Jews are indigenous to the land and maintained a continuous presence for over 3,000 years according to archeological and historical evidence.
Jewish civilization in Israel was already over 1,000 years old when Rome destroyed the Holy Temple and conquered the Jewish nation in the first century.
Rome exiled only a portion of the population. The remaining Jews, banned from Jerusalem, flourished for centuries in other Jewish towns, such as Yavne, Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.
The Jewish population was decimated by the Crusaders in the 12th century AD, but it rebounded in the next centuries and grew as Jews returned in waves of immigration and settled in Safed, Jerusalem, Tiberius and Hebron.
After 1850, the Jewish population grew further. By the 1870s, Jews once again were the majority religious group in Jerusalem. Early modern Zionists began purchasing land and establishing thriving communities like Tel Aviv (1909), even while the land was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire. |
