Second Temple period Jerusalem stood on two heights during the late Second Temple period, the western hill being the one which was called the "Upper Market," or simply the "Upper City" by
Josephus (). The
Phasael tower (now called the
Tower of David) was also situated in the Upper City, a place used as a stronghold for
Simon Bar Giora during the
First Jewish–Roman War.
Late Roman period , Jewish Quarter In CE 135, when the Roman Emperor
Hadrian built the city of
Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of ancient Jerusalem, the
Tenth Legion set up their camp on the land that is now the Jewish Quarter. New structures, such as a Roman bathhouse, were built over the Jewish ruins.
Ottoman period The Jewish quarter was initially located near the Gate of the Moors and Coponius Gate, in the southwestern part of the Western Wall. Most of the housing property consisted of Muslim
religious endowments, and was rented out to Jews. The population of the quarter was not homogeneously Jewish, such a rule being neither desired by the Jewish inhabitants nor enforced by the Ottoman rulers. During the Ottoman era, most of the homes in the quarter were leased from Muslim property owners. This is one of the reasons for the growth of buildings west of the city in the last years of the Ottoman Empire since land outside the city wall was freehold (
mulk) and easier to acquire. While most residents of Jerusalem in the 19th century preferred to live near members of their own community, there were Muslims living in the Jewish Quarter and Jews living in the Muslim Quarter. Many Jews moved to the Muslim Quarter toward the end of the century due to intense overcrowding in the Jewish Quarter. In 1857, an organization of Dutch and German Jews named
Kollel Hod (
kolel standing for "society" or "community" and Hod being an abbreviation of Holland and Deutschland) bought a plot of land on which, between 1860 and 1890, the
Batei Mahse ("Shelter for the Needy" in Hebrew) housing complex was built. The most prominent building of the project, the two-storey Rothschild House, built in 1871 with money donated by Baron
Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild, stands on the west side of the Batei Mahse Square.
Rashid Khalidi claimed that the quarter "originally" covered "four or five acres" (c. 16,200–20,250 m2), of which prior to 1948 the Jewish-owned property amounted to less than 20%.
British Mandate period Between December 1917 and May 1948, the entire city of Jerusalem was part of British-administered Palestine, known after 1920 as
Mandatory Palestine.
1947–48 hostilities negotiating the surrender with Arab Legion soldiers
Background Between 1910 and 1948, the number of Jews in Jerusalem rose from 45 to 100 thousand and within these totals the Old City's Jewish population fell from 16 to 2 thousand over the same period. According to Benny Morris, quoting a British diplomat, the nearly all-Orthodox community were "on good terms with their Arab neighbours", resented the Haganah presence, and "were loath to see their homes sacrificed to Zionist heroics". Before 1948, the quarter extended over 4 or 5 acres, and according to Rashid Khalidi, Jewish-owned property amounted to less than 20% of that.
May 1948 cease-fire agreement On April 28, 1948
Francis Sayre, the President of the
United Nations Trusteeship Council announced that both
Moshe Shertok of the
Jewish Agency and
Jamal al-Husayni of the
Higher Arab Committee had agreed to recommend to their respective communities in Palestine: (a) the immediate cessation of all military operations and acts of violence within the Old City; (b) the issue of cease-fire orders to this effect at the earliest possible moment; and (c) that the keeping of the truce should be observed by an impartial commission reporting to the Trusteeship Council. At the May 3 Trusteeship Council meeting, Sayre announced that a cease-fire order had been issued the previous day. On May 7,
General Cunningham, the
High Commissioner met Arab League representatives including
Azzam Pasha, the Secretary-General of the League and obtained approval for a cease-fire agreement covering all of Jerusalem provided that the Jews also agreed, this being forthcoming later the same day when the Haganah issued a cease-fire order to its troops in the Jerusalem area.
British withdrawal According to a diary covering the period 12 May to July 16, 1948, of Hugh Jones, a British clergyman with
Christ Church, British troops were withdrawn from their positions protecting the Jewish Quarter in the evening of May 13, 1948. Haganah forces occupied the positions vacated by the British army and the High Commissioner left Jerusalem early the next morning. Morris says that there were 90 mostly Haganah defenders, joined by 100 more after the British left their positions.
