Chapter 1: We Are Not a Myth

Here, we go from ancient times to modern day. Exiles, the British, Arab Nationalism, "Jewish terrorists", Israel is only 23% of Palestine, the Nakba, the sneaky levantine hints of Ashkenazi culture, and how Jews from Baghdad to Berlin stayed one people.

A brief background of the land of Israel

While rooted in a biblical and archaic tradition, the story of Jews and Israel transcends the boundary between the religious and the secular. You see, jews are uniquely able to trace ourselves back to these far-reaching times. We’ve outlived every empire that tried to erase us, carrying our identity with us through text, tradition, and even genealogy. While may seem mythical to others is, to us, entirely and miraculously real. 

From Moshe Rabbeinu at Sinai to modern scholars, Jewish teachings and identity passed directly from: Moshe → Yehoshua → the Elders → the Prophets → the Men of the Great Assembly → Hillel and Shammai → Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi → Rav Ashi → the Geonim of Babylonia → the Rishonim of North Africa and Europe → the Ashkenazi Torah giants of Poland and Lithuania → Rabbi Naftali Amsterdam.

My own great-great-great-grandfather was R' Naftali Amsterdam, student of Rav Yisrael Salanter, who was a student of Rav Zundel of Salant, who learned from Rav Chaim of Volozhin, student of the Vilna Gaon — whose roots go back to Rav Moshe Margalit, to the Taz and Shach, to the Rema, to the Rambam, to the Geonim of Babylonia, and to Sinai.

This is not a mythos. This is documented, generational memory. 

Now, let’s get into the timeline. I promise it's interesting.

1700 BCE–586 BCE: In a biblical and prophetic timeline, we see the arrival of Abraham, the Israelite conquest of Canaan following the Exodus, and the establishment of the Israelite kingdom under David and Solomon. Solomon builds the first temple in Jerusalem, creating a central, sacred home for the Jewish people. Amidst infighting, the kingdom splits into two, the northern Kingdom of Israel and the southern Kingdom of Judah.

586 BCE: The Babylonians (now extinct) conquer the Kingdom of Judah and destroy the temple. This marks the first Jewish exile from our ancestral homeland, and a great migration of Jews to Babylonia; modern-day Iraq.

538 BCE: King Cyrus of Persia conquers Babylon in 539 BCE, just a wink after Jerusalem’s destruction. Cyrus and his Achaemenid empire allow the exiled Jews to return and rebuild their temple. This marks the start of the second temple period.

322 BCE: Alexander the Great sweeps through and conquers the Persian empire, including Judea. After his death, his empire fractures. Judea briefly falls under Ptolemaic rule, then shifts to the Seleucid Empire around 200 BCE. Initially, Jews are granted some degree of autonomy, however this is short-lived and forced hellenization pushes Jewish study and practice underground. An altar to Zeus is erected in the temple, complete with wild pigs unleashed into the sacred grounds. This leads to the famous story of the Jewish uprising by the Maccabees we now commemorate on Hanukkah.

70 CE: The Roman Empire (now extinct) conquers Jerusalem from the Seleucid empire, and officially destroys the second temple during its siege of Jerusalem. Most of the city is burned. Tens of thousands of Jews killed, enslaved and exiled. Many are dragged to Rome in chains. When Rome destroys the Second Temple in 70 CE, exiled Jews follow a familiar path: from Judea to Babylonia, where Jewish life has already taken root centuries earlier. But the memory of Jerusalem doesn’t fade. It never does.

132 CE: The final mark preceding a deepened and total diaspora. The Simon Bar Kokhba Revolt is a major Jewish rebellion, eventually brutally crushed by the Romans. This leads to Jews being banned from entering Jerusalem. And here is the crux of it all: the Romans rename Judea “Syria Palaestina” in a deliberate move to erase Jewish identity and connection to the land. As a note, they also rename Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina — yet no one today is fighting to call it that. Why? Likely because the broader claim to Jerusalem had already been cemented by others. Judea, on the other hand, is unmistakably Jewish. And erasing that name is the real aim. Jews are killed, sold into slavery, and Judea is emptied of its Jews. Following the same trail of exile from Babylonian times, Jewish life shifts east to Babylonia. Our presence in the land never fully disappears, but it is seized, marginalized, and brutalized for centuries. Until today.

