About Bseiso Land Deeds
This collection consists of digital files that comprise digitized versions of the original documents (PDF, JPG, and TIFF formats) and supporting additional description (Word and PDF formats).
Mr. Mahrous Mustafa Bseiso (1884-1968) hails from the renowned Bseiso family which is a branch of the Kayali family, whose well-documented lineage goes back to the noble Hashemite ancestry. For over a millennium, the Kayali family produced countless scholars, scientists, artists, poets, and business people in the larger Levant and Palestine, one of whom was Mr. Mahrous Mustafa Bseiso, an entrepreneur and philanthropist. Mr. Mahrous's great grandfather Alhaj Ahmed Bseiso Al Kayali was the first to have the Bseiso last name (in the late 1700s), whose care and kindness extended not only to the people of Palestine, but also to stray cats he sheltered in his mills. Alhaj Ahmed Bseiso Al Kayali was colloquially designated as the "carer of cats", or "Abu Besseh/Bseiseh" ("cat" in Arabic), a designation which was adopted by his descendants as the particular family branch name: "Bseiso".
The archive documents purchase agreements, land deeds, and the existence and usage of water reservoirs in Palestine throughout the early to mid-1900s. It details some of Mr. Bseiso's work as a leading businessman who consolidated large swaths of land in Biʾr al-Sabʿ/Beersheeba, Palestine in the 1930s in and around the city center (what is now the city's suburbs). The archive contains many documents detailing land-purchase deeds from neighbors, business owners, and family members, revealing a large quantity of land ownership (acreage or dunams in Arabic) directly under Mahrous Bseiso, and documenting the rentals and usages of water reservoirs owned by Mr. Bseiso (many of the reservoirs have been documented to go back to the Byzantine era) by neighboring farmers who needed water to grow their crops. Mr. Bseiso introduced cutting-edge irrigation machinery into Beersheba, purchased farming equipment from the Jaffa Iron Works company for land cultivation, which allowed him to transform the dry land into prosperous gardens and farms.
The archive is also a testimony to the long standing family and business relations between the Bseiso family, and the various Arab families in Palestine, and to existing legal infrastructures which regulated daily life in Palestine. The purchase agreements were witnessed, signed, and sealed with Palestinian stamps and notarized marks for authenticity purposes. In addition, the documents and land deeds are often signed by a selection of historically relevant people from the Beersheba area, including prominent Sheikhs of large tribes of the Negev desert and various other businesspeople of the Beersheba region, hence serving as a testimonial to the long standing history of Arab families in the region, and their relation to and ownership of the land, prior to the Nakba, 1948, when the Bseiso family, like many other Arab families, were forced to leave Palestine, leaving their properties behind.