WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: For the reason described below, I don’t think I’ll be doing this weekly email next week, so let me leave you with a double-dose you can digest in two bites. We have to make the case that the land of Israel, Palestine west of the Jordan, belongs to the Jewish people, not “the West Bank” and “East” [i.e., historic] Jerusalem to “The Palestinians.” The basis of this is that Jewish biblical history happened and that following Judaea’s final destruction by Rome, we weren’t “exiled” but Never Left. This (and next) week’s email connects the Jewish homeland physical presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl.
This and Next Week: We Never Left, We Really Didn’t
There may not be one of these weekly emails next week. We’re threatening to drive down south to visit my fifty-some-years-ago law school roommate in a small town near Orlando. (Among America’s marvels is that the distance from Philly to Florida is sufficient to sustain a half-century friendship between a Quaker and rightwing Zionist Jew.) So let me regale you this week, and next, so you can imbibe it in two installments, with the fallout from a small leadership group meeting in suburban Philadelphia some years ago that had a big impact on me.
That leadership meeting, around the dining room table in someone’s home, was of us mostly vice presidents [for our Christian readers, local chapters of American Zionist organizations have more vice presidents than stockbrokerages, railroads (if there still are any) and banks] of a local chapter of an American Zionist organization. Someone brought along a guest whom he introduced as a businessman with a sideline. He owned a small, sometimes non-profit, book publishing company that specialized in subjects, including “Judaica,” in which the big publishers were not interested. He seemed like a nice guy. I went up to him afterwards and told him there were two “Judaica” books needing writing and publishing: on the Jewish people’s unbroken three-millennia physical presence in Palestine, and on how the media skews the news to skrew the Jews. “You write those books, and I’ll publish them” – Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s Three Thousand Year Presence in Palestine and (with Lee Bender, Esq.) Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z.
My purpose this week, of course, is not to get you to purchase these books (Amazon, PavilionPress.com), but to make the case to you that it’s true, the Jewish people’s homeland-claiming physical presence in Palestine has continued without interruption for over three thousand years. It may be the longest continuous such people-place connection on earth. (An exception may be China, where an 8,000 year-old public building has been recently unearthed with organic remains in situ that have been analyzed as egg fu-yung, a scroll partially deciphered as “… from column A and two from column B,” and no evidence whatever of it being closed on Christmas.)
The significance of our three-millennia uninterrupted homeland-claiming physical presence has to be viewed in the context that we Jews are the only people on earth every moment of whose three millennia existence is incessantly challenged – from “King David is as real as King Arthur,” to “the Holocaust never happened,” to “Israel was created and founded [as though artificially and out-of-the-blue] in 1948.”
If it is true, which it is, that not only did the Jews’ biblical history happen, but that the Yishuv, the homeland Jewish community, never left, then eminent British historian James Parkes was right when he wrote in Whose Land that the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming post-biblical physical presence of the Yishuv, in spite of every discouragement, wrote the twentieth century Zionists’ “real title deeds.” We must press that point home, along with the historical fact that today’s State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been one invading foreign empire after another.
So, in due course, I emailed to my publisher the draft of Israel 3000 Years, in which I set the opening scene in the year 70 CE, in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. He fired back: “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” I answered: “If we can’t connect the dots between Hadrian and Herzl, then, for our purposes, King David and all that stuff doesn’t matter.” It does matter, of course, in unassailably anchoring our Jewish homeland connection to the land of Israel back in ancient times, as well as being the Judao-Christian foundation of western civilization, not to mention its centuries-later relation to Islam. So chapter 1 became chapter 4, and some week when we have time, I burst with enthusiasm to recap for you chapters 1, 2 and 3, including not least what I learned from discussions with the Jerusalem rabbi directly involved in major recent discoveries bearing on the time of King David.
But this week, and this week for next (take a deserved break partway through), let me try to connect for you those necessary physical presence dots between Hadrian and Herzl.
