NAZARETH

"Synagogue-Church", Nazareth, courtesy Expedia

Today, Nazareth is a largely peaceful Arab town in the Lower Galilee, two thirds of whom are Muslim and one third Christian. Historically associated with the life of Christ, a Jew born in the Jewish city of Bethlehem, until the 7^th century, Nazareth was a wholly or largely Jewish town.

According to some medieval Jewish scholars, the area was settled by Jews during the time of the prophet Jeremiah who wrote of the watchmen (netzarim) of Ephraim whence the town may have gotten its name. Centuries later, it became the boyhood home of Jesus Christ. According to the New Testament account, when Jesus tried to preach to the people of the town, he was attacked and almost thrown off a cliff, identified by tradition as the nearby Jebel Qafza. After the end of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135, Nazareth became the home of, and ruled by, the Hafitzatz family of Cohanim, descendants from the House of Levi son of Jacob. They remained the priestly rulers of Nazareth for the next few centuries.

During the early Byzantine period, many massacres and expulsions of Jews took place throughout the Land of Israel, including Nazareth. Forced conversion attempts were commonplace. In the 4^th century, Epiphanius, an anti-Jewish Jewish convert to Christianity, was given permission by the authorities to build a church in Nazareth in an attempt to convert the Jews. According to tradition, it was built on the site of the synagogue where Jesus worshipped and thus became known as the “synagogue church”. This conversion attempt was unsuccessful but a small body of Jewish Christians grew up around it. The “church” exists to this day and is one of many focal points for Christian pilgrims. By the 6^th century, another church was built, apparently converted from a synagogue.

In reaction to centuries of ceaseless persecutions under the Christians, Jews would actively support anyone who came to relieve their plight. The answer came in 614 when the Persians invaded the Land of Israel aided by some 20,000 Jews who served in the Persian army. Those in and around Nazareth, especially the mountain areas, also actively aided the Persians and contributed much to the Persian takeover, massacring many Christians in the process. The Jews finally got their revenge but this victory however, was short-lived. By 630, the Byzantines finally expelled the Persians. All Jews were expelled from Nazareth which was, then, settled by Christians from throughout the Empire. Nazareth became a Christian town. So much so that the Hebrew word for Christian, “Notzri”, derives from the name Nazareth. Much later, a small number of Jews did return and remained there for centuries. After the Arab conquest in 636, Arab Muslims also began to settle there. The “synagogue church” was later purchased by the Franciscans in 1741. Today, the site belongs to the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

Christian prejudice against Jews had never ceased during the centuries of Christian and Muslim rule. In 1849 upon the visit to Nazareth of British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, someone had accused him of killing a child and using his blood for making Passover Matza – an old anti-Semitic trope from Europe, centuries in the making. Fortunately, the ruling Ottoman Turks found the accusation baseless and Montefiore was then able to go on his way.

After the British conquest of the Land of Israel in World War I and the subsequent increase in Jewish immigration spurred on by the Zionist movement, representatives of Nazareth who opposed Zionism, sent a delegation to the First Palestine Arab Congress and issued a letter of protest in 1920 that condemned the movement while also proclaiming solidarity with the Jews of Palestine as one of many religions in the country. In 1922, Nazareth had a remaining Jewish population of 53 that had survived over the centuries. They were ethnically cleansed from there, as were other places in the Land of Israel during the bloody Arab riots in the ‘20s and ‘30s.

In the 1936–1939 Arab Revolt, Nazareth played a minor role, contributing two rebel commanders to the Arab militias – the Christian Fu'ad Nassar and Tawfiq al-Ibrahim. The leaders of the revolt sought to use Nazareth as a staging ground to protest the British proposal to include the Galilee into a future Jewish state. To give expression to that opposition, on September 26, 1937, the British district commissioner of the Galilee, Lewis Yelland Andrews, was assassinated in Nazareth by local rebels.

Nazareth was in the territory allotted to the Arab state under the 1947 UN Partition Plan. In the months leading up to the 1948 War of Independence, the town became a refuge for Arabs fleeing the urban centers of Tiberias, Haifa and Baysan before and during the Haganah's capture of those cities in April and May.

During the War, Nazareth was conquered by Arab forces under the direction of the Nazi-trained Fawzi al Kaukji from Syria but was taken by Israeli forces in July. The town surrendered and after the War, was incorporated into the State of Israel.

In 1957, the adjacent Jewish town of Nazrat Illit (Upper Nazareth) was established. It became populated by native born Israelis and European immigrants and in 1974, it achieved city status.