Jaffa

• 1. Introduction

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  Jaffa sits on a 40-metre-high ridge of kurkar sandstone, its harbour visible from the sea long before any ship reaches shore. For thousands of years, that natural elevation made it the most strategic point on the central Mediterranean coast of the Levant. Sailors from Egypt, Cyprus, and Lebanon knew it. Conquerors from Thutmose III to Napoleon to the British Army fought for it. And today, its ancient port district draws artists and tourists to the same streets where, within living memory, a population was scattered and a city was renamed.

  The city goes by several names: Jaffa, Japho, Joppa, Joppe. In Arabic it is Yafa; in Hebrew, Yafo. It appears in Egyptian papyri, in the Hebrew Bible, in the Acts of the Apostles, and in Crusader chronicles. It lent its name to an orange that once dominated European fruit markets. It hosted the signing of a truce between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. Napoleon ordered a massacre on its sand dunes. Its Arab population fled or was expelled in 1948, after which it was merged with the Jewish city of Tel Aviv next door.

  How does a city accumulate that many layers? The answer begins more than five thousand years ago, in the Early Bronze Age, when the first settlers recognized what that sandstone ridge could offer.

• 2. A Port Through the Ages

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  Jaffa was settled as early as the Early Bronze Age I period, in the 4th millennium BCE, as evidenced by potsherds found in excavations. Those early remains are deeply buried now, compressed beneath centuries of rubble and landfill that made the hill even taller over time. By the Middle Bronze Age II, in the 18th century BCE, a real settlement had taken shape, covering approximately three hectares and ringed with an earthen rampart likely topped by a mudbrick wall.

  Imported Middle Cypriot pottery found at the site, including Black-on-Red Ware and White-Painted Ware, along with Egyptian Hyksos scarabs, confirms that even a modest Bronze Age Jaffa was plugged into trade routes linking the Levant, Egypt, and Cyprus. By the 15th century BCE, Egypt's New Kingdom had annexed the city outright. Thutmose III of the Eighteenth Dynasty listed it among his conquered territories in the Levant.

  Papyrus Harris 500 preserves a tale set during this Egyptian occupation: a story called The Taking of Joppa, in which an Egyptian general named Djehuty smuggled 200 soldiers into the city hidden inside sacks, achieving its capture without a fight. Scholars have noted the resemblance to the Greek story of the Trojan Horse, although the Egyptian tale predates Homer's account by at least two centuries.

  Around 1350 BCE, the Amarna letters document Jaffa as a residence for Egyptian officials and the administrative hub of the central coastal plain. A clay-inscribed letter found at nearby Tel Aphek records the delivery of 12,000 to 15,000 litres of wheat to Jaffa, received by an official named Tur-shimati. That single detail captures what the city was in Egypt's imperial accounting: a supply depot, a granary, a gateway. The monumental gateway from this period, which archaeologists have nicknamed the Ramesses Gate, still anchors excavations of the site today.

• 3. Myth and Scripture

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  An outcropping of rocks near the harbour is reputed to be the place where Andromeda was chained and then rescued by Perseus, according to Greek legend. The Hellenist tradition links the city's name itself to Iopeia, or Cassiopeia, Andromeda's mother. Pliny the Elder offered a different etymology, connecting the name to Iopa, daughter of Aeolus, the god of the wind. A third tradition, recorded in mythology, claims the city was named for Japheth, one of the sons of Noah, and that he built it after the Flood.

  The Hebrew Bible mentions Jaffa four times: as the northernmost Philistine city bordering the territory of the Tribe of Dan; as the port through which Lebanese cedars arrived for Solomon's Temple; as the place where the prophet Jonah boarded a ship for Tarshish; and again as the cedar port for the Second Temple of Jerusalem. The Israelites never managed to take the city from the Philistines during the Iron Age.

  In the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles sets two pivotal scenes in Jaffa, then called by its Greek name Ioppa. Saint Peter brought back to life a widow named Dorcas there, and it was in Jaffa that he received his vision of a large sheet filled with clean and unclean animals lowered from heaven, accompanied by a message from the Holy Spirit directing him toward the gentiles.

  Those religious associations drew serious Jewish scholars to the city as well. The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled in the 4th and 5th centuries, references Rabi Akha bar Khanina of Jaffa and Rabi Pinchas ben Yair of Jaffa. Several streets and alleys in the Jaffa Flea Market area are still named after these figures today.

• 4. Conquests and Crusades

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  In 636, Arab armies conquered Jaffa, and under Islamic rule the city became the principal port serving Ramla, then the provincial capital of Palestine. The medieval geographer al-Muqaddasi, writing in the 10th century, described it as "a small town, although the emporium of Palestine and the port of Ar-Ramlah," protected by strong walls with iron gates and an excellent harbour.

  In June 1099, Crusaders seized Jaffa during the First Crusade and made it the centre of the County of Jaffa and Ascalon, one of the vassals of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. One of its counts, John of Ibelin, authored the principal book of the Assizes of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a major legal text of the medieval Crusader states.

  Saladin conquered Jaffa in 1187. King Richard the Lionheart retook the city on the 10th of September 1191, three days after the Battle of Arsuf. When Saladin attempted to retake the city in the July 1192 Battle of Jaffa, he failed, and on the 2nd of September 1192 the two sides signed the Treaty of Jaffa, formalising a three-year truce. In 1229, Frederick II signed a new ten-year treaty in Jaffa and had two inscriptions carved into the city wall, one in Latin and one in Arabic. The Arabic inscription, deciphered only in 2011, describes him as the Holy Roman Emperor and records the year as 1229 of the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus the Messiah.

