In the winter of 1910, the Salonikan Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Tribuna Libera published a plebiscite in which it asked its readers to decide where the future of Ottoman Jewry lay: nationalism, assimilation, or Zionism. The paper's appeal was an effort to settle the battle that had raged in the Judeo-Spanish press of the empire in the preceding eighteen months over the growing clash between Ottomanism and Zionism. According to the paper, the situation was “bordering on fratricide,” threatening to engulf Ottoman Jewry entirely.

The expert is a quintessential figure of modern bureaucratic rule, offering a “protean image of authority and rational knowledge.” Tracing the development of modern rule, Max Weber describes the emergence in European government of a “professional labor force, specialized in expertness through long years of preparatory training…[and] based on the division of labor” as a “gradual development of half a thousand years.” Different fields, Weber suggests, demanded experts at different moments, but in three areas—finance, war, and law—“expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century.” For the British civil service, the triumph of the expert has been located in “the nineteenth-century revolution in government” such that the “modern image of the expert, canonised and criticised, was well established by the 1920s.” With this consolidation of the expert's place in modern rule, it has been generally agreed that, whether for good or for ill, “the expert in the civil service is here to stay.”

Dissent between the clerical establishment and lay followers is not an infrequent phenomenon and has often focused on church appointments, leadership, and political issues. In the Middle East, such tensions are found between churches usually led by European clergy and their predominantly Arab congregations. Here we combine historical and geographical research methods to investigate a neglected source of contention—that of property held by the church. We reconstruct, analyze, and present detailed case studies of long-term disputes over real estate between the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem (its Greek patriarch and clergy), and its lay Arab community, known as Rum Orthodox, Roman Christians, or Greek Orthodox, and which number about 71,000 members.

In the letters he wrote from Aleppo in 1600, the British merchant William Biddulph described the daily life of this dynamic center of the East–West trade, the city where spices and silks from India and Iran were exchanged for English broadcloth and New World silver in one of the world's largest covered bazaars. He also presented Muslim practices and religious beliefs, emphasizing those features that seemed to him most unusual and reprehensible. His contempt fell firmly on a fixture of the early modern Islamic street, the ecstatic, antinomian Muslim saint: They also account fooles, dumbe men, and mad men,…Saints. And whatsoever such mad men say or doe…or strike them, and wound them, yet they take it in good part, and say, that they shall have good lucke after it. And when such mad men die, they Canonize them for Saints, and erect stately Monuments over their graves, as we have here many examples, especially of one (who being mad) went always naked, whose name was Sheh Boubac…they…erected an house over his grave, where…they are Lampes burning night and day, and many idle fellows (whom they call Darvises) there maintained to looke unto his Sepulchre…

Economic historians have recently made great progress in studying the past by applying the tools and concepts of New Institutional Economics. A fundamental element of this achievement has been to go beyond the narrow confines of previous approaches. Whereas the application of narrow neoclassical economic analysis typically lacked an appreciation for the role of history and focused primarily on the efficiency properties of institutions, the new trend has been to integrate economic and historical approaches for richer and more comprehensive explanations of how and why history mattered. Similarly, whereas unsystematic historical approaches lacked sound theoretical bases and proceeded narrowly by focusing on how previous customs and traditions were responsible for the existence of an institution, the new approach has been also to examine the properties of the institution that ensured its survival.

The question behind this article evolved from two separate observations. While the expansion of comparative and cross-regional research has been actively promoted by leading scholars of the Middle East (and was later encouraged by such bodies as the Middle East Studies Association and this journal), so has the incorporation of scholarly insights from area studies been urged by leading political scientists as a prerequisite for revitalizing all of the discipline's subfields and institutionally endorsed by the American Political Science Association. Viewed as interrelated, these observations prompted the question framing this text: if the aims of many Middle East scholars and institutions are compatible with the aims of many political scientists and their association, why have they remained largely parallel, as suggested by scholars within both fields?