The Continuous
Jewish Presence in the Land

Why this Chapter exists

How we know.

One version of the story is simple: Rome destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the Jews were scattered, and they did not return until 1948. It makes a clean story, and it skips eighteen centuries.

The evidence runs unusually deep: in the ground, in the archives of the empires that governed the land, and in the people’s own letters and law books. The place itself, its geography and its names, belongs to the Land of Israel Chapter.

The kinds of evidence

How historians know.

No single source carries the whole claim. The strength of the record is that six independent kinds of evidence, gathered by different people for different reasons, all point the same way. When sources that never coordinated end up agreeing, a historian trusts the result.

• Remains in the ground. Excavated synagogues, ritual baths, cemeteries, oil lamps, and Hebrew inscriptions, left in place and uncovered centuries later. No one left them behind to make a case to later readers.
• Writing cut in stone. Names and dedications carved into synagogue floors and tombstones, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, by the communities that used them.
• The community’s own texts. Law codes, letters, and commentaries written in the land. Examples include the Mishnah, the Jerusalem Talmud (also called the Palestinian Talmud), medieval responsa (a rabbi’s written rulings on questions of law), and the writings of Safed.
• The rulers’ own paperwork. The empires that governed the land kept administrative and tax records, and the Jewish communities they taxed appear in the ones that survive, above all the Ottoman registers.
• Travelers passing through. Christian, Muslim, and Jewish visitors across many centuries described the Jewish communities they met, each writing independently of the others.
• Headcounts. Ottoman tax registers and, later, British censuses that record the population town by town.

Together, these independent lines of evidence allow historians to reconstruct an unusually well-documented record of continuous Jewish life in the land, with scholarly debate focused on the numbers and the details rather than on whether the communities were there.

After 70 CE: the shift, not the disappearance

The center moved. The population did not.

The events after 70 CE are where the common picture, that Rome’s destruction of the Temple emptied the land of Jews, parts company with the record.

In 70 CE the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and much of Jerusalem. The destruction was severe, and the deportations were large: many were enslaved and sold into the Mediterranean slave markets. But the Jewish population of the land, in the hundreds of thousands, was not removed. What changed decisively was the center of gravity of Jewish life.

By rabbinic tradition, Yochanan ben Zakkai was carried out of besieged Jerusalem hidden in a coffin and won permission from Vespasian, the Roman commander and soon emperor, to open a school at Yavneh on the coastal plain. Whatever the legendary details, Yavneh became a center of rabbinic learning in the years after 70 CE. By rabbinic tradition, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, reconstituted itself there.

In 132 CE a second revolt broke out under Simon bar Kokhba. For about three years (132–135 CE) the rebels held real territory and struck their own coinage. Rome crushed the revolt in 135 CE, and the emperor Hadrian barred Jews from Jerusalem, now the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, and renamed the province Syria Palaestina, the name from which “Palestine” descends. The Land of Israel Chapter traces what that name has meant since.

The ban from the city did not empty the land. It shifted the Jewish center north, to the Galilee. By the same tradition, the Sanhedrin moved in turn to Usha, Shefar’am, Beit She’arim, Sepphoris, and Tiberias, all Galilean. What was produced in these centuries shaped Judaism permanently. The Mishnah, the first major written collection of the oral legal tradition, was compiled in the Galilee around 200 CE under Judah the Prince. The Jerusalem Talmud (Yerushalmi), mostly written in the Tiberias academy despite its name, was completed around 400 CE.

Byzantine rule · 324 – 638 CE

Continued life, mainly in the Galilee.

When the Roman Empire Christianized under Constantine after 312 CE, the land became part of the Byzantine Empire and a major site of Christian pilgrimage. Jewish life continued, mainly in the Galilee. There were periodic persecutions (Justinian’s anti-Jewish legislation in the sixth century, restrictions on synagogue building), but communities held on in Tiberias, Sepphoris, Beit She’arim, and rural Galilean villages. Synagogues from this period have been excavated and are archaeologically attested: Beth Alpha (sixth century), Hammath Tiberias (fourth century), and the basilica-style synagogues (long halls lined with rows of columns) at Capernaum and Bar’am. Political authority changed hands, but Jewish religious and communal life kept developing in the Galilee.

Early Islamic Period · 638 – 1099

The end of the Byzantine ban.

