Yishuv (Settlement or Community, in Hebrew)

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YISHUV (Settlement or community, in Hebrew)

The Jewish community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel. The Yishuv was divided into two sections: the Old Yishuv, Jews of communities established prior to the start of the Zionist movement; and the New Yishuv, consisting of Zionists who came to Palestine in the hope of establishing a national Jewish homeland. The two had different cultures and aims and their members were often antagonists.

Members of the Old Yishuv came to Ottoman Palestine from Eastern Europe, starting in the late eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth. Pious men and scholars concerned by the waning of traditional Jewish culture in Europe, their goal was a routine centered upon study, prayer, and observance of religious commandments, based on medieval European ways of life. The communities and schools they established were funded by wealthy Jews in Europe and the United States who were supportive of this aim; but as their numbers grew, these funds became inadequate and most lived in poverty.

When Zionism emerged in Europe in the 1880s, Zionists, too, began to sponsor immigration to Palestine; but the goal of the newcomers was a self-supporting secular, egalitarian society based on productive labor and a Hebrew cultural renaissance, fueled by a vision of political change. They wanted to cut ties with tradition and build modern independent Jewish state. So the two lifestyles clashed, and the social change brought about by the new threatened to overwhelm the old—a situation exacerbated by the fact that both competed for funding.

After World War I, when Palestine came under the British mandate, British policy recognized the Yishuv as a religious community; but in practice, it encouraged the Zionists' establishment of national-style institutions. These began with the election of a national council (Vaʿad Le'umi), which administered the community. Many members of the Old Yishuv refused to participate in the elections because they objected to female suffrage and to the secular aims of Zionism. Most Zionists, on the other hand, refused to obey traditional Jewish laws, such as the one requiring land to lie fallow every seventh year. There was, of course, some overlap, as some newcomers were strongly religious and some members of the older communities embraced new ways; but on the whole the Yishuv became largely Zionist in its outlook, providing the foundation upon which the State of Israel was created. From the time of the first Zionist congress of 1897 to the UN plan for partition of Palestine in 1947, the Yishuv grew from 40,000 to 600,000 persons, from 27 to 300 agricultural settlements and from land holdings of 204,000 to 1,800,000 dunams.