Jewish Immigration to the Land of Israel
Scott Abramson and Ken Stein
The Exile and the Homeland
It may be said that the Jewish people’s entire “cosmology” (the origin and nature of the universe) since their birth as a people in the late Bronze Age (3300-1200 BCE) down to the present day has centered on the Land of Israel. In the Jewish mind throughout history, there’s the Land of Israel and then there’s everywhere else; if a Jew was not in the homeland, he or she was in exile. It was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that some Jews in the Diaspora felt, for the first time, that they could “unpack their bags” and look upon life in their “host-countries” as a permanent condition rather than as a passing phase. Even so, this remained a minority view in the Jewish world, limited to the assimilated Jewish communities of the more tolerant and prosperous West. Most Jews in the Diaspora, whether believers waiting for the messiah or Zionists aspiring to self-government, understood themselves as exiles. Yet, the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel was no recent phenomenon spawned by the evolution of modern nationalism; the centrality of Zion and Jerusalem are core to thousands of years of Jewish identity.
So central was the Land of Israel to the Jewish people’s spatial consciousness that it shaped their “sense of direction.” As prescribed by the Talmud (Berakhot 30a), Jewish worshippers turn toward Zion and Jerusalem when reciting their thrice-daily prayers and in many other places of Jewish liturgy. This orientation is emphasized in synagogue architecture, which situates the Torah ark (the niche enshrining the Torah scrolls) toward Jerusalem. Even the everyday vocabulary of Jews places the Land of Israel at the center of their existence. In Hebrew, the points on the compass (i.e., north, south, east, west) take their names from landmarks in and around the Land of Israel, reflecting the geographical perspective of one in the Land of Israel. Thus, the Hebrew word for “west” is yam (“sea”) because the Mediterranean forming the country’s western border, and the word for “south” is negev because the desert of this name makes up the southern half of the country. In this way, proper nouns of fixed places in the Land of Israel became common nouns for general directions.
Space and language have overlapped in other ways to express the centrality of the Land of Israel in the Jewish consciousness. Just as Jewish existence is divided between the two realms of the homeland and the galut (exile), the Hebrew language features different words for one’s movement relative to the Land of Israel–depending on whether one is going to or leaving the homeland. The Hebrew word for immigrating to the Land of Israel is aliyah, a word so familiar to non-Jews it’s recorded in English dictionaries. Literally meaning “ascent,” the word aliyah, in antiquity, was understood literally, as it described the physical rise in elevation of Jews ascending some 3,000 feet into the hill country of Judea. These Jewish ascenders might be pilgrims or returnees from Alexandria, Aleppo, or Babylon whose journey from the lowlands to the hill country of Judea was an upward trek.
But in time, the meaning of aliyah turned from literal to metaphorical and from topographical to spiritual. A Jew bound for the Jewish heartland of Judea, the cradle of Jewish peoplehood and the seat of the Jewish capital, was rising to a higher plane of existence. The opposite of aliyah–that is, the spiritual uplift exalts the Jew to spiritual heights–is yerida, “descent,” which degrades the Jewish expatriate to spiritual depths. Moses Maimonides, medieval Judaism’s greatest philosopher, even gave the stigma of yerida legal standing, ruling, “It is forbidden to emigrate from the Land of Israel and go abroad unless one goes to study the Law or to marry a wife or to rescue property from heathens and then returns to the Land of Israel.” It was on this principle that the Rebbe, the last rabbi of the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty, eschewed visiting the Land of Israel.
Like the directional words and the terms aliyah and yerida, the historical absence of certain Hebrew words attests to the dominance of the Land of Israel in the spatial awareness of the Jewish people. Although the Hebrew language, the world’s oldest language in continuous use, is more than three millennia old, it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that a word for “immigrate” was added to the Hebrew lexicon, courtesy of the Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the moving spirit behind Hebrew’s revival. There was, however, a word meaning “to immigrate to the Land of Israel,” a verb that derives from the same root as aliyah. How telling it is that despite the antiquity of Hebrew and the constant migrations of its speakers for millennia, the only word for “immigrate” was destination-specific, to immigrate to the Land of Israel. The Land of Israel, after all, was the only land worth immigrating to.
Aliyah in Jewish Law and Thought and the “Negation of the Diaspora”
The Romans’ genocidal massacres, deportations, and, finally, their vengeful ban on Jewish residence in Judea, had reduced the Jewish population of the Land of Israel such that more Jews lived in the Diaspora than in the homeland. But centuries earlier, ever since the first Jews were carried off into exile and the Diaspora began, Jews have been returning to the Land of Israel. The yearnings of the Diaspora’s first residents are immortalized in one of the best-known Psalms, Psalm 137: “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill.” It was with these words that Theodor Herzl closed out the last Zionist Congress he attended before dying.
