Approaching Gaza
For anyone wanting a panoramic view of late nineteenth-century Gaza, the best spot was from the top of Jabal al-Muntar, a hill to the east of the city. The unknown photographer who hiked up on a sunny day in the early twentieth century captured the broad swath of fields around the city delineated by cactus fences, the large sand dunes to its west towards the Mediterranean Sea, and the city’s general embeddedness in its agricultural surroundings (Figure I.1).
Figure I.1 View of Gaza from Jabal al-Muntar, dated 1918.Footnote 1
Another photograph taken by a British reconnaissance plane during World War I (WWI) when the region of Gaza was the theater of battles between the Ottoman and British forces, shows Gaza’s geographic position in even sharper relief: Large sand dunes separate Gaza from the Mediterranean Sea, some four kilometers to its west (Figure I.2). Its tiny port was connected to the city by a dirt road through the sands. On the photo, both the road and the port installations are barely visible. Their position can mainly be derived from that of the gardens around the port whose dark colors contrast starkly with the bright sands around it.
Gaza, as clearly visible in these two images (Figures I.1 and I.2), was not a port city, at least not in the usual sense of a city defined by its port. Its tiny port was connected to the city by a dirt road through the sands and is barely visible.
This impression is compounded by Gaza’s representation on contemporary maps. For example, in the first precise map of late Ottoman Palestine published by the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in 1879, Gaza resembles an oasis surrounded by a large green belt of fields and orchards rising out of the vast sand dunes (Figure I.3). Gaza’s second defining feature was its location at the crossroads of major trade and traffic routes in southern Palestine, on the border with the sparsely populated Negev and Sinai deserts.
Almost every reader today will immediately compare these bird’s-eye views of Gaza as a trade and agricultural center embedded in a wide-ranging network of overland routes with media images that show the reality of today’s Gaza Strip as a heavily populated territory with sharp boundaries dictated by the outcome of the 1948 war. Since the early 2000s, these images have been complemented by the media coverage of combat between the Israeli army and Palestinian militias, as well as power struggles involving several regional powers. In contemporary public discourse, Gaza tends to be characterized solely as a theater of the ongoing conflict. Meanwhile, the city and its complex society have been neglected in academic scholarship.
This study addresses this lacuna and seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Gaza and its hinterland during the late Ottoman period, up to WWI. It aims to depict the dynamics of an important city and region that have been overshadowed by the devastations of that war and the ongoing Israeli–Arab conflict. In a wider context, this work aims to provide a building block for a better understanding of the social fabric of the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern period.
Why write another book on a late Ottoman city, and why Gaza? We became interested in this topic through reading sources as well as personal encounters. Both of us trained in Islamic and modern Middle Eastern studies, and have gradually specialized in the social, cultural, and political history of late Ottoman Palestine. We became aware that the southern part of the country constituted a blind spot in knowledge of the Eastern Mediterranean, although it was home to a large part of the population of late Ottoman Palestine and had experienced dramatic dynamics that needed to be understood. Studying Gaza as citizens of Germany and Israel in a time of heightened political tensions and military conflict created a number of obstacles. Starting this book with two aerial photographs and a map, all produced by British photographers, members of the military and technicians, is emblematic of the context of this study and our positionality as historians: we approach Gaza from the outside. Given the political situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories in the last few decades, we cannot visit Gaza and it is difficult to contact local scholars who possess vast amounts of knowledge and have abundant sources at their disposal, even for email correspondence or participation in conferences abroad.
To date, there is not even one monograph in any of the major European research languages on late Ottoman Gaza. Nevertheless, there are rich documentary records on Gaza in different places in the world, especially in archives compiled by the Ottoman and British Empires. In this volume, we sift through these records to formulate hypotheses on Gaza’s social, political, and cultural dynamics in the hope of laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive history of this important part of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Gaza’s contemporary isolation is only one of several reasons for the general absence of research on this city during the late Ottoman period. Around 1900, Gaza was one of the largest and most important cities in Ottoman Palestine and had a population of some 20,000–25,000 inhabitants. The city had a small port from which barley was exported to Europe, but its inner-city markets were in fact more important. Thus, politically, economically, and culturally, it was more like an interior market city than a coastal port city. Compared to Jerusalem, Palestine’s political capital and a magnet for pilgrims, or the port cities to its north such as Jaffa, Haifa, and Beirut, Gaza may easily appear somewhat isolated. This at least is the impression when looking at it from the vantage points of the typical narratives of the emergence of “the modern Middle East” that have dominated the historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean over roughly a century.Footnote 2 Many studies dealing with the late Ottoman period summarily depict Gaza in terms of “stagnation,” “crisis,” and “decline,” by more or less explicitly taking the rapid growth of nearby cities such as Beirut, Jaffa, and Jerusalem as standards of comparison.Footnote 3 Certainly, in comparison to these localities, Gaza was much less involved in the major developments that historian James Gelvin called the “great nineteenth century transformation” of the Middle East, such as incorporation into the world market, Ottoman state centralization, and extensive social differentiation fueled by an unprecedented degree of human mobility and migration.Footnote 4 The city went largely unnoticed by most Western travelers, journalists, pilgrims, explorers, and diplomats who visited the Holy Land in growing numbers in the nineteenth century. The relatively small number of Westerners who did visit Gaza mostly portrayed it as a sleepy provincial backwater in an attractive natural and agricultural landscape.Footnote 5
Arabic sources present similar views, as can be gauged from a selection of quotes on the city compiled by the local chronicler ʿUthman al-Tabbaʿ in the early twentieth century.Footnote 6 They praise Islamic learning in the city, the lush gardens of Gaza’s oasis, and the natural beauty of its dunes by the blue sea.Footnote 7 At the same time, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Arabic intellectuals criticized the “lack of economic opportunities” and “slow progress” in Gaza.Footnote 8 The editors of the Jaffa-based Arabic newspaper Filastin (“Palestine”), in a rather alarmist piece in which they called for more government attention to Gaza, went as far as to evoke the Prophet Zephaniah’s words “Gaza will be abandoned” (Zephaniah 2:4).Footnote 9 Gaza, they wrote, gave the impression of having been “left alone by the government, isolated from the world, abandoned by God.”Footnote 10
Nevertheless, a closer look at the city and local sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish shows that Gaza was the economic and transportation hub of southern Palestine, a center of Muslim religious education and scholarship, home to a population with diverse social backgrounds, and the theater of exceptionally stormy political events that were linked to both imperial politics and local factionalism. Gaza’s diverse society, the rifts within its elite, and the heterogeneous coalitions supporting the rivaling parties, which was also manifested in the city’s morphology, are the core of this study.
