Palestine, some more history (source: Brills Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World) Whatever their expectations of the Arab conquerors, there is no doubt that the Jews of Palestine were now allowed to return to Jerusalem, from which they had been banned under the Romans and Byzantines. Rabbanite and Karaite sources from the gaonic period agree that the restoration of Jewish settlement in Jerusalem came after more than five hundred years during which Jews were banned from the city. The gratitude they felt is evident in a letter of the gaon of the Palestinian yeshiva, Daniel ben Azariah, written around 1057: “And it was by the hand of our Lord that grace was inclined toward us before the Kingdom of Ishmael at the time when they invaded and captured the Holy Land from the grasp of Edom and came to Jerusalem, and there were among them members of the Jewish nation who showed them the place of the Temple and dwelled with them from that time to this day.” This important description indicates that Jews guided the Muslims to the Temple Mount, which had been covered with mountains of refuse during the Byzantine era to symbolize Christianity’s triumph over Judaism. According to Muslim sources, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, surrendered to ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb in 638. Although a clause of the surrender treaty stated that “no Jew will be allowed to live in Jerusalem with its inhabitants,” there is no doubt that Jews settled in the city soon thereafter. Goitein maintained that the treaty was a forgery, written long after the Muslim occupation of the city. Mann and Gil, on the other hand, believe that the Christians extracted a guarantee of the status quo, but the Muslims later decided that it did not serve their interests and opened the gates of Jerusalem to Jewish settlement. An eleventh-century Geniza document recounts that the caliph sent a Jewish delegation to the Christian patriarch to negotiate the number of Jewish families allowed to live in the city. Soon thereafter seventy families from Tiberias took up residence in a neighborhood of their own in the southern part of the city. Some scholars dismiss this document, not only because it is of later vintage, but also because it wrongly asserts that ʿUmar was the caliph who built the Dome of the Rock. One might counter that the author’s not knowing the history of the Dome of the Rock has no bearing on the reliability of the sources available to him about Jewish settlement of the city. The involvement of the patriarch in determining the number of Jewish families may have been a reference to the treaty clause prohibiting Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Since no contemporary Jewish sources are available, the circumstances leading up to the Jewish return to the city cannot be fully understood, nor can the obligations and rights of the Jews at that time. Daniel ben Azariah claimed that the Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem because they had shown the Muslims the location of the Temple. He went on to state: “they placed upon them conditions that they would clean the Temple from any refuse.” Muslim sources indicate that up to the era of the Umayyad caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 717–720), a limited number of Jews, who were exempt from paying the poll tax (jizya), did janitorial work in the Aqṣā mosque. The gaon’s statement may hint at this particular group of Jews. According to Ben Azariah’s letter, the first Jewish settlers in Jerusalem obtained two other important concessions. They “bought” the Mount of Olives (i.e., were permitted to purchase a plot there), and the city was reopened to Jewish pilgrims. The Jewish community of Jerusalem paid a global poll tax, which meant that Jewish pilgrims did not have to pay the special tax levied on dhimmīs who entered the city but were not permanent residents. The tax exemption for Jewish pilgrims was still in effect in the eleventh century, as noted by both Daniel ben Azariah and Solomon ben Judah Gaon (1025–1051). Since Jerusalem was not the capital of Palestine and did not have a flourishing economy, the exemption for pilgrims was invaluable, because it enabled many more Jews to enter the city and thus helped to support the local Jewish community. In the eleventh century, however, what had been considered an advantage when the Jews began to renew their presence in Jerusalem turned into a disadvantage, for as Ben Azariah pointed out, the number of Jewish residents decreased in contrast to the tax levy, which remained constant. This caused serious problems for the community, with only the pilgrims benefiting. As a result, Daniel’s exhortations to the Diaspora communities to send contributions for the welfare of Jerusalem’s Jews became more urgent.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 23:52:01 +0000
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