1948 Arab–Israeli War
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War, or the First Arab–Israeli War, was fought between the newly declared State of Israel and a military coalition of Arab states over the control of former British Palestine, forming the second and final stage of the 1947–49 Palestine war. The first deaths of the 1947–49 Palestine war occurred on November 30, 1947, during an ambush of two buses carrying Jews. There had been tension and conflict between the Arabs and the Jews, between each of them and the British forces since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine. British policies dissatisfied both Jews; the opposition by the Arabs developed into the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, while the Jewish resistance developed into the Jewish insurgency in Palestine. In 1947, these ongoing tensions erupted into civil war, following the 29 November 1947 adoption of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which planned to divide Palestine into three areas: an Arab state, a Jewish state, the Special International Regime encompassing the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
On 15 May 1948, the ongoing civil war transformed into an inter-state conflict between Israel and the Arab states, following the Israeli Declaration of Independence the previous day. A combined invasion by Egypt and Syria, together with expeditionary forces from Iraq, entered Palestine – Jordan having declared to Yishuv emissaries on 2 May that it would abide by a decision not to attack the Jewish state; the invading forces took control of the Arab areas and attacked Israeli forces and several Jewish settlements. The 10 months of fighting, interrupted by several truce periods, took place on the former territory of the British Mandate and for a short time in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon; as a result of the war, the State of Israel controlled both the area that the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 had recommended for the proposed Jewish state as well as 60% of the area of Arab state proposed by the 1948 Partition Plan, including the Jaffa and Ramle area, some parts of the Negev, a wide strip along the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road, West Jerusalem and some territories in the West Bank.
Transjordan took control of the remainder of the former British mandate, which it annexed, the Egyptian military took control of the Gaza Strip. At the Jericho Conference on 1 December 1948, 2,000 Palestinian delegates called for unification of Palestine and Transjordan as a step toward full Arab unity. No state was created for the Palestinian Arabs; the conflict triggered significant demographic change throughout the Middle East. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes in the area that became Israel, they became Palestinian refugees in what they refer to as Al-Nakba. In the three years following the war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, with many of them having been expelled from their previous countries of residence in the Middle East. Following World War II, the surrounding Arab nations were emerging from mandatory rule. Transjordan, under the Hashemite ruler Abdullah I, gained independence from Britain in 1946 and was called Jordan in 1949, but it remained under heavy British influence.
Egypt gained nominal independence in 1922, but Britain continued to exert a strong influence on the country until the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 which limited Britain's presence to a garrison of troops on the Suez Canal until 1945. Lebanon became an independent state in 1943, but French troops would not withdraw until 1946, the same year that Syria won its independence from France. In 1945, at British prompting, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen formed the Arab League to coordinate policy between the Arab states. Iraq and Transjordan coordinated policies signing a mutual defence treaty, while Egypt and Saudi Arabia feared that Transjordan would annex part or all of Palestine, use it as a steppingstone to attack or undermine Syria and the Hijaz. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish, the City of Jerusalem; the General Assembly resolution on Partition was greeted with overwhelming joy in Jewish communities and widespread outrage in the Arab world.
In Palestine, violence erupted immediately, feeding into a spiral of reprisals and counter-reprisals. The British refrained from intervening as tensions boiled over into a low-level conflict that escalated into a full-scale civil war. From January onwards, operations became militarized, with the intervention of a number of Arab Liberation Army regiments inside Palestine, each active in a variety of distinct sectors around the different coastal towns, they consolidated their presence in Samaria. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni came from Egypt with several hundred men of the Army of the Holy War. Having recruited a few thousand volunteers, al-Husayni organized the blockade of the 100,000 Jewish residents of Jerusalem. To counter this, the Yishuv authorities tried to supply the city with convoys of up to 100 armoured vehicles, but the operation became more and more impractical as the number of casualties in the relief convoys surged. By March, Al-Hussayni's tactic had paid off. All of Haganah's armoured vehicles had been destroyed, the blockade was in full operation, hundreds of Haganah members who had tried to bring supplies into the city were killed.
