WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: In pre-State days, Dr. Weizmann rightly told the British that Jews were living in Jerusalem when London was a marsh. Today, given the world’s obsessive attacks on our claim to our Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and even to the very heart of Jerusalem itself, we must stress something further – Not only was the land of Israel our people’s ancient homeland, We Never Left.
Historian Parkes: Homeland Jews’ Continuous Presence All Through the Centuries, In Spite of Every Discouragement, Wrote Today’s Israelis’ “Real Title Deeds”
For a few years some years ago, I had the privilege to be a vice-president of the Greater Philly chapter of the venerable Zionist Organization of America (“ZOA”). Don’t be impressed; chapter-based US Jewish organizations have more vice-presidents than railroads and banks. But for me it was, nevertheless, a privileged experience. For a while, Lori was chapter president, and, talk about Golda’s kitchen, we officers and committee chairmen sat monthly around Lori’s more than ample dining room table, greedily consuming her freshly-baked brownies [subtlety wasn’t Lori’s shtick – You want something chocolate? Here’s chocolate] and joining in exceedingly lively discussion [I labeled my annual dues check “Season Ticket”] of grave issues confronting Israel and Jews.
One time, Guzzardi brought to the meeting a Philadelphia businessman, Steve, who told us of a sideline of his, a modest non-vanity publishing company that published books on subjects, including ‘Judaica,” in which the big publishing houses weren’t interested. I went up to him afterwards and told him there were two such “Judaica” books screaming outloud to be published – on the continuous post-biblical presence of the Jewish people 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.
I set the opening scene of Israel 3000 Years, my Jews-in-Palestine book (Amazon and Abe), in 70 CE, in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins, and sent it off, together with my recounting of our people’s ensuing twenty centuries’ homeland hijinks, to my esteemed non-vanity publisher. Steve fired back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” I fired back, citing our thesis – “We Never Left” – that “If we can’t connect the Jewish presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then ‘King David and all of that stuff’ doesn’t matter.” King David et seq. does matter, fundamentally deeply, of course, and chapter 1 became chapter 4 [after all, Steve was paying to put out the book], but since at least a slim majority of Milky Way Galaxy residents accept that Jewish [and ergo Christian] biblical history happened, let’s deal here, ok on horseback, in this week’s #1146 with the rather less-known, but no less significant, Jews’ post-biblical homeland presence. It happened, and it wrote today’s Israelis’ real title deeds.
The following horseback ride comes from my research in writing my book. But it was precipitated by this week’s Victor Sharpe INN article, Facts Most Arabs and a Hostile World Would Rather Not Admit, in which he wrote that
“most people, because they have been exposed for so long to anti-Israel Arab propaganda, believe that there has not been a continuous Jewish presence in the Land during the last 2,000 years. They are thus unaware that the territory was never Judenrein (that is empty of a Jewish presence).”
“Not empty of a Jewish presence.” Ok, but let’s set ourselves a higher bar – that during those long dark foreign rule centuries between 135 and 1948, we Jews weren’t there just as stray individuals but as the self-aware, organized, openly Jewish, homeland-claiming Yishuv. And understand this as we mount up: without exception, every ruler of that land between 135 and 1948 was a foreign empire invader. Palestinian Arabs have never ruled Palestine ever, and foreign Arab dynasties only between 638 and 1099. Today’s Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.
Roman-Byzantine Rule
Jimmy Carter was flat wrong in the Historical Chronology in the front of his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid: “135 – Romans suppress a Jewish revolt, killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile. The Romans name the province Syria Palaestina.” But what he voiced there is an almost universal misperception that “the Romans exiled the Jews.” They didn’t.
Historian James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (pp. 44-45):
“The population remained as it had been before the loss of independence, primarily peasants and landowners…. Jewish villages were thickly scattered in the hills and valleys of the region.”
Zev Vilnay in his incomparable The Guide to Israel (passim) cites urban and rural centers of Jewish life, and Roman-Byzantine era synagogue remains throughout the land. The Romans themselves recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland Jews until the fifth century. Scholars in the periods known as those of the Tannaim and Amoraim compiled the Mishnah and then Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud.
When the Persians invaded in 614, they were joined by twenty-thousand or more homeland Jews fighting in their own self-mustered battalions against the hated Romans’ Byzantine heirs. Scholar Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (p. 16) wrote that their participation showed “Palestinian Jewry’s awareness of itself as a political force, capable of taking action.” Prof. Dinur, writing in the Ben-Gurion edited The Jews in Their Land (p. 198): “The mass participation of Jews in the war indicates that the Yishuv was large at the time, though it is impossible to gauge what percentage of the overall population was Jewish.” We hadn’t left, and as Jacob DeHaas wrote in History of Palestine: The Last 2,000 Years (p. 115), were “still fighting for independence.”
Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid Muslim Dynasties’ Rule
A tremendous number of homeland Jews had been killed in the Great and Bar-Kochba revolts against Rome. And now, as Prof. Dinur put it succinctly in The Jews in Their Land (pp. 198-99), “Persia’s pact with the Yishuv was short-lived.” The Byzantines regained control and went on a Jew-massacring rampage, seriously diminishing Palestine Jewry for several centuries (DeHaas, supra, pp. 119-20). But soon, in 638, Omar and the Arabs arrived, and the Jews aided them, receiving rewards. Bahat, Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations (p. 26): “Settlement in Jerusalem resumed and the Jews were appointed guardians of the Temple Mount in return for their aid to the conquering army.”
Legends abound surrounding consequential meetings of historical figures. One with many versions is of Omar asking Jerusalem’s Christian patriarch Sophronius to take him to the site of Solomon’s Temple. But beneath these legends, as Colin Thubron wrote in Jerusalem (p. 189), “underneath, like ruins gilded over by the earth, the truths are there in harder shapes.” It is not by random selection of site that the Arabs’ al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of Rock stand on the Jews’ Temple Mount.
Homeland Jews were still there during the ensuing foreign Muslim dynasties’ rule. Archeologist Bahat includes in The Forgotten Generations (pp. 30-31) a map of a hundred homeland Jewish communities we know of today, a millennium later. This is in a place the size of New Jersey.
Crusader Rule
Prof. Dinur in the Ben-Gurion edited The Jews In Their Land (p. 214):
“A contemporary Crusader account of the conquest of Jerusalem acknowledges the valor of the Jewish fighters: ‘And here, in front of us, were the foreigners, Jew, Turk and Arab, fighting for their lives with slingstones, with catapults, with fire and venom …. and when the end came upon the foreigners, they withdrew from one battlefront, only to find a second battlefront facing them. And though there was terror on all sides, none put down his sword; the Turk, the Arab, and the Jew were among the fallen. The Jew is the last to fall.’”
Samuel Katz in his classic work Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine (p. 90): “The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month.” Albert of Aachen, quoted by Bahat, supra, p. 37: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.”
Prof. Dinur, supra, p. 215: “Apart from a few places in the south, we have no information about Jewish participation in the defense of other Palestinian towns; but there is no reason to suppose that Jerusalem and Haifa were exceptional places.”
The famous Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela counted the Jews in Palestine during late Crusader times. The fact is he did not count too many. Joan Peters in From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine (p. 152), cited the Crusades authority Runciman that the Crusaders’ horrific massacres had once again greatly reduced Palestine’s Jewish population. But the wonder is not that Benjamin did not count more Jews; the wonder is that he was able to count any at all.
Mamluk Rule
Following Asian and even Mongol invasions in the void following Saladin’s 1187 defeat of the Crusaders, yet further reducing the land’s population, Turk-Circassian Mamluks took over and ruled for two centuries. Katz, supra, pp. 98-99, writes of Jewish immigration from Spain, despite royal prohibition of “transport of Jews to the East,” and from elsewhere in Europe despite Italian maritime states’ denial of ships to Jews for getting to Palestine, and the Pope blocking Jewish immigrants to the Holy Land. I constructed in my book (pp, 115-17) from multiple sources a timeline of Jewish life in Jerusalem, including a 1491 Christian pilgrim’s observation of “not many Christians, but many Jews” in Jerusalem, who claim the Holy Land and “refuse to leave.” And the authors referenced herein cite Jews in Acre, Haifa, Caesarea, Shechem, Hebron, Gaza, Galilee and elsewhere.
Turk Rule
Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamluks in 1517 and misruled for exactly 400 years in a lawless corrupt manner making that of the Mamluks seem enlightened. They drove the land’s population down to its lowest in all recorded time, famously chronicled by Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad and by others. My own contribution: Sauron did not make much worse of a mess of Mordor. Jews lived much of the time in their four holy cities – Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron, in Galilee farming villages and elsewhere in the land. They became Jerusalem’s majority population, never relinquished thereafter, during pre-Zionist Turkish rule nineteenth century times.
British Rule
Britain was awarded the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate with its “historic connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “Jewish national home” in the 22% west of the Jordan River (the other 78% becoming all-Arab Transjordan, with its majority population today of Palestinian Arabs). The Mandate trusteeship-defying British White Paper of 1939 foreclosed Jewish immigration before, during and after the Holocaust and barred Jewish purchase of Palestine land. Yet in 1948 western Palestine’s population was 650,000 Jews and about a million Arabs, and even the UN General Assembly’s partition resolution referred to the land’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”
Summing Up
This is the quote of British theologian and historian Parkes (Whose Land, A History of the Peoples of Palestine, p. 266) that I put in the front of my book, which I believed then and now most effectively states the Jewish homeland case we must make:
“It was, perhaps, inevitable that Zionists should look back to the heroic period of the Maccabees and Bar Cochba, but their real title deeds were written by the less dramatic but equally heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.”