WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: If you could get we Jews ourselves, then publics in the West, and ultimately Arabs to accept one truth about our Jewish people, what fact would you pick? I’d pick that our Jewish people has continuously resided in homeland-claiming presence in our land of Israel for three thousand years.
Yes, It’s True – We Never Physically Abandoned Our Homeland Presence and Claim
Years ago, a guest businessman in Philadelphia addressed a small meeting of Philly ZOA officers, of which I had the privilege to be one, sitting around the huge dining room table in Lori’s home. He said that among his activities he owned a small publishing house which published books on aspects of subjects in which the big publishers weren’t interested, including among such subjects “Judaica.” I went up to him afterwards and said two such Judaica books were crying out to be published – on the Jewish people’s continuous three-millennia presence in Palestine, and on how the media skews the news so it skrews the Jews. He said you write those books and I’ll publish them. We did.
Incensed as I was by the chronology in President Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that the Romans had “exiled” their Revolts’ surviving Jews (and made no mention of them again until 1917), I set my Jews’ continuous homeland presence book’s opening scene in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. My publisher, having read at least my first page, fired back: “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” I fired back that if we couldn’t connect Jewish presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then, for purposes of our claiming uninterrupted homeland Jewish presence for three thousand years, then King David and all of that stuff didn’t matter.
But it does matter, fundamentally deeply, of course. It’s the foundation on which that three millennia continuous homeland presence is built. And so – as I learned and wrote about some astounding archeological discoveries, not least of a ninth century BCE enemy king’s inscription mentioning “the House of David,” demolishing scoffing archeologists’ dismissal of King David as having been “as real as King Arthur” – chapter one of my book became chapter four. But since I don’t doubt that all of you Gentle Readers of these weekly emailed epistles of mine fully believe that ancient Jewish homeland history happened, let’s start with that widespread “Romans exiled the Jews” misbelief.
But let’s not just rest on my layman’s homeland Jewish history book, my six hundred-some footnotes (I was Ivy League Law Review-trained in reliably citing citations) citing archeologists’ and historians’ works notwithstanding. Some internet article I read this week cited a heavily-documented thirty-nine page article, ok Wikipedia, History of the Jews and Judaism in the Land of Israel. And another one, Khaled Abu Toameh’s on Gatestone, Why Palestinians Celebrate the Murder of Jews, points out, citing polls, to U.S. Secretary of State Blinken that Palestinian Arabs don’t want a Palestine “two-state solution” alongside Israel, but Palestine without Israel. We have to make the case, first to ourselves, then to the West, and ultimately to those Arabs whom even we call “The Palestinians,” that the Jewish people not only arose but has always abided in Israel and the Mideast. So here, starting from Judaea’s final destruction by Rome, is a while-you-stand-on-one-leg on our people’s homeland physical presence, leaving aside for this purpose the spiritual and other remarkable things we have done there.
Final Bar Kochba Revolt (132-135 CE): It is true, as Roman historian Dio Cassius recorded, that in the final Bar Kochba revolt the Romans slaughtered “myriads” of Jewish soldiers “in skirmish and in battle,” and that “of those who perished by famine and disease there is no one that can count the number.” (But it was quite a war, not a minor provincial rebellion. Dio Cassius appended: “Many also of the Romans were slain in the war. Wherefore Hadrian, in writing to the Senate, would not use the Emperor’s wonted opening form of words, ‘I and the army are well.’”)
Under Roman-Byzantine Foreign Rule (135-636): The Wiki article states that following the Bar Kochba Revolt, “the main Jewish population center was now the Galilee, and there were also significant Jewish communities in Beit She’an, Caesarea, the Golan Heights, and along the edges of Judea.” It cites Roman recognition of the patriarch as representing the land’s Jews to the Empire, and the works of schools of Jewish sages and scholars, including the Mishnah and Jerusalem Talmud. It mentions a 351-52 CE Jewish revolt, and Emperor Julian’s 361-62 death-aborted permission of the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Wiki: “Jews probably constituted the majority of the population of Palestine until some time after Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century.” Wiki mentions thousands of Jews aiding the 614 Persian invaders. “A general massacre of the Jewish population ensued” when the Byzantines regained control.