The situation for those who dwelt in the Jewish settlements in the isolated Negev and North of Galilee was more critical. While the Jewish population had received strict orders r
Jews
Jews or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and a nation, originating from the Israelites and Hebrews of historical Israel and Judah. Jewish ethnicity and religion are interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish people, while its observance varies from strict observance to complete nonobservance. Jews originated as an ethnic and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, in the part of the Levant known as the Land of Israel; the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah; some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as'Hebrews'. Though few sources mention the exilic periods in detail, the experience of diaspora life, from the Ancient Egyptian rule over the Levant, to Assyrian captivity and exile, to Babylonian captivity and exile, to Seleucid Imperial rule, to the Roman occupation and exile, the historical relations between Jews and their homeland thereafter, became a major feature of Jewish history and memory.
Prior to World War II, the worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million, representing around 0.7% of the world population at that time. 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since the population has risen again, as of 2016 was estimated at 14.4 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank, less than 0.2% of the total world population. The modern State of Israel is the only country, it defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state in the Basic Laws, Human Dignity and Liberty in particular, based on the Declaration of Independence. Israel's Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to Jews who have expressed their desire to settle in Israel. Despite their small percentage of the world's population, Jews have influenced and contributed to human progress in many fields, both and in modern times, including philosophy, literature, business, fine arts and architecture, music and cinema, science and technology, as well as religion. Jews have played a significant role in the development of Western Civilization.
The English word "Jew" continues Iewe. These terms derive from Old French giu, earlier juieu, which through elision had dropped the letter "d" from the Medieval Latin Iudaeus, like the New Testament Greek term Ioudaios, meant both "Jew" and "Judean" / "of Judea"; the Greek term was a loan from Aramaic Y'hūdāi, corresponding to Hebrew יְהוּדִי Yehudi the term for a member of the tribe of Judah or the people of the kingdom of Judah. According to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. Genesis 29:35 and 49:8 connect the name "Judah" with the verb yada, meaning "praise", but scholars agree that the name of both the patriarch and the kingdom instead have a geographic origin—possibly referring to the gorges and ravines of the region; the Hebrew word for "Jew" is יְהוּדִי Yehudi, with the plural יְהוּדִים Yehudim. Endonyms in other Jewish languages include the Yiddish ייִד Yid; the etymological equivalent is in use in other languages, e.g. يَهُودِيّ yahūdī, al-yahūd, in Arabic, "Jude" in German, "judeu" in Portuguese, "Juif" /"Juive" in French, "jøde" in Danish and Norwegian, "judío/a" in Spanish, "jood" in Dutch, "żyd" in Polish etc. but derivations of the word "Hebrew" are in use to describe a Jew, e.g. in Italian, in Persian and Russian.
The German word "Jude" is pronounced, the corresponding adjective "jüdisch" is the origin of the word "Yiddish". According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, It is recognized that the attributive use of the noun Jew, in phrases such as Jew lawyer or Jew ethics, is both vulgar and offensive. In such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility; some people, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a practice that carries risks of its own. In a sentence such as There are now several Jews on the council, unobjectionable, the substitution of a circumlocution like Jewish people or persons of Jewish background may in itself cause offense for seeming to imply that Jew has a negative connotation when used as a noun. Judaism shares some of the characteristics of a nation, an ethnicity, a religion, a culture, making the definition of, a Jew vary depending on whether a religious or national approach to identity is used.
In modern secular usage Jews include three groups: people who were born to a Jewish family regardless of whether or not they follow the religion, those who have some Jewish ancestral background or lineage, people without any Jewish ancestral background or lineage who have formally converted to Judaism and therefore are followers of the religion. Historical definitions of Jewish identity have traditionally been based on halakhic definitions of matrilineal descent, halakhic conversions; these definitions of, a Jew date back to the codification of the Oral
Tzrifin
Tzrifin is an area in Gush Dan in central Israel, located on the eastern side of Rishon LeZion and including parts of Be'er Ya'akov. The area proper is defined as an'area without jurisdiction' between the two cities. Nearly the entire area of Tzrifin proper is taken up by the central Israel Defense Forces base, Camp Yigael Yadin, with which it is synonymous though the base spills into Rishon LeZion and Be'er Ya'akov. Camp Yadin contains a multitude of training bases, as well as Prison Four, the largest Israeli military prison. Tzrifin was founded in 1917, during World War I, as a British base named Sarafand, after the nearby Arab village Sarafand al-Amar. Sarafand was a central British base in a strategic location, having a railway connection to Jaffa and Lydda; the Transjordan Frontier Force was established at Sarafand on 1 April 1926 with a cadre drawn from the Arab Legion. The TJFF subsequently moved to Zerqa in October 1926. During World War II, the Jewish Brigade was formed in Tzrifin. On 14 May 1948, the day of the Israeli declaration of independence, British forces vacated Sarafand.
