Shmuel Katz

The history of the second half of the sixteenth century illustrates the dynamism of the Palestinian Jews
their prosperity, their progressiveness, and their subjugation. In 1577, a Hebrew printing press was established in Safed. The first press in Palestine, it was also
the first in Asia. In 1576, and again in 1577, the
Sultan Murad III, the first anti-Jewish, Ottoman ruler,
ordered the deportation of 1,000 wealthy Jews from
Safed, though they had not broken any laws or transgressed in any way. They were needed by Murad to
strengthen the economy of another of the Sultan’s provinces-Cyprus. It is not known whether they were in
fact, deported or reprieved.

The honeymoon period between the Ottoman Empire and the Jews lasted only as long as the empire
flourished. With the beginning and development of its
long decline in the seventeenth century, oppression
and anarchy made growing inroads into the country,
and Jewish life began to follow a confused pattern of
persecutions, prohibitions, and ephemeral prosperity.
Prosperity grew rarer, persecutions and oppressions be-
came the norm. The Ottomans, to whom Palestine was
merely a source of revenue, began to exploit the Jews
fierce attachment to Palestine. They were consequently
made to pay a heavy price for living there. They were
taxed beyond measure and were subjected to a system
of arbitrary fines. Early in the seventeenth century,
two Christian travelers, Johann van Egmont and John
Hayman, could say of the Jews in Safed: “Life here is
the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine.”

The Turks so oppressed them, they wrote, that “they
pay for the very air they breathe.” 11
Again and again during the three centuries of Turkish
decline, the Jews so lived and bore themselves that even
hostile Christian travelers were moved to express their
astonishment at their pertinacity-despite suffering,
humiliation, and violence-in clinging to their home-
land.

The Jews of Jerusalem, wrote the Jesuit Father
Michael Naud in 1674, were agreed about one thing:
“paying heavily to the Turk for their right to stay here.
. . . They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem to enjoy-
ing the freedom they could acquire elsewhere. . . . The
love of the Jews for the Holy Land, which they lost
through their betrayal [of Christ], is unbelievable.
Many of them come from Europe to find a little com-
fort, though the yoke is heavy.”

And not in Jerusalem alone. Even as anarchy spread
over the land, marauding raids by Bedouins from the
desert increased, and the roads became further infested with bandits, and while the Sultan’s men, when
they appeared at all, came only to collect both the
heavy taxes directed against all and the special taxes
exacted from the Jews, Jewish communities still held on
all over the country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, travelers reported them in Hebron
(where, in addition to the regular exactions, threats of
deportation, arrests, violence, and bloodshed, the Jews
suffered the gruesome tribulations of a blood libel in
1775); Gaza, Ramleh, Sh’chem, Safed (where the com-
munity had lost its preeminence and its prosperity);
Acre, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Irsuf, Caesarea, and El Arish;
and Jews continued to live and till the soil in Galilean
villages.

But as the country itself declined and the bare essentials of life became inaccessible, the Jewish community also contracted. By the end of the eighteenth

century, historians’ estimates put their number at between 10,000 and 15,000. Their national role, how-
ever, was never blurred. When the Jews in Palestine
had no economic basis, the Jews abroad regarded it
as their minimum national duty to insure their physical maintenance, and a steady stream of emissaries
brought back funds from the Diaspora. In the long run,
this had a degrading effect on those Jews who came to
depend on these contributions for all their needs. But
the significance of the motive and spirit of the aid is
not lessened: the Jews in Palestine were regarded as
the guardians of the Jewish heritage. Nor can one
ignore the endurance and pertinacity of the recipients,
in the face of oppression and humiliation and the
threat of physical violence, in their role of “guardians
of the walls.”

However determined the Jews in Palestine might
have been, however deep their attachment to the land,
and however strong their sense of mission in living in
it, the historic circumstances should surely have ground
them out of physical existence long before the onset
of modern times.

