Iris Agmon. Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. xxiii + 264 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3062-3.

Reviewed by Amy A. Kallander (Department of History, Syracuse University)
Published on H-Levant (October, 2007)

Textual Conventions, Legal Procedures, and the Production of Court Records in Ottoman Palestine

Iris Agmon's ambitious exploration of court records in Jaffa and Haifa is a welcome addition to the growing body of secondary literature on the social history of the Ottoman provinces. In writing a mircohistory, Agmon concentrates on individual experiences throughout the period of reform from the Tanzimat to the early decades of the twentieth century. Her choice of Jaffa and Haifa alludes to broader questions of change within the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean, namely the two cities' increasing bureaucratic significance, their role as ports, and, thus, as regional centers of migration and urbanization. By focusing on the court as a social and cultural arena, Agmon presents an analysis of legal culture and the family, while offering a methodological contribution on the use of court records themselves.

The book is divided into four parts, the first of which is largely historiographical, the second and third contain the bulk of the case studies, while the final part discusses these studies' pertinence to family history and presents several conclusions. The first two chapters cover essential background material for the non-specialist audience, describing Ottoman reforms and their impact in Palestine, and the relevance of gender and family history to studies on the Middle East. While Agmon provides concise synopses of numerous recent publications, her own intervention is highlighted in terms of source material. In this respect, she misses an opportunity to clarify what differentiates Ottoman Palestine from Egypt, Syria, or Anatolia, and how the experience of Jaffa and Haifa compares to that documented in previous studies of Nablus and Jerusalem.

The central four chapters of Agmon's book comprise a sampling of testimonies in the form of case studies of divorce, alimony, custody, and the status of orphans. Here she offers a solid contribution to the scholarship on Islamic courts, legal culture, and bureaucratic consciousness in the Ottoman Empire. For instance, her approach to the personnel at the courts in Jaffa and Haifa reveals how Ottoman reforms and the process of centralization altered the balance of power within the court where judges often relied upon their subordinates, demonstrating the dependence of institutional knowledge upon local. By treating the courts as a sort of community, Agmon demonstrates the importance of the local to Ottoman officials, as well as the continuing importance of marriage as a way of expanding and maintaining local networks.

Agmon is perhaps at her strongest in these two middle sections, where the functioning of provincial courts and the social networks in which they were enmeshed is explicated in some detail. Through the use of personal stories, Agmon's writing comes alive in eloquent discussions of the lives of various inhabitants of these two cities and biographical descriptions of court personnel. Any of these four chapters could serve as a useful classroom tool, introducing undergraduate students to the practical applications of Islamic law through the interaction of judges and the decision making process. These cases further demonstrate that women were able to petition the courts, often with success. Finally, the judge's decisions often demonstrate an interest in social equilibrium that other scholars have associated with the rendering of justice in the Ottoman Empire.

Agmon's description of court procedures and the attempts to modify and regulate the court system throughout the Tanzimat era are informative, suggesting continuity, especially in terms of local autonomy and adaptation, rather than a sharp break that ushered in new legal notions of the family. Thus the link she establishes between transformation and modernity is not as well developed as it could be, and her explication of the "certain practices" of modernity and their substantial differentiation from the premodern era suffer as a consequence (p. 5). In her conclusion to chapter 4, Agmon posits the procedural changes of the courts (namely a recitation of the court record and the addition of the participants signatures, two recent modifications made by the Ottoman state) as an example of the modern state's intrusive practices. While both of these changes demonstrate an increasing interaction between "the state and its humble subjects," Agmon's insistence that this was a demonstration of state authority, or an intrusive practice, seems to overlook the agency of those individuals who appeared in court (pp. 124-125).

While Agmon makes a valid point that the family as a social practice was discursively constructed in a variety of spheres including the court, her own detailing of this process fades into the background. The family finally appears as the object of study in chapter 7, where Agmon builds upon the court cases previously summarized to elaborate the overlap between family and community, and the types of living situations of the urban lower- and middle-classes. Here she documents the diversity of family situations and experiences, as well as the frequent similarity between the middling and upper strata of society, in contrast to the monolithic picture of an Oriental or Middle Eastern family type. Aside from her synopsis of recent work on family history in the Middle East in chapter 2, it is here that Agmon's focus on the family takes precedence. Her discussion of the historiography and the importance of this line of inquiry is well grounded, though it is not always clear how her work builds on and differs from previous scholarship on courts and/or the family. One also wonders, for example, how to understand her contribution to family history as a comparative field, and thus beyond the borders of Middle East area-studies.

While offering a glimpse of provincial life around the turn of the twentieth century, Agmon's work offers intriguing conclusions about the roles migration and urbanization played in transforming notions of family and community. Though her discussion of family, gender, and modernity could have been further developed, Family and Court uses its numerous case studies of Ottoman practices to make a remarkable contribution to studies on legal culture and the court system.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-levant.

Citation: Amy A. Kallander. Review of Agmon, Iris, Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in Late Ottoman Palestine. H-Levant, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13745

Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.