Tag Archives: ottoman history

From Paper Mill to Archives: The Jerusalem documents in the National Library of Bulgaria

13/07/2017 Open Jerusalem

by Orlin Sabev

After two prospections missions conducted at the National Library of Bulgaria (Sofia) by Louise Corvasier, Vincent Lemire and Yann Potin (December 2016; June 2017) and with the help and support of Milena Koleva-Zvancharova, Head of the Oriental Collections Department of the NLB, Open Jerusalem research collaborators Orlin Sabev and Stoyanka Kenderova completed the archival description of the two important fonds (283 and 283A) for the history of Ottoman Jerusalem.

The prevailing number of documents related to the history of Jerusalem in the Ottoman period, preserved at present in the Oriental Department of the National Library of Jerusalem in the Ottoman period, preserved at present in the Oriental Department of the National Library “Sts Cyril and Methodius” (Sofia, Bulgaria) established in 1878, are organized in two archival fonds: no. 283 (comprising 7 archival units) and no. 283A (comprising 469 archival units). The Oriental Department houses about 500,000 archival units (comprising about 1 million folios) dating from the Ottoman period. They are organized in several collections, the biggest of which is the collection of topographic funds organized according to the place with which the documents are related to.

As part of the documents preserved in Sofia are originating from the Bulgarian lands that were under Ottoman rule from the late fourteenth century to 1878, the history of most of the documents dates back to the early 1930s when the authorities of the recently proclaimed Republic of Turkey – known for their rejection of the Sultan’s rule and the Ottoman legacy – sold large amount of Ottoman documents (being charged in several wagons) to a Bulgarian paper mill in order to be recycled for paper production. When the first wagons arrived the factory owners noticed that the cargo is consisted of Ottoman documents and asked expertise by the Oriental Department. After confirming their historical and archival value all the survived documents were transferred to Sofia to be preserved in the Oriental Department. Since the documents were sent from Constantinople and mostly from the depositories of the former Ottoman ministry of finances they deal mainly with financial issues and are related to all the former Ottoman provinces (in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Arabian peninsula, and North Africa). This explains why documents related to Ottoman Jerusalem (mainly dealing with financial issues) are now to be found in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Another point is the process of the organization of these documents into archival funds formed according to the previously existing Ottoman provinces. The organization was executed in two stages: at the first stage over 1,000 topographical funds have been organized in alphabetical order, while at the second stage funds with similar enumeration with attached “A” have been added, respectively. These funds include mainly documents written in Ottoman Turkish, while those in Arabic have been separated in a special collection of Arabic documents. Hence fonds 283 and 283A contain documents related to Ottoman Jerusalem. Since the key word used by the archivists in the distribution of the documents was the place name appearing in them, the fonds include both documents sent from Jerusalem to the Ottoman capital Constantinople, as well as drafts of documents sent from Constantinople to the local authorities in Jerusalem. Although most of the documents deal directly with Jerusalem proper some documents are related to other places located within the province of Jerusalem such as Jaffa, Hebron, Bethlehem, etc. Some documents are mistakenly distributed to the Jerusalem funds because of the similarity between the Arabic/Ottoman name of Jerusalem – Kuds/Kudüs, and the expression “Kuddise Sırruh” (“May God bless him”) used for the famous mystic Jalal ad-din Rumi (1207–1273) whose tomb is in Konya, Central Anatolia. The same is true also for some other documents in which the mosques and waqfs of Rumi are mentioned.

The documents of fonds 283A are distributed in 469 archival units (that is, folders), put in 7 boxes. Most of the folders contain just one document, but some contain two to three, in rare cases even more documents. Some of the documents are torn and therefore they are just fragments simply because the initial purpose of their transportation to Bulgaria was to be recycled in a paper mill as said above. Some other documents are in a poor condition, the edges being rotten and the text partly illegible. Therefore during the exploration of the fonds 283A some damaged documents had been already taken out for chemical restoration and hence I was unable to include them in the inventory.
The documents of fonds 283A are dating from the mid-16th to the early 20th century. The earliest document is dating from 1550 (fragment of a register of zeamets in the district of Doha), while the latest one is from 1908 (related to revenue collection), respectively. The 19th-century documents prevail, however the number of the 17th- and 18th-century documents is also considerable. In terms of content almost all of them deal with financial issues related mostly to incomes from taxes, expenses for the officers who guarded the fortress of Jerusalem, as well as some other minor fortresses in the region, and transfer of waqf posts with the respective salary from one holder (mostly because of his death) to another holder. Having this in mind, the documents of fonds “Jerusalem” preserved in the National Library in Sofia could be useful for studying the socio-economic history of Jerusalem and its province during the Ottoman period.