Merely to recall the succession of conquerors who
passed through the country and who oppressed or
slaughtered Jews, deliberately or only incidentally to
their struggle for power or survival, raises the question
of how any Jews survived at all, let alone in coherent
communities. Pagan Romans, Byzantine Christians,
the various Moslem imperial dynasties (especially
during the Seljuk Turkish interlude, before the Crusaders), the Crusaders themselves, the Kharezmians
and the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks-all these
passed over the body of the Jewish community. How
then did a Jewish community survive at all? How did it
survive as an arm of the Jewish people, consciously
vigilant for the day of national restoration?
The answer to these questions reflects another aspect of the phenomenal affinity of the Jewish people
to the Land of Israel. In spite of bans and prohibitions, in spite of the most improbable and unpromising
circumstances, there was never a period throughout
the centuries of exile without Jewish immigration to
Palestine. Aliyah (“going up”) was a deliberate expression and demonstration of the national affinity to
the land. A constant inflow gave life and often vigor
to the Palestinian community. By present-day standards, the numbers were not great. By the standards
of those ages, and in the circumstances of the times,
the significance and weight of that stream of aliyah-
almost always an individual undertaking-matches the
achievements of the modem Zionist movement.
Modem Zionism did indeed start the count of the
waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame
and the capacity for organization were new: The living
movement to the land had never ceased.
The surviving records are meager. There was much
movement during the days of the Moslem conquest.
Tenth century appeals for aliyah by the Karaite leaders in Jerusalem have survived. There were periods
when immigration was forbidden absolutely; no Jew
could “legally” or safely enter Palestine while the
Crusaders ruled. Yet precisely in that period, Yehuda
Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of the exile, issued
a call to the Jews to emigrate, and many generations
drew active inspiration from his teaching. (He him-
self died soon after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1141,
crushed, according to legend, by a Crusader’s horse.)
A group of immigrants who came from Provence in
France in the middle of the twelfth century must have
been scholars of great repute, for they are believed to
have been responsible for changing the Eretz Israel
tradition of observing the New Year on only one day;
ever since their time, the observance has lasted two
days. There are slight allusive records of other groups
who came after them. Among the immigrants who began arriving when the Crusaders’ grip on Palestine had
been broken by Saladin was an organized group of
three hundred rabbis who came from France and
England in 1210 to strengthen especially the Jewish
communities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Ramleh. Their
work proved vain. A generation later came the destruction
by the Mongol invaders. Yet no sooner had
they passed than a new immigrant, Moses Nachma-
nides, came to Jerusalem, finding only two Jews, a dyer
and his son; but he and the disciples who answered
his call reestablished the community.
Though Yehuda Halevi and Nachmanides were the
most famous medieval preachers of aliyah, they were
not the only ones. From the twelfth century onward,
the surviving writings of a long series of Jewish travelers described their experiences in Palestine. Some of
them remained to settle; all propagated the national
duty and means of individual redemption of the “going up” to live in the homeland.

The concentrated scientific horror of the Holocaust
in twentieth-century Europe has perhaps weakened
the memory of the experience of the people to whom,
year after year, generation after generation, Europe
was purgatory. Those, after all, were the Middle Ages;
those were the centuries when the Jews of Europe
were subjected to the whole range of persecution,
from mass degradation to death after torture. For a
Jew who could not and would not hide his identity to
make his way from his own familiar city or village to
another, from the country whose language he knew
through countries foreign to him, meant to expose himself almost certainly to suspicion, insult, and humiliation, probably to robbery and violence, possibly to
murder. All travel was hazardous. For a Jew in the
thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth century (and even
later) to set out on the odyssey from Western Europe
to Palestine was a heroic undertaking, which often
ended in disaster. To the vast mass of Jews sunk in
misery, whose joy it was to turn their faces eastward
three times daffy and pray for the return to Zion, that
return in their lifetime was a dream of heaven.

There were periods, moreover, when the Popes ordered their adherents to prevent Jewish travel to Palestine. For most of the fifteenth century, the Italian
maritime states denied Jews the use of ships for getting to Palestine, thus forcing them to abandon their
project or to make the whole journey by a roundabout
land route, adding to the initial complications of their
travel the dangers of movement through Germany,
Poland, and southern Russia, or through the inhos-
pitable Balkans and a Black Sea crossing before reaching the comparative safety of Turkey. In 1433, shortly
after the ban was imposed, there came a vigorous call
by Yitzhak Tsarefati, urging the Jews to come by way
of then tolerant Turkey. Immigration of the bolder
spirits continued. Often the journey took years, while
the immigrant worked at the intermediate stopping
places to raise the expenses for the next leg of his
journey or, as sometimes happened, while he invited
the local rich Jews to finance his journey and to share
vicariously in the mitzvah of his aliyah.
Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker, Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem in 1479, wrote down the
route and stopping places of a Jew newly arrived as
an immigrant from Germany. He had set out from
Nuremberg and traveled to Posen (about 300 miles).

