Download PDF | Eyal Ginio, Elie Podeh (eds.) - The Ottoman Middle East_ Studies in Honor of Amnon Cohen-Brill Academic Pub (2013).
284 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many individuals and organizations contributed to this volume and accompanied us throughout our journey to publication.
We are grateful to the Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem for hosting the conference “The Ottomans in Palestine and the Middle East”, in honor of Prof. Amnon Cohen’s retirement. Many of the presentations gave rise to ideas that were later developed into chapters for this book. We are grateful for the generous support for the conference provided by the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Noteworthy financial aid for the publication of this book was received from the Forum for Turkish Studies, The Institute of Asian and African Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Dr. Leigh Chipman did a fine job editing the papers, unifying and standardizing them, and making them enjoyable to read. Mr. Nadav Solomonovich painstakingly prepared the bibliography and the index.
Finally, we would also like to thank Franca de Kort and Renee Otto from Brill Publishers who oversaw the project, and answered all our questions and concerns quickly and efficiently.
Eyal Ginio and Elie Podeh, Jerusalem July 2013.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Yaron Ben-Naeh is an associate Professor in the Department of the History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the Director of Misgav Yerushalayim Research Center for the Study of Sephardi Jewry. His research deals with the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Jews. Among his publications are Jews In the Realm of the Sultans: Ottoman Jewry in the Seventeenth Century (Tiibingen: Mohtr-Siebeck Press, 2008) and together with Richard Wittmann, Everyday Life Realities in The Haskéy Quarter of 17th Century Istanbul (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2014).
Eyal Ginio is Senior Lecturer and the former Chair of the Department of Islam and Middle Eastern Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2009-2012). He also serves as the coordinator of the Forum of Turkish Studies at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, The Hebrew University. His current research deals with Ottoman society during the Balkan Wars (1912-13). Among his recent publications are “Paving the Way for Ethnic Cleansing: Eastern Thrace during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and Their Aftermath,” in Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz (eds.) Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 283-297; and “Making Sense of the Defeat in the Balkan Wars: Voices from the Arab Provinces,” in M. Hakan Yavuz and Isa Blumi (eds.), War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913, and Their Sociopolitical Implications (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2013), 594-617.
Jacob M. Landau is Professor Emeritus in political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His works have dealt mainly with the political history and the literatures of the modern Middle East. His latest book, authored together with Professor Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, is entitled Language Politics in Contemporary Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).
Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of many critically acclaimed and bestselling books. Some of his major publications include The Arabs in History (London: Hutchinson, 1966), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), and most recently, with Buntzie Churchill, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Viking, 2012).
Rachel Milstein is a professor of Islamic art (the L.A. Mayer chair of Islamic Art and Archaeology). She lectures in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University. Her main interest is in miniature painting, both Persian and Ottoman. She is currently studying the visual representation of sultans and the representation of space in Persian painting. Among her publications are the following: “A Collection of Thirteenth-Century Illustrated Hajj Certificates,” in Irvin Cemil Schick (ed.), M. Ugur Derman 65th Birthday Festschrift (Istanbul: Sabanci Universitesi, 2000), 101-134; “Kitab Shawq Nameh, an Illustrated Guide to Holy Arabia” Jerusalem Studies of Arabic and Islam 25 (2001), 275-345.
Elie Podeh is professor in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His major fields of interest are the modern Middle East, Arab-Israeli conflict, Egypt, culture and education in the Arab world. He served as chair of the department during the years 2004-2009. Among his recent publications are The Arab-Israeli Conflict in Israeli History Textbooks, 1948-2000 (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002; Arabic version, 2006); Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt (edited with Onn Winckler, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004); and The Politics of National celebrations in the Arab World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Minna Rozen teaches Jewish history and philosophy of history at the University of Haifa. From 1987 onwards she has conducted projects of documentation and digitization of 60,000 tombstones, scores of synagogues and thousands of religious artifacts in Turkey, the deciphering and codification of the Istanbul Jewish community records, and the records of the Jewish communities of Salonika and Athens (16th—2oth centuries). Among her recent publications are A History of The Jewish Community of Istanbul—The Formative Years (1453-1566) (Brill, Leiden ,2002, 2010); The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond: The Jews of Turkey and the Balkans, 1808-1945, I-II (Tel Aviv: Goren-Goldstein Diaspora Research Center, TAU, 2002-2005); and A Journey Through Civilizations: Chapters in the History of Istanbul Jewry, 1453-1923 (forthcoming, Brepols and Tel Aviv University Press, 2014).