Roman-Byzantine Empire Foreign Rule
Jimmy Carter wrongly wrote in his charmingly-titled book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid that on defeating the Bar Kochba Revolt in 135 (btw, a war sufficiently costly to the Roman empire that Hadrian omitted from his dispatches to the Senate the customary “I and the Army are well”), the Romans renamed Judaea as Syria-Palaestina, “killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile.” We have multiple lines of evidence that this was not so.
One evidence line is the continual unearthing in the land of Israel remains of synagogues and other evidences of Jewish life throughout the post-revolt period of Roman-Byzantine rule, 135 – 638. “The Jews were able to maintain their status in the country, and shared in the material prosperity of the Byzantine period. The numerous synagogues of the fourth to seventh centuries attest to this.” See Avi-Yonah, The Holy Land: Architecture, Scupture, Painting, pp. 137-142.
Another evidence line is the extensive body of homeland Jewish writings of that era, a substantial sampling of which has survived, by the Tannaim and then Amoraim, including the Mishnah and Palestinian (Jerusalem) Talmud.
Another line, delved into in depth by scholar Gedaliah Alon in The Jews In Their Land in The Talmudic Age, is the correspondence between authorities in the land and in the diaspora, especially Babylon, recognizing the preeminence of the homeland authorities, and not just in setting the calendar.
Another evidence line is that the Romans themselves formally recognized the Patriarch as head of the homeland’s Jews until dismissing the office in the fifth century, reputedly for that office’s then holder violating a “no new synagogues” ban. The Sanhedrin, legislative-judicial council of sages, continued. A fourth century Roman emperor made an abortive attempt to rebuild the Temple.
A final evidence line: When the Persians invaded Palestine in 614, twenty to twenty-six thousand homeland Jews fought alongside them, in their own self-mustered battalions, against the Romans’ hated Byzantine heirs. The professor authors of the Ben-Gurion-edited The Jews In Their Land (p. 198) wrote that “the mass participation of Jews in the war indicates that the Yishuv was large at the time”; historian DeHaas wrote in History of Palestine: The Last 2000 Years (p. 115) that the Jews believed they were “still fighting for independence”; and Alon wrote (p. 16) that their “considerable” military and other help to the Persians evidenced “Palestinian Jewry’s awareness of itself as a political force, capable of taking action.”
“… killing or forcing almost all Jews of Judaea into exile” back in the year 135? We don’t think so.
(Alas, as Prof. Dinur concisely put it in the above-cited Ben-Gurion-edited The Jews In Their Land (p. 198), “Persia’s pact with the Yishuv was short-lived.” The Byzantines again took over and went on a Jew-slaughtering rampage of which the later Crusaders would have been proud, seriously diminishing Palestine Jewry for several centuries. See DeHaas, pp. 119-20.)
[Partly interrupted] Ommayad, Abbasid, Fatimid Dynasty Foreign Rule
Roman-Byzantine Palestine rule was succeeded by a succession of foreign Muslim dynasties’ rule, commencing with an Omar-led invasion, which the homeland Jews aided. “Settlement in Jerusalem resumed and the Jews were appointed guardians of the Temple Mount in return for their aid to the conquering army.” Bahat, The Forgotten Generations (p. 23).
We know a fair amount about Jewish life in the homeland during this Muslim dynasty period, 638 – 1099, interrupted-on-occasion by Tulunides and Ikhshids (really), and finally by Seljuk Turks. Archeologist Bahat in The Forgotten Generations includes a map he drew showing a hundred ninth century homeland Jewish communities that we know about today, a millennium later, in this place the size of New Jersey. A gaon declared Palestine’s Jews still the valid owners of Palestine’s land. A Tiberias rabbi wrote a Hebrew grammar. The Jerusalem Yeshiva Gaon had “jurisdiction” over all Jews in the western diaspora (and set the dates of the festivals), as his Babylonian counterpart had over the eastern. Palestine Jews aided the Fatimid conquest and were given control of the fortress at Haifa, an important Jewish town and seat of the Sanhedrin.