Bibliography
www.nationallibrary.bg/wp/?page_id=258 (only Bulgarian version is available)
İsmet Binark and Seyit Ali Kahraman, eds., Bulgaristan’daki Osmanlı Evrakı (İstanbul: T.C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü, 1994).

Summer School

Call for applications: Summer School ‘Reading and analysing Ottoman manuscript sources’

30/05/2017 Open Jerusalem

The French Institute of the Near East (Ifpo), the Orient-Institut Beirut (OIB), the University of Balamand, the Lebanese University (Doctoral School of Literature, Humanities and Social Sciences), the Center for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan and Centralasian Studies (CETOBaC), the Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Üniversitesi, the İbn Haldun Üniversitesi, and the Japan Center for Middle Eastern Studies (JaCMES) with the support of the Open Jerusalem project are organising a summer school devoted to reading and analysing Ottoman manuscript sources. This is the second edition, following the summer school of 2016 in Amman, Jordan.

During the four-day programme we will introduce young researchers (mostly MA and PhD candidates, but postdocs may also apply) to reading, combining and analysing manuscript sources from various archives of the Ottoman era, produced at local, provincial and imperial levels. We concentrate mainly on materials from the 16th and 20th centuries, but welcome also explorations into earlier archives. Our summer school offers future researchers introductory presentations of the archival situation, various types of sources and basic research tools and workshops with a focus on the actual work with texts. The aim is to overcome the initial difficulties researchers often face when working with archival material from the Ottoman period, one of which is an administrative terminology no longer in use today.

Our programme emerged from several observations. First, young historians often feel helpless when faced with difficult Ottoman archival material in Ottoman Turkish or other languages used in the Empire if they have not had proper training in palaeography and philology. Moreover, there is not enough dialogue and exchange between the different schools of Ottoman history, particularly between those focusing on the analysis of imperial dynamics (who are generally specialists in the Ottoman language) and those who concentrate on the provinces of the Empire and who therefore work on sources produced in local languages. Our summer school will focus on the study of archives in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, in case also in Armenian and other languages, so as to provide future historians with the skills necessary to use such sources within the framework of their research projects.

The objective of including these three languages of the empire in one summer school is two-fold: firstly, to foster an exchange around theory and methodology among specialists of different regions of the empire. Secondly, the three languages are important for a comprehensive analysis of local dynamics in various provinces, either for administrative, economic and social dynamics or more specifically in religious studies and belles-lettres. An additional aim is to encourage the use of source materials in different languages by facilitating the identification and understanding of diverse archival holdings. Bringing together specialists of different regions and subjects will encourage the exchange of information on archival holdings, their history, catalogues and finding aids.

How?

This summer school is an initiative of the Ifpo, the OIB, the University of Balamand, the Lebanese University (Doctoral School of Literature, Humanities and Social Sciences), Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Üniversitesi, İbn Haldun Üniversitesi, the CETOBaC, the JaCMES and other Lebanese partners to be defined.

The focus of the summer school are practical workshops in small groups allowing trainees to read and discuss archival documents with specialists familiar with different types of documents. These workshops will make up more than half of the training, the other part including visits of archives in and around Beirut, presentations of Ottoman archives and research aids in palaeography, and discussions about methodology.

In a workshop, the students will be asked to read and analyse a document of their choice.

The summer school will accept up to 20 students. About ten researchers and professors from Arab, Turkish, German and French universities will attend the summer school as instructors.

The main working language of the summer school is English.

Who?

Students enrolled in a Master or Ph.D. programme as well as researchers in an early post-doctoral stage, regardless of nationality, can apply for this summer school, provided that his or her research project necessitates the use of Ottoman source materials in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic or Armenian (or other relevant languages).

The students selected for the summer school will be offered the following free of charge:

summer school fees
lunch and dormitory accommodation during the summer school
round-trip air transportation from their country of residence
excursions and visits.

In order to be considered, the applications must include:

a proposal outlining the candidate’s research project and archival sources (two pages maximum)
a curriculum vitae, mentioning language skills (two pages maximum)
name and contact of 2 referees that may be contacted for a recommendation

Around fifteen students will be selected for participation in this summer school. The applications must be submitted in English and sent to this address: ottomansummerschool2016@gmail.com

When?