Khader Salameh is a Ph.d student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the director of al-Aksa Library (AL) and the Islamic Museum (IM). His publications include The Qur’an Manuscripts in the al-Haram al-Sharif, Islamic Museum, Jerusalem (London: UNESCO and Garnet Publisher, 2001) and Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in al-Aqsa Library, 4 volume (vol. 1 Jerusalem: Awgaf Administration, 1980; vol. 2 Amman: Al-albayt Foundation 1983, vol. 3 and 4 London: al-Furqan Foundation 1996, 2008).
Amy Singer teaches Ottoman and Turkish History in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. She has researched Ottoman public kitchens extensively, including on this topic the monograph Constructing Ottoman Beneficence (Albany: SUNY, 2002). The study of one endowment led to a more general interrogation of Islamic charity: Charity in Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). At present, her research focuses on public kitchens across the Ottoman Empire and on the city of Edirne.
Ehud R. Toledano is professor in the Department of History of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University the Director of the Program in Ottoman and Turkish Studies at the Department of Middle East and African History, Tel Aviv University. He also served as the Director of the Graduate School of History (2004-2008) and was a member of TAU’s Executive Council (2005-2009). Among his recent publications are: As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in Islamic Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007); and 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).
Nicolas Vatin is Directeur d’études at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and a Directeur de recherche in the CNRS (CETObaC, EHESS-Collége de France). He is a historian of the Ottoman Empire, especially from the late 15th century until the seventeenth century. His current research deals with the Gazavat of Hayreddin Barberousse. His recent publications include L’épitaphe ottomane musulmane. Contribution a une histoire de la culture ottomane (Paris-Louvain: Peeters, 2007, with Edhem Eldem); Feridiin Bey. Les plaisants secrets de la campagne de Szigetvar. Edition, traduction et commentaire des folios 1 a 147 du Nizhetii-l-esrar-il-ahbar der sefer-i Sigetvar (ms. H 1339 de la Bibliotheque du Musée de Topkapi Sarayi (Vienna and Munster: LIT Verlag, 2010); Catalogue du fonds ottoman des archives du Monastére de Saint-Jean a Patmos. Les vingt-deux premies dossiers (Athenes: Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut d’Etudes Byzantines, 20u, with G. Veinsein and E. Zachariadou).
Gilles Veinstein (Paris, 18 July 1945—-Saint-Cloud, 3 February 2013) was a Directeur d’études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), and a Professeur in the Collége de France (Paris). His research dealt with the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire, especially during the 16-18th centuries. He published extensively on the shaping of Ottoman administrative and financial institutions in the provinces and on the different communities (especially on the Jews) living in the Ottoman realm. His other major topics of research were Ottoman diplomacy—in particular vis-a-vis France, Ottoman military and legal history and the biography of several sultans. Another major contribution for Ottoman studies was his publication and translation of Ottoman manuscripts. Among his recent publications are Le sérail ébranlé. Essai sur les morts, dépositions et avenements des sultans ottomans (XIV°-XIX° siécles) (Paris: Fayard, 2003, with N. Vatin); Autoportrait du sultan ottoman en conquérant (Istanbul, Isis, 2010); Catalogue du fonds ottoman des archives du Monastére de Saint-Jean a Patmos. Les vingt-deux premiers dossiers (Athenes: Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut d’Etudes Byzantines, 2011, with N. Vatin and E. Zachariadou).
Michael Winter is professor emeritus in the Department of History of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University. His current research interests are Egypt and Syria under the late Mamluk and early Ottoman rule, the judiciary system of Damascus, and Sufism. Winter's recent publications include: “The Ottoman conquest and Egyptian culture”, in Benjamin Lellouch and Nicolas Michel (eds.), Conquéte ottomane de l’Egypte (1517): Arriére-plan, impact, échos (Leiden, Brill: 2012), 287-302 and “The ashraf and the naqib al-ashraf in Ottoman Egypt and Syria: a comparative analysis”, in Morimoto Kazuo (ed.), Sayyids and Sharifs in Muslim Societies: The living links to the Prophet (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 138-157.
