Understanding the Middle East, part 9 - Oranges and dates, part 1

image
( Source of image: Wikipedia)

There are very few people that stand out as those who changed the course of history with their own hands. If I’d ask you to name a few, you will probably mention Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, or maybe Martin Luther King, M. K. Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln. I don't believe anyone would mention in this regard, the man in the picture at the top of this post. Most people, Most Israelis even, don't know who he was. Some will say that they might have heard his name, some will know that there is a street named after him in Jaffa. Very few will know exactly who he was and what he did.

Yet, without this man, Rabbi Yehuda Ha’Levi from Ragusa, the face of history, not only of the Jewish people or of the Middle East, but of the whole world, could have been completely different.

“What would the Middle East be like, without Israel?”. That's a question that is often asked in debates about the Arab Israeli conflict. It even echoed in the speech of Mahmoud Abbas to the UN, at the 2016 General Assembly, in which he asked the UK to apologize for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Abbas was echoing once more the idea that Israel and Zionism, are to blame for the instability in the Middle East.

I am an Israeli and a Zionist, so you may suspect that my opinion on this subject is quite biased. And then there is this thing that we cannot really know “what would happen if…”, but still, I would like to present to you with a very likely possibility for what might have happened.

So let me start by telling about Rabbi Yehuda Ha'Levi of Ragusa and about what he did. He was born in Sarajevo, in 1783. In his youth, he studied in Ragusa ( now Dubrovnik, Croatia ) and hence his title. When he was 18, he arrived to Jerusalem and started learning in a Yeshiva there. In 1836 he arrived to Jaffa after spending few years in a Jewish envoy in Istanbul. In Jaffa he became a successful merchant.

Now, let me remind you what I told you about that time in the previous chapters. In 1836, Jaffa was under the control of Mohammed Ali Pasha, the founder of Modern Egypt who settled thousands of immigrants from Egypt and Sudan, in the vacancies of Jaffa, to grow Shamutti Oranges. Let me also remind you that when the Ottomans regained control of the Levant, they made changes in the land ownership regulations, to try and make sure that lands will only be owned by subjects of the empire.

In 1840 Rebbi Yehuda was appointed as the chief Rabbi of Jaffa, and in 1842, he took an advantage of the new land ownership regulations and bought 103 dunams of land ( about 25 acres ) and planted an orchard of oranges and various other fruit trees on it. He was almost 60 years old at that time but he planted many of the trees with his own hands.

To understand why this was an act with such a great significance, we have to go back to to the year 135 ad. In the aftermath of the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, the greatest disaster in Jewish history except for the Holocaust, the Jewish spiritual leadership took steps to try and prevent future revolt attempts from happening. They tried to turn the Jewish longing for an independent state in their traditional homeland, into an utopian dream. Something that will only come to reality at the end of days. They decreed that Jews should not take any practical steps towards return to “Eretz Israel”. During the almost 2000 years of exile, many important Rabbis were even against allowing Jews to even visit the Holy Land, and even those who supported the Jews that were living in this area (and there were some ten of thousands who did, through all the time of the exile) , strongly objected that they will do any secular work. The communities who lived mainly in Jerusalem, Hebron and Tiberias, were to continue in the studying of the holy Scriptures and live from money donated to them by communities elsewhere. From the point of view of many ultra Orthodox Jews, this should be the case to this day.

So when Rabbi Yehuda Ha'Levi of Ragusa, bought land in the Holy Land and planted fruit trees with his own hands, he went against almost 2000 years of tradition. And he did much more than just this symbolic act. He worked very hard to persuade Jewish philanthropists, and especially Sir Moses Montefiore, to fund his initiatives instead of just giving charity money to support the unproductive lifestyle of the Jewish communities in the Holy Land. His deep conviction, that the Jews should take their destiny into their own hands greatly inspired others, which first led to the establishment of new residencies outside the walls of the old city in Jerusalem, and then to the expansion of the Jewish population in Jaffa and to a shift to productive work and entrepreneurship. In 1855, Rabbi Yehuda sold his orchard to Sir Montefiore so that he can better support its continued cultivation. In 1870, the first Jewish Agricultural school, Mikve Yisrael, was established outside of Jaffa, after long persuasion efforts by Rabbi Yehuda, and in spite of a strong objection of the Jewish Orthodox establishment. In 1878, Rabbi Yehuda was invited by one of his greatest admirers, Rabbi Yoel Moshe Solomon to the groundbreaking ceremony of Petach Tikva, one of the first two Jewish settlements to be built in the ancestral land after almost 2000 years. But Rabbi Yehuda, already old and sick, could not arrive and just gave his blessing. He died about a year later and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Jaffa which is situated near the street that now bears his name.

(To be continued in part 2)