The motives that impelled Jews through history to brave the life-threatening hazards of premodern travel to the land of their ancestors were varied. For some, living in the Land of Israel was important, but dying there was no less so because it meant being interred in the Land of Israel’s sacred soil. The Talmud explicitly sanctifies this practice: “Whoever is buried in the Land of Israel is deemed to be buried under the altar.” Indeed, Jews throughout history trekked there in the twilight of their lives expressly to be buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, the world’s oldest Jewish cemetery.
The Talmud likewise sanctifies living in the Land of Israel, laying down that “it is better for a person to live in the Land of Israel in a city entirely of non-Jews than to live outside the Land in a city entirely Jewish.” Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish rabbi and philosopher, went even further, ruling that living in the Land of Israel was no mere sacred act; it was indeed a sacred obligation, “a positive commandment for all generations obligating every individual, even during the period of exile [the pre-messianic age].” To put precept into practice, Nachmanides braved the perils of long-distance travel to settle in Acre under the inhospitable rule of the Crusaders. Yehuda HaLevi, another eminent Jew from Muslim Spain attempted the same journey, hoping to bridge the Diaspora-Homeland divide lamented in the best-known line from all his poetry: “My heart is in the east, and I in the distant west.” History does not record whether he united body and soul and reached the Land of Israel or if he died en route in Cairo.
If Nachmanides felt that it was incumbent on every Jew to live in the Land of Israel, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the great-grandson of the founder of Hasidic Judaism, felt that living in the Land of Israel was the only means to a complete Jewish existence. Rabbi Nachman spoke of the “ultimate level of faith which can only be achieved in the Land of Israel” and argued that “genuine enlightenment and wisdom come only in the Land of Israel.” The doctrine that Jews are obliged to live in the Land of Israel and the belief that a complete Jewish life cannot be attained in exile are antecedents of Zionist principles, principles held by religious and secular Zionists alike. It didn’t matter, for instance, that Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was an atheist when he echoed Rabbi Nachman’s pronouncement of three centuries earlier, declaring, “Only in the State of Israel is a full Jewish life possible.” Ben-Gurion’s view is indeed a popular one in Israel. One of Israel’s most celebrated litterateurs, A.B. Yehoshua, described his estimation of Diaspora Jews starkly: “They are partial Jews while I am a complete Jew.” Nor was Yehoshua the only literary luminary in Israel to speak of the Diaspora in Ben-Gurion’s idiom. Both Israel’s first prime minister and Natan Alterman called American Jews “Babylonians” because the largest Diaspora community, like some of the ancient Jewish exiles in Babylon, reserved the right to return home but chose not to exercise it. These Israelis were enunciating a tenet of Zionist philosophy known as the “negation of the Diaspora” (shlilat hagolah), which holds that there is only one authentic and legitimate arena of Jewish life: the Land of Israel. It was in this spirit that Ben-Zion Dinur, the preeminent Zionist historian and Israel’s third minister of education, famously declared, “Zionism is a revolt against the Diaspora.”
Aliyah in Jewish Practice
Before train travel and the steamship revolutionized long-distance transport in the nineteenth century, pre-modern travel was a dangerous and, often, lethal proposition. A strong constitution and good fortune were essentials; otherwise, adverse weather, wildlife, disease, dehydration, highway robbers, and stranding threatened to intercept these travelers. Typical was the experience of the eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish preacher Judah the Hasid, who, in 1700, led a caravan of some 1,500 Jews to the Land of Israel. By the time they reached their destination, disease had claimed a third of their party. And yet, for all these potentially fatal hazards, Jewish returnees to the Land of Israel have been numerous and constant. In the words of the Israeli Declaration: “Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland.”
Though the journey to the Land of Israel was the real hardship, life in premodern Palestine was no easy affair either. Palestine under Arab and Muslim became a thinly populated backwater with no city of any importance to regional commerce except, to a very limited extent, Ramle from the ninth through the eleventh century, and Acre from the mid seventh to the early eighteenth century. Far from immigrating for commercial or financial reasons, the Jews throughout history who returned to the Land of Israel were driven by religious, national, and sentimental motives. In recognition of the merit of living in the Land of Israel and in support of their kinsmen languishing in Palestine, Diaspora Jewry provided for the upkeep of these communities. A roving fundraiser known as an “emissary of Zion” (shaliach zion) would make his rounds, going from community to community soliciting alms from Jews in exile to sustain Jews in the homeland.
The return of Jews to their homeland has been continuous, uninterrupted since antiquity. These inflows of Jews into their homeland were sometimes a trickle, sometimes a wave, and sometimes a flood. On occasion, these homecomings were coordinated, collective efforts–like the “Aliyah of 300 Rabbis,” the mass Aliyah of French and British Jewish scholars in 1211–but mostly they were haphazard personal initiatives of individuals. The volume of immigration was often tied to an event in the Diaspora–a country’s expulsion of Jews, for instance–or in anticipation of an event in the homeland: namely, the coming of the messiah.
