Copyright

Jane Hathaway

Published On

2026-03-12

Page Range

pp. 121–170

Language

  • English

Print Length

50 pages

2. Documents from Ottoman Alexandria

  • Jane Hathaway (author)
Chapter of: Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah (pp. 121–170)

Chapter 2 focuses on Alexandria, Egypt’s other great Mediterranean port, located on the Nile’s western arm. Four of the five Genizah documents presented here are composed in Ottoman Turkish and feature Salmūn al-Iskandarānī, the powerful Jewish merchant who directed Alexandria’s customs in the early 17th century. In the first two (T-S Ar. 38.111 and T-S Ar. 39.425), two of Salmūn’s agents—a member of the imperial palace soldiery and another high-ranking military officer—report to him, requesting guidance on a sale of wood and asking Salmūn to aid a fellow Alexandrian travelling to Mecca. The third document (T-S AS 178.88) is a petition from Salmūn himself, who complains to an unnamed official that the subprovincial administrators known as kāshifs prevent him from assembling the tribute to be shipped to the Ottoman palace. Document 4 (Mosseri Xa.3.10) is a petition from Salmūn’s replacement as tax farmer of a village near Alexandria, requesting that Salmūn be investigated for subleasing revenue sources to his associate Saʿadia Cohen; notable here is that all those involved in this case are Jewish merchants. The final document (ENA 3941.4), written in Arabic, is a brief salary receipt, dated 1824, from one of the textile-weaving factories that Egypt’s autonomous governor Meḥmed ʿAlī Pasha (r. 1805–48) opened in an attempt at import-substitution industrialisation.

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.