The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A friend recently forwarded a podcast, Environmentalists Against War, by the economist Jeffrey Sachs. While mainly about global geopolitics, Sachs also touches on the Middle East. He questions the Jewish connection to the Holy Land by pointing out that before the start of the modern Zionist movement in the late 1800s, Jews constituted only five percent of the population of Ottoman Palestine.

It occurred to me that today, Canada’s indigenous people, the First Nations, also represent about five percent of Canada’s total population (42 million). Yet, despite the small percentage of their numbers, nobody disputes their indigeneity and their connection to the land.

Why are the First Nations numbers low in relation to the total population of Canada? Well, after centuries of mistreatment by European colonialists, including genocidal conflict, outbreaks of European-introduced infectious diseases, policies of forced assimilation (for example, residential schools), and large-scale immigration from Europe and beyond, the wonder is that they and their culture and traditions still exist. Indeed, some, such as the Beothuk of Eastern Canada, no longer do.

I recently learned a new word: self-abnegation, which is, “The denial of one’s own interests in favour of the interests of others” (Collins English Dictionary). The comment by Sachs is a good example.

A prime instance in my mind would be a 2017 Haaretz article about Mark Twain’s 1869 book, The Innocents Abroad. The book describes a voyage that Twain (Samuel Clemens) took to Europe and the Levant in 1867, aboard the ship Quaker City.

The Haaretz author, Moshe Gilad, questions Twain’s description of the desolation and unpeopled nature of Palestine, “a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.” Heaven forbid that Twain’s description should provide support for the Zionist agenda by suggesting that Palestine was empty and desolate.

Gilad explains that Twain’s visit to the Holy Land coincided with a period of serious economic difficulty. Many residents were riding it out in neighboring countries such as Egypt. That is why, he said, it appeared to be so unpeopled. (The Palestinian site Palestine Remembered makes a similar argument in pointing out that Twain’s visit took place during a hot Mediterranean summer.)

What about the experiences of the Jews of the Holy Land in the mid-1800s? Most of them lived in urban centers: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberius. Why were their numbers low?

In 1834, Jews represented half of the inhabitants of the town of Safed (Tzfat) in Galilee. That same year however, the land that is now Israel was caught between Egyptian and Ottoman rivalries — and local Arabs took it out on the Jews of Hebron and Safed.

The situation in Safed was particularly dire. Safed’s Jews experienced a month-long pogrom of looting, raping, and killing by local Arabs. Five hundred Jewish inhabitants were killed. (A second and equally devastating pogrom befell the Jewish community of Safed in 1838, this one instigated by Druze rebels.)

In 1837, a severe earthquake, with an epicenter near Safed, and felt strongly from Beirut to Jerusalem, destroyed the entire Jewish Quarter of Safed and many Jewish homes in Tiberius, killing and injuring many thousands. This was not only a Jewish calamity, but the effect on the Jewish community was especially devastating because Jewish areas were the quake’s primary foci.

Can it get worse? Yes. Cholera epidemics plagued the Holy land throughout the 1800s but especially after 1831, when steamships made it easier for Muslim pilgrims to travel back and forth to Mecca. While the disease affected all the inhabitants in the land, the densely populated urban Jewish centers were very vulnerable. Fear of cholera was a primary reason for building housing units beyond Jerusalem’s city walls during the 1860s.

The Jews in Palestine of the 19th century did not have to deal with the nightmare of residential schools, as did the First Nations of Canada. (Jews in Russia and Yemen did.) But they did face Ottoman immigration restrictions and this meant that the majority were elderly and not gainfully employed. Their impoverishment made them susceptible to the missionizing efforts of a variety of Protestant organizations, such as the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.

So yes, Jewish population numbers were low in the Land of Israel during the mid-1800s. But there were extenuating circumstances. In the final analysis, the Jewish people never abandoned the Land of Israel, neither physically nor spiritually. They are not colonial settlers. They are indigenous. In 1939, Martin Buber wrote a letter to Mahatma Gandhi contesting Gandhi’s view that Palestine belongs to the Arabs. Buber said “By what means did the Arabs attain ownership in Palestine? Surely by conquest and, in fact, a conquest by settlement.” Who are the colonialists?

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.