One way in which the two events and two locations were interrelated related to the coming of the messiah. In Jewish theology, it is believed that adversity and upheaval will usher in the messianic age, an event known as chevlei mashiach or “the [birth] pangs of the messiah.” Now, since tribulation has been one of the most salient features of Diaspora experience, Jews were inclined to think that the disasters that befell them time and again were preludes to the coming of the messiah. In anticipation of the messiah’s advent, Diaspora Jews would “prepare” for redemption by selling off their possessions and hastening home to the Land of Israel. But it wasn’t only disaster that convinced Jews throughout history to go to the Land of Israel in the belief that the messianic age was upon them. Numbers convinced some Jews too. Using an alphanumerical system in which numbers correspond to Hebrew letters, Jews throughout history believed that certain years would bring the messianic age because certain configurations of numbers spelled words or acronyms related, in some way, to the messiah. Using this method of hishuv haketz or “calculation of the end [of exile],” Jews became convinced in certain years–for example, 1648, 1700, 1706, 1740, 1840–portended the messiah’s advent, so they made their way to Palestine to welcome him. The most recent such year that brought thousands of Jewish messianists to the Land of Israel was 1840 (5600 in the Hebrew calendar). Citing the Talmud and the Zohar, the central text of Kabbalah, eminent rabbis like the Sephardic Judah Alkalai and the Ashkenazi Gaon of Vilna encouraged their disciples to return home to await the messiah. One of those who heeded the call was Rabbi Moshe Rivlin, the ancestor of former Israeli president Reuven Rivlin.
Besides messianic expectancy and the desire or, depending on one’s view, the obligation to live in the Land of Israel, expulsion was another force that drove Jews back to their homeland. Expulsion was a theme of Jewish exilic experience, and many Jews banished from their host-countries would simply look for refuge in the nearest place that would have them. But this often proved a temporary solution. In 1290, when England expelled its Jews, most of them settled in neighboring France only to be expelled from there, too, in 1306. The same was true of Jewish refugees from Spain, which expelled the Jews in 1492, and went to neighboring Portugal, which, in turn, expelled them five years later. But many Jews were led by a search not only for shelter, but also for what the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher George Steiner called “at-homeness.” And where else could a Jew feel at home than in his or her homeland?
Jewish expellees who preferred the familiarity of the homeland to the proximity of the closest country that would have them have been returning to the Land of Israel since the Second Temple Period (539 BCE-70 CE) despite the perils of preindustrial long-distance travel.
Such was the decision of, among countless others, the two Jewish tribes expelled from the city of Medina by Mohammed and from the Hijaz by his successor Omar. If two more examples may be singled out from among many, the same choice was made by many Jews expelled from Muslim Spain in the twelfth century and from Christian Spain in the fifteenth century. These Jewish expellees could have stayed closer to Iberia, but the chose to return home and thus
formed the largest mass repatriation of Jews until the Zionist aliyot of the late nineteenth century.
These Sephardic refugees didn’t merely settle in the Land of Israel, they transformed it. They single-handedly turned Safed into a center of learning and kabbalah, setting up there the first printing press in all of Western Asia. In sixteenth-century Hebron, they, under the leadership of Rabbi Malkiel Ashkenazi, “the father of Hebron settlement,” completely resuscitated the town’s languishing Jewish community. Meanwhile in Tiberias, Sephardim didn’t just revive the Jewish community, they rebuilt the town itself. Only a few years earlier, an Italian rabbi had described Tiberias as “in ruins and desolate,” where “no man can walk [there] for fear of the Arabs.” But after Sephardic philanthropists secured the Ottoman sultan’s personal permission by way of a decree, the refugees breathed new life into a landscape that, a few years earlier, had been a wasteland. Olim (those who make aliyah) can also be credited with the renewal of Jewish life in Tiberias after the town was twice destroyed in the ensuing centuries. The Jewish community of Tiberias was revived by Rabbi Chaim Abulafia from Turkey after the Druze laid waste to it in 1660 and by Rabbi Haim Shumuel Hacohen Konorti from Italy after an earthquake reduced it to ruins in 1837. Olim made their indelible mark on other cities of the Land of Israel well before the emergence of Zionism. Thanks to immigration mostly from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, the Jews of Jerusalem attained a residential majority in the 1860s. One Jewish community founded by olim proved especially helpful to the Zionists who began arriving in the Land of Israel in the 1880s. The descendants of the mostly North African olim who established the Jewish community in Jaffa around 1800 helped the Zionist new arrivals at the end of the century, smoothing obstacles for them in an unfamiliar environment. Providing hospitality, facilitating land purchase, and interceding with the Ottoman bureaucracy on their behalf, the veteran Jewish residents of Jaffa rendered many valuable services to the Zionists. The Zionists were only the latest Jews to continue the 2,500-year-old tradition that the Jews of Jaffa (or their recent ancestors) had themselves upheld not long before: returning home.
