Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am joined as always by my brother, the man who probably has a map of nineteenth-century Palestine tattooed on his brain somewhere.
Herman Poppleberry at your service, and while I do not have any tattoos, my browser history certainly looks like a cartographer went on a bender. It is good to be here, Corn.
So, our housemate Daniel sent us a really interesting audio prompt today. He was playing around with some math, looking at the timeline of this land, and it really puts things into perspective. He noted that the Ottoman period lasted for four centuries, from fifteen sixteen to nineteen seventeen. That is over five times longer than the modern state of Israel has existed so far. As of today, February fourth, twenty twenty-six, Israel is only seventy-seven years old. And then you have the British Mandate, which was just a blip of about three decades, yet it feels so much more present in our daily lives here in Jerusalem.
It is a classic case of historical recency bias, right? We walk down King George Street or past the old British Consulate and we feel that connection. But four hundred years of Ottoman rule? That is an incredible span of time. To put it in context, when the Ottomans took the land, the Protestant Reformation was just starting in Europe. By the time they left, we had airplanes and tanks.
It is wild. And Daniel wanted us to dig into what life was actually like during those four centuries. What was the Jewish presence like? How did the people living here relate to the big bosses in Constantinople? And then, the second part of his question, which I find fascinating, is about the physical stuff. The roads, the electricity, the swamps. What did the state of Israel actually inherit in nineteen forty-eight? Was it a blank slate, or was there a foundation already laid by the Ottomans and the British?
Those are massive questions, and they hit on some of my favorite niche topics. I think we should start with the Ottomans because, as Daniel pointed out, four hundred years is a long time for things to stay the same, even though we often talk about it as a period of stagnation.
Right, because the common narrative is that the Ottoman Empire was the sick man of Europe for a long time, and this region was just a neglected backwater. Is that fair? Or is that just us looking back with modern eyes?
It is a bit of both. For much of that period, the land was indeed a peripheral province. It was not a single administrative unit called Palestine back then. It was divided into different districts, or Sanjaks, often reporting to Damascus or later directly to Constantinople. Jerusalem was important religiously, but economically? Not so much for a long time. But life was not just standing still. There was a very specific social structure called the Millet system.
I remember we touched on the legal aspects of that in episode two hundred sixty-eight, the one about the legal lasagna. The Millet system was basically communal autonomy, right?
Exactly. The Sultan basically said, as long as you pay your taxes and do not revolt, you can manage your own internal affairs according to your religious laws. So the Jewish community, the various Christian denominations, and of course the Muslim majority, all had their own courts and leadership. For the Jewish presence, which Daniel asked about, this was the era of the Old Yishuv. These were people living here primarily for religious reasons, concentrated in the four holy cities: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias.
And Safed had a real golden age in the sixteenth century, did it not?
Oh, absolutely. After the expulsion from Spain in fourteen ninety-two, many Sephardic Jews made their way to the Ottoman Empire because the Sultans were actually quite welcoming to them. They brought trade, printing presses, and textile expertise. Safed became a global center for Kabbalah and Jewish law. But by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, things got tougher. The empire started to decentralize, local warlords took over, and the Jewish communities often faced heavy taxation and insecurity.
So what was the relationship with Constantinople like? Was it just about taxes?
Mostly. The central government wanted two things: tax revenue and stability for the Hajj pilgrimage routes. Beyond that, they did very little in terms of what we would call social services or infrastructure. There were no public schools, no state hospitals, and certainly no paved roads between cities. If you wanted to get from Jaffa to Jerusalem, you were riding a mule on a dirt track, and you probably had to pay a local sheikh for protection along the way.
That is such a contrast to how we think of a state today. But things started to change in the nineteenth century, right? The Tanzimat reforms?
Yes, and this is where the Ottoman period gets really interesting and where the seeds of modernization were planted. In the mid-eighteen hundreds, the Ottoman Empire realized it had to modernize or be eaten by the European powers. They introduced new laws, allowed foreigners to buy land, and started building some actual infrastructure. The first telegraph line reached Jerusalem in eighteen sixty-five. The first carriage road from Jaffa to Jerusalem was completed in eighteen sixty-nine, just in time for the visit of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph.
