Was Gaza ever a Jewish city?

Gaza Strip · Palestinian city

Azza עַזָּה (Hebrew, “strong”) → Gaza (Greek/Latin, via Philistine) → Ghazza غزة (Arabic)

Yes: Gaza held a documented, continuous Jewish presence for roughly two thousand years, from the Hasmonean conquest around 145 BCE through a thriving Ottoman-era community, ending only with the anti-Jewish riots of 1929 and, for the resettled kibbutzim, the wars of 1948 and 2005. The city itself is older still and was never Jewish-founded; it enters recorded history as a Philistine stronghold, the stage of Samson’s death, and its modern Arabic name is unrelated to the vanished Aegean Philistines despite the echo Palestinians borrowed from Rome’s rebranding of Judea.

Founding and what the ground has produced

Gaza appears in the Amarna letters of the 14th century BCE and again as one of the five Philistine city-states in the Hebrew Bible, allotted to the tribe of Judah but never subdued by it. Judah Maccabee’s brother Jonathan finally broke Philistine Gaza around 145 BCE, and Alexander Jannaeus destroyed the city in 96 BCE for its resistance before the Roman governor Gabinius rebuilt it. Under Rome and Byzantium the city’s port, Maiumas, became a Mediterranean trade hub, and it is there, in the modern Rimal district, that Egyptian archaeologists uncovered a synagogue in 1965 whose mosaic floor is dated by inscription to 508 or 509 CE. Its centerpiece depicts King David as Orpheus, playing a lyre to tame wild animals, labeled in Hebrew; after Israel captured the Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967 the mosaic was moved to Jerusalem for restoration and today sits in the Museum of the Good Samaritan. A second, older piece of evidence stood inside Gaza’s own Great Mosque: a reused column on its upper tier carried a carved menorah, shofar, lulav and etrog framed by a Hebrew-and-Greek inscription reading “Hananyah son of Jacob,” almost certainly salvaged from that same Byzantine-era synagogue community. The relief survived over a thousand years of Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman rule before being effaced sometime after 1967; the mosque itself, built atop a Philistine temple to Dagon, then a Roman temple to Marnas, then a Byzantine church and a Crusader cathedral, was reduced to a shell by an Israeli airstrike on 8 December 2023.

Population, era by era

Jews resettled Gaza under the Hasmoneans and held on through Roman rule, and by the fourth century the city served as the principal Jewish port for trade between the Land of Israel and the wider Mediterranean. Crusader conquest scattered the community, but it rebuilt by the 14th century; a 1481 traveler’s count found roughly 60 Jewish households. The Ottoman 16th and 17th centuries were Gaza’s Jewish high-water mark: the community supported a rabbinical court and yeshiva, produced chief rabbis such as Yisrael Najara, author of the Sabbath hymn “Kah Ribon Olam,” and briefly became a center of Sabbatean messianism when the false messiah Shabbetai Zevi passed through in 1665. By the 19th century the community had shrunk to a handful of barley traders dealing with Bedouin. The British Mandate’s official 1922 census of Palestine, the Mandate’s first, recorded Gaza’s total population at 17,480, of whom just 54 were Jewish, a fraction of the roughly 42,000 residents the city had held before the First World War; the 1917 battles between Ottoman-German and Allied forces for the city had emptied it in between.

The twentieth century: expulsion, return, and withdrawal

The remaining Jewish presence ended with the anti-Jewish riots of 1929, the same countrywide violence that emptied Hebron’s ancient Jewish quarter; British authorities, after days of inaction, evacuated Gaza’s Jews rather than protect them, and none were permitted to resettle the old town. Jewish presence in the district returned by another route: in 1946, as part of a coordinated operation to plant eleven points of settlement across the Negev and secure it for the future Jewish state, the Hapoel HaMizrachi kibbutz movement founded Kfar Darom on land purchased in 1930, naming it for an ancient Jewish village recorded in the Talmud on the same site. The settlement held through a three-month Egyptian siege in the 1948 war before its defenders were evacuated. Egypt administered Gaza from 1948 without ever offering its Arab residents citizenship or statehood; Israel took the Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War, and in 1970 a Nahal outpost was reestablished at Kfar Darom’s ruins, eventually growing into the Gush Katif bloc of settlements. That second Jewish presence lasted 35 years and ended when Israel dismantled every settlement and withdrew unilaterally in the August 2005 disengagement.

Gaza today

No Jews have lived in Gaza since 2005. Roughly two million Palestinians live in the Strip, governed since a 2007 coup against the Palestinian Authority by Hamas, which built an extensive military infrastructure beneath the civilian population rather than an economy above it. Israel withdrew its civilians, soldiers and administration in 2005, a fact obscured by the ongoing dispute over whether Gaza remained legally occupied afterward; the war launched by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 massacre brought Israeli forces back into the Strip, where in November 2023 soldiers reached the ruins of the Rimal synagogue and prayed there for the first time in close to two decades.

The claim, answered

The propaganda version, repeated in campus slogans and activist maps, is that Gaza is an ancient, uninterrupted Arab city with no Jewish past to speak of. The archaeological and documentary record says otherwise on every point that can be checked: a dated 6th-century synagogue mosaic, a carved menorah reused for a thousand years inside the city’s own central mosque, Ottoman-era chief rabbis, and a British government census that counted Jewish residents by name a century ago. What the record actually shows is a Jewish presence broken twice by violence, in 1929 and 1948, and ended a third time by Israel’s own choice to withdraw in 2005, not by an absence of Jews to begin with. Gaza’s Jewish history is real, documented across two thousand years and half a dozen independent sources, and the claim that it never existed is simply false.

Is Hebron a Jewish city or a Palestinian city? · Gaza Strip · What should come next: two states, and who runs Gaza? · Six-Day War · Gaza now · The cities

Sources

From The cities on the main site.