Lyn Julius
Jews in Israel Before Zionism: The Old Yishuv
Summary
Following their dispersion by the Romans, Jews have lived continuously in Eretz Israel. Under Ottoman rule, the Old Yishuv was established by mostly Arabic or Ladino-speaking religious Jews. Lyn Julius discusses how during this time, well before the modern Zionist movement and the First Aliyah, Yemenite Jews moved to Israel and wealthy North African Jews invested in urban development.
Lyn Julius
Lyn Julius was born in the UK and educated at the French Lycée in London and the University of Sussex. The daughter of Jewish refugees from Iraq, she is a journalist and founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (www.harif.org). Lyn blogs daily at Point of No Return (www.jewishrefugees.org.uk). Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Huffington Post, Jewish News, and Jerusalem Post. She has a regular column in the Times of Israel and JNS News. Her book Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight has been translated in to Norwegian, Portuguese and Arabic, and a Hebrew version is in progress.
I think it’s not entirely true because you’ve got people like Haim Amzallak who was helping the the Russian aliyah settle. His brother was a Zionist nationalist and was reckoned to be the first Mizrahi leader of the Zionist community. But I think the people who thought that they could build bridges with the Muslims got a rude awakening in 1929 with the Hebron massacre, and they realised it was not going to be possible.
No, it was quite a struggle. At one point, German was considered by the World Zionist Congress as the language that the Yishuv would adopt in Palestine. So it was a struggle for Eliezer Ben-Yehuda to even get his own family to speak Hebrew.