Under Foreign Islamic Dynasty Rule (616-1099): Wiki references ups and downs of Jewish communities during successive Muslim dynasties rule. In the beginning they “began to grow and flourish,” but restrictions followed. In my book I cite an archeologist Bahat map showing a hundred ninth century homeland Jewish communities.
Under European Christian Crusader Foreign Rule (1099-1291): Wiki: “According to Gilbert, from 1099 to 1291 the Christian Crusaders ‘mercilessly persecuted and slaughtered the Jews of Palestine.’” Both Wiki and my own book cite authorities on the Jewish role in defending Jerusalem and Haifa against the Crusaders. Wiki: “Under Crusader rule, Jews were not allowed to hold land and involved themselves in commerce in the coastal towns during times of quiescence. Most of them were artisans: glassblowers in Sidon, furriers and dyers in Jerusalem. At this time there were Jewish communities scattered all over the country, including Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza. In line with trail of bloodshed the Crusaders left in Europe on their way to conquer the Holy Land, in Palestine, both Muslims and Jews were indiscriminately massacred or sold into slavery.” Wiki sums up: “The Crusader rule over Palestine had taken its toll on the Jews.”
Under Foreign Mongols and Mamluks (1291-1517): Following Mongol invasions in the Crusaders’ wake, in 1260 control passed to non-Arab Mamluks, ruling from Turkey then Egypt. Wiki: “The era of Mamluk rule saw the Jewish population shrink substantially due to oppression and economic stagnation.” But: “Although the Jewish population declined greatly during Mamluk rule, this period also saw repeated waves of Jewish immigration from Europe, North Africa, and Syria.”
Under Foreign Ottoman Turks (1517-1917): Both Wiki and my book cite authorities tracing Jewish life in the Yishuv’s four holy cities (Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberius and Hebron), in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land. Jews became the majority population of Jerusalem during 1800’s Ottoman rule. Wiki summarizes the Jewish population in 1880, just before the beginnings of Zionist aliyah, but after Roman, Byzantine, Crusader and other foreign invaders’ successive slaughters of Jews in their homeland.
In 1880, the Jewish population of Palestine numbered around 20,000 to 25,000 [Palestine’s mid-nineteenth century population was down to c. 100,000 – Katz in Battleground, pp.108-09, citing Volney and others], of whom two-thirds lived in Jerusalem [footnotes 205, 206]. The Jewish population, known as the Old Yishuv, was divided into two predominant clusters. The oldest group consisted of the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish communities which had been established in the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods and the Arabic-speaking communities who had already been living there since before the coming of Islam and had been culturally and linguistically Arabized. The Sephardic community traced its origins to not only Sephardim who settled in Palestine, but local Arabized Jews who had intermarried into the Sephardic community [footnote 207] and Mizrahi Jews who had migrated from other parts of the Middle East and integrated into the Sephardic community. The second group was the Ashkenazi community, composed of primarily Haredi Jews who had migrated from Europe to settle in Palestine in the 18th and 19th centuries.
And then came Jews fleeing persecution in Europe and dhimmi mistreatment in Arab and other Muslim lands. Israel’s population today is majority Mizrahi, though the Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi streams are blending into “Israeli.”
Of all the people who left Europe for elsewhere during the last few centuries, the ones least constituting “colonizers” in behalf of the places they left were its Jews.
“The Palestinians” have a Palestine homeland in 78% of the Palestine Mandate, judenrein Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan. We have a land of Israel homeland claim in the historic land of Israel, the defensible, Jewishly meaningful 22% of Palestine west of the River. And historian Parkes was right when he asserted in Whose Land (p. 266) that the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming physical presence of the Jewish Yishuv all through the long dark exclusively foreign rule post-biblical centuries, “in spite of every discouragement,” wrote today’s Israelis’ “real title deeds.”