The Jewish Majority in Jerusalem in the 1850s, Another Source

William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854), a painter, made five trips to the Levant, including the Land of Israel. His first trip trip took place in 1834-35 and his fifth and last trip took place in 1853-54. His paintings and illustrations of religious and historical sites and other notable views in Israel and neighboring countries were widely published in his own lifetime and afterwards.  His book on his last voyage, Jerusalem Revisited (London) came out in 1855, a year after his death in a ship that sank in the Mediterranean. He reports a Jewish majority at that time. Cesar Famin, a French historian and diplomat, reported a Jewish majority in Jerusalem as well, in a book published in 1853, around the time of Bartlett's last visit. Famin's book later became the source for Karl Marx's report of a Jewish majority in the Holy City (New York Daily Tribune, 15 April 1854). Other visitors to Jerusalem reported a Jewish majority starting in the mid-nineteenth century (also here).

Here are quotes from Bartlett's Jerusalem Revisited:

"The Jews are also the most numerous body in Jerusalem, and there is good reason to believe that their total number is about 11,000; divisible into Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The latter, or German and Polish Jews, are about 4,000. Their numbers are augmented by constant arrivals from Europe. . ."
[Jerusalem Revisited, p 42].
Hence, he estimates the numbers of Sefardi and Oriental Jews at the time as between 6,000 and 7,000 [p  43]. He also reports the Judeophobia of the Muslim and local Christian population [pp 42-43].

As to the Muslims and Christians, he writes: "The Moslem population is decreasing, as well as in fanaticism" [p 50]
He goes on: ". . . while the native Moslem population is diminishing in numbers and influence, the Christians, strengthened and supported from abroad, are gaining in both respects." [p 51]

I find Bartlett's paintings and other pictorial works to be very interesting. Several of them have been very widely published. A good number of them appear in:
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Painting the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi & New York: Hemed 1997).

Ben-Arieh's book also contains a reliable account of Bartlett's career and works (see Chapter 4, pp 78-95). Of particular interest is his depiction of religious Jews gathered at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount enclosure (p 86). This work was painted in 1842 and besides its intrinsic human interest, it belies recent claims by Arab propagandists and their Western partisans that Jews were not interested in the Western Wall before 1967. I have used Ben-Arieh's book as the main source about Bartlett, although I found the quotes in his own book, Jerusalem Revisited (1855).

EU Violates Its Own Principle of Transparency

The NGO Monitor organization has shown that EU funding for so-called "non-governmental organizations" operating in Israel and against Israel and flying the false flags of "human rights" and "peace" is anything but transparent. Yet transparency is supposed to be one of those principles of the European Union that were supposed to make it something new and different and admirable, something more democratic on the soil of the Old Continent.

Evelyn Gordon too has found that the European Union likes to cover its tracks and pretend that the results of "reports" by the bodies that it funds and sometimes invites to Brussels or Strasbourg to lecture on Israel's alleged evils towards those Arabs now fashionably called "Palestinians" are purely objective and motivated by the highest morality and justice, rather than by the desire to please one's European financiers.

Here is her too brief examination of the EU and its relationship with its Middle Eastern echo chamber:

In the three days since Israel passed a law mandating new reporting requirements for NGOs that are primarily funded by foreign governments, there’s one question I have yet to hear any of its critics answer. If, as they stridently claim, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with NGOs getting most of their funding from a foreign government, then why would simply being required to state this fact in all their publications exercise a “chilling effect” (the U.S. State Department) or “stigmatize” them (the New Israel Fund) or result in “constraining their activities” (theEuropean Union)?

The obvious answer is that the critics know perfectly well it isn’t alright: An organization that gets most of its funding from a foreign government isn’t a “nongovernmental” organization at all, but an instrument of that government’s foreign policy. In fact, with regard to the EU, that’s explicit in itsfunding guidelines: For an Israeli organization that conducts activities in the territories to be eligible for EU funding, it must comply with EU foreign policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, incidentally, also explains why 25 of the 27 organizations affected by the law are left-wing: The far-left is the only part of Israel’s political spectrum that shares Europe’s opinions on the conflict, and hence, that Europe is willing to fund.

Yet if an organization is an instrument of a foreign country’s foreign policy, it’s very hard to argue that it’s an objective “human rights organization,” as the organizations in question bill themselves. Rather, it’s an overtly political organization that seeks to pressure Israel into adopting the foreign government’s preferred policies. And making this known definitely could be “stigmatizing,” in the sense that Israelis might be less willing to trust an organization’s assertions once they realize it has a not-so-hidden policy agenda that could be influencing its reports.

That, however, is precisely why Israelis have a need and a right to know where these organizations’ funding is coming from–especially given this funding’s sheer scale. And it’s also why there’s nothing remotely undemocratic about the law, as explained in depth by legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich here.

Nevertheless, if this is really what the law’s critics fear, then they’re behind the times. In the years since the idea of legislating this law first arose, most of the organizations in question have made themselves so toxic that it’s hard to see how information about their foreign funding could make Israelis view them any more negatively. Thus the more likely impact of publicizing their funding sources won’t be to delegitimize the organizations, but to delegitimize their donors–which is precisely why Europe, which provides most of this funding, is so worried.

Currently, a nontrivial portion of Europe’s influence in Israel comes from the fact that Israelis still admire it and, therefore, want it to like their country, not merely to trade with it. The fact that Europe is Israel’s biggest trading partner obviously also matters greatly, but the emotional angle, which stems mainly from Europe’s role as part of the democratic West, shouldn’t be underrated.