So it took three hundred fifty years of rule before there was a road a carriage could actually drive on?
Pretty much. And even then, it was not exactly a highway. But that period, the late nineteenth century, is when you see the Jewish presence shift from just the Old Yishuv to the early Zionist pioneers of the First Aliyah. They were able to come because the Ottoman laws were changing, even if the local bureaucracy was still incredibly corrupt and difficult to navigate. You often had to pay baksheesh, or bribes, just to get a building permit.
It sounds like a nightmare for anyone trying to actually build something permanent. Which leads us to Daniel's question about infrastructure. If the Ottomans were just starting to build roads in the late eighteen hundreds, what did the physical state of the country look like by nineteen seventeen when the British marched in?
It was still very primitive by European standards. There was one railway line from Jaffa to Jerusalem, built by a French company in eighteen ninety-two. The Ottomans, with German help, built the Hijaz railway down through the east, and a branch line reached Haifa. But electricity? Non-existent for the public. Most people were still using oil lamps. Water was collected in cisterns. There was no national grid, no sewage systems to speak of, and huge parts of the coastal plain were literal swamps.
And that is where the British come in. It feels like the British Mandate, despite being so short, was an explosion of development. Was that because they were just more efficient, or did they have a different strategic goal?
Both. The British viewed Palestine as a strategic asset. It was the land bridge to India, it was next to the Suez Canal, and it was the terminus for oil pipelines from Iraq. So, they treated it like a proper colony that needed to function. They brought in a professional civil service, a police force, and a massive amount of engineering. If the Ottomans gave us the legal lasagna, the British gave us the plumbing and the pavement. By nineteen forty-eight, they had built over one thousand kilometers of paved roads.
Let us talk about the big stuff. Electricity and water. Because you cannot have a modern state without those.
Right. And this is a great story. It actually involves a Jewish engineer named Pinhas Rutenberg. He was a former Russian revolutionary who came here with a vision to electrify the whole country using hydroelectric power from the Jordan River. The British granted him a concession in the early nineteen twenties, and he built the first major power plant at Naharayim. By the nineteen thirties, the lights were coming on in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. The British also built the first modern water pipeline to Jerusalem because the city was outgrowing its ancient cisterns.
So the British were the ones who actually laid the grid?
They provided the framework and the concessions, but a lot of the actual labor and capital, especially for the Jewish areas, came from the Zionist movement itself. This is what we talked about in episode three hundred sixty-one, the dual economy. You had the British administration building the Haifa Port, which was a massive engineering feat and one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean, and then you had the Jewish Agency and private Jewish capital building the towns, the factories, and the smaller roads.
Daniel specifically asked about land reclamation and the swamps. There is this very famous narrative in Israel about the pioneers draining the swamps and making the desert bloom. How much of that was the British and how much was the people on the ground?
The British certainly did some anti-malarial work because their own soldiers were dying of it. They helped with the drainage of the Kishon River area near Haifa. But the heavy lifting of land reclamation, especially in places like the Hula Valley or the Sharon plain around Hadera, that was almost entirely funded and executed by the Jewish National Fund and the pioneers. It was backbreaking, deadly work. Thousands of people got malaria. It was not just about making land for farming; it was a public health necessity.
So when we get to nineteen forty-eight, the British decide they have had enough and they leave. What is the inventory? If you are David Ben Gurion on May fourteenth, nineteen forty-eight, what tools do you actually have in the shed?
It is actually quite a lot, though much of it was damaged by the fighting. You have a functioning, if small, electrical grid. You have a deep-water port in Haifa. You have a major international airport at Lydda, which we now call Ben Gurion Airport, built by the British in the nineteen thirties for their imperial air routes. You have a network of paved roads connecting the major cities, though many of the bridges had been blown up during the Arab Revolt or the subsequent conflicts. You also have the Tegart Forts—those massive concrete police stations you see all over the country today. Those were British-built to control the population.
