16 • cHAPTeR 1
of the Ottoman empire in the Great War, when the country was under
British Mandate. Between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries,
however, the region’s rulers did not treat it as a separate political or
administrative entity, and it was not formally called palestine.^3 In other
words, notwithstanding the increasingly common scholarly preference
for the term “Late Ottoman Palestine”^4 (a term I also use in this book),
al- Khalidi’s native and Ben- Yehuda’s adoptive city of Jerusalem was,
more precisely, in the larger territory the Ottomans named— forgive
the confusion— Jerusalem, or in Ottoman and Arabic, al- Quds.
Jerusalem had not always been the name of an independent Otto-
man administrative unit. though the idea had been proposed earlier,
this was an innovation fully enacted by the Ottomans only in the final
quarter of the nineteenth century.^5 earlier in the century, the region we
know of as Palestine (today’s Israel, West Bank, and Gaza Strip) was
part of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of Syria, three sanjaks (districts)
of which were acre (in the north), Nablus (in the center), and Jeru-
salem (in the south).^6 Due in part to their recognition of the growing
(^3) See Thomas Philipp’s discussion of the anachronistic use of “Palestine” in Acre, 1– 8,
233n.1.
(^4) Consider, for instance, agmon, Family & Court; Saposnik, Becoming Hebrew; Ben-
Bassat and Ginio, Late Ottoman Palestine; perry and Lev, Modern Medicine in the Holy Land;
campos, “A ‘Shared Homeland’ and Its Boundaries”; Schidorsky, “Libraries in Late Otto-
man Palestine between the Orient and the Occident”; Mccarthy, The Population of Pales-
tine; Kushner, ed., Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period. On debates in the historiography of
the Late Ottoman period in palestine, particularly concerning the attitude of the Ottomans
toward Zionist immigration, see Reinkowski, “Late Ottoman Rule over Palestine.”
(^5) there had been two earlier, short- lived moves (in 1841 and 1854) to separate Jeru-
salem from Damascus and to make it an independent sanjak. The final, lasting separation,
however, took place in 1874. abu- Manneh, “the rise of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the
Late Nineteenth century,” 42– 43; Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856– 1882 , 12–
13; Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem, 1890– 1914 , 6; Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 35,
218n.37. the same had been done to Mount Lebanon in 1861 after intercommunal vio-
lence erupted the previous year. See Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 91.
Benny Morris renders the year of the transformation of Jerusalem into an independent
mutasarriflik as 1887. Morris, Righteous Victims, 7.
(^6) as of the Ottoman reforms of 1864, the empire was divided into a number of dif-
ferent levels of administrative units. The first level was that of the vilayet, or province,
which was ruled by a governor (vali). Vilayets were divided in turn into a number of
sanjaks, or districts, which were themselves composed of subdistricts that were governed
by kaymakams (subgovernors). an exceptional status was that of the mutasarriflik or
independent sanjak, which, though much smaller than a typical vilayet, was under the
direct authority of the sultan rather than through the intermediary of a vali; as we shall
see, mutasarrifliks were typically created to bypass the standard Ottoman administrative
hierarchy to satisfy particular political interests, whether domestic or foreign. See Davi-
son, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856– 1876 , 136ff; Gerber, Ottoman Rule in Jerusalem,
1890– 1914 ; Gerber, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 9:33– 76. On eighteenth- and
early nineteenth- century acre, see philipp, Acre.