Eight Days? Try 2,000 Years (and Counting)

Every year at Hanukkah, we celebrate a familiar story.

A small band of Jews, the Maccabees, defeated a great empire and restored Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. We light candles to remember that the Maccabees relit the Menorah in the Jerusalem Temple. 

But after the candles are out and the sufganiyot are gone, most of us quietly jump over the next two millenia. We assume that the Roman Empire “exiled” the Jews after destroying the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and that Jews wandered the globe for 1,800 years, more or less, until modern Zionism brought about a “return.”

It’s a powerful narrative. But it’s also wrong in important ways.

It is probably true that the Romans temporarily made Jerusalem Judenrein and that they renamed all of Judea and the southern Levant “Palestine,” after the ancient enemy of the Jews, the Philistines. But it is not true that the Romans shipped off all Levantine Jews to be slaves in Europe. 

Rather, most Jews relocated a short distance on their own to areas well within the Biblical Heartland, especially the Galilee region, where the rabbis wrote the Mishnah.

Scholars like Michael Avi-Yonah and Moshe Gil show that Jews formed substantial percentages of the population in the Galilee, Samaria, and the Golan for hundreds of years after the Second Temple’s destruction. 

Tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of Jews populated dozens of cities in and around the Holy Land well into the early 7th century. Indeed, Jewish fighters rebelled against Christian rule at that time and briefly retook Jerusalem with Persian assistance in 614 CE, as documented in works like the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel. These writings depict Jewish leaders like Nehemiah ben Hushiel, Benjamin of Tiberias, and Hephzibah, a legendary female warrior who reportedly killed multiple evil kings.

So what happened in the mid-7th century, after the Persian alliance with the Jews soured and Christian Byzantium retook Jerusalem for itself?

According to the traditional Islamic narrative, that is when Muhammad and his followers burst out of Arabia to conquer — one might say “colonize” — the lands that make up what we now call the Middle East, including Jerusalem, by 638 CE.

But a group of revisionist scholars, including Fred Donner, Patricia Crone, and Stephen Shoemaker, tell a different story. One version of this story, supported by a 7th-century Armenian chronicler often referred to as pseudo-Sebeos, has Jews and “Ishmaelites” (Arabs) joining forces to conquer the Land of Israel together, as fellow descendants of Abraham.

This chronicler even describes Jews helping build a sanctuary in Jerusalem after the conquest.

Professor Shoemaker has also argued that Islam’s earliest sacred geography may refer not to Mecca, but to Jerusalem. On this reading, the Qur’an’s “Sacred House” and the ritual of running between al-Ṣafā and al-Marwah originally referred to the site of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem as well as the pilgrimage stops that included nearby Mount Scopus (Safa) and Mount Moriah (Marwah). These sites and place names only later shifted south in the Islamic memory to the Meccan shrines in what is now Saudi Arabia. 

In other words, the earliest Muslim “hajj” (حجّ) — Arabic cognate of the Hebrew word “chag” (חג) — might have been a pilgrimage that included both Jews and Muslims walking together on the same mountains that Jews had revered since the Bible.

Regardless, even traditional Muslim sources hold that Caliph ʿUmar, who was the second successor to Muhammad, cooperated with local Jews to locate the footprint of the ancient sanctuary and clear the garbage from the Mount. Jewish and Muslim sources note that Jews were welcomed to live in Jerusalem again and to pray on or near the site in the 630s CE.

By the 8th century, Umayyad rulers had built the Dome of the Rock, not as a mosque, but as a shrine. And it was not purely “Islamic” as we think of that term today. Early descriptions included in works by later Muslim writers like al-Wasiti discuss rituals that look much more like ancient Israelite practices than contemporary Islamic worship.

In one account, Jews of priestly descent (Levites) were chosen to anoint the Rock with special oil, burning huge amounts of incense until the Dome was blackened with smoke. 

Art historians such as Beatrice St. Laurent have pointed out that the building’s design and decoration echo the Jewish Temple, and that early Muslims called the complex Bayt al-Maqdis (بيت المقدس) in Arabic, another cognate for a Hebrew term, i.e., the Beit Ha-Mikdash (בֵּית־הַמִּקְדָּשׁ), which Jews used to refer to the First and Second Temples.

By the time of the First Crusade in 1099, Jewish communities in what is now Israel were so integrated that they took part in the defense of cities like Jerusalem and Haifa alongside the Fatimid Muslim garrison. Unfortunately, the Crusaders defeated the joint Muslim and Jewish brigades. 

The massacres and expulsions that followed were horrific. Yet even there, Jewish continuity in the Holy Land proved hard to extinguish. Jewish communities persisted nearby and the Jewish sage Maimonides still managed to make a pilgrimage to Christian-controlled Jerusalem, even ascending the Temple Mount, in 1165.

When the Muslim general Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, he invited the Jews back yet again — and they returned. In the next decades, another Jewish sage, Nachmanides, settled permanently in Jerusalem, where he helped build a synagogue that still functions today.

When the Ottoman Empire conquered Jerusalem centuries later and built the walls that now surround what we now call the Old City of Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter of the city continued to thrive. Likewise, Jewish communities elsewhere in the Land of Israel flourished, especially in Safed, where Sephardic Jews settled after a formal “exile” really did expel them from Spain in 1492.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, new waves of Jewish immigrants arrived to the Holy Land from Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Ottoman heartland out of religious conviction. These communities formed what later became known as the Old Yishuv. They were pious, sometimes poor, often supported by donations from abroad — but they were deeply rooted in the Land of Israel and especially in the four holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron.

In the 19th century, we finally get hard numbers. The Montefiore censuses of 1839 and after counted thousands of Jews in the four holy cities, and smaller nearby towns. European consuls and travelers began to notice that in Jerusalem, Jews were not just present — they were the largest single community. 

By the 1860s and 1870s, Jews were the clear majority in Jerusalem, decades before Herzl and the organized Zionist movement.

So, as you light the Hanukkah candles this year, you can and should keep celebrating the story of the Maccabees. 

But you should also remember that the flame the Maccabees lit in the Land of Israel never went out. It dimmed, it moved, it was battered by empires — but for two thousand years, it never stopped burning where it started.