Did Jews only arrive in 1948?

A common claim is that Jews are recent European arrivals who ‘showed up’ in the 1900s or 1948. They never left. Through Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman rule, Jewish communities held on in the land without a break, anchored in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. Safed was a centre of Jewish scholarship and printing in the 1500s; Montefiore’s 1839 census counted thriving communities. By the 1850s-1860s Jews were already the largest single group in Jerusalem, and a majority of the city well before modern Zionism’s First Aliyah (1882). The 20th-century waves grew an existing presence; they did not begin one. Compare Jewish indigeneity.

Read more on the main site: The Unbroken Text