The Regional Background
Since late Antiquity, Gaza was a major hub within the network of trade and traffic in Western Asia, on a par with urban centers like Jaffa in Palestine or Tripoli in Syria and secondary only to the “global-scale” transportation nodes, cultural and education centers of the Old World such as Damascus and Aleppo, imperial capitals such as Constantinople/Istanbul or Cairo, or pilgrimage sites such as Jerusalem or Mecca. Two major factors that changed its relative position in the hierarchy of cities from medieval times were its position within empires and the prevailing modes of trade. The first major change was connected to the imperial order and occurred with the Ottoman conquest of Gaza in 1517. In the Mamluk Sultanate, Gaza had been the capital of a very centrally located province (niyaba) and an important center of Islamic learning. Under the Ottomans, the city was relegated to a more peripheral position and received less imperial investment than under the Mamluks. Nevertheless, it was an important pillar of Ottoman rule situated on the vital Cairo–Damascus road, and it contributed to the provision of the Hajj caravan. The second major change was induced by the changing world economy in the second half of the nineteenth century when caravan trade declined in importance. Gaza’s leading families had to look for new business opportunities and grapple with the changing nature of a centralizing and modernizing Ottoman Empire. In this process, the old elites were challenged by newcomers. These developments were still in full swing at the turn of the twentieth century.
During the late Ottoman period, Gaza was located at the crossroads of major land routes near the border between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt – de jure an Ottoman province, but de facto an independent state since the early nineteenth century and from 1882 under British occupation. Economically and socially, Gaza was subject to larger trends similar to those that Ulrike Freitag described for the port city of Jeddah in the southern margins of the Ottoman Empire:
Many Ottoman port cities expanded in the course of the nineteenth century due to the rise in exports from their agricultural hinterlands and of imports for local markets – which incidentally also increased religious heterogeneity. Global economic developments played out differently in Jeddah […]. [I]n the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it lost its role as major entrepôt in the trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean through the rise of Aden and the advent of steamshipping. This could not be compensated for by the increase in local (distributary) trade […]. These developments might also explain the slower urban growth of Jeddah in comparison to other Ottoman port cities.Footnote 11
Gaza likewise did not benefit from the late-nineteenth-century wave of globalization. As a result, it did not experience the significant increase in immigration and in religious heterogeneity observed in Alexandria, Jaffa, Haifa, or Beirut. This at least partially explains the relative disinterest in the city on the part of contemporaneous Western visitors to the Holy Land.
In the case of Gaza, the major factors contributing to its overall economic slowdown were the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which diminished the importance of caravan trade, and the competition from the more successful northern ports of Jaffa and Haifa. However, these were somewhat offset by new economic opportunities when Gaza became a commercial hub in response to the rising demands for grain in Europe, especially barley, which the rural areas around Gaza could provide in large quantities earlier in the season than other places.Footnote 12
The strategic importance of the Gaza region increased after the British occupied Egypt in 1882 and specifically after the administrative dividing line between Egypt and Palestine was set in 1906 following tremendous British pressure. Another important development that considerably affected Gaza was the separation of the Bedouin-populated region of Beersheba from the Subdistrict (kaza) of Gaza in 1900 and the establishment of the new Subdistrict of Beersheba (in Arabic Biʾr al-Sabʿ, in Hebrew Beʾer Shevaʿ, in Ottoman Turkish Biʾrüssebʿ), although influential Gazan notables and merchants maintained some of their earlier ties with the Bedouins around Beersheba even after this administrative move.Footnote 13
The region around Gaza was populated by dozens of villages that made their living primarily from grain farming. The population was characterized by a plurality of identities, often constructed around binaries such as urban and rural, nomadic and sedentary, landowners and tenants, newcomers and people whose ancestors had settled the land many generations earlier, and people originally from Egypt, as opposed to individuals who had come from other parts of Palestine.Footnote 14 Some rural migrants settled in the outskirts of Gaza itself, for instance in the Eastern neighborhood of Shujaʿiyya, and maintained ties with their village of origin. There were few European settlers in the vicinity of Gaza, unlike in the vicinity of Jaffa and Haifa, which were the focus of German Templar and Jewish settlement.Footnote 15 Only a handful of small Jewish colonies were established at the end of the nineteenth century in the Subdistrict of Gaza, at a distance of some 30–40 kilometers from Gaza itself.Footnote 16 Recent research has identified intensification of urban–rural relationships as well as a growing tendency towards regionalism and the development of a regional identity in the Gaza region in the second half of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 3).Footnote 17
Gaza during the late Ottoman period was caught up in internal political strife. This had to do with the relatively weak Ottoman presence in the region, and the radical economic transitions that led to a reshuffling of economic resources in different sectors of the population. Between the 1870s and 1890s, factional strife was centered on appointments to the post of the city’s jurisconsult, the mufti.Footnote 18 Gaza’s local politics and the influence and jockeying by local notables curtailed the influence of the District of Jerusalem’s Administrative Council, which had jurisdiction over Gaza. Thus, on the ground, its involvement and control over issues such as the supervision of tax collection and registration of land was only partial.Footnote 19 The Gazan elite tended to operate within rival coalitions while trying to draw Istanbul into its internal conflicts. It maintained complex relationships with the Jerusalemite elite that dominated Palestine’s politics (i.e., different elite families in Gaza sided with different segments of the Jerusalem elite) and with Ottoman officials as well as with the agricultural sedentary population and Bedouins in the city’s outlying areas.Footnote 20
