Explore the vast range of titles available.

Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East: “Modernities” in the Making is an edited volume that seeks to deepen and broaden our understanding of various forms of change in Middle Eastern and North African societies during the Ottoman period. It offers an in-depth analysis of reforms and gradual change in the longue durée, challenging the current discourse on the relationship between society, culture, and law. The focus of the discussion shifts from an external to an internal perspective, as agency transitions from “the West” to local actors in the region. Highlighting the ongoing interaction between internal processes and external stimuli, and using primary sources in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, the authors and editors bring out the variety of modernities that shaped south-eastern Mediterranean history. The first part of the volume interrogates the urban elite household, the main social, political, and economic unit of networking in Ottoman societies. The second part addresses the complex relationship between law and culture, looking at how the legal system, conceptually and practically, undergirded the socio-cultural aspects of life in the Middle East. Society, Law, and Culture in the Middle East consists of eleven chapters, written by well-established and younger scholars working in the field of Middle East and Islamic Studies. The editors, Dror Ze'evi and Ehud R. Toledano, are both leading historians, who have published extensively on Middle Eastern societies in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman periods.

This article explores a covert partnership between a prominent Zionist agronomist, Menashe Meirovitch, and the Christian Arab editor of the newspaper Filastin, ʿIsa al-ʿIsa, a founding father of Palestinian nationalism. Under the literary guise of an Arab Muslim peasant called Abu Ibrahim, the two men produced a series of Arabic-language columns in 1911–12 that exhibited imperial citizenship par excellence, demanding political and agrarian reforms in Palestine in the name of strengthening the Ottoman Empire. The article explores their short-lived political alliance to interrogate historiographical uses of the press as a source for social history. Moreover, it challenges the portrayal of cooperation between Jews and Arabs as “collaboration” in its pejorative sense. Far from a simple story of betrayal or corruption, the partnership between the two men demonstrates how a shared commitment to Ottoman modernism brought them together more than nationalism, language, or religion pulled them apart.

This article examines the chemical deterioration of wooden materials on the exterior surfaces of a historical mansion in Kahramanmaraş, constructed using the Bağdadi Wall Construction Technique, which is a rare example of Late Ottoman-Turkish architecture. The study employed various analyses to demonstrate that environmental factors, such as air, temperature, light, rain, and biological decay, have aged the wood. Fourier transform infrared analysis revealed a decrease in holocellulose peak density and lignin degradation. X-ray diffraction analysis indicated that the amorphous components of hardwood had diminished, leading to an increase in crystallinity, while the crystalline cellulose content in softwood had decreased, thereby weakening the structure. Thermal analysis uncovered changes in thermal stability between the wood’s outer and inner surfaces. Ultraviolet analysis indicated a 21% color change on the exterior compared to that in the interior. Despite the deterioration of the exterior, the interior surfaces remained intact. Appropriate measures could prolong the mansion’s lifespan, and urgent restoration is necessary to preserve this important cultural heritage.

`Haifa al-Jadida` (New Haifa) was erected in 1761 by order of the Bedouin ruler Daher el-Omar, governor of the Galilee. As part of the process of building the city, a wall was constructed to encircle it, with a tower overlooking it from above. After its establishment the 'New Haifa' became the urban core for the emergence of modern Haifa while the new city was gradually solidified and its characteristic outlines were moulded. From the end of the Ottoman period in 1918 until 1948, the urban expanse remained practically unchanged. In 1948 'New Haifa' was almost destroyed except for the few ruins that were left. In spite of the centrality of the new city in the history of Haifa, very little is known about this area. This article reconstructs the image of 'New Haifa' by portraying the location of the city walls and the urban expanse. For the purpose of reconstruction, an 1841 sketch of the city is superimposed on an aerial photograp of the area taken in 2008, and a map of the old city dated to 1937.

