From the Pages of the Defter (ص 28)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 28)

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tenants.’’ These commissions appear to have been dispatched from ‘Akka in the early 1870s
to areas in the region that today encompasses southern Syria, northern Israel and northern
Jordan. Yitzhak Shechter theorizes that semsiyye is a category that was assigned by tapu
commissions to the lands of villages which were abandoned or sparsely populated, i.e. their
agricultural lands were under-utilized. They were then offered to nearby inhabitants for a
fee equal to the assessed value of the land (bedel-i mis/) and, if they did not want them or
could not pay the fees, the lands were auctioned. Shechter hand-copied and studied a
semsiyye register in the 1920s while working in the lands division of the Palestine-Israel
Colonization Association.’® Michael Fischbach states there were special commissions sent
out from ‘Akka that were charged with investigating areas of land to determine whether
they were under continuous cultivation. Lands that were not being exploited were then
auctioned by the state.’ According to Alexander Schélch these surveys may have been even
more widespread: “At the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the 1870s, the government
conducted outright sales campaigns of land that was not continuously cultivated, especially
” See Munir Fakher Eldin, “Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politcs in Palestine 1858-
1948”, PhD dissertation, New York University (September 2008) and Raya Adler, “The Tenants of Wadi
Hawarith: Another View of the Land Question in Palestine”, International Journal of Middle East Studies,
20/2 (May 1988), 197-220.
"8 vitzhak Shechter , “Rishum HaQarqa ‘ot b-Aretz Israel ba-Makhatsit HaShniyah shel HaMeah Ha-yud”tet
(Land Registration in Eretz Israel in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century)”, Qatedra 45 (September
1987), 147-160 (Hebrew). It is not known where the register Shechter examined is today. In his article,
he reproduces the texts of selected documents from the register that he examined.
*’ In his doctoral dissertation, Michael Fischbach mentions (p. 94) a semsiye commission surveying in the
Jordan Valley (Ghor) sometime between 1870 and 1872. | have not found this same information in his
2000 book of the same title.
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From the Pages of the Defter

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Susynne McElrone

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