JewishGen Talks: Souls, Taxes & Real Estate in the Ottoman Administrative State

The Ottoman Empire, like all empires and states, was not just founded upon the idea of military power and might; it required a vast administrative apparatus to exert sovereignty over its lands, which included more than 690,000 square miles of territory at its height. For Jewish genealogists, there are four key types of administrative registers that offer insights: Cizye, Nüfus, Tapu Tahrir, and Temettuat. Cizye registers hold information about the male poll tax payers belonging to ahl al-Kitab, the non-Muslim "People of the Book" (Jews and Christians). Nüfus are the modern census registers dating from 1832 to 1921. Tapu Tahrir is a series of cadastral population surveys conducted by the Ottoman Empire between the 15th and 18th centuries. And the Temettuat are real estate and tax censuses conducted in the wake of the original Nüfus, primarily to adjust taxation. In this lecture, Associate Director of the Sephardic Research Division, Michael Waas, will introduce these registers, heretofore little utilized by genealogists for genealogy research, and will reveal, with a series of examples from these registers, what might be possible to learn from them, including the heights, whether your ancestors had a beard, and if so, what the color of their beard was.