What about the legal and administrative stuff? That is infrastructure too, in a way.
That is arguably the most important thing they left behind. The British left a functioning court system, a land registry, and a professional bureaucracy. Even the emergency regulations that the British used to control the population were adopted by the new state of Israel. It was a turnkey government in many ways. The tragedy, of course, was that the handover was not peaceful. The British basically just walked away and left the keys in the door while the house was on fire.
It is interesting to think about the Ottoman legacy in that mix. We talk so much about the British, but did the Ottomans leave anything that lasted until nineteen forty-eight?
Beyond the legal system, which we have discussed, their legacy was mostly in the land ownership patterns. The Ottoman Land Code of eighteen fifty-eight defined five classes of land—like Miri, which was state-owned but leased to farmers, and Mulk, which was private. This code defined who owned what for decades. Even today, if you are looking at land disputes in the West Bank or the Negev, lawyers are still digging through Ottoman records. And of course, the Old City of Jerusalem, the walls we see today, those were built by the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century. That is a pretty significant piece of physical infrastructure.
True, though maybe not as functional for a modern economy as a power plant. I want to go back to the human element for a second. Daniel asked about life during the Ottoman period. We talked about the Sephardic golden age in Safed, but what about the average person? If you were a Jewish farmer in the Galilee in eighteen hundred, what was your day like?
It was tough, Corn. You were likely a tenant farmer or part of a small, self-sufficient community. You were constantly worried about three things: the tax collector, the local Bedouin tribes who might raid your crops, and the plague. Disease was a huge factor. Cholera and the plague visited this land frequently during the Ottoman years. There was no modern medicine. The average lifespan was short. It was a very traditional, very slow-paced life.
And yet, people stayed. The Jewish presence never vanished.
Never. It was always there, sometimes just a few thousand people, sometimes more. But it was a presence based on faith and connection to the land, not on political sovereignty. That shift to sovereignty only starts to feel possible when the British arrive and bring with them the ideas of modern nationalism and efficient administration.
It is wild to think that the British were here for only thirty years, and yet they built the ports, the airports, the police stations, many of which are still used today, and the electrical grid. It feels like they compressed a century of development into three decades.
They did, but they also created a lot of the problems we are still dealing with. By creating a modern infrastructure but failing to create a unified political structure that both Jews and Arabs could agree on, they essentially built a high-tech stage for a very old and very deep conflict. They built the roads that tanks would later roll over.
So, to answer Daniel's question about how much work was completed by previous administrations by nineteen forty-eight, it sounds like the answer is: a surprising amount of the basics, but almost none of the expansion needed for a modern state.
Right. Israel in nineteen forty-eight inherited the bones of a country. They had the skeleton. But the population was about to double in just a few years with the arrival of Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The British infrastructure was designed for a colony of maybe one point five million people. It was not designed for the mass immigration and rapid industrialization that followed. Today, in early twenty twenty-six, the population has just crossed ten million people. That is nearly seven times what the British planned for.
I guess that is why we see so much construction today. We are still trying to catch up. I mean, look at King George Street, as Daniel mentioned. It is a British-named street, but it is currently a giant hole in the ground because we are finally building the Green Line of the light rail system. I hear they are doing test runs now, but the full opening has been pushed back to May of this year.
Exactly. The British gave us the street, but we have to figure out how to put a train under it. And that is the story of this place, is it not? Layer upon layer. You dig a hole for a light rail and you find a British pipe, and under that, you find an Ottoman cistern, and under that, you find a Byzantine mosaic.
It is a legal lasagna and a physical lasagna. I love that. Herman, what do you think is the biggest misconception people have about the Ottoman period? You mentioned the sick man of Europe thing, but is there something else?
I think people assume it was a period of constant conflict, like it is today. But for long stretches of those four hundred years, it was actually quite peaceful, albeit in a very stagnant, quiet way. There were decades where nothing much happened. No wars, no major uprisings, just people living their lives, farming their olives, and praying in their respective houses of worship. It was a different kind of stability, one based on imperial indifference rather than modern security.