The applications must be submitted before 15 June 2017 (midnight Beirut time).

You will receive a reply by 25 June 2017.

The summer school will take place from 27 to 30 August 2017. Arrival day in Beirut is 26 August, departure is foreseen for 31 August at the earliest.

Where?

The summer school will take place in Beirut and Balamand, Lebanon.

List of potential instructors

Simon Abdel Massih (Lebanese University), Metin Atmaca (Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Üniversitesi), Marc Aymes (CETOBaC), Fatih Çalısır (Ibn Haldun University), Antranig Dakessian (Haigazian University Beirut), Aylin De Tapia (IFEA), Vanessa Guéno (Ifpo), Mahmoud Haddad (University Balamand), Astrid Meier (OIB), Serife Memis Eroglu (Hacettepe University), Falestin Naili (Ifpo), Norig Neveu (Ifpo), Abdallah Said (Lebanese University), Souad Slim (University of Balamand), Faruk Yaslıçimen (Ibn Haldun University) and others.

Publications

De-Municipalising Jerusalem

09/02/2017 Open Jerusalem

Les municipalités proche-orientales datent de la fin de l’époque ottomane et sont ainsi des témoins et des acteurs importants des changements qu’a connus la région au cours des 150 dernières années. L’échelon municipal permet d’appréhender les questions liées à l’espace social et politique des villes sur la longue durée. Ainsi, pour le cas de Jérusalem, l’analyse de la gouvernance urbaine (entre la fin de l’époque ottomane et la période mandataire) pointe la centralité de cet échelon afin de comprendre de manière plus nuancée les changements politiques impulsés par l’arrivée de la puissance mandataire.

READ THE ARTICLE: F. Naili, La dé-municipalisation de la gouvernance urbaine et de l’espace politique post-ottoman : le cas de Jérusalem, Les Carnets de l’IFPO

Posts, Reviews

Review of “Ottoman Izmir”

26/03/2015 Open Jerusalem

Sibel Zandi-Sayek,
Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port,
1840–1880
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press for Architecture,
2014

Review by Angelos Dalachanis

This review originally appeared on ABE Journal, 6, 2014

Izmir is a somewhat privileged case, among the “cosmopolitan” port cities of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, in terms of the number of studies devoted to it. However, although scholars dealing with Izmir’s history almost unanimously cite its cosmopolitan
character, most of them examine the city from the perspective of individual ethnic and religious minorities. An obvious disadvantage of such an approach is that it ignores the relational dimension of group formation: minority communities coalesced in relation and
opposition to one another. Another disadvantage is that it downgrades the multicultural character of the city’s diverse population –an aspect historians of such cities are careful to point out– and its interactions with the Ottoman administration. Usually, approaches tending to encompass all minorities focus on the end of the Ottoman era, namely the first two decades of the twentieth century and especially 1922, when the city was burned. In most Turkish, Greek, Armenian, or other national historiographies, the image of Izmir in flames has become a symbolic signpost, announcing the end of the city’s cosmopolitanism.

Sibel Zandi-Sayek’s study addresses the abovementioned issues with considerable success. She goes back to the time when Izmir’s cosmopolitanism was forged, providing a fresh view of the phenomenon. Her study, situated at the crossroads of urban, social, and political history, discusses Izmir’s cosmopolitanism as an outcome of constant negotiation between its diverse population, the city’s institutions, and the multifaceted urban reality from the 1840s to the 1880s, a period of especially rapid political, social, and urban
change. Unlike most historians of 19th century cities, Zandi-Sayek does not blindly accept institutionally defined ethnoreligious categories. Her contribution to the debate consists in interrogating the urban space for responses to issues concerning identity and belonging.
The author argues that social categories, which were designed by Ottoman institutions, were reconfigured by the everyday use of the urban space and citizens’ routine behaviors.
The author’s use of “the urban space and spatial practices as a lens,” shifting the focus to the porosity of institutional and group boundaries, enables her to capture a world in flux and “hinged on delicate balances”. Indeed, nothing is static in Zandi-Sayek’s Izmir. Everything is dynamic, fluid, and in constant (re)negotiation: people, groups, urban practices and space as well as institutional policies. Being “the West of the East and the East of the West,” the city itself is part of a broader dynamic Levantine/Mediterranean universe. Izmir’s urban space is not only defined by its permanent residents but, to a great extent, by the mobility of its population. This mobility was a salient feature throughout the period under scrutiny, enhanced by the region’s history as a favorable setting for the transfer of resources, goods, and people. This fluidity inevitably etched itself into the urban landscape. The author manages to capture this permanent flux, the force behind continual urban transformations and the definition of new social, class, and ethnoreligious borders. Zandi-Sayek‘s writing style, also fluid, contributes to highlighting the ever-changing urban and social environment and makes the book accessible to any reader, specialist or not. The structure of the historical narrative, divided into four chapters that follow on from a rich introduction and precede a strong and summative epilogue, is an ideal channel for this essential fluidity.

