From the Pages of the Defter (ص 98)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 98)

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160
servant or slave.
In almost every Hebron village there were households (hanes) with as
many as seventy members.
Ottoman researchers have long debated how many people were represented by the
Ottoman category of “hane”. The question is of no small importance, since the household
was the basic fiscal and counting unit until the mid-nineteenth century, when it began to be
replaced by the individual. A number of important and still-influential studies over the past
half century have assumed the hane was a nuclear family and ascribed to it five, sometimes
six members.*°*
Thus, a village of ten hanes was assumed to have a population of fifty or
possibly sixty individuals. Without any way to translate early-Ottoman hane numbers reliably
into numbers of individuals, however, this evaluation was merely theoretical. Recent studies
‘69 There was a khadim or ‘abd, male or female, in a small percentage of village households. If black, the
color of their skin is also noted. This information is based on my research of the 1905 population registry
for Hebron and its villages (ISA RG39 NT).
‘©! Omer Lutfi Barkan , the pioneer of demographic studies, used the number five for hanes in his
calculations. Kemal Karpat was initially unpersuaded by Barkan’s argument in his 1985 study but two
years later came to agree with Barkan’s calculations. See his “The Ottoman Family: Documents
Pertaining to its Size”, International Journal of Turkish Studies 4/1 (1987): 137-145. Amnon Cohen and
Bernard Lewis defined the hane as “a married man with his family, constituting a fiscal unit.” They used
the coefficient of six per hane in their co-authored study, Population and Revenue in the Towns of
Palestine in the Sixteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 14-15, quotation on p.
14. Ehud Toledano has also used six as a coefficient, in his study “The Sanjaq of Jerusalem in the
Sixteenth Century: Aspects of Topography and Population”, Archivum Ottomanicum 9 (1984), 309. The
coefficient of five was adopted by HUutteroth and Abdulfattah in their foundational study (1977). Haim
Gerber likewise estimated five people per hane: “The Population of Syria and Palestine in the
Nineteenth Century”, Asian and African Studies, the journal of the Israel Oriental Society, 13/1 (1979),
62. David Grossman has also calculated hane size by using five as an equivalency. Hakfar Ha’Aravi ve
Banotav: Tahalikhim ba-ishuv Ha’Aravi b-Aretz Israel ba-Tkufa Ha’Othmanit (The Arab Village and its
Daughters: Processes of Arab Settlement in the Land of Israel in the Ottoman Period) (Jerusalem: Yad
Itzhak Ben Zvi, 1994), 15. More recently he has applied the coefficient of six as a possibility alongside
five. Idem., Rural Arab Demography and Early Jewish Settlement in Palestine, trans. Marcia Grossman
(New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2011), 111, 114-115.
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From the Pages of the Defter

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المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

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