Part V

During the Jewish Diaspora, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, Palestine never became a state for another people. For centuries, far-away caliphs controlled the region. The territory had been conquered many times by numerous nations and groups, including the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Seljuks, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans and English. Each conquest left in its wake soldiers, slaves and their offspring who were compelled to accept Islam or suffer the consequences. By the 19th century, Palestine was a mélange of nations, linguistic, religious and ethnic groups.

Hostility Toward Jews

British historian Tudor Parfitt stressed that hostility toward the Jews before the 19th century was often a result of religious and social differences, while violence against them (particularly during war) occurred when they and Christians were assumed to be assisting the enemy—or when enmity against an adversary could be more practically aimed against their vulnerable and abhorred Jewish communities.

In “A Descriptive Geography and Brief Historical Sketch of Palestine,” Rabbi Joseph Schwartz explained that after Napoleon conquered Egypt in 1799, he launched an attack on Gaza and Jaffa. Fear that Napoleon would succeed in an assault on Jerusalem precipitated panic among the Muslims. The Jews of Jerusalem were terrified of being killed by their Arab neighbors who wrongly accused them of being “spies and traitors” for having entered into a treaty with Napoleon to “deliver the city into his hands, through fraud and cunning.” The Muslims “secretly resolved … to kill all the Jewish inhabitants, as soon as Napoleon marched on Jerusalem.” The crisis was averted when the Jews learned of the threat and helped the Muslims fortify the city. Once they saw Jews actively participating in the defense of Jerusalem, the Muslims recognized that it was “nothing but calumny and falsehood to accuse the Jews of a treasonable intention.”

Shortly after the French retreated from Safed in 1799, which they held with limited armed forces, Parfitt said the resident Muslims demolished the Jewish quarter, murdered a number of Jews and ordered the remaining inhabitants to pay 50,000 piastres in penalties. During Napoleon’s Syrian campaign, Jews in Palestine were seen as traitors and the enemy was regarded as being part Jewish.

Parfitt added that in 1834, the Jews in Tiberias and Safed suffered in the anti-Egyptian revolt against the occupation of Palestine and Syria by Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian soldiers. The Jews were confined in Tiberias until they paid the rebels 50,000 piastres. In Safed, Jews were killed, their wives and daughters were raped, and Torah scrolls were vandalized. During the Crimean War (1853-1856), a number of Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem were charged with being spies, while the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 precipitated anti-Christian riots in Lydda. It was during these turbulent periods that Muslim loathing and contempt for the dhimmis would be manifest.

“Zealous Towns in 19th-Century Palestine”

In “Zealous Towns in 19th Century Palestine,” David Kushner, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, said that travelers going through Nablus on their way to or from Jerusalem during the first half of the 19th century were urged to do so with a guard or in a group. He said “Murray’s Handbook for Travelers” described the Muslim residents of Nablus as having “a bad character and deserve it. They have long been notorious for fanaticism and turbulence. … Travelers, and especially ladies, in passing through the streets are exposed to the most wanton insolence.” Foreigners reported being cursed and threatened with stones. Most of the perpetrators were children, apparently with the approval of their parents. In “Stirring Times, Or, Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856,” James Finn, the British consul in Jerusalem, observed that Nablus was “mostly inhabited by fanatic Muslims” and was “notoriously one of the most turbulent and fanatical places in Syria.”

Finn found that except for Reverend John Bowen and Reverend J. Mills, who spent 12 months and three months respectively in Nablus: “No one from our land has remained, even for a few days, in this most interesting district, visited and passed through by hundreds of British travelers, for pleasure, but cared for by none.”

After visiting Nablus, John Lewis Burckhardt, a Swiss citizen and orientalist, concluded in “Travels and The Holy Land”: “The inhabitants of Nablous [sic] are governed by their own chiefs, who are invested by the Pasha [governor of Damascus]. It is said that the villages belonging to the district can raise an army of five thousand men. They are a restless people, continually in dispute with each other, and frequently in insurrection against the Pasha. Djezzar never succeeded in completely subduing them, and Junot, with a corps of fifteen hundred French soldiers, was defeated by them.”

Hebron was hardly better. In “Syria and the Holy Land,” Walter Keating Kelly, a lawyer and historian, wrote: “There is little to detain” a person in the city. “The present inhabitants are the wildest, most lawless, and desperate people in the Holy Land. …The Muslims in Hebron are exceedingly bigoted.” When Kelly and a Jewish companion paused to admire the marble staircase leading to the tomb of the patriarch Abraham, a Turk emerged from the bazaar and “with furious gesticulations” summoned a crowd that surrounded them. The Jew and the Christian “were driven with contempt from the sepulchre of the patriarch whom they both revered.”

Blood Libel

One particular blood libel episode in March 1847 epitomized the treacherous life faced by Jews in Palestine. After having been hit with a stone by a Greek pilgrim boy, a little Jewish boy struck the Greek with another stone, drawing blood from his ankle. Fearing a repeat of the blood libel affairs in Rhodes and Damascus in February 1840, Finn intervened. A mob of pilgrims and others called for vengeance against all Jews “for having stabbed (they said) an innocent Christian child with a knife in order to get his blood for mixing in their Passover biscuits.”

The case was brought before the Pasha but was dismissed as being too trivial, Finn notes. Three days later, the Christian clergy exaggerated the nature of the wound and attempted to use Jewish sacred texts to prove to him that Jews are “addicted” to this “cannibal practice, either for purposes of necromancy or out of hatred of Christians.” The Jews were then ordered to defend their position two days later. Finn maintained that the “unexpected revival of so monstrous and false accusation” was almost certainly a result of “the desire of both Greeks and Turks to get possession of some Jewish money.”

In his memories Finn wrote, “In the interval, both Greeks and Armenians went out in the streets insulting and menacing the Jews, both men and women, sometimes drawing their hands across the throat, sometimes showing the knives which they generally carry about with them, and among other instances brought to my notice, was that of a party of six catching hold of the son of the late Chief Rabbi of London (Herschell) and shaking him, elderly man that he was by the collar, crying out, ‘Ah Jew, have you got the knives ready for our blood.’”

Dr. Alex Grobman, a Hebrew University-trained historian, is senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.