Prestate Immigration (1882-1948)
Reconnecting diaspora Jews physically to the land of Israel was essential to Zionism’s success. Understanding how and why Jews embraced Zion anew and where they settled is explained in depth at Forming a Nucleus for the Jewish state (Spanish) and (Hebrew). The First Aliyah (1882-1903) was the beginning of five consecutive waves of Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel prior to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This Aliyah comprised individuals and small groups like Hibbat Zion and the Bilu, the two most influential groups that settled in the Land of Israel during this period. Leaving behind pogroms—organized massacres of Jews—in Russia and driven by idealism, they aspired to create a Jewish home for themselves in Eretz Israel. By 1903, 25,000 immigrants had established 28 agricultural settlements in addition to “Mikveh Israel,” the first Jewish agricultural school in Palestine. Hebrew was revived and modernized as a spoken language, and 90,000 acres of land were purchased.
Fear and insecurity from the 1903 Kishinev pogroms and other systematic government attacks against Jews in Russia drove some the 40,000 Jews to immigrate to Palestine during what came to be called the Second Aliyah (1904-1914). More than 50,000 acres of land (200,000 dunams) from Arab owners were purchased, with notably other large areas in the Jezreel Valley south of Haifa in initial stages of negotiations, with areas in consummated in the 1920s. The newcomers possessed an idealistic fervor similar to that of the First Aliyah and, in addition, brought the beliefs of socialism and set the stage for “Labor” Zionism, one of the core foundations of the Jewish state. The Second Aliyah arrivals coincided with the early years of the official Zionist enterprise, including the opening of a Palestine office of the Zionist Organization in Jaffa in 1908. In 1909, the first Kibbutz (Degania), the first modern Jewish city, Tel Aviv, and the first self-defense group, Hashomer was established. Hashomer was the precursor of the
Haganah, established in 1920 and itself the forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces. Four decades before the British articulated. Balfour Declaration to ‘facilitate the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine,’ Jewish immigrants were already in the mode of linking people to the land.
The Third Aliyah (1919-1923) coincided with the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the post-World War I period. Fear, insecurity, and the hope of nation-building motivated many of these immigrants. The 1917 Balfour Declaration and British control over Palestine offered the prospect of stability and security. The British government set up its administration in Palestine seeking to elicit Jewish and Arab participation in local government; the Zionists participated, but the Arab political community refused and boycotted. 35,000 immigrants were drawn to Eretz Israel. The majority came from Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Romania and a few hundred came from Western European countries. Those in the Third Aliyah were mostly young people, many single males, who had received preparatory agricultural training. Upon arrival, they were ready to do pioneering and organizational work. They established the Palestine office of the world Zionist Organization in 1907, the Histadrut, a labor federation, small businesses, political parties, the Haganah, and the Palestine office of the Jewish National Fund in 1921.
During the Fourth Aliyah (1924-1929), the British continued their policy of dual obligation to Jewish and Arab communities. In the fields of Jewish land settlement and Jewish immigration, British policy was to neither make Palestine wholly Jewish nor to subordinate Jews to the Arab population. In immigration, Britain applied a principle of Jewish immigration tied to an ambiguous formula established in its 1922 policy statement of the “economic absorptive capacity of the country” to take in new immigrants. Zionists argued that such a capacity was limitless, while the Arab political leadership continued to insist that both immigration and land purchase be halted and the entire idea of a Jewish national home come to an end. Different from the previous waves of immigration, this Aliyah was driven by economic forces and the restrictive US 1924 Immigration Act, which established and applied national origin-based quotas. While improved economic conditions in Palestine made it more attractive to immigrants, there was, for a brief period of time, an actual increase in Jewish immigration from Palestine in 1927. Yet, more than 80,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine in the Fourth Aliyah. Middle-class newcomers settled in towns and invested in workshops, small factories, restaurants and shops. They contributed to the development of the coastal region by developing agricultural villages with citrus orchards. Thousands invested their own savings in new enterprises, indicating deep personal commitments to Zionist aspirations. Early in this period, the British administration in Palestine acknowledged that the Jewish community was creating political, social, and economic separation from the Arab community.
The Fifth Aliyah (1929-1936) was spurred by increased commitment to Zionism among European Jews and the rise in anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany and was compounded by difficulties in emigrating to the U.S. and Canada. Some 250,000 Jews immigrated and 80,000 acres of land were purchased. These seven years saw the largest Jewish demographic and geophysical increases of the Mandate Period. Significantly, from early 1932 onward, the Palestinian Arab press repeatedly castigates Palestinian leaders, small owners, and land brokers for engaging in land sales to Jews. More than a quarter of the immigrants came from Germany and Austria. They brought with them a good deal of capital, contributing to economic growth in the Jewish sector, expanding trade, industry and agriculture. Most of these immigrants settled in urban areas and contributed significantly to business, medicine, education, literature and music. One-fifth of this Aliyah settled in kibbutzim and moshavim. Careful assessments were made about which lands should be purchased for building rural settlements where populations could sustain themselves with incomes generated in and commercial profits made on the world market. Offers to Jewish buyers outstripped their capacity to acquire land.
