Palestinian Jews or Jewish Palestinians were the Jewish inhabitants of the Palestine region (known in Hebrew as Eretz Yisrael, ) prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
The common term used to refer to the Jewish communities of Ottoman Syria during the 19th century and British Palestine prior to the 1948 establishment of the State of Israel is Yishuv (). A distinction is drawn between the "New Yishuv", which was largely composed of and descended from Jewish immigrants who arrived in the Levant during the First Aliyah (1881–1903), and the "Old Yishuv", which was the pre-existing Jewish community of Palestine prior to the consolidation of Zionism and the First Aliyah.
In addition to applying to Jews who lived in Palestine during the British Mandate era, the term Palestinian Jews has been applied to the Jewish residents of Southern Syria, corresponding to the southern part of the Syria region under the Ottoman Empire; there are also historical scholarly instances in which Jews residing in the Palaestina Prima and Palaestina Secunda provinces (4th to 7th centuries CE) of the Byzantine Empire in Late Antiquity were referred to as Palestinian Jews.
After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the Jews of Mandatory Palestine became Israeli citizens, and the term Palestinian Jews has largely fallen into disuse and is somewhat defunct, in favour of the modern term Israeli Jews.
Historical overview
Prior to dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the population of the area comprising modern Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip was not exclusively Muslim. Under the empire's rule in the mid-16th century, there were no more than 10,000 Jews in Palestine, making up around 5% of the population. By the mid-19th century, Turkish sources recorded that 80% of the population of 600,000 was identified as Muslim, 10% as Christian Arab and 5–7% as Jewish.
The situation of the Jewish community in Palestine was more complicated than in neighbouring Arab countries. Whereas in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, communities were largely homogeneous in ethnic and confessional terms, in Palestine in the 19th century, Jewish pilgrims and European Christian colonial projects attracted large numbers of Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe and Sephardic groups from Bulgaria, Turkey and North Africa. The Jews of Palestine were not exclusively of Iberian origins, and included substantial Yiddish speaking communities who had established themselves in Palestine centuries earlier.
Towards the end of the Ottoman era in Palestine, native Jewish communities lived primarily in the four 'holy cities' of Safed, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem. The Jewish population consisted of Ashkenazim (Yiddish speakers), Sephardim (Judeo-Spanish speakers), and Maghrebim (North African Arabic speakers) or Mizrahim (Middle Eastern Jews, comparable to the Arabic term Mashriqiyyun, or 'Easterners'). The majority of Jews in the four holy cities, with the exception of Jerusalem, were Arabic and Judaeo-Spanish speakers. The dominant language among Jews in Jerusalem was Yiddish, due to the large migration of pious Ashkenazi Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe. Still, in 1882, there were registered 7,620 Sephardim/Mizrahim/Maghrebim, in Jerusalem, of whom 1,290 were Maghrebim, from the Maghreb or North Africa. Natives of the city, they were Turkish subjects, and fluent in Arabic. Arabic also served as the lingua franca between the Sephardim/Mizrahim/Maghrebim and Ashkenazim and their non-Jewish Arab counterparts in mixed cities like Safed and Hebron. However, during the Greek and Roman period, the primary language of Palestinian Jews was Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew.
In the narrative works of Arabs in Palestine in the late Ottoman period, as evidenced in the autobiographies and diaries of Khalil al-Sakakini and Wasif Jawhariyyeh, "native" Jews were often referred to and described as abnaa al-balad (sons of the country), 'compatriots', or Yahud awlad Arab (Jews, sons of Arabs). When the First Palestinian Congress of February 1919 issued its anti-Zionist manifesto rejecting Zionist immigration, it extended a welcome to those Jews "among us who have been Arabicized, who have been living in our province since before the war; they are as we are, and their loyalties are our own."
Reference to European Jews as Palestinians prior to 1948
European Jews were commonly considered an "Oriental" people in many of their host countries, usually as reference to their ancestral origins in the Middle East. A prominent example of this is Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century Prussian philosopher who referred to European Jews as "Palestinians living among us."