Yishuv
The Yishuv, HaYishuv Ha'ivri, or HaYishuv HaYehudi Be'Eretz Yisra'el was the community of Jews residing in Palestine prior to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. The term came into use in the 1880s, when there were about 25,000 Jews living in that region, and continued to be used until 1948, by which time there were some 630,000 Jews there. The term is still in use to denote the pre-1948 Jewish residents in Palestine, corresponding to the southern part of Ottoman Syria until 1918, OETA South in 1917–1920, and Mandatory Palestine in 1920–1948.
A distinction is sometimes drawn between the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv. The Old Yishuv refers to all the Jews living in Palestine before the first Zionist immigration wave of 1882, and to their descendants until 1948. The Old Yishuv residents were religious Jews, living mainly in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. There were smaller communities in Jaffa, Haifa, Peki'in, Acre, Nablus, Shfaram, and until 1799 in Gaza. In the final centuries before modern Zionism, a large part of the Old Yishuv spent their time studying the Torah and lived off charity, donated by Jews in the Diaspora.
The term New Yishuv refers to those who adopted a new approach, based on economic independence and various national ideologies, rather than strictly religious reasons for settling in the "Holy Land". The precursors began building homes outside the Old City walls of Jerusalem in the 1860s, followed soon after by the founders of the moshava of Petah Tikva, with growth in full swing during the First Aliyah of 1882, followed by the founding of neighbourhoods and villages until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Ottoman rule
Old Yishuv
The Old Yishuv were the Jewish communities of southern Ottoman Syria in the Ottoman Empire, up to the onset of Zionist aliyah and the consolidation of the New Yishuv by the end of World War I in 1918 and the establishment of the British Mandate for Palestine. The Old Yishuv had continuously resided in Palestine and was largely made up of ultra-Orthodox Jews dependent on external donations for living, as opposed to the later Zionist aliyah and the New Yishuv, who were more socialist-leaning and secular, emphasizing labor and self-sufficiency.The Old Yishuv developed after a period of severe decline in Jewish communities of the Southern Levant during the early Middle Ages, and was composed of three clusters. The oldest group consisted of the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish communities in Galilee and the Judeo-Arabic speaking Musta'arabi Jews who settled in Eretz Yisrael in the Ottoman and late Mamluk period. A second group was composed of Ashkenazi and Hasidic Jews who had emigrated from Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries. A third wave was constituted by Yishuv members who arrived in the late 19th century. The Old Yishuv was thus generally divided into two independent communities – the Sephardi Jews, mainly constituting the remains of Jewish communities of Galilee and the Four Holy Cities of Judaism, which had flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries; and the Ashkenazi Jews, whose immigration from Europe was primarily since the 18th century.
The Old Yishuv term was coined by members of the 'New Yishuv' in the late 19th century to distinguish themselves from the economically dependent and generally earlier Jewish communities, who mainly resided in the four holy cities, and unlike the New Yishuv, had not embraced land ownership and agriculture. Apart from the Old Yishuv centres in the four holy cities of Judaism, namely Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias and Safed, smaller communities also existed in Jaffa, Haifa, Peki'in, Acre, Nablus and Shfaram. Petah Tikva, although established in 1878 by the Old Yishuv, nevertheless was also supported by the arriving Zionists. Rishon LeZion, the first settlement founded by the Hovevei Zion in 1882, could be considered the true beginning of the New Yishuv.
Beginning of modern Aliyah (New Yishuv)
The Ottoman government was not supportive of the new settlers from the First and Second Aliyah, as the Ottoman government officially restricted Jewish immigration. The Yishuv relied on money from abroad to support their settlements.In 1908, the Zionist Organization founded the, under Arthur Ruppin, for land acquisition, agricultural settlement and training, and later for urban expansion. The first Hebrew high schools were opened in Palestine as well as the Technion, the first institution for higher learning. Hashomer, a Zionist self-defence group, was created to protect the Jewish settlements. Labor organizations were created along with health and cultural services, all later coordinated by the Jewish National Council. By 1914, the old Yishuv was a minority, and the New Yishuv began to express itself and its Zionist goals.
The First Aliyah was the very beginning of the creation of the New Yishuv. More than 25,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine. The immigrants were inspired by the notion of creating a national home for Jews. Most of the Jewish immigrants came from Russia, escaping the pogroms, while some arrived from Yemen. Many of the immigrants were affiliated with Hovevei Zion. Hovevei Zion purchased land from Arabs and other Ottoman subjects and created various settlements such as Yesud HaMa'ala, Rosh Pinna, Gedera, Rishon LeZion, Nes Tziona and Rechovot. These agricultural settlements were supported by philanthropists from abroad, chiefly Edmond James de Rothschild. and Alphonse James de Rothschild.