Britain’s White Paper of 1939 limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 Jews over five years, after which Jewish immigration would be prohibited entirely unless an unlikely accommodation with the Arabs could be reached and gave Mandate authorities the power to restrict and prohibit land sales to Jews. Jewish immigration to Palestine slowed enormously, though illegal immigration continued. Jewish land buying was stunted but did not halt completely; in fact, Arab sellers and Jewish buyers continued land transfers at quite a significant and sophisticated pace. Details on the frequency of such transfers and methods of circumventing the land transfer prohibitions is evidenced in detail in the Land Transfer Inquiry Committee Report, 1945. Zionist decision makers established 42 new settlements on already-purchased but not yet occupied lands. Geopolitically, the settlements filled in already heavily settled Jewish areas on the coastal plain, in valley regions, and along the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road
From 1945 to 1948, 42 settlements were established in Palestine with a notable concentration in the area around Beersheba. Since the early 1940s, Ben-Gurion had emphasized in Jewish National Fund meetings the necessity for Zionism and the future Jewish state to have a presence in the Negev, situated as it was between Egypt in Sinai and Jordan on the eastern borders of Palestine. Moreover, he advocated for acquiring land near the southern port of Eilat as a future water outlet. Land acquisitions in those areas were not made in large numbers, but Ben-Gurion’s intentions were clear. Due to vigorous British enforcement of their restrictions on Jewish immigration, Jews who left Europe after WWII were mostly denied access to enter Palestine. Some 150,000 Jews immigrated illegally by land and ship. After Britain handed the issue of Palestine in 1947 to the newly formed United Nations, the Mandate authorities continued their policy of limiting the growth of the Jewish national home.
Immigration to Israel
“The state of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles.” So reads the Israeli Declaration of Independence. When this proclamation was issued on May 14, 1948, some six percent of the world’s Jewish population (650,000) lived in the Jewish state. Today, just under half of the world’s Jews (7.7 million) call Israel home. Demographers project that within the next two decades, Israel will host a majority of the world’s Jews. When that comes to pass, and more Jews live in Israel than outside of it, the population balance between the Jewish homeland and the Jewish Diaspora will be restored for the first time since antiquity.
Although the “ingathering of the exiles” was always a central tenet of Zionism, the British,
though ostensibly committed to advancing Zionism, had restricted Jewish immigration since their first year in Palestine, 1918. It was thanks to Britain’s closure of the gates of Palestine that history remembers the 1940s as the decade that brought the two defining events of modern Jewish experience, the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel. Had the order been reversed, and Israel founded first, only one of these events would have occurred.
The priority given to immigration in the Jewish state was reflected not merely in the Declaration of Independence’s reference to it, but also in the first ordinance adopted by the Israeli government. No sooner had Ben-Gurion finished reading the Declaration of Independence aloud than he read another text, an edict annulling Britain’s White Paper of 1939, the document that restricted the admission of Jewish refugees to 75,000 over a five-year period. Other government measures related to immigration soon followed. In 1948, Israel set up an entire governmental department for immigration, the Ministry of Aliyah (redesignated by its current name, the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, in 1951).
In 1950, the Israeli legislature enacted, by a unanimous vote, what is probably Israel’s best-known and, arguably, its most consequential law, the Law of Return. This legislation
stipulates that all Jews the world over reserve the right to immigrate to Israel and to receive full Israeli citizenship. Since then, it has been amended twice: first, in 1954, to exclude Jews with a criminal history and second, in 1970, to bring closure to an open question: namely, who is a Jew? The 1970 amendment answers this tangled question by adopting the same criteria by which the Nazis’ 1935 Nuremberg Decrees defined a Jew. Under this definition, a Jew is a person who descends from a Jewish grandparent or is married to one who does.
While countries like Greece and Ireland have laws for naturalizing members of their diaspora, Israel stands alone among the countries of the world in involving its intelligence community in immigration. Since the Mossad’s founding, one of its main responsibilities has been to assist Jews in hostile countries to immigrate to Israel. In parallel with the Mossad, the Israeli prime minister’s office set up Nativ in 1951, an intelligence organization devoted to fostering ties with and encouraging the immigration of the Jews of communist countries.
Immigrants’ countries of origin and the Mizrahim
Israel is the quintessential country of immigrants. Today almost a quarter of Israelis are foreign-born, but the rest of the population consists overwhelmingly of the children and grandchildren of immigrants. The journey to the Land of Israel of Israelis’ recent ancestors began in about a hundred countries across all six inhabited continents. But there are two parts of the Jewish world that contributed the majority of Israeli immigrants over the years. The first is Eastern Europe–specifically, the contiguous expanse of territory that included the Russian Empire, Hungary, and Romania. The second is the Islamic world. Jews who came to Israel from the Islamic world emigrated from some fifteen Arab countries and, in lesser numbers, from Iran, Turkey, Kurdistan, and Bukhara (historical region in modern Uzbekistan). Still fewer came from Afghanistan and Pakistan. While the mass of Israelis emigrated from Eastern Europe and the Islamic world, the rest came from Australia, India, Sub-Saharan Africa (Ethiopia and South Africa almost exclusively), the Americas (mainly the U.S., Canada, and Argentina), and Western Europe (mainly France and Britain).
