A review of Palestine, before the era of prosperity began with the late nineteenth-century renewal of Jewish land settlement, shows that periodically Palestine was virtually laid waste, and its population suffered acute decline.
An enormous swell of Arab population could only have resulted from immigration and in-migration (from Jordan and the West Bank to the coastal area). It is helpful to see the land that was virtually emptied-and why.
Dio Cassius, writing at the time, described the ruin of the land beginning with the destruction of Judah:
Of their forts the fifty strongest were razed to the ground. Nine hundred and eighty-five of their best-known villages were destroyed....Thus the whole of Judea became desert, as indeed had been foretold to the Jews before the war. For the tomb of Solomon, whom these folk celebrate in their sacred rites, fell of its own accord into fragments, and wolves and hyenas, many in number, roamed howling through their cities.1
One historian after another has reported the same findings.
In the twelve and a half centuries between the Arab conquest in the seventh century and the beginnings of the Jewish return in the 1880's, Palestine was laid waste. Its ancient canal and irrigation systems were destroyed and the wondrous fertility of which the Bible spoke vanished into desert and desolation... Under the Ottoman empire of the Turks, the policy of disfoliation continued; the hillsides were denuded of trees and the valleys robbed of their topsoil.2
In 1590 a "simple English visitor" to Jerusalem wrote, "Nothing there is to bescene but a little of the old walls, which is yet Remayning and all the rest is grasse, mosse and Weedes much like to a piece of Rank or moist Grounde."3
"While Tiberias was being resettled by Jews from Papal states, whose migration was approved by a papal Bull, Nazareth was continuing its decline." A Franciscan pilgrim translated a Latin Manuscript that reported that " 'A house of robbers, murderers, the inhabitants are Saracens.... It is a lamentable thing to see thus such a town. We saw nothing more stony, full of thorns and desert.'"
4 A hundred years afterward, Nazareth was, in 1697, "an inconsiderable village.... Acre a few poor cottages ... nothing here but a vast and spacious ruin." Nablus consisted of two streets with many people, and Jericho was a "poor nasty village."
5
In the mid-1700s, British archaeologist Thomas Shaw wrote that the land in Palestine was "lacking in people to till its fertile soil."
6 An eighteenth-century French author and historian, Count Constantine Frangois Volney, wrote of Palestine as the "ruined" and "desolate" land.
In "Greater Syria," which included Palestine,
Many parts ... lost almost all their peasantry. In others.... the recession was great but not so total.7
Count Volney reported that, "In consequence of such wretched government, the greater part of the Pachilics [Provinces] in the empire are impoverished and laid waste." Using one province as an example, Volney reported that
... upwards of three thousand two hundred villages were reckoned; but, at present, the collector can scarcely find four hundred. Such of our merchants as have resided there twenty years have themselves seen the greater part of the environs ... become depopulated. The traveller meets with nothing but houses in ruins, cisterns rendered useless, and fields abandoned. Those who cultivated them have fled... 8... And can we hope long to carry on an advantageous commerce with a country which is precipitately hastening to ruin? 9
Another writer, describing "Syria" (and Palestine) some sixty years later in 1843, stated that, in Volney's day, "the land had not fully reached its last prophetic degree of desolation and depopulation." 10
1. Dio Cassius, History of the Romans, lxix, 12-14, cited by de Haas, History, pp. 55-56. De Haas adds: "In the third of the Schweich Lectures of 1922 the late Israel Abrahams ('Campains in Palestine from Alexander the Great' London, 1927) belittles Dio, Cassius' record of this war, and repeats the suggestion that the Jews were influenced by Hadrian 'consent to the rebuilding of the Temple.' This rebuilding myth, depending upon the alleged visit of Hadrian to Palestine on the death of Trajan, has been fully dealt with by Henderson in his biography of Hadrian. All the dimensions of the war, its gravity, and its duration, are fully attested by the inscriptions relating to the legions and by the honors distributed at the end of the campaign. The archeological records, carefully analyzed, support Dio Cassius and not his would-be corrector.
2. Carl Hermann Voss, "The Palestine Problem Today, Israel and Its Neighbors" (Boston, 1953), p. 13.
3. Gunner Edward Webbe, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, p. 86, cited in de Haas, History, p. 338.
4. De Haas, History, p. 337, citing Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, 1925, p. 197, translation of Latin manuscnpt by a Franciscan pilgrim.
5. Henry Maundrell, The Journal of Henry Maundrellfrom Aleppo to Jerusalem, 1697, Bohn's edition (London, 1848), respectively pp. 477, 428, 450.
6. Thomas Shaw, Travels and Observations Relating to Several Parts of Barbary and the Levant(London, 1767), p. 331ff. De Haas notes: "Hasselquist, the Swedish botanist, munching some roasted ears of' green wheat which a shepherd generously shared with him, in the plain of Acre, reflected that the white bread of his northern homeland and the roasted wheat ears symbolized the difference between the two civilizations' Had he known that Mukaddasi boasted in the tenth century of the excellence Of Palestine's white bread he might have been still more impressed by the low estate to which the country had fallen in seven hundred years.... Hasselquist joined a party of four thousand pilgrims who went to Jericho under an escort of three hundred soldiers. He estimated that four thousand Christians, mostly of the eastern rites, entered Jaffa each year, and as many Jews. The Armenian Convent in Jerusalem alone could accommodate a thousand persons. The botanist viewed the pilgrim tolls as the best resource of an uncultivated and uninhabited country. . ~ . Ramleh was a ruin." (Emphasis added.) De Haas, History, pp. 349, 358, 360, citing Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-1752, pp. 139, 145-146, 190.
7. Norman Lewis, "The Frontier of Settlement in Syria, 1800-19 50," in Charles Issawi, ed., The Economic History of the Middle East (Chicago, 1966), p. 260.
8. Count Constantine F. Volney, Travels Through Syria and Egypt in the Years 1783, 1784, 1785 (London, 1788), Vol. 2, p. 147. According to Volney, ". . . we with difficulty recognize Jerusalem.... remote from every road, it seems neither to have been calculated for a considerable mart of commerce, nor the centre of a great consumption.... [the population] is supposed to amount to twelve to fourteen thousand.... The second place deserving notice, is Bait-el-labm, or Bethlehem, ... The soil is the best in all these districts ... but as is the case everywhere else, cultivation is wanting. They reckon about six hundred men in this village capable Of bearing arms.... The third and last place of note is Habroun, or Hebron, the most powerful village in all this quarter, and able to arm eight or nine hundred men . . ." (pp. 303-325).
9. Volney, Travels, Vol. 2, p. 431.
10. A. Keith, The Land of Israel (Edinburgh, 1843), p. 465. "The population (viz., of the whole of Syria), rated by Volney at two million and a half, is now estimated at half that amount."
This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
E-mail to a friend
Source: "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters, 1984, a national
Portions Copyright © 1984 Joan Peters, Portions Copyright © 2001 Joseph Katz
1181 Comments