Fruma Zachs is an associate Professor in the Department of the history of the Middle East, at the university of Haifa Israel. Among her research interests are the intellectual and cultural history of Greater Syria, and the formation of national and gendered identities in modern Syria. She is the author of The Making of a Syrian Identity: Intellectuals and Merchants in 19th Century Beirut (Leiden: Brill, 2005), co-auther of Gendering Culture in Greater Syria: Intellectuals and Ideology in the Late Ottoman Period (forthcoming in I.B. Tauris) as well as several articles.
Dror Ze‘evi is professor in the Department of Middle East Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He served as the President of Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel (2006-2009). Among his publications are An Ottoman Century: the District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany: University of New York Press, 1996); and Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). His current project, together with Prof. Beny Morris, Ben Gurion University, is The Armenian Massacres in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, 1894-1923.
INTRODUCTION
Eyal Ginio and Elie Podeh
In 2005, after a long and devoted academic career of teaching and research, Professor Amnon Cohen retired from his position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His enormous contribution to the study of Ottoman history in general, and to the scholarship of the social and economic history of Ottoman Palestine/Eretz Israel in particular, is well known. Acknowledging his contribution to the study of Ottoman Palestine, in 2007 Amnon Cohen was honoured with the Israel Prize for the study of Eretz Israel—the most distinguished award that Israeli society can bestow upon a scholar. We, his former students and colleagues, would like to celebrate Professor Cohen’s productive and stimulating academic career by presenting him with this collective volume. The articles contained here reflect our deep gratitude and appreciation for his scholarship, and indeed, the inspiration we draw from him. We celebrate his past and continuing research on Ottoman history.
Amnon Cohen is a prolific scholar. While the scope of his research includes important studies of other periods and regions as well, his major academic contribution lies in his study of Ottoman Palestine, its relations with the central authorities in Istanbul, and its various groups of inhabitants: Muslims, Christians and Jews. As is well known, the Ottomans ruled Palestine for some four hundred years (1516-1917/18). During this lengthy period, the land changed unrecognizably. These changes and developments were studied in the past mostly through the eyes of European visitors. Indeed, to a large extent, the history of Ottoman Palestine was explored mainly through writings and documents composed by Western travelers and consular representatives of European powers who resided in Palestine. Amnon Cohen was one of the first to attempt to draw a picture of the history of Palestine as seen through sources composed by representatives of the Ottoman state serving there, and by making use of local sources—especially the documents produced by the shar% court of Jerusalem, known as the sijillat al-gadi (Arabic) or kad: sicilleri (Turkish). These sources—all manuscripts in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish—formed the main textual foundation of his research. Professor Cohen was one of the first scholars to base his research on these sources and to train generations of students capable of coping with the paleographical challenges of reading handwriting in a language created largely for the Ottoman administration.
Cohen’s pioneering research began a new era in the study of Ottoman Palestine and integrated it into the study of the history of the Middle East and of the Ottoman Empire. In this he essentially followed in the footsteps of his teachers, Uriel Heyd (1913-1968), the founder of Turkish and Ottoman studies in Israel, Shlomo Dov Goitein (1900-1985), who pioneered the study of the Cairo Genizah, and Bernard Lewis (b. 1916), who in the 1950s worked in the newly-opened central archives in Istanbul. Most of Cohen’s research dealt with general aspects of life in Ottoman Palestine, but through these studies he also shed light on the religious minorities in general, and Jewish communities in particular. His research is a unique and pioneering contribution to the study of the Middle East and to the understanding of the frameworks and patterns of the Ottoman state. His studies of the séjill laid the groundwork for the wide-ranging research being conducted today on all of the Ottoman provinces, in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab world, utilizing this source. Amnon Cohen created a new school of study, whose findings are today at the center of debates about the Ottoman state.
The synthesis between Western and Ottoman sources was at the basis of Cohen’s doctoral dissertation on Palestine in the 18th century. This dissertation, later published in English as a monograph under the title of Palestine in the 18th Century,| was based on documents kept at the French chamber of commerce in Marseilles, 18th-century biographies written in Arabic, and Ottoman manuscripts and documents preserved for the most part at the Prime Minister’s Archives in Istanbul. This synthesis allowed Cohen to demonstrate the many changes that occurred in Ottoman Palestine during the 18th century, principally the rise of local rulers to power: first Dahir al-‘Umar and, then, his more powerful and ambitious successor, Ahmad al-Jazzar. While acting in the name of the Ottoman state and as an integral part of the state machine, these two rulers were able to establish a strong and efficient centralized regime, based on a powerful private military arm, substantial revenues from trade and agriculture, and firm commercial ties with French merchants—to name their main achievements. This book on 18th-century Palestine, published in English in 1973, remains the principal study used by researchers in Israel and abroad.
