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Palestinian Jews

Extended-protected article
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Palestinian Jews
יְהוּדִים פָלַסְטִינִים
اليهود الفلسطينيون
Painting of Palestinian rabbi Raphael Hayyim Isaac Carregal by American artist Samuel King, 1782
Regions with significant populations
Palestine (Land of Israel)
Languages
Religion
Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Samaritans and Israeli Jews

Palestinian Jews or Jewish Palestinians (Hebrew: יְהוּדִים פָלַסְטִינִים; Arabic: اليهود الفلسطينيون) are historical designations for the Jews who inhabited Palestine (alternatively the Land of Israel) prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

The term reflects the use of "Palestine" as a geographic and administrative labeling under the Ottoman Empire and Mandatory Palestine. At that time, the Jewish community in Palestine was also commonly referred to as the Yishuv[1], a term used for the Jewish population and settlement in Palestine before the establishment of Israel.[2][3]

Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and the establishment of Israel, the Jewish population was naturalized under Israeli citizenship law, and the Palestinian designation largely receded into historical usage.

History

Ottoman era

Workers in Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem (between 1852 and 1862)
Jews in "Ben Zakai" house of prayer, Jerusalem, 1893
Jews of Jerusalem, 1895
Jews of Peki'in, c. 1930

From the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate (1516) to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (1922), the population of the region of Palestine, the area comprising modern Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip, included Ottoman Jews. Under Ottoman rule in the mid-16th century, there were no more than 10,000 Jews in Ottoman Palestine,[4] making up around 5% of the population. By the mid-19th century, Ottoman sources recorded that the region's population of 600,000 included a Jewish community comprising 5–7% of the total.[5]

The situation of the Jewish community in Palestine was more complicated than in neighbouring Arab countries.[6] Whereas in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, communities were largely homogeneous in ethnic and confessional terms, in Palestine in the 19th century, Jewish pilgrims and European Christian colonial projects attracted large numbers of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe and Sephardic groups from Bulgaria, Turkey and North Africa.[6] The Jews of Palestine were not exclusively of Iberian origins, and included substantial Yiddish speaking communities who had established themselves in Palestine centuries earlier.[6]

Towards the end of the Ottoman era in Palestine, native Jewish communities lived primarily in the four "holy cities" of Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem.[6] The Jewish population consisted of Ashkenazim (Yiddish speakers), Sephardim (Judeo-Spanish speakers), and Maghrebim (North African Arabic speakers) or Mizrahim (Middle Eastern Jews, comparable to the Arabic term Mashriqiyyun, or "Easterners"). The majority of Jews in the four holy cities, with the exception of Jerusalem, were Arabic and Judaeo-Spanish speakers.[6] The dominant language among Jews in Jerusalem was Yiddish, due to the large migration of pious Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. Still, in 1882, there were registered 7,620 Sephardim/Mizrahim/Maghrebim, in Jerusalem, of whom 1,290 were Maghrebim, from the Maghreb or North Africa. Natives of the city, they were Turkish subjects, and fluent in Arabic.[6] Arabic also served as the lingua franca between the Sephardim/Mizrahim/Maghrebim and Ashkenazim and their non-Jewish Arab counterparts in mixed cities like Safed and Hebron.[6]

In the narrative works of Arabs in Palestine in the late Ottoman period, as evidenced in the autobiographies and diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh, "native" Jews were often referred to and described as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country), "compatriots", or Yahud awlad Arab (Jews, sons of Arabs).[6] When the First Palestinian Congress of February 1919 issued its anti-Zionist manifesto rejecting Zionist immigration, it extended a welcome to those Jews "among us who have been Arabicized, who have been living in our province since before the war; they are as we are, and their loyalties are our own."[6] In practice, however, Jews as dhimmi were second-class citizens throughout the Ottoman empire until its collapse.[7]

British Mandate era

Despite the overtures by Palestinian Arabs by 1914 the local Arab population, which was uniting under a new concept of Palestinianism was becoming increasingly detached from the Arabic-speaking Jews over Zionism. Even though many Jews who spoke Arabic, identified as "Arab" and maintained intellectual networks in Cairo, Beirut, and Istanbul many of them were also supporters of Zionism and the Jewish colonization of Palestine. Jewish newspapers such as the HaHerut which dealt with Sephardic issues were Pro-Zionist and Pro-Ottoman and in many ways, similar to HaTzvi which was published by newly arrived Ashkenazi Jews. Attempts to ease the tensions were made by Arab-speaking Jews establishing societies such as HaMagen to counter Anti-Zionism in the Arab press, translate Arabic articles so newly settled Jews could understand Arabs and suppress anti-semitic publications but this was becoming challenging due to the rising wave of nationalist publications.[8]

In 1920, the Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Sharif called Palestinian Jews to live alongside Arabs and reject Zionism and recent arrivals, appealing to the long history of Sephardic Jews had with Arabs. In 1921, the Palestinian delegation in London claimed to the British negotiation team that the local Sephardim opposed Zionism and the Palestinian press began reaching out to Sephardim calling but this time the pleas were met with stiff opposition from the local Palestinian Sephardic leadership.[8] The 1929 Anti-Jewish riots resulted in the final breakdown of relations between Palestinian Jews and Arabs with even Jewish communities that were opposed to Zionism joining together for protection creating a unified Yishuv.[9] The Yishuv was known as the Palestinian Jewish community.[10]