Gaza in a Comparative Perspective
How typical, or unique, was Gaza, compared to the many urban centers in Bilad al-Sham (“the Syrian land,” also known at times as Greater Syria)Footnote 21 and the wider Eastern Mediterranean? What insights can be drawn from the literature that will help understand Gazan society at the end of the nineteenth century? While this book focuses on late Ottoman Gaza, it engages in a dialogue with several strands of Middle Eastern history, including the study of urban politics and urban elites, urban–rural relationships, the interplay between imperial and local forces and the implementation of Ottoman reforms in the provinces, as well as studies on class, gender, religion, and ethnicity. The commonality across all these approaches is that they explore cities in context rather than in isolation, and as points of departure for broader topics in Middle Eastern history.Footnote 22
Despite its specific characteristics, and its relative detachment from some of the key processes undergone by the most dynamic cities in the coastal regions of the Eastern Mediterranean, Gaza was nonetheless greatly influenced by processes and events beyond its borders, including international trade, trans-regional pilgrimage routes, and geostrategic regional developments. There are several important studies on Ottoman cities dealing with various aspects of these features that considerably influenced our perspective and enabled us to generate comparative hypotheses related to Gaza.
Damascus, the political center of Bilad al-Sham from the time of the Islamic conquests up to WWI, has attracted much attention in academic historical scholarship. Linda Schatkowski Schilcher’s path-breaking study Families in Politics examined local politics in this city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (c. 1750–1870).Footnote 23 Although the elites of Damascus operated on a much grander scale and the city boasted more religious and cultural diversity than Gaza, it offers important points for comparison, and in particular its imperial connectedness. The two crucial economic factors accounting for the imperial connectedness of Damascus were the caravan trade flowing through this city and the grain economy in its hinterland, since grain was the major source of taxation of the empire and its main means of provisioning the population.Footnote 24 Both these characteristics also apply to Gaza. Schatkowski Schilcher’s book, despite being outdated in some respects, especially with regard to its treatment of social differentiation, still provides invaluable insights and comparisons, which help understand the mechanisms of Gaza’s unusually stormy and shifting urban politics.Footnote 25 Schatkowski Schilcher shows how faction building led to spatial clustering, the emergence of particular locations as factional power bases, and the formation of visible and invisible urban boundaries within the city. Our own investigation is likewise based on the premise that faction building in Gaza was conducive to spatial clustering where specific locations became factional power bases, as discussed in Chapter 4.
In historical scholarship, Damascus also serves as the prime case for a related issue, the “politics of the notables.” Building on a seminal 1968 article by Albert Hourani, notables are commonly defined as intermediaries between specific sectors of the local population and representatives of the imperial government. Due to their exceptional abilities to act as power brokers between central and local forces within the empire, notables became both partners of Ottoman administrators as well as representatives of local groups and factions. They also defined a particular style of politics, which placed a premium on a careful balance between different interests within a multifaceted society.
The “politics of the notables” has become a central concept in studies on politics and society of the Eastern Mediterranean between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and, as we show below, is particularly crucial for understanding late Ottoman Gaza.Footnote 26 Hourani’s original concept has inspired a sizable body of research that deals with various cities and regions.Footnote 27 It has also undergone several important revisions after being heavily criticized for its narrow focus on Arab elite families, its artificial distinction between Ottoman and local elites, and its sidelining of the role of commoner actors in politics.Footnote 28 This overemphasis on the elite resulted in the scholarly neglect of the involvement of non-elite actors such as women, non-Muslims, Bedouins, and villagers in local politics. Thus, it remains unclear what a farmer or a market seller, male or female, Muslim, Christian or Jew, would have made of the struggles between notables of his or her city and raises the question of who benefitted from factional politics. Was it purely the purview of the elite or did it reflect the interests of wider circles of society? To what extent were commoners able to influence decision-making on the local level?
The limitations of our sources make it difficult to resolve these questions, but throughout this book we attempt to offer at least some tentative answers. The sources available for late Ottoman Gaza, such as petitions and biographical compilations, provide a rare opportunity to add complementary perspectives to the “notables” paradigm, especially when the power plays and rivalries between the local Arab elites in the Ottoman Empire are viewed in terms of their mediation between the imperial center and the local population. This makes it possible to identify a wider range of actors who acted as intermediaries between sectors of the local population and the imperial representatives, far beyond the groups enumerated by Hourani. For example, these included businessmen with artisan backgrounds, and professional scribes who worked as petition writers.
In Gaza, the term “notable” best applies to individuals who had the clout to influence political decision-making through leverage at home, at the provincial level, and in the imperial capital. Unlike notables, a category that only refers to individuals, the notion of the elite refers to a broader swath of society corresponding to the aggregate of individuals distinguished in their local society who are ascribed social esteem, and sometimes specific privileges, by virtue of their wealth or erudition. This social esteem and its associated privileges may be distributed across an entire family, but was more often concentrated in certain households connected to a certain family.
In terms of the city studies focusing on space and cultural history that influenced our perspective on Gaza, Ruth Kark’s study of JaffaFootnote 29 had a major influence on our work. It discusses the rapid growth of this port city in central Palestine in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to the influx of new immigrants, their impact on the local population, and the complex interrelationships between long-time residents and newcomers. Although Kark neglected the Arabic-speaking population in this study, her erudite interpretation of maps, diplomatic sources, the writings of Jewish immigrants, and architectural structures to reconstruct the dynamics of the city’s development remains innovative.Footnote 30
Ulrike Freitag’s history of Jeddah mentioned above presents a comparative case of a city which, like Gaza, was situated on the fringes of the Ottoman Arab provinces, but whose development was dominated by the locally specific themes of Muslim pilgrimage, as well as Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade.Footnote 31 Jens Hanssen’s study of Beirut provides important insights into imperial and regional developments and their influence on the workings of this rising metropolis in the eastern Mediterranean, whose rapid growth and religious and cultural diversity contrasts sharply with that of Gaza in many respects.Footnote 32
More recently, Damascus has been the subject of exemplary analyses on urban transformation as an expression of social change during the late Ottoman period.Footnote 33 Many recent studies also discuss the city of Jerusalem,Footnote 34 either separately or as part of broader analyses of Palestine. They explore Arabic sources to tease out the experience of urban life and evaluate the city’s spatial development in the eyes of the local Arabic-speaking population. Yasemin Avcı contributed the perspective of Ottoman decision-makers to this picture.Footnote 35 Several other city studies are only available in Arabic. They often provide important documentation on local structures based on personal archives and other sources that are hard to find elsewhere.Footnote 36
Studies on specific cities also help understand city institutions as well as wider social phenomena through locally generated archival sources such as records of commercial transactions, endowment deeds, imperial orders to the local authorities, or marriage contracts. In the absence of formal archives for such sources, the registers (sijillat) of the local mahkama or Shariʿa court are the best repository for this kind of information. Therefore, court records loom large in the historiography of the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean.Footnote 37 For Gaza, unfortunately, the available body of court records is fairly limited. Sijills from only four years are available (1857–1861, see the sources section below), but these can yield important insights into the inner workings of Gazan society at the beginning of our period. We are fortunate to have an excellent introduction to this material in the pioneering study by ʿAbdul-Karim Rafeq.Footnote 38
A number of more recent monographs and collective volumes deal with cities in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean in a comparative approach that deliberately departs from the study of specific cities, which dominated urban studies in the Ottoman Arab provinces for decades. These influenced our perspective considerably.Footnote 39 A trailblazer in this direction is Nora Lafi’s collective volume on Mediterranean municipalities, which focuses on the development and working of municipalities after the Tanzimat reforms as compared to Italian and French cases.Footnote 40 Noteworthy in the latter collection is the article by Yasemin Avcı and Vincent Lemire, “De la modernité administrative à la modernisation urbaine: une réévaluation de la municipalité ottomane de Jérusalem (1867–1917),”Footnote 41 a pioneering study on the Municipality of Jerusalem which served as a model for us to examine and evaluate the work of the Municipality of Gaza and the power struggle between the rival factions in the city to control it.
Several studies on politics and society in late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham have taken a regional approach rather than focusing on one city or comparing cities. They examine one area as a whole, often with the rural hinterland around it. Given the intricate web of connections between Gaza and the rural area around it, including complex dynamics of cooperation and co-optation, these studies were vital to our analysis. For instance, Eugene Rogan’s study on TransjordanFootnote 42 examined Ottoman efforts to take over the Empire’s periphery during the period of reforms and introduce a measure of modernization and state control. The processes he discussed were echoed in southern Palestine by the establishment of Beersheba and the detachment of the northern Negev from the control of Gaza in 1900. A similar regional approach was taken by Meltem Toksöz in her study of the Adana-Mersin region based on state correspondence located in the archives of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul.Footnote 43 These studies help contextualize, understand, and evaluate Gaza’s relationships with its surrounding rural area, as well as its complex relations with the central government in Istanbul and the Province of Jerusalem that witnessed many ups and downs during this period.
The most pertinent example of the regional approach, for our concerns, is Beshara Doumani’s study on merchants and peasants in the Nablus region.Footnote 44 Based on local sources, including court records and personal papers, Doumani portrays the complex relationships between the important inland regional urban center of Nablus in Palestine’s central mountains with its hinterland, which involved patronage networks between the urbanites and the rural population. He shows how Nabulsi families carved out zones of influence in their city’s environment to control agricultural production and trade.Footnote 45 They had extensive economic and social ties with the villagers, especially given that some Nabulsi elite families originated from the villages around the city. Such insights are invaluable when comparing the relationships between Gaza’s elite and the rural population in the city’s surrounding area, both villagers and Bedouins, especially given that in some respects Gaza was more similar to cities in the interior than to coastal ones. One such similarity was that the Ottoman authorities’ reach into local society was quite limited, although the plains around Gaza were easier to navigate for imperial armies than the mountainous terrain around Nablus. At the same time, the influence of Gazan elite families in the city’s hinterland extended as far as the northern Negev and, like the “ruling families” and merchants Doumani describes for Nablus, they cultivated long-lasting ties with sections of the rural population and could build on their support. The rival parties among the Gazan elite also strove to enlist support and followers among the rural population for their internal struggles, as discussed in Chapter 3.