  In March 1268, the Mamluk sultan Baibars took Jaffa simultaneously with the conquest of Antioch, and an inscription commemorating both victories is still visible, now housed in the Great Mosque of Gaza. By 1432, when the traveller Bertrandon de la Broquiere visited, the city had fallen to ruin, its harbour shallow and dangerous, offering little more than a few reed-covered tents to shelter pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem.

• 5. The Orange and Its City

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  Muhammad Abu-Nabbut, appointed governor after Napoleon's siege, threw himself into rebuilding Jaffa in the early 19th century, commissioning the Mahmoudiya Mosque and the public fountain known as Sabil Abu Nabbut. That recovery set the stage for one of the city's most unusual chapters: the rise of an orange that would carry Jaffa's name to European grocery markets.

  The Jaffa orange, known locally as the Shamouti, emerged as a mutation on a tree of the Baladi variety of sweet orange near the city. Arab farmers cultivated it first. After the Crimean War of 1853-56, the rapid expansion of citrus cultivation transformed the local economy. British consular reports from the 1850s first mention the orange being exported to Europe. The development of steamships, which cut the transit time for perishable goods from weeks to days, was a key factor.

  The American missionary E.C. Miller, visiting in the 1860s, recorded that about ten million oranges were being exported annually and that the town was surrounded by three or four hundred orange gardens, each containing upwards of one thousand trees. A study in 1902 by Zionist officials documented the export markets as England, Turkey, Egypt, and Austria-Hungary. That same study noted that traditional Arabic cultivation methods, though dismissed by European observers as primitive, proved more cost-efficient than the Zionist-European enterprises that followed.

  Beyond citrus, by 1910 Jaffa's metalworking factories, including a machine shop run by the Templers, employed more than 100 workers. Most of the newspapers and books printed in Ottoman Palestine were published in Jaffa, which also produced soap, wine, cosmetics, ink, and leather. The city was, in the late Ottoman period, the commercial and print capital of the region.

• 6. 1948 and Its Aftermath

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  The 1921 Jaffa riots left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs dead and accelerated the growth of Tel Aviv as a separate Jewish city to the north. Through the 1920s and into the 1940s, despite rising tensions, the two cities remained economically intertwined: Jewish businesses operated inside Jaffa, some Jewish neighbourhoods paid taxes to the Jaffa municipality, and the Jaffa Electric Company, owned by Jewish shareholders, ran the joint electricity grid for both cities from 1923.

  By 1945, the population of Jaffa had reached 94,310. Among the most prominent members of its Arab Christian community was Issa El-Issa, publisher of the newspaper Falastin. On the 4th of January 1948, the Lehi detonated a truck bomb outside the Ottoman-era administrative building known as the Saraya, killing twenty-six Palestinian civilians. Most of the dead were bystanders or staff of a food distribution programme for poor children operating in the same building.

  On the 25th of April 1948, the Irgun launched a mortar bombardment of Jaffa that continued for three days, firing twenty tons of high explosive into the city. An Irgun intelligence report from the 28th of April stated that the shelling had paralysed bus movement and the food supply and caused the port to fill with masses of refugees boarding boats in confusion. The population before the attack had stood at between 50,000 and 60,000; by the time the Haganah took control on the 14th of May, around 4,000 people remained.

  The city was formally unified with Tel Aviv on the 16th of June 1950. On the 19th of August 1950, the unified city was renamed Tel Aviv-Yafo to preserve the historical name. Jaffa had been expected to consume 18% of the unified municipality's budget while contributing only 4% of its income, a fiscal imbalance the Israeli government helped bridge through direct state funding for healthcare, education, and social services.

• 7. A Mixed City Today

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  As of 2021, Jaffa has 52,470 residents, roughly a third of whom are Arab. Administratively it forms Borough 7 of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality. In the 2018 city council election, the Yafa list, representing Jaffa's Arab population, received 28% of the vote within Jaffa, making it the most-voted party there.

  The Old City has been partially renovated into a tourist district of galleries, restaurants, and restored buildings, but Arab residents of neighbourhoods such as Ajami have raised concerns about gentrification driving up real-estate prices and eviction from public housing managed by the Amidar government company. Amidar has described the affected residents as illegal squatters; residents and advocates have characterised the process as an effort to alter Jaffa's demographic character.

  After 1948, all pre-existing street names in Jaffa were abolished and replaced with numeric identifiers. By 1954, only four main streets had received proper names. Arabic street names were later replaced with Hebrew ones, a practice that has drawn criticism. A Tel Aviv-Jaffa city councillor named Ahmed Belha described one renamed street, now bearing the name of a Hasidic rabbi, as a local laughingstock; another street where the Al Siksik Mosque stands was renamed Beit Eshel Street, after a Jewish settlement in what is now Beersheba.

  From the 1990s onwards, efforts have been made to restore Arab and Islamic landmarks, including the Mosque of the Sea and the Hassan Bek Mosque. The Jaffa Museum of Antiquities, housed in an 18th-century Ottoman building that has served successively as a seat of government, a soap factory, and, since 1961, an archaeological museum, documents the city's layered past. The Red Line of the Tel Aviv Light Rail, inaugurated in 2023, now runs through Jaffa along Jerusalem Boulevard, connecting it to the broader metropolitan network that has grown up around what was once its great rival city.