False rumours suggested the British sold the base to the Arabs, but only Arab residents of nearby villages, some of whom worked in the base, entered the base for looting. The adjacent Arab village Sarafand al-'Amr was depopulated on 15 May. After a two-day battle, between the 18th and 19 May, the base was captured by the Jewish forces from the Givati Brigade; the place was named Tzrifin after a historical city with that name located in the area and mentioned in the Talmud. As the years passed, Rishon LeZion expanded to the east reaching the fences of Camp Yadin; as a result, the IDF decided to vacate Tzrifin and sell its land to private contractors due to the high land value. Most bases inside Camp Yadin are planned to be relocated to the City of Training Bases in the Negev. Tzrifin is located between Rishon LeZion on the west, Be'er Ya'akov on all 3 other sides, it is 15 km from the Mediterranean seashore. The base in it has three main entrances—Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem Gate and Rishon LeZion Gate, all of which are located within the municipalities, not within Tzrifin proper.
The Jaffa Gate links a street within the base to Road 44. At this location, there are a number of fast food restaurants and a pedestrian bridge which connects the base to the bus terminal on the other side of the road; the Assaf HaRofeh Medical Center is located near the Jaffa Gate. The Jerusalem Gate links the base to Tzahal Road in Be'er Ya'akov, which connects to Road 44 at the Nir Tzvi Junction in the Emek Lod Regional Council; the Rishon LeZion gate is located deep within Rishon LeZion and connects Rishon's Jerusalem Street with the base. As with many other IDF bases, Camp Yadin is a container base for many smaller ones; the following is a list of bases within Camp Yadin. Bahad 6 – the school for logistics Bahad 7 – the school for telecommunications and computers - technically located outside Camp Yadin Bahad 10 – the school for medical professions Bahad 11 – the Human Resources Directorate training base Bahad 12 – the school for command, belonging to the GOC Army Headquarters Bahad 16 – the school for extraction and rescue Bahad 20 – the school for the Ordnance Corps The school for military law and the disciplinary court department The school for governing 108th Air Force Unit and Erez Workshop Military Police Corps area, including Prison Four, Yamlat 8225, CID Dan and Yamar Center Lotem telecommunications unit 779th Military Rabbinate Unit 542nd Medical Corps Unit Anti-WMD Base B 276th Anti-WMD Center Military court for off-duty days Food supply center 562nd and 564th building and maintenance units Combat Equipment and Spare Parts Center Hoshen Center Maintenance and Rehabilitation Center 791st Workshop During the 1950s, a Ma'abara was located on the lands of Tzrifin, the residents of which moved out to the nearby towns Lod.
Several non-military installations are located in the Tzrifin area: Assaf HaRofeh Medical Center, which provides care for both military and civilian patients Shmuel HaRofe Geriatric Hospital Warehouses belonging to the Jewish Agency for Israel Various industrial complexes The Israel Defense Forces is slated to move most bases in Tzrifin in 2013–2014 to the new City of Training Bases being built south of Beersheba. The area of the base will open to civilian development, will be divided between the municipalities of Rishon LeZion and Be'er Ya'akov. Most of the area, 840 dunams, will go Rishon LeZion, much of it will be zoned for commercial development; this will including an industrial zone for medical development, next to the Asaf HaRofe Hospital. Be'er Ya'akov will get 560 dunams for residential development. An archaeological excavation was conducted at Khirbet Tzrifin in 2010 by Ron Toueg on behalf of Israel Antiquities Authority
Odessa
Odessa is the third most populous city of Ukraine and a major tourism center and transportation hub located on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. It is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast and a multiethnic cultural center. Odessa is sometimes called the "pearl of the Black Sea", the "South Capital", "Southern Palmyra". Before the Tsarist establishment of Odessa, an ancient Greek settlement existed at its location as elsewhere along the northwestern Black Sea coast. A more recent Tatar settlement was founded at the location by Hacı I Giray, the Khan of Crimea in 1440, named after him as "Hacıbey". After a period of Lithuanian Grand Duchy control and surroundings became part of the domain of the Ottomans in 1529 and remained there until the empire's defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1792. In 1794, the city of Odessa was founded by a decree of the Russian empress Catherine the Great. From 1819 to 1858, Odessa was a free port. During the Soviet period it was the most important port of trade in the Soviet Union and a Soviet naval base.