Then
Posen [Poznan] to Lublin 250 miles
Lublin to Lemberg [Lvov] 120 miles
Lemberg to Khotin 150 miles
Khotin to Akerman 150 miles
Akerman, to Samsun 6 days
Samsun to Tokat 6-7 days
Tokat to Aleppo 15 days
Aleppo to Damascus 7 days
Damascus to Jerusalem 6 days

The Ottoman Sultans had encouraged Jewish immigration into their dominions. With their conquest of
Palestine, its gates too were opened. Though conditions in Europe made it possible for only a very few
Jews to “get up and go,” a stream of immigrants
flowed to Palestine at once. Many who came were
refugees from the Inquisition. They comprised a great
variety of occupations; they were scholars and artisans
and merchants. They filled all the existing Jewish centers. That flow of Jews from abroad injected a new
pulse into Jewish life in Palestine in the sixteenth century.
As the Ottoman regime deteriorated, the conditions
of life in Palestine grew harsher, but waves of immigration continued. In the middle of the seventeenth
century, there passed through the Jewish people an
electric current of self-identification and intensified affinity with its homeland. For the first time in Eastern
Europe, which had given shelter to their ancestors
fleeing from persecution in the West, rebelling Cossacks in 1648 and 1649 subjected the Jews to massacre
as fierce as any in Jewish history. Impoverished and
helpless, the survivors fled to the nearest refuge-
now once more in Western Europe. Again the bolder
spirits among them made their way to Palestine.
That same generation was electrified once more by
the advent of Shabbetai Zevi, the self-appointed Messiah whose imposture and whose following among the
Jews in both the East and the West was made possible
only by the unchanged aspirations of the Jews for restoration. The dream of being somehow wafted to the
land of Israel under the banner of the Messiah evaporated, but again there were determined men who
somehow found the means and made their way to
Palestine, by sea or by stages overland through Turkey
and Syria.

The degeneration of the central Ottoman regime,
the anarchy in the local administration, the degradations and exactions, plagues and pestilence, and the
rain of the country, continued in the eighteenth and
well into the nineteenth century. The masses of Jews
in Europe were living in greater poverty than ever.
Yet immigrants, now also in groups, continued to
come. Surviving letters tell about the adventures of
groups who came from Italy, Morocco, and Turkey.
Other letters report on the steady stream of Hasidim,
disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, from Galicia and
Lithuania, proceeding during the whole of the second
half of the eighteenth century.

It is clear that by now the state of the country was
exacting a higher toll in lives than could be replaced
by immigrants. But the immigrants who came shut
their eyes to the physical ruin and squalor, accepted
with love every hardship and tribulation and danger.
Thus, in 18 10, the disciples of the Vilna Goan who had
just emigrated, wrote:

Truly, how marvelous it is to live in the good country. Truly, how wonderful it is to love our country.

Even in her ruin there is none to compare
with her, even in her desolation she is unequaled,
in her silence there is none like her. Good are her
ashes and her stones.

These immigrants of 1810 were yet to suffer unimagined trials. Earthquake, pestilence, and murderous onslaught by marauding brigands were part of the
record of their lives. But they were one of the last
links in the long chain bridging the gap between the
exile of their people and its independence. They or
their children lived to see the beginnings of the modern restoration of the country. Some of them lived to
meet one of the pioneers of restoration, Sir Moses
Monteflore, the Jewish philanthropist from Britain
who, through the greater part of the nineteenth century, conceived and pursued a variety of practical
plans to resettle the Jews in their homeland. With him
began the gray dawn of reconstruction. Some of the
children of those immigrants lived to share in the enterprise and purpose and daring that in 1869 moved a
group of seven Jews in Jerusalem to emerge from the
Old City and set up the first housing project outside
its walls. Each of them built a house among the rocks
and the jackals in the wilderness that ultimately came
to be called Nahlat Shiva (Estate of the Seven). Today it is the heart of downtown Jerusalem, bounded
by the Jaffa Road, between Zion Square and the
Bank of Israel.

In 1878, another group made its way across the
mountains of Judea to set up the first modern Jewish
agricultural settlement at Petah Tikva, which thus be-
came the “mother of the settlements.” Eight years
earlier, the first modern agricultural school in Pales-
tine had been opened at Mikveh Yisrael near Jaffa. As
we see it now-and they in 1810 would not have been

surprised, for this was their faith and this was their
purpose-the long vigil was coming to an end.
But the conception and application of practical modern measures for the Jewish restoration was preceded
by a fascinating interlude: Zionist awakening in the
Christian world.

The affinity of the Jewish people for Palestine, unique
in the historic circumstances, had become an integral
part, inextricably entwined in the texture of Western
culture. It was a commonplace of all education. The
persistence of the Jewish people as an entity, kept alive
for century after century of monstrous persecution by
a faith in ultimate restoration to its Homeland, was
congenial to some Christians, unpalatable to others.