After Rome, things don’t get much easier.Following the Roman period, the Byzantine Empire takes over until 638 CE. Under their control, Jews are still banned from entering Jerusalem. Synagogues are destroyed, Torah study is suppressed, and persecution is routine. Whatever Jewish life remains in the land is harshly subjugated.

638–1099 CE: Muslim Arab armies conquer the region from the Byzantines and bring it under a series of Islamic caliphates. While Jews face social and economic restrictions under dhimmi status, they are no longer banned from Jerusalem. As “people of the book,” they are tolerated, and some Jews begin returning to the city.

1099–1291 CE: The Crusaders conquer the land, and Jerusalem with it. They massacre the city’s Jewish and Muslim residents indiscriminately. Synagogues are torched, entire communities wiped out.

1187 CE: Saladin’s Muslim forces recapture Jerusalem. Under Islamic rule, Jews are again allowed entry, and some semblance of Jewish life returns.

1291–1517 CE: Egyptian-based sultans take over, and Jewish communities maintain a fragile existence in Jerusalem and Tzfat.

Now, we veer into modern times. The Ottoman Empire.

The ottoman empire lasted 400 years, from 1517-1917 CE. 

Jewish communities begin another return, specifically due to the Spanish inquisition. It is during this time Jews also settle in Morocco and other North African countries. Living as dhimmis, Jews are second-class citizens with relative protection against forced conversion and mass expulsion. 

Spain’s expulsion of jews, which consisted of many educated sephardic jews, marked a good investment for the ottomans: Sultan Bayezid II reportedly mocked Spain for “impoverishing itself and enriching us.” 

Jews were able to thrive, sometimes, however only within capacities and positions that were defined or allotted for them. This also was dependent on specific governors and neighbors. Jews were often extorted, falsely accused of crimes, and subject to mob violence. Local hostility and tolerated harassment was common despite the legal dhimmi protections. Local abuse was often unchecked. 

A particularly antagonizing example of Ottoman-era antisemitic harassment comes from Eyewitness memoirs of 19th-century Jews living in Jerusalem. Accounts by travelers and European consuls described how in some cities, particularly during Jewish fast days like Yom Kippur, glass was thrown on the ground where Jews walked barefoot in synagogues, often accompanied by stone-throwing. An ironically common trend among Arabs in the Holy Land even to this day. In Tzfat, the Jewish community suffered repeated robbery, raids, and plundering throughout the 1800s. Jewish communities in the land of Israel were often subsidized by Jews abroad through the halukkah system. 

Towards the late 1800s, a renewed wave of Jews began to immigrate back to Israel, specifically to Jerusalem. It was during this time jews began purchasing land and building towns outside of the major historical Jewish cities. The majority of the land was not privately owned by anyone during Ottoman times. In the 1800s, Jews purchased land legally from absentee landowners living in Istanbul, Egypt, and Syria.  The first time land in Ottoman Palestine was registered under private names was in the 1858 Land Code.

While the Ottomans weren’t genocidal or obsessed with racial antisemitism like modern Europe, humiliation and systemic degradation were often woven into everyday life,  especially under local Islamic dominance in places like Jerusalem.

It is also during this time that pan-arabism and Arab nationalism began to emerge. Ironically, it was Christian Arabs who first sparked the movement, aiming to break from the Muslim Ottomans and form alliances with Muslim Arabs. So just as a new influx of Jews arrived fleeing persecution, Arab nationalism was on the rise. Meanwhile, European powers, particularly the British and French, were entering the region through colonial expansion.