Jewish surrender The defenders surrendered on May 28, 1948, and
Mordechai Weingarten negotiated the surrender terms.
Expulsion of the inhabitants The Jordanian commander is reported to have told his superiors: "For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible."
Hurva and Tifereth Israel Synagogues In respect of the destruction of the
Hurva Synagogue, originally built in 1701, according to author Simone Ricca, Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian sources generally present divergent versions of the events that led to the destruction of the building. Whereas Israeli sources say that the Jordanian army purposefully demolished the synagogue after the cessation of the fighting, Jordanian and Palestinian sources present the destruction of the synagogue as a direct result of the fighting that took place in the Old City. Vatikiotis writes of the diary kept by Constantine X. Mavridis of the Greek Consulate General, Jerusalem, "an eyewitness account of the contest between Arabs and Jews for the control of the Old City which went on for at least six months during the Palestine War (1948)". According to the diary: The Arab guerrilla fighters who later joined with the Legion of Transjordan were preoccupied with clearing the Jews from the Jewish Quarter inside the Old City, who even used their own synagogues as strongholds from where attacks were made. Qawuqji and the Transjordanian army were continuously pounding the Jewish Quarter. The
Tiferet Yisrael Synagogue was first destroyed, and was followed by the most famous and historic Hurva Synagogue, which was destroyed on May 27. But the Arab Headquarters had warned the Jewish Headquarters through the International Red Cross that unless the armed Jewish forces withdrew from the Synagogue within a certain time limit, they would be compelled to attack it. Since there was no reply from the Jewish side, as it was stated officially by the Red Cross, the Arabs bombed and destroyed it.
Jordanian period Damage and destruction According to Chief Rabbi
Rabbi Isaac Herzog, speaking in Tel Aviv less than two weeks after the surrender and reported on 9 June 1948, of 27 synagogues in the Old City, 22 had been "razed by fire and explosives", with over 500
scrolls and scores of old Jewish manuscripts and sacred vessels being destroyed since the surrender date. During the following nineteen years of Jordanian rule, a third of the Jewish Quarter's buildings were demolished. This grew into the Muaska refugee camp managed by
UNRWA, which housed refugees from 48 locations now in Israel. Over time many poor non-refugees also settled in the camp. but neither UNRWA nor the Jordanian government wanted the negative international response that would result if they demolished the old Jewish houses.
State of Israel The Jewish Quarter remained under
Jordanian rule until the
Six-Day War in June 1967 when Israel
occupied it. During the first week after taking the Old City, Israel dynamited the
Mughrabi Quarter, demolishing 135 houses, and two mosques on
waqf property and evicting the 650 Arab residents in order that, on the razed ground, a plaza could be created at the foot of the Western Wall. On 18 April 1968, the Israeli minister of finance,
Pinchas Sapir, issued an order for the expropriation of 29 acres (116 dunums) extending from the Western Wall to the
Armenian Quarter, and from Tariq Bab al-Silsilah in the north, to the city's southern walls. 700 stone buildings were subject to the expropriation. Of these 105 had been Jewish properties before 1948. The remainder was Palestinian property, comprising 1,048 apartments and 437 workshops and business stores. The aim, stated to be assuming land for "public purposes", was to establish residences for an Israeli Jewish community. According to an article by Thomas Abowd in the
Jerusalem Quarterly (Hawliyat al-Quds), the Arab population of the quarter reached approximately 1,000, most of whom were refugees who had appropriated the evacuated Jewish houses in 1949. Although many had originally fled the Quarter in 1967, they later returned after
Levi Eshkol ordered that the Arab residents not be forcefully evacuated from the area. With
Menachem Begin's rise to power in 1977, he decided that 25 Arab families be allowed to remain in the Jewish Quarter as a gesture of good will, while the rest of the families who had not fled during the Six-Day War were offered compensation in return for their evacuation, although most declined. and many large educational institutions have taken up residence. Beginning in the years immediately after 1967, around 6,000 Arabs were evicted from the Jewish Quarter, and the start of exclusion of Palestinians from appropriated land by the private company in charge of its development, for the reason that they were not Jewish. This later became legal precedent in 1978 when the
Supreme Court made a decision in the case of Mohammed Burqan, in which the Court ruled that, while Burqan did own his home, he could not return because the area had "special historical significance" to the Jewish people. ==Archaeology==