No less varied than their countries of origin are the communal profiles of these immigrant groups, diversified as they are by education, occupation, religiosity, and mores. Common denominators between them were few; just about all that could be said of their common attributes was that they, like most Jews throughout the world since the eleventh century, were overwhelmingly urban (i.e., not peasants engaged in agriculture). But what bound all of them together was the very thing that brought them all to the state in the first place: their common heritage.
In the first three years of Israeli statehood, the influx of Jewish immigrants was so great that the population of the state doubled. In Israeli collective memory, this three-year mass migration is known as the “Great Aliyah.” The numbers fell after 1952, only to spike again in the latter half of the decade. While Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps in Europe and Russian, Romanian, and Polish Jews figured prominently among these immigrants, the majority were from the Arab and Islamic world. And while the violence against Jews in Europe abated, with a few notable exceptions, after the Holocaust, the postwar circumstances of the Jews of the Arab and Islamic world were quite otherwise. When the war ended, their ordeal was just beginning.
Starting in Libya in November 1945, Jewish communities throughout the Arab world were attacked, terrorized, and harassed. As the UN began deliberating on a solution to the Zionist-Arab conflict in 1947, Arab governments used threats against their Jews as leverage to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. The Iraqi prime minister warned, “Should it come to a clash of arms, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries,” and Egypt’s U.N. representative warned that “the lives of one million Jews in Muslims countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state.” They made good on their word. The Jews of Arab lands became the easy prey of mobs avenging developments, political and military, in Palestine. Pogroms broke out in Aden (December 1947), Manama (December 1947), Aleppo (December 1947), Tripoli (June 1948), Oujda (June 1948), Djerada (June 1948), and Cairo (June 1948). Thus began the ethnic cleansing of the 850,000 Jews in the Arab world, a number that now hovers around 5,000.
The massacres, incitement, and harassment led to a stampede of Jews trying to flee the country. For their part, the Mizrahim did not see themselves merely as refugees fleeing to a sanctuary; they also saw themselves as returnees going back to their homeland. Disembarking in Israel, many knelt down to kiss its sacred soil. But the joy of being restored to the country of their ancestors was soon embittered by the trials of being in a country that was ill equipped to receive them. The late 1940s and 1950s were Israel’s lean years. It was a time of austerity, when the government, which then enforced rationing, did not command the resources to give the newcomers a more hospitable welcome.
Most of the Jewish refugees were lodged, first, in dormitory-like immigrant camps (machane olim) before being transferred to transit camps with single-family units, though with shared washrooms, known as ma’abarot. Some of these ma’abarot eventually grew into towns and even cities, Kiryat Shmona, Sderot, and Yavne among them. The conditions in the ramshackle ma’abarot were shockingly rudimentary. For many of the new immigrants, life in the ma’abarot–squalid, aswarm with people, unsanitary–was a rude awakening from the dream of being back in the homeland. Of all these groups, none were hit harder by the wretchedness of their circumstances than the Jews of Iraq and Egypt. These communities consisted not only of a large bourgeoisie, but also moneyed, cosmopolitan. Their descent had been an especially steep one, having gone from the luxury of palatial villas in Baghdad and Alexandria to hovels in the Negev Desert.
Besides being housed in immigrant camps and ma’abarot, the Mizrahim were also sent to so-called “development towns.” These were localities established on the country’s periphery (principally the Galilee and the Negev) in the interest of national defense and development. They were intended to settle Israel’s thinly populated borderlands, one of the country’s most vulnerable underbellies, and to distribute the Israeli population more evenly. Most of the Jewish state’s population was clustered on the coastal plain while the hinterlands remained wildernesses. Eventually, two dozen development towns were built under the 1951 Sharon Plan, named after and conceived by Arieh Sharon, the head of the planning authority in the Office of the Prime Minister. Some localities, whether neighborhoods or suburbs of big cities, became associated with one Mizrahi group in particular. Rosh HaAyn became synonymous with Yemeni Jews while Iraqi Ramat Gan became known as “Little Baghdad.”
Compounding the challenges of life in the ma’abarot was the culture shock. Israel at the time was led by the Labor Party, which promoted secularism, championed socialism, and celebrated agriculture–three things that held little charm for overwhelmingly observant Mizrahim who valued private property and looked down on agriculture as the drudgery of peasants.
To make matters worse, the largely Eastern European Israeli establishment was indelicate in its treatment of the Mizrahi newcomers and dismissive of their culture, regarding it as primitive or unworthy. This attitude of cultural condescension rankled the newcomers, alienating them from the establishment. The passage of time, the success of Mizrahim, and greater popular respect for multiculturalism have dimmed this attitude, but it has not vanished completely. Consider, for instance, a remark made in 2010 by Natan Zach, Israel’s most influential poet in the latter half of fifties: “The one lot [Ashkenazim] comes from the highest culture there is, Western European culture, and the other lot [Mizrahim] comes from the caves.”
