Old Yishuv

The Old Yishuv (Hebrew: היישוב הישן, haYishuv haYashan) were the Jewish communities of the region of Palestine during the Ottoman period,^[1] up to the onset of Zionist aliyah and the consolidation of the New Yishuv by the end of World War I. In the late 19th century, the Old Yishuv comprised 0.3% of the world's Jews, representing 2–5% of the population of the Palestine region.^[2]^[3]

As opposed to the later Zionist aliyah and the New Yishuv, which began with the First Aliyah (of 1882) and was more based on a socialist and/or secular ideology emphasizing labor and self-sufficiency, many Jews of the Old Yishuv, whose members had continuously resided in or had come to the Southern Levant in the earlier centuries, were largely religious Jews, who depended on external donations (halukka) for financial support.

The Old Yishuv developed after a period of severe decline in Jewish communities of the Southern Levant during the early Middle Ages, and was composed of three clusters. The oldest group consisted of the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish communities who settled in Ottoman Palestine in the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods and the Arabic-speaking (Musta'arabi) communities who had already been living there since before the coming of Islam and had been culturally and linguistically Arabized.

A second group was composed of Ashkenazi Jews who had emigrated from Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries. A third wave consisted of Yishuv members who arrived in the late 19th century.^[4]

The Old Yishuv was thus generally divided into two independent communities—the Sephardim (including Musta'arabim), mainly consisting of the remains of Jewish communities of Galilee and the four Jewish holy cities, which had flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries; and the Ashkenazim, whose immigration from Europe was primarily since the 18th century.^[5]

The "Old Yishuv" term was coined by members of the "New Yishuv" in the late 19th century to distinguish themselves from the economically dependent and generally earlier Jewish communities, who mainly resided in the four holy cities of Judaism, and unlike the New Yishuv, had not embraced land ownership and agriculture.

Apart from the Old Yishuv centres in the four holy cities of Judaism, namely Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed, smaller communities also existed in Jaffa, Haifa, Peki'in, Acre, Nablus and Shfaram. Petah Tikva, although established in 1878 by the Old Yishuv, nevertheless was also supported by the arriving Zionists. Rishon LeZion, the first settlement founded by the Hovevei Zion in 1882, could be considered the true beginning of the "New Yishuv".

^ Destruction and Reconstruction – the Jewish Quarter. For the 400 years of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem there was a Jewish community living inside the walls of the Old City. The community, which we call the “Old Yishuv,” was not a single, cohesive unit. Until the early 19th century the community consisted mainly of Sephardic Jews, descendants of the exiles from Spain with Ashkenazi (Hassidic and Mitnagdim) and Mizrahi Jews in the minority. Beginning in the mid-18th century Ashkenazi Jews begin to settle in the city, but not for extended periods. [1] Archived 2013-04-01 at the Wayback Machine
^ The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world's Jewish population: see On, Raphael R. Bar. "ISRAEL'S NEXT CENSUS OF POPULATION AS A SOURCE OF DATA ON JEWS." Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies / דברי הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות ה (1969): 31*-41*. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23524099.
^ Mendel, Yonatan (5 October 2014). The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Security and Politics in Arabic Studies in Israel. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 188. ISBN 978-1-137-33737-5. Note 28: The exact percentage of Jews in Palestine prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 per cent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 per cent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 per cent) were Christian and 15,011 (3 per cent) were Jewish (quoted in Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine, Cambridge: Polity, 2008, p. 13). See also Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 43 and 124.
^ Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, Princeton University Press, 2008 p.104
^ Abraham P. Bloch, One a day: an anthology of Jewish historical anniversaries for every day of the year, KTAV Publishing House, 1987, ISBN 978-0-88125-108-1, M1 Google Print, p. 278.

[1] Destruction and Reconstruction – the Jewish Quarter. For the 400 years of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem there was a Jewish community living inside the walls of the Old City. The community, which we call the “Old Yishuv,” was not a single, cohesive unit. Until the early 19th century the community consisted mainly of Sephardic Jews, descendants of the exiles from Spain with Ashkenazi (Hassidic and Mitnagdim) and Mizrahi Jews in the minority. Beginning in the mid-18th century Ashkenazi Jews begin to settle in the city, but not for extended periods. [1] Archived 2013-04-01 at the Wayback Machine

[2] The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world's Jewish population: see On, Raphael R. Bar. "ISRAEL'S NEXT CENSUS OF POPULATION AS A SOURCE OF DATA ON JEWS." Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies / דברי הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות ה (1969): 31*-41*. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23524099.

[Mendel2014-3] Mendel, Yonatan (5 October 2014). The Creation of Israeli Arabic: Security and Politics in Arabic Studies in Israel. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 188. ISBN 978-1-137-33737-5. Note 28: The exact percentage of Jews in Palestine prior to the rise of Zionism is unknown. However, it probably ranged from 2 to 5 per cent. According to Ottoman records, a total population of 462,465 resided in 1878 in what is today Israel/Palestine. Of this number, 403,795 (87 per cent) were Muslim, 43,659 (10 per cent) were Christian and 15,011 (3 per cent) were Jewish (quoted in Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine, Cambridge: Polity, 2008, p. 13). See also Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 43 and 124.

[4] Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, Princeton University Press, 2008 p.104

[Bloch-5] Abraham P. Bloch, One a day: an anthology of Jewish historical anniversaries for every day of the year, KTAV Publishing House, 1987, ISBN 978-0-88125-108-1, M1 Google Print, p. 278.

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