whilst the Jews (usually) bought their land fair and square, the owners of the land were very rarely the ones who lived and worked on it.
I have heard this before but never understood what it meant. Did the people who worked the land respect the ownership of the previous owners, for example by paying rest or by being employed by the previous owners, but they just did not respect the sale? Or did the people who worked the land consider themselves to be owners or didn’t have the same concept of ownership as we do today?
Agriculture was primitive, with little irrigation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, land was usually owned by the villagers privately tely or collectively. The second half of the century saw the growing impoverishment of the villagers, in large part owing to more efficient Ottoman taxation, and a great deal of rural land was bought up by urban notable families (in Arabic, a’yan), who had accumulated their new wealth as Ottoman agents, especially in tax collection, and through commerce with the West. By the early twentieth century, villagers in dozens of localities no longer owned their land but continued to cultivate it as tenant farmers.
It seems you’ve stepped on quite a land mine here, and the following is mostly just vague guesses.
As far as I can make out it dates back to the Ottoman land code of 1858 where for various reasons a lot of land was declared owned by the government, which would collect a tax in lieu of rent.
So in one case the Ottoman empire sold a large tract of land to a Lebanese Effendi, who then sold it to the Yishuv. There was an village on this land which had been settled for some 60+ years, and despite protests to the Ottoman government the villagers were all evicted by the Jewish settlers.
It seems the villagers paid a tithe. I suppose at first they would have paid the tithe to the Ottoman government, which would have seemed normal to them (and more like a tax), then they switched to paying a Lebanese Effendi, which wouldn’t have made any difference to them either way. And then suddenly they were sold again, and evicted off their land, which would have felt very wrong given they’d been living there all their life, and viewed it as their land.
I have heard this before but never understood what it meant. Did the people who worked the land respect the ownership of the previous owners, for example by paying rest or by being employed by the previous owners, but they just did not respect the sale? Or did the people who worked the land consider themselves to be owners or didn’t have the same concept of ownership as we do today?
Just read in Morris’s Righteous Victims:
It seems you’ve stepped on quite a land mine here, and the following is mostly just vague guesses.
As far as I can make out it dates back to the Ottoman land code of 1858 where for various reasons a lot of land was declared owned by the government, which would collect a tax in lieu of rent.
So in one case the Ottoman empire sold a large tract of land to a Lebanese Effendi, who then sold it to the Yishuv. There was an village on this land which had been settled for some 60+ years, and despite protests to the Ottoman government the villagers were all evicted by the Jewish settlers.
It seems the villagers paid a tithe. I suppose at first they would have paid the tithe to the Ottoman government, which would have seemed normal to them (and more like a tax), then they switched to paying a Lebanese Effendi, which wouldn’t have made any difference to them either way. And then suddenly they were sold again, and evicted off their land, which would have felt very wrong given they’d been living there all their life, and viewed it as their land.