1948 transition to State of Israel

As the British Mandate drew to a close and the State of Israel was established, archival documents released by the Israel State Archives show that Jewish officials debated what the new country would be called in Arabic: Palestine (Filastin), Zion (Sahyoun), or Israel (Isra’il). Officials anticipated the concurrent creation of an Arab state under the UN partition plan and recognized that the Jewish state would encompass a large Arab minority. The name Palestine was ultimately rejected to avoid confusion with the projected Arab state, leading officials to select Israel.[11]

Uses and identity

References to Jews in Europe as Palestinians

European Jews were commonly considered an "Oriental" people in many of their host countries. The 18th-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant in an anti-Jewish polemic referred to European Jews as "Palestinians living among us."[12][13] The British Mandate referred to Arab Palestinians and Jewish settlers from Europe alike as "Palestinians," consistent with an Orientalist view of all Jews as Eastern people.[14]

Israeli Jewish usage

The people that had been known as Palestinian Jews before May 1948 became Israeli after that date.[15]

PLO Charter definition

The Palestinian National Charter, as amended by the PLO's Palestinian National Council in July 1968, defined Palestinians as "those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father—whether in Palestine or outside it—is also a Palestinian. The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians."[16][17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Yishuv". Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 21 September 2012. Retrieved 14 December 2015.
  2. ↑ Fishman, Louis A. (2020). Jews and Palestinians in the Late Ottoman Era, 1908–1914: Claiming the Homeland. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 134–171.
  3. ↑ Saposnik, Arieh B. (2008). Becoming Hebrew: The Creation of a Jewish National Culture in Ottoman Palestine. Oxford University Press. pp. 65–92.
  4. ↑ Peters, Francis E. (2005). The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume II: The Words and Will of God. Princeton University Press. p. 287. ISBN 978-0-691-12373-8.
  5. ↑ Rubenberg, Cheryl A. (1989). Israel and the American National Interest: A Critical Examination. University of Illinois Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-252-06074-8.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Tamari, Salim (2004). "Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew in Palestine". Jerusalem Quarterly (21). doi:10.70190/jq.I21.p10.
  7. ↑ Morris, Benny (1999). Righteous victims: a history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881 - 2001. Westminster: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 13. ISBN 9780307788054.
  8. 1 2 Fishman, Louis (15 March 2021). "Arab Jewish Voices in Ottoman Palestine: Caught between the Sephardim and Palestinians". Revue d'histoire culturelle. XVIIIe-XXIe siècles (2). doi:10.4000/rhc.915.
  9. ↑ Moshe Sakal, 'The real point of no return in the Jewish-Arab conflict,' at Haaretz, January 4, 2014, reviewing Hillel Cohen, Tarpat: Shnat Ha’efes Ba’sihsuh Hayehudi-Aravi (1929: Year Zero of the Jewish-Arab Conflict), Keter Publishing & Ivrit, 2013: 'No factor contributed more to the gathering under a joint political roof of [both] the veteran Jewish communities and the Zionist Yishuv [the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine] that was then being renewed, than the riots of 1929. The Arab attacks forced the Eastern and Maghrebi Jews who were living in the country, including those who had previously recoiled from doing so, to join the Zionists, take shelter beneath their wings and ask for their protection. Or, to put it more sharply: The Arabs created in 1929 the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine.'
  10. ↑ Mattar, Philip (2004). Mattar, Philip; Butterworth, Charles E.; Caplan, Neil; Fischback, Michael R.; Hooglund, Eric (eds.). Encyclopedia of Modern Middle East & North Africa. p. 684. ISBN 978-0028657691.
  11. ↑ Friedman, Matti (11 April 2013). "Why Israel's first leaders chose not to call the country 'Palestine' in Arabic – The Times of Israel". The Times of Israel.
  12. ↑ Kant, Immanuel (1974). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Gregor, Mary J. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff., cited in Chad Alan Goldberg, Politicide Revisited. University of Wisconsin-Madison
  13. ↑ Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht Publisher: Leipzig : F. Meiner. Republished in 1912. "Die unter uns lebenden Palästiner sind durch ihren Wuchergeist seit ihrem Exil, auch was die größte Menge betrifft, in den nicht ungegründeten Ruf des Betruges gekommen."
  14. ↑ Kalmar, Ivan Davidson & Derek Penslar. Orientalism and the Jews; Brandeis 2005
  15. ↑ Bauer, Yehuda, ed. (1988). Present-day Antisemitism: Proceedings of the Eighth International Seminar of the Study Circle on World Jewry under the auspices of the President of Israel, Chaim Herzog, Jerusalem 29–31 December 1985. Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. p. 258. ISBN 9789652221278.
  16. ↑ "The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council July 1–17, 1968: Articles 6–7". Retrieved 22 April 2016.
  17. ↑ Hammer, Juliane (2009). Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland. University of Texas Press. p. 81. ISBN 9780292779273.
  18. ↑ Anat Leibler, "Disciplining Ethnicity: Social Sorting Intersects with Political Demography in Israel's Pre-State Period," Social Studies of Science 44, no. 2 (2014), p. 273.
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