Religion, Economy, and the Making of Communal Boundaries in Ottoman Jerusalem

Jerusalem, like many Ottoman cities, was historically marked by an extensive demographic heterogeneity and a complex pattern of urban integration along religious, confessional, and ethnic lines. After presenting data from the Ottoman census mapping out residential patterns in the city, which shows a clear pattern of residential mixing, this paper focuses on the role of confessional institutions and religious actors in marking invisible boundaries on the urban landscape of mid-to late 19^th century Jerusalem. Against an urban landscape with extensive property held as religious endowment (waqf), I first examine the role of the Sephardi Jewish custom of ḥezakah, or long-term subleasing of property, as a method of communal control as well as an attempt to mark confessional boundaries and limit commercial interaction between Jews and non-Jews. The paper then turns to the attempts by Jerusalem’s rabbis to regulate the use of urban space by Jews in their religious rulings (responsa), sermons, and in their intermediary role with the local and imperial Ottoman government. Both the institution of the ḥezakah as well as the intervention of Jerusalem’s rabbis illustrate the strong confessional pulls toward spatial purity and confessional isolation in the late 19^th century, at the same time that Ottomanism, civic urbanism, and new public spaces – as well as the attendant opportunities for spatial and ideological mixing – were on the rise in the empire. The mid-century expansion of settlement outside the city’s walls and the later arrival of Zionism also encouraged ethno-religious segregation in the urban landscape, a process that would rapidly accelerate in the 1920s under the British Mandate.