The first chapter, entitled “Defining Citizenship: Property, Taxation and Sovereignty,” deals with the articulation of the legal status of individuals and groups in relation to ownership rights and taxation. After presenting different aspects of Ottoman legal pluralism, the author turns our gaze to the tensions that arose when the Ottoman state tried to impose economic and legal control over individuals and groups, through legislative measures and the establishment of the cadastre. In a place where the foundations of citizenship and legal status were often shifting, language, religion, and culture constituted the main demarcation lines between different groups.

“Ordering the Streets: Public Space and Public Governance” is the title of the second chapter, which discusses the establishment of a modern institutional apparatus when Izmir expanded during the period under scrutiny. Here, citizenship matters most because
foreign protection is of significant importance in the city’s streets, troubled as they were by fire, epidemics, and crime. Despite divisions between private and public interests, protected and unprotected individuals, Ottoman administrators and foreign consuls, Izmir is viewed as a whole. The author argues that in Izmir, “physical and administrative structures mutually inform one another,” a finding that offers, according to her, a model to be used to analyze modernization in different cities around the globe.

The title of the third chapter, “Shaping the Waterfront; Public Works and Public Good,” is highly evocative of its focus. The state-of-the-art design of the new port of Izmir, built between 1869 and 1875, symbolizes the city’s passage to modernity. The construction of such an infrastructure provides an interesting background to examine different views of the city’s diverse population regarding not only the question of public good and private interest but also the physical interaction of the different groups along the 3.2 kilometers of the new quay.

The final chapter of the book, “Performing Community: Rituals and Identity,” demonstrates how public rituals, feasts, and ceremonies contributed to the forging of a sense of urban community among Izmir’s diverse minorities. This form of citadinité constituted the cultural core of the cosmopolitan universe Zandi-Sayek discusses here. Within it, the urban landscape emerges as an additional actor in this story. Accordingly, the author aptly underlines the political dimension of the use of public space. In this perspective, she does not view the city as a static construction but as a system of multiple
spaces, appropriated to different degrees by the local population, Muslim or non-Muslim.

Nevertheless, the use in the title of the rather ambiguous, if not problematic, term “cosmopolitan” should have been addressed in the introduction. This description has been often associated with an elitist, rosy image of the Eastern Mediterranean cities. The author
could have employed the term, which has fuelled a nostalgic literature, more tactfully. Instead, she utilizes it as an umbrella term from above without much consideration as to precisely whom it may be referring to. The interrelatedness noted by the author –which
could be considered to be a synonym of cosmopolitanism– seems to concern a particular part of the city’s population: that is, the most privileged social strata. In this respect, a more detailed discussion of the city’s social stratification might have clarified some blind spots and enriched the discussion with a view from below, which is sometimes missing.
Overall, this work provides a fascinating account of Izmir’s glorious cosmopolitan past. Zandi-Sayek astutely documents her study with a variety of Ottoman primary sources, French and British consular documents, and articles from the local press. The bibliography, which draws on works in Turkish, French, and English, is more than
satisfying. Moreover, the book is illustrated with a valuable collection of maps, plans, engravings, printed advertisements, and pictures, which make for enjoyable reading and remind us of the author’s specialization as a historian of art and architecture.

Events, Posts

The Ottoman municipality of Jerusalem: lecture by Falestin Naili

11/12/2014 Open Jerusalem Leave a comment

Open Jerusalem team member Falestin Naili will give a lecture on “The Ottoman Municipality of Jerusalem: How to reconstruct the history of a forgotten urban institution” at the CBRL British Institute in Amman on 14th December 2014 at 6 pm.

