Confessionalization of space in seventeenth-century Istanbul: The making of a Jewish Habitus

Abstract

This thesis examines the interconnections between spatial practices and confessional politics in early modern Istanbul through a focus on non-Muslim communities. Addressing the correspondences amid the primary sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this study aims to comprehend the changes and continuities manifested in the religio-political discourse of the Ottoman ruling establishment with references to spatiality. The central objective of this study is thus to explore the introduction of new socio-religious conceptualizations and spatial regulations imposed on confessional communities. During the seventeenth century, the state’s burgeoning propensities to monitor society and to reinforce socio-religious orthopraxy vis-à-vis the other associated non-Muslims with notions of dirtiness, impurity and danger. Accordingly, Muslim commoners expressed their religious zeal by participating in this process as the agents of confessionalization. This overlap not only can uncover the growing rancor articulated against non-Muslims but it can also shed light on the state’s ventures that intermittently expelled the Jewish congregations from Eminönü to Hasköy. However, this thesis suggests that by exploring the formation of social space in Hasköy through the intermediation of the residents’ agency, the district can be revisited as a Jewish habitus in which social, religious and gender boundaries were frequently infringed. In the midst of new spatio-temporalities, these violations resulted in the emergence of socio-cultural structures rather different from those envisioned by the state, which can enable one to question the limits in the execution of confessional politics at that time.