Palestine in 1695
Avi Goldreich is a resident of Caesarea, a lover of antiquarian books and Judaica. In Budapest, he found an old book, in Latin, which had been written by a Christian named Reland, chronicling his trip in the land of Israel in 1695/6.
The writer, Reland, a man of many talents - a geographer, a cartographer and a philologist – knew Hebrew, Arabic and Ancient Greek, as well as the European languages, perfectly. The book was written in Latin. In the year 1695, Reland was sent on a tour of the land of Israel or, as it was then called, Palestine. During that trip, he visited approximately 2500 places which had been inhabited and mentioned in the Bible or in the Mishnah.
The manner in which he studied these places was interesting. First of all, he mapped out the land of Israel. Reland identified each of the places mentioned in the Mishnah or in the Talmud according to the source of its name. If the source of the name was Jewish, he sited the appropriate verse in the Holy Scriptures. If the source of the name was Roman or Greek, he sited the context in Greek or Latin. He even supplemented this and did a survey and a general census for each settlement.
The outstanding conclusions are:
1. No settlement in the land of Israel has a name of Arabic extraction. The names of settlements are mostly of Hebrew extraction; some of Greek or Latin-Roman. In fact, no Arab settlement (except for Ramla) has had an original Arabic name to this day. Most names of Arab settlements are of Hebrew or Greek extraction which have been impaired and replaced by meaningless names in Arabic. There is no meaning in Arabic for the names Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza or Jenin and the names of cities, such as Ramallah, El-Halil and El-Kuds have no historical or philological roots in Arabic. In the year 1696, the year in which the tour was taken, Ramallah, for example, was called Beit El, Hebron was called Hebron and Mearat HaMachpelah was called El Chalil (a name for Abraham of the Bible).
2. The land was, on the whole, empty and desolate; the inhabitants were few and concentrated in the cities of Jeusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants of the cities were Jews, the others were Christian; there were very few Moslems, mostly nomadic Bedouins. Nablus (Schem) was different, with a population of about 120 people from the Moslem Natsha family and about 70 Shomronites. In Nazareth, the capital of the Galilee, there were approximately 700 people – all Christians.
It is interesting that Reland mentions all the Muslims as nomadic Bedouin tribes who arrived in the area as seasonal workers, in both agriculture and construction. In Gaza, for example, there were approximately 550 people; fifty per-cent of them were Jews, the rest Christians. The Jews engaged in flourishing agriculture, owning vineyards and olive orchards and growing wheat (like in Gush Katif) and the Christians engaged in commerce and the transportation of the produce.
In Tiberius and in Safed there were Jewish settlements, though their occupations, on the whole, were not mentioned. The only exception was fishing in the Kinneret – a traditionally Tiberian activity.
A city such as Um el-Phachem, for example, was then a village of 10 families, all Christian, consisting of about 50 people; a small Maronite church was also mentioned. (The Shehadah family)
3. The book totally contradicts the post-modern theory of “a Palestinian heritage” or a Palestinian people, and strongly supports the fact that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews and not at all to the Arabs, who stole the land, and the name Palestine, as well, stole from the Latin and still claim to possess even that.
The full name of the book and the publisher:
Palestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrate / Adriaan Reland.
Published by Trajecti Baravorum, Utrecht, 1714
An online copy of the book is available for the public at:
http://lib.haifa.ac.il/www/nedirim/eng/reelant.htm
Tags: History of Israel
June 7th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
We are going to start a series of Articles about the History of Israel, since it seems that a lot of people have a distorted view of the events in the Middle East.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Shimshon…good news and agree with you.
The distorted views need to be clarified.
History shows it is palenstine.
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:30 pm
If it hadn’t been for the Holocaust, Palestinians would have a homeland. The main reason the great powers, in the years after World War Two, stood back from the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from the land they had lived on for centuries was guilt for genocide of the Jews. The Palestinians were made to pay the price for a huge European atrocity. They are still paying today. And still, the world looks on and shrugs its shoulders.