فلسطين نايلي سوف تعطي محاضرة عن

بلدية القدس العثمانية : كيفية صياغة تاريخ مؤسسة طي النسيان

في المعهد البريطاني في عمان

14 ديسمبر

في الساعة السادسة مساء

Posts, Seminars

New Perspectives for Jerusalem’s Late Ottoman and Mandate Social History

03/12/2014 Open Jerusalem 1 Comment

by Falestin Naili

The round-table entitled “New Perspectives for Jerusalem’s Late Ottoman and Mandate Social History: Sources and Resources in Jordan” was held on the 24^th of November 2014 at the Ifpo Amman. Supported by the Ifpo and the ERC-financed research project “Opening Jerusalem Archives: For a Connected History of ‘Citadinité’ in the Holy City (1840-1940)”, this round-table was conceived and organised by Falestin Naili, research associate at the Ifpo Amman and member of the ERC project. It brought together four members of the ERC project with their colleagues of the University of Jordan in order to present and discuss their respective research in relationship to the ERC project’s aim of overcoming the segmented historiography of Jerusalem by opening and interconnecting the city’s archives and laying the framework for an urban history approach to Jerusalem.

The round-table was welcomed by Vanessa Guéno (Ifpo Amman), who underlined that the Ifpo is currently relaunching the Ottoman studies and who emphasized the possibilities of future synergies between the Open Jerusalem Project and Ifpo Research Programs.

Vincent Lemire, executive director of the ERC Open-Jerusalem Project, briefly presented the scope, the scientific framework and the global schedule of the ERC project (2014-2019). He underlined the importance of Jordan’s archival sources and institutional actors dealing with Jerusalem’s history. Hence, he explained that the ERC project team was eager to meet their colleagues from the Center for Manuscripts and Documents and the Committee for the History of the Bilad Al Sham of the University of Jordan in Amman.

In her presentation entitled “Jerusalem, Amman, Beirut and beyond: moving from the Jerusalem municipal archives to the collective memory of Ottoman Jerusalem in search of citadinité (urban citizenship)”, Falestin Naili presented the first results of her analysis of the Arabic minutes of Ottoman Jerusalem’s municipal council for the period from 1892 – 1917, which account for about 45% of this rare primary source. These hand-written minutes document the decisions and announcements of the council (founded several years before the Ottoman Provincial Law on Municipalities of 1877) and offer a wealth of information and many glimpses of daily life issues in Jerusalem. About two-thirds of the members of the municipal council were elected and one third were ex officio members. Muslims, Christians and Jews were among the members and the Ottoman government chose the mayor among the elected members. After a short digression into the material and palaeographic aspects of the minutes, Falestin Naili gave examples of the issues dealt with in the municipal minutes, emphasizing that revenue-generating activities were an important preoccupation of this urban institution spearheading Jerusalem’s development of modern infrastructures and services. As an interconfessional interethnic urban institution interacting directly with the citizens and the imperial authorities, the municipality was probably the most important mediating structure for Jerusalem’s urban society, translating imperial impulses into local activities and relaying local realities and initiatives back to Istanbul. This new picture of Jerusalem’s society at the end of the Ottoman period should be complemented by several other sources, such as court registers, local press, imperial documents and, last but not least, autobiographical writings and collective memory narratives from this period.

Yasemin Avci, Associate Professor at the University of Pamukkale and member of the ERC team, presented her analysis of the Ottoman language minutes (about 55% of the total text) of Jerusalem’s municipal council for the period from 1892 – 1917 and their link with the imperial level of governmentin a paper entitled “Jerusalem Municipal Archives and Istanbul Imperial Archives: how to interconnect the two levels”. She explained that the resolutions of the municipal council are in a rough draft format, since they were for the internal use of the council itself. Nonetheless, they could occasionally be inspected by central government authorities. She then placed the municipal council back into the new governmental structure created as a result of the Tanzimat reforms, which signified the development of a legal authoritarian regime in the Ottoman Empire. Within the pyramidal structure extending from Istanbul to the provinces and sanjaks, the municipal council was at the bottom as a means of connecting urban administration to the imperial center. Although the objective of the creation of municipalities was not democratic, the municipal councils could at times nuance, circumvent and even subvert imperial intentions in their desire to assert varying degrees of autonomy.

Abdul-Hameed Al-Kayyali, associated researcher at Ifpo Amman and member of the ERC project, presented the first results of his ongoing research on Jerusalem’s Hebrew press in a paper entitled “The Hebrew newspaper Ha-Zvi: a mirror of Jerusalem’s public affairs at the turn of the century”. The Hebrew press, and in particular Ha-Zvi (later called Ha-Or) for the period between 1840 and 1940 (available online www.jpress.org.il) provides some specific information which cannot be found in the minutes of the Jerusalem municipal council, such as the names of candidates for municipal elections. Furthermore, they provide many detailed accounts of daily life (schools, hospitals, transport, water etc.) in Jerusalem, mainly from the perspective of the city’s Jewish inhabitants. The work on Ha-Zvi is relatively easier than that on other newspapers, since (as a publication directed by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the «father» of Modern Hebrew) it contains a simpler Hebrew with less Talmudic and Yiddish terms than other newspapers of that period.