The Mizrahi immigrants to Israel, in contrast to their Ashkenazi counterparts, labored under many disadvantages in their new society. Whereas Ashkenazi immigrants tended to have relatives and contacts already in the country, Mizrahim often didn’t. This meant that the Ashkenazi newcomers settled in Israel with a support system and social network waiting for them. Since the Ashkenazim’s contacts most likely lived in the center of the country, where most Israelis lived, they benefited from proximity to the nucleus of Israeli commerce and industry. The Mizrahim, in contrast, often wound up in the far-flung undeveloped periphery. The Ashkenazim also boasted considerably higher levels of education, a consequence of coming from Europe, where the standard of living was much higher than in the Middle East. Differing religious and social values likewise played a part in the widening disparity between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi immigrants. For instance, Ashkenazi women were much more likely to be employed than Mizrahi women, who were often homemakers. This higher rate of voluntary female unemployment naturally led to lower household incomes. Similarly, Mizrahi families were larger than Ashkenazi families, which militated against capital accumulation and inherited wealth.
Reparations payments to Holocaust survivors, paid individually under agreement between the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the German government, afforded another advantage to the Mizrahim vis-a-vis the Ashkenazim. In consequence of all these disparities in education, location, family size, and employment, the upward mobility of the Mizrahi immigrants was hindered and an overwhelmingly Mizrahi underclass created.
Although the Mizrahim would become a numerical majority in the 1960s, this predominance was not reflected at the political level. What’s more, they were often underprivileged in the government’s resource allocation. This deprivation, together with the cultural condescension of many in the government, alienated many Mizrahi Jews from the ruling Labor Party.
The event that led to increased Mizrahi representation and political engagement was the Likud Party’s 1977 victory. After three decades of hegemony by the Labor Party, the Likud Party came to power, and it was thanks, in no small part, to the widespread support of Mizrahi Jews. Even before the establishment of the state Mizrahim were drawn to the right. Vladimir Jabotinsky, the godfather of the Israeli right, and his protege Menachem Begin had admired Mizrahim, never treating them with the arrogance that characterized the Labor Party’s dealings with them. The Mizrahim not only voted for the Likud Party, Haredi Mizrahim founded their own religious party, Shas, in 1984. Whereas political parties in Israel are often short-lived affairs, going defunct within years of being founded, Shas has proved remarkably resilient. In the 1999 election, it registered its best showing ever, garnering 17 votes and thus becoming the third-largest party in the Knesset.
Since the 1980s, Mizrahim have risen to the highest echelons of the Israeli military and political system, serving repeatedly as president, chief of staff, defense minister, foreign minister. It remains, however, for a Mizrahi to be prime minister. And just as Mizrahi representation in the corridors of power has increased, so has Mizrahi income. So upwardly mobile have the Mizrahi become that the gap between the income of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is now negligible. The cultural influence of Mizrahim has expanded correspondingly. The Mizrahi contribution to Israeli literature, cinema, television, poetry, and especially music and cuisine is especially pronounced. Two Israeli media scholars have shown that, in contrast to the past, when Mizrahim were stigmatized with unflattering stereotypes, in today’s Israel the Mizrahim are associated with positive attributes like warmth, family closeness, hospitality, and festivity. “The New Israeliness is Mizrahi” they proclaim.
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Jews from Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc
After the Six-Day War, around the same time that Mizrahi immigration began dropping off, immigration of Jews from the Eastern Bloc (Poland) and the Soviet Union started to surge. The Soviet Union had made little distinction between Israel and its own Jews, whom it had mistreated for decades. After Israel’s victories in 1956 and 1967, the Soviets retaliated against their own Jewish citizens, tightening restrictions on emigration. The Soviet restrictions had become so onerous that by the early 1970s, the American government adopted measures on behalf of the “refuseniks” (Soviet Jews barred from emigrating). With the end of the Soviet Union came the end of these restrictions. Emigration, formerly prohibited, was now permitted, and with the floodgates suddenly flung open, more immigrants poured into Israel than the country had received at any time since its first three years. By the time the immigrant inflows slowed from a gush to a trickle at the end of the decade, nearly a million former Soviet citizens had made their home in Israel.
The absorption of these newcomers presented certain difficulties for Israel, particularly where employment was concerned. In the first place, absorbing the immigrants was costly, a burden Israel sought to relieve by securing loan guarantees from the United States. Moreover, many of the former Soviets were highly educated, highly skilled professionals, but the supply of such excellent human capital far surpassed the demand, as there were too few jobs in the Israeli labor market appropriate to their talents. Underemployment (work that does not make full use of a skilled worker’s talents) became a chronic problem.
