Were there Jews in the land before the State of Israel?

Question 10170.

A continuous Jewish presence in the land of Israel is one of those historical facts that almost everybody in the modern debate assumes away. The popular story says the Romans expelled the Jews in AD 70, the land lay empty of them for nearly nineteen centuries, and then in 1948 a European population arrived and took possession of somebody else’s country.

That story is tidy, widely believed and historically false. The exile was real and terrible, but it was never total, and the record of the intervening centuries is not hard to find.

What actually happened after AD 70

The destruction of Jerusalem by Titus was catastrophic. The temple was burned, the priesthood scattered and the city’s population devastated. Sixty years later the Bar Kokhba revolt ended even worse, and Hadrian renamed the province and barred Jews from Jerusalem itself. Those two blows are the reason the exile looms so large in Jewish memory.

What neither event produced was an empty land. The Jewish presence shifted north into Galilee, where the rabbinic academies regrouped. The Sanhedrin relocated to Usha, then to Sepphoris, then to Tiberias. The Mishnah was compiled in that region around AD 200, and the Jerusalem Talmud was completed in Galilee a couple of centuries later.

Think about what that means. A body of literature we still read was written in the land by Jews living in the land, in the very period the popular story says there were none there. Documents are stubborn things, and these ones were produced by a community that had not gone anywhere.

The centuries nobody talks about

Under Byzantine rule the Jewish presence in Galilee persisted, though under increasing pressure. After the Arab conquest in the seventh century Jewish communities are recorded in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramla and Gaza. The Cairo Geniza documents, thousands of ordinary letters and contracts from the medieval period, mention communities in the land constantly.

The Crusades were a disaster for that population, as they were for the Muslim population. Jerusalem’s Jewish community was massacred in 1099. And yet within decades travellers such as Benjamin of Tudela were recording Jewish communities again in Ashkelon, Tiberias, Acre and Jerusalem itself. Communities are hard to extinguish when the people in them believe they belong there.

By the sixteenth century Safed had become one of the most important centres of Jewish learning anywhere in the world, with a printing press, thousands of residents and a mystical tradition that spread through the whole diaspora. That is not a survival. That is a flourishing, several hundred years before Zionism was invented.

The Ottoman records of a Jewish presence

Ottoman tax registers and European consular reports give us harder numbers for the modern period. They show a Jewish presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias, the four cities that Jewish tradition itself calls holy, all through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were not new arrivals but long settled families, many of them speaking Arabic and living much as their neighbours did.

Consular and travellers’ accounts from the middle of the nineteenth century record that Jews had become the largest single community in Jerusalem, well before organised Zionist immigration began in the 1880s. Whatever else the founding of the state involved, it did not involve a people arriving somewhere they had never been.

I labour the point because the historical claim is doing political work. If the Jewish presence in the land ended in AD 70, then the modern state is a colonial imposition. If it never ended, then what happened in the twentieth century was the return of a scattered majority to a remnant that had held on. Those are very different stories, and the evidence supports the second.

Why Scripture leads us to expect this

The theological point interests me even more than the historical one. God repeatedly promised that his judgements on Israel would not be final. In Leviticus he says that even when they are in the land of their enemies he will not spurn them or abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break his covenant with them (Leviticus 26:44). Utterly is the word to notice.

The prophets work with the same idea through the doctrine of the remnant. The Hebrew root shaar means to remain or be left over, and it appears again and again in contexts of judgement. God never leaves himself without a witness, and he never leaves the land without a people who belong to it.

So a continuous Jewish presence, however small and however battered, is exactly what a reader of the prophets would expect to find. Amos promises that God will plant them on their land, never again to be uprooted (Amos 9:15). A promise of replanting implies roots that were never entirely pulled out.

What this does not prove

Let me be careful here, because history can be misused by anyone. The continuity of a Jewish presence does not settle every modern political question, does not make any particular government’s policies righteous, and does not mean that the Arab families who have lived there for generations have no claim on our sympathy or on justice.

Two peoples with deep attachments to the same small piece of ground is a genuine tragedy, and Christians ought to be able to say so without being accused of taking sides. I refuse to let prophecy make me careless about real suffering, and the prophets themselves never allowed national election to excuse injustice.

What the historical record does do is remove one particular argument from the table. Nobody can honestly say the Jewish people had no connection with the land until the twentieth century. The connection is documented in every century between the Romans and the Ottomans, and quite often in stone.

The archaeology underneath the argument

Walk through the land today and the physical evidence is everywhere. Synagogue mosaics at Beth Alpha and Hammat Tiberias from the Byzantine period. Ancient synagogues at Capernaum and Bar’am. Burial inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic spanning centuries. Ritual baths, oil presses and household objects that only make sense for an observant Jewish community.

These are not tourist reconstructions. They are the ordinary infrastructure of everyday religious life, and you do not build a synagogue floor in a place where nobody lives. The archaeology confirms the literary record, and the literary record confirms the archaeology, which is the sort of agreement historians normally treat as decisive.

For a wider treatment of how the land promises work, my article on the land covenant sets out the biblical framework, and the prophetic significance of 1948 picks up the modern end of the story.

The remnant as a pattern of grace

There is a spiritual lesson buried in all this that I would hate anyone to miss. God’s method throughout Scripture is to preserve a remnant when everything visible has collapsed. Seven thousand who had not bowed to Baal when Elijah thought he was the last one. A handful returning from Babylon. A believing minority in Paul’s day.

Every generation of the church has produced someone convinced that the faith is finished, that the lights are going out and that nothing will survive. Every generation has been wrong. God is a specialist in remnants, and he tends to work with the small and the overlooked rather than with the impressive.

A stubborn Jewish presence in Galilee through the Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods is that principle written into geography. Nobody planned it, nobody organised it, and it outlasted every empire that thought it had settled the matter.

What the sources actually show

If you want to check any of this for yourself, the material is public. Byzantine church histories complain about Jewish communities in Galilee. Muslim geographers list them. Crusader chronicles record their destruction and then, a generation later, their reappearance. Ottoman census material counts them in the four holy cities.

None of these sources had any interest in supporting a modern political position, which is what makes them useful. A Crusader chronicler recording a massacre is not trying to prove a continuous Jewish presence. He is describing what he found there, and what he found there was a community with synagogues and leaders and a life of its own.

The same applies to the rabbinic material. The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in Tiberias by scholars who lived in the land, argued about its agricultural laws, and disputed the calendar with the community in Babylon. Those debates only make sense if a Jewish presence was there to have them, working the soil that the laws describe.

Jeremiah’s promise that the offspring of Israel would not cease from being a nation before God is one of the strongest in the prophets (Jeremiah 31:36). Whatever we make of the politics, the survival of an identifiable Jewish presence in that particular land across those particular centuries is precisely the sort of thing that promise leads a reader to expect.

So, now what?

Get your history right before you form your opinions, especially on a subject where everyone is shouting. Christians ought to be the people who check things, because we serve the God of truth and because half-remembered claims do enormous damage once they harden into slogans.

And take the encouragement that runs underneath the facts. The God who kept a people in that land through nineteen centuries of pressure is not a God who loses track of his own. If he can preserve a remnant across empires, can he not preserve you across a difficult year?

I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them, says the LORD your God.

Amos 9:15, ESV