A Palestinian Jew is a Jewish inhabitant of Palestine (or Land of Israel) at various points in the region's history (see Dispute over usage of the term below). Jews in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel are more commonly referred to as "Yishuv" (Jewish Community). A distinction is drawn between the "Old Yishuv," that is, the pre-existing Jews in the land of Israel, and the "New Yishuv," that is, the newly-arrived Jewish immigrants after the First Aliyah in 1881. After the modern State of Israel was born in 1948, native Jews in Palestine became citizens of Israel, and the term "Palestinian Jews" largely fell into disuse.
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Prior to the Empire's dismemberment, the population of the area comprising modern Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip was not exclusively Muslim. Under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16th century, there were no more than 10,000 Jews in Palestine,[1] making up around 5% of the population, possibly forming the biggest concentration of Jews in ratio to the non-Jewish population in a particular region at the time. By the mid-19th century, Turkish sources recorded that 80% of the 600,000-strong population was identified as Muslim, 10% as Christian Arab and 5-7% as Jewish.[2]
The situation of the Jewish community in Palestine was more complicated than in neighbouring Arab countries.[3] Whereas in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, communities were largely homogeneous in ethnic and confessional terms, in Palestine in the nineteenth century, Jewish pilgrims and European Christian colonial projects attracted large numbers of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe and Sephardic groups from Bulgaria, Turkey and North Africa.[3] The Jews of Palestine were not exclusively of Iberian origins, and included substantial Yiddish speaking communities who had established themselves in Palestine centuries earlier.[3]
Towards the end of the Ottoman era in Palestine, native Jewish communities lived primarily in the four 'holy cities' of Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem.[3] The Jewish population consisted of Ashkenazim (Judeo-German speakers) and Sephardim, the latter of which could be further subdivided as Sephardim proper (Judeo-Spanish speakers) and Moghrabim (Arabic speakers). The majority of Jews in the four holy cities, with the exception of Jerusalem, were Arabic and Judaeo-Spanish speakers.[3] The dominant language among Jews in Jerusalem was Yiddish, due to the large migration of pious Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. Still, in 1882, there were 7,620 Sephardim in Jerusalem, of whom 1,290 were Moghrabim, from the Maghreb or North Africa. Natives of the city, they were Turkish subjects, and fluent in Arabic.[3] Arabic also served as the lingua franca between the Sephradim/Moghrabim and Ashkenazim and their non-Jewish Arab counterparts in mixed cities like Safed and Hebron.[3]
In the narrative works of Arabs in Palestine in the late Ottoman period, as evidenced in the autobiographies and diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh, "native" Jews were often referred to and described as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country), 'compatriots', or Yahud awlad Arab (Jews, sons of Arabs).[3] When the First Palestinian Congress of February 1919 issued its anti-Zionist manifesto rejecting Zionist immigration, it extended a welcome to those Jews "among us who have been Arabicized, who have been living in our province since before the war; they are as we are, and their loyalties are our own."[3]
European Jews were commonly considered an "Oriental" people in many of their host countries. Thus figures such as Immanuel Kant (18th-century Prussian philosopher) referred to European Jews as "Palestinians living among us."[4] The British mandatory authorities referred to all citizens of Palestine, whether Arab, Jewish, or other, as "Palestinians".
The Palestinian National Charter, as amended by the PLO's Palestinian National Council in July 1968, defined "Palestinians" as "those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father — whether in Palestine or outside it — is also a Palestinian."[5] Additionally, "the Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion are considered Palestinians."[5]
See also Definitions of Palestinian.
Uri Davis, an Israeli citizen, academic, activist and observer-member in the Palestinian National Council living in the Arab town of Sakhnin, identifies himself as an "anti-Zionist Palestinian Jew".[6][7] Davis explains, "I don’t describe myself as a Palestinian Jew, I actually happen to be a Palestinian Jew, I was born in Jerusalem in 1943 in a country called Palestine and the title of my birth certificate is 'Government of Palestine'. That is neither here nor there, though. It is significant only in a political context in which I am situated, and the political context that is relevant to my work, my advocacy of a critique of Zionism. I'm an anti-Zionist Jew."[7] He has since converted to Islam in 2008 to marry a Palestinian Muslim woman Miyassar Abu Ali whom he met in 2006.[8][9]
The actor, director and activist Juliano Mer-Khamis, the son of an Israeli Jewish mother and a Palestinian father, described himself in a 2009 interview with Israel Army Radio as "100 percent Palestinian and 100 percent Jewish".[10]