The Status of Samaritans in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Damascus

Abstract

In this article, we explore the status of Samaritans in early modern Ottoman Damascus through a focus on a particular firman—a sultanic legal decree. The firman orders that Samaritans—a religious group that traces its origins to ancient Israel but differs from Jews in several aspects—are not to be employed as clerks by Ottoman authorities. We argue that the firman indicates Ottoman officials engaged in religious status management despite the lack of legal terminology for minority in the document. The significance of the firman regarding conceptualizing status, we suggest, is that it points to an alternative model of minoritization that is not based in modern European legal approaches to religious minority status and law but which accounts for people’s experiences of minority status before modernity.