ABSTRACT
Despite its general economic backwardness, the incorporation of Jerusalem into an emerging national Yishuv had the effect of ending its long isolation from the rest of the country. In the years before World War I, the momentum of Yishuv life began to shift to Jaffa and the settlements; after the war, little was left for the Old Yishuv but to reconcile itself to its essentially marginal status. Of all the figures of the Old Yishuv at the turn of the century, few suffered as tragic a fate as Ephraim Cohn-Reiss, though on the surface of it few appeared to have succeeded as grandly. The Old Yishuv of nineteenth-century Jerusalem is probably the least known of any major Jewish community of the modern period. A "new" Yishuv of secularized settlers had stolen the old one's thunder, and by 1904 even that Yishuv was being ideologically overwhelmed by the Zionists of the Second Aliya.
