Book Description

To Come to the Land makes available in English a vast body of research, previously available only in Hebrew, on the early history of the land now known as Israel. Abraham David here focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century, tracing the beginnings of Sephardic influence in the land of Israel. After the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516, the Ottoman regime, unlike their Mamluk predecessors, encouraged economic development and settlement throughout the region. This openness to immigration offered a solution to the crisis Iberian Jews were undergoing as a result of their expulsion from Spain and the forced conversions in Portugal. Within a few years of the Ottoman conquest, Jews of Spanish extraction, many of them clustered in urban areas, dominated the Jewish communities of Eretz-Israel. In this carefully researched study, David examines the lasting impression made by these enterprising Jewish settlers on the commercial, social, and intellectual life of the area under early Ottoman rule. Of particular interest is his examination of the cities of Jerusalem and Safed and David's succinct biographies of leading Jewish personalities throughout the region. This first English translation of a ground-breaking Hebrew work provides a comprehensive overview of a significant chapter in the history of Israel and explores some of the factors that brought to it the best minds of the age. Essential for scholars of late Medieval Jewish history, To Come to the Land will also be an important resource for scholars of intellectual history, as it provides background crucial to an understanding of the intellectual flourishing of the period.