Ottoman Empire
Palestine/Israel
Political Economy
Credit and Debt
Jews in the Middle East

Email: aviv.derri@mail.huji.ac.il
Personal website: Aviv Derri

Current Projects: 

I specialize in the history of the Ottoman Empire and in the comparative study of empires. I am interested in the social, political, and cultural history of capitalism in the Middle East, and the Global South, more broadly. My research examines the financial markets and provincial public debt in nineteenth century Ottoman Damascus, foregrounding the role of sarrafs, tax-farmers, merchant families, and Jewish financiers of the hajj, which most scholarship has relegated to the realm of the “pre-modern”. 

My work explores local and inter-imperial conflicts and anxieties about political belonging, nationality and sovereignty, risk and uncertainty, and the boundaries of financial activity - reflected, most notably, in the distinction between interest and usury - in a period of European financial expansion and large-scale development projects at home. 

Publications: 

Peer reviewed publications:

• 2021 The Construction of ‘Native’ Jews in late Mandate Palestine: An Ongoing Nahḍa as a Political Project,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no. 2 (2021): 253-271

• 2021 Imperial Creditors, ‘Doubtful’ Nationalities, and Financial Obligations in Late Ottoman Syria: Rethinking Ottoman Subjecthood and Consular Protection,” The International History Review 43, no. 5 (2021): 1060-1079

• 2020    “Bankers into Bureaucrats: Ottoman Non-Muslim Elites in Syria/Palestine after the Imperial Bankruptcy in 1875” (in Hebrew) Jamaa: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (2020): 91-110