Daniel Nessim PhD

On This Day — August 24, 1349 6,000 Jews were murdered in a single day in Mainz. As the Black Death tore through Europe, the old blood libel returned with new force. Jews were accused of poisoning the wells. No evidence was required. The accusation alone was enough. In Mainz, one of the great centers of Jewish life in the Rhineland, the mobs slaughtered 6,000 Jewish men, women, and children. The community that had produced scholars, poets, and rabbis for generations was erased in hours. In Cologne, the same wave of hatred arrived. Facing the choice between forced baptism and death, many Jews chose the fire. They set their own homes ablaze and perished in the flames rather than abandon their faith under the sword. The plague killed indiscriminately. The pogroms did not.

This day (April 24) in 1950: Jordan Illegally Annexed Judea & Samaria After Ethnically Cleansing Every Jew From the Land On this day in 1950, Jordan formally annexed the “West Bank” (Judea and Samaria) and eastern Jerusalem — territories it seized by military force during the 1948 Arab invasion of the nascent State of Israel. Jordan had no legal right to the land. The annexation was never recognized by the international community. Only Great Britain and Pakistan gave it any form of recognition — and Britain explicitly refused to recognize Jordan’s annexation of eastern Jerusalem. Even most Arab states rejected the move. During the war that preceded annexation, Jordan carried out a complete ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population. Every single Jew was expelled or murdered from the areas under Jordanian control. The ancient Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem was destroyed. 58 synagogues were desecrated or razed. The Mount of Olives — one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the world, with graves dating back more than 2,500 years — was systematically vandalized: thousands of tombstones were smashed and used as paving stones, building material, and even latrines for the Jordanian army. For the first time in more than 3,000 years of recorded Jewish history, not a single Jew remained in Judea, Samaria, or the Old City of Jerusalem. Jordan even invented a new name for the territory: the “West Bank” (of the Jordan River). Before 1948, the area had never been called that in history. The term was created to erase its ancient Jewish connection and reframe it as an Arab possession. From 1948 to 1967, Jerusalem was physically divided by Jordanian-built concrete walls, barbed wire, and minefields. Jewish families who had lived in the city for generations were forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Jews were barred from the Western Wall and the Old City. Jordanian snipers regularly fired across the armistice lines into western Jerusalem. This 19-year period of illegal Jordanian occupation and ethnic cleansing ended only with Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Jordan’s annexation was eventually annulled at Jordan’s own initiative when it signed the 1994 peace treaty with Israel. But the damage had been done: an ancient Jewish presence was erased, holy sites were desecrated, and a new narrative was born. History does not support the claim that Judea and Samaria were some ancient “Arab homeland.” The record shows something very different: a brief, illegal occupation built on military conquest and ethnic cleansing. The Jewish people’s connection to this land predates Islam by more than a millennium — and it was never extinguished.