Copyright

Jane Hathaway

Published On

2026-03-12

Page Range

pp. 33–120

Language

  • English

Print Length

88 pages

1. Documents from Ottoman Damietta

  • Jane Hathaway (author)
Chapter of: Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah (pp. 33–120)

Chapter 1 presents three Genizah documents from Damietta, Egypt’s Mediterranean port on the eastern arm of the Nile. All three relate in some way to the lucrative tax farm of the port’s customs while illustrating the Ottoman Empire’s desire to encourage trade through Egypt’s Mediterranean ports. The first (CAJS Halper 359), in Arabic, dates from 1538 CE and details repayment of a debt to the powerful Jewish financier Abraham Castro, a close ally of the Ottoman sultan Süleyman ‘the Magnificent’. Document 2 (T-S NS 297.6, in Ottoman Turkish), from the late 16th century, depicts fierce competition over Damietta’s customs in the context of shipping the annual tribute that Egypt supplied to the Ottoman palace. The final document (CAJS Halper 222, in Arabic), dated 1708, shows the commander of Damietta’s Janissary regiment, a branch of the Ottoman elite infantry, enlisting the aid of several of Cairo’s Janissary officers and one of the subprovincial governors known as beys (who happened to be a Jewish convert to Islam) to protect the Jewish administrator of Damietta’s customs. A Jewish burial prayer appears on the verso of this last document for reasons that remain mysterious.

Contributors

Jane Hathaway

(author)
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Ohio State University

Jane Hathaway is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History Emerita at Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1992; while at Princeton, she worked on the medieval Genizah under the direction of Mark R. Cohen. She is a specialist in the early modern history of the Ottoman Empire and, in that context, on the Ottoman Arab provinces, the Ottoman Chief Harem Eunuch, and Jewish communities under Muslim rule. Her publications include The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlıs (Cambridge, 1997), A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman Egypt and Yemen (SUNY, 2003), The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker (Cambridge, 2018), and The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1800. (2nd ed. Routledge, 2020), as well as scores of articles and book chapters on related topics and on reactions in Egypt and Yemen to the movement of the Jewish messianic figure Sabbatai Zevi.