© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/18775462-00402002 brill.com/thr Turkish Historical Review 4 (2013) 135–152 Mass petitions as a way to evaluate ‘public opinion’ in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman empire? The case of internal strife among Gaza’s elite Yuval Ben-Bassat Abstract This article evaluates collective petitions (arz-ı mahzars) sent to Istanbul from Gaza at the end of the nineteenth century as a way of assessing the political mood of the elite in Ottoman provincial towns. Gaza was the theatre of considerable tension, cleavages, and rivalry among its elite. One of the key questions in this context is the implications of sending collective petitions from towns such as Gaza to the imperial centre given the political cen- sorship and the absence of free press at a time when there was nonetheless greater com- munication between the centre and the provinces, and an altered relationship between the state and its subjects. Thus more than ever before collective petitions represented local political alignments and what could be very cautiously defined as ‘public opinion’ among the elite in provincial Ottoman towns such as Gaza. Keywords Gaza; petitions; arz-ı mahzars; public opinion; Ottoman empire During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, dozens of collective peti- tions (arz-ı mahzars) were sent from the town of Gaza on Palestine’s south- ern coast to the imperial centre in Istanbul. These collective petitions were signed by any number of petitioners ranging from several and even up to hundreds, usually from the ranks of Gaza’s Muslim elite. Given the size of this town at the time and the illiteracy rates among its inhabitants these are very considerable numbers which include much of this town’s elite. The main bone of contention reflected in these petitions was competition over offices in the local bureaucracy such as the post of the local mufti, Author’s note: I would like to thank Professor Butrus Abu-Manneh and Dr. Johann Büssow for their thoughtful comments. * Department of Middle Eastern History, University of Haifa, yuval@research.haifa.ac.il