History
The quarter has had a rich history, with a nearly continual Jewish presence since the 8th century BCE. When, in CE 135, the Roman Emperor Hadrian built the city of Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of ancient Jerusalem, the Tenth Legion had their camp on the land that is now the Jewish Quarter. At the start of the 20th century, the Jewish population of the quarter reached 19,000. At no time was its population purely and homogenously Jewish - such a rule being neither desired by the Jewish inhabitants nor enforced by the Ottoman or British rulers; in fact, there had always been a considerable non-Jewish population living among its Jews. Almost all the properties in the Quarter were rented by their occupants from Muslim endowments (Waqfs), which owned them. This is one of the reasons for the growth of buildings West of the city in the last years of the Ottoman Empire since land outside the city was freehold (mulk) and easier to acquire.
| Old Yishuv |
| Jewish life in the Land of Israel before Modern Zionism |
| Key figures |
|---|
| Joseph Nasi • Levi ben Jacob • Haim Abulafia • Yehuda he-Hasid Haim Farhi • Menachem Mendel • Jacob Saphir |
| Economy |
| Kollel • Halukka • Etrog |
| Communities |
| Musta'arabim • Sephardim • Perushim • Hasidim Read more about this topic: Jewish Quarter (Jerusalem) Famous quotes containing the word history:“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” “The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.” “False history gets made all day, any day, |