Palestinian Spousal Age Differences around 1900 in a Comparative Perspective

Niziplioglu Niziplioglu , Department of Philology, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Ruhr University Bochum
Johann Büssow, Institut für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft Fakultät für Philologie, RUHR-UNIVERSITÄT BOCHUM
Joerg Baten
Sarah Büssow, Institut für Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, Fakultät für Philologie, RUHR-UNIVERSITÄT BOCHUM
Mikolaj Szoltysek, The Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw

We present the first large-scale dataset on spousal age gaps in late Ottoman Palestine (1880–1910), built from several thousand linked marriage records reconstructed from late Ottoman Nüfus (population) registers. These materials enable systematic measurement of gendered age asymmetry at the moment of union formation. To contextualize the Palestinian evidence, we employ a broad comparative framework integrating post-1850 spousal age-gap data from historical Europe, as well as two historical MENA cases available —Egypt and Istanbul—using harmonized datasets from the Mosaic project and IPUMS International. The mean spousal age gap in Palestine—6.6 years—places the region between the more egalitarian marriage regimes of Northwestern and Eastern Europe and the markedly age-asymmetric systems of Egypt, Istanbul, and Albania. Comparative distributional analyses and individual-level statistical tests consistently show that Palestinian couples had significantly narrower age gaps than their Egyptian and Turkish counterparts, yet still wider than those typical of European populations. Internal variation within Palestine underscores the heterogeneity of gendered power relations. Couples with herding or nomadic backgrounds exhibited notably smaller age gaps, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants displayed similarly egalitarian patterns. By contrast, Muslim and Greek Orthodox couples had the largest gaps, whereas Protestant and Catholic communities showed the smallest disparities. Unexpectedly, residents of small and medium-sized towns did not have lower age gaps than villagers, indicating that urbanization in the Middle East did not uniformly reduce gender inequality. The findings position historical Palestine as a revealing case for understanding gradations of gender inequality across Mediterranean and MENA societies. Its hybrid marriage regime—neither aligned with the Northwest European pattern nor with the more patriarchal systems of the MENA interior—highlights the role of local ecologies, kinship structures, and religious diversity in shaping marital norms. More broadly, the study shows that gender inequality within Muslim societies around 1900 varied systematically across social, economic, and cultural contexts.

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 Presented in Session 46. Patriarchal Regimes in Comparative Perspective: Variation, Measurement, and Historical Change