The last sphere of reference to be considered is Ottoman Palestine as a whole, which has been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years, although in comparison to the studies dealing with Mandatory Palestine it still represents a trickle.Footnote 46 In contradistinction to the political-diplomatic approach and the study of elite groups that dominated previous research,Footnote 47 more studies today focus on previously neglected social categories such as women, peasants, Bedouins, and other subaltern groups,Footnote 48 even though many works still center on the literate urban population.Footnote 49 Recent research also refers more often to local sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and other local languages,Footnote 50 beyond the European sources which had been the main (and often sole) sources used.Footnote 51
Very few studies have dealt with southern Palestine; that is, the lands south of Jerusalem, during the late Ottoman period,Footnote 52 despite the growing strategic importance of this region as a border zone between the Ottoman and British Empires.Footnote 53 Several researchers have recently explored the establishment of Beersheba at the turn of the twentieth century as an administrative regional center around which the Bedouin tribes were to be settled.Footnote 54 This was part of the Ottoman government’s effort to strengthen its control over this region and stop the Bedouins’ roaming and insubordinate activities.
Nevertheless, Gaza and the rural area around it have received only scant attention in the literature. Works on the history of Gaza tend to be general books on this city throughout history,Footnote 55 books published in local languages dealing with certain aspects of the city’s history (usually from a local, non-academic perspective),Footnote 56 and books dealing with periods other than the one we are interested in here.Footnote 57 There are several general surveys of Gaza’s history, which briefly cover the late Ottoman period, but generally the 400 years of Ottoman rule are only concisely summarized based on secondary sources, since their main concern is more recent political events.Footnote 58 Several works have explored Gaza and its region as a major frontline and battle area during WWI, but they mainly discuss military and tactical issues.Footnote 59
One exception that considers Gaza’s history in the early twentieth century is Abahir Al Sakka’s recent monograph in Arabic on the social history of Gaza during the British Mandate. Based largely on local sources, it provides important information on Gaza’s development, social makeup, and politics during the period following the one discussed in this book, in addition to new details on the late Ottoman period.Footnote 60 Another exception is Dotan Halevy’s recent prolific research on various aspects of the history of Gaza during the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, including references to environmental history.Footnote 61 Our own previous research has examined various aspects of Gaza’s history, politics, and demography during the late Ottoman period.Footnote 62
Overall, in many respects Gaza was a typical case of an Eastern Mediterranean trade hub in the Arabic-speaking provinces during the late Ottoman Empire. Thus, many of our findings are applicable to other cases. Like Acre further north on the Mediterranean shore,Footnote 63 or Jeddah on the Red Sea coast, Gaza lost important sources of income when trade flows were rerouted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and did not experience the influx of immigrants or the resulting religious diversity that was so characteristic of the booming Eastern Mediterranean port cities during this period.
What set Gaza apart from other cities in its regional environment was its location as a trade and traffic hub at the crossroads of major caravan routes midway between Cairo and Damascus. Other specificities accumulated over time. The oldest, which has long been overlooked in research, is the sand dunes that separated the city and agricultural oasis from the seashore.Footnote 64 This remained a limiting factor for Gaza’s urban development ever since late Antiquity, when for a time there were two urban settlements on either side of the dunes: Gaza and the port of Mayumas. Urban expansion into the dunes was first discussed in the late Ottoman period, but only began after WWI, in the shape of Hayy al-Rimal, the “Sands Neighborhood.”
Gaza maintained close relations to Egypt since Mamluk times. Trade, migration, the education of Islamic scholars (ʿulamaʾ) and the cultivation of trade and Sufi networks all contributed to sustaining these relations. During the late Ottoman period, the networks of Gaza’s religious, scholarly and political elite reached as far as the Egyptian Viceroy’s court in Cairo.
Other factors specific to the last quarter of the nineteenth century included Gaza’s rising importance as hub for most of the grain production in southern Palestine, which became a prime source of tax income for the Ottoman government. At the same time, Ottoman central government came to view Gaza as the main urban center of a double frontier zone: the frontier dividing it from the unsettled arid lands on the Negev (in Arabic al-Naqb, in Hebrew ha-Negev) and the frontier with British-occupied Egypt.
Sources for the Study of Late Ottoman Gaza
Our book draws on untapped sources in several languages including Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish, Hebrew, French, and German. This allowed us to analyze a wide spectrum of texts, which is critically important for research projects of this type that situate the topic in different regional, cultural, and political contexts. The sources include Ottoman documents from Istanbul, the former imperial center; the Ottoman census of 1905, which is preserved today in the Israel State Archives; remnants of the Shariʿa court records of Gaza (digital copies of which are available in Istanbul); memoirs, diaries, and newspapers; manuscripts from Gaza; and numerous maps, pictures, and documents from an array of archives and libraries. The main sources used in this study are discussed below.
The 1905 Census of the Palestinian Districts
The Ottoman census of 1905 was the most comprehensive and accurate census conducted during the 400 years of Ottoman rule in Palestine. From the 1880s onwards, the Ottoman administration systematically compiled population registers (in Ottoman Turkish sicil-i nüfus defterleri) on an empire-wide scale, particularly during two waves after 1881 and 1902. In Gaza, as was the case in much of the Palestinian region, the census based on the 1902 regulations was implemented during the summer of 1905.Footnote 65
Although these counts did not fully conform to today’s standard definition of a census since the entire population was not counted at the same time and registers were constantly amended and updated, the forms were consistent with the period’s state of the art.Footnote 66 Ottoman population counts prior to the 1880s recorded households (hanes), with detailed information on the head of the household and some information on the male household members, but only summary information on women and children. After 1881, all household members including women, children, and domestic workers were registered. In 1902, this system of individual registration incorporated more details (although still fewer for women than for men). Mobile population groups, such as pastoral nomads and itinerant laborers, were not counted. The census registers were printed tabular forms that were uniformly completed in Ottoman Turkish. The categories of inquiry in the post-1902 “basic registers” (esas defterleri) include:
(1) spatial data (name of neighborhood or village, street, number of the household);
(2) individual identification data, such as date and place of birth, names of mother and father, physical characteristics (for adult men only) such as height, skin, and eye color, and visible physical disabilities;
(3) data on individuals within the household and family and their affiliation to an ethnic or religious community (millet);
(4) data on household members’ occupation and (occasionally) education.
