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Academic Biography


Scientific Biography
 
My PhD thesis and the book that emanated from it deal with Jewish society in the larger metropolitan centers of the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century, a formative period in its history. My attention focused on the communities in three central cities: Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir, which together accounted for the vast majority of Ottoman Jewry. The main topics that were discussed were: the legal and social status of individuals and the community; organizational structure and operation of the congregations and the urban community; the congregational (kahal) institutions and its leadership; social, as well as economic and cultural characteristics of Ottoman Jewry. My research provided, for the first time, a comprehensive description and analysis of this Jewry in that period. It also laid the foundations for further study of this community.
 
In the following years I published several articles which to some degree deal more extensively with topics discussed in relatively narrower context in the thesis and the book. These include, among others: inter-communal relations; self-government; charitable and philanthropic institutions; poverty and its treatment by the community. The period covered in my articles stretches from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, at which time significant changes took place in the area under Ottoman rule.
            I gradually came to realize that what most interested me is social and cultural history. The theme of acculturation and interaction with the majority society became clearer, and is a subject which I believe can provide important new insights about Jewish life under Islam in general.
            Since 2000 and during my post-doctoral years at the 'Scholion' Interdisciplinary Research Center my research focused on social, cultural, and mental aspects of Ottoman Jewish society. I availed myself of interdisciplinary approaches (e.g. gender studies), as had already been done in the study of European societies and to some degree also of Jewish communities in Europe. Despite the fact that these approaches are central to contemporary historical research, they are almost completely lacking in Ottoman Studies, and even more so in research on Ottoman Jewry. Studies written in the past two decades have opened up fresh avenues of research and made it possible to raise new questions and examine mutual inter-societal influences.
            Later publications have veered away from the topics dealt with in my thesis, relating to issues having diverse geographical and chronological frameworks. The subjects of some of my recent articles,for example, were slaveholding which bears some new and important insights, the consumption of luxury goods, and recreational patterns of Jewish women in Ottoman Jerusalem. These articles are the materials out of which I intend to construct a wider monograph on Ottoman Jews at the beginning of the modern age (material culture and family history). Among the topics with which I have dealt or am engaged in studying at the moment are the family, gender and sexual practices, delinquency and social surveillance, folk beliefs, conceptions of honor and shame, and more. I have for some time been engaged in preparing and studying a corpus of dozens of wills and testaments left by old and young men and women from among Ottoman Jewry. To all these I apply my basic assumption concerning the great and multi-faceted influence of the wider urban culture, particularly that of Ottoman Islamic urban society, upon Jewish society and its culture.
           
           
            I am constantly seeking out additional written sources that I intend to publish, to make them available to a wider audience, and advance the state of research. With all due respect to post-modern theories, written and visual sources are still the base for historic research and writing. Our field still needs more sources in order to enabler us a better understanding of the past. After over five years of mutual work with an associate from Istanbul (Dr. Richard Wittmann), we are about to publish a volume which will include an introduction, summaries of a few hundred documents (Shari’a court records of Hasköy), an analytical chapter interpreting the documents, and indices. The book will be published by Brill (Leiden), next year (2012). These documents contain much information and enrich our knowledge of Jewish life and the way Jews related with the surrounding population and environment. Besides publishing the Shari’a court records from Istanbul, several Hebrew sources will also be published. I regard the publication of unknown, important sources as a significant contribution to the study of Ottoman Jewish history, as fewer people tend to read original sources, especially if these are extant in non-European languages. Various projects in this fashion are part of my forthcoming research agenda:
There are two volumes which are practically prepared for publication, both are an outcome of many years of work: The first is 'The Communal Ordinances of the Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-19th Centuries'. Which will be published by the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem (750 pp. Written in cooperation with Prof. Joseph R. Hacker). The second publication is 'Wills of Ottoman Jews: An Annotated Corpus of Wills of Jews from the Ottoman Empire'. I intend to publish it by The Benzion Dinur Center & The Zalman Shazar Center, Jerusalem. (250 pp.). A volume of the Ladino letters of 'Va'ad Pkidey Kushta' (= the Istanbul Committee for Eretz Israel) is currently in preparation, will continue and complement Prof. Barnai's work on that subject. Another important source is A collection of communal regulations (e. g., the Edirne community in the 18th-19th centuries). Another genre which fascinates me is historiographic essays (as is the case of the study of a 17th century text which is about to appear in Turkey (see no. 6), in cooperation with a Turkish scholar).       
                
The Sassons' Archive project ("The Sassoon Family: Jewish Plutocrats between East and West in an Age of Change") received a four-year research grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). Together with two students we have catalogued over 7200 letters (half of which were also scanned), most of them in Judeo-Arabic, dating 1850-1900. The letters include vast quantities of information, most of it unknown. I imagine that the publication of these documents will open new avenues of research in economic history, colonial history, history of Iraqi Jews in the Far East, and their interaction with the British elite, etc. A few scholars in Israel and abroad are already interested in our findings. We hope to produce a solid database for the study of an elite group as well as a Jewry that has been neglected. I intend to initiate a conference and later a publication that will draw on this Sassons' archive database
            The Sassoon project has greatly expanded my academic interests, both geographically and chronologically. While continuing my work on the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the pre-Tanzimat period, I have moved to its eastern province – present day Iraq and beyond to Persia and the Far East in the second half of the nineteenth century. This came at the very same period I was working on Turkey (no. 8) which dealt with Ottoman Jewry in the nineteenth century and the Turkish republican period. These two projects moved away from my earlier work on Ottoman Jewry and together with several articles (e.g. nos. 44, 48, 49, 56) attest to the chronological expansion as well.
Aside from the chronological and geographical (Iraq, Far East, Morocco [no. 54]) shift in my work, there is a definite thematic shift towards social and cultural history, with a growing interest in everyday life and material culture.
 
Future Plans
Many plans for the future are on my horizon. I have already committed myself to several projects that will inevitably lead to some new issues and ideas. 2011 is the last year of my project on the Sassoon family archive, sponsored by the ISF. I intend to apply for further funding in order to broaden and complete this important project, that has extensive scholarly potential.
* I plan to write a book on the Ottoman-Jewish Family, a subject that has received limited research to this day. The study will incorporate gender studies, recent research on power relations, mentality and social norms, women and family in Ottoman society. The anthropological discipline interests and even fascinates me, and I adopt the standing point of an anthropologist, depicting, analyzing and explaining ceremonies, social constructions and actions vis-à-vis this subject and others. An extensive corpus of sources that I have accumulated over the last twenty years will be incorporated into this study. I am certain that this work will be an important contribution to our knowledge of Jewish and Ottoman history, and will enable future comparative studies.
* I was invited to write an extensive entry, "Ottoman Jewry" for the Oxford Bibliographies Online. It is an annotated bibliography, containing up to 150 items, summing up 'the state of the art'. (see letter).
* In 2011 I was appointed the editor of Sefer Yerushalayim - the Ottoman Period (Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. See letter), Yad Yizhak Ben-Zvi, Jerusalem. This will be a part of a prestigious series, edited and written by leading scholars. The advisory board includes Prof. Amnon Cohen, Prof. Amy Singer and Prof. Dror Zeevi. I have also agreed to edit another volume for the Ben-Zvi Institute series on the Jewish communities –on the Palestinian Sephardi "Yishuv' in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The last two publications to gether with my synthetic innovative introductory chapter on sixteenth century Safed (no. 20) and my courses in the university express my ongoing interest in the history of Palestine during the Ottoman period. Furthermore, I have signed a contract to write part of a book for the Open University, titled: The Ottomans. I will be covering be the subject of legal and social status of the dhimmis.