In 1593, a Franciscan friar with antiquarian aspirations abandoned Europe for Jerusalem with the aim of attracting the munificence of the ageing Philip II, king of Spain (r. 1556-98), in support of his order. Bernardino Amico da Gallipoli, OFM, whose biographical details remain shrouded in mystery, would spend nearly five years in the Levant before returning to his native Italy in 1598, the year of Philip II's death. During his extended stay in the Holy Land, Amico's collegial relationship with the Franciscan Custodian Gianfrancesco della Salandra, a fellow Italian, ensured that he was entrusted with a series of important commissions that also gave him the opportunity to travel the length and breadth of Palestine and Egypt. In 1597, for example, while serving as the president and confessor to the Christian community of Cairo, Amico visited the Christian shrine at Matariya, where the Holy Family was said to have taken refuge on their flight into Egypt. Here, Beaver looks into Amico's book published at Rome in 1609 Under the title Trattato delle piante & immagini sacri edifizi di Terra Santa that include highly detailed descriptions of the Holy Land's cardinal buildings and shrines, as well as a wealth of information about their topographical settings and the spatial relationships between them.

The first significant clash between European Jewish agricultural colonists and Arab peasants in Palestine, a conflict over peasant grazing rights in Petah Tikva, took the life of one Jewish person, an older woman named Rachel Halevy. This article traces the commemoration history of the event in Zionist sources, particularly local Petah Tikva sources, between its occurrence in 1886 and the mid-1960s. It looks at both the evolving ghostly presence of the central Jewish female victim, who disappears, reappears, and lurks on the margins of the story, and Halevy's son, Sender Hadad, who becomes increasingly prominent over the years as he is configured as an archetypal Zionist guardsman and hero. Through the commemoration history of these figures, the article traces shifting Zionist narratives about heroism and victimhood in Petah Tikva; the construction of Petah Tikva, founded before the Zionist movement, as a locus of foundational Zionist bravery; and the gendered notions by which men and women are remembered and forgotten.

Abstract When Shaykh Dahir al-ʿUmar al-Zaydani died in 1775, he had ruled large parts of Palestine for over half a century. Capitalizing on the forward economy introduced by the Dutch merchant \"gone native,\" Paul Maashoek (d. 1711), Dahir created a politics of trade and power that brought about the economic flourishing of Palestine and the prosperity of its population for most of the eighteenth century. From his urbanization of the Galilee's main villages, Tiberias, Nazareth, Acre and Haifa, sprang the merchant class whose subsequent active trading with the West helped quicken the pace of Palestine's integration into the Europe-dominated world economy.

In the late Ottoman period, foreign schools played a crucial role in educational modernization and cultural diplomacy. The Haydarpaşa German School, located in Istanbul and established as a branch of the Galata Bourgeois School, exemplifies Ottoman-German interaction in education and colonial architecture. Archival records reveal complex negotiations between the Ottoman administration and the German Embassy, reflecting broader geopolitical and cultural imperialist dynamics. The school follows the city school model, a disciplinary architectural approach emphasizing hierarchy, control, and efficiency, aligning with late 19th-century German pedagogical principles. A comparative analysis of the Galata Bourgeois and Yedikule German Schools shows that all three institutions adhere to the city school typology. Unlike the prevailing Neo-Ottoman or Orientalist styles, these schools adopted a rigid, regimented design, serving as tools of cultural imperialism. Its transformation after World War I and integration into the Turkish education system reflect shifts in foreign educational policies. Recent restoration efforts balance historical preservation with contemporary needs. This study positions the Haydarpaşa German School as both an architectural artifact and a colonial instrument, contributing to discussions on cultural imperialism, modernization, and education in the late Ottoman period.

The article describes and probes the initial experiments in laying railroad tracks in northern Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century and presents the construction phases of Haifa Station. Considering the period, the intentions of the various railroad planners exhibited outstanding vision. Even though the first trials failed, they remained determined and, above all, they succeeded in proving that railway projects were feasible. For this reason the Jezreel Valley railway project was considered a tremendous achievement for that period. The station built in Haifa, the largest and most important of the stations, became an impressive and representative symbol of a project of imperial scale.