Nufan Al Sawariah, Professor in the History Department of the University of Jordan, presented a paper entitled “Water and its resources in Jerusalem: The Registers of Jerusalem’s mahkame shar‘iyya as a source of study”. He emphasized that the sijill shar ‘i has to be considered as an important mirror of life in Jerusalem, reflecting a large number of people’s everyday preoccupations. One of the most important daily life issues in Jerusalem was the regular cutting of water which sometimes even amounted to a complete halt. The sijillat contain many details about the extent of people’s suffering due to lack of water and about the efforts of the imperial and local government to resolve these problems. The registers also contain much information about the water infrastructure in and around Jerusalem, including public fountains, reservoirs and aqueducts, which were regularly supervised and repaired by government employees.

Abla Muhtadi, who is a researcher at the Center for Manuscripts and Documents of the University of Jordan, offered a rare insider perspective on the sijillat mahkame shar‘iyya in her presentation entitled “Jerusalem’s court registers as a source for social history”. In fact, although the prerogatives of the shari‘a courts diminished as a result of the reforms of the judiciary system in the second half of the 19^th century, these courts remain an extremely valuable source on the daily life of Jerusalemites. Even after the separation of civil courts according to confession, Christians and Jews at times opted for appearing in front of the qadi instead of turning to the courts of their confessional group. The sijillat contain much information about the holders of public offices, about teachers and schools, shops, restaurants, hospitals and hotels, to name just a few categories of public spaces. In Abla Muhtadi’s words, the sijillat are the “living memory” of the city and its inhabitants, providing the texture of daily life.

The discussions in English and Arabic were stimulating and full of promising perspectives for further connections between different local archives, namely the court registers and the local press in Arabic, Hebrew and Ottoman. Mahmoud Yazbak (Professor of History, University of Haifa) who attended the round-table, offered much valuable advice based on his own work on the sijillat for Haifa and Jaffa and urged the participants to pay special attention to continuities between the period preceding the Tanzimat and the actual reform period. Vanessa Guéno shared her insights about the effects of the judiciary reforms from her work on Ottoman Homs. All the participants agreed that a larger event should be organised next year at the Center for Manuscripts and Documents, whose Director Mohammed Adnan Al Bakhit, has expressed his wish to host such an event.

Photo: two excerpts from the municipal minutes of 1910 (1326 hijri),
the first one being a public bid for meat for the municipal hospital,
the second an announcement of a public sale of tax-farming rights
according to the iltizam system

Posts, Seminars

Round-Table Workshop: New Perspectives for Jerusalem’s Social History

19/11/2014 Open Jerusalem Leave a comment

ERC Funded Project

Opening Jerusalem’s Archives:

for a Connected History of ‘Citadinité’

in the Holy City (1840-1940)

Programme for round-table workshop

“New Perspectives for Jerusalem’s Late Ottoman

and Mandate Social History:

Sources and Resources in Jordan”

Monday the 24^th of November from 9:30 am to 1:30 pm

at the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) in Amman

9:30 am
Word of welcome by Vanessa Guéno
Opening remarks by Falestin Naili and Vincent Lemire

9:45 am
“Jerusalem, Amman, Beirut and beyond: moving from the Jerusalem municipal archives to the collective memory of Ottoman Jerusalem in search of citadinité (urban citizenship)”
Falestin Naili

10:15 am
“Jerusalem Municipal Archives and Istanbul Imperial Archives: how to interconnect the two levels”
Yasemin Avci

10:45 am
“The Hebrew newspaper Ha-Zvi: a mirror of Jerusalem’s public affairs at the turn of the century”
Abdul-Hameed Al Kayyali

11:15 – 11:40 Coffee break

11:45 am
“Water and its Sources in Jerusalem in the Ottoman period”
Nufan Al Sawariah

12:15 pm
“Jerusalem’s court registers as a source for social history”
Abla Muhtadi

12:45 pm
Synthesis and closing remarks
Mohammed Adnan Al Bakhit

Download the pdf announcement

Opening Jerusalem Archives: for a connected history of 'Citadinité' in the Holy City (1840-1940)