But Fatimid rule was yet another time of foreign empire slaughter of homeland Jews. A visiting Jewish scholar recorded that “troops played a major part in the pogroms.” He wrote of “pregnant women disemboweled and the blood of old men and babies freely spilt, synagogues destroyed by ravening beasts, victims of the sword in Zion left without burial.” (Ben-Gurion ed., The Jews In Their Land, p. 210.) An event in 1010 that haunts me as relevant still is that the Fatimids destroyed the Church of The Holy Sepulchre, and the story spread in the West that they did this at the instigation of the Jews, and “widespread massacres and forced baptism were the result.” (Parkes, Whose Land, p. 77).
European Christian Crusader Foreign Rule
Contemporary Crusader account of Jerusalem: “And here, in front of us, were the foreigners, Jew, Turk, and Arab, fighting for their lives with sling-stones, with catapults, with fire and venom … 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.” (Ben-Gurion-ed,, p. 214).
Albert of Aachen: “Haifa … which the Jews defended with great courage, to the shame and embarrassment of the Christians.” 1719 French priest-historian on Jews’ defense of Haifa: “Although the Jews fought with courage [alone, for a month], they were overcome by the might of the invaders.” (Bahat, pp. 36-37). “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.” (Ben-Gurion-ed., p. 215)
Accounts of gruesome Crusader slaughter of Holy Land Jews are legion. They curdle the blood to this day. When historian Parkes wrote of the tenacity of Jews staying in the land through the foreign rule centuries “in spite of every discouragement,” he did not engage in hyperbole. The celebrated Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudula visited the Holy Land in Crusader times, counting the number of Jews. The marvel is not that he did not count very many, but that he counted any.
Legislation during Crusader rule routinely referenced Jews among other indigenous groups. Dyeing, a considerable industry, was generally granted to Jews. We know of Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Galilee, Tiberias, Safed, Acre and Caesarea. Jewish immigration, Miamonides among it, defiantly continued despite Crusaders’ ban. The diaries of Christian pilgrims (e.g., Saewulf in 1102) attested to the land’s continuing links, a millennium after Judaea’s destruction, to the Jews: “the citadel of King David … the Gate of David … the place where Solomon built the Temple … the region called Judea [between the Jordan and Sea].”
Mamluk Empire Foreign Rule
Parkes, p. 80: “… the reversion of the country to Islam, when it came, was not to come from Arab sources, but from a fresh wave of Turkish invaders represented by Saladin the Kurd.” The key battle was Horns of Hattin in 1187, and the Turks capture of Jerusalem and most of the land, but the Crusaders did not give up the ghost of their kingdom until 1291.
Turk-Circassian Mamluks defeated the Mongols in the waves of slaughter-strewn invasions in the Crusaders’ wake, and ruled Palestine and surrounding areas with less than enlightenment for over two hundred years.
Katz, Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, p. 91: “Yet the dust of the Mongol hordes, defeated by the Mamluks, had hardly settled when the Jerusalem community, which had been all but exterminated, was reestablished. This was the work of the famous scholar Moses ben Nachman (Nachmonides, the RaMbaN). From the day in 1267 when RaMbaN settled in the city, there was a coherent Jewish community in the Old City of Jerusalem until it was driven out, temporarily as it proved, by the British-led Arab Legion from Transjordan seven hundred years later.”
Jewish immigration continued despite papal and Spanish royal ban on “transport of Jews to the East.” A fourteenth century Jewish geographer noted Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Gaza, Ramleh, Lod, Bet She’an, Safed and Gush Halav. Bahat (p. 45) adds: “There is no doubt that there were many more.” Many Jews came to Palestine from Europe after the Inquisition of 1492.