Muslim armies from Arabia took the region from the Byzantines, and Umar, the caliph (the ruler of the new Islamic empire), took Jerusalem in 638 CE. By a tradition recorded in early Islamic and Jewish sources, Umar permitted Jews to live in Jerusalem again, ending the Roman and Byzantine prohibition that had stood for five centuries. The “Pact of Umar” (disputed in date and authenticity in its received form) set the framework under which non-Muslim communities, Jews and Christians as dhimmis (protected non-Muslim subjects), lived under Islamic rule: protected in their religious practice, but restricted and legally subordinate.

The Geonic period of Babylonian Jewish leadership (c. 589–1040 CE) overlapped with this era. The authority of the Babylonian Talmud, the parallel compilation produced by the Jewish academies of Babylonia, spread widely, and rabbinic correspondence flowed between Baghdad, Cairo, and the communities of the land. The Cairo Geniza preserves extensive correspondence between Land-of-Israel communities and the wider diaspora across these centuries.

The land had its own academy as well, and in the tenth and eleventh centuries its heads also carried the title gaon (“eminence”). In Tiberias, the Ben-Asher family of Masoretes (from masorah, “tradition”) worked for five generations, from the eighth century on, to fix the vowels, chanting marks, and exact spelling of the Hebrew Bible. A Bible codex corrected by Aaron Ben-Asher in the early tenth century is generally identified with the Aleppo Codex. Two centuries later Maimonides, writing in Egypt, said of it that “everyone relies upon it.”

Crusader Period · 1099 – 1291

Ten men. Then rebuilt.

The First Crusade, an army of European Christians marching to seize the Holy Land, reached Jerusalem in 1099 and committed one of the most heavily attested massacres of the medieval period. Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the city were killed indiscriminately. Most communities outside Jerusalem survived, though the Crusaders expelled the Jews of Hebron in 1100. The city itself stayed mostly emptied of non-Christians. Around 1170 the Spanish Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela found “about 200 Jews who dwell under the Tower of David in one corner of the city,” renting the city’s dyeing-house from the king. The Muslim sultan Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187 and permitted Jews to settle there again. A run of further blows (the Crusaders’ return by treaty in 1229, the Khwarezmian raid of 1244, the Mongol incursion of 1260) devastated the Jerusalem community again and again without ever ending it.

In 1267 the Catalan rabbi and physician Nachmanides (Moshe ben Nachman, the Ramban), exiled from Aragon after the Disputation of Barcelona (1263), a forced public debate on Judaism held before the king, reached Jerusalem at about seventy-three. He found the city devastated. In a letter to his son he described what was left of its Jews: “only two brothers, dyers who bought their dye from the governor,” joined by up to ten men in their home on the Sabbath for prayers. Within weeks he had founded a synagogue in a ruined house, and Torah scrolls that had been evacuated to Shechem before the Mongol raid were brought back. Jewish life in Jerusalem revived around him. A synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City bears his name and is in use today.

Mamluk Period · 1291 – 1517

The four holy cities.

The Mamluk Sultanate, based in Cairo, ruled Jerusalem and Hebron from about 1260 and ended the Crusader presence with the fall of Acre in 1291. Under the Mamluks, new synagogue building was restricted and the dhimmi laws were enforced. In 1267 the sultan Baybars barred Jews from entering the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a ban that stayed in force until 1967. Jewish communities persisted in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, the four holy cities of Jewish tradition.

Even under restrictive rule, new migrations kept reshaping the existing communities. The 1492 Spanish Expulsion sent waves of Sephardi refugees, the Jews of Spain and Portugal, across the Mediterranean, the land among them. Four years before the Expulsion, the Italian rabbi Obadiah of Bertinoro arrived in Jerusalem, and his letters home record the community he found. The arriving Sephardim joined the existing communities of the four holy cities and reshaped their composition and intellectual life on the eve of the Ottoman conquest.

Ottoman Period · 1517 – 1917

Safed, Hebron, Tiberias, Jerusalem.

The Ottoman Empire conquered the territory in 1517 and held it for four centuries. The population of the land around 1800 is estimated at 250,000 to 300,000. Most were Arab Muslims, with sizable Christian (Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Maronite, Armenian) and Druze minorities and a continuous Jewish population concentrated in the four holy cities.

