"Eastern" Print Modernities and the Jewish Newspaper of Ottoman Baghdad.

Ha-Dover (The speaker") (1863–1871) was Iraq's first newspaper. Because the editor-printer Barukh Moshe Mizrahi was Jewish and since the text of the newspaper uses the Hebrew script, scholarship has analyzed it only within frameworks of European Jewish modernity. However, nineteenth-century Baghdad was a part of the Ottoman Empire's eastern frontier. Examining Ha-Dover as an Ottoman frontier press artifact through content, materiality, and temporality points to other frames of reference as understood by Mizrahi. In addition to being a bilingual Jewish newspaper, Ha-Dover generated Ottoman civic participation through the consumption of cultural content, its lithographic form tied it closer to print products from the Persianate world, and its adoption of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Rumi calendar signified an embrace of Ottoman imperial modernity. As Ha-Dover differs from many of the other Jewish newspapers of the nineteenth century, analyzing it within a wider regional context underscores the significance of multiple models of modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]