To date, the registers of the post-1902 Ottoman census are not available for most areas of the Ottoman Empire. The census for the city of Gaza, held in 1905 based on the 1902 guidelines, has survived even though a considerable number of registers are missing. We could only find entries for about 19,500 persons, whereas contemporary estimates are for 20,000–25,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 67 These gaps emerge most clearly in cases where entire families, such as the important Busaysu family, or communities, such as the Christian communities, are missing from the registers. It is important to note here that the population estimates for early twentieth-century Gaza reflect the devastating effect of the 1902 cholera epidemic, when up to half of the city’s population was infected and as many as 4,000 residents died.Footnote 68
The available census registers for the city of Gaza itself include some 2,500 householdsFootnote 69 divided into four neighborhoods: Daraj, Shujaʿiyya, Zaytun, and Tuffah (Shujaʿiyya was divided into the two sub-neighborhoods of Turkuman and Judayda, see Figure I.4). We do not know the order in which the neighborhood houses were numbered since we do not possess a map or sketch indicating their order, if one existed at all. However, we can tell which neighborhood a certain household was located in, and at times we can locate and identify specific houses and locations based on other sources on a map or an aerial photo.
Narrative Sources
The most important local source on Gaza from the period discussed here is ʿUthman al-Tabbaʿ’s Ithaf al-aʿizza fi tarikh Ghazza, a four-volume work that combines prosopographic information on individuals and families with historical and geographic data. Tabbaʿ (1882–1951) was a scholar from Gaza who grew up during the Hamidian period and was educated at al-Azhar institute in Cairo, where he studied with some of the most famous Sunni Muslim scholars of his time. Upon returning to Gaza in 1902, he worked as a preacher (khatib) at local mosques in the city and started compiling his monumental work, which he finished in two manuscript volumes in 1330/1911–1912. He focused exclusively on personalities from Gaza, in particular Islamic scholars and merchants. Tabbaʿ styled his biographies of Gazan notables as success stories that were intended to elicit local patriotism and feelings of loyalty towards the city’s leading families and personalities, particularly when it came to the Husayni family, with whom he was very close.Footnote 70
The two other manuscripts from late Ottoman Gaza that we used extensively are an anonymous dialogue on Gaza’s politics that was published in manuscript form around 1895 (henceforth Dialogue)Footnote 71 and Ahmad Busaysu’s Kashf al-niqab from 1897.Footnote 72 The Dialogue is a piece of political fiction that was authored in Gaza and sent to the imperial government in Istanbul. It is essentially a polemic pamphlet in the guise of a literary work that contains important information on political culture and discourse.Footnote 73 The author was a staunch supporter of one of Gaza’s leading elite families, the Husaynis (who had only loose ties to the illustrious Jerusalem family of the same name).Footnote 74 He also must have been very close to the two signatories of a petition that was sent from Gaza to Istanbul around the same time and that contains content similar to that of the Dialogue.Footnote 75
Ahmad Busaysu (c. 1825–1911) was a scholar-cum-Sufi shaykh with numerous followers and a graduate of al-Azhar. His pamphlet Kashf al-niqab – “Unveiling,” is in many respects a response to the Dialogue. In it, he proclaims his loyalty to the Ottoman state and advertises his knowledge of the tribes in the Negev region and the families of Gaza. He also praises the specific merits of the Shawwa and Busaysu families, who in the late 1890s became the main opposition to the established Husayni family (after the Shawwas and Busaysus ceased supporting them), and makes polemical remarks about other families.
Maps
Unlike most other cities in Bilad al-Sham at the time, we possess a detailed colored map of Gaza drawn in 1887 by the Austrian Catholic priest Georg Gatt (1843–1924) and published a year later in a German scholarly journal (see Figure I.5).Footnote 76 Gatt lived in Gaza for many years and had first-hand knowledge of the city and its people. He moved there in 1879, where he founded a parish and a school. At the time the map was published, he had lived in Gaza for eight years and can therefore be regarded as a long-term resident of the city. His map owes much to a British map of 1843, as its many stylistic similarities suggest.Footnote 77 Gatt’s Map, produced during the time of factionalist struggles in Gaza, is invaluable as it helps reconstruct the buildings and layout of the city, and leads to insights unavailable from other sources. In particular, it provides information not only on public buildings and infrastructure but also on the households of leading Gazan families.
Figure I.5 Georg Gatt’s Map of Gaza (1888). Note the clear-cut depiction of the city’s division into neighborhoods and the separation of Shujaʿiyya and Tuffah neighborhoods from the rest of the city. The map also provides a vivid impression of the agricultural surroundings of Gaza, and the city’s sprawling nature. Within the urban neighborhoods, it focuses on the assets of prominent families (e.g., houses, trading firms, and mosques). The gray line around the city center marks the remains of the old city fortifications.
We have no Ottoman maps of Gaza from the end of the nineteenth century and efforts to locate such maps have not been successful. During the British Mandate, several accurate maps of Gaza and its region were prepared, which can be used to examine continuities and changes in the city’s development in comparison to the Ottoman era. The British prepared an accurate map of Gaza as early as 1917 when the region was still under Ottoman control, as planning for their invasion of the region.Footnote 78 We used GIS technology to collate some 15 maps of Gaza from different periods, ranging from the 1880s to the 1940s, in GIS layers that can be overlaid or removed according to need and presented in comparison to a general current-day map of Gaza as well as aerial photos of the city.