Safed (Tzfat), in the Upper Galilee, drew Jewish scholars from across the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century and became a center of Jewish law and mysticism whose reach was worldwide. Joseph Karo (born in Spain in 1488, before the Expulsion) settled in Safed and there completed the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law followed across the diaspora to this day. It was printed in Venice in 1565. Ashkenazi Jews, the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, follow it with the glosses of Moses Isserles of Krakow. Isaac Luria taught Kabbalah in Safed in the 1570s, reshaping Jewish mysticism far beyond the land. The town ran one of the earliest printing presses in the Ottoman Empire and drew a continuous influx of immigrants from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and North Africa. Ottoman tax registers record its growth. They list 233 Jewish households in 1525–26 and 719 in 1555–56. The registers counted taxpaying households, not individual people.

Hebron’s Jewish community, with interruptions, reached back to antiquity, anchored at the Cave of the Patriarchs (Me’arat HaMachpelah), the traditional burial site of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah. It endured until 1929, when Arab rioters killed sixty-seven Jews and wounded many more in the Hebron massacre. The survivors, many of whom had been sheltered by Arab neighbors, left the city. Thirty-five families returned in 1931. In April 1936, as the Arab revolt began, the British authorities evacuated them, and Jewish residence was not restored until after 1967.

Tiberias, the Galilean city beside the Sea of Galilee where the Jerusalem Talmud was largely written, lost and regained its Jewish community more than once, most recently in 1740, when Rabbi Haim Abulafia led its resettlement. Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi, a Portuguese-born Jewish banker and philanthropist, secured a long-term lease of Tiberias from Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1558, and her nephew Joseph Nasi gained ruling authority over the city in 1561. They set out to rebuild it as a refuge for Sephardi exiles fleeing the Inquisition, the Spanish and Portuguese religious tribunals.

Jerusalem (the city, not the wider territory) had a Jewish demographic majority by about 1880, according to consular and travelers’ estimates (Ottoman registers, which left out foreign nationals, counted fewer Jews). The Old Yishuv, the term for the Jewish population of the land before the modern Jewish national movement (Zionism), numbered roughly 25,000 in 1880, concentrated in the four holy cities and a few smaller communities.

The Aliyot · from 1881

Documented immigration, both populations growing.

Beginning in 1881–82, in the wake of the Russian pogroms, the mob attacks on Jewish communities there, organized waves of Jewish immigration to the land began. Each wave is called an aliyah (Hebrew for “going up”), plural aliyot. The First Aliyah (1882–1903) brought 25,000 to 35,000 Jews, mostly from the Russian Empire. The Second Aliyah (1904–1914) brought 35,000 to 40,000 more, including refugees from the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. These immigrants bought land through recorded transactions and built agricultural settlements: Petah Tikva (founded in 1878 by Jews of the Jerusalem Old Yishuv, revived by the newcomers in 1883), Rishon LeZion (1882), Zikhron Ya’akov (1882), Rosh Pinna (1882), Rehovot (1890). Jews from Yemen began arriving in the same years. The first reached Jerusalem in August 1881, larger groups followed from 1882, and from 1885 many settled in new neighborhoods built for them outside the Old City walls.

The British Mandate · 1917 – 1948

The last of the ruling powers.

British forces took the territory from the Ottomans in 1917 and 1918. The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, stated British support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It added a condition: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The British Mandate was formalized by the League of Nations in 1922. Britain governed the whole territory as a single administration under the name Palestine, deepened the port of Haifa, and laid new roads and rail.

The British took their first census of the territory in October 1922. Between that census and 1947, both populations grew rapidly. The Arab population roughly doubled, from about 670,000 to about 1,300,000 (mostly through natural increase, with some immigration). The Jewish population grew more than sevenfold, from about 84,000 to about 630,000 (mostly through immigration).

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted (33 to 13, with 10 abstentions) to partition the territory into an Arab state and a Jewish state: UN Resolution 181. Fighting between Arab and Jewish forces broke out within days of the vote. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish provisional government declared the State of Israel, and the armies of five Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Transjordan) invaded. The 1948 war ended with Israel holding territory beyond the partition lines and Egypt holding the Gaza Strip. Jordan held, and later annexed, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. There the Jews of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter were expelled, the Hurva Synagogue was destroyed, and Jewish access to the Western Wall was barred for the next nineteen years. Historians’ estimates of how many Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the war run from under 600,000 to more than 750,000.

