ABSTRACT
The Jewish community in Jerusalem is degenerating in idleness and, beggary, drowning in illiteracy, chaotic, splintered and ruled by a band of hypocrites and cheats, unschooled rabbis and ignorant scholars. Beginning in the early 1880s, when secularized proto-Zionists immigrated from Russia and Romania to the Land of Israel and established their presence in Jaffa and the rural settlements that they built in the countryside, the Yishuv, as the Jewish population of Palestine before 1948 was commonly called, was divided into two components: the secularized newcomers and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Old Yishuv-specific relations obtained between that colonial economy and the nature of Jewish life in Jerusalem. The Old Yishuv was also a culturally conservative community. The Old Yishuv remained dependent upon its limited colonial economy, never developing a diversified and partly autonomous economic base, as the New Yishuv did, with agricultural settlements, industry, commercial life, and access to the formidable resources of the world Zionist movement.
