JERUSALEM According to the wilder elements of Zionist propaganda – distrusted for good reason at the time by visitors, authorities and scholars – Jerusalem Jews constituted a RELIGIOUS plurality for the first time in the 1840s (not the 1820s), and constituted a RELIGIOUS majority for the first time in the 1890s (not the 1870s). According to the narrative, neither status was sustained continuously, with Jews relinquishing the former more often than not up till the 1880s, and the latter more often than not up till the 1920s.* Both eventualities were achieved through the building of scores of NEW neighbourhoods OUTSIDE of the city by foreign philanthropists and charities for Jewish IMMIGRANTS. Turning to reliable sources however, we find that a Jewish preponderance in the “city” likely evolved even more slowly, with the Jerusalem District of the “Mandate”, ie. the “Corpus Separatum” of one among many “nonbinding” UNGA proposals, boasting an overwhelming Arab majority. This was the case with all preceding Ottoman governorates (since before even Christian Zionism came into existence), and had always remained the case with the enduring Jerusalem Subdistrict. What we see here is how even non-Ahkenazim (non-European/Zionist Jews), regularly conflated with the alms-dependant Yishuv ha-Yashan, were themselves not “native” to Jerusalem or Palestine: Jewish Kurds and Jewish Persians were both resident, not to mention the “Yemenites” from the far reaches of South Arabia, “Moghrabis” from Northwest Africa, “Babylonians” from Georgia, “Baghdadis” from Mesopotamia, “Bukharans” from Russia, Jewish Syrians from Aleppo, and “Sefardi” Jews from Spain and Portugal. *Notice that by the 1880s Palestinian Arab nationalism was already nascent and ascendant, with a Jewish “religious” plurality in any case very much an ethnic minority, the Old Yishuv (that is, the indigenous Palestinian Jews) disregarding it in an Arab-majority city. By the 1920s, the British Empire, with its anti-Semitic “declaration” by Lord Balfour already operative, was well in control of Jerusalem – Viscount Allenby having conquered the city following the Arab Revolt several years previously.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:29:06 +0000
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