From the Pages of the Defter (ص 239)

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From the Pages of the Defter (ص 239)

المحتوى

apparent that the mortgage was a pittance compared to the land’s value. The highest-paid
sellers, those who received 370 kurus per share, received the approximate equivalent of only
34.7 kurus per dunam, since one share was equivalent on average to 10.66 dunams.
Collectively, the per-dunam value on all the lands mortgaged together was even lower: 26.4
kurus per dunam. To convert this into buying power, the mortgage amount received for one
dunam would have been about enough to purchase merely half a goat."
Additionally, we
must factor into this sum the interest stipulated by the buyers/lenders. They were to receive
one-third of the harvests after the ‘ushr tax (tithe) on crops had been deducted, until the
land was re-purchased by its owners. -*
*" | base this assessment on values assigned to black and white goats in three inheritance settlements for
area villagers in these years: 45, 48 and 50 kurus each. From Samu‘ village: HR 14 / 17 / 70 (24 Dhu al-
Q’ada 1308 / 1 July 1891) and HR 14 / 18 / 69 (same date), and from Surif: HR 3 / 35 / 84 (Ghara Jumadi |
1286 / August 1869). Goats were the least expensive livestock to own. In these three terekes, for
example, we also find values for a camel (600 kurus), a donkey (150 kurus), and small and large cattle
(150, 202, and 500 kurus/each).
*” As Iris Agmon has found in her research of Haifa and Jaffa Ottoman sharia courts (see Family & Court:
Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), in
Hebron | likewise observed in the town’s court registers that these types of loans were used frequently
by both individual urbanites and villagers throughout the period under discussion. Among the most
frequent lenders were well-to-do, orphaned minors, whose affairs were managed for them by their legal
guardians (wasi). Mahmoud Yazbak writes that Islamic law encouraged such investments. He has also
found this practice to have been historically routine in Nablus. See his “Muslim Orphans and the Sharia
in Ottoman Palestine According to Sijill Records”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient (JESHO) 44/2 (2001): 133.
In contradistinction, the “formal credit market” was in its infancy in Palestine at this time. The
majority of banks in the southern region were established in Jerusalem, from the late 1880s. The
Deutsche-Palestina Bank opened in Jerusalem in 1899. According to Ottoman financial historian Huseyin
Al, it was the first German bank to be opened anywhere in the Ottoman Empire. (HUseyin Al, “Banks and
Banking”, in Gabor Agoston and Bruce Masters, eds., Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York:
Facts on File, 2009): 77 )
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From the Pages of the Defter

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المنشئ

Susynne McElrone

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