Jerusalem: The Facts of History

Over the centuries Palestine was the one place on Earth that Jews migrated to because they wanted to, not because they were forced out of somewhere else which has been a major part of the Jewish story for the last 1,000 years. And, most of those Jews settled in Jerusalem.

Photo Credit: Lyman Coleman (1796-1882) (www.vampirehigh.org) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The pull was so strong for Jews to “return” to Jerusalem that even during the worst of times they attempted to reach their city. S.D. Gotein, in researching the Gheniza documents, published a letter from a man stuck in Cairo in 1100, writing to his community in Spain. He couldn’t get to Jerusalem because “the Franks arrived and killed everyone in the city whether Ishmael or of Israel,” (The First Crusade, Edward Peters ed., pg. 269) referring to the massacres that occurred as a result of the siege of Jerusalem in the first Crusade in 1099.

Around 617, the Persians went to war against Byzantium. The Jews helped the Persians remove the Byzantines from the Levant, and with their blessing, became the rulers of Jerusalem and most of the surrounding area, which we know as ancient Judea.

A few years later the Byzantines countered and took it back. Ibn Ishaq, the earliest known chronicler of Islamic history, said that the Byzantine King Heracles thought seriously about driving out all the Jews in Palestine because he was not yet aware of Muhammad’s conquest which began in 622 and mistook a dream he had that warned him of a second Jewish uprising. Ibn Ishaq phrased it, he “saw a kingdom of a circumcised man victorious” (Life of Muhammad, A. Guillaume, pg. 654). Ibn Ishaq wrote this 80 years after Mohammed’s death so more than likely the king stopped short of driving the Jews out of the realm because his court realized their importance to the trade routes that were long established and the Jews’ major role in them all through the Levant.

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