The Jews Who Stayed

Did you know that in the year 70, when the Temple burned, some Jews never left the land of Israel? As Jerusalem burned, the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai took one small town, Yavneh, and there rebuilt Judaism to live without a temple. By the year 200, in Tzipori, the city of mosaics in the Galilee, Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi wrote down the Mishna. In those same years at Beit Shearim, the Sanhedrin convened and the nation buried its greatest teacher among his people. In the 4th century in Tiberias by the lake, scholars argued the Jerusalem Talmud into being. By the year 900, the Masoretes of Tiberias had invented the vowel marks. Open any Hebrew Bible on Earth, their dots are still there. In 1267, the great sage Ramban reached a Jerusalem the Crusaders [music] had emptied of Jews. He found only a handful. He gathered them and founded a synagogue that still stands [music] today. In Safed in 1563, Yosef Caro wrote the Shulhan Aruch. Soon after, the land's first Hebrew press began to print. In Peki'in, families traced their line past the Romans. The olive terraces remember. In Gaza, too, a synagogue rose by its harbor 1,500 years ago. A thousand years on, the poet Israel [music] Najara led its community. In the 1860s, Montefiore's men went door-to-door recording Jerusalem's [music] Jewish families name by name. Within a generation, they were the majority of the city. In Hebron, [music] Jews prayed beside the tombs of the fathers for centuries. In 1929, their Arab neighbors slaughtered 67 of them. The survivors were driven out, expelled again and again, returned again and again. Some of us simply never left. Follow Jewish Time Machine for more stories like this.