History beyond the mainstream. Not lost-just ignored.
Joined August 2024
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⚠ TW: Sexual Violence.
The most detailed report on the sexual crimes committed during & after the Oct 7 massacre is out.
The Dinah Project reveals Hamas terrorists used rape, gang rape & sexual torture systematically.
This is hard to read, but vital. 🧵
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Good thing they never threw anything away. For 1,000 years.
Jewish tradition says you don't destroy a text with God's name in it.
So in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, worn-out manuscripts were stored, not thrown away.
For about 1,000 years, from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
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Schechter heads to Cairo in 1896 to 1897 and brings back over 190,000 fragments. In all, the genizah held around 300,000 items, now in libraries around the world. Most are in Hebrew script, including Arabic written in Hebrew letters.
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Bible manuscripts. Letters. Business records. Marriage and divorce contracts. Even personal notes.
A thousand years of daily life, saved by one rule.
#Manuscripts #EstBC
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Before Zionism had a name, a Jewish aunt and nephew rebuilt a town in the Galilee.
Doña Gracia Nasi. Born in Portugal in 1510 to a family of forced converts.
Christian in public. Jewish in secret.
In 1561 her nephew, Joseph Nasi, received an Ottoman grant over Tiberias and nearby villages. By the mid-1560s, the town's walls were rebuilt and Jewish settlement was renewed.
A Jewish rebuilding project in the Land of Israel, almost 400 years before 1948, and long before anyone called it Zionism.
#OttomanEmpire #EstBC
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If there were no Jews in Jerusalem. So who did the Crusaders burn in the synagogue in July 1099? Three very different sources answer.
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Some Jews survived as captives, held for ransom with their holy books. A letter from the Jewish elders of Ashkelon, kept in the Cairo Geniza (Cambridge University Library, T-S 20.113), says Egypt's Jews spent about 500 dinars ransoming captives and holy books from the Crusaders, and were still 200 dinars in debt.
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A Muslim historian. A Christian army. A Jewish letter. All three agree: in 1099 there were Jews in Jerusalem, and Jews in Egypt going into debt to save them.
#MedievalHistory #EstBC
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Her name was Babatha. She lived near the Dead Sea about 1,900 years ago.
She was widowed young.
She went to court over the guardianship of her orphaned son. She kept her marriage contract.
When the Bar Kokhba revolt broke out, her documents were hidden in a cave. About 35 papyri, in Greek, Aramaic and Nabatean.
In 1961 Yigael Yadin found them.
Nobody had come back for them.
A Jewish woman's family paperwork. 1,900 years old.
#AncientHistory #EstBC
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"King David never existed."
One stone in northern Israel disagrees.
July 1993. Gila Cook, a surveyor on a dig at Tel Dan, notices a stone built into an old wall.
It has writing on it. Aramaic. Carved for a king who fought Israel, almost 2,900 years ago.
The words that made headlines: "House of David."
His enemies wrote his family's name in stone.
#Archaeology #EstBC
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CREDIT: Oren Rozen
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Everyone says Jews "came" to Israel.
Margalit Zinati's family says it never left.
Peki'in, a village in the Galilee.
The Zinati family tradition traces an unbroken Jewish presence there back to the destruction of the Second Temple, nearly 2,000 years ago.
CREDIT: Shlomo Roded / PikiWiki Israel
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During the Arab revolt of 1936-39, most of Peki'in's Jews left. In 1940, one Jewish family came back. Hers.
Margalit was born there in 1931.
For decades she looked after the village's ancient synagogue. In 2018, Israel asked her to light a torch on its 70th birthday.
3/3 Some people arrived in 1948. Some were waiting for the country to catch up.
2018. Israel turns 70, and Margalit lights a torch at the Independence Day ceremony.
#DidYouKnow #History #FamilyHistory #EstBC
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"Jews have no history in Jerusalem."
Funny. This Jewish coin was made there 2,000 years ago.
Around 67 CE.
Read it. Not Arabic. Not Latin. Ancient Hebrew:
"Shekel of Israel."
"Jerusalem the Holy."
And a date: Year 2. Year 2 of what? Of the Jewish revolt against Rome. The rebels counted time from their own independence.
The coin answered. In silver.
#Archaeology #EstBC
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Quick quiz: who was the largest group in Jerusalem in 1845?
Not according to Israel.
According to the Prussian consul.
His estimate: 7,120 Jews. 5,000 Muslims. 3,390 Christians.
That's 103 years before Israel existed, and decades before the word "Zionism."
Population numbers from the 1800s are estimates, and historians argue about them.
This one came from a European diplomat.
#History #EstBC
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CREDIT: Photo: Félix Bonfils
Pharaoh Merneptah carved this line in a victory poem in stone around 1208 BCE.
"Israel is laid waste, his seed is not."
It's the oldest known mention of "Israel" outside the Bible, and it's a pharaoh bragging.
Flinders Petrie found the stone at Thebes in 1896. It's in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
About 3,200 years old.
#AncientEgypt #EstBC
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CREDIT: W. M. Flinders Petrie, Six Temples at Thebes (1897)
74 members of his family were shot by the Nazis. 40 years later, the KGB made him the face of its campaign against Israel.
David Dragunsky. A tailor's son from a small town called Sviatsk.
A tank commander who fought from Kyiv to Berlin. Twice named Hero of the Soviet Union. In June 1945 he took part in the Victory Parade in Moscow.
That year he wrote in a letter that 74 members of his family had been shot in his home region. His two brothers died fighting in the Red Army.
In 1983 the KGB set up an Anti-Zionist Committee to attack Israel and push back against Soviet Jews who wanted to leave. It needed a Jewish face. A war hero was perfect. They picked him.
He chaired it until he died in 1992.
Propaganda doesn't just lie. It borrows the people you'd never doubt.
#NpcActivities
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CREDIT: Yevgeny Khaldei / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Imagine finding out the protest you reposted was being cheered on by a foreign government.
Not hypothetical. On July 9, 2024, the US Director of National Intelligence said actors tied to Iran's government were posing as activists online, encouraging the Gaza protests and "even providing financial support to protesters."
The trick is old. In 1971 the KGB planned to bomb a Black neighborhood in New York and blame the Jewish Defense League, to turn Black and Jewish Americans against each other (the Mitrokhin Archive).
Different regime. Same playbook: find a real fight, pretend to be one side, pour gas on it.
Before you repost, ask who's holding the match. Being an unpaid extra in someone else's campaign is peak #NpcActivities
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CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
April 2022. Russian troops pull out of Bucha, near Kyiv. Journalists find civilians dead in the streets.
Russia's answer: it's staged. A "provocation."
Satellite images taken while Russian troops were still in the town showed bodies on the same street.
When the evidence comes in, the propaganda starts. Don't be the NPC repeating "it's staged" for the people who did it.
#NpcActivities
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CREDIT: U.S. Embassy Kyiv
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