Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration Around Sixteenth-Century Jerusalem (review)

174 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration Around Sixteenth-Century Jerusalem, by Amy Singer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 201 pp. This book grew out of a Princeton doctoral dissertation, and it ventures into the barely charted terrain of Ottoman peasant studies, focusing on the district of Jerusalem in the sixteenth century. Professor Amy Singer (Tel Aviv University) examines the relationship between Ottoman officials and Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian peasants. This focus is both made possible and necessitated by the nature of available source materials; sixteenth-century peasants have not left extensive written records, and anthropology and oral history cannot easily be used to recover their experiences or perspectives. Therefore the author does not discuss questions such as the internal organization of villages, village stratification, the household economy, and peasant concepts of kinship and community. Singer's sources are urban or imperial: law-court records from Jerusalem and population, fiscal, and administrative records from Istanbul. She argues that the Jerusalem-district peasants were agents in the construction of the Ottoman world, and were not passive objects of external (imperial or urban-based) forces. She characterizes the Ottomanpeasant relationship as one that was subject to constant renegotiation. Local officials saw peasants as a source of taxation and income, but peasants were able to defend their interests by exploiting contradictions within the Ottoman system, engaging in individual petty resistance, and threatening to withhold their labor via flight from the land. The administrative system that took shape in sixteenth-century Palestine after the Ottoman conquest was, paradoxically, both conservative and flexible. It was conservative in the sense that the Ottomans retained institutions and arrangements inherited from the Mamluks. For instance, Ottoman rulers simply carried on with the previous system ofdealing with peasants through locally selected village headmen. The Ottomans were flexible too in that their administration adapted itself to a variety of local realities and did not insist on procrustean uniformity. The flexibility of local practices is evident particularly in the Jerusalem law-court registers. Such flexibility facilitated Ottoman rule since it accommodated local conditions, customs, and expectations. Peasants, for their part, familiarized themselves with the Ottoman administration and "worked" it to their own advantage. They appealed to Jerusalem's law court against unjust officials, and sent petitions directly to the Sultan in Istanbul seeking redress of grievances. In an intriguing Book Reviews 175 suggestion, Singer posits the existence ofa tacit alliance between sixteenthcentury sultans and peasants against grasping officials who, through greed and maladministration, threatened the long-term health of the empire's fiscal base. The peasants who emerge from Singer's study are neither passive nor ignorant (two epithets that have at times been applied to peasantries in the Middle East and elsewhere). They defined their interests in a certain way, defended them as best they could, and most of the time evinced a "grudging acceptance" towards state officials (p. 126). Although the subalterns in this book do not speak, Singer's work demonstrates the kinds of understandings that historians can achieve through judicious use of Ottoman-era archival materials. Tables, appendices, statistical data, and maps (including one that shows the locations of the district's villages) underscore her painstaking work. It is a considerable achievement, and Singer asks questions about the Ottomans and their peasant subjects which could usefully be explored for other parts of the Empire. The book's major audiences are the author's fellow Ottomanists and other historians interested in comparative studies of agrarian empires and peasantries. James A. Reilly Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies University of Toronto Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period. Essays in Memory of Morton Smith, edited by Fausto Parente and Joseph Sievers. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. 392 pp. In 1990, Morton Smith suggested to one of the editors of this volume, Joseph Sievers, the idea of convening an international colloquium on Josephus "that should bring together as many specialists in the field as possible" (p. ix). Sievers then prepared a program proposal with the other editor, Fausto Parente. After Professor Smith died in the summer of 1991, the feasibility of the project was questioned, but it...