Six Challenges Jewish Chronology

Challenge and response

Max Dimont wrote The Indestructible Jews (1971) partly as a reply to Arnold Toynbee, who had called the Jews a “fossil” of a dead civilization. Dimont used Toynbee's own method against him. In his account Rome, Persia, Islam and feudal Europe each posed a challenge, and Jews survived each one with an intellectual response: the Mishna, then the Gemara, the Gaons' responsa, the codes of the Poskim. The ribbon at the top of the page marks his six stages. The two hatched bands, between the second and third challenges and between the fourth and fifth, are what he called interregna: periods when one order had collapsed and the next had not yet formed.

His sixth stage, the “sick society” of the scientific age, ends with the “fall of the Talmud”. He did not mean that study stopped. He meant that the Talmud no longer held Jewish life together on its own: emancipation, secular learning and Zionism now offered Jews other answers. Some of his phrasing is his own, too. The medieval chart's dry refrain of “more salvation” is Dimont's irony, and it is kept as he wrote it.

Three promises, one territory

During the First World War, Britain made three commitments that could not all be kept. The McMahon–Hussein letters (1915–16) encouraged Arab hopes of independence. The secret Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) divided the region into British and French spheres. The Balfour Declaration (1917) backed “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine while protecting the civil and religious rights of the communities already there. The San Remo Conference (1920) and the League of Nations (1922) wrote Balfour's pledge into Britain's Mandate.

For the next quarter-century, Britain answered both to a growing Zionist movement and to an Arab majority that saw the pledge as a betrayal. Riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929 and the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 came as Jewish immigration rose with persecution in Europe. The 1939 White Paper then capped that immigration just as European Jews most needed a refuge. In 1947 Britain handed the problem to the United Nations.

Further readingThe Balfour Declaration · Sykes–Picot · The British Mandate, 1920–1948

Partition, independence, war

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international rule. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it, and fighting began within days. On 14 May 1948, as the Mandate ended, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. The United States recognized it within minutes and the Soviet Union within days. Within hours of the proclamation, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq invaded.

When the 1949 armistices were signed, Israel had survived and held more land than the partition plan had given it. Jordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt held Gaza. Roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled or been expelled, a loss Palestinians call the Nakba, “the catastrophe”.

Two refugee populations

Palestinian refugees went chiefly to the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Over the same years, Jewish communities across the Arab world that were older than Islam came apart through discriminatory laws, riots, seized property and, in some places, expulsion. Some 850,000 Jews left Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and North Africa within a generation. Most went to Israel, where, together with Holocaust survivors, they built much of the young state.

The two exoduses were not the same. Neither cancels the other out. The sharpest difference is what happened next. Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees as citizens, and they stopped being refugees. Most Palestinian refugees were not integrated: Jordan gave them citizenship, but most other host states kept them apart. The UN built a separate system around them.

Further readingJewish exodus from Arab countries · Palestinian refugees and Jewish exiles

Why the refugee count grew

Every other refugee population in the world falls under UNHCR, whose task is to end refugee status through return, local integration or resettlement. Palestine refugees alone have their own agency. Since 1949, UNRWA has run schools, clinics, relief and 58 recognized camps in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, pending a political settlement that has never come.

UNRWA registration passes to the descendants of male refugees. As a result, about 700,000 people displaced in 1948 have become about 5.9 million registered refugees today, many of them citizens of Jordan. The 1964 Palestinian National Charter applied the same rule to national identity: anyone born to a Palestinian Arab father is Palestinian, wherever they were born.

Further readingWhy Palestine refugees are different · UNRWA and UNHCR · The case for abolishing UNRWA

Settle, flourish, break, begin again

One pattern recurs across the chronology. A community settles, prospers, meets restrictions, then violence or expulsion, and rebuilds somewhere else: from Babylonia to Spain, from Spain to the Ottoman Empire and Amsterdam, from the Rhineland to Poland, from Russia to America, and finally from Europe and the Arab world to Israel.

The ruptures are real: the Rhineland massacres (1096), the Norwich blood libel (1144), the Black Death killings (1348–51), Spain in 1391 and 1492, the Khmelnytsky massacres (1648), the Russian pogroms from 1881, and the Holocaust, on a scale beyond all of them. The hatred behind them changed form, from religious anti-Judaism to racial antisemitism to genocide carried out by a modern state. But the ruptures are not the whole record. Between them lie centuries of law and commentary, poetry, philosophy, science and trade, and the chart records those too. That was Dimont's point: the Jews did more than survive.

Further readingThe pogroms of 1391 · The expulsion from Spain · The Holocaust

Where things stand

For the first time since antiquity, the largest Jewish community in the world lives in a Jewish state. World Jewry has still not returned to its 1939 size of about 16.5 million. Roughly half of all Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, and half in the diaspora, most of them in neighbouring Arab states.

Further readingAliyah: immigration to Israel · Palestinian statistics