On 1 January 2000, the Quarantine Pier at Odessa Commercial Sea Port was declared a free port and free economic zone for a period of 25 years. During the 19th century, Odessa was the fourth largest city of Imperial Russia, after Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Warsaw, its historical architecture has a style more Mediterranean than Russian, having been influenced by French and Italian styles. Some buildings are built in a mixture of different styles, including Art Nouveau and Classicist. Odessa is a warm-water port; the city of Odessa hosts both the Port of Odessa and Port Yuzhne, a significant oil terminal situated in the city's suburbs. Another notable port, Chornomorsk, is located to the south-west of Odessa. Together they represent a major transport hub integrating with railways. Odessa's oil and chemical processing facilities are connected to Russian and European networks by strategic pipelines; the city was named in compliance with the Greek Plan of Catherine the Great. It was named after the ancient Greek city of Odessos, mistakenly believed to have been located here.
Odessa is located in between the ancient Greek cities of Tyras and Olbia, different from the ancient Odessos's location further west along the coast, at present day Varna, Bulgaria. Catherine's secretary of state Adrian Gribovsky claimed in his memoirs that the name was his suggestion; some expressed doubts about this claim, while others noted the reputation of Gribovsky as an honest and modest man. Odessa was the site of a large Greek settlement no than the middle of the 6th century BC; some scholars believe it to have been a trade settlement established by the Greek city of Histria. Whether the Bay of Odessa is the ancient "Port of the Histrians" cannot yet be considered a settled question based on the available evidence. Archaeological artifacts confirm extensive links between the Odessa area and the eastern Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages successive rulers of the Odessa region included various nomadic tribes, the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire.
Yedisan Crimean Tatars traded there in the 14th century. During the reign of Khan Hacı I Giray of Crimea, the Khanate was endangered by the Golden Horde and the Ottoman Turks and, in search of allies, the khan agreed to cede the area to Lithuania; the site of present-day Odessa was a fortress known as Khadjibey. It was part of the Dykra region. However, most of the rest of the area remained uninhabited in this period. Khadjibey came under direct control of the Ottoman Empire after 1529 as part of a region known as Yedisan, was administered in the Ottoman Silistra Province. In the mid-18th century, the Ottomans rebuilt the fortress at Khadjibey, named Yeni Dünya. Hocabey was a sanjak centre of Silistre Province; the sleepy fishing village that Odessa had been saw a step-change in its fortunes when the wealthy magnate and future Voivode of Kiev, Antoni Protazy Potocki, set up trade routes through the port for the Polish Black Sea Trading Company and set up the infrastructure in the 1780s. During the Russian-Turkish War of 1787–1792, on 25 September 1789, a detachment of the Russian forces including Zaporozhian Cossacks under Alexander Suvorov and Ivan Gudovich took Khadjibey and Yeni Dünya for the Russian Empire.