As a result, anti-colonialism and anti-Zionism became rallying cries. Arab only. Jews didn’t have a right to be there. Europeans didn’t have a right to be there. Only Arabs. It’s important to note that jews were never included in Arab nationalist movements. In theory, Arab nationalism included non-muslims. But once it gained dominance, it hardened into an Islamic and anti-Zionist identity, and in practice, often became openly anti-Jewish.

1917-1948: The British Mandate of Palestine

After World War I, the British colonized Palestine. In the 1920s–1940s, as Arab nationalism took hold across the region, violence against Jews in Jerusalem began to surge once again.

Before anything else, it's worth noting that the original British Mandate for Palestine, established after World War I, included both sides of the Jordan River. But in 1922, the British carved out 77% of the land east of the Jordan and created Transjordan (now Jordan), placing it off-limits to Jews under Article 25 of the Mandate. In effect, the British handed that territory to the Hashemite dynasty from Arabia and made it Judenrein- free of Jews- decades before Israel was even declared. 

This left only 23% of the original Mandate, west of the Jordan River, for any potential Jewish and Arab self-determination. Even this proved deeply contentious. 

“Jewish terrorists” are always a fan-favorite talking point for those opposing Israel. But In realty, violence against Jews in the Middle East and North Africa predates any militant Jewish response.

1920: Nebi Musa riots. 

1921: Jaffa riots. 

1929: Hebron massacre.

1936-1939: The Arab Revolt.

The British, who were struggling to maintain control over a region far more volatile than they had expected, repeatedly turned a blind eye to these anti-Jewish riots. They didn’t intervene. Rather than protect Jewish communities, they sought to appease Arab demands, even as antisemitic incitement grew and Nazi influence spread. As the Holocaust loomed, the British doubled down and restricted Jewish immigration, turning away refugees, and empowering local Arab leaders who promoted violence. 

Lehi, founded in the 1930s, and Irgun, founded in the 1940s, formed in direct response to the ongoing waves of anti-Jewish violence. Even then, Jewish “terrorists” targeted British military infrastructure and colonial authorities.

Arab violence, by contrast, took the form of pogrom-style mobs attacking defenseless Jewish civilians fueled by local antisemitic clerics and political leaders furious over the growing jewish population. This behavior was appeased, tolerated, and even empowered by the British. Jewish militancy was not expansionist or deeply ideological- it was reactionary and born out of defense and survival. 

By the time the UN Partition Plan was proposed in 1947, it was already based on just 23% of the original British Mandate. And out of that, Jews agreed to accept 55%. This comes out to roughly 12–13% of the total original Mandate territory. The Jews accepted it. The Arabs rejected it. Instead of negotiating, the surrounding six Arab armies launched a war aimed at destroying the Jewish presence in the land altogether.

Let’s break down the history no one seems to talk about:

1922 – Creation of Transjordan:

• Britain carved out 77–78% of the British Mandate east of the Jordan River.

• That became Transjordan (modern-day Jordan) and was explicitly closed to Jewish settlement.

• That left just 22–23% of the original Mandate for both Jews and Arabs- west of the Jordan.

1947 – UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181):

• Proposed to divide that remaining 23% into: • Jewish state: 55% of what was left (12–13% of the original Mandate) • Arab state: 45% • Jerusalem: International zone (corpus separatum)

The Jews accepted. The Arabs rejected. Not just the borders. They rejected any measure of Jewish sovereignty in the land. And the response? War.

When the Arab states and Palestinian Arab leaders outright rejected the UN Partition Plan, violence erupted immediately. The civil war phase began. Arab militias launched attacks on Jewish civilians and convoys, especially in mixed cities and along major roads.

Brutal fighting broke out across areas still under British rule. Jewish neighborhoods including in Jerusalem were besieged, roads were blocked, and convoys were ambushed. The violence was fueled by Arab propaganda and religious incitement, echoing the tone of earlier pogroms. In response, Jewish forces comprising of Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi began organizing a more coordinated defense.