The Christian Churches had their share in perpetuating the forced exile of the Jewish people. To Catholics,
it was a matter of duty as God’s servants to enforce
the Jewish dispersion; they therefore could not even
countenance Jewish restoration to their land. It was
part of his apostasy that in 464 the Emperor Julian
announced his intention of rebuilding the Temple.
With the splits and schisms in the Church, the coming
of the Reformation, and the evolution of the various
Protestant sects, voices were heard proclaiming it as
a Christian act to help the Jewish people regain its
homeland. Palestine, however, was in the hands of the
Ottoman Turks, and there was no means of translating
Christian feeling into action.

In practical Christian minds, this situation began rapidly to change during the early nineteenth century.

The first catalytic agent may have been Napoleon
Bonaparte. On launching his campaign for the con-
quest of Palestine in 1799, he promised to restore the
country to the Jews. Though Napoleon was forced to
withdraw from Palestine, the prospect he opened may
have been instrumental in setting off a chain of developments, primarily in Britain, that grew in intensity
and significance as the nineteenth century wore on.
A distinguished gallery of writers, clerics, journalists,
artists, and statesmen accompanied the awakening of
the idea of Jewish restoration in Palestine. Lord Lind-

say, Lord Shaftesbury (the social reformer who learned Hebrew), Lord Palmerston, Disraeli, Lord Manchester, George Eliot, Holman Hunt, Sir Charles Warren, Hall Caine-all appear among the many who spoke, wrote, organized support, or put forward practical projects by which Britain might help the return of the Jewish people to Palestine. There were some who even urged the British government to by Palestine from the Turks to give it to the Jews to rebuild.

Characteristic of the period were the words of Lord Lindsay: The Jewish race, so wonderfully preserved, may yet have another stage of national existence opened to them, may once more obtain possession of their native land…The soil of “Palestine still enjoys her sabbaths, and only waits for the return of her banished children, and the application of industry, commensurate with her agricultural capabilities, to burst once more into universal luxuriance, and be all that she ever was in the days of Solomon.”

In 1845, Sir George Gawler urged, as the remedy for the desolation of the country: “Replenish the deserted towns and fields of Palestine with the energetic people whose warmest affections are rooted in the soil”

There were times when this concern took on the proportions of a propaganda campaign. In 1839, the Church of Scotland sent two missionaries, Andrew Bonar and Robert Murray M’Cheyne, to report on “the conditions of the Jews in their land.” Their report was widely publicized in Britain, and it was followed by a Memorandum to the Protestant Monarchs of Europe for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. This memorandum, printed verbatim by the London Times, was the prelude to many months of newspaper projection of the theme that Britain should take action to secure Palestine for the Jews. The Times, in that age the voice
of enlightened thought in Britain, urged the Jews simply to take possession of the land. If a Moses became necessary, wrote the paper, one would be found.

Again and again groups and societies were projected or formed to promote the restoration. The proposals and activities of Moses Montefiore found a wide echo throughout Britain. Many Christians associated themselves practically with his plans; others brought forward plans and projects of their own and even took steps to bring them to fruition. What was probably the first forerunner in modern times of the Jewish agricultural revolution in Palestine was the settlement established in 1848 in the Vale of Rephaim by Warder Cresson, the United States Consul in Jerusalem; he was helped by a Jewish-Christian committee formed in Britain for the Jewish settlement of Galilee.

The ideas of Sir George Gawler, a former governor of South Australia, before and after the Crimean War, when he formed the Palestine Colonisation Fund; of Claude Reignier Conder who, with Lieutenant Kitchener, carried out a survey of Palestine and brought to public notice the fact that Palestine could be restored by the Jews to its ancient prosperity; of Laurence Oliphant, the novelist and politician, who worked out a comprehensive plan of restoration and a detailed project for Jewish settlement of Gilead east of the Jordan; of Edward Cazalet, who proposed equally detailed projects-all were broached and propagated against a background of widespread Christian support.

By the middle of the century, the concept of Jewish restoration began to be considered in responsible quarters in Britain as a question of practical international politics. In August 1840, the Times reported that the British government was feeling its way in the direction of Jewish restoration. It added that “a nobleman of the Opposition” (believed to be Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury) was making his own inquiries to determine:

1. What the Jews thought of the proposed restoration.

2. Whether rich Jews would go to Palestine and invest their capital in agriculture.

3. How soon they would be ready to go.

4. Whether they would go at their own expense, requiring nothing more than assurance of safety to life and property.

5. Whether they would consent to live under the
Turkish government, with their rights protected by
the five European powers (Britain, France, Russia,
Prussia, Austro-Hungary).

Lord Shaftesbury pursued the idea with Prime Minister Palmerston and his successors in the government
and was incidentally instrumental in the considerable
assistance and protection against oppression that Britain henceforth extended to the Jews already living in
Palestine.

The Crimean War and its aftermath pushed the ideas
and projects into the background, but they soon came
to life again. In 1878, the Eastern Question reached its
crisis in the Prusso-Turkish War, and the Congress of
Berlin gathered to find a peaceful solution. At once
reports spread throughout Europe that Britain’s representatives, Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli) and
Lord Salisbury, were proposing as part of the peace
plan to declare a protectorate over Syria and Palestine
and that Palestine would be restored to the Jews.

Though these reports were unfounded, the idea
again caught the imagination of political thinkers in
Britain. It was widely supported in the newspapers,
which saw it as both a solution to the Jewish problem
and a means of eliminating one of the perennial causes
of friction between the powers. So popular was the
idea with the British public that the weekly Spectator
on May 10, 1879, in criticizing Beaconsfield for not
having adopted it, wrote: “If he had freed the Holy
Land and restored the Jews, as he might have done
instead of pottering about Roumelia and Afghanistan,
he would have died Dictator.”

No less significant is the fact that the idea of Jewish
restoration, when it was presented in the form of
practical projects, was not rejected by the Moslem authorities. In 1831, Palestine was conquered from the
Turks by Mehemet Ali, who ruled it from Egypt for

the next nine years, introducing a comparatively pleas-
ant interlude in the life of the country. It was at this
time that Sir Moses Montefiore began developing his
practical plans. In 1839, he visited Mehemet Ali in
Egypt and put forward a large-scale scheme for Jewish settlement that would regenerate Palestine. Mehemet Ali accepted it. Montefiore was in the midst of
discussing practical details with him when Mehemet
was forced to withdraw from Palestine, which returned
to Turkish rule.

Forty years later, the Turks themselves were presented with practical plans for Jewish colonization and
autonomy in a part of Palestine. The most important
of these plans was that carefully and conscientiously
worked out by Laurence Oliphant, who demonstrated
to the Turks that it was in their own interest, as well
as in Britain’s, to help fulfill a Jewish restoration in
Palestine. His detailed plan for the settlement of Gilead was supported and recommended to the Turkish
government by the leading personalities in Britain: The
Prime Minister Lord Beaconsfield, the Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury, and even the Prince of Wales
(later King Edward VII). The French government,
through its Foreign Minister Waddington, also added
its encouragement.

The Sultan showed considerable interest in the plan;
the Turkish Foreign Office even proposed some
amendments for further discussion. But again events
intervened. In 1880, a general election drove Beaconsfield-considered by Turkey as her friend-from
office, to be replaced by William Ewart Gladstone.
To the Turks, Gladstone was an enemy. The Oliphant
scheme, based on Turko-British cooperation as well as
a similar scheme proposed by the British industrialist
Edward Cazalet, were shelved and faded into history.
By now the effervescence among the Jewish people
began to find its outlets.

Jewish organizations were now launched. The result
was a wave of immigration, to be known later as the
First Aliyah, which laid the solid foundation of the
new Jewish agriculture. The advent of Theodor Herzl
was only fifteen years away, and with it the beginning
of the modem political frame for the return to Zion:
the World Zionist Organization.

Throughout the ages, and now in the nineteenth
century, when the restoration of the Jewish people to
Palestine and the restoration of Palestine to the Jewish
people was discussed in growing intensity, when scores
of books and pamphlets and innumerable articles pub-
lished in Europe, America, and Britain put forward
both ideological motivation and practical projects
for the consummation of the idea, never once was it
suggested openly or covertly that the Holy Land could
not, or should not, be restored to the Jews because it
had become the property of others. There were many
who disliked the Jews; there were Christians who ob-
jected on theological grounds to the very idea of re-
versing the “edict” of exile. Imagine what would hap-
pen to the Catholic dogma of the inadmissability of
Jewish restoration if a Jewish state were suddenly to
arise! They had enough reason to seek grounds and
means of resistance to the spread of the idea. Yet
nothing led anyone to believe or to suggest that there
was any other nation that had a claim, or had estab-
lished an affinity or connection, or had made such a
contribution in sweat or in blood, to have and to hold
the country for its own.

No such nation existed, nor any such claim. The
claim of historic association, of historic right, of his-
toric ownership by the Arab people or by a “Pales-
tinian entity” is a fiction fabricated in our own day.
After the Jews had been absent as a nation for eigh-
teen centuries, this was a self-evident truth, which is
also part of the historic record.

“No nation has been able to establish itself as a na-
tion in Palestine up to this day,” wrote Sir John William Dawson in 1888, “no national union and no
national spirit has prevailed there. The motley im-
poverished tribes which have occupied it have held it
as mere tenants at will, temporary landowners, evidently
waiting for those entitled to the permanent
possession of the soil.”

There was another fact that gave immediate practi-
cal impact to the logic and justice of Jewish restora-
tion. Palestine was a virtually empty land.
When Jewish independence came to an end in the
year 70, the population numbered, at a conservative
estimate, some five million people. (By Josephus’ fig-
ures, there were nearer seven million.)
Even sixty years after the destruction of the Temple,
at the outbreak of the revolt led by Bar Kochba in
132, when large numbers had fled or been deported,
the Jewish population of the country must have num-
bered at least three million, according to Dio Cassius’
figures. Seventeen centuries later, when the practical
possibility of the return to Zion appeared on the ho-
rizon, Palestine was a denuded, derelict, and depopu-
lated country. The writings of travelers who visited
Palestine in the late eighteenth and throughout the
nineteenth century are filled with descriptions of its
emptiness, its desolation. In 1738, Thomas Shaw wrote
of the absence of people to till Palestine’s fertile soil.

In 1785, Constantine Francois Volney described the
“ruined” and “desolate” country. He had not seen the
worst. Pilgrims and travelers continued to report in
heartrending terms on its condition. Almost sixty years
later, Alexander Keith, recalling Volney’s description,
wrote: “In his day the land had not fully reached its
last degree of desolation and depopulation.”

In 1835, Alphonse de Lamartine could write:
Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no
living object, heard no living sound, we found the
same void, the same silence . . . as we should have
expected before the entombed gates of Pompeii or
Herculaneam. . . a complete eternal silence reigns
in the town, on the highways, in the country … the
tomb of a whole people.

Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, wrote
of what he saw as he traveled the length of the
country:

Desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is
given over wholly to weeds-a silent mournful ex-
panse. . . . A desolation is here that not even
imagination can grace with the pomp of life and
action. We reached Tabor safely. We never saw
a human being on the whole route.

And again:

There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even
the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a
worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.
So overwhelming was his impression of an irre-
versible desolation that he came to the grim conclu-
sion that Palestine would never come to life again. As
he was taking his last view of the country, he wrote:
Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods
the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and
fettered its energies. Palestine is desolate and un-
lovely. . . . Palestine is no more of this workday
world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dream-
land.

By Volney’s estimates in 1785, there were no more
than 200,000 people in the country.20 In the middle
of the nineteenth century, the estimated population for
the whole of Palestine was between 50,000 and
100,000 people.

It was the gaping emptiness of the country, the
spectacle of ravages and neglect, the absence of a
population that might be dispossessed and the growing
sense of the country’s having “waited” for the “return
of her banished children,” that lent force and practical
meaning to the awakening Christian realization that
the time had come for Jewish restoration.
What is the Arab historical connection with Pales-
tine? What is the source of their fantastic claims?

The Arabs’ homeland is Arabia, the southwestern
peninsula of Asia. Its 1,027,000 square miles (2,630,000 square kilometers) embrace the present-day Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrein, Qatar, Trucial Oman
on the Persian Gulf, Muscat and Oman, and South
Yemen. When in the seventh century, with the birth
of the new Islamic religion, the Arabs emerged from
the desert with an eye to conquest, they succeeded in
establishing an empire that within a century extended
over three continents, from the Atlantic Ocean to the
border of China. Early in their phenomenal progress,
they conquered Palestine from the Byzantines.

Purely Arab rule, exercised from Damascus by the
Omayyad dynasty, lasted a little over a century. The
Omayyads were overthrown in 750 by their bitter
antagonists, the Abbasids, whose two centuries of gov-
emment was increasingly dominated first by Persians,
then by Turks. When the Abbasids were in turn de-
feated by the Fatimids, the Arabs had long had no part
in the government of the empire, either at the center
or in the provinces.

But the Arabs had one great lasting success: Through-
out a large part of the subjugated territories, Arabic
became the dominant language and Islam the predomi-
nant religion. (Large scale conversions were not on the
whole achieved by force. A major motive in the
adoption of Islam by “nonbelievers” was the social
and economic discrimination suffered by non-Moslems.) This cultural assimilation made possible the
so-called golden age of Arabic culture.
“The invaders from the desert,” writes Professor
Philip K. Hitti, the foremost modem Arab historian,

“brought with them no tradition of learning, no heri-
tage of culture to the lands they conquered. . . . They
sat as pupils at the feet of the peoples they subdued.”
What we therefore call “Arabic civilization” was Ara-
bian neither in its origins and fundamental structure
nor in its principal ethnic aspects. The purely Arabic
contribution in it was in the linguistic and to a certain
extent in the religious fields. Throughout the whole
period of the caliphate, the Syrians, the Persians, the
Egyptians, and others, as Moslem converts or as Chris-
tians or Jews, were the foremost bearers of the torch
of enlightenment and learning.

The result was a great volume of translation from
the ancient writings of a host of cultures in East and
West alike, from Greece to India. Most of the great
works in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and phi-
losophy were rendered into Arabic and, in many cases,
were thus saved for Europe. The translation period
was followed by the even brighter glow of great orig-
inal works in Arabic on all these subjects as well as on
alchemy, pharmacy, and geography.

“But when we speak of ‘Arab medicine’ or ‘Arab
philosophy’ or ‘Arab mathematics’,” notes Hitti, “we do
not mean the medical science, philosophy or mathe-
matics that are necessarily the product of the Arabian
mind or developed by people living in the Arabian pe-
ninsula, but that body of knowledge enshrined in books
written in the Arabic language by men who flourished
chiefly during the caliphate and were themselves Per-
sians, Egyptians or Arabians, Christian, Jewish or
Moslem.

“Indeed, even what we call ‘Arabic literature’ was
no more Arabian than the Latin literature of the Mid-
dlie Ages was Italian…. Even such disciplines as philosophy, linguistics, lexicography and grammar, which
were primarily Arabian in origin and spirit and in
which the Arabs made their chief original contribution,
recruited some of their most distinguished scholars
from the non-Arab stock.”

Whatever the precise definitions of the cultural his-
torians, the Arab Empire certainly ushered in a cul-
tural era that illuminated the Middle Ages. In this
golden age, Palestine played no part at all.
The history books and the literature of the period fail
to reveal even a mention of Palestine as the center of
any important activity or as providing inspiration or fo-
cus for any significant cultural activity of the Arabs or
even of the Arabic-speaking people.23
On the contrary: Anyone seeking higher learning,
even in specifically Moslem subjects, was forced to
seek it at first in Damascus, later in the centers of Mos-
lem learning in various other countries. The few known
Palestinian scholars were born and may have died in
Palestine, but they studied and worked in either Egypt
or Damascus.

Palestine was never more than an unconsidered back-
water of the empire. No great political or cultural center
ever arose there to establish a source of Arab, or any
other non-Jewish, affinity or attachment. Damascus,
Baghdad, Cairo-these were the great, at times glitter-
ing, political and cultural centers of the Moslem Em-
pire. Jerusalem, where a Moslem Holy Place was es-
tablished on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple,
never achieved any political or even cultural status.
To the Arab rulers and their non-Arab successors,
Palestine was a battleground, a corridor, sometimes an
outpost, its people a source of taxes and of some man-
power for the waging of endless foreign and internecine
wars. Nor did a local non-Jewish culture grow. In the
early Arab period, immigrants from Arabia were
encouraged, and later they were given the Jewish lands.
But the population remained an ethnic hodgepodge.

When the Crusaders came to Palestine after 460 years
of Arab and non-Arabic Moslem rule, they found an
Arabic-speaking population, composed of a dozen races
(apart from Jews and Druzes), practicing five versions
of Islam and eight of heterodox Christianity.

“With the passing of the Umayyad empire . . .
Arabianism fell but Islam continued.” The Persians
and the Turks of the Abbasid Empire, the Berbers and
the Egyptians of the Fatimid Empire, had no interest
at all in the provincial backwater except for what could
be squeezed out of it for the imperial exchequer or the
imperial army.

To the Mamluks who, in 1250, followed the Crusa-
der Christian interregnum, Palestine had no existence
even as a subentity. Its territory was divided administratively, as part of a conquered empire, according to
convenience. Its variegated peoples were treated as objects for exploitation, with a mixture of hostility and indifference. Some Arab tribes collaborated with the
Mamluks in the numerous internal struggles that
marked their rule. But the Arabs had no part or direct
influence in the regime. Like all the other inhabitants
of the country, they were conquered subjects and were
treated accordingly.

Their state did not improve under the Ottoman
Turks. The fact of a common Moslem religion did not
confer on the Arabs any privileges, let alone any share
in government. The Ottomans even replaced Arabic
with Turkish as the language of the country. Except
for brief periods, the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had
cause to dislike their Turkish rulers just one degree less
than did the more heavily taxed Jews.

The Arabs did, however, play a significant and spe-
cific role in one aspect of Palestine’s life: They con-
tributed effectively to its devastation. Where destruction
and ruin were only partly achieved by warring imperial
dynasties-by Arab, Turkish, Persians, or Egyptians,
by the Crusaders or by invading hordes of Mongols
or Kharezmians-it was supplemented by the revolts
of local chieftains, by civil strife, by intertribal
warfare within the population itself. Always the process
was completed by the raids of Arabs-the Bedouins-
from the neighboring deserts. These forays (for which
there were endemic economic reasons) were known al-
ready in the Byzantine era. Over fifteen centuries, they
eroded the face of Palestine.