One part of the troops came under command of a Spaniard in Russian service, Major General José de Ribas, the main street in Odessa today, Deribasivska Street, is named after him. Russia formally gained possession of the area as a result of the Treaty of Jassy in 1792 and it became a part of Novorossiya; the city of Odessa, founded by Catherine the Great, Russian Empress, centers on the site of the Turkish fortress Khadzhibei, occupied by Russian Army in 1789. Flemish engineer working for the empress, Franz de Volan recommended the area of Khadzhibei fortress as the site for the region's basic port: it had an ice-free harbor, breakwaters could be cheaply constructed and would render the harbor safe and it would have the capacity to accommodate large fleets; the Governor General of Novorossiya, Platon Zubov supported this proposal, in 1794 Catherine approved the foundi
1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine
The 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine came to be known as "The Great Revolt", was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs in Mandatory Palestine against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate, demanding Arab independence and the end of the policy of open-ended Jewish immigration and land purchases with the stated goal of establishing a "Jewish National Home". The dissent was directly influenced by the Qassamite rebellion, following the killing of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam in 1935, as well as the declaration by Hajj Amin al-Husseini of 16 May 1936 as'Palestine Day' and calling for a General Strike; the revolt was branded by many in the Jewish Yishuv as "immoral and terroristic" comparing it to fascism and nazism. Ben Gurion however described Arab causes as fear of growing Jewish economic power, opposition to mass Jewish immigration and fear of the English identification with Zionism; the general strike lasted from April to October 1936. The revolt consisted of two distinct phases.
The first phase was directed by the urban and elitist Higher Arab Committee and was focused on strikes and other forms of political protest. By October 1936, this phase had been defeated by the British civil administration using a combination of political concessions, international diplomacy and the threat of martial law; the second phase, which began late in 1937, was a violent and peasant-led resistance movement provoked by British repression in 1936 that targeted British forces. During this phase, the rebellion was brutally suppressed by the British Army and the Palestine Police Force using repressive measures that were intended to intimidate the Arab population and undermine popular support for the revolt. During this phase, a more dominant role on the Arab side was taken by the Nashashibi clan, whose NDP party withdrew from the rebel Arab Higher Committee, led by the radical faction of Amin al-Husseini, instead sided with the British – dispatching "Fasail al-Salam" in coordination with the British Army against nationalist and Jihadist Arab "Fasail" units.
According to official British figures covering the whole revolt, the army and police killed more than 2,000 Arabs in combat, 108 were hanged, 961 died because of what they described as "gang and terrorist activities". In an analysis of the British statistics, Walid Khalidi estimates 19,792 casualties for the Arabs, with 5,032 dead: 3,832 killed by the British and 1,200 dead because of "terrorism", 14,760 wounded. Over ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, imprisoned or exiled. Estimates of the number of Palestinian Jews killed range from 91 to several hundred; the Arab revolt in Mandatory Palestine was unsuccessful, its consequences affected the outcome of the 1948 Palestine war. It caused the British Mandate to give crucial support to pre-state Zionist militias like the Haganah, whereas on the Palestinian Arab side, the revolt forced the flight into exile of the main Palestinian Arab leader of the period, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – Haj Amin al-Husseini.
In 1930 Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam organized and established the Black Hand, an anti-Zionist and anti-British militant organization. He recruited and arranged military training for peasants and by 1935 he had enlisted between 200 and 800 men, they were engaged in a campaign of vandalizing trees planted by farmers and British-constructed rail lines. In November 1935, two of his men engaged in a firefight with the Palestine Police patrol hunting fruit thieves and a policeman was killed. Following the incident, the police launched a manhunt and surrounded al-Qassam in a cave near Ya'bad. In the ensuing battle, al-Qassam was killed; the death of al-Qassam generated widespread outrage among Palestinian Arabs. Huge crowds accompanied Qassam's body to his grave in Haifa; the dissent in Palestine was influenced by the discovery in October 1935 at the port of Jaffa of a large arms shipment destined for the Haganah, sparking Arab fears of a Jewish military takeover of Palestine, Jewish immigration peaked in 1935, just months before Palestinian Arabs began a full-scale, nationwide revolt.
In the four years between 1933 and 1936 more than 164,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Palestine, between 1931 and 1936 the Jewish population more than doubled from 175,000 to 370,000 people, increasing the Jewish population share from 17% to 27%, bringing about a significant deterioration in relations between Palestinian Arabs and Jews. The uprising began with the 1936 Anabta shooting, a 15 April 1936 roadblock that stopped a convoy of trucks on the Nablus to Tulkarm road during which the assailants shot two Jewish drivers, Israel Khazan, killed and Zvi Dannenberg, who died five days later; the next day members of the militant Jewish faction, the Irgun and killed two Arab workers sleeping in a hut near Petah Tikva in a revenge attack. The funeral for Khazan in Tel Aviv on 17 April attracted a huge crowd, some Jews beat up Arab bystanders and destroyed property; this was followed by the Bloody Day in Jaffa, in which an Arab mob rampaged through a residential area killing Jews and destroying property.
