Capsalı as a source for Ottoman history, 1450 - 1523

Donated by Klaus Kreise

Overlapping Boundaries in the City: Mahalle and Kahal in the Early Modern Ottoman Urban Context

In the present article, I examine the construction and articulation of urban and communal identities in the early modern Ottoman Empire with special reference to the complex and dynamic local Jewish identities in Edirne. I analyse the terminology used for identifying Jewish litigants at the Islamic court in Edirne based on 12 cases selected from the Islamic court registers. In other words, I scrutinize in which cases the court identified Jews by their membership of a particular congregation (Heb. kahal; pl. kehalim), in which cases by their residential affiliations (Ott. mahalle; pl. mahallat, "urban quarter"), and in which by a combination of these aforementioned ascriptions. In so doing, I attempt to enhance our understanding about pre-modern people who were simultaneously members of multiple religious, spatial, ethnic or occupational sub-communities. More specifically, I examine which of the Jews' multiple identities (i.e., kahal as religious/ethnic; mahalle as spatial) were emphasized by the judges of the Muslim courts. I suggest that various identification markers were employed by court personnel to define the Edirne Jews. While in some matters the fiscally, administratively, as well as socially defined spatial identity based on the term mahalle was employed, in other cases the ethnic/communal identity based on the Jewish kahal-that was also a taxable unit-was the prevalent concept

Rabbinical perspectives on money in seventeenth-century Ottoman Egypt

Episodes of monetary instability in Ottoman Egypt stimulated a discussion of monetary doctrine among Egyptian rabbis. A central issue was the valuation of debts following changes in the value of silver coins. While the leading rabbi of the sixteenth century advocated linkage to gold coins, the rabbis of the seventeenth century adopted valuation by purchasing power and rejected valuation by weight and linkage to gold coins. The rabbis of the seventeenth century differed from their predecessors in two essential respects: they were more critical of traditional Jewish monetary doctrine, and they utilized a much more sophisticated form of economic analysis.Jewish economic thought, monetary doctrine, monetary history, Ottoman Empire, Egypt,