What was Lod before it was Lydda?

Lod is one of the oldest continuously named places on earth: a town first recorded under Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III around 1465 BCE, a rabbinic center after Jerusalem’s fall, a Roman colony called Diospolis, the traditional martyrdom site of Saint George, an Arab town emptied in the fighting of July 1948, and today a mixed Jewish-Arab city of roughly 80,000 next to Israel’s main international airport, which still carries the old name: Ben Gurion Airport’s international code is LOD.

Lod לוֹד (Hebrew Bible) → Lydda / Diospolis / Georgiopolis (Greek/Roman/Byzantine) → al-Ludd اللد (Arabic) → Lod (restored, 1948)

Where and what it is

Lod sits on Israel’s coastal plain about 15 kilometers southeast of Tel Aviv, at the point where the ancient road from Jaffa to Jerusalem crossed the north-south route along the plain, which is exactly why every empire that held the country bothered to hold Lod too. Its Arab population before 1948 was largely expelled in the fighting of that July, a story this site handles without flinching on the hardest-case page. Today it is one of Israel’s officially mixed cities, roughly 70 percent Jewish and 30 percent Arab, and it sits inside the borders Israel has held since its founding, not the West Bank.

Ancient Lod: a Canaanite town, a rabbinic capital

Egyptian topographical lists from Karnak name Lod among the Canaanite towns of the region as early as the fifteenth century BCE, and the Book of Chronicles lists it among the towns rebuilt by the tribe of Benjamin after the Babylonian exile. Its real flowering came after Rome crushed Jerusalem in 70 CE: Lod became one of the great centers of rabbinic learning in the land, home to the academy of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, whose rulings fill tractate after tractate of the Talmud, and the town produced enough scholarship that later rabbis debated law “as they do in Lod.” Rome rewarded, then absorbed, that prominence: in 200 CE Emperor Septimius Severus elevated the town to full colonial status under the name Diospolis, “city of Zeus,” stripping the biblical name from the map for the next 1,748 years. A Roman-era mosaic floor excavated at the site in 1996, depicting exotic animals, fish and merchant ships and among the best-preserved of its kind anywhere, is now displayed in the purpose-built Shelby White & Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Center, opened in 2020.

Diospolis becomes Christian, then Muslim, then eclipsed

Byzantine Christianity gave the town a third identity. Tradition holds that a Roman officer named George was martyred at Diospolis around 303 CE for refusing to renounce his faith, and the town’s great church, later rebuilt by Crusaders as the Cathedral of St. George, still marks the traditional site of his tomb; for a stretch the Byzantines even renamed the town Georgiopolis in his honor, the same George who became the patron saint of England, Georgia and a long list of others. The Muslim conquest of 636 CE made Lydda the capital of Jund Filastin, the military district of Palestine, but that status lasted less than eighty years: around 715 CE the Umayyad caliph Suleiman ibn Abd al-Malik founded a new city, Ramla, a few kilometers away and moved the administrative seat and much of the population there deliberately, the first and cleanest case in the region’s history of a ruler founding a brand-new Arab city rather than inheriting one, a pattern worth comparing with which city Arabs actually founded. Lydda never fully recovered its former rank; Crusaders held it briefly from 1099, Saladin’s forces took it back in 1187, and it settled into thirteen more centuries as a lesser market town while Ramla grew in its place.

Ottoman village, Mandate town

Ottoman tax records from 1596 counted 241 Muslim households and 233 Christian households in Lydda; by 1869 travelers recorded roughly 4,850 Muslims alongside a Christian minority of about 2,000. British Mandate censuses tracked its steady growth: 8,103 residents in 1922, 11,250 in 1931, and 16,780 by 1945, the population overwhelmingly Muslim Arab with a Christian minority and essentially no Jewish residents, a demographic picture consistent with the wider Mandate-era record.

July 1948: the emptying of Lydda

By July 1948 Lydda’s population had swollen to roughly 40,000, doubled by refugees fleeing Jaffa and nearby villages already taken in the fighting Israel did not start; see who attacked first in the 1948 war. On July 11 to 13, under an operation Ben-Gurion approved to open a corridor to besieged Jerusalem, an offshoot of the broader Plan Dalet framework, Israeli forces under Moshe Dayan and the Yiftah Brigade fought through Transjordan’s Arab Legion garrison in the town. What happened next is genuinely contested history rather than settled fact: Israeli accounts and Arab accounts disagree sharply on the civilian death toll from the fighting itself, with figures ranging from roughly 100 to several hundred, and historians still argue over how much of the July 13 exodus was expulsion by military order and how much was flight once the fighting collapsed local resistance. That argument is worked through in full at the dedicated article on the Lydda and Ramle expulsion and at how much of the 1948 exodus was flight and how much expulsion. What is not contested: some 50,000 to 70,000 people left Lydda and Ramle together within days, most on foot toward Arab Legion lines, and only a few hundred residents remained in Lydda itself by the war’s end.

Lod today

The town Israel resettled kept the biblical name. Jewish immigrants arrived in successive waves after 1948, first from Morocco and Tunisia and later, after decades, from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, part of the broader story of aliyah that repopulated dozens of towns like it. Lod today counts roughly 80,000 residents, about 70 percent Jewish and 30 percent Arab, one of a handful of Israeli cities where both communities live under the same municipal government, the same schools system in parallel Hebrew and Arabic tracks, and the same, sometimes strained, civic life. It is not a wealthy suburb; it is a working city with real friction between its two populations, and Shoresh does not pretend otherwise.

The propaganda, and what actually happened

The propaganda version treats Lydda’s 1948 story as proof of a premeditated plan to erase an Arab country called Palestine. The record does not support a tidy conspiracy in either direction: Lydda’s population left amid a war the Arab side entered by choice, a war Israel had not sought and could easily have lost, and it left in circumstances that included real killing, real coercion, and real panic, not a single cause. Treating it as either an innocent wartime evacuation or a premeditated plot both fail the record; see was the creation of Israel in 1948 ethnic cleansing for the fuller argument. What the “ethnic cleansing” framing cannot explain is that Lod exists today, under Israeli law, as a mixed city where an Arab minority holds citizenship, votes, and sits on the city council.

The cities, on the main site · The hardest case, on the main site · 1948 expulsion from Lydda and Ramle · Who attacked first in the 1948 war · How old is Jaffa · Was 1948 ethnic cleansing

Sources

From The cities on the main site.