About this Website

1. A Gateway to Historical Gaza: The Public Part of the Gaza Historical Database

The Image Gallery

presents images of people, landscapes and the architecture of Gaza and the region, such as photographs, architectural drawings and plans. The images are grouped alphabetically. Click on an image to enlarge or get additional information. Each image is linked to at least one location on the Interactive Map.

The Interactive Map

is an interactive tool to explore locations in late Ottoman Gaza and its region. Historical maps of Gaza and aerial photographs of 1918 are overlapped on the Open Street Map (for references, see the Impressum). Our aim is to be a platform to help identify the exact geo-coordinates of historical locations. For this purpose, we geo-rectify the historical images (please note that several layers have unavoidable mismatches; e.g. the aerial photographs of 1918 and the map by G. Gatt of 1887.)

User’s Manual

Technical Note

The map works best with the Google Chrome browser. Not all maps are available in the same resolution. Therefore, some maps will fail to show at a certain zoom level. Due to the large file sizes, some maps load slower than others.

Functions

From the menu, you can chose from different historical maps and categories such as cities and villages, or streets and neighborhoods.

Place the mouse cursor over an object on the map and click to get more information in the form of both texts and images.

Change the transparency of any map in order to see how a particular location has changed over time and how it was represented by cartographers, photographers and artists over the past 200 years.

What to Find Where?

• The Gaza region, its villages, roads and natural features is presented on the PEF map of 1880.
• Detailed information on street and place names in Gaza city can be found on the British map of 1928.
• Unique information on Gaza’s elite families, their residences and economical assets is contained in G. Gatt’s map of 1887.

Users looking for information on specific localities in the Gaza region (e.g. buildings, streets or neighborhoods) should consult the Online Gazetteer of Gaza during the Late Ottoman Period. Clicking on an individual entry will refer you to the correct part of the interactive map.

2. The Gaza Historical Database: The project’s research tool

The Gaza Historical Database is the backend of this website. This is the place where we collect and analyze the data that are partly presented on the open access part of this website. To date we have collected data on a total of households and persons.

The main results will be published in a monograph on or before 2022 and we plan to make the database public around that time.

The Research Project

Gaza during the Late Ottoman Period is a research project directed by Yuval Ben-Bassat (University of Haifa) and Johann Buessow (University of Bochum). To date there is no single monograph on the history of Gaza and the surrounding region in the late Ottoman period, despite the pivotal role it continued to play as the economic, administrative, cultural, social and political center for its hinterland and as a crossroads of trans-regional flows of goods, people and ideas.

Gaza’s importance diminished in most if not all of these areas over the course of the nineteenth century as it was gradually eclipsed by other coastal towns which benefitted from growing economic connections with Europe and the integration of the eastern Mediterranean into a Europe-centered economic system. Nevertheless, late Ottoman Gaza remained an important center for the region’s rural population, including the Bedouins in its vicinity, and was located at the crossroads of major land routes near the border between the Ottoman Empire and British-ruled Egypt.

The research cooperation between Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Büssow is funded by a grant from the German-Israeli Foundation for Research and Development (GIF grant 1226; funding period: 2016-2018). The research cooperation with Khaled Safi is supported by several travel grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Two workshops (May 2017 and March 2018) will be the impetus to integrate our findings into these larger contexts.

Sources

Our research is based on primary sources written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew and a range of European languages, which are located today in archives in Turkey, Israel, Palestine and other countries . Documents and data from these archives will help to reconstruct the political, social, and economic history of the population in the Gaza region, and thus constitutes a crucial step toward a better understanding of the complex social fabric of Palestine and the Levant, including such varied issues as relationships with the imperial center, rural-urban relationships, migration and demographics, and relationships between the state and the Bedouins. Many of our research questions detailed below derive directly from examination of our source material. Therefore, we introduce our sources first.

The main sources of the data in the Gaza Historical Database are the Ottoman census registers of the Gaza region, which today are housed in the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem (ISA). These registers are based on an Empire-wide census conducted from 1905 to 1907. They are a unique source, which is not available for most other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The image below highlights the categories in the census documents that are the most important for our research.

We complement the data derived from the census registers with information from a number of other sources, and most importantly the Sharia court records, petitions, and a local biographical dictionary.

A study devoted to a recently discovered manuscript by the Gazan scholar Ahmad Busaysu (autograph dated 1897) will shed additional light on the political and cultural landscape of Gaza and its region. We are working on this manuscript in collaboration with Prof. Khaled Safi from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.

Research Topics

The key topics include:

• Social networks: Local chronicles, biographical dictionaries and court records can shed light on the ways in which Gaza’s inhabitants were linked by economic partnerships, marriage, or teacher-student relationships.
• Political networks: Late Ottoman Gaza was rife with factional strife. Hundreds of people listed in the census signed petitions sent to Istanbul. These complaints and requests are a valuable window on the social basis of factionalism.
• Household and family structures: The census registers list different types of households—from single households to large ones with more than 50 members, from the nuclear family to the extended family including relatives. One of our goals is to define patterns and varieties of households and families in relation to parameters such as location in neighborhoods in Gaza and social milieu.
• Social differentiation: Honorific titles and occupations, for example, shed light on the social profile of individual households and geographical areas.
• Migration: Place and year of birth are indicated for each individual registered in the census. This information, especially when combined with other data, e.g. birthplaces of children, can serve to draw conclusions as to migration. Additional information such as occupation or honorific titles can be used to formulate hypotheses about the reasons for migration.
• Health: In the census, many individuals are described in terms of their personal attributes such as bodily defects or other special characteristics. At the time, this helped identify individuals, similar to a passport photograph. Today these data are clues to health and welfare at the time. For example, how widespread were certain illnesses? What can be deduced about life expectancy?
• Local economy: Although occupations are not listed for many individuals, the available data is informative as to local economic activities. What different kinds of professions were there in Gaza, how many people worked in the agricultural sector, how many were artisans, teachers, civil servants, etc.? Do the occupational data reflect Gaza’s status as a hub of trade and transport?

Below are two examples of data analyses (place the mouse cursor over pie slice or bar on the chart to display more information):

1. Registered occupations among household heads in the Zaytūn neighbourhood, Gaza, 1905