Image Resource Bank
Image Gallery | 
2 of 15 
Early Jewish Settlers in Palestine
This image shows early Jewish settlers (Biluim) in Palestine in the 1880s. While large-scale settlement of Jews in the area then known as Palestine didn’t really occur until the twentieth century, there were small groups of Jewish settlers in the late nineteenth century who, inspired by the emergence of political Zionism and the overtly hostile and anti-Semitic conditions of their countries of residence (particularly the pogroms of Russia), banded together to settle in Ottoman Palestine. These settlements were often not very successful, as they frequently lacked both sufficient funding and the practical skills necessary to live off the land. However, they are historically significant for the precedent they set, and they hold a prominent place in Israeli history as the first aliyah, or wave, of Zionist settlement in the region.
Name: First Aliyah BILU in Kuffiyeh
Material: Photograph
Size: 550 x 307 pixels (63 KB)
Date: ca. 1880s CE
Place of Origin: Unknown
Location: Wikimedia Commons
Source and Registration#: Link to resource
(accessed April 30, 2010).
A. Holly Shissler
Associate Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish History, University of Chicago
Erin L. Glade
Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago
