The talk provides a genealogy of "the birth of title-by-registration" in Palestine under British colonial rule, tracing its conflicted origins back to the late Ottoman period. The discussion centers on a famous lawsuit filed by the heirs of Sultan Abdulhamid II in the Jaffa land court in 1933, seeking to reclaim the possessions of the late sultan in the al-Muharraqa village of the Gaza district. The disputed land, comprising about 4,800 dunums, was just a small portion of the vast land holdings accumulated by the former sultan as emlak-i humayun, or imperial estates, across various parts of the empire. The lawsuit aimed to serve as a test case for reclaiming all such properties from the successor states.
The heirs contested the Ottoman state's treatment of these lands as state property, arguing that no changes had been made in the imperial land registry. They challenged the British authorities by presenting their written proofs of ownership: the Ottoman Tapu. This initiated a series of legal battles and retrials spanning Jaffa, London, and Jerusalem, which only ended with the termination of the British Mandate in 1948. British officials were dispatched to Istanbul to obtain official Turkish documents from the state archives and sought legal counsel from prominent Turkish lawyers to refute the heirs' claims.
Fakher Eldin address two main questions: Why did the Ottoman authorities not see a need to alter the Tapu records? And why did the heirs' claims wield such influence over the British government, despite a clear state action that should have swiftly resolved the case? What insights can be gained from this case about the nature of British colonial intervention in the land question in Palestine?
Munir Fakher Eldin is the Arab Center Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Humanities at Birzeit University, where he directed the MA program in Israeli Studies from 2015 to 2021 and served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 2021 to 2024.He was a EUME Fellow of the Forum Transregionale Studien in 2009/2010 and returns as a Fellow in the current academic year. He is the chief editor of the fourth edition of The General Survey of Israel (2020), published by the Institute for Palestine Studies, and the co-editor of The Untold Story of the Golan Heights: Occupation, Colonization, and Jawlani Resistance (I.B. Tauris, 2023). Currently, he is working on a manuscript about British colonial intervention in the land regime in Palestine.
Nazan Maksudyan is a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin) in the ERC project, ‘Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789–1914’ (PI: Peter McMurray) and a visiting professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with special interest in children and youth, gender, sexuality, exile and migration, sound studies, and the history of sciences. She is an Editorial Board Member of Journal of Women’s History, Journal of European Studies, and First World War Studies. She is the author of Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (Syracuse UP, 2019), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse UP, 2014), and Measuring Turkishness (Metis, 2005). In the academic year 2009/2010 Maksudyan was a EUME Fellow at the Forum Tranregionale Studien
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.