The Old City of Safed

The Jewish people originated in the land of Israel, and have maintained physical, cultural, and religious ties to it ever since. Although they had first emerged centuries earlier as an outgrowth of southern Canaanites, and the Jewish Bible claims that a Jewish monarchy existed starting in the 10th century BCE, the first appearance of the name Israel in the secular historic record is the Egyptian Merneptah Stele, circa 1200 BCE. During the Biblical period, two kingdoms occupied the highland zone, the Kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. The Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire , and the Kingdom of Judah by the Neo-Babylonian Empire . Upon the defeat of the Babylonian Empire by the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great , the Jewish elite returned to Jerusalem, and the Second Temple was built. In 332 BCE the Macedonian Greeks under Alexander the Great conquered Israel, starting a long religious struggle that split the Jewish population into traditional and Hellenized components. In 165 BCE, after the religion-driven Maccabean Revolt, the independent orthodox Hasmonean Kingdom was established. In 64 BCE the Romans conquered Israel, turning it into a Roman province. Although coming under the sway of various empires and home to a variety of ethnicities, the area of ancient Israel was predominantly Jewish until the Jewish–Roman wars of 66–136 CE, during which the Romans expelled most of the Jews from the area and replaced it with the Roman province of Palaestina, beginning the Jewish Diaspora. After this time, Jews became a minority in most regions, except Galilee, and the area became increasingly Christian after the 3rd century, though the percentages of Christians and Jews are unknown, the former perhaps coming to predominate in urban areas, the latter remaining in rural areas Jewish settlements declined from over 160 to 50 by the time of the Muslim conquest. Michael Avi-Yonah calculated that Jews constituted 10–15% of Palestine's population by the time of the Persian invasion of 614, while Moshe Gil claims that Jews constituted the majority of the population until the 7th century Muslim conquest .In 1099 the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and nearby coastal areas, losing and recapturing it for almost 200 years until their final ouster from Acre in 1291. In 1517 the Ottoman Empire conquered it, ruling it until the British conquered it in 1917, and ruled it under the British Mandate until 1948, when the Jewish State of Israel was proclaimed, which was made possible by the Zionist movement and its promotion of mass Jewish immigration.
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