An Arab general strike and revolt ensued that lasted until October 1936. During the summer of that year, thousands of Jewish-farmed acres and orchards were destroyed, Jewish civilians were attacked and murdered, some Jewish communities, such as those in Beisan and Acre, fled to safer areas. Economic factors played a major role in the outbreak of the Arab revolt. Palestine's fellahin, the country's peasant farmers, comprised over two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population
Talmud
The Talmud is the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the primary source of Jewish religious law and Jewish theology. Until the advent of modernity, in nearly all Jewish communities, the Talmud was the centerpiece of Jewish cultural life and was foundational to "all Jewish thought and aspirations", serving as "the guide for the daily life" of Jews; the term "Talmud" refers to the collection of writings named the Babylonian Talmud, although there is an earlier collection known as the Jerusalem Talmud. It may traditionally be called Shas, a Hebrew abbreviation of shisha sedarim, or the "six orders" of the Mishnah; the Talmud has two components. The term "Talmud" may refer to either the Gemara alone; the entire Talmud consists of 63 tractates, in standard print is over 6,200 pages long. It is written in Mishnaic Hebrew and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and contains the teachings and opinions of thousands of rabbis on a variety of subjects, including halakha, Jewish ethics, customs, history and many other topics.
The Talmud is the basis for all codes of Jewish law, is quoted in rabbinic literature. Talmud translates as "instruction, learning", from a root LMD "teach, study". Jewish scholarship was oral. Rabbis expounded and debated the Torah and discussed the Tanakh without the benefit of written works, though some may have made private notes, for example of court decisions; this situation changed drastically as the result of the destruction of the Jewish commonwealth and the Second Temple in the year 70 and the consequent upheaval of Jewish social and legal norms. As the rabbis were required to face a new reality—mainly Judaism without a Temple and Judea without at least partial autonomy—there was a flurry of legal discourse and the old system of oral scholarship could not be maintained, it is during this period. The oldest full manuscript of the Talmud, known as the Munich Talmud, dates from 1342 and is available online; the process of "Gemara" proceeded in what were the two major centers of Jewish scholarship and Babylonia.
Correspondingly, two bodies of analysis developed, two works of Talmud were created. The older compilation is called the Talmud Yerushalmi, it was compiled in the 4th century in Galilee. The Babylonian Talmud was compiled about the year 500; the word "Talmud", when used without qualification refers to the Babylonian Talmud. While the editors of Jerusalem Talmud and Babylonian Talmud each mention the other community, most scholars believe these documents were written independently. Here the argument from silence is convincing." The Jerusalem Talmud known as the Palestinian Talmud, or Talmuda de-Eretz Yisrael, was one of the two compilations of Jewish religious teachings and commentary, transmitted orally for centuries prior to its compilation by Jewish scholars in the Land of Israel. It is a compilation of teachings of the schools of Tiberias and Caesarea, it is written in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, a Western Aramaic language that differs from its Babylonian counterpart. This Talmud is a synopsis of the analysis of the Mishnah, developed over the course of nearly 200 years by the Academies in Galilee Because of their location, the sages of these Academies devoted considerable attention to analysis of the agricultural laws of the Land of Israel.
Traditionally, this Talmud was thought to have been redacted in about the year 350 by Rav Muna and Rav Yossi in the Land of Israel. It is traditionally known as the Talmud Yerushalmi, but the name is a misnomer, as it was not prepared in Jerusalem, it has more been called "The Talmud of the Land of Israel". Its final redaction belongs to the end of the 4th century, but the individual scholars who brought it to its present form cannot be fixed with assurance. By this time Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire and Jerusalem the holy city of Christendom. In 325, Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, said "let us have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd." This policy made a Jew an pauper. The compilers of the Jerusalem Talmud lacked the time to produce a work of the quality they had intended; the text is not easy to follow. The apparent cessation of work on the Jerusalem Talmud in the 5th century has been associated with the decision of Theodosius II in 425 to suppress the Patriarchate and put an end to the practice of semikhah, formal scholarly ordination.
