Epilogue

Author(s):  
Yaron Harel

This epilogue studies how the Young Turk Revolution further weakened both Jewish autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and, along with growing secularization, the official recognition and legal authority hitherto accorded to the law of the Torah and to the religious leadership. In the controversies that broke out after the Young Turk Revolution, the call to remove the chief rabbis in a number of Jewish communities drew on revolutionary, reformist, and Enlightenment arguments, including the idea of free expression. Struggles over power in the community began to assume the character of a confrontation between those who were defined as enlightened liberals and their opponents, who were seen as benighted conservatives. Ultimately, the ‘secularization of the rabbinate’ — that is, the involvement of the ḥakham bashi in political matters and his role as a government official fulfilling explicitly administrative functions — led to a ‘cheapening of the rabbinate’. Modernization, and especially the expansion of education, disseminated ideas of secularism and individualism, and facilitated the emergence of new kinds of leader. During the first decade of the twentieth century, patterns of leadership that had been accepted in the Ottoman Empire for generations, including the placing of a religious figure at the head of the community, were increasingly perceived as outdated.

Author(s):  
Yaron Harel

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the rabbinate, particularly the chief rabbis, in the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire. There is a widely held conception that, throughout history, the rabbi was the ultimate Jewish leader and, in the absence of counterbalancing community institutions, had the final word in all matters. For Jews within the Ottoman Empire, the right to appoint their rabbis was part of the autonomy they enjoyed, an aspect of the community's life with which the imperial authorities were not involved. However, the creation in 1835 by the Ottoman authorities of the institution of ḥakham bashi transformed the chief rabbi from the senior religious figure within Jewish society into its senior government official. With this change, the long arm of the government began to reach into Jewish communal affairs, and as a result Jewish autonomy gradually weakened. From this point on, the chief rabbi's relationship with the rulers became the most important aspect of his position. This tendency was strengthened throughout the period of the Ottoman reforms (1839–76), during which security, protection, and equality before the law were promised to members of all religions.


Author(s):  
R.M. Valeev ◽  
O.D. Vasilyuk ◽  
S.A. Kirillina ◽  
A.M. Abidulin

Abstract The study of the Turkic, including Asia Minor sociopolitical, cultural and ethnolinguistic space of Eurasia is a long and significant tradition of practical, academic and university centers in Russia and Europe, including Ukraine. The Turkic, including the Ottoman political and cultural heritage played a particularly important role in the history and culture of the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and modern Turkic states. Famous states and societies of the Turkic world (Turkic Khaganates, Volga Bulgaria, Ulus Juchi, the Ottoman Empire and other states of the Middle Ages and the New Age), geographical and historical-cultural regions of the traditional residence of the Turkic peoples of the Russian and Ottoman empires and Eurasia as a whole became the object and subject of scientific studies of Russian and European orientalists Turkologists and Ottomans of the nineteenth beginning of the twentieth century.Аннотация Исследование тюркского, в том числе малоазиатского социополитического, культурного и этнолингвистического пространства Евразии является давней и значимой традицией практических, академических и университетских центров России и Европы, в том числе Украины. Особо важную роль тюркское, в том числе османское политическое и культурное наследие играло в истории и культуре народов России, Украины и современных тюркских государств. Известные государства и общества тюркского мира (Тюркские каганаты, Волжская Булгария, Улус Джучи, Османская империя и другие государства Средневековья и Нового времени), географические и историко-культурные регионы традиционного проживания тюркских народов Российской и Османской империй и в целом Евразии стали объектом и предметом научных исследований российских и европейских востоковедов тюркологов и османистов ХIХ начала ХХ в.


Author(s):  
Will Smiley

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.


2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 926-946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen MacDonald

AbstractFrom the mid-twentieth century, England's coroners were crucial to the supply of organs to transplant, as much of this material was gleaned from the bodies of people who had been involved in accidents. In such situations the law required that a coroner's consent first be obtained lest removing the organs destroy evidence about the cause of the person's death. Surgeons challenged the legal requirement that they seek consent before taking organs, arguing that doing so hampered their quick access to bodies. Some coroners willingly cooperated with surgeons while others refused to do so, coming into conflict with particular transplanters whom they considered untrustworthy. This article examines how the phenomenon of “spare part” surgery challenged long-held conceptions of the coroner's role.


