From the Pages of the Defter (ص 215)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 215)

المحتوى

suited the needs of the time. The thousands of dunams of land and olive trees registered en
bloc to “the people” of many of the villages, as discussed in Chapter 3, supports this
argument that assigning tax liability was sufficient for the commission at this early juncture,
as long as it was agreeable to the people from whom taxes were to be collected.
One may detect elements of the conventional narrative in this assessment. Until
today, most historians of Palestine argue that at this stage, due to peasant fright or
misunderstanding mukhtars, tribal chiefs, urban notables and businessmen stepped in to
register villagers’ agricultural lands. The case of the Hebron district leaves us no choice but
to re-examine this narrative regarding other districts of Palestine, and to search out
documentary sources that can answer these questions.
We can venture to say that the registration of properties in the tapu and tax registers
was not initially understood among villagers to replace or nullify understandings of
ownership that were already recognized locally, some expressed only orally and others
documented on paper, either informally or in the sharia court. In the same breath, however,
we must qualify this statement with the observation that, actually, they did not replace or
nullify such claims. As this case and the Bayt Kahili’s case to be examined in the following
section make clear, these claims to ownership continued to be substantiated in the sharia
court when the need arose.
Although the 1895 tax-survey registers they examined were composed differently than the Hebron-
district one analyzed here (see Mundy and Smith, 117-118 and 138-139),
198

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From the Pages of the Defter

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المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

مجموعات العناصر

Generated Pages Set

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