In the early 20th century, tuberculosis was a fairly common disease. At that point in time, an effective treatment had yet to be developed. The disease mainly spread among populations that suffered from nutritional deficiencies. War could often lead to significant parts of the population suffering from malnutrition, and so it isn’t surprising that Franz Kafka contracted tuberculosis in 1917 – in the midst of the First World War.
At first, Kafka tried a very simple method of treatment; he figured a few months of rest outside the city at his sister Ottilie’s home might help. During his years of illness, Kafka occasionally returned to work at the insurance company in Prague where he was employed but he found he increasingly needed long breaks, which he took at various sanatoriums in Bohemia and Austria. During his last weeks, he stayed at a sanatorium in the town of Kierling near Vienna, Austria. Many of the patients there were in the terminal stages of tuberculosis and had hardly any chance of leaving in a reasonably healthy state. For Kafka, the disease had spread to his throat, preventing him from speaking and he switched to exclusively written communication.
The author sent letters and postcards to his friends, like the ones pictured here that he sent to Max Brod in April and May 1924:
The last postcards sent by Kafka to Max Brod. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama
In these postcards, Kafka wrote about his own literary interests, the works of other authors, and also his unpleasant experiences due to the difficult treatments he was receiving, for example, injections of alcohol. At best, these injections offered a bit of relief.
About 40 “conversation sheets” from this difficult period have been preserved. They contain the ideas Kafka wrote down and the words he wished to express to the people who surrounded him: his friend and lover Dora Diamant, the doctor Robert Klopstock, Max Brod, and possibly others. After Kafka’s death on June 3, 1924, these pages were distributed among his friends, with five of them given to Max Brod. These items were brought to the National Library of Israel, along with Max Brod’s personal archive and a number of Kafka’s writings which were in Brod’s possession. While reading the pages (which were never published), it is not always easy to understand who exactly Kafka was “conversing” with when he wrote a certain line on the page, or what exactly the conversation was about. Some interesting references can be found among the pages, for example, his memories of experiences he had with his father when he was a child:
“When I was a little boy, before I learned to swim, I sometimes went with my father, who also can’t swim, to the shallow-water pool. Then we sat together naked at the buffet, each with a sausage and a half liter of beer. My father used to bring the sausages from home, because at the swimming school, they were too expensive.”
Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama
Elsewhere in these pages, two lines reveal Kafka’s concern for the flowers that were brought to his room in the sanatorium:
“Not cold water, but not too hot either, so that they don’t get sick.”
“And they should have made sure the flowers that were pushed to the bottom of the vase were not damaged. How can they do that?“
Kafka also had comments about his diet: “It makes sense that in the hospital, dinner was between six and seven-thirty, after lying down all day, you can’t eat at half past eight” and “after all, a round of meals without fruit is unbearable over time.” In his deteriorated condition, it wasn’t easy for him to drink, either: “Milk? I drank sour milk for too long, then vinegar. The agony that drinking milk causes, now.“
Of course, his illness and the treatments also became an issue: “It was from a cough at the time. I’m still burning from the oil. The injections don’t excite me anymore either, it’s too confusing.”
The exact order of the pages isn’t clear, nor is it clear if they contain all the content of Kafka’s written conversations in his last days or if there were more.
Despite his health and mental condition, he put together several short stories for a final collection he prepared, entitled A Hunger Artist. Proofreading the pages may have been the last literary act Kafka undertook. His friend Brod completed the process of getting it published. Franz Kafka never got to see it in print.
Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama
These and many other items will be displayed in the National Library of Israel’s exhibition on Franz Kafka, which will open towards the end of 2024.
The Prime Minister’s Stuttering Speech
In the lead-up to one of Israel's greatest-ever military victories, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol took to the airwaves to address the nation. It didn't go well, and the national crisis became significantly worse as a result. Despite his failure in a critical moment, today Eshkol is often viewed as one of Israel's greatest leaders.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and IDF troops during the Six-Day War, 1967. Both images are part of the Israel Archive Network project (IAN) and are made accessible thanks to the collaborative efforts of the Yad Levi Eshkol Archive, the Oded Yarkoni Historical Archives of Petach Tikva, the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage and the National Library of Israel.
If only Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, prior to addressing panic-stricken Israelis on live radio on May 28, 1967, had reviewed his short speech to ensure that everything was in order—or, better yet, rehearsed it.
If only word processing existed then, it would have obviated the need for Eshkol’s top aide, Adi Yaffe, to scribble a change to the text that the Prime Minister—fresh off a cataract procedure, exhausted from late-night meetings in the leadup to the Six-Day War and having rushed to the Tel Aviv broadcast studio to deliver his remarks—struggled to read. Confused by the wording, Eshkol whispered to Yaffe in Hebrew, “What does it say?” (again, this was a live broadcast) and stumbled and stuttered. That undermined Israel’s confidence in its 71-year-old leader, led to Eshkol being compelled to relinquish his other job as Defense Minister, necessitated the government’s being expanded on an emergency basis to include opposition parties and, at least temporarily, tarnished Eshkol’s reputation.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol speaking at the podium of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, 1967. Photo by IPPA, the Dan Hadani Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel
The episode would become known as Eshkol’s Stutter, hardly Israel’s parallel to Abraham Lincoln’s stately Gettysburg Address at wartime a century earlier.
It wasn’t what Eshkol said, but how he said it—and its context was everything.
IDF tanks near Jerusalem’s famous Montefiore Windmill, during the Six-Day War, 1967. Photo by Boris Carmi, the Meitar Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel
By the time Eshkol addressed the nation, Israelis were white-knuckled, fearing for the country’s survival after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in mid-May evicted United Nations peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula and deployed his own troops there, then blocked the Straits of Tiran to cut off Eilat from Israel’s Red Sea commerce—an act of war under international law. Israel’s military mobilized, and Tel Aviv residents dug ditches in anticipation of mass fatalities.
Reassurance through a national address was needed. Eshkol’s meetings at the Defense Ministry’s Kirya compound in Tel Aviv ran long, leaving no time to record the address that afternoon at his office on the grounds. Instead, he went across the street to a radio studio to speak live.
In a vacuum, Eshkol’s mistakes during the address were minor. Cross-outs and insertions dotted the 1½-page text, and Eshkol handled them fine, with slight hesitations and stutters here and there.
His pivotal screw-up centered on one word.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol during a visit to Dimona in southern Israel, 1967. This image is part of the Israel Archive Network project (IAN) and has been made accessible thanks to the collaborative efforts of the Yad Levi Eshkol Archive, the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage and the National Library of Israel.
It occurred near the end of a broadcast that ran just over three minutes. Listening to a recording of the speech today while following along on the typed text containing the handwritten changes, the drama builds. That’s because Eshkol reached the end of the first page, flipped to the second page—we hear the crinkle of the paper—and immediately encountered the fifth word crossed out and two scribbled words above replacing it.
Instead of reciting, “Likewise, directions of activity were specified for withdrawing the [Egyptian] military concentrations from Israel’s southern border,” we can imagine Eshkol’s confusion upon encountering the handwritten Hebrew word for moving. (Italics added for this article.)
That’s when Eshkol turned to Yaffe and whispered his question. Yaffe made a hand-rolling motion to signal Eshkol to quickly continue. An engineer cut the sound for seven seconds. Silence. The sound returned, and Eshkol proceeded.
But the whisper, the sound cut and the resumption—all vital to understanding the magnitude of the screw-up—aren’t grasped by listening to the audio recording today. Rather, those key components, and Yaffe’s gesture, come courtesy of an archived interview the Israel Broadcast Authority conducted years later with Yigal Lossin, who was working that day in the studio’s sound engineer booth.
The audio that exists is Eshkol’s address after it was edited—the whispered question and the seven-second pause were deleted—for rebroadcast later that night, because Eshkol’s staff realized the magnitude of the Prime Minister’s blunder.
The edited speech in Hebrew can be heard here:
Where the original audio is today is anyone’s guess.
Ehud Shapira, a businessman who was 11 years old at the time, remembers the tension Eshkol’s hesitancy caused. Shapira’s father had been called up to reserve duty and was away. Shapira, his siblings and their mother listened together to Eshkol’s radio address. She pronounced in Yiddish, “Oy a brokh!”—What a disaster!
With Eshkol’s performance, “she thought it was impossible to rely on him,” he said. “The Six-Day War was a big victory, but it was not taken as a given” at that point, he added.
Afterward, like a game of Telephone, Israelis’ anxiety levels multiplied. People commiserated about their fears, magnifying the collective dread. Rumors spread of a coup. Shapira recalled that a Hebrew term coined at the time evoked both the military and the deteriorating mood of the street: “Maj. Rumor” (Rav-seren Shmuati), which typically refers to the unclear or dubious source of whatever widespread rumor is circulating in Israel at any given moment. These days, he quipped, social media’s power would bump that up to Lt. Gen. Rumor.
Arnon Lammfromm, who worked for the Israel State Archives for many years and authored a 2014 biography of Eshkol, holds Yaffe responsible for not ensuring that his boss rehearsed, or at least reviewed, the speech. Eshkol also bears responsibility, he added, for not ensuring that Yaffe did just that.
The fallout was swift, and shocking. Opposition leader Menachem Begin approached former premier David Ben-Gurion to urge that his Rafi party join Eshkol’s ruling coalition during the wartime crisis, something Begin and his Gahal party did. Moshe Dayan, a Knesset member from Rafi and a former IDF chief of staff, replaced Eshkol as Defense Minister. (Dayan wouldn’t be sworn in until after the war.)
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (center, middle row) sitting between Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (left) and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin (right). Other members of the general staff are also pictured, including Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon, Maj. Gen. Chaim Herzog, Maj. Gen. Ezer Weizmann and Maj. Gen Shlomo Goren, among others. Photo by Avraham Vered, the Dan Hadani Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel
Eshkol’s stuttering address didn’t politically doom the Prime Minister, who remained in office until his death in early 1969, having served nearly six years. Nor did it harm his legacy in the long term. Lammfromm considers Eshkol one of Israel’s most important leaders for his range of accomplishments, including, as Prime Minister, signing a defense pact with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson that became the basis for Israel’s ongoing alliance with Washington.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (center) reads the newspaper as Defense Minister Moshe Dayan eats an apple and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin relaxes. The three were on their way to visit the troops shortly before the war broke out in June, 1967. Photo by Avraham Vered, the Dan Hadani Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel
Lammfromm pointed to Eshkol’s wide-ranging impact on Israel. As Treasury Minister, and as treasurer and settlement director of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency for Israel before that, Eshkol handled the deficit arising from the War of Independence, helped the country fund the absorption of more than 650,000 immigrants (doubling Israel’s population), transferred the Absorption Ministry from the Jewish Agency to the government, expanded the economy from agriculture-based to industry-based and added approximately 300 settlements. Eshkol also launched the Mekorot water utility.
As time will do, Eshkol became forgotten in subsequent decades. But historians and older Israelis later came to appreciate Eshkol, Lammfromm said.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol (center) reviewing the Independence Day IDF parade in May, 1967. On the left are President Zalman Sazar and IDF chief Yitzhak Rabin. Photo by IPPA, the Dan Hadani Collection, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel
“In 1967 was the last time that Israel went to war and won a clear victory. People long for victory and for his personal leadership,” he said. Eshkol wasn’t charismatic, but “his strength wasn’t there,” Lammfromm added. “It was managing people, getting into the weeds in many things. He was multidisciplinary.”
That said, was it fair that Eshkol is so well-known for his inopportune mistake in 1967?
“No, because he was a good prime minister and defense minister,” Lammfromm said. “But that’s life.”
The Treasure Left Behind by the IDF Reservist Killed in Gaza
Eyal Meir Berkowitz's talent for explaining complex Mishnayot was recognized by rabbis and experts in the field. On December 7, 2023, Eyal fell in an IDF operation extracting the bodies of hostages abducted to Gaza. His family decided to cherish his memory by handing his work over to the National Library of Israel.
Many unique and fascinating stories can be linked to items preserved in the collections of the National Library of Israel. But it’s not every day that we receive a book connected to current and tragic events which we hear about on the news – and when this happens, it can be truly moving.
Here is one such recent case.
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Eden Zachariah and Ziv Dado were abducted to Gaza on October 7. Eden, a 28-year-old from Rishon Letziyon, was kidnapped while trying to escape from the Nova festival, which she attended with her partner Ofek Kimhi – who was murdered there that day. After 67 days, her family was informed that Eden had been murdered in Hamas captivity. Ziv, a 36-year-old IDF warrant officer from Rehovot who served as a logistics supervisor for the Golani Brigade’s 51st Battalion, was killed in an encounter with terrorists on the same day. His body was taken to Gaza and he was recognized as an abducted fallen soldier held by a terrorist organization. He left behind a wife and child. Two months after Eden and Ziv were kidnapped, soldiers of the 699th Battalion – belonging to the IDF’s 551st (Reserve) Brigade (“The Arrows of Fire”) – set out to extract their bodies from the Jabaliya area of the Gaza Strip, where intelligence indicated they were being held. On the way there, a roadside explosive was detonated, targeting the Israeli troops. Two reservists were killed in the explosion. The two had been friends for years, since their time together in training – Eyal Meir Berkowitz, 28 from Jerusalem, and Gal Meir Eizenkot, 25 from Herzliya, son of the former IDF Chief of Staff and current war cabinet member Gadi Eizenkot. Other soldiers were wounded as well. Eden and Ziv’s bodies were ultimately extracted and given a proper Jewish burial in Israeli territory.
One of the last pictures of Eyal and Gal together in Gaza. Photo courtesy of the Berkowitz family
While studying there, Eyal joined a group of students who studied Mishnah together. Eyal himself studied and memorized the Mishnah based on a small version of the Mishnah Sdurah series.
Eyal’s book of Mishnayot from his time at Eli
The first edition of the six orders of Mishnah published by Mishnah Sdurah came out in the 1990s. What made this series unique was its design and the arrangement of the text in a way that makes it easier for the student to understand the Mishnah.
Each individual Mishnah is spread out over a series of brief lines. Each line is devoted to a new sentence, a pause mid-sentence, or a particular point from within a list of several points. This structure also serves as its own form of punctuation and can also help with memorization. The spacious design also leaves room for writing comments on the page.
Eyal was able to make good use of all of this, and throughout his studies, he wrote brief comments for practically every Mishnah. As someone who always had a knack for drawing, he also occasionally added little illustrations.
Tractate Sanhedrin, with Eyal’s comments
After three years in Eli, Eyal enlisted in the IDF in 2016. He started out in Sayeret Matkal and then moved on to Maglan – both elite units. In 2022, he married Michal. They lived together in Jerusalem, where he started studying to become a doctor at Hebrew University.
But he only managed to finish his first year.
On that fateful day of Simchat Torah, Eyal and Michal were at his parent’s house in Susya. Upon learning of the scope of the terrorist assault in the Gaza border region, Eyal was immediately called as a reservist, and he soon found himself fighting inside the Gaza Strip once the ground invasion got underway.
Eyal was killed in action, a few hours before the beginning of Hannukah, on December 7, 2023. Just a few days earlier, he and Michal had marked their first year of marriage and had promised to celebrate when Eyal came back from the reserve duty.
Eyal Meir Berkowitz ob”m. Photo courtesy of the Berkowitz family
A few weeks after his death, his family approached the National Library. They had found Eyal’s book of Mishnayot with his written comments, and offered to have the volume scanned and cataloged by the NLI. The idea was welcomed by the Library and the scans have already been completed. The bibliographic information accompanying Eyal’s set of Mishnayot at the Library contain a brief note in Hebrew:
The illustrator, an alumnus of the Bnei David Advanced Yeshivah in Eli in Binyamin, served in the Maglan unit and fell during a mission to extract the bodies of hostages held in the Gaza Strip on the 24th of Kislev, 5784, December 7, 2023. The volume was delivered for photocopying by his wife.
While preparing this article, we were excited to hear that aside from the scans that were uploaded to our online catalog, the family also decided to donate the book itself to the National Library, and it was indeed handed over a few days after Israeli Memorial Day.
Eyal’s family handing over his Mishnayot to the National Library of Israel, May 2024. Right to left: Dr. Chaim Neriah, curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library, Shmaya Berkowitz, his wife Riki, and Michal – Eyal’s widow. Photo: Motti Dahan
The scanned book reveals how Eyal’s comments were often brief, but were still able to very succinctly explain the intention of the Mishnah, even in places where the original text does not tell us many details.
The Mishnah, like every ancient text, is hard to read and understand without background knowledge of its subject matter. This is why commentators throughout the generations – Rashi, Maimonides, Rabbi Ovadyah of Bartenura, the Tosfot Yom Tov as well as more modern commentaries like Kehati, Safrai, and Artscroll – have been written to help readers dive in.
Eyal succeeded in illuminating the words of the Mishnah, using very brief explanations in a modern Hebrew style, with an occasional dash of humor added in. Rabbis who saw the Mishnah with his comments attested to his succinct comments containing amazing depth and great talent in connecting Mishnayot to other sources.
Here’s just one brief example: The Mishnah in Tractate Eruvin calculates the distance between two cities to allow the carrying of objects between them on Shabbat, something which would be forbidden if it involved carrying things from one jurisdiction to another. If the radius of 70 cubits and 2/3 cubits from one city touches on the same calculated area of a nearby city, they are considered a single locality or jurisdiction, and as Eyal put it, along with a small illustration: “we connect them both.” This is certainly a much clearer explanation than the Mishnah’s original formulation in Hebrew.
We will only add that it is a Jewish custom to study Mishnayot for the ascension of a person’s soul on the anniversary of their death, as the words “Mishnah” and “Neshamah” (soul) consist of the same letters in Hebrew.
May the memory of Eyal, Gal, and all the fallen of Israel be a blessing.
Eyal Berkowitz ob”m. Photo courtesy of Berkowitz family
Why Does Gaza Appear in This Antique Hebrew Scroll?
Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, the tombs of the righteous in the Galilee, and... Gaza? Jewish scrolls from the 16th and 17th centuries offer an interesting selection of holy places in the Land of Israel. How did the city of Gaza end up on this list?
Illustration of the city of Gaza in the 17th century Yichus Ha’avot Scroll, which is kept at the National Library of Israel
A complete road atlas for the holy sites in the Land of Israel, an advertisement brochure, or a travel book? From the Middle Ages to the 16th and 17th centuries, written and illustrated compositions were circulated in the Land of Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora, claiming to present those abroad with descriptions of the Jewish holy places found throughout the land. Three of these, which were copied as illustrated scrolls, are preserved at the National Library of Israel.
These items were copies of what’s known as the Yichus Ha’Avot scroll, or in its full name as it appears in the first part of the manuscript: “Lineage of the Forefathers and the Prophets and the Righteous and the Tana’aim and the Amora’im, May They Rest in Peace, in the Land of Israel and Outside the Land, May God Establish Their Merit for Us, Amen.” As its name indicates, this scroll is mainly focused on the burial places of our ancient ancestors – from those buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs(Ma’arat Ha’Machpela) to the later tombs of the Amorites which were spread throughout the Land of Israel, and sometimes even outside of it (such as the tombs of Mordechai and Esther, Daniel, and others).
But then, in one of the copies, above the illustration depicting a city surrounded by a wall, the following Hebrew inscription appears:
“Kfar Gaza, the city of Samson, a beautiful country”
This particular copy of Yichus Ha’Avot was copied and illustrated in Casale Monferrato in northern Italy, in 1598. As mentioned above, the illustration depicts a walled city with many towers covered with domes, some alluding to their status as mosques, some reminiscent of churches. The whole city is surrounded by a wall, and a (very) large domed gate with no doors symbolizes the entrance to the city.
Another illustration very similar in its characteristics – in which Gaza is referred to as “the land of Samson, a beautiful country” – appears in another Yichus Ha’Avot scroll from the National Library collection, this one dating to the 17th century. Here, the illustrator imagined Gaza as an even greener and more colorful city, with the mosques appearing more prominently. The city gate is still broad and impressive, lacking doors and wide open.
Shlomo Zucker, a former member of the National Library’s manuscripts department, researched the composition and described it as follows:
“The drawings are spectacular; green and red for the trees and flowers, gold for the domes and some of the columns of the buildings […] However, the buildings – with vaults, gables, columns, and crowns in the classical style – are completely imaginary, and have nothing to do with the actual shape of the sites described in the text.” (S. Zucker, Yichus Ha’Avot or Elleh Massai, Ariel, 123-122, 5757, p. 206 [Hebrew])
Is this really how Gaza looked in those days?
Written testimony, archaeological findings, and descriptions in various travel books present a different picture of the city.
But the very fact that the descriptions and illustrations in the Yichus Ha’Avot scroll are imagined is not surprising or unusual. Scientific or geographical accuracy was not necessarily at the forefront of the minds of the writers and artists of the time. Maps and illustrations based on imagination or various graphic ideas disconnected from reality were quite common.
One of the interesting examples is the “Clover Leaf Map” by Heinrich Bünting, one original copy of which is preserved in the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection at the National Library.
The map depicts the old world in the form of a clover leaf on which three continents are represented: Asia, Europe, and Africa. Jerusalem, by the way, is located in the center of the world according to this map. On the map itself, Bunting explains the reason for his artistic choice: “The whole world is in the shape of a clover leaf, which is a symbol of the city of Hanover, my beloved birthplace.”
Like the famous Clover Leaf Map, the Yichus Ha’Avot scrolls also weren’t trying to be realistic or to reflect actual geography and topography. The scrolls and the illustrations inside them tried to express a visual-imagined space, emotional at its core, which made it possible to browse through them and feel like someone who was walking in the footsteps of our ancestors, as someone who is faithful and connected to the “lineage of the fathers”.
The much more surprising fact is that Gaza was added to the map of holy places at an unknown time.
In earlier and more ancient versions of the Yichus Ha’Avot scrolls, Gaza does not appear at all. Why suddenly in the 16th and 17th centuries was Gaza included on the map of holy places? Why is it described as a “beautiful country”, and why is the city where Samson the biblical hero met his death suddenly named after him – “Samson’s city”?
It should be noted that Gaza was not one of the four traditional Jewish holy cities in the Land of Israel. Moreover, various halachic discussions raised the question of whether Gaza is part of the Land of Israel, and whether the commandments that are dependent on the land must be observed there. According to most opinions, the answer is no.
So what suddenly changed at the end of the 16th century?
The fluctuations in Gaza’s status as an important or backwater city over the years stemmed from its location on the coastal road leading between the Land of Israel and Egypt. When the Crusaders conquered the Holy Land, there were no trade relations between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Muslim Egypt, and Gaza was a ruined and largely abandoned city. But then the Mamluks conquered the region, and with the increased stability, the status of Gaza, which had been rejuvenated into an important roadside trading city, rose as well.
Towards the end of the Mamluk period, in 1481, Rabbi Meshullam of Volterra, a Jewish banker from Florence, visited Gaza, and his descriptions corroborate the literal description in the Yichus Ha’Avot scroll which states that Gaza is a “beautiful country”.
According to Rabbi Meshullam, Gaza was “a good and fat land”, with a small Jewish community that produced wine. But unlike the illustrations in the Yichus Ha’Avot scroll, Rabbi Meshullam described Gaza as so self-confident that it had no wall at all: “Aza is called Gaza by the Ishmaelites, and it is a good and fat land, and its fruits are very fine. And there is good bread and wine, although the wines are only made by the Jews. Its perimeter is 4 miles long and it has no walls […] it is surrounded by blue on the shore of the sea. And has about 60 Jewish homeowners […]”
Samson carries off the gates of Gaza, a mosaic from the synagogue in Hukok, Byzantine period / Photo: Jim Haberman, courtesy of Jodi Magness
Rabbi Meshullam also notes the fragment of Jewish history that is connected to the city of Gaza: It is the city where the biblical hero and judge Samson lived for part of his life, together with his wife Delilah, who ultimately brought on his demise out of greed. It is also the city where Samson was imprisoned and killed, and which he destroyed:
“And at the top of the Judaica [mound] was the house of Delilah, and Samson the hero lived in it. And near there […] I saw the great court which he overthrew with his strength and power” (Abraham Yaari, Masa Meshullam MeVolterra, Mossad Bialik, 599, p. 64 [Hebrew]).
About thirty years after Rabbi Meshullam’s visit, in 1517, an event occurred that further affected Gaza’s status in the following centuries: The war between the Mamluks and the Ottomans ended in an Ottoman victory. The Ottoman Sultan Selim I conquered the entire region, including the Land of Israel, the shores of the Red Sea, Mecca, and Medina, as well as the southern connection to the African continent – Egypt. The victory of the Ottomans strengthened the position of Gaza. From a peripheral border city, it became a city perfectly situated in the center of a vast empire.
The Ottoman victory also had additional significance. All the holy places of Islam and Judaism and most of the holy places of Christianity now fell under the control of a single regime. The Ottoman Empire developed, improved the access routes, and ensured the safety of the Muslim pilgrims who set out for the Hajj to Mecca, while also offering safety to the Jewish and Christian pilgrims. The security resulted in economic growth and the improvement of roads, which contributed to a significant increase in the volume of pilgrimage.
Samson bringing down the temple of Dagon on all the celebrants and calling out “Let me die with the Philistines!”, Gustave Doré
As it turns out. even though Gaza was not one of the four Jewish holy cities in the Land of Israel, it became a popular place to visit when making the long journey to the Holy Land.
Why?
Those who embarked on a pilgrimage for religious reasons were specifically interested in the holy places, especially in the tombs of biblical figures and righteous sages, which Gaza could not claim to have. But Samson “came to her aid”.
This is perhaps the reason why Gaza is depicted in illustrations as a walled city with its mighty gates open. The illustrators of the scrolls didn’t illustrate Gaza, the prosperous trading city without a wall, but rather as a city whose doors Samson had uprooted, leaving it with wide open gates. That’s also why they call it the “Land of Samson.”
The illustrators of the Yichus Ha’Avot scrolls knew that many of the immigrants, especially those from Italy, would pass through Gaza anyway on their way to or from Egypt. As such, they indicated to the pilgrims that although there were no tombs of note in Gaza, there was indeed a history of Jewish heroism there.
This article is based on an article by Dr. Chaim Meir Neria, curator of the Haim and Hanna Solomon Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel, published in Etmol, issue 286 February 2024
