From the Pages of the Defter (ص 213)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 213)

المحتوى

representative of the Taffuh villagers in the 1895 case, registered on Dura’s lands 318
dunams: a 168-dunam plot at Rifada and a 150-dunam plot at ‘Ayn Mawsib (or Misib).°°°
Each of these parcels was too big to be farmed by a single family, without either partners or
hired laborers.
To conclude, | argue that the seeming contradictions between tapu and tax lists
which this case makes apparent were not problematic in Ottoman eyes, and neither were
they disharmonious for the landowners and taxpayers involved. Rather, they should be seen
as a reflection of flexibility on the part of the registration commission(s) in working to
register villages’ properties. It indicates that the Emlak commission’s concern, not illogically,
was not with who owned what, per se. It bears recalling that the individual citizen was just
beginning in these decades to become significant for the government. For example,
traditional population counts in the Empire had, for centuries, used the household as the
unit of measurement when counting the population. This remained the case until 1831,
when the male individual became the unit of measurement. It would be another half century
before women made it onto the population rolls. In 1881, the General Population
Administration (NUfus-u Umumi idaresi) was created, and population counts began to record
367
the entire population.~”’ In the Hebron district, however, it was not until 1905 that a full-
© Ibid., entries #9056, 9059. Some of the Taffuhi properties in Dura are are locatable on available maps.
See Abu Sitta, sheets # 474/A3 and C3, 475/A3, and 493/B1 and C1.
°°” Guilhan Balsoy, The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838-1900 (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 2013), p. 7.
196

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From the Pages of the Defter

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المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

Theses رسائل ماجستير ودكتوراه