Today, Israel celebrates its 60th birthday. To Palestinians, this is the Day of Nakba — the Disaster.
George Bush and Queen Elizabeth are among scores of Heads of State who have showered Israel with congratulations on its anniversary. In a message on Tuesday to President Shimon Peres, Elizabeth II said: “It gives me particular pleasure to send Your Excellency my congratulations on the celebration of your National Day, on the 60th anniversary of your Independence. I extend my best wishes for the happiness and prosperity of the Government and people of Israel in the coming year.”
To the Palestinians, no word even of condolence. Hemmed in by checkpoints and the Apartheid Wall or huddled into horrendously overcrowded refugee camps scattered across the region, the Palestinian people continue to seethe and suffer.
Palestinians have to be demonised so as to render this oppression acceptable. So ferocious has been the propaganda onslaught against them that many reasonable people have come genuinely to believe that Israel is defending itself in a measured way, in civilised contrast to Palestinian fighters damned for targeting civilians.
Far more Palestinians are being killed by Israelis than Israelis by Palestinians, and the disproportion is widening year on year. In 2002, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli fatalities in the conflict was 2.5 to one. Last year, it was 25 to one. And a significantly higher proportion of the Palestinians have been children.
This reproduces the pattern of 60 years ago, when Zionist forces set out to ‘de-Arabise’ the territory.
Zionism is widely presented today as the authentic defining ideology of the Jewish people down the ages. This is a sedulously cultivated myth with no basis in history. Zionism was invented in Russia just over a century ago, in response to the extreme anti-Semitism of the Tsarist regime. It became a major tendency within Judaism only after Hitler took power in Germany with the acquiescence of countries which were later willing to declare war on him over other offences but not over the persecution of Jews. At the heart of Zionism was the notion that there could never be an accommodation between Jews and Gentiles, that it was, would always be, futile for Jews to strive for acceptance into any wider society, that for a Jew to aim at assimilation was sacrilege, that Jews must have a land of their own, exclusively theirs.
The ideology was to be expressed, once the Zionists had settled on Palestine as the land on which to construct their State, in an invincible belief that any who stood in the way of their manifest destiny could justifiably be driven out, and must be driven out, or put to death.
The early Zionists were well aware of how useful their project might be to the European powers. Theodor Herzl wrote in Zionism’s founding document, Der Judenstaat: “For Europe we shall constitute there (in Palestine) a sector of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as the vanguard of culture against barbarism.” For Europe …
The germ of the War of Civilisations.
In 1956, future Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan, speaking at a graveside facing Gaza, told an audience of young men: “We are fated. Before their (the Palestinians in Gaza) very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived … This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life.”
Contrarywise, the anti-Zionist Jewish writer Uri Averni recalls with gentle regret: “That night, we attacked al-Qubab. When we entered the village, it was already deserted. I broke into one of the homes. The pot was still warm, food was on the table. On one of the shelves I found some photos: a man who had obviously just combed his hair, a village woman, two small children. I still have them with me.”
Between February and October 1948, heavily armed Zionists systematically emptied and destroyed more than 500 villages and 11 towns. Massacres were too many to mention. In those months alone, half of Palestine’s native people were ethnically cleansed. In all, 700,000 fled.
None has been given a right to return. Meanwhile any Jew or child of a Jew, from anywhere in the world, irrespective of whether they or their ancestors have ever set foot in Palestine, is entitled to full citizenship of Israel.
Today, the main reason the US and its allies offer uncritical, unconditional, unlimited support to Israel in its continued hounding of the Palestinians has to do with the strategic value of the racist State in a key region of the world.
The main reason they get away with it in the eyes of decent people is rooted in a European wish to atone. It’s far easier to pay for the evil of the Holocaust by giving Zionism free rein than it would be to look history in the face
July 12th, 2008 at 11:52 am
hello shimshon.
the above article i posted was found here on the internet.
what are your thoughts?
July 12th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Kyle, read this: http://www.likud.nl/press282.html