On November 29, 1947, the United Nations voted on Resolution 181, the Partition Plan to create separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international control (corpus separatum). The vote passed: 33 in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions.

On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel- just before the British Mandate expired. That’s when the surrounding Arab states invaded.

Within 24 hours, five Arab armies: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, invaded the new state with one goal: to destroy the Jewish presence entirely.

This began the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War, referred to by anti-Zionists as the “Nakba.”

Israel was surrounded on all sides, outnumbered two to one, and armed with barely anything. No tanks, no air force, no heavy weapons. The Arab states invaded with armored vehicles, tanks, and full national armies. Jewish forces were small, fragmented, and desperate- and Jerusalem’s Jews were under siege. The new state had no real allies. But we had to fight. There was no alternative to survival.

As the war dragged on, Israeli forces strengthened, recruitment swelled, and Arab coordination began to collapse. Against all odds, Israel turned the tide and pulled off a miraculous victory.

The “Nakba” was a term originally coined by Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq to describe the pan-Arab failure to prevent the establishment of Israel. Ironically, this term has since become central to the Palestinian narrative of dispossession and displacement. 

Let’s break down the refugees: 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were displaced, including 150,000 who were internally displaced, meaning they stayed within the State of Israel’s subsequently established borders. Around 550,000 fled to neighboring Arab regions, namely Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Now, the important aspect here is the false narrative of forced displacement. Many were urged by Arab leaders to leave temporarily, with the promise of return upon the Jews’ defeat. As we know, this never happened.

After crossing into Arab countries, no, they were not allowed to return. Those who remained within Israel’s borders were given Israeli citizenship. The Palestinian Arabs who crossed into Arab countries, Instead of being absorbed, they were kept in refugee camps, often in dire conditions, for decades. And many remain stateless to this day.

In Lebanon, they were allowed in but refused citizenship, barred from land ownership, and held in separate camps. To this day, third-generation Palestinians in Lebanon remain stateless. Syria gave Palestinians education and employment but not citizenship. Jordan allowed citizenship to Palestinian refugees and, ironically, now has peace with Israel. Nonetheless, despite being the majority population, they are often treated as second-class citizens, and thousands have had their citizenship revoked. Egypt, who controlled the Gaza Strip from 1948 to 1967, refused to grant its Palestinian Arab inhabitants citizenship. Gaza was not integrated into Egypt, and its “refugees” were not allowed to resettle elsewhere in Egypt.

Why Didn’t the Arab States Absorb Them?

To this day, Palestinian Arab populations remain in intentional, manufactured limbo. Maintaining their refugee status keeps Israel politically pressured by preserving a permanent symbol of victimhood; not to seek justice, but to weaponize it. Naturalizing these populations would have meant ceding to Israel’s existence. So they didn’t.

Power dynamics also played a role. Arab leaders feared that granting Palestinians full rights would embolden them to demand autonomy or even declare statehood within their borders.

This wasn’t just paranoia: in both Lebanon and Jordan, those fears exploded into brutal civil wars.

While these 550,000 Arabs are given the spotlight, between 850,000 to 1 million Jews were expelled or fled violence from Arab countries between 1948 and 1970. Their property was seized. Their communities were erased.

Let it be clear: There is no Jewish “right of return” demand to Baghdad, Cairo, or Aleppo. There is no “right of return” demand to Krakow, Berlin, or Budapest.

Israel absorbed its Jewish refugees. Arab states deliberately refused to absorb Palestinian Arab refugees- using them instead as political pawns.

A brief background on the people of Israel

Now that you’ve got the background, it’s time to get into the contemporary questions. When people ask, “Who are the Israelites today?” the answer isn’t symbolic or spiritual. It’s literal. The Jews are the Israelites. Not by myth, but by unbroken transmission of law, memory, language, and lineage. Judaism is not simply a religion; it’s a civilizational and cultural inheritance maintained through waves of exile, persecution, and dispersion. Our stories have been maintained name-by-name, teacher to teacher, father to student. There is no other people who can trace their tradition with such clarity and continuity.

