Svartalf wrote:Not to mention that less than 50 years after Jesus' death, Palestine became a no Jews' land after the revolt and the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by Titus... so much for being saved from foreign powers.
This isn't true, as the Jewish Pharisee movement survived and made peace with Rome, and Jews lived in Judea in significant numbers. There were Jewish revolts in the 2nd century -- Kitos War -- Bar Kochba Revolt, etc. In the late 2nd century, Jewish populations were mainly in Galilee, but they were still there, obviously. The Romans kept razing their towns and eventually banned them from Jerusalem for a while when they built a Temple to Jupiter on the site of the Temple Mount. The Romans massacred them at a pretty high clip, but the Jews remained.
Under the Byzantines, Jerusalem was a Christian city, and Jews were still banned from living there, but there were Jews still in Judea and the Holy Land in large enough numbers to have revolts against the Byzantines in the 4th century. In the late 4th century, the Byzantine emperor relaxed the harsh anti-Jew laws and allowed them to move back to Jerusalem and rebuild parts of it.
The Jews probably constituted the majority of the population of Palestine until well into the 4th century -- until Constantine converted the Christianity. After the collapse of the western Roman empire, a huge migration of Christians to the holy land occurred, and reduced the Jewish population to about 15% of the population. There were again anti-Jew laws and taxes imposed.
In the 5th Century Empress Eudocia relaxed the rules again and formally ended the Jewish exile from Jerusalem. There were more revolts by Jews against the Byzantines, on into the 7th century.
At the time of the Arab conquest the majority of the population was Jewish or Samaritan. That was in like 640 AD, give or take. There were plenty of Jews living there throughout the next couple of hundred years.
The Jews took a population hit during the Crusades, but then there was a resurgence of Jewish population in the 13th and 14th centuries. And Jews lived there in significant populations during Ottoman rule until 1917.
Then, of course, we have the post-WW1 French and British Mandates for Palestine, and the place was carved up into States for the first time -- we got Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, etc., and of course, Israel. But, Jews were there the whole time, and in the 1940s when the lines were drawn on a Jewish state, it was Gerrymandered to include the mainly Jewish inhabited territory.
