After touring the land of Israel, an early Zionist delegation proposed resettling European Jews not just in agricultural colonies but in cities. A pioneer group from Jaffa agreed to pave the way in Gaza, writing a new chapter in the turbulent story of Jewish settlement there

There’s been a Jewish community in Gaza ever since the late Middle Ages. In the 1600s, two of its distinguished members were the great liturgical poet Rabbi Yisrael Najara – who composed, inter alia, the Sabbath hymn Ya Ribon Olam and Yodukha Ra’ayonai – and Nathan of Gaza, who proclaimed Shabbetai Zvi the Messiah. At the turn of the 18th century, during the Napoleonic Wars, the Jews abandoned Gaza. As Rabbi Yehosef Schwartz (the first modern researcher of the land of Israel) wrote:

None of our nation is there now. Until 5559 [1799] there was indeed settlement there. But that year, French forces marched into the land with Napoleon Bonaparte, moving from Egypt to the land of Israel via Gaza, and it was a time of distress for the Jews of Gaza, and many fled. Since then, the group of our people [there] has dwindled, until in 5571 [1811] not one Jew remained, for they’d all gone to Hebron and Jerusalem. (Yehosef Schwartz, The Produce of the Land [Lvov, 1865], p. 65 [Hebrew])

Ibrahim Pasha subsequently destroyed the desolate local synagogue, using its stones to fortify Ashkelon during his 1831 revolt against Ottoman rule.

In 1881, after Jews were falsely implicated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a wave of pogroms broke out in Russia. In response, the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) association in Ukraine sent member Zalman David Levontin (a Moscow bookkeeper) to the land of Israel in search of suitable areas for the resettlement of Jews seeking to leave Russia.

In 5642 (1882), Levontin formed the Yesud Ha-ma’ala Pioneer Committee in Jaffa, and he and Yosef Feinberg – his partner in founding Rishon Lezion, the first Zionist colony, that same year – set out to find land for a colony in the Judean Lowlands. With Jaffa and Jerusalem real estate prices inflated by European commercial interests, the pair headed south. In Gaza they encountered a Jewish convert to Christianity named Shapira – the only European in town – who arranged a meeting for them in Deir al-Balah with the local Bedouin chief. Levontin made three separate trips Gaza to finalize a land deal, but to no avail. Instead, at year’s end he acquired a site known as ‘Uyūn Qārā (Fountain of the Crier), on which Rishon Lezion was promptly founded.