Elite households in Gaza, c. 1900 (original) (raw)
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Rethinking Urban Neighborhoods in Late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham: The Case of Gaza
From the Household to the Wider World Local Perspectives on Urban Institutions in late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham, edited by Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow, 2022
This chapter aims to provide a better understanding of the neighborhood as a crucial component of urban governance in late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria). Taking as a case study the neighborhoods of late Ottoman Gaza, it examines the extent to which Gaza's neighborhoods were social, administrative and political entities. In Gaza, a sizable part of the population was involved in two rival political factions that were based in neighborhoods at opposite ends of the city. While we have examined Gaza's factionalism elsewhere, the discussion here is embedded in an analysis of the city's morphology and its economic and social makeup. This approach helps to reveal the social characteristics of additional types of neighborhoods, beyond the official Ottoman administrative divisions. It also sheds light on the social background of additional types of political actors, beyond the political elite, such as muhtars, scribes, and imams. We show that Gaza was influenced by the flow of people and goods at the crossroads of two major caravan routes. A spread-out urban structure allowed kinship groups to settle in clusters. The nature of neighborhood boundaries was varied. Physically, they were permeable and allowed traffic to flow freely, including many city-dwelling peasants who commuted between the city and the rural area around it. Socially, as evidence on marriage relations suggests, there was a deep social rift between Gaza's two competing commercial and religious centers. This dual urban structure helped some elite families to build a viable opposition to the dominant political faction.
Urban Factionalism in Late Ottoman Gaza, c. 1875- 1914: Local Politics and Spatial Divisions
During the late Ottoman period the city of Gaza was caught up in internal political strife. The city's elite families tended to operate within rival factions while trying to draw Istanbul into its internal conflicts. In this context, they formed complex relationships with the elite of Jerusalem that dominated Palestine's politics, as well as with peasants and Bedouins in Gaza's hinterland. The article presents the first systematic account of factional strife in Gaza during the period. In addition, it examines what caused the internal divisions in Gaza to be so severe and considers whether faction-alism also played out in the urban space. It is argued that (1) the severity of this fac-tionalism derived from the rising stakes resulting from imperial politics and economic benefits, and (2) factionalism and urban development interacted with each other, leading to a particular type of 'spatialized factionalism'. We suggest that this perspective can lead to a better understanding of both urban politics and urban development in other towns and cities in the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces.
Die Welt des Islams
This article presents a new approach for analyzing the characteristics and historical transformations of an institution central to Palestinian society and the Fertile Crescent at large – the Elite Family. The approach perceives elite families in the twentieth century as complex organizations with three fundamental traits: structure, distinct goals and strategy. Based on the cases of the al-Jaʿbarī family from Hebron and the al-Maṣrī family from Nablus, the article comparatively examines the ways each family dealt with historical shifts from the early twentieth century through the late 1970s and how this affected its sociopolitical status. My principal argument is that the three attributes of goals, structure and strategy – which were influenced by local conditions too – shaped the different ways in which the two families managed changes and challenges, and directly determined the degree to which each endured in the sociopolitical arena. This approach challenges the prevalent view of...
Gaza of the late Ottoman period was integrated into an imperial web of Eastern Mediterranean port cities. As a maritime nodal point exporting grain grown in the arid terrains of southern Palestine, it enjoyed a peculiar status. This article explores the materialization of this status in the form of two interrelated urban institutions, a maritime pier and a municipal hospital. It is argued here that Gaza's pier-hospital construction project between 1893 and World War I exposed tensions and conflicts that radiated outwards in concentric circles, from the urban to the provincial and then to the imperial, bringing into play the very pillars of imperial modernity: public health and economic development, and the related question of which strata of the Ottoman body politic would dominate the two. Further along in the pier-hospital project's realization, the same fault-lines informed an inter-imperial conflict between the Ottomans and their European rivals over the shore of Gaza, such that this modest sea outlet transformed into a global arena of struggle for political legitimacy and economic sovereignty. Probing the undercurrents of this conflict, the article ultimately returns to the materiality of the pier-hospital initiative to argue for the peculiar modernity engendered by Gaza's imperial status, one that was ephemeral as it encompassed states of construction and of ruin almost simultaneously.
