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Abstract
The Jewish Yishuv in Palestine came under Ottoman rule at the beginning of the 16th century. When World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, this community of about 85,000 Jews was caught in the vise of a superpower struggle and was immediately cut off from its traditional European sources of financial support. While much has been written about Zionist attempts to secure the Balfour Declaration in London toward the end of World War I as well as the life of Yishuv during the British Mandate, far less has been done to examine the situation of the Yishuv during the war itself. This paper addresses the question of how the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine managed to survive this difficult period. The introductory chapter presents the historiography of the Yishuv in the centuries prior to World War I. Subsequent chapters contain a chronological narration of the Yishuv's efforts to survive on four fronts: socioeconomic; diplomatic; education, cultural, and health; and defense.
World War I left the Yishuv impoverished and its population diminished by one-third, but it survived due to the indispensable support of American Jewry. The Germans, allies of the Ottomans, wished to keep the United States neutral; American Jewry exploited this desire and succeeded in forcing the Germans to restrict Ottoman pressures on the Yishuv. The Ottomans complied because of Palestine's relatively minor strategic value to the Empire's national security; had the province been of greater importance, no foreign intervention--American, German, or otherwise--could have saved the Yishuv from a much more cruel fate. Though the Yishuv endured unquestionable hardships during the war, a comparison to the situation of Jews in other arenas of the war as well as that of other minority groups under Ottoman rule leads to the conclusion that the suffering of the Yishuv was relatively less extreme than that endured by many other wartime victims. A final conclusion regards the Zionist movement, which was a relatively minor player in the political structure of the Yishuv at the start of the war. The Zionists took control of the incoming support funds and used their superior organizational skills to wrest the reins of leadership away from the so-called Old Yishuv, which had dominated the Yishuv for nearly a century. They maintained this control throughout the era of the British Mandate, and they lead the State of Israel to this very day.
