Yi•sᵊr•â•eilꞋ & Yᵊru•shâ•laꞋyim vs 'Palestine' & 'Aelia'

Excerpts from The Jerusalem Post, 97.03.28, p. 13, by Mosheh Kohn

Pâ•qidꞋ  Yi•rᵊmᵊyâhꞋu

"My parents were originally Ottoman subjects, citizens of the area of the Ottoman empire called the Sanjak of Jerusalem (not ‘Palestine’).

"This was one of several districts into which the Ottomans had divided Yi•sᵊr•â•eilꞋ and Syria in the second half of the 19^th century.

"The Sanjak of Jerusalem was autonomous, reporting directly to the capital, Istanbul. It included the land from Jaffa south to the Sinai Peninsula and east to the tip of the Dead Sea.

"The remainder of the western side of the Jordan River was divided into the Sanjaks of 'Nablus' (ShᵊkhëmꞋ), Acre and Beirut, responsible to the Vilayet of Beirut, and the eastern side was divided into the Sanjaks of Kerak and Hauran, extending down to Aqaba, and responsible to the Vilayet of Damascus.

"This was but the latest in a long series of administrative or military reorganizations and renamings of the country since the Roman emperor Hadrian imposed the name ‘Palæstina’ on it in the second century, as part of his effort to expunge from the land every Jewish association. In fact, the Romans divided the entire region from Syria and Lebanon down through Arabia into three districts, called Palaestina I, II, and III respectively.

"The Moslem caliphs retained the name, though they changed the borders of the districts. And until the 10^th century, Yi•sᵊr•â•eilꞋ’s Arab conquerors generally did not call Yᵊru•shâ•laꞋyim by the name [Arabs use] today: ‘al-Quds ("the Holy"),’ but ‘Elya.’

"This was a corrupt abbreviation of ‘Aelia Capitolina’ [emphasis added for clarity; ybd] the name Hadrian, whose Latin name was Publius Aelius Hadrianus, had given it in honor of himself and the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus.

"My elder sister was born here in 1917.02, and was thus also originally an Ottoman subject and citizen of the Sanjak of Jerusalem.

"The following 1917.11 the British took the country from the Ottomans and restored its Hadrianic name, ‘Palestine.’ My parents and sister – like the rest of the country’s population – were now ‘Palestinians,’ and that is the label they bore when my father arrived in the US in 1921 and my mother and sister in 1922 with British passports…”

An additional note, The Jerusalem Post, which published this article, was originally called The Palestinian Post.

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