Some modern scholars have questioned this connection. Despite its incomplete state, the Jerusalem Talmud remains an indispensable source of knowledge of the development of the Jewish Law in the Holy Land, it was an important resource in the study of the Babylonian Talmud by the Kairouan school of Chana
Ma'abarot
Ma'abarot were refugee absorption camps in Israel in the 1950s. The Ma'abarot were meant to provide accommodation for the large influx of Jewish refugees and new Jewish immigrants arriving to the newly independent State of Israel, replacing the less habitable immigrant camps or tent cities; the ma'abarot began to decline by mid-1950s and were transformed into Development Towns. The last Ma'abara was closed in 1963; the Hebrew word Ma'abara derives from the word ma'avar. Ma'abarot were meant to be temporary communities for the new arrivals. Immigrants housed in these communities were Jewish refugees from Middle East and North Africa, as well as Holocaust survivors from Europe; the first Jews to arrive in Israel post-WWII were Ashkenazi Holocaust survivors from displaced-persons camps in Germany and Italy, British detention camps in Cyprus. These refugees were from central and Eastern Europe. In subsequent years, the number of Ashkenazi Jewish refugees declined, the number of Sephardi Jews from North Africa and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East increased.
The sudden arrival of over 130,000 Iraqi Jews in Israel in the early 1950s meant that a third of immigrant camp dwellers were of Iraqi Jewish origin. At the end of 1949 there had been 90,000 Jews housed in immigration camps. More habitable housing had been provided to replace the tents of the immigrant camps, the camps were renamed into "transition camps", or "ma'abarot". Most of ma'abarot residents were housed in temporary tin dwellings. Over 80% of the residents were Jewish refugees from across Arab and Muslim countries in Middle East and North Africa. Scholars Emma Murphy and Clive Jones offer a critique of the ma'abarot system, contending that "housing policies weighted in favour of Askenazi immigrants over Oriental Jews. Housing units earmarked for Oriental Jews were reallocated to European Jewish immigrants, consigning Oriental Jews to the privations of ma'abarot for longer periods."Jonathan Kaplan describes the characteristics of the ma'abarot residents as follows: "The survivor population was older and contained fewer children.
On the other hand, the Jews from developing countries in Asia and Africa tended to have a large number of children but a smaller elderly population. The European immigrants were better educated. Neither group however, resembled the profile of pre‑state immigration: a lower percentage of the post‑1948 immigrants were in the primary wage earning group and fewer could participate in the work force of the new state; the newer immigrants had less education: 16% of those aged 15 and above had completed secondary education as compared to 34% among the earlier settlers." The Ashkenazi refugees were thus better positioned to take advantage of the pre-state Ashkenazi-led society in Israel, as long as they were willing to acculturate by minimizing religious observance, adopting Hebrew and leaving behind Yiddish. By contrast, Jews from North Africa and the Middle East experienced more significant discrimination. According to a journalist's description of his encounter with Migdal Gad maabara, "in the whole camp there were two faucets for everyone.
About a thousand people. The toilets had no roof and were infested with flies."Over time, the Ma'abarot metamorphosed into Israeli towns, or were absorbed as neighbourhoods of the towns they were attached to, residents were provided with permanent housing. The number of people housed in Ma'abarot began to decline since 1952, the last Ma'abarot were closed sometime around 1963. Most of the camps transformed into Development Towns - "Ayarat Pitu'ach". Ma'abarot which became towns include Kiryat Shmona, Beit She'an, Yokneam, Or Yehuda and Migdal HaEmek. Most of ma'abarot residents were housed in temporary tin dwellings. Conditions in the Ma'abarot were harsh, with many people sharing sanitation facilities. In one community it was reported that there were 350 people to each shower and in another 56 to each toilet. Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon produced a satirical film about the Ma'abarot called Sallah Shabbati; the film is regarded as an Israeli classic. Austerity in Israel Immigrant camps Dvora Hacohen,Immigrants in Turmoil: Mass Immigration to Israel and Its Repercussions in the 1950s and After, Syracuse University Press, 2003
Israel
Freiberg, Germany
Le Grand-Quevilly, France
Qingdao, China
Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland
