Overlapping Boundaries in the City: Mahalle and Kahal in the Early Modern Ottoman Urban Context

Date

2018-01-01

Author

Karagedikli, Gürer

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

304
views

0
downloads

In the present article, I examine the construction and articulation of urban and communal identities in the early modern Ottoman Empire with special reference to the complex and dynamic local Jewish identities in Edirne. I analyse the terminology used for identifying Jewish litigants at the Islamic court in Edirne based on 12 cases selected from the Islamic court registers. In other words, I scrutinize in which cases the court identified Jews by their membership of a particular congregation (Heb. kahal; pl. kehalim), in which cases by their residential affiliations (Ott. mahalle; pl. mahallat, "urban quarter"), and in which by a combination of these aforementioned ascriptions. In so doing, I attempt to enhance our understanding about pre-modern people who were simultaneously members of multiple religious, spatial, ethnic or occupational sub-communities. More specifically, I examine which of the Jews' multiple identities (i.e., kahal as religious/ethnic; mahalle as spatial) were emphasized by the judges of the Muslim courts. I suggest that various identification markers were employed by court personnel to define the Edirne Jews. While in some matters the fiscally, administratively, as well as socially defined spatial identity based on the term mahalle was employed, in other cases the ethnic/communal identity based on the Jewish kahal-that was also a taxable unit-was the prevalent concept.

Subject Keywords

Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, History

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/38173

Journal

JOURNAL OF THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ORIENT

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341458

Collections

Department of History, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

The Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities and its role in the appropriation of İstanbul’s diverse heritage as national heritage (1939–1953) Aykaç Leıdholm, Pınar (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2020-04-01) This paper argues that the early Republican attempts to reintegrate the Ottoman past into nationalist narratives later found their reflections in discussions regarding the preservation of İstanbul’s diverse heritage, coinciding with the redefinition of Turkish nationalism in the 1940s, incorporating Islam and marking a departure from the foundation ideology of the Republic of Turkey. In 1939, the Republican authorities decided to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1...
Multi-functional buildings of the T-type in Ottoman context : network of identity and territorialization Oğuz, Zeynep; Altan, Tomris Elvan; Department of History of Architecture (2006) This thesis focuses on the Ottoman buildings with a T-shaped plan and their meanings with respect to the central and centrifugal tendencies in the Ottoman context in the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The emergence of the multi-functional buildings of the T-type in the Ottoman realm is simultaneous with the burgeoning of a state in the early Ottoman frontier milieu, which is profoundly intermingled with the notion of gaza; whereas the demise of the use of the T-plan is coincident with ...
Financial Development of the Waqfs in Konya and the Agricultural Economy in the Central Anatolia (Late Sixteenth-Early Seventeenth Centuries) Orbay, Kayhan (Brill, 2012-01-01) This study examines the financial history of three waqfs (those of Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi, Sadreddin-i Konevi, and Selim II) in Konya through their account records covering the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These waqfs (charitable foundations) had large agricultural holdings, and their financial developments consequently reflect the local agricultural conditions in central Anatolia. This analysis of the waqf account books deals with the short-term financial difficulties resulting from h...
Agrarian Relations, Property and Law: An Analysis of the Land Code of 1858 in the Ottoman Empire Aytekin, Erden Attila (Informa UK Limited, 2009-01-01) Contrary to the prevalent tendencies of 'state-centrism' and legal formalism in the literature, this article studies the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 not as an initiator of trends but as a product of social change. The Code recognized private property on land, enlarged liberties of landholders, and pushed inheritance rules further towards gender equality. Deeply influenced by the uneven development of the capitalist relations of production, agrarian conflict, and the complex matrix of the interests of ruling g...
Institutionalization of History in the Ottoman Empire Ergut, Ferdan (Informa UK Limited, 2015-04-03) This article examines the process within which history was institutionalized in the Ottoman Empire. Institutional space for history had begun to be constructed within the context of interstate rivalry during the mid-nineteenth century. History had the task of "proving" the fact that the Turks had been from the very beginning a part of the "Western civilization." The essential period for the institutionalization history was that of the regime of the Committee of Union and Progress in 1908-18, providing histo...

Citation Formats

G. Karagedikli, “Overlapping Boundaries in the City: Mahalle and Kahal in the Early Modern Ottoman Urban Context,” JOURNAL OF THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE ORIENT, pp. 650–692, 2018, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/38173.