There is a fissure, almost on ground level, through which the Christians and the Jews are permitted to pass their heads while crawling to kiss the holy paving stones. And this evening, some poor Israelite pilgrims are there, prostrated, stretching their necks like burrowed fox in order to try to press their lips against their ancestor’s tomb while some charming and mocking Arab children who have their own entrance in the enclosure are looking at them with disdainful smiles. The wall and the access of the hole have been rubbed against for centuries by so many hands, so many heads and so much hair that they have assumed a shiny and greasy polish. Furthermore, all the large stones of the surrounding wall… are also shiny, as if oily, after the continual rubbing by humans.

P. Loti, Jerusalem

The arrival of the Jews who had been expulsed from Spain (1492) at the beginning of the 16th century marks a turning point in the history of the community in Hebron. They bring glass and leather craftsmen with them and provide for their own needs without resorting to gifts collected in the Diaspora. They will have their ups and downs at the mercy of the political situation and the activities of the Jewish personalities in the city. In the 17th century, Hebron welcomes some Kabbalists who had left Safed and in turn, asserts itself as the center of Palestinian Judaism, promotes the growth of mystic circles and contributes to the propagation of monastic rituals and to the rise in Messianic fervor.

In 1659, the yeshiva, – rabbinic academy – Hessed le-Abraham, built by a leader of the Jewish community in Amsterdam, is inaugurated. Four years later, the city welcomes Shabbatai Zevi who takes himself for the Messiah and spreads chaos throughout the Diaspora. Finally, his conversion to Islam provokes a new crisis from which the community of Hebron will not recover until the disintegration of the community in Jerusalem and the arrival of its leading rabbis such as Abraham Gershon of Kutow, the brother-in-law of the Baal Sham Tov, the founder of Hassidism, and Haim Joseph David Azulay, nicknamed the Hida.3 Academic institutions are created and a hospital is opened. At the end of the 19th century, there were almost 1,500 people in the community.

During the First World War, the young men somehow enlist in the Turkish Army. Gifts from the Diaspora no longer arrive, famine spreads, epidemics follow one after another and institutions collapse. When the city falls into the hands of the British in 1918, the first disputes between the Jews and the Arabs break out. The leaders, especially the Jerusalem mufti, do not cease to inflame their followers against the recent settlers. In 1929, riots breakout in Jerusalem and spread to the whole country. On Saturday, August 24th, a violent crowd invades the old Jewish neighborhood in Hebron, ransacks the synagogue, burns the Law Scrolls, massacres more than sixty people from among the Jewish population and injures as many – the elderly, women and especially children. Responsible for maintaining order and security, the British do not intervene. These riots are echoed in the international press: Albert Londres (1884 – 1932), poet and journalist writes: