift filled cities; labor migration later linked Yemenis, Egyptians, and Iranians to Gulf oil fields.

• Military corridors: The Near and Middle East served as theaters of imperial rivalries—British in the Gulf and Egypt, Russians in the Caucasus, Ottomans across Anatolia and Arabia.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Religion and reform: Islamic modernists such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh sought synthesis of faith and reason; Christian minorities in Lebanon and Armenia fostered education and journalism.

• Literature and art: The Nahda (Arab Renaissance) revived Arabic prose and poetry; Persian and Turkish writers blended realism with nationalism.

• Architecture: Cairo’s modern boulevards, Tehran’s avenues, and oil-era Gulf skylines redefined urban form while domed mosques and minarets remained emblems of continuity.

• Music and media: Radio and cinema from Cairo, Tehran, and Istanbul spread popular culture across linguistic and sectarian boundaries.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Desert agriculture expanded through artesian wells and canals; the introduction of cash crops like cotton in Egypt and tobacco in Iran restructured rural economies. Oases sustained date-palm and grain cultivation, while pastoralists adjusted routes to motor transport and border restrictions. In coastal cities, desalination and modern infrastructure emerged to offset water scarcity.

Political & Military Shocks

• Imperial decline and reform:

  • The Ottoman Empire weakened, culminating in its dissolution after World War I.

  • Egypt’s Muhammad Ali dynasty modernized administration and industry but fell under British occupation (1882).

  • Iran’s Qajar dynasty faced constitutional revolution (1905–11) and later Pahlavi modernization (from 1925).

• World Wars and mandates: British and French mandates carved up former Ottoman territories; Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Palestine emerged under European oversight.

• Nationalism and revolution:

  • Turkey’s Republic (1923) under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk secularized and industrialized Anatolia.

  • Arab nationalism surged—Nasser’s Egypt championed anti-imperial unity.

  • Iran underwent the 1951 oil nationalization crisis and the White Revolution (1963).

  • The Zionist movement culminated in the creation of Israel (1948) and successive Arab–Israeli wars (1948, 1956, 1967).

• Oil and Cold War: The discovery of major oil fields (Iran 1908; Iraq 1927; Saudi Arabia 1938; Kuwait 1938) made the region central to global power politics. U.S. and Soviet rivalry deepened through alliances and arms races.

Transition

Between 1828 and 1971, the Near and Middle East transformed from imperial provinces and desert sultanates into a mosaic of nation-states, revolutionary republics, and monarchies bound by oil and ideology. The collapse of Ottoman and colonial empires unleashed nationalist movements, while petroleum wealth and Cold War geopolitics redefined economies and alliances. In the deserts of Arabia and the deltas of the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates, modernization coexisted with faith, and cities like Cairo, Tehran, and Riyadh became centers of a region poised between deep tradition and global transformation

A severe pogrom (Russian: “devastation” or “riot”) ensues that devastates Jewish communities throughout the Pale of Settlement following the assassination of Alexander II,

Although the assassin is not a Jew, and only one Jew is associated with him, false rumors arouse Russian mobs in more than two hundred cities and towns to attack Jews and destroy their property.

The new Tsar, Alexander III, enacts oppressive policies against the Jews and denies police protection to those Jews who remain in the countryside.

As a result, a flood tide of impoverished Jews enters the cities where they join various movements that seek to overthrow the tsar.

The severe pogrom that broke out in Odessa in 1881 had not only been ignored but also even abetted by the government and defended by the press.

Leon Pinsker, his assimilationist beliefs shattered, turns to Jewish nationalism, no longer believing that mere humanism and enlightenment would defeat anti-Jewish sentiments.

His visit to Western Europe leads to his famous pamphlet Auto-Emanzipation, subtitled Mahnruf an seine Stammgenossen, von einem russischen Juden (Warning to His Fellow People, from a Russian Jew), which he publishes anonymously in German on January 1, 1882, and in which he urges the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness.

The book raises strong responses, both for and against.

An incisive, embittered, and impassioned pamphlet, Auto-Emanzipation provokes strong reactions, both critical and commendatory, from Jewish leaders.

In the pamphlet, he contends that Judeophobia is a modern phenomenon, beyond the reach of any future triumphs of” humanity and enlightenment,” and that the only restorative for Jewish dignity and spiritual health lies in a Jewish homeland, not necessarily in their ancestral home in the Holy Land.

As a professional physician, Pinsker prefers the medical term "Judeophobia" to the recently introduced misnomer "antisemitism".

Pinsker knows that a combination of mutually exclusive assertions is a characteristic of a psychological disorder and is convinced that pathological, irrational phobia may explain this millennia-old hatred: "... to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival."

His analysis of the roots of this ancient hatred lead him to call for the establishment of a Jewish National Homeland, either in Palestine or elsewhere.

Eventually Pinsker will come to agree with Moses Lilienblum that hatred of Jews is rooted in the fact that they are foreigners everywhere except their original homeland, the Land of Israel, or Eretz Israel.

Leon Pinsker had inherited a strong sense of Jewish identity from his father, Simchah Pinsker, a Hebrew language writer, scholar and teacher.

Leon had attended his father's private school in Odessa and was one of the first Jews to attend Odessa University, where he studied law.

Later he realized that, being a Jew, he had no chance of becoming a lawyer due to strict quotas on Jewish professionals and chose the career of a physician.

