Roy Marom

This paper discusses the Palestinian rural notables' class, comprised of rural sheikhs, village or clan headmen with similar life trajectories in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. The paper uses the Palestinian Hannun family of Tulkarm to demonstrate how these notables exploited changing legal, administrative and political conditions, and global economic realities, to attain socioeconomic and political ascendency in the Palestinian countryside and its emergent towns. The article analyses their actions in structuralist terms of clans, households, marriage alliances and networks of patronage, and historically contextualises their rational decision-making process about selling land to Jews and cooperation with the British authorities.

This article offers the first linguistic discussion of a Palestinian typonymic corpus from the 16th century. It shows that the general outlines of the Palestinian nomenclature of space were well developed by that time, instead of being the more recent linguistic product of later centuries as previously thought. Many Arabic-language microtoponyms, traditionally regarded as the product of modern Palestinian rural society, reflect instead a long-lasting linguistic continuity of the country’s Arabic speaking village communities. As our test case, we used the toponyms recorded in the endowment deed (waqfiya) of the ‘Imāra al-‘Āmira, the Jerusalem soup kitchen established by Roxellana (1502–1558 C.E.), Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent’s favourite wife (Haseki Sultan), dated 958AH/1552 CE. The list of 195 topoynyms reveals that the lowest levels of preservation are in the western part of Lod Valley (20–25%), while the highlands are characterized by higher preservation percentage of 40–60%.

<This is the paper's abstract. the Version of Record (VOR) was published as: Marom, R. and Zadok, R., “Early-Ottoman Palestinian Toponymy: A Linguistic Analysis of the (Micro-)toponyms in Haseki Sultan’s Endowment Deed (1552),” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 139.2 (2023), pp. 258-289>

This paper provides a social and geographic account of al-Lajjun (Jenin Sub-district), a prominent Palestinian village during the British Mandate period (1918–1948). It portrays a countryside in renewal, encapsulated in the story of Umm al-Fahm’s expansion and Lajjun’s resettlement. In contrast to existing scholarship, the present work contextualizes the site within the wider diachronic, longue durée, history of the region, and the synchronous, shifting pattern of settlements in Marj ibn ‘Amir (Jezreel Valley), Bilad al-Ruha (Ramot Menashe), and Wadi ‘Ara (Nahal ‘Iron). It focuses on the development of the physical outlines of the (re)new(ed) village, with the development of three “Lajjuns” reflecting its founders’ Hebronite/Khalīlī patterns of settlement. Furthermore, it explores Lajjun’s diversified economy and its metamorphosis from a derelict hamlet into a hub of utilities and transportation infrastructure of regional importance under the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948).

This paper deals with the dialectics of settlement continuity and change in Palestine's southern coastal plain during the Mamluk and Early Ottoman periods (1270–1750 CE). Using Ḥamāma, an Arab village in Majdal ‘Asqalān's hinterland as a test-case, the paper introduces a new method of establishing settlement continuity — a major challenge in the study of the historical geography of late medieval and Ottoman Palestine, by showing continual presence of known village lineages. The paper presents an integrative, topic-oriented discussion of Ḥamāma's administration, demography, settlement geography, economy, religion, material culture and daily life, as evidenced by literary and archaeological evidence. The paper argues that nomadic economic and security pressures led to a major process of settlement abandonment around Majdal ‘Asqalān, and the southern coastal plain in general, during the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. The population of abandoned villages moved to surviving settlements, while the lands of abandoned settlements continued to be cultivated by neighboring villages.

The article explores the interplay between transnational migration, cultural patrimony and political conflict, tying together the former realms of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. It discusses the role played by Russian Jews in the development of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine until 1948. It focuses on the Northern Sharon, where three distinct immigrant groups-Circassians, Bosnians and Russian Jews-settled in the 1870s-1890s. Methodologically, it adopts a new, twofold, approach to the genesis of the conflict, by tracing its roots within the broader setting of Eurasian transnational migrations to Palestine, and the stricter context of 'locality expressing glocality', that is, of specific colonies and their development under internal pressures and outside interactions. In 1948, prior actions aimed at achieving ethnic homogeneity through coerced population transfers during the disintegration Eurasian imperial polities served as a blueprint for some of the same Zionist immigrants for achieving plurality in their new Jewish State.

Jindās was the nearest village to Lydda, situated by the town’s northern entrance. Although Lydda remained, to a large extent, an agricultural town until 1948, its rural hinterland has received little scholarly attention thus far. In this article, I sought to redress this disparity by reconstructing the history of Jindās, based on Ottoman tax records, waqf endowment deeds, registers of the Sharia courts and even oral testimonies. Jindās is mentioned in the 15th , 16th and early 17th centuries as a flourishing village whose lands belonged to different religious endowments. In the 18th and 19th centuries the village was abandoned several times. The desertion of Jindās, as well as of its neighbors Sibtāra, Kafr Jinnis, Beit Qūfa, and Shīhā, reflects the unsettled conditions around Lydda as a result from the migrations of nomadic groups and local manifestations of the Qays and Yaman rivalry.
From a broader historiographical perspective, the article underlines a key point: the abandonment of villages did not necessarily result in an overall demographic decline. Just as the inhabitants of Jindās were scattered throughout Palestine’s central hill country, residents of other abandoned villages relocated, for the most part, to other regions, expanding and changing their existing patterns of settlement. In addition, the lands of these villages were not left abandoned, but continued to be cultivated by other populations. Thus, the lands of Jindās were cultivated by the inhabitants of Beit Nabālā and Lydda, and while they became the target of early Zionist settlement initiatives starting in the late 19th century, Ottoman reassertion of Jindās’ status as a waqf estate forestalled the land acquisition initiatives.