Weighing a famous quote

The “empty land” problem.

In 1867 Mark Twain visited the land and, in his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad, described a desolate, thinly peopled country. The passage is vivid, and it still gets quoted as proof that the land was empty before modern Jewish immigration. It makes a good test of how to read a source.

Twain was one traveler, on one route, in one dry season, writing to entertain readers back home. His impression is real evidence of what one man saw on one trip. It is not a headcount. Set it beside the Ottoman tax registers from the same century, the letters of the community itself, and the other travelers who described the same towns, and the impression of emptiness does not hold up as a population figure. A single striking quote can be true as description and wrong as demography.

The multi-confessional reality

A land of many communities.

The land has been inhabited by more than one community for the whole of recorded history. Arab Muslims, Christians (Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Maronite, Armenian, and Latin), Druze, Bedouin, and Jews have all lived on it, in shifting proportions across the centuries. Most have roots there going back many centuries, and each has passed through major demographic change. The Jewish presence ran alongside the land’s Arab and other communities, not in place of them.

Old Yishuv and New Yishuv

1882 was not a beginning.

Historians divide the modern Jewish community of the land into two. The Old Yishuv is the traditional community that had been present all along, clustered in the four holy cities and supported in part by donations from Jews abroad. The New Yishuv is the modern immigration that began in 1882, which built farming villages, a Hebrew school system, and the institutions that would later become the State of Israel.

When the first modern immigrants arrived in 1882, a Jewish community roughly twenty-five thousand strong was already there. The wave that followed added to that community and reshaped it.

Object Spotlight

The Cairo Geniza.

Look at the room before you know what is in it. A scholar sits alone at a wooden table in a tall, bright hall, one hand to his head, a single page in front of him. All around him, on every table and spilling out of open packing crates on the floor, are heaps of torn, browned paper and parchment. It looks less like a library than like the aftermath of one. The man is buried in fragments, and there are clearly tens of thousands of them.

Those fragments came from a geniza. In Jewish practice, any worn-out page that might carry the name of God is not thrown in the trash. It is set aside in a storeroom, a geniza, until it can be buried respectfully. One synagogue in particular, the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo, in Egypt), had a geniza that was almost never emptied. For roughly a thousand years the community kept dropping its used-up writings into that chamber and leaving them. By the time scholars opened it in the 1890s, it held the everyday paper of a living world: not just sacred texts, but letters, contracts, court records, school exercises, even shopping lists.

Among its hundreds of thousands of fragments is the ordinary mail of Jewish communities, letters to and from Jerusalem, Ramla, Tyre, and Tiberias across the ninth through twelfth centuries. Nobody wrote these to prove a point to the future. They wrote them to do business and check on family. The result is a paper trail in the people’s own handwriting.

The Geniza’s value lies in how ordinary it is: the unguarded, day-to-day record of how people lived, traded, married, argued, and prayed. Historians can reconstruct a whole medieval society from it in a detail no monument could give.

The storeroom’s afterlife is a story of its own. In 1896 the Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter traveled to Cairo, tipped off by two travelers who had bought fragments there. He carried away the bulk of the chamber’s contents, around 190,000 pieces, to Cambridge, where the 1898 photograph was taken. Other portions ended up in libraries across Europe, America, and Israel, so the single Cairo storeroom is now scattered among institutions worldwide, slowly being reunited online. One of the most detailed records of medieval Jewish life survived because, for a thousand years, a community refused to throw its paper away.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• Historical Thinking & Historiography: how historians build a continuous record from many independent kinds of evidence.
• World History: a single community traced across successive empires, Roman through British.
• Archaeology: excavated synagogues, inscriptions, and the material record.
• Geography: the land across successive regimes and its shifting centers.
• World Religions: Jewish communal and religious life sustained across the periods.
• Museum & Archives Education: the Cairo Geniza, Ottoman registers, and census records as primary sources.

What students practice

Students learn to distinguish among archaeological, documentary, demographic, and narrative sources, and to weigh them together when evaluating historical continuity.

Standards Alignment

• C3 Framework: Dimension 2 (gathering, evaluating, and corroborating sources, and continuity and change) and Dimension 3 (developing claims and using evidence).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: Reading in History/Social Studies (RH), citing textual evidence and corroborating multiple primary and secondary sources.
• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.3 (the classical world and the post-70 CE shift).