Author(s):  
James Gordley

‘Classical’ contract law was built on a substantive premise about contract law and two premises about legal method. The substantive premise was voluntaristic: the business of contract law is to enforce the will or choice of the parties. The first methodological premise was positivistic: the law is found, implicitly or explicitly, in the decisions of common law judges. The second methodological premise was conceptualistic: the law should be stated in general formulas which can be tested by their coherence. Finally, ‘classical’ contract law reflected an attitude about how best to steer a course — as every legal system must — between strict rules and equitable considerations. Since the early twentieth century, classical contract law has been breaking down. Allegiance to its premises has weakened as has the preference for rigor. At the same time, scholars have found classical law to be inconsistent even in its own terms. Nevertheless, much of it has remained in place faute de mieux while contemporary jurists have tried to see what is really at stake in particular legal problems. This article describes their work.


Author(s):  
L. C. Green

In HisDe Jure Belli ac Paris, Grotius, quoting Cicero, stated that “there is no Middle between War and Peace,” and this sentiment seems to have received general agreement well into the twentieth century. Thus, inJansonv.Driefontein Consolidated Mines, Lord Macnaghten stated: “I think the learned counsel for the respondent was right in saying that the law recognises a state of peace and a state of war, but that it knows nothing of an intermediate state which is neither one thing nor the other — neither peace nor war.” One might have thought that the English courts would have abandoned this view in the light of their own experience during the Manchukuo incident, for by 1939 inKawasaki Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha of Kobev.Bantham S.S. Co.the Court of Appeal was prepared to concede that “war” might exist for some commercial purposes but not in so far as other legal relationships were concerned.


Author(s):  
Rodney Brazier

This chapter examines the role of the monarchy in the history of the British constitution during the twentieth century, investigating how the constitutional power enjoyed by the sovereign gave way to constitutional influence and describing the changes the Parliament made to the law relevant to the Crown. It suggests that, for most of the twentieth century, sovereigns and their closest advisers recognised the continuing need to adapt the institution of monarchy so as to reflect changes in British society, and this involved further erosions in the sovereign's power.


Author(s):  
David Gutman

This chapter examines the politics of Armenian return migration in both the Ottoman Empire and United States between 1890 and 1908. In the mid-1890s, allegations of Ottoman mistreatment of returning Armenians who had naturalized as US citizens while abroad caused a major diplomatic row between the two states. Over the course of the late-1890s, harnessing the growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, Ottoman diplomatic officials successfully convinced the US government to grant Istanbul wide latitude in handling the return of Armenians who claimed US citizenship. By the start of the twentieth century, the convergence of Ottoman and US policies on Armenian return resulted in returnees losing the protections of citizenship and rendering them vulnerable to imprisonment and deportation from the empire.


Author(s):  
David Feldman

This chapter examines the changes in civil liberties in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It suggests that, for those 100 years, the law and practice of civil liberties have pulled in many directions at the same time. The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy gave Parliament the opportunity either to extend effective protection for rights or to interfere with them more extensively, and some rights, such as those derived from the idea of equality, have been advanced by Parliament.


Author(s):  
Mike McConville ◽  
Luke Marsh

The point at which the liberty of the subject can be subject to interference by force of the law is a critical issue and one reliant on the integrity of judicial oversight. Focusing on the start of the twentieth century, this chapter addresses the discontinuities in the then existing rules relating to the interrogation of suspected persons (embodied by the Judges’ Rules of 1912, whose obscure origins are discussed) and the divergent responses of different police forces to the cautioning and questioning process. From this it explores how the need for closer formal regulation arose and the role of Home Office officials (the very same as those involved in the Adolph Beck case) in drafting the first revision of the Judges’ Rules in 1918 which were to remain in force for almost fifty years. These inapt and inexpertly drafted Rules thereafter laid the foundations for policing regulation in jurisdictions around the world.


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