During the latter phase of the Abbasids and in the
Fatimid era, Bedouin depredations grew more intense.
It was then that Palestine east of the Jordan was laid
waste.

Starting in the thirteenth century, with the entry of
the Mamluks, all the instruments of ruin were at work
almost continuously. The process went on even more
colorfully under Ottoman misrule. Bedouin raiders,
plundering livestock and destroying crops and planta-
tions, plagued the life of the farmer. Bedouin encamp-
ments, dotting the countryside, served as bases for
highway attacks on travelers, on caravans carrying
merchandise, on pilgrim cavalcades.
Count Volney, describing the Palestinian country-
side in 1785, wrote:

The peasants are incessantly making inroads on
each other’s lands, destroying their corn, durra,
sesame and olive-trees, and carrying off their sheep,
goats and camels. The Turks, who are everywhere
negligent in repressing similar disorders, are the less
attentive to them here, since their authority is very
precarious; the Bedouin, whose camps occupy the
level country, are continually at open hostilities with
them, of which the peasants avail themselves to re-
sist their authority or do mischief to each other, ac-
cording to the blind caprice of their ignorance or
the interest of the moment. Hence arises an anarchy,
which is still more dreadful than the despotism that
prevails elsewhere, while the mutual devastation of
the contending parties renders the appearance of this
[the Palestinian] part of Syria more wretched than
that of any other. . . . This country is indeed more
frequently plundered than any other in Syria for,
being very proper for cavalry and adjacent to the
desert, it lies open to the Arabs.

Neither history books nor reports of travelers, whether Christian, Moslem, or Jewish, report on any other
permanent feature of the Arabs’ historical relationship
with Palestine. In the tenth century, the Arab writer
Ibn Hukal had written: “Nobody cares about building
the country, or concerns himself for its needs.” This
was a mild foretaste of the ruination of a country,
carried out over hundreds of years. There is no reason
to blame the handful of Arabs who were part of the
medley of peoples that made up the settled population
of Palestine .26 They were merely subject residents, usu-
ally downtrodden, of this or that village or this or that
town. The remote central authority in Constantinople
stretched out its conscripting hand to take away their
sons, the local tax farmer sucked them dry, the vil-
lage over the hill, and the rival tribe, had to be guarded
against or fought in a cycle of mutually destructive
retaliation. The Bedouin nomads tore up their olive
trees, destroyed their crops, filled their wells with
stones, broke down their cisterns, took away their live-
stock-and were sometimes called in as allies to help
destroy the next village .

Thus it was that by the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, when hundreds of years of abuse had turned the
country into a treeless waste, with a sprinkling of ema-
ciated towns, malaria-ridden swamps in its once-fer-
tile northern valleys, the once-thriving south (Negev)
now a desert, the population too had dwindled almost
to nothing.

There was never a “Palestinian Arab” nation. To
the Arab people as a whole, no such entity as Pal-
estine existed. To those of them who lived in its neigh-
borhood, its lands were a suitable object for plunder
and destruction. Those few who lived within its bounds
may have had an affinity for their village (and made
war on the next village), for their clan (which fought
for the right of local tax-gathering), or even for their
town. They were not conscious of any relationship to
a land, and even the townsmen would have heard of
its existence as a land, if they heard of it at all, only
from such Jews as they might meet. (Palestine is men-

tioned only once in the Koran, as the “Holy Land”—
holy, that is, to Jews and Christians.)

The feeling of so many nineteenth-century visitors
that the country had been waiting for the return of its
lawful inhabitants was made the more significant by
the shallowness of the Arab imprint on the country. In
twelve hundred years of association, they built only a
single town, Ramleh, established as the local subpro-
vincial capital in the eighth century. The researchers of
nineteenth-century scholars, beginning with the archae-
ologist Edward Robinson in 1838, revealed that hun-
dreds of place-names of villages and sites, seemingly
Arab, were Arabic renderings or translations of ancient
Hebrew names, biblical or Talmudic. The Arabs have
never even had a name of their own for this country
which they claim. “Filastin” is merely the Arab trans-
literation of “Palestine,” the name the Romans gave
the country when they determined to obliterate the
“presence” of the Jewish people.

Sir George Adam Smith, author of the Historical
Geography of the Holy Land, wrote in 1891: “The
principle of nationality requires their [the Turks'] dis-
possession. Nor is there any indigenous civilization
in Palestine that could take the place of the Turkish
except that of the Jews who … have given to Palestine
everything it has ever had of value to the world.”28
This blunt judgment was entirely normal; it aroused no
objections and offended no one. It was a simple state-
ment of a unique and irrefutable fact. The Arabs’ dis-
covery of Palestine came many years later.