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda also immigrated during the first Aliyah. Ben-Yehuda took it upon himself to revive the Hebrew language, and along with Nissim Bechar started a school for teaching Hebrew, later on founding the first Hebrew newspaper.
During the Second Aliyah, between 1903 and 1914, there were 35,000 new immigrants, primarily from Russia.
During World War I, the conditions for the Jews in the Ottoman Empire worsened. All those Jews who were of an enemy nationality were exiled and others were drafted into the Ottoman army. Many of those exiled fled to Egypt and the United States. Those who remained in the Ottoman ruled Palestine faced hard economic times. There was disagreement whether to support the British or the Turks. A clandestine group, Nili, was established to pass information to the British in the hope of defeating the Ottomans and ending their rule over Palestine. The purpose and members of the Nili were discovered. All involved were executed by the Ottomans except its founder, Aaron Aaronsohn, who escaped to Egypt. During World War I, the Jewish population in Palestine diminished by a third due to deportations, immigration, economic trouble and disease. During World War I, there were two British battalions of Jews, called the Zion Mule Corps, who were to fight on the front of Palestine. They helped in the British capture of Ottoman Syria, leading to the Turkish surrender. The members of the Zion Mule Corps later made up the Yishuv's defence groups that would fight against the British.
During the British Mandate
World War I ended, along with the Ottoman Empire. Britain gained control of Palestine through the Sykes–Picot Agreement, which partitioned Ottoman Syria into French-ruled Syria and Lebanon and British-controlled Palestine and Transjordan. There was a hope that British control would allow the creation of a Jewish national homeland as promised in the Balfour Declaration. The British Mandate was formalized in 1922 based on the Balfour Declaration. The British were supposed to help the Jews build a national home and promote the creation of self-governing institutions. The mandate provided for an agency in which the Jews could represent Jewish interests and promote Jewish immigration. It was called the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and was only created ten years later, serving as the de facto government of the Yishuv.Along with a Jewish agency there was to be a general self-governing institution created in Palestine including Jews and Arabs. The Yishuv feared such an institution due to the Arab majority, but none was created in the end due to the Arabs' refusal to cooperate with the Jews or the British. The optimism that existed in the beginning of the British mandate soon diminished due to continued hardships in the Yishuv. Most of the European funds that supported the Jewish settlements before World War I ended. The Arabs, opposed to the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, instigated riots against the Jews. The British limited immigration through yearly quotas; only those who received "certificates" could make Aliyah.
Women's rights
Many women who immigrated to Israel came out of national Zionist motives; they wanted the same rights as men and wanted to rebuild their land. In 1919 the first nationwide women's party in the New Yishuv was created, and Rosa Welt-Straus, who had immigrated there that year, was appointed its leader, as which she continued until her death. The constituent assembly was voted upon in 1920, and 14 women were elected out of the three hundred and fourteen delegates. As well as the increase in the number of women filling public positions, the rate of women participating in the labor force increased steadily during the British mandate period in the Yishuv. With that being said, the employment opportunities at the beginning of the mandate period were very limited and women were mainly restricted to typical female occupations because the only other option would be to work in construction, which only pioneer women committed to as part of their feminist-nationalist outlook because those roles were considered inappropriate for women. Women were consistently more unemployed when compared to their male counterparts, regardless of cyclical fluctuations. The wages for working women were consistently lower than the wages of their male counterparts, and throughout the Yishuv period, the average wage for women were 50 to 70 percent of male's wage.Not only were non-religious women fighting for equality, but so were religious women. Female religious Zionists were faced with double the amount of barriers of non-religious female Zionists because they were rejected from religious society because of their gender and they were rejected from secular society because of their religiosity In 1926, the haredim, who preferred not to face the possibility of a plebiscite, left the Yishuv's Assembly of Representatives. That year, an official declaration was made confirming "equal rights to women in all aspects of life in the yishuv – civil, political, and economic." In 1935, the establishment of the national organization of religious pioneer women emerged. Its main goal was to improve the material status and spiritual welfare of the religious women workers and gain admittance to the Ha-Po'el ha-Mizrachi. This organization grew from eight-hundred members in 1935 to six-thousand members in 1948. Women gained rights with the establishment of the religious kibbutz movement by participating in Torah studies with men and by taking part in the co-ed activities that the Kibbutz offered.