Jaffa

Jaffa, ancient Mediterranean port that is now part of Tel Aviv–Yafo in modern Israel, located about 2.5 miles (4 km) south of the city center.

Ancient history

Canaanite peoples inhabited the earliest known settlement of Jaffa, which in the 15th century bce was overtaken by Thuti, a general of Thutmose III of Egypt. Jaffa is twice mentioned in the Amarna Letters of the 14th century. Called Yapu, the city was a prominent administrative center during the ancient Egyptian New Kingdom. In the 13th century, Jaffa served as a garrison city for Ramses II.

In the Hebrew Bible’s account of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, which historians generally place in the 13th century, Yafo (Joppa) is assigned to the tribe of Dan. Any control by the Israelites was brief, however: the Philistines took control of the city in the 12th century, and its importance was eclipsed soon afterward by the other city-states of the coast. The Chronicler in the Bible identified Jaffa as the landing port for the timber used for Solomon’s Temple (2 Chronicles 2:16; Ezra 3:7) in the 10th century. However, the books of the Chronicles and Ezra were not contemporaneous accounts, as they were written after the Babylonian Exile (6th century) and within the context of the postexilic rebuilding of the Temple. The town was captured during the campaigns of the Babylonian king Sennacherib in the late 8th century and might have been destroyed. During the Persian period (6th–4th century), the Phoenician city-state Sidon gained dominion over Jaffa.

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After Alexander the Great’s conquest of the city, the Macedonian general Ptolemy I Soter garrisoned it, and it was besieged and taken by another Macedonian general, Antigonus I. In the Hasmonean (Maccabean) period the Seleucids garrisoned the city, the Jewish general Jonathan captured it in 148, and Simon recaptured it, installed a garrison, and completed the harbor. In 68 ce the Roman commander Vespasian captured the city on his way to Jerusalem. By that time the harbor and port city of Caesarea had come to play a larger role in commerce than Jaffa, and for several centuries Caesarea took precedence as the region’s Roman capital.

The Crusades

Jaffa regained importance during the Crusades. Although Acre served as the main port for the Kingdom of Jerusalem during much of the period, Jaffa’s proximity to the city of Jerusalem made it the preferred gateway for pilgrims. The Battle of Jaffa (1192) brought the Third Crusade to an end, leading to a truce between the Muslim sultan Saladin and Richard I (Richard Coeur de Lion, or Lionheart) that left the Crusaders with just a narrow coastal strip but ensured pilgrims’ access to the holy sites of Jerusalem. Amid the ongoing threat posed by the Crusades in the 13th century, the Mamluks moved the urban settlement of Palestine inland and razed the ports along the coast, which were vulnerable to plunder by Frankish invaders.

Modern Jaffa

Toward the end of the 17th century the Ottomans began to develop Jaffa again as a seaport. By the mid-18th century it was flourishing as a commercial center, but in the second half of the century activity was disrupted because of the turmoil of Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar’s rebellion and Napoleon’s subsequent siege of coastal Palestine. Once stability was restored, the city developed rapidly throughout the 19th century and attracted an influx of Western merchants and pilgrims, thereby becoming one of the most active ports along the eastern Mediterranean and the second largest city in Palestine. Its exports consisted of soap of olive oil, sesame, barley, watermelons, wine, and especially oranges (commonly known as Jaffa oranges). Western diplomats established consulates in Jaffa, and new neighborhoods were built that catered to migrants from abroad, including from Egypt, the United States, and Germany. The Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II erected a limestone clock tower in the town square in 1903.

In the early 20th century the Second Aliyah (1904–14) brought Jewish immigrants to Palestine who were inspired by political Zionist Theodor Herzl’s vision of a Jewish state as a socialist utopia. In 1909 about 60 Jewish families, most of whom had recently settled in Jaffa, founded a garden suburb a little more than a mile (2 km) northeast of the city. In 1910 they named the suburb Tel Aviv after the Hebrew title of Herzl’s novel Altneuland (1902; German: “Old-New Land”). After World War I, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the beginning of the British mandate of Palestine, Arabs in the territory grew concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants, including the arrival of about 20,000 Jews to Jaffa between 1918 and 1921 to whom the British had promised a homeland. As May Day marches took place in Jaffa, a riot broke out, targeting Jewish migrants in the city. The violence did little to stop the arrival of new migrants, but it accelerated the emigration of Jewish communities out of the city center and into the outskirts. With the establishment of Ramat Gan (1921) to the east, Bat Yam (1926) to the south, and Holon (1935) to the southeast, Jaffa gradually became enclosed by Jewish settlements. Tension and violence between the mainly Arab city and the Jewish suburbs continued to escalate, particularly during the 1929 Arab riot and 1936–39 Arab revolt, and by the 1940s there were virtually no Jews left in the city.

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In the partition plan adopted in United Nations Resolution 181 (1947), Jaffa was designated an exclave of the proposed Arab state, surrounded by the proposed Jewish state. Conflict broke out after the partition plan was announced: Arabs and Jews fought to secure strategic parts of Palestine, irrespective of the partition’s allotment, before the partition was set to go into effect on May 15, 1948. On April 26 of that year, Irgun Zvai Leumi attacked Jaffa to ensure that it would become part of the Jewish state, saying that the boundary between Jaffa and Tel Aviv would be indefensible. Nearly all of the city’s 70,000 Arab Muslims and Christians were displaced in the battle, and on May 13 Jaffa was securely under the control of Jewish paramilitaries. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Jaffa was firmly within the armistice lines secured by the new state of Israel, and in 1950 it was united with Tel Aviv, which by then had become a sizable city with a population exceeding 400,000. Most of Jaffa’s old city was subsequently demolished, and the 4,000 Arabs who remained were concentrated in the Ajami neighborhood, south of the old city. The Ottoman clock tower remains as the most prominent monument, now bearing a plaque commemorating the 1948 battle for Jaffa.