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The Jewish presence in Palestine began with the Zionist movement, right? Wrong. Jews have been in that region throughout recorded history.

In the year 438, the Roman Empress Eudocia removed the prohibition on Jews’ praying at the site of their ancient Temple in Jerusalem, a prohibition that had been in place for three hundred years. Jewish leaders in Galilee sent out a message to “the great and mighty people of the Jews” relaying the happy news and declaring: “Know then that the end of the exile of our people has come.”

It hadn’t, but some Jews still persevered and continued to live in the region. In the tenth century, Jewish leaders in Palestine issued another call to the Jews to return to their homeland. But the various invaders and occupiers of the land of Israel never made aliyah (“going up,” or returning to the land of Israel) an easy or attractive option. On July 15, 1099, after some of their number had terrorized and murdered Jews all across Europe as they made their way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders finally entered Jerusalem, after a five-week siege. Once inside the city, they encountered a significant number of Jews, and were no kinder to them than they had been to their brethren in Europe. According to the twelfth-century Syrian Muslim chronicler al-Azimi, “they burned the Church of the Jews.”

A contemporary of al-Azimi and a fellow chronicler, Ibn al-Qalanisi, added: “The Franks stormed the town and gained possession of it. A number of the townsfolk fled to the sanctuary and a great host were killed. The Jews assembled in the synagogue, and the Franks burned it over their heads. The sanctuary was surrendered to them on guarantee of safety on 22 Sha’ban [14 July] of this year, and they destroyed the shrines and the tomb of Abraham.”

The Crusaders, expanding on the prohibition that the Romans had set centuries before, forbade Jews to enter Palestine, but some came anyway. In 1140, with the Crusaders still ruling Jerusalem, the Spanish philosopher and poet Yehudah Halevi wrote in his Kuzari, or Book of Refutation and Proof in Support of the Despised Religion, that Jews could be closest to the God of Israel within Israel itself. He himself then set out for the land, only to be killed in Jerusalem the following year, run down by an enraged Arab Muslim’s horse as he sang his famous elegy, “Zion ha-lo Tish’ali.”

Yet still some Jews remained in the Holy Land, and Jews continued to emigrate to it, including another renowned philosopher, Maimonides, in the thirteenth century. But the Jews in the Holy Land always faced hardship. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Czech traveler Martin Kabátnikencountered Jews during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, andreported that they still thought of the area as their land: “The heathens [that is, the Muslim rulers] oppress them at their pleasure. They know that the Jews think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised to them. Those of them who live here are regarded as holy by the other Jews, for in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies that they suffer at the hands of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.” Shortly thereafter, nearly thirty Jewish communities were counted in Palestine.

These communities faced continual oppression. In 1576, the Ottoman Sultan Murad III ordered the deportation of one thousand Jews from the city of Safed to Cyprus, not as punishment for anything they had done but arbitrarily, because he wanted to bolster the Cypriot economy. It is not known whether the order was carried out, but if it was, the deportees may have been better off, at least in material terms: two travelers who visited Safed in the early seventeenth century said that for the Jews of that city, “life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine…. They pay for the very air they breathe.”

But they were still there, and they remained. The idea that they all began pouring into the area in the late nineteenth century is a convenient myth that leftists use to justify their ridiculous claim that the Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people of the region.