Who are the Jews of the Middle East? Who are the Jews of Europe? Genetically, practically, culturally, and behaviorally, the truth is, we are one and the same. And our routes are documented and tracked through the very tradition that kept us intertwined. After the second Jewish exile from Judea, Jewish life moved across the Islamic world. Through Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Spain, and into Europe. Throughout all of it, the Jewish identity remained intact, as did the ancestral memory of Israel.

The Ashkenazi- Sephardic distinction is not about origin, but about exile geography. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jews were exiled from Judea. Many were taken east to Babylonia, today’s Iraq, where they built thriving communities and wrote the Babylonian Talmud. Others moved west across the Mediterranean, settling in places like Egypt, Tunisia, and eventually Italy and southern France. These Jews weren’t Europeans. They were Israelites living in exile. Preserving their law, their language, and their identity.

From Italy and southern France, Jewish migration took two main paths. Some Jews continued west into Spain, where they flourished under Islamic rule and formed what became the Sephardic tradition. Others, especially as conditions shifted, migrated back toward North Africa and the Ottoman Empire following expulsions and persecution. But another group took a different route: north, deeper into Christian Europe.

By the 800s–900s, Jews had settled along the Rhine River in what is now Germany, in cities like Mainz, Worms, and Speyer. This community became known as Ashkenaz, the Hebrew name for that region. These Jews preserved the same Torah, the same laws, the same longing for Jerusalem,

Ashkenazi Jews

A common libelous anti-Israel flashpoint is rooted in anti-colonialism. European Jews don’t belong in the Middle East, they say. Notwithstanding the fact that the mass return to Israel was spurred by the very genocidal concept that Jews were racially different from Europeans, 1,000 years in exile seems to have made Jews “European”? Simply ask a European what they’d say about that.

Europeans never considered us Europeans. We weren’t Germans, Poles, or Russians. We were Jews. Marked as other, segregated, ghettoized, expelled, and ultimately slaughtered. We spoke different languages, held different customs, buried our dead differently, lived under separate laws, and prayed to return to a land they didn’t believe in. We were never part of Europe. We were in Europe. And when we tried to belong, when times got good, they reminded us with blood that we didn’t.

Even in Eastern Europe, Ashkenazi Jews lived as Levantines in exile. We continued eating halva and olives, reading Talmud in Aramaic, hiding from the evil eye, and preserving Temple ritual through mourning, blessings, and law. Jews spoke their own language, Yiddish, literally meaning "Jewish", a Germanic language mixed with Hebrew and written in Hebrew characters. Even our superstitions: hiding new pregnancies, warding off the evil eye with spit or amulets, placing knives under pillows… these all preserved the folk wisdom of ancient Israel, long after European Christianity dismissed such practices as primitive.

Culturally, Ashkenazi Jews maintained Levantine civilization with them, and customs foreign to Europe: Hebrew as a sacred and functional language, dietary laws rooted in Temple purity, prayer facing Jerusalem, modesty norms from the Near East, a lunar calendar tied to Israel’s seasons, and a rabbinic structure echoing tribal authority. Wearing our ancient garments of tallit and tzitzit, centering spices, olive oil, and dates in our kitchens (absolutely unheard of in Polish cuisine), and maintaining an agricultural cycle tied to Judea. The tone and rhythm of our prayers, closer to Middle Eastern melodies than any sounds of Europe. Jews never stopped living like people in exile waiting to come home.

We preserved countless echoes of our Levantine ancestors: ritual hand-washing with blessings before meals, a Semitic purity practice, unheard of in European custom. The ketubah, a legal marriage contract, Semitic in structure and purpose, not a sacrament like in Christianity. Naming practices that kept alive Biblical and Talmudic ancestors instead of adopting Christian names. A legalistic, debate-centered worldview, where even spiritual questions are argued like case law, much closer to Babylon than Berlin. Jewish burial customs that mirror ancient Israel: no embalming, immediate burial, and simple shrouds. The mikveh, a ritual bath rooted in Levitical law, was maintained even in the snows of Lithuania.

