Actually, Jews never left the area, although fairly decimated at times:
"The Romans may have laid the entire nation waste between A.D. 70 and 135, slaughtering as many as 600,000 Jews, and carrying off half that number in bondage. Yet even in the wake of this monumental dispersion, a few thousand Jews somehow remained on in the country. Heavily taxed, denied the right to visit their ancient capital, the survivors made thier homes in Galilee, where they farmed their land and plied their trades. In the late Roman era this decimated Jewish community actually managed something of a revival. For three centuries, its towns, villaes, and farms extended as far as the coastal plain, and were reasonably affluent. Its culture showed signs of a certain uneven vitality. During this period, for example, the Palestinian Talmud was compiled. Moreover, the Jewish population sustained its growth well beyond the Arab conquest in the seventh century and even under the Seljuk Turks, untimately reaching 300,000 inhabitants by the year 1000." [IBID]
"This promising interlude ended abruptly, however and quite terribly, with the arrival of the Crusaders. Thereafter, the butchery of Jews was so extensive under Christian rule that in 1169, when Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish jewish traveler, visited the Holy Land, he found only a thousand Jewish families still alive. Yet even then the foothold was tenaciously maintained. Eighteen years later Salah-ed-Din (Saladin), sultan of Egypt, won a crushing victory over the Latin Kingdoms and began the process that ultimately evicted the last of the Crusaders a century later. Subsequently, under a tolerant Moslem regime, pilgrimages of Jews from overseas augmented the tiny Palestinian remnant. The immigrants arrived from North Africa, from Europe, and most particularly from Spain, the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora. Well before the pressures of the Inquisition, in fact, some 5,000 Sephardic Jews (from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Spain) had already established their preeminence among other Jews in the Holy Land, swallowing up the Musta'aribin (Arabized Jews) and imposing their own Ladino dialect as the lingua franca of Palestine Jewry."
"Yet it was most notably the Spanish Inquisition, and finally the Spanish expulsion decree in 1492, that propelled tens of thousands of Sephardim into all corners of the Mediterranean world, and not less than 8,000 of them into Palestine. By fortunate chance, their arrival corresponded with the Ottoman conquest of the Levant (1517), and in its first century the rule of the Turks proved unexpectedly benign. Thus, in ensuing years, only Jews made their way to Palestine from the Mediterranean littoral. Most of them were Cabalists, followers of the Zohar, a volume of Jewish mysticism that prophesied the final redemption of God's Spirit in the outer world. Not surprisingly, the Cabalists had discerned in the Spanish upheaval a timely injunction to return to ancestral soil in expectation of the "End of Days." Large numbers of them settled in the abandoned Crusader city of Safed, pricisely because Safed was located only a half-hour's donkey ride from the tomb of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai, the Zohar's putative author. They were joined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by fitful migrations of Ashkenazim, Jews from central or northern Europe (literally, from Askenaz, the Hebrew word for Germany). Moreover, the largest numbers among the Europeans called themselves Chasidim, "Followers of the (True) Way." Like many of the Sephardic Jews, the Casidim also were devotees of Cabalistic literature and similarly regarded themselves as mystics, although of a more emotional and rapturous variety. Sephardic and Askenazic newcomers alike, then, increased Safed's Jewish population to 16,000 by the opening of the eighteenth century. Many of the pilgrims remained dependent on charity from abroad, but most of them became self-supporting as tinkers, shoemakers, spice merchants, even occasionally as farmers."
As Sachar points out in his narrative, Jews were everywhere terrorized by Arab bandits which roamed uncehcked through the Galitlee and when they were not terrorized they were heavily taxed, making their "odeal essentially as a testament of repentance..." And, "Bedouin robber bands" continued to "terrorize the country's 400,000 inhabitants (by 1840)." He said that the Jews who lived in Palestine "vegetated in unspeakable squalor...." He wrote of Jerusalem: "Hygienic facilities were all but nonexistent. year in and year out, Jerusalem was racked by summer epidemics of typhoid and typhus. Yet those who chose to live there found no alternative to this walled congestion. The city gates were locked at twilight, and the unfortunates who delayed were compelled to spend the night in the open, likely victims of Bedouin robbers. Nor did any of Jerusalem's inhabitants suffer a more painful constriction than the Jews. The Ashkenazim sought a measure of physical protection by erecting their dwellings around courtyards, most of these impacted into a tiny quarter known as the Churva, the "ruin" of Rabbi Judah the Chasid's eighteenth-century settlement. As a rule, the little enclaves were owned and supported by the European Jewish communities of origin."
If not for Zionism, Palestine would still be a neglected and impoverished backwater desert with little if any appeal to the Bedouins or Arabs who migrated there and called themselves Palestinians, after it was restablished as a homeland for the Jews in 1948. |
