JPS "Hidden Gems" and "Greatest Hits": Fifty Years of Ottoman Studies of Palestine

In this essay, emeritus sociology professor Salim Tamari surveys the study of Ottoman Palestine within the pages of JPS, identifying two groundbreaking articles: Beshara Doumani's "Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History" (1992) and Louis Fishman's "The 1911 Haram al-Sharif Incident: Palestinian Notables versus the Ottoman Administration" (2005). Tamari argues that the two contributions have, in different ways, fundamentally shifted our understanding of a local Palestinian identity within the broader Ottoman-era region of Bilad al-Sham.