Now consider how that admiration might be affected by the discovery of how much money Europe gives, say, Breaking the Silence. This organization, which compiles “testimony” by Israeli soldiers about alleged abuses, is unpopular in Israel for many reasons–because Israelis don’t think its reports accurately reflect their army’s actions (see here for oneegregious example); because its “testimony” is strictly anonymous, making it impossible to investigate its allegations; and because it spends most of its time and effort marketing its reports abroad, convincing many Israelis that it’s more interested in tarnishing Israel’s image than in getting the army to improve its behavior. But last month, two incidents brought its reputation to a new low.

The first was Mahmoud Abbas’ infamous address to the European Parliament, in which he repeated a medieval blood libel by claiming rabbis were ordering their followers to poison Palestinian wells. This accusation originated in a report by a Turkish news agency that cited Breaking the Silence as its source, which sounded highly unlikely. Except then the Israeli website NRG published a video showing one of the organization’s founders claiming that settlers had engineered the evacuation of a Palestinian village by poisoning its well. And a respected left-wing journalist, Ben-Dror Yemini, published a column with further documentation of both the organization’s claim and its falsity. So it turned out BtS actually was spreading a medieval blood libel.

Then, the following week, a group of reservists went public with their experiences of how BtS collects its testimony – which turns out to entail both harassment and deception. After their discharge from the army, the organization called them repeatedly to urge them to talk about their experiences in the 2014 Gaza war; one man said he was called eight or nine times. But when they finally acquiesced, they discovered that the organization had cherry-picked from their accounts to present the army in the worst possible light.

To grasp just how toxic BtS has become, consider the fact that the president of Ben-Gurion University–who has scrupulously defended its right to speak at university seminars–nevertheless overturned a departmental decision to grant it a monetary prize last month. What Professor Rivka Carmi essentially said is that while she will defend its right to speak, she isn’t willing to have her university finance the organization. And when you’ve lost the universities, which are among the most left-wing organizations in Israel, you’ve really lost the whole country. [Commentary 14 July 2016, here]
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
See Eugene Kontorovich on the NGO Transparency Law.

The Hypocritical Critics of Israel's New NGO Transparency Law

I am going to let the erudite law professor, Eugene Kontorovich,
explain the hypocrisy of the critics of the new, Israeli NGO
Transparency Law [Tablet magazine, 13 July 2016]:

Israel this week passed a law requiring domestic organizations
that are primarily funded by foreign governments to disclose 
this connection in their communications with the government. 
The law, shepherded by Ayelet Shaked, is totally neutral with
regard to the activities of the funded organization. However,
European governments that fund political groups only on the 
left- and far-left of the political spectrum, have denounced the 
law in apocalyptic terms as undermining Israeli democracy and 
rightly inviting international opprobrium.

A major talking point of the law’s critics is that it has “no democratic 
parallel,” and that it puts Israel in the category of non-democratic 
regimes like Russia, and even sets it on the road to fascism. But 
if these claims are true, there is little hope for democracy in the 
U.S., which has had similar rules for decades, and imposed new
ones a few years ago without a peep of international objection.

Critics of the Israeli law generally concede that the required
disclosures are legitimate. They object that the application of 
such disclosure requirements only to groups funded by foreign 
governments, as opposed to those funded by foreign private
individuals (who, unlike the EU, support both left- and right-
-wing political NGOs), are arbitrary and therefore sets Israel 
apart from other democracies. Both claims are specious.

First of all, treating foreign government contributions 
differently from private ones is entirely commonplace and 
rational, especially in the case of Israel. Governments are 
indeed different from rich individuals. Governments have 
foreign policies, trade rules, and United Nations votes
—and they use the groups they fund in Israel to produce 
documents that they then invoke when taking those actions. 
Private people have no similar powers. As a matter of basic 
democratic integrity, groups that depend largely on 
government funds should not be able to advertise their 
“NGO” status without at least some small-print clarification.

Moreover, Israel has good cause to take a different approach
to the issue than other Western democracies because the 
outsized role of foreign—and specifically European-funded—
groups is particularly egregious in Israel. Protecting the
integrity of Israeli democracy requires special transparency rules.

First, Israel is unique in the sheer scale of the foreign government
sponsorship of domestic political groups. For example, the 
European Union alone has in recent years given roughly 1.2 
million Euro a year for political NGOs in the U.S,. and roughly an
order of magnitude more in Israel—a vastly larger per capita
amount. This is magnified by similar imbalances in funding by 
individual European countries. There is a unique secrecy 
concerning the processes by which funding is granted to Israeli 
non-profits by the EU and many individual governments, 
including refusals in response to Freedom of Information requests.

Secondly, Europe itself has unique rules about funding Israeli
groups, which have no parallel elsewhere. Under Article 15 of 
the EU’s special guidelines for funding Israeli groups, 
organizations dealing with the territories are only eligible for 
funding if they declare that their activities promote EU foreign 
policy, and the EU agrees. These are groups that get the bulk 
of their funding from the EU, but only if they promote Brussels’s
interests—the very definition of a foreign agent.

Indeed, even the United States uses NGOs as proxies to meddle
in internal Israeli affairs. As the U.S. Senate Permanent 
Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) reported yesterday, 
the State Department funded an Israeli political organization
that later ran a campaign dedicated to ousting Israeli Prime 
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The distinction between getting money from a foreign government
and a foreign person is basic, and reflected in U.S. law. The House 
of Representatives requires from those who testify before it a 
disclosure of monies received specifically from foreign governments
—just like the Israeli law.

More egregiously, the Israeli law is so clearly aligned with the
American Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) that both 
Obama Administration officials and political groups have made 
the false claim that unlike the Israeli measure, FARA applies “equally” 
to foreign governments and foreign people. This is demonstrably 
false as a matter of the intent, application, and text of FARA. In 
fact, FARA only applies, in law and practice, to donations from 
foreign governmental actors.

[to continue reading go here]