Evidence of a considerable Jewish population during the talmudic period in Gaza is provided also by a relief of a
menorah, a
shofar, a
lulav, and an
etrog, which appear on a pillar of the Great Mosque of Gaza; and various Hebrew and Greek inscriptions. According to the Karaite Sahl b. Maẓli'aḥ, Gaza, Tiberias, and Zoar were the three centers of pilgrimages in Ereẓ Israel during the Byzantine period.
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In a great battle fought near Gaza in 635, the Arabs vanquished the Byzantines; the city itself fell soon afterward. It remained the seat of the governor of the Negev, as is known from the Nessana Papyri. The Jewish and Samaritan communities flourished under Arab rule; in the eighth century, R. Moses, one of the masoretes, lived there. In the 11th century R. Ephraim of Gaza was head of the community of Fostat (old Cairo).
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Meshullam of Volterra in 1481 found 60 Jewish householders there and four Samaritans. All the wine of Gaza was produced by the Jews (A.M. Luncz, in
Yerushalayim, 191
. Obadiah of Bertinoro records that when he was there in 1488, Gaza's rabbi was a certain Moses of Prague who had come from Jerusalem (
Zwei Briefe, ed. by A. Neubauer (1863), 19). Gaza flourished under Ottoman rule; the Jewish community was very numerous in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Karaite Samuel b. David found a Rabbanite synagogue there in 1641 (
Ginzei Yisrael be-St. Petersburg, ed. by J. Gurland (1865), 11). In the 16th century there were a
bet din and a yeshivah in Gaza, and some of its rabbis wrote scholarly works. Farm-owners were obliged to observe the laws of
terumah ("priestly tithe"),
ma'aserot ("tithes"), and the sabbatical year. At the end of the 16th century the Najara family supplied some of its rabbis;
Israel *Najara, son of the Damascus rabbi Moses Najara, author of the "
Zemirot Yisrael," was chief rabbi of Gaza and president of the
bet din in the mid-17th century. In 1665, on the occasion of Shabbetai Ẓevi's visit to Gaza, the city became a center of his messianic movement, and one of his principal disciples was
*Nathan of Gaza. The city was occupied by Napoleon for a short time in 1799. In the 19th century, the city declined. The Jews concentrated there were mainly barley merchants; they bartered with the Bedouins for barley which they exported to the beer breweries in Europe.
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Under Mandatory rule Gaza developed slowly; the last Jews left the town as a result of the anti-Jewish Arab disturbances in 1929.