Yet, for all these challenges, the Soviet Jews made valuable contributions to Israel’s economy (particularly in the high-tech sector), its society, and its cultural scene (particularly in music). Israel’s political, residential, and artistic landscape was likewise changed by the Soviet influx, as Russian newspapers, restaurants, musical events, political parties, neighborhoods, and towns sprung up throughout the country. In time, the Israeli melting pot would absorb these new Russian additives, assimilating them and giving new piquancy to the dominant Israeli flavor.
Ethiopian Jews
Until the late 1970s, if Israelis encountered one of the few Ethiopians in the Jewish state, it was more than likely that he was neither a Jew nor a full Israeli citizen. There was a good chance that the Ethiopian was not only Christian–and, as such, a member of one of Christianity’s most ancient peoples–but also a cleric or a communicant at one of Jerusalem’s two Ethiopian churches, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher’s rooftop monastery.
But in the late 1970s, this started to change, after the Jews of Ethiopia, known as Beta Israel and concentrated in the country’s north, were deemed eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. Consequently, if in 1977, there were hardly any Ethiopian Jews in Israel, by 1992, there were hardly any Beta Israel left in Ethiopia, virtually the entire community having been airlifted to Israel. Throughout this 15-year period, the immigration of Ethiopian Jews was ongoing, but the mass of these immigrants came in two major operations administered by the Mossad. The first, dubbed Operation Moses, took place in 1984, and the second, 1991’s Operation Solomon, gathered the last remnants of this community, bringing them to Israel.
The record of the Ethiopian Jews’ acclimation in Israel has, in equal parts, been a tale of woe and a success story. For Ethiopian Jews, the usual accompaniments of integrating into a new country–adapting to the culture, learning the language, obtaining employment–were compounded by the difference between Ethiopians and Israelis in the human development index. In Israel, Ethiopian Jews, an unskilled and unlettered community of subsistence farmers, had been plunged into a modern, industrial society with a highly skilled labor force. Starting from such a baseline placed the Ethiopians at a disadvantage relative to other immigrant communities. Consequently, many Ethiopians struggled to find employment in Israel. Those who succeeded to this end could usually find only menial employment.
This skills gap was paralleled by a religious gap. For all the many commonalities of belief and worship between Beta Israel and veteran Israeli Jews, some of the latter looked askance at the Ethiopian newcomers, questioning whether they were really Jews at all. Their suspicions were anchored in the apparent absence of many of the essentials of Judaism in Ethiopian liturgy and practice. Beta Israel were familiar neither with Hebrew nor the Talmud nor many Jewish holidays, and they had introduced an admixture of decidedly non-Jewish beliefs (e.g., the impurity of non-Jews) and practices (e.g., celibacy) into their doctrines and devotions.
Even though the Israeli rabbinate had already declared the Ethiopian Jews authentic Jews, on entering Israel, the first waves of Ethiopian newcomers had to submit to a ceremonial conversion, a protocol that was later abandoned. When some schoolteachers at ultra-Orthodox institutions barred enrollment to Ethiopian pupils, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef intervened, forbidding this exclusion by instructors under penalty of termination. Occasional instances of social discrimination and vulgar racial prejudice further embittered the adjustment of the Ethiopians in their new country.
No sooner had the mass transfer of the Beta Israel concluded in the early 1990s than another community in Ethiopia became the subject of the immigration debate in Israel. This community, related to but different from Beta Israel, claimed a Jewish heritage. Known popularly as Falash Mura–a designation they reject–they contend that their ancestors were Beta Israel who converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century, reverting to their Jewish faith decades later. While the Israeli interior minister has not recognized the Falash Mura as Jews as a whole, thousands of Falash Mura have settled in Israel anyway, undergoing a mandatory conversion once in the country.
Since the late 1990s and, still more so, in the past decade, Ethiopian Israelis have risen up the country’s socioeconomic ladder. The community has produced many outstanding professionals and popular personalities, among them doctors, IDF officers, musicians, journalists, and Knesset members. They have also become an integral part of the Israeli social fabric, as symbolized by the designation of their annual festival, Sigd (meaning prostration), as a national holiday in 2008, celebrated annually 50 days after Yom Kippur.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, outbursts of antisemitism in Europe, France after 2012 and 2015 in Toulouse and Paris respectively, from the Ukraine after 2014, and from political leaders, particularly the British Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn spiked annual Jewish immigration to Israel from 20,000 to some 30,000 per year. Economic instability in Venezuela and Argentina with the rise of populist governments elsewhere and the rise in antisemitism in Europe after the outbreak of the Hamas-Israel war in October 2023, contributed additionally to more Jews seeking refuge in Israel. Despite existential issues with its Muslim and Arab neighbors, Israel has remained a security destination for Jews in precarious living environments.
Documents
1922 HMG (British) White Paper for Palestine
1939 HMG (British) White Paper for Palestine
1945 Jewish Request at the End of WWII: Let My People Go [to Palestine]!
1950 Law of Return