KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
properties among members of the ever-renewing generations of heirs, or unregistered transactions
carried out in the course of time, are among the obstacles to be overcome and cleared along this road.
Another built-in hurdle is the fact that no maps were drawn by the Ottoman authorities - borderlines
were systematically described verbally by reference to the four bearings of south, north, east and
west - hence pinpointing the exact location of a piece of property involves a painstaking process of
reconstruction through the identifying of the immediate neighbors or neighboring elements like roads,
going all the way back to the initial Ottoman setup.
There are not infrequent cases, when an application for a “first registration” - i.e. registration of
a piece of property for which taxes had been paid (of crucial importance as a preliminary sine qua
non condition ), but no identifiable “tabu” reference exists - is presented to the authorities, without the
parties concerned being aware of the crucial importance of an Ottoman relevant document or even just
a reference thereto. Such cases call for special attention of the Registry Officers in order to try and
establish not just the exact location, but also to decide whether the very reason for registration - i.e. the
actual ownership - has not disappeared in the course of the passing years, annulling any legal basis for
the claim in question.
and vakf lands, we frequently find a note emphatically stating that the land in question was acquired
through a Shar‘i sale.” Moreover: “Once sold with a court document, land could not revert to miri
status”.4
To sum up: The Ottoman documentation that exists in Israel concerning real-estate is preserved
by the government in perfect condition and may serve as an important historical source for the
understanding of the actual legal situation of lands in the late Ottoman years, particularly during the
Tanzimat reforms. More importantly, it still serves as one of the important tools, in order to establish
legal facts and questions of ownership which are relevant for our time. As regards the land registry
they may be consulted at the Land Registry Department of the Ministry of Justice, but the future even
looks more promising. A thorough process of digitation of all the real-estate transactions in Israel over 8 million referring to a total of 2.8 million properties - is under way. This will make the archives
more easily accessible to applicants entitled to consult them. By way of answering the question asked
by the title of my presentation: Indeed, the Ottoman archives are of practical relevance.
At times problems would arise from proceedings which have only been partially recorded: let’s
suppose that in the early years of the British Mandatory rule a person came to have his long time dating back to Ottoman years - property registered, proving that he was one of ten heirs. The official in
charge would have this request recorded, while all other nine owners did not bother to do the same for
their respective parts. Years later, the first applicant sold his share, the buyer also passed away, and his
property was legally registered. How could this legal situation be actually properly recorded, while the
developments of most of the original Ottoman larger tract are unclear? A painstaking process of going
back to the Ottoman records is due in order to establish the actual situation on the ground! It is in this
context that the Da’imi books could be of great help, because of the “permanent” (the literal meaning
of this term) nature of their information, but how about applications based on registered information
in the yoklama series, which by definition are of temporary type - how can one prove that the reason
for the initial registration has not ceased to exist, and hence the former registration would not be not
binding any more?
As suggested earlier on, the