Five years later, together with Bernard Lewis, Cohen published a study of the demography and economics of 16th-century Palestine. The book Population and Revenue in the Towns of Palestine? made use of another kind of Ottoman source—the population censuses carried out by the Ottoman state for taxation purposes during the 16th century. These censuses, known as tahrir, are kept in the tapu registers in Istanbul and Ankara. The tahrir surveys are the product of the work conducted by official commissions dispatched to survey tax-paying populations, lands and revenues in the towns and villages for fiscal purposes. The data collected were gathered in registers (tapu defterleri). The accumulated figures provided for the individual taxes represent the authorities’ global estimations of what was expected, rather than statements of the amounts and yields actually collected.
The registers were handwritten in codes and abbreviations. Cohen and Lewis worked painstakingly to decipher these codes, and the book, that incorporated the extensive data they extracted from these censuses, draws a detailed and original picture of the six major cities of Palestine after the Ottoman conquest. As the registers provide considerable quantities of details, statistics and information covering most of the first century of Ottoman rule over Palestine, their study was concerned mostly with two major themes: population and revenues. In this case, too, the book revolutionized our knowledge of Palestine and its different inhabitants immediately after the transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule and during the first century of Ottoman presence in the country’s urban centers. Indeed, the 16th century—a period of great political and economic upheaval and administrative changes in Palestine—would attract Cohen's attention in many of his subsequent studies.
Professor Cohen’s greatest contribution to the study of Ottoman Palestine is probably his researches in the archives of the shar% court of Jerusalem. Apprehending the documents’ potential contribution to our understanding of the matrix of life in Ottoman Jerusalem, Cohen was the first researcher, from Israel or elsewhere, to receive official permission to conduct research on the sijill registers from the Muslim Supreme Council in Jerusalem, as early as 1968. As in other provincial centers, the gadi of Jerusalem and the court’s scribes, who were either agents of the political center or local appointees, shaped and compiled these records according to long-established general patterns and traditions lightly seasoned by local usage and practices. As state-generated sources, these documents mainly reflect the local administration’s concerns and mirror the diversity of the gadis responsibilities in the Ottoman city. The documents found in the séill most frequently are notarial registrations, litigations, copies of decrees arriving from the Sublime Porte or from other high officials, and registrations of estates. While the sijill records do not always yield a detailed and clear picture, still they evidently reflect the perceptions of the local elite and echo some of the initiatives and responses of local residents and their strategies vis-a-vis other groups, local authorities as well as their Ottoman rulers, though the official language of the documents blurs their personal voices.
The séjill documents as penned by the court’s scribes are, therefore, unique and precious sources for understanding the quotidian life of the various groups composing the urban population of Jerusalem. Cohen’s subsequent and long-lasting fascination with the sijill is evident in his research and writing. In one of his introductions, he phrases it in the following manner:
Each new sijill entry tempts the researcher to investigate a hitherto unexplored facet of daily life, to follow the fortune or misfortune of a person whose name seems familiar from some earlier innuendo, or whose family affairs we have learned about from previous entries.?
The earliest court records from Ottoman Jerusalem are dated 1530/1— less than two decades after the Ottoman conquest of the city. The last entries date from the hasty retreat of the Ottoman army from Jerusalem in December 1917. Therefore, these registers document the long Ottoman rule over the city and the various changes and events that took place within. The registers are 420 leather-bound volumes containing some half-million documents that shed light on life in Jerusalem and its surroundings throughout the Ottoman period. Many varied topics emerge from within the pages of the siill, elucidating aspects of administration, government, society, economics, and the functioning of religious and cultural institutions. Different documents reveal the inner life of the residents of the city and the activities of visitors there; minority-majority relations; the communal organization of Jews, Christians and Muslims; architecture and civic administration; town-village relations; recreational activities; social tensions; natural disasters, and more. These registrations provide us with numerous encounters and insights into the lives of Jerusalemites under Ottoman rule. They likewise enable the researcher to discuss broader topics regarding various aspects of Ottoman history. Cohen studied these topics and published his findings in a series of scholarly articles and books. He also guided a generation of young scholars who continued in the path of studying the sijill that he paved. Some of their works can be found in this volume.