S tudents of Ottoman history have long recognized the household as one of the building blocks of Ottoman society and politics. In the last few decades important contributions have been made to the scholarly understanding of the varying structures, operations and functions of elite households. Many historians have been interested in the devolution of power from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, when high state officials and other grandees built large household organizations to undertake responsibilities that once had belonged exclusively to the central government. 1 Underlying these studies is the basic argument that the patrimonial household organizations of the larger political elite provided the necessary administrative agency for perpetuating dynastic state authority just when the political institutions of the central imperial state were faced with serious challenges. 2 How households among the common, subject populations shaped, and were shaped by, changing political and social conditions presents a challenging but no less important question. The relationship of the household (who one lives with) to the family (who one is related to) is of central importance. The starting assumption is that the households of the elite service class (the 'askeri) combined kinship-based family units with servants, slaves and clients, while households of the subject population (the re'aya) were family units defined by kinship relations alone. Complicating this picture, however, is the emerging scholarly view that there was considerable internal variation in the make-up of both elite and subject households, as well as the established fact that the boundary between elite and subject populations was constantly contested and shifting. 3 Contributing to this view are studies that have drawn on the theories and methods of sociology, anthropology and gender studies to challenge essentialist assumptions of the 'traditional' Middle Eastern family in the early modern and modern periods. Such works trace generational cycles of change in household structure, chart regional and cultural variations, point to the environmental factors affecting family formation, and shed light on the constructed nature of 'family' itself. 4 The pioneering study of Margaret Meriwether on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Aleppo, a major Ottoman trading and administrative city in the north of geographical Syria, focuses on the family dynamics of a distinct but composite social group, the urban notables, ordinar-ᇹᇺᇹ
The Refashioning of Palestinian Merchant Homes in the Late Ottoman Period
Jerusalem Quarterly, 2020
This article is about movement and the role it has played in shaping Palestinian homes. The article looks at merchants from Bethlehem as a case study of how mobility produced new types of homes in the late Ottoman and mandate periods, both materially and conceptually. It documents how the merchants' newfound economic success transformed Bethlehem's urban landscape and in turn produced a kind of "mobile home" as they adopted increasingly transient lifestyles, moving between multiple locations across the globe. These trends are explained within a framework of nineteenth century globalization, the birth of corporate identities, and shifting gender relations.
The Arzuhalcis and the Changing Late Ottoman Urban Sphere in Gaza
From the Household to the Wider World Local Perspectives on Urban Institutions in late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham, edited by Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow, 2022
Little research has been devoted to date to the work and social background of the arzuhalcis, the professional letter and petition writers in the Ottoman Empire, even though they were part of the Ottoman urban landscape of the 19 th century and handled most of the public's writing and correspondence with the authorities. The services they offered were well known to the general public and a wide variety of people, men and women, urbanites, villagers, Bedouins, and officials alike, approached them and paid for having their petitions written professionally. This article examines the arzuhalacis' social profile and status in society based on the Ottoman census of 1905 for the city of Gaza on the southern Palestine coast. Petitions sent from this city to Istanbul by the city's urban population as well as by peasants and Bedouin from the region were for the most part written in Arabic, often in a very high register, which no doubt was formulated by professional petition writers. Several questions come to mind when exploring the place of the arzuhalcis in Gaza, in particular given what we know about this city's stormy politics at the time. How many petition and letter writers were active in this city? Were any of them identified with one of the factions in this city to an extent that others from rivaling coalitions refrained from using their services? Were any of the petition writers in Gaza former state employees, or perhaps non-natives of Gaza? What was their relationships with state and local officials? Finally, where were they active in Gaza's public space? This article attempts to respond to some of these questions to better understand the role of the arzuhalcis in the public space of a late Ottoman provincial city in Greater Syria.
Journal of Contemporary History, 2016
The Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate may be characterized as bourgeois and educated, similarly to bourgeois classes that have developed in the West in the Modern era. The bourgeois characteristics of the Palestinian-Arab middle class, and their influence on its historical trajectory during the Mandate era, have not been studied in depth yet. This article aims to focus on a local aspect of the rise of the middle class in the region in that period: the rise of the Palestinian-Arab middle class under the Mandate, until the Palestinian-Arab Revolt (1936–9). The main hypothesis is that particular bourgeois social and cultural characteristics prevented the middle class full incorporation into the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, and even led to estrangement between the middle class and the national leadership, as well as members of lower strata, especially the villagers. Members of the middle class, mostly Christians but Muslims as well, espoused in their daily life modern habits, ideas, and customs, as a means to distinguish between themselves and other classes, similarly to their parallels in the West, and like their contemporaries elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, as has demonstrated Watenpaugh. Those gaps reached their climax during the years of revolt