We know much detail of Jerusalem Jewish life during Mamluk rule times. I have a fifteenth century timeline in my book, culminating in 1497 and 1499 writings of Christian travelers: “… in Jerusalem dwell many Jews … very many Jews in Jerusalem.” But the Jews’ main Mamluk rule period community until destroyed by the Mamluks in 1291was not Jerusalem, but Acre (Bahat, p. 42). Other historians cite other Mamluk period homeland Jewish communities. “… toward the end of the rule of the Mamluks, at the close of the fifteenth century, Christian and Jewish visitors and pilgrims noted the presence of substantial Jewish communities” (Katz, Battleground, p. 92).
Turkish Empire Rule
During their four hundred year foreign empire rule starting in 1517, the Ottoman Turks managed to make their predecessor Mamluk rule seem enlightened. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Turk cruelty and corruption drove Palestine’s population down to its lowest in all recorded time, perhaps less than 100,000 (Katz, pp. 108-09, citing sources, DeHaas, p. 39n). Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes ….”
And yet, the Turkish Ottoman Empire era Yishuv lived in its four holy homeland cities – Jerusalem, Safed (and Galilee farming villages), Tiberias and Hebron –, each with its own ups and downs, but each, and elsewhere, exemplifying the tenacity of Jewish homeland attachment to the land. Of particular significance is that the Yishuv reattained a Jewish majority in Jerusalem during 1800’s Ottoman rule, before the main waves of Zionist immigration came. These Jerusalem Jews were not ghostly mourners of an ancient destruction, but, as noted in a survey by the Briton Charles Warren, were productive people – shopkeepers, shoemakers, bakers, professional letter writers, carpenters, porters, stonecutters and artisans of various kinds (see Tal, Whose Jerusalem, pp. 232-33).
And it was before these main Zionist immigration waves that the Yishuv reawakened from initiative-smothering Ottoman night into the sunlight of modern times. In 1855 Moses Montefiore and Judah Touro enabled Jewish-led breakout from the Old City’s confining, if protective, boundary walls with the founding of the community of Mishkenot Shananim, followed Oriental Jews’ Mahane Israel, and then Nahlat Shiva and Me’a She’arim, and in 1894 Yemin Moshe (Tal, pp. 162-63, Bahat, p. 60). 1870 saw the establishment of Palestine’s first modern agricultural school at Mikveh Israel, near Jaffa (Katz. P. 101) and the village of Motza, near Jerusalem (Bahat, p. 64), and 1878 the land’s first modern agricultural settlement, Petah Tikva (Vilnay, The Guide To Israel, 16th ed., pp. 243-44). It was to this already reviving Yishuv that the Zionists came.
British Foreign Rule
The before-during-and-after-the-Holocaust blockade of Palestine to the Jews by post-Ottoman Empire Palestine Mandate Trustee Britain was the final chapter in causing the 1948 population of western Palestine, the land of Israel, having more Arabs than Jews (c. a million vs 600,000). The British, charged with facilitating “close settlement of Jews on the land,” also drastically restricted Jewish acquisition of land. Both the Haganah and Irgun tenaciously challenged this latest ban against “transporting of Jews to the East” through sailing rickety Holocaust refugee-laden ships into the teeth of the British blockade.
But add to that the long succession of foreign conquerors’ successive slaughterings of homeland Jews who were already there.
The point we must make to the attention-span-challenged western world, no less simply, loudly and relentlessly than our “Palestinian”-championing adversaries chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” is that
*** Jewish biblical history happened;
*** the Romans did not exile the Jews – We Never Left, but tenaciously stayed all through the ensuing exclusively foreign rule centuries with their slaughterings of homeland Jews;
*** modern Israel is the land of Israel’s Next Native State after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea;
*** the Palestine Mandate’s two states for two peoples are Israel, the Jews’ historic homeland, (22%) and Arab Jordan (78%); and
*** the land of Israel’s historic, natural and legal border is the Jordan River, encompassing Judea, Samaria and historic Jerusalem, not the 1967 war-obliterated Israel-Jordan military ceasefire line of 1949.