The Holocaust, the brutal climax of centuries of European persecution, wiped out two-thirds of European Jewry. Survivors were left stateless, scattered, alone, and traumatized. For many, there was only one direction left to go: back east, to the land they never stopped praying for. The same land their ancestors had left after the Temple fell. The same land they’d whispered about through pogroms and ghettos. The Holocaust didn’t Europeanize the Jews. It proved, devastatingly, that they never belonged there. And so, they came home.

Sephardic Jews

Not all Jews went north.Many traveled west into Spain, where Jewish life flourished under Islamic rule. Sephardic Jews built vibrant communities in Spain and Portugal, producing scholars like the Rambam, Ramban, and the Rif. They also had a "yiddish", Ladino, a Judaic Spanish written in and mixed with Hebrew, lived fully Jewish lives, and preserved halacha, Hebrew, and identity while adapting to the cultures around them.

That ended in 1492, when the Spanish crown ordered the expulsion of all Jews who refused to convert. Tens of thousands fled to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and beyond. Others were forcibly converted and lived as secret Jews. But even in exile, they remained distinct. Not Arabs. Not Spaniards. Jews.

In Muslim lands, Sephardic Jews lived as dhimmis, a  second-class designation with limited rights. They preserved the same as Ashkeanzi jews, Halacha Hebrew, Temple memory,

Direction of prayer toward Jerusalem, Purity laws, and A national identity rooted in Israel. 

Like their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters, Sephardic jews were pushed back toward home by fire. When Arab nationalism rose in the 20th century, they were pushed out again.

Between 1948–1970, over 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries.Homes were looted. Property seized. Citizenship revoked. Ancient communities in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Tripoli,  erased, and they b-lined for Israel. Because after centuries in exile, Jews knew where home was.

Persian Jews

The Persian Jewish community is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world. They’re one of the main arteries of the Jewish exiles’ path. When the Babylonians destroyed the first temple and exiled Jews to Babylonia, modern-day Iraq, many went deeper into the Persian empire. When king Cyrus allowed jews to return to Jerusalem, not all went back. Many stayed in modern-day Iran, continuing their pre-talmudic, pre-Roman, and pre-Islamic Jewish lives .

Persian Jews, like Sephardic jews, were second-class dhimmis confined to jewish quarters, taxed, and barred from certain professions. And just like their Sephardic and Ashkenazi brothers and sisters, Persian Jews were pushed out in the 20th century, especially after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Many fled to Israel, the U.S., and Europe. But they didn’t arrive as strangers. They arrived with the same Hebrew prayers and memory of Jerusalem, just like every other Jew.

Mizrahi Jews

Often grouped with Sephardim, Mizrahi Jews are the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa. Not from the Spain expulsion pipeline, but from places like Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and Iran. They didn’t arrive there, they never left. These are the descendants of Jews who remained in the region after the Babylonian exile, preserving ancient traditions under empire after empire.

Mizrahi Jews spoke Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Aramaic, and Persian dialects, ran vibrant communities in cities like Baghdad, Sana’a, Aleppo, and Cairo, and preserved a uniquely Babylonian-Levantine Jewish tradition.

They prayed toward Jerusalem, kept the laws of purity and modesty, held onto Hebrew names, and lived distinctly as Jews, not absorbed into Arab culture, but set apart by Torah. And like the Sephardim, they were expelled or fled en masse in the 20th century, leaving behind homes, property, and centuries of history, but not identity. They returned to Israel not as colonizers, but as the last remnants of Jewish life in Babylon, coming home.

Coming up… 

Back to the basics. Who was living in the land? What did they call themselves?