Mulabbis was the frst Arab village whose lands were acquired by Jews for settlement purposes (1878), and is counted among the earliest villages to be fully depopulated due to Zionist settlement during the Late Ottoman period. However, the history of Mulabbis, or of any of the other villages depopulated at that time, has not been discussed in any depth. By adopting oral history as its socio-cultural prism, this paper identifies the residents of the village, descendants of Abu Hamed alMasri, and explores their historical narratives as recounted by elders of the family within the context of settler colonialism in Palestine. As an oral history of a village depopulated in the Late Ottoman period, the story of Mulabbis may offer us a glimpse at future trends of cultural recollection of the Nakba: it is an idealized lost homeland, and a relational signifer of patrimony for the descendants of its inhabitants.

This article explores lingering recollections of a marginalised sphere of participation by Jewish and Arab citizens of Mandatory Palestine in the
Allied war effort. During the war, Palestine became a major staging ground for Allied troops in the Middle East. Some 15,000 Jewish and 35,000 Arab workers worked in administrative, construction, catering, and maintenance roles within the newly built army bases. The story of civilian labour in RAF Ein Shemer reveals previously neglected normative and non-normative patterns of inter-communal relations between British soldiers and Jewish and Arab workers on the social, economic, ideological, and romantic levels within the context of a colonial-era military installation.

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is freely available in War and Society since August 12, 2020: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07292473.2020.1786889

The following article summarizes our current knowledge of the history of Tell Mulabbis (in modern Petah Tikva). As a key archaeological site in the Yarkon River basin, it was inhabited during the Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk and Late Ottoman periods. Based on the published results of recent excavations, older scholarship, and hereto-unnoticed written evidence, the article examines and interprets Mulabbis's material culture within the broader contexts of the region's historical geography. Although possessing important advantages like access to water and arable land, the site was inhabited only intermittently due to malaria and changing economic and political circumstances. Within the framework of Ottoman Archaeology, the article suggests the need to pay closer attention to 'recent' archaeological layers. For example, the few Ottoman material remains published so far, testify to continued cultural exchange and economic ties between Mulabbis, the mountainous interior, and the southern parts of Palestine.

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in the Palestine Exploration Quarterly since June 20, 2019: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00310328.2019.1621734

This article centres around the question of how do modern researchers view the Hijrah and its being a historical event or process which took place in a specific time and place. The general convention is that the Hijrah is the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Al-Madinah in the summer of 622 CE. Yet, a closer examination reveals that the Hijrah is deeply and inextricably tied to the chronological reconstruction of the emergence of Islam and its conquests. Some researchers have argued that the Hijrah was a different historical event, for instance, a campaign of Jews and Arabs – led and inspired by Muhammad – to liberate the Holy Land from Christian hold; or a gradual migratory movement from Arabia to the then known world; still others view the Hijrah as a later historical process, during which Arab warriors migrated to new garrison towns established in the lands conquered by Islam.
The premise in this article is that the answer to the historical essence of the Hijrah is primarily a historiographical one, which is connected to the historical method and its interpretations. This article will demonstrate how the understanding of the Hijrah has developed via the correlation between Traditional historiography – which is derived from the classical Muslim narrative, and new insights which have emerged in recent decades – and are based both on a reinterpretation of existing evidence, as well as new evidence (mostly non-Islamic in nature). Considering the central role that the revisionist work by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism, has had on the discussion on the Hijrah, its main thesis will be examined in this paper and compared to both the Traditional research approach and the Integrative and Neo-Traditionalist approaches that followed this work

This article assesses the contribution of Claude Reignier Conder’s travelogue, Tent Work in Palestine (1878) as evidence for research into the history of Palestine in the Late Ottoman period by examining its contribution to three case studies relating to the Sharon plain. The article is divided into five parts. The first part is devoted to a historiographical assessment of the scholarship of the PEF. The second part surveys the historical context of 19th century Palestine from the local-provincial viewpoint. The next three parts demonstrate the historical merit of the Tent-Work  in light of extant local sources, through specific case studies focusing on the Sharon region: law enforcement and the administration of justice, tribal migrations and settlement, and finally the partitioning of the Sharon's Great Oak Forest.

Marom, Roy. 12. The Contribution of Conder's Tent Work in Palestine for Understanding of Shifting Geographical, Social and Legal Realities in the Sharon During the Late Ottoman Period. Exploring the Holy Land - 150 Years of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. Sep 2018. ISBN 9781781797068. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=34549. Date accessed: 20 Sep 2017 doi: 10.1558/equinox.34549. Sep 2018

(Full text can be had by request)