A severe drought gripped Israel in 1985 and 1986. The winter rains barely came. Water was pumped from the Sea of Galilee to irrigate parched fields throughout the country. Predictably, the Kinneret (the Hebrew name of the freshwater inland lake also known as the Sea of Galilee) shrank. Wide expanses of lakebed, normally covered with […]
Primary Sources August 1198, Forced Conversion of the Jews of Aden The Great Game 1611 – East India Company established a cotton factory in India Aug 11, 1840, Viscount Palmerston to Viscount Ponsonby August 11, 1840 Viscount Palmerston to Viscount Ponsonby 1842 Abraham Benisch to Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Viscount Canning- Scheme April 15, […]
Prohibition of Jewish Conversion to Christianity to Avoid Crimes “It had been ordained, in the old laws as well as in ours, that, since we have learned that converts of the Jewish religion want to join the community of the Church in order to escape their crimes and out of various necessities, this is done […]
The mass emigration of Jews from Iraq in the years 1950 and 1951 brought to an end the existence of a community which had been in the region for millennia. From the very birth of Judaism in what was then Mesopotamia, Jews have been present in or very strongly linked to the area. Primary sources […]
Sir Albert Abdallah David Sassoon, Bart. was an Anglo-Indian merchant; head of the house of David Sassoon & Co., born in Baghdad 1817; died in Brighton, England in 1896. The Sassoons were known as “the Rothschilds of the East.”
During the course of Operation Magic Carpet (also known as Operation On Wings of Eagles), 49,000 Jews were airlifted to the new State of Israel. The vast majority of these Jews were from Yemen.
In 1922, the government of Yemen reintroduced the “orphans decree,” which stated that an orphan under 12 years of age would be taken from the Jewish community and turned over to a Muslim foster family.
About 10% of Yemen’s Jews left Yemen and immigrated to Palestine in the first wave of immigration, which lasted from 1881 to 1914.
“Hannukah”—the celebration of the (re-)dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem—goes back to the very first dedication—that of Solomon in the 10th century BCE. But the holiday Jews have long called Hannukah commemorates just one of the Temple’s re-dedications—that at the hand of the Maccabees in 164 BCE. This holiday has sometimes been called a “minor” […]
Protection of Synagogues and the Jewish Sabbath “No one shall dare to violate or seize and occupy what are known the names of synagogues and are assuredly frequented by the conventicles of the Jews, for all must retain what is theirs with unmolested right and without harm to religion and cult. Furthermore, since the ancient […]