If you were asked to name a prominent Sephardi Jew who funded the development of Jerusalem, Sir Moses Montefiore might spring to mind. Yet Montefiore, a British philanthropist, never lived in Eretz Israel, although he made seven visits.
You may have never heard of Rabbi David Ben Shimon. He came to Israel in 1854 and found a community of desperately poor Maghrebi or Moroccan Jews living within the city walls. Like Montefiore, he helped develop the Mishkenot Sha’ananim quarter outside the Old City. He founded the Mahane Israel quarter. It also housed Kurdish Jews, Georgians and Bukharans. Like Montefiore, Ben Shimon tried to wean poor Jews off charity and encourage them to become productive citizens.
Contemporaneously with Montefiore, a select group of Sephardi grandees – mostly from North Africa – also made significant contributions towards urban and coastal development. These individuals – some wealthy enough to be called “the Rothschilds of the East” – are almost unknown in the modern historiography of the Land of Israel. They were neither members of the traditional Sephardi community, who settled mainly in Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias after the Spanish inquisition, nor were they Zionist nationalist activists who immigrated during the First Aliyah or later.
While they could not be called Zionists, they were unconscious forerunners of Zionism. They belonged to elite Ottoman families who took advantage of foreign protection. Several became wealthy businessmen and entrepreneurs, vice-consuls, and communal leaders of the Old Yishuv. Escorted by splendidly-attired Turkish guards, they represented foreign states, and reaped the benefits of the “capitulations: system. This was a special arrangement the Ottomans had made with the western powers, granting useful non-Muslims certain privileges. Jews and Christians could thus escape the dhimmi status of institutionalized inferiority under Muslim rule.
Jews had already been moving in from the Ottoman empire and Morocco in the early 19th century.
Settling in Safed
Born in Algeria, Rabbi Shmuel Abbo arrived in the Galilee in 1817 and settled in Safed. Abbo bought the desolate tomb of Shimon Bar Yochai on Mount Meron and built a proper shrine.
Abbo became French consul in Safed. This meant that he came under French, and not Ottoman, law according to the capitulations regime: he had a right to buy land. This he did on behalf of the foreign Jews who came to Palestine.
IT IS assumed that the first agricultural settlements were founded by the Ashkenazim of the First Aliyah. In fact, Abbo established the very first agricultural settlement in Meron, 39 years before the founding of the kibbutzim Degania and Kinneret. There he settled Kurdish Jews. They worked the land by day and studied kabbala by night.
Abbo accompanied Montefiore and the French-Jewish leader Adolphe Crémieux on their mission to save the Jews arrested in the Damascus Affair of 1840. He was useful as an Arabic interpreter. Abbo’s son bought land in the Galilee for agricultural use decades before the first kibbutzim were established.
A few hundred Maghrebi Jews arrived by steamship to settle in Jaffa from the mid-to the late 19th century. The city was booming but was becoming very crowded.
Yosef Moyal Bey (1843-1914), whose father came to Palestine from Rabat in Morocco, acquired tremendous wealth. He used his ties with the Ottomans to promote his interests and those of the Old Yishuv.
Moyal was described as the richest man in the country. He bought land in Jaffa and Jerusalem either on his own or in partnership with the entrepreneurs Chelouche and Amzalak. He helped finance the Jaffa clock tower and the adjoining plaza.
Yosef’s brother Abraham was a Zionist nationalist and represented the Hovevei Zion society. Abraham was considered the first Mizrahi leader of the community but died at the tragically early age of 35.
Yosef helped the Zionists arriving after 1882 with food and money. He got permits for the Ashkenazim of the First Aliyah to enter Palestine when they were forbidden from disembarking in Jaffa. The title Bey was conferred on Yosef by the Ottoman sultan for services rendered to the empire. He became an Ottoman subject and was thought to have donated to the Ottoman war chest.
The man principally responsible for constructing the railway between Jaffa and Jerusalem was Yosef Navon, an Ottoman subject. Navon, an ancestor of Yitzhak Navon – who served as Israel’s fifth president – also received the Ottoman concession to extend the line to Gaza and Nablus.
Haim Amzalak (1828-1916) was the son of Joseph, born in Gibraltar. Joseph settled in Jerusalem around 1816. Haim and family resided in a large house near Jaffa. Montefiore, an old friend of the family, was impressed by a dinner served “in the best European style” in the Amzalak household by multilingual waiters. “All this might have made us forget that we were in the Holy Land had we not been reminded of it every now and then, either by the overpowering heat or the bite of an intruding mosquito,” he wrote.
LIKE HIS father, Amzalak worked in banking with Ya’akov Valero, a member of another prominent Sephardi family. He was one of the first Jews to buy land around Jaffa, both for housing, and to plant orange groves. Baron Edmond de Rothschild took over this task from Amzalak in the 1880s. Haim was appointed by Portugal as vice-consul and as British vice-consul.
The Valero family were for four generations key players in the economy of Jerusalem. A humble ritual slaughterer or shohet from Istanbul, Ya’akov established the first private bank in Palestine inside the Old City. Whereas other banks moved outside the Old City walls, Valero’s bank remained within them. Valero issued their own paper bank notes. They also bought much property, and Jerusalemites referred to them as the Rothschilds of the East.
As Ottoman citizens they were able to do this without hindrance. Haim Aharon Valero owned property in Ein Kerem, Bethlehem, Jaffa, and Hebron. He had business dealings with Arabs as well as Jews.
In 1876, Arabs rioted in Jerusalem. Haim Valero interceded with the Ottoman army commander and the mufti, asking them to protect the Jews in the city. But by and large, relations were good, especially with Arab elite families.
Another Arabic-speaker with excellent ties to the Arabs was Aharon Chelouche. The Chelouches were among 300 Jewish families to leave Algeria for Eretz Israel in 1840. In Jaffa, Aharon became a goldsmith and a successful money changer. He went into property development. He built, with Shimon Rokach, the first Jewish settlement outside Jaffa, Neveh Tzedek, in 1887. This neighborhood preceded the founding of Tel Aviv in 1909. He bought a vineyard which he sold to Yemenite Jews, known today as Kerem Hateimanim.
Aharon Chelouche’s son Yosef-Eliyahu became a founder of Ahuzat Bayit, the association which pioneered the building of Tel Aviv. He was responsible for establishing 32 buildings.
As a 10-year-old, Yosef-Eliahu was the victim of an attempted kidnapping by an Arab acquaintance of his father. Ironically, however, he was a tireless campaigner for coexistence. In 1913, to counter Judeophobia in the Arab press, Yosef-Eliahu, along with other Arabic-speaking Tel Avivians, founded Hamagen (the Shield), dedicated to persuading Arabs that they and Jews shared economic and cultural interests and could only improve each other’s lot.
Arabic-speaking Sephardim are thought to have had affinity with the Arabs. Some even think that if the leadership of the Jewish community had been Sephardi, conflict with the Arabs in Palestine might have been avoided. But even leaders like Yosef-Eliahu were powerless to stem the rising tide of violence and Jew-hatred.
Throughout the 19th century , the Old Yishuv was mostly Sephardi. Yet the Sephardi contribution to settling and building the land of Israel has been downplayed: the modern history of Israel tends to begin with the Zionist movement and the better known Ashkenazi First Aliyah.
It is time for the Sephardi grandees to take up their rightful place in the history books.
The writer is the cofounder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.