Dr. Neta Talmud

I am a historian of the late Ottoman Empire. I completed my PhD in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University in 2026. My dissertation examined the social and cultural history of cholera in the late Ottoman Empire, focusing on Baghdad, Trabzon, and the imagined community of Arabic readers in the Ottoman Arab provinces. It explored how epidemics shaped social, political, and emotional life, tracing the redefinition of imperial authority, and communal identities. Centering the experiences of provincial actors, it examined changing relations between center and periphery, religion and science, and fear and rational self-discipline.

My current research examines nineteenth-century Jerusalem as a city of immigrants, focusing on the migration networks that connected it to the wider Ottoman Empire. It explores how Muslim, Jewish, and Christian immigrants from cities such as Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, Cairo, and Baghdad helped shape Jerusalem’s neighborhoods, institutions, and emerging middle classes. Situating these movements within Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Indian Ocean networks of migration, trade, and knowledge, the project investigates how religious ties, economic opportunities, and prospects for social and institutional integration shaped the city.

More broadly, my work explores how local societies in the Ottoman Arab provinces engaged with, negotiated, and reimagined imperial reforms and global processes of the nineteenth century. My research interests include the social and cultural history of public health, urban life, migration, and emotions, with particular attention to the everyday experiences through which people navigated institutional change and forged communal ties and forms of belonging.

Publications:

"By the rivers of Babylon: the 1889-cholera outbreak in Iraq, production of medical knowledge, and construction of scientific periphery." Dynamis 45.1 (2025): 27-51.

“Ha-kehilah ha-mughrabit bi-Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-17” [The Maghrebi Community in Jerusalem in the Seventeenth Century]. In Sefer Yerushalayim ba-tekufah ha-‘otmanit, 1517–1830 [The Book of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Period, 1517–1830], edited by Yaron Ben-Naeh and Dotan Arad, 75–89. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2026.

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