Table Of ContentJEWISH LIFE UNDER ISLAM
Jewish Life under Islam
JERUSALEM IN T HE S I X T E E N TH C E N T U RY
Amnon Cohen
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
and London, England
1984
Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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This bock is printed on acid-free paper,
and its binding materials have been chosen
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Cohen, Amnon, 1936-
Jewish life under Islam.
Translation of: Yehudim be-shilton ha-Islam.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Jews—Jerusalem—History—16th Century.
2. Jerusalem—History.
3. Jerusalem—Ethnic relations.
I. Title.
DS109.92.C6313 1984 956.94'4004924 83-13025
ISBN 0-674-47436-8
Contents
Preface vii
O NE
Jews and the Authorities 1
T W O
Population of the Jewish Community 72
T H R E E
The Leadership 36
F O U R
Legacies, Debts, and Financial Obligations 59
F I V E
Religious Practice and Institutions 72
S I X
Social and Judicial Status 110
S E V E N
Economic Activity MO
E I G H T
Conclusion: the Importance of Being Tolerated 220
Notes 229
Index 263
Preface
THE POLITICAL and administrative importance of Jerusalem has
varied dramatically in the course of its long history. Düring the
time of the First and Second Temples the city reached significant
heights; during the Middle Ages it declined. In modern times—
after the British conquest of 1918 and, above all, since the estab-
lishment of the State of Israel—it has come into its own again.
Jerusalem's religious significance, however, has never decreased
but has increased greatly over the centuries. In biblical days,
during the reign of the House of David, the city was established
as the ritual and spiritual center for Jewry. Since the day Jesus
was crucified there, it has also been central to Christianity. Under
Islam, Jerusalem was designated the first qibla, the place toward
which believers direct their prayers; though later reduced in im-
portance to the third haram, after Mecca and Medina, the city has
remained one of Islam's höhest places. In the Middle Ages, under
Islamic rule—both Mamluk and Ottoman—Jerusalem was a
small provincial city compared with other urban centers of these
empires. And yet, for Muslims, Christians, and Jews throughout
the World it never lost its importance as a focal point for ritual
observance, memories, and above all, for religious thought and as-
pirations.
For followers of the three religions, one of the practical expres-
sions of the centrality of "celestial" Jerusalem has always been
that some of their number lived within the confines of "earthly"
Jerusalem, as long as the rulers of the land did not expressly for-
bid it. Religious sentiment no doubt accounted for the presence of
viii Preface
Christians and Jews in Muslim Jerusalem, but they were, none-
theless, ordinary people who engaged in social and economic ac-
tivities within their own communities and maintained contact
with the rest of the population in and outside the city.
There would be nothing particularly remarkable about the
Statement that Jerusalem was populated by ordinary people were
it not for the fact that we are accustomed to visualizing earlier
epochs as essentially one dimensional, so that details are blurred
and nuances obliterated. This book will attempt to bring the pic-
ture closer to the reader's field of vision. From a dense accumula-
tion of individual dots all viewed from a given perspective, as in
the technique employed for satellite transmission, a multidimen-
sional picture emerges. The reconstruction of a historical tableau
can be achieved in precisely the same manner.
To penetrate deep into complexities, it is essential to focus
one's sights on a single subject. The decision to study Jerusalem's
Jewish Community, then, is the result of an arbitrary choice that
implies no value judgment. Needless to say, the majority of the
residents of sixteenth-century Jerusalem were Arabs and Mus-
lims. In the daily conduct of the city's life they were the group
that most influenced its character. Their story has not yet been
told in füll, nor has that of Jerusalem's Christians, at first a
smaller minority than the Jews, and later a larger one. Only after
the stories of these two communities have been told will we have
a complete history of the city's inhabitants at the time.
A great political upheaval took place in the Middle East in the
sixteenth Century, when Palestine—like Syria, Egypt, and parts
of the Arabian peninsula—came under Ottoman dominion. This
marked the inception of an era that continued for four hundred
years, and during it patterns of government and administration
were established that essentially remained in force until the be-
ginning of the twentieth Century. Moreover, most of the sixteenth
Century—^the periods of Selim the First and Suleiman the Mag-
nificent—was considered the golden era of the Ottoman Empire.
Palestine then was not a separate administrative unit; its various
districts {sanjaqs)—Safed, Nablus, Gaza, Lajjun—and Jerusa-
lem too were all subordinate to the governor of Damascus.
Through most of the Century Jerusalem's population was larger
than that of other Palestinian towns, but even at its peak of fifteen
Preface ix
thousand, Jerusalem was small compared to Istanbul, Cairo,
Aleppo, or Damascus. And yet, for the Ottoman conqueror,
Jerusalem had far greater significance than many of the larger
cities. The Temple Mount with its mosques not only was an im-
portant ritual center but also was closely associated with various
events in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.
In the second quarter of the Century and the decades immedi-
ately following, the rulers in Istanbul initiated many projects de-
signed to strengthen and develop Jerusalem. A wall was built
around the city, and its gates were locked every evening. A vigor-
ous building program was begun: neglected markets and shops
were renovated and repaired; the water system, which had fallen
into disrepair during the decline of Mamluk power, was recon-
structed and expanded; important endowments (waqf) were es-
tablished to Support scholarly activities and maintain Muslim
institutions. The result was a steady growth of all the elements of
Jerusalem's population.
The splendid era of growth and development did not last long.
After some fifty years, in the last third of the Century, there were
perceptible signs of the Ottoman Empire's decline, and Palestine
too sufFered. It was no longer safe to travel the roads; commerce
was adversely afFected; officials began to be more interested in
lining their own pockets than in maintaining the welfare of the
citizenry. Military units stationed in Jerusalem's Citadel began to
meddle in economic life, thereby undermining their military
readiness. In brief, development came to a standstill, and people
left the city in growing numbers. As fortunes changed and Jeru-
salem entered a period of decline that was to continue throughout
the following centuries, its Jewish residents, who had flourished
during the good years, sufFered greatly. By the dose of the six-
teenth Century the trends afFecting the city's Jewry had already
assumed the form and direction they would take in later years.
Thus, I have chosen to conclude this work as the 1500s come to
an end.
The concerns, form, and norms of Jewish life at that early time
also remained essentially unchanged until the beginning of the
modern era. What sources of Information are available for study-
ing the milieu in which the Jews lived and for learning what went
on inside the Jewish Community under Ottoman rule? Descrip-
X Preface
tions of the status of religious minorities, Jewish and Christian,
can be found in books of Muslim laws and religious traditions.
Despite their stereotypical formulations, volumes of the Jewish
Responsa offer information about some of the actual problems
raised and thus provide useful information for students of history.
Descriptions written by travelers (occasionally a Jew or Muslim,
but most often Christians) in a variety of languages offer abun-
dant, if not always dependable, information. Arab chronicles and
Muslim biographies, although relatively few, transmit inside in-
formation in the words of people describing their own society.
Another source is the archives of European consulates, as well as
letters written by European merchants who either lived in or
traded with the Levant. These contain a wealth of economic in-
formation as well as tidbits about other spheres of life.
The major drawback of these sources is that the picture evoked
by Muslim texts remains largely hypothetical, and texts written
by European Christians or Jews tend to convey a biased descrip-
tion with details adapted to fit the author's purposes. Most of
these descriptions were written by people of foreign origin, cul-
ture, and language. There is thus fairly good reason to doubt their
credibility, and even their originality, since their authors neces-
sarily had to draw upon the words of others, or rely on their own
powers of invention. Authoritative sources, such as the ofiicial ar-
chives kept by European delegations, record only the aspects
of events that were of specific interest to the home countries;
and even such sources were almost nonexistent in the Arabic-
speaking provinces during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. In the past thirty years Ottoman-Turkish archives con-
taining a great störe of information that is most important for
compiling the administrative history of various provinces in the
empire have been made available for scholarly research; but their
references to the Jews and other religious minorities are relatively
few.
As a Student of Ottoman Palestine who has experienced the
shortcomings of all the sources mentioned above—and who had
nothing to match the rieh Genizah archives and the monumental
tableau for earlier Mediterranean society drawn by Goitein—I
was intensely excited to encounter a very old, hitherto untapped
source, the sijill volumes in the archives of the Muslim court. For
hundreds of years in each administrative center throughout the
