A World Within: Jewish Life as Reflected in Muslim Court Documents from the Sijill of Jerusalem (XVIth Century), 2 vols.

AuthorGhazzal, Zouhair

Amnon Cohen has gathered, for the years 1530-1601 A.D., hundreds of Shari a court cases from the first 82 sijills of Jerusalem, dealing in one way or another with Jews living in that city during the first century of Ottoman rule in Bilad al-Sham. His research appears in two volumes. In the first, after a brief introduction, Cohen provides for each Shari a court register a "summary" of each case in which one or several Jews are involved; there are, on average, a dozen cases per register, but sometimes this number can be as low as one or two per volume. Then, in the second volume, a facsimile of the court record of each case is reproduced so the reader can compare the summary directly with the original Arabic or Ottoman text.

Considering the extreme brevity of his introduction, and the lack of analytical and synthetic tools, Cohen's aim seems to be to provide first-hand source material for researchers interested in "Jewish life" in early Ottoman Jerusalem of the sixteenth century. However, those interested in aspects of "Jewish life" in Jerusalem, or the Ottoman legal system, in particular, will be frustrated because of the way the two volumes have been conceived. In the first, Cohen's "summaries" are too short to provide us with even a general idea as to how Jews came to court and how the qadi's rulings proceeded; Cohen's work seems to be oriented more toward researchers desirous of a glimpse of the social life of Jews, that is, some kind of "social history" where Shari a court records serve as a source of "information." Quite often within the perspective of social history, it does not matter much how a case proceeded in the court, what the parties in conflict said, or even how qadis proceeded toward their final decisions. The perspective changes dramatically for those interested in the Ottoman legal system and in judicial writing, in particular; for this rare species of researcher, for whom any word can be significant, and the totality of the document-as-text is the most valuable object, the alternative is to skip the summaries or simply browse through to pick up cases of interest and then go to the original facsimile. Unfortunately, there are problems here as well. The reproductions are too small and the handwriting is quite often illegible enough to discourage even scholars trained in reading the difficult script of court documents. There is, however, a solution to this problem: simply scan the document on a hard drive or CD-ROM and then...

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