Pinsker believes that the Jewish problem could be resolved if the Jews could attain equal rights.

In his early years, Pinsker had favored the assimilation path and had been one of the founders of a Russian language Jewish weekly.

The Odessa pogrom of 1871 had moved Pinsker to become an active public figure.

In 1881, a bigger wave of anti-Jewish hostilities, some allegedly state-sponsored, had swept southern Russia; the pogroms will continue until 1884.

Leon Pinsker's authorship is soon discovered, and the newly formed Zionist group Hibbat Ziyyon (”Love of Zion”), ignoring Pinsker's indifference toward the Holy Land and taking up his call for a territorial solution to the Jewish problem, makes him one of its leaders.

Pinsker organizes an international conference in 1884 in Katowice (Upper Silesia, part of the Kingdom of Prussia).

Leon Pinsker convenes the Kattowitz Conference (Katowice, Poland) of the Hovevei Zion society, which establishes a permanent committee with headquarters in Odessa in 1884.

One of the visions of the Zionist movement is the establishment of a Jewish university in the Land of Israel; this is first proposed at the Kattowitz Conference.

Asher Ginsberg, better known by his pen name Ahad Ha'am (”One of the People”), moves to Odessa at thirty with the vague hope of modernizing Judaism.

Here he is influenced both by Jewish nationalism and by the materialistic philosophies of the Russian left-wing nihilist Dmitry Pisarev and the English and French positivists.

The son of a Hasidic rabbi, he is typical of the Russian maskalim, the leaders of the Haskalah (”enlightenment”) movement.

Reared in Russia in a rigidly Orthodox Jewish family, he had mastered rabbinic literature but soon was attracted to the rationalist school of medieval Jewish philosophy and to the writings of the Haskala.

Zikhron Ya'akov had been founded in December 1882 when one hundred Jewish pioneers from Romania, members of the Hovevei Zion movement, had purchased land in Zammarin.

The difficulty of working the rocky soil and an outbreak of malaria had led many of the settlers to leave before the year was up.

Baron Rothschild had become the patron of the settlement in 1883 and had drawn up plans for its residential layout and agricultural economy.

Zikhron is one of the first Jewish agricultural colonies to come under the wing of the Baron (along with Rishon LeZion and Rosh Pina), who renames it in memory of his father, James (Ya'akov) Mayer de Rothschild.

To accomplish his first objective, Baron de Rothschild had brought in planners who designed and allotted housing lots along the main road for the use of settlement farmers.

Each lot includes a house facing the street, a long interior courtyard and a rear building for storing agricultural implements.

The French-inspired architecture includes tiled roofs and painted wooden windows.

Each farmer is given a salary and placed under the direction of Elijah Shaid, the Baron's clerk.

The Baron has also commissioned the construction of the Ohel Ya'akov Synagogue, named after his father, to serve the town.

Sparing no expense to build the edifice, the synagogue features a majestic ark made of white marble.

The synagogue opens in 1886 and has conducted daily prayer services continuously to this day.

Following a number of economic failures, in 1885 Rothschild had helped to establish the first winery in Israel, Carmel Winery, together with a bottling factory, in Zikhron Ya'akov.

Palestine is again linked administratively to Damascus until 1887–88, at which time the administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire are settled for the last time.

Palestine is divided into the mutasarrifiyahs of Nablus and Acre, both of which are linked with the vilayet (province) of Beirut, and the autonomous mutasarrifiyah of Jerusalem, which deals directly with Constantinople.

Young Jewish colonists from Europe, who bring neither capital nor experience for agricultural settlement, typify the first wave of Zionist settlement in Palestine, the "First Aliyah” (1882-1903).

Their economic enterprises are not viable until their rescue by the Hibbat Zion movement, which calls on Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831-1896) for financial assistance.

Although Hirsch's efforts in Jewish agricultural resettlement focus on ventures in other countries, the First Aliyah enterprise in Palestine is consistent with his prescriptions for enhancing the Jewish condition, and his Jewish Colonization Association (ICA, established 1891) will become an important player in land redemption after his death.

Ahad Ha'am, after joining the central committee of Hibbat Zion, publishes his first essay, Lo ze ha-derekh ("This is not the Way"), which emphasizes the spiritual basis of Zionism.

His views on Zionism are rooted in the changing nature of Jewish communal life in Eastern Europe.

Ahad Ha'am realizes that a new meaning to Jewish life will have to be found for the younger generation of East European Jews who are revolting against traditional Jewish practice.

Whereas Jews in the West can participate in and benefit from a secular culture, Jews in the East are oppressed.

While Herzl will later focus on the plight of Jews alone, Ahad Ha'am is also interested in the plight of Judaism, which can no longer be contained within the limits of traditional religion.

Ahad Ha'am's solution is cultural Zionism: the establishment in Palestine of small settlements aimed at reviving the Jewish spirit and culture in the modern world.

In the cultural Zionist vision, a small number of Jewish cadres well versed in Jewish culture and speaking Hebrew will settle in Palestine.

Ahad Ha'am believes that by settling in that ancient land, religious Jews will replace their metaphysical attachment to the Holy Land with a Hebrew cultural renaissance.

Palestine and the Hebrew language are important not because of their religious significance but because they have been an integral part of the Jewish people's history and cultural heritage.