CHAPTER V

THE JEWS AT GAZA[20]

There is no record to show that the Jews obtained any stronghold in Gaza during Pagan times.

Pompey liberated Gaza _c._ 65 B.C., which had been subjected to the Jews since the times of the Maccabees, and restored the city to its freedom.

With the institutions of Pompey, the freedom of the Jewish people, after having existed for scarcely eighty years, if we reckon it as beginning in 142 B.C., was completely overthrown.

Josephus says (_The Jewish War_, II. 18, 1) that after the people of Cæsarea had slain about 20,000 Jews, and all the city was emptied of its Jewish inhabitants, A.D. 66, the whole nation was greatly enraged, so the Jews divided themselves into parties, utterly demolishing Anthedon and Gaza.

Schürer (_History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, II. vol. i, p. 71), however, thinks that this must have been a very partial destruction, for so strong a fortress as Gaza could not have been actually destroyed by a band of insurrectionary Jews.

During the middle ages, the use of wine being forbidden to Muslims by the Kûrản, it was manufactured in Gaza only by the Jews. This Jewish wine trade remained in their hands exclusively for a lengthened period. There was also a colony of wine-dealers in the harbour Mayoumas.

In February 1799 most of the Jews fled when the French troops under Napoleon entered Gaza. Meyer says that in 1811 there were none left. Their synagogue stood idle, and their cemetery was deserted.

There were supposed to be, in 1907, about one hundred and sixty Jews in Gaza (of whom thirty were Sephardim).

FOOTNOTE:

[20] It will be noticed that this chapter does not refer to the earliest connections of Jews with Gaza.