Indifference can be a form of peace, I suppose. But it does not build roads.
No, it certainly does not. And that is why the transition to the British era felt so jarring. Suddenly, you had people with clipboards and stopwatches measuring everything, taxing everything more efficiently, and building things at a pace that must have seemed magical to the local population.
I think we should take a moment to look at the practical takeaways for Daniel and our listeners. Because when you look at these percentages, five hundred percent of modern history was Ottoman, and about thirty percent was British. What does that tell us about where we are going?
To me, it suggests that we are still in the very early stages of the Israeli experiment. If the Ottomans could last four hundred years by basically doing nothing, and the British could change the face of the land in thirty years by doing everything, it shows how much impact a focused, modern state can have in a short time. But it also reminds us that infrastructure is not just concrete. It is the institutions and the laws that survive the people who build them.
That is a great point. The British left, but their law stayed. The Ottomans left, but their land codes stayed. We are building our own layers now. I also think it is worth noting for anyone visiting Israel that if you see a building with a very specific kind of red roof or a certain style of arched window, you are looking at that late Ottoman or early British transition. The German Colony in Jerusalem or the American Colony, those are all products of that late nineteenth-century opening that the Ottomans allowed.
Yes, and if you go to Haifa and look at the port, or you go to Tel Aviv and see the old power station at Reading, you are looking at the British legacy. It is all around us. We just tend to stop seeing it because we are so focused on the new skyscraper going up next door.
It is a lot to chew on. Daniel, thanks for that math. It really changes the way you walk through the city when you realize that the British era, which feels so foundational, was really just a tiny sliver of the timeline.
And it makes me wonder what someone will be saying about our current era four hundred years from now. Will they say we were the ones who finally finished the roads, or will they be complaining about the ancient light rail tracks we left behind?
Ha! I think we both know the answer to that. They will definitely be complaining about the traffic. Alright, I think we have covered a lot of ground here, literally and figuratively. From the Kabbalists of Safed to the engineers of the British Mandate.
It is a fascinating journey. And if you want to dive deeper into those legal layers we mentioned, definitely check out episode two hundred sixty-eight. Or if you are interested in how the economy shifted from that Ottoman stagnation to the modern tech boom, episode three hundred sixty-one is the one for you.
And for those interested in the future of how we develop the land, particularly the desert areas that were largely ignored by both the Ottomans and the British, episode one hundred forty-nine on the future of the Negev is a great listen.
We have a lot of history in the archives at myweirdprompts dot com. You can search for any of these topics there.
Before we wrap up, I just want to say, if you are enjoying these deep dives and the brotherly banter, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on Spotify or whatever podcast app you use. It genuinely helps other curious minds find us.
It really does. We see the reviews and we appreciate the feedback. It keeps us going, even when we are knee-deep in Ottoman tax records.
Alright, that is it for today. Thanks to Daniel for the prompt, and thanks to all of you for listening to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. We will see you in the next layer of the lasagna.
Stay curious, everyone. Bye for now.
Goodbye.
You know, Herman, I was thinking about that Jaffa to Jerusalem road. If it took them three hundred fifty years to build a carriage road, we really should not be complaining about the light rail taking ten years.
I mean, on a percentage basis, we are actually ahead of schedule! But tell that to someone stuck in traffic on Jaffa Road right now.
Fair point. Let us get out of here before the next construction crew starts drilling.
Agreed. Catch you later.
See ya.
Actually, one more thing, Corn. Did you know the British actually mandated the use of Jerusalem stone for all buildings in the city? That is why it all looks so uniform.
I did know that! Another piece of British infrastructure that defines our lives every single day. Ronald Storrs, the first governor, really left his mark.
Exactly. They literally dictated the color of the city.
Alright, now we are really leaving.
Okay, okay. Bye!
Bye.
Seriously though, the stone thing is fascinating...
Herman!
Going! I am going!
Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. Visit us at myweirdprompts dot com for more episodes and to get in touch. We will be back soon.
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Bye!
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