The Jews of Ottoman Palestine
The Jews of the "Old Yishuv" are were joined by waves of immigrants, changing the map of Jewish Settlement in Ottoman Palestine to form the "New Yishuv."
The "Old Yishuv"
In Ottoman Palestine, there were between 23,000 and 26,000 Jews in 1880, according to most researchers. This is what is called the “Old Yishuv,” with most of them living in four ancient cities in the Galilee and Judea: Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and Jerusalem (the latter of which was home to about half of the entire population). Several hundred Jews resided in small urban settlements along the Mediterranean coast: Haifa, Jaffa, and Gaza. Several hundred other “Musta’arabi Jews” (Arabic speakers who were in the country before the Ottoman occupation of 1517) lived in villages in the Galilean mountains. Palestine’s Jewry was a kind of microcosm of most of the ethnic groups in the diaspora.
Immigration, Aliyah, and the "New Yishuv"
Immigrants began to arrive in Palestine from the Russian Empire, Romania (which had gained full political independence from Ottoman Europe only in 1878), and Yemen, which was under Ottoman rule from 1872.
The waves of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1881–1882 and 1890–1891 included founders of the new Jewish agricultural colonies in Israel, who became known as the members of the “First Aliyah.” The agricultural colonies founded by East Europeans in the early 1880s outlined the future map of the “New Yishuv”: two territorially continuous blocks on the coastal plain south of Jaffa and on the slopes of the Carmel south of Haifa, and another block on the eastern side of the Upper Galilee, near Safed. Over the next few years, the geographical gaps between these three blocs filled with more new settlements, coalescing into one social geopolitical entity that formed the basis for determining the borders of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
The fourth wave, which began in 1904 and contained a small minority of immigrants to Israel—the “Second Aliyah”—included the largest group of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It is estimated that approximately 60,000 Jews arrived in Palestine between 1881 and 1914.
On the Eve of the Great War
In January 1915, when the Ottoman Empire entered World War I, there was a small Jewish settlement in Palestine, with voluntary social and organizational patterns of Jewish self-government, and it was already possible to speak of a Jewish domestic culture with a language recognized as its “national” tongue—modern Hebrew.
It is true that only a tiny proportion of the Jewish mass movement from the “Old World” across the seas and oceans ended up in Palestine. Nonetheless, on the eve of the Great War, there were already political, social, economic, and cultural signs of the birth of a voluntary, autonomous national entity in the small Jewish community. Political views, intertwined with ideas of nation-building and improving the world, left their mark on innovative forms of social organization and affected the direction of cultural creativity.
Everything was in miniature, but it could still be claimed—at least, this was the thinking of the activists of the new national parties that had been formed only a few years earlier—that those tens of thousands formed the nucleus for the growth of a Jewish entity that would be further boosted by the arrival of millions more in the coming years.
During the Great War
The Zionist settlement project in Ottoman Palestine halted when the Ottoman Empire joined the war alongside Germany and Austro-Hungary. Between 1915 and 1918, the land of Israel was either close to the frontline or actually subsumed within battle zones. The war caused economic distress in Palestine. When the British army completed its occupation of Palestine in the summer of 1918, only 56,000 Jews remained there, little more than half their number in 1914.