THE JEWS AT GAZA[20]
There is no record to show that the Jews obtained any stronghold in
Gaza during Pagan times.
Pompey liberated Gaza _c._ 65 B.C., which had been subjected to the
Jews since the times of the Maccabees, and restored the city to its
freedom.
With the institutions of Pompey, the freedom of the Jewish people,
after having existed for scarcely eighty years, if we reckon it as
beginning in 142 B.C., was completely overthrown.
Josephus says (_The Jewish War_, II. 18, 1) that after the people of
Cæsarea had slain about 20,000 Jews, and all the city was emptied of
its Jewish inhabitants, A.D. 66, the whole nation was greatly enraged,
so the Jews divided themselves into parties, utterly demolishing
Anthedon and Gaza.
Schürer (_History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, II. vol.
i, p. 71), however, thinks that this must have been a very partial
destruction, for so strong a fortress as Gaza could not have been
actually destroyed by a band of insurrectionary Jews.
During the middle ages, the use of wine being forbidden to Muslims by
the Kûrản, it was manufactured in Gaza only by the Jews. This Jewish
wine trade remained in their hands exclusively for a lengthened period.
There was also a colony of wine-dealers in the harbour Mayoumas.
In February 1799 most of the Jews fled when the French troops under
Napoleon entered Gaza. Meyer says that in 1811 there were none left.
Their synagogue stood idle, and their cemetery was deserted.
There were supposed to be, in 1907, about one hundred and sixty Jews in
Gaza (of whom thirty were Sephardim).
FOOTNOTE:
[20] It will be noticed that this chapter does not refer to the
earliest connections of Jews with Gaza.