Most prominent amongst Cohen’s many studies of the sijill are those focusing on economics in Ottoman Jerusalem and on the Jewish population of the city. In 1989, Cohen published a monograph—Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem—that explores modes and aspects of the production and consumption of meat, soap and olive oil, and bread in 16th-century Jerusalem.5 By studying the production and distribution of these basic commodities, consumed by the majority of 16th-century Jerusalemites, Cohen was able to discuss broader social and economic institutions and topics that reflect the local economy of Jerusalem, such as agricultural production in the vicinity of Jerusalem (and the economic relations with the Bedouin tribes of the Judean desert), transportation, inflation, attempts at price control and supervision, the state’s involvement in the city’s economic infrastructure and policies (and its limits), urban planning, the close relations between the waqf (pious endowments) and the local economy, patterns of trade, professional specialization and guild inter-relationships, the local population’s patterns of supply and demand and how they affected and changed economic life in the city, modes of production and technology. On the basis of this intensive study, Cohen was able to demonstrate the impressive demographic and economic growth that characterized much of the first fifty years of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem (and elsewhere in Palestine).
The guild system of Jerusalem, regarded by Cohen as the harbinger of civil society, stands at the focus of another of his studies of Jerusalem: The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem.§ A Turkish version of this book was later published under the title Osmant Kudiistinde Loncalar.’ In this book, Prof. Cohen used the proceedings of the local shari court from the early 16th century until the beginning of the i9th century to reconstruct Jerusalem’s guild system in the longue durée. In this study he sheds light on the historically “silent majority” of Jerusalemites: the members of the professional guilds who controlled much of the economic activity that took place in the city’s markets. In Ottoman Jerusalem there were some seventy different professions, organized in about sixty guilds. His study describes the different professions in Ottoman Jerusalem and reveals the systems organizing the marketplace, the production arrangements of the guilds of Jerusalem, and their provision of services. Drawing on the sijill registers, the economic and social significance of the guild system to Ottoman Jerusalem is clearly demonstrated.®
Cohen’s research on the Jewish community as viewed from the pages of the sijill registers has led to a real revolution in our understanding of Jewish existence in Jerusalem in the Ottoman period. As tolerated religious minorities, the Jews (like the Christians) maintained their own internal judicial systems, but, being an integral part of the larger society and economy of the Ottoman state, they were bound by many of the Sultanic decrees (fermans) and decisions issued by the central authorities, the provincial authorities and the Muslim court. According to Ottoman usage, all of these official documents were registered in the local séjill. In addition, as was shown by Cohen, Jews and Christians voluntarily attended the Muslim court for rulings in matters that touched on members of other religions and also, sometimes, in matters related to people of their own community. Other non-Muslims came to the gadi, in his capacity of the local notary, to receive a legal document that would confirm deeds, agreements, and contracts.
On the basis of these varied documents Cohen was able to offer a detailed and innovative discussion of various aspects of Jewish life in Ottoman Jerusalem in all their complexity and diversity: communal organization, relations with the authorities and the larger society, economics, demography, emigration, social relations, and more. In a process of comparison, analysis and synthesis of the various historical sources, Cohen was able to advance a novel approach to understanding the Ottoman regulation and perception of Jewish communal life in Jerusalem and the inter-communal relationships in the city, and to reconstruct a rich living reality hitherto hidden from researchers.? In a wide-ranging project, supported by the Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, Cohen has published four volumes, each dedicated to a century of Jewish life in the Ottoman city of Jerusalem.!° These volumes include many documents related to Jews and translated into Hebrew. The documents are annotated and accompanied by extensive commentary, enabling students of the Jewish settlement who are not acquainted with Ottoman Muslim society to make use of the documents in their own research.
The present collection of articles aims to reflect the rich research conducted by Cohen in Ottoman studies over the last decades. Therefore, its various parts deal with four major topics that characterize much of Cohen’s work: Ottoman Palestine and its various communities; the neighboring Arab provinces; the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire, and the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire in general.
Following his retirement from teaching, Amnon Cohen has not slowed the pace of his academic research. On the contrary, his continuing fascination with the history of Ottoman Palestine, as well his new interest in the current upheavals in contemporary Iraq," have triggered him further to explore documents from the past and to offer innovative insights and interpretations of the region’s history. His appetite for scholarship and his dynamism continue to inspire us all. We wish him many more years of good health and intellectual curiosity and creativity.
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