The One Surviving Register (Sijill) of the Shariʿa Court
The only known Shariʿa court records from late Ottoman Gaza belong to one register that covers the years 1857–1861. Digital copies are accessible at the Center for Islamic Studies (İSAM) in Istanbul.Footnote 79 The data from the available sijill of Gaza cannot easily be compared to the Ottoman census of 1905 since more than four decades separate the two, but it still provides important information on some of Gaza’s elite families whose policies and the coalitions they formed constitute the core of this book. The fact that the study of sijills from Ottoman Bilad al-Sham is a highly developed research area makes it possible to examine the case of Gaza in relation to other cities in this region and draw comparisons.Footnote 80
Ottoman Documents
We consulted thousands of Ottoman documents preserved today in the Ottoman Archives of the Presidency of Turkey (BOA). These mainly include official Ottoman correspondence dealing with petitions and complaints, investigative reports, and routine exchanges between various Ottoman offices and bureaus. Petitions housed in the BOA provide glimpses into the concerns and political demands of Gaza’s inhabitants. These Ottoman documents are crucial to complementing the information from the Ottoman census, especially with regard to reconstructing the rift within the Gazan elite and the alignment of the camps involved.
Aerial Photos
There are several very good aerial photos of Gaza from WWI. In particular, we possess scans of high-resolution aerial photos of the region (on glass plates) taken by the Bavarian Squadron in 1918, after the British army had captured Gaza.Footnote 81 The aerial photos are presented as GIS layers and serve as another way to identify and visualize various structures within the city. Our online database of late Ottoman Gaza, the Gaza Historical Database, allows us to tag certain items and to create custom-made maps of certain urban features.Footnote 82
Methods for the Study of Late Ottoman Gaza
This book, through an in-depth-study of Ottoman sources, local sources in Arabic, and a vast array of other primary as well as secondary sources, aims to close the gap in research on late Ottoman Gaza and establish a solid foundation for writing the social and political history of modern Gaza. In our previous works, we have attempted to provide insights into the interplay between local dynamics in Palestine during the late Ottoman period and imperial dynamics orchestrated from Istanbul.Footnote 83 This dual approach makes it possible to bypass the national paradigms that continue to dominate research on late Ottoman Palestine, which in the past have limited the range of issues addressed by historians. The focus on the interaction between the Ottoman imperial center and this part of the Arab provinces also helps overcome the deep-rooted Eurocentrism in Middle Eastern history and instead provides an important example of transregional dynamics within the Global South.
Focusing on Gaza, an area that has been almost totally neglected in research on late Ottoman Palestine, allows us to implement a similar approach and to provide a fine-grained analysis of this important city and its region. In addition to studying the city itself, we also examine its relationships with the rural population in its vicinity and with the Ottoman authorities and its representatives at both the local and imperial levels. This approach takes all the major players and factors that shaped Gaza and its environs into consideration, rather than just the city itself as is often done in studies focusing on a specific locality. It also allows us to give due weight to these components while avoiding undue emphasis on specific factors (usually the urban elite), as is commonplace in research. Future research can compare urban–rural relations around Gaza to studies on other regions in Palestine such as Jerusalem and its environs, Mount Hebron, Mount Nablus, as well as to regions of the Ottoman Empire further afield.Footnote 84
We see this study on late Ottoman Gaza as a key step towards a better understanding of the complex social fabric in Late Ottoman Palestine, including such varied issues as relationships with the imperial center, migration, and demographics, and interactions between the state and the rural populations, including the Bedouins. Many results of this in-depth study can be compared and are transposable to other Ottoman and Middle Eastern contexts and thus are vital to both researchers and lay people interested in the history of the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Ottoman Palestine.
In collaboration with the University of Tübingen’s eScience Center and recently with the Digital Humanities Center at Ruhr-Universität Bochum we launched the Gaza Historical Database. We used Historical Geographic Information System (HGIS) data to document different aspects of the history of Gaza in the late Ottoman period. The database stores information on people and places in Gaza and enables a whole host of analyses that are formulated as interactive queries. It includes census data, geographic data, images, and prosopographical information.
The Gaza Historical Database was tailor-made to integrate a body of rich but heterogeneous sources and to allow for collaborative and simultaneous work by researchers internationally. Interactive digital maps serve to identify historical locations and the spatial relations between them in novel ways.Footnote 85 The system supports easy data entry, collaborative uploads, user-friendly data search, and extraction. It can run various types of analyses, visualize the data, and assemble comprehensive datasets. More importantly, this database emerged through a continuous dialogue between database experts and historians in such a way that whenever our historical investigation produced important new questions, our technical support in Tübingen and Bochum Universities could add features to the system that contributed to answering these questions. The ability to investigate, modify, and extend our research questions during the study was crucial to the success of this project.
Our research demonstrates how Gaza’s two political factions drew support from a broad range of social categories representing all walks of life in Gaza and that political activity was not confined to specific areas in the city. Digital technology was crucial in helping us tackle these issues, since we could organize diverse pieces of evidence, process statistical data, and visualize social networks. In a number of instances, this display format sensitized us to hitherto overlooked features. For example, the GIS layers revealed how the leading households of the two rival factions in Gaza’s elite capitalized on the symbolism of architecture and urban structures, such as by turning mosques into family strongholds, and renaming streets leading from family strongholds to important local centers of power. Through patronage over mosques and street naming, each faction constructed a visible symbolic axis that physically connected its stronghold to the governmental compound it was aiming to control. The GIS layers also enabled us to map out historically important sub-neighborhoods and identify several of them as political hotspots. Network visualization tools allowed us to discern key gatekeepers among the supporters of the two factions.
Another advantage of the database is that it helps better understand the biases inherent to each of the sources by comparing them to the Ottoman census of 1905 and contemporary maps. For example, Gazan pottery was carefully documented by Gatt in the 1880s.Footnote 86 Both Gatt’s Map of Gaza from 1888 and a British map from 1928Footnote 87 show that a whole sub-neighborhood in the northern part of the Daraj neighborhood called Harat al-Fawakhir (Potters’ Street/Neighborhood) was dominated by pottery workshops. However, the Ottoman officials who carried out the census in 1905 chose for some unknown reason to ignore potters and not to include them among the approximately 150 different occupations they recorded in the city.
Moreover, the database made it possible to identify many of the signatories of petitions to Istanbul and to reconstruct their households and personal networks. The interactive maps made it possible to localize a good part of these households and other assets and understand the extent to which political polarization was inscribed in the urban tissue.
More specifically, we were able to put two central features of the debate around the “politics of the notables” to an empirical test; namely, the relative importance of elite actors and urban neighborhoods. Several patterns emerged. Large elite families were the backbone of political mobilization. The leading households tended to reside close to one another, and they used their professional and economic networks to exert influence on the Ottoman government. In so doing, they mobilized a socially diverse followership. The existing scholarship frequently assumes that cities in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean – or “Middle Eastern” cities, as they are often termed anachronistically – were politically fragmented along the lines of neighborhood divisions. The factionalist politics of Gaza, however, engulfed the entire city and mobilized people from practically all parts of the city and from a wide variety of social strata. Neighborhoods, however, were important units of urban self-organization and the rival factions in Gaza’s elite apparently made efforts to have the most important neighborhoods represented among their ranks. We were able to make actors visible in urban politics who would otherwise have remained anonymous such as notables’ family members as well as commoners (ordinary merchants, artisans, farmers, workers) who supported one of the two rival coalitions.
Structure of This Book
This book is divided into four chapters, each covering a topic we find crucial for a better understanding of Gaza’s unique social fabric and internal politics during the late Ottoman period.
The first chapter, A Bird’s-Eye View, analyzes major trends in Gaza’s economy, society, and geostrategic importance. It tackles the misconception that in this period Gaza was a stagnant city, or worse, a city in “decline.” It discusses varied topics such as the impact of early globalization and the change in the Hajj pilgrimage route on the status of Gaza as a caravan city; the impact of the barley boom in the Northern Negev between 1890 and 1910 as a result of the growing demand in Britain’s beer industry on Gaza’s economy; the city’s lack of a proper port and its implications; the government state-building measures and division and redivision of the region’s administrative borders, including the establishment of Beersheba to reduce Gaza’s influence on the Bedouins of the Negev; the development plans envisioned for the Gaza region, including the port, a hospital, sanitation services, train lines, and roads; the relationships between Gaza and Egypt including Gazan scholars who studied in al-Azhar, the massive migration of Egyptians to the Gaza region, and the relationships of the Gazan elite with the Khedive of Egypt; and the effects of the occupation of Egypt by Britain in 1882 and the creation of the administrative dividing line between Egypt and Palestine in 1906 on Gaza’s geostrategic importance. Finally, it explores whether the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 constituted a turning point in Gaza’s importance in the eyes of the central government and how it affected the city’s development.
Chapter 2, Living in Late Ottoman Gaza, examines Gaza’s socio-spatial organization and the demographic characteristics of its population. It first presents Gaza’s main urban features during the late Ottoman period including divisions into neighborhoods, main landmarks, and thoroughfares. It then presents an in-depth portrayal of Gazan society, including data on economy and lifestyles, social hierarchies, marriage patterns, migration, and health, based on a detailed analysis of the Ottoman census of 1905 and surviving court records (1857–1861), in light of evidence from the literature, maps, and photographs.
Chapter 3, Relationships with the Rural Population, focuses on the complex relationships between Gaza’s urban elite and the rural population around the city, especially the network of villages in the kaza of Gaza. This chapter discusses the composition of the rural population and the ethnic, social, and economic boundaries between them including peasants, Bedouins, and Egyptians, the involvement of the rural population in urban politics and its alignment with rivaling coalitions within the city, and the complex relationships with Bedouin groups in the city’s vicinity and farther away.
Chapter 4, Gaza-Style Politics and the Emergence of Spatialized Factionalism, shows how all the above-mentioned entities and relations came into play when Gazans engaged in making collectively binding decisions and mobilized their fellow citizens for specific causes. In particular, it delves into the politics of factionalism in Gaza, its causes, development, the impact of external factors, and its effects. The chapter surveys the main bones of contention within the Gazan elite including control over the position of the mufti, the municipality (in Ottoman Turkish belediye, in Arabic baladiyya), the local court, governmental offices, and the sub-district’s Administrative Council. It next analyzes the portraits of elite families and political personalities by the local Gazan chronicler ʿUthman al-Tabbaʿ, who left the most detailed account on this issue. Then it focuses on the relationships between the Gazan elite and outside forces such as the Jerusalem elite, the officials in the District of Jerusalem, and the central government in Istanbul. It next presents the rise of the Shawwa family and its allies the Busaysus, erstwhile supporters of the Husaynis, who at some point in the mid-1890s turned against them for unknown reasons and eventually were able to oust them from control over the city’s politics in 1898, when the leadership of the Husayni family was exiled by the Ottoman government to Ankara. We examine whether this event was the culmination of the struggle within the Gazan elite and would constitute a new order in the city. The rise of the Shawwa-Busaysu coalition, whose source of power was the newly created municipality, was accompanied by a spatial divide of the city between the neighborhood of Daraj where most of the elite families, including the Husaynis resided, and the relatively poor neighborhood of Shujaʿiyya, a stronghold of the opposition. This led to what we call “spatialized factionalism,” a term we discuss at length. We devote special attention to the Shawwa family, who despite their very modest origins as butchers in Tuffah neighborhood rose to power and were able to overcome the all-powerful Husaynis. Finally, we examine Gaza’s factionalism in a regional comparison to evaluate how exceptional it was and how it fits into wider patterns of space-making, the economy, and politics in late Ottoman cities.
