The Jews: From the Dispersion to the Modern Israeli State
By the time the prophet Muhammad was preaching the tenets of the
new Islamic religion, the Jews had not had a state for some five
centuries. They had rebelled against Roman rule in A.D. 66, a rebellion
that took the Romans four years to crush. Thereafter, the Jerusalem
temple lay in ruins.
A later rebellion from 132 to 135 (the Bar-Kokhba revolt) led
to the utter destruction of Jerusalem. The Romans built a new town
on its ruins, renaming it Aelia Capitolina. No Jew was allowed
to set foot there on pain of death. The Jewish nation-state was
no more. It was not to exist again until the middle of the 20th
century.
Following defeat in the two Jewish revolts, many of the surviving
Jews fled Judea for other parts of the Roman Empire and beyond.
From 638 to 1917 Jerusalem was under Islamic rule except for a
short period during the Crusades.
Scattered throughout the nations, the Jewish people yearned to
return to their homeland. Persecuted by governments and the Roman
church, denied equal rights, frequently expelled from the new nations
in which they had settled, the Jewish people's suffering
continued down through the centuries.
Toward the end of the 19th century Jews began to return to their
traditional homeland as the Zionist movement was born. Under the
rule of the declining Ottoman Turks, the returning Jews joined
other Jews who had remained in the area for centuries. They prospered
and grew in number.
In 1917, after the defeat of the Ottoman Turks, the area came
under the control of the British. In the same year, the British
government announced the Balfour Declaration, named for the British
foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, which promised Zionists a national
homeland in Palestine. Meanwhile, encouraging Arab revolt against
the Ottoman Turks who had sided with Germany in World War I, the
British were making promises to the Arabs of independence, offering
them their own homelands-two promises that would prove violently
contradictory.
A later rebellion from 132 to 135 (the Bar-Kokhba revolt) led
to the utter destruction of Jerusalem. The Romans built a new town
on its ruins, renaming it Aelia Capitolina. No Jew was allowed
to set foot there on pain of death. The Jewish nation-state was
no more. It was not to exist again until the middle of the 20th
century.