Brief City History

Brief City History

Having risen from empty sand dunes less than a century ago, Tel Aviv could never hope for the ancient aura of Jerusalem. Still, the city's southern border, the port of Jaffa, is as old as they come: Jonah set sail from here for what turned out to be his journey to the belly of a whale. The cedars of Lebanon used to build Solomon's Temple arrived in Jaffa before being transported to Jerusalem.

According to archaeologists, Jaffa was founded in the Middle Canaanite period, around 1600 BC. For the next thousand years it was dominated by one ancient people after another: Egyptians, Philistines, Israelites, Phoenicians, and Greeks. After being taken by Crusaders twice, in the 11th and 12th centuries, Jaffa was recaptured by the Muslims and remained largely under Arab control until the 20th century. During much of this time it was abandoned; it did not regain its importance as a port until the 19th century.

In the second half of the 19th century, Jewish pioneers began immigrating here in numbers that strained the small port's capacity. By the late 1880s, Jaffa was overcrowded, rife with disease, and stricken with poverty. A group of Jewish families moved to the empty sands north of Jaffa to found Neveh Tzedek, now a beautifully restored cultural district. This was followed by Ahuzat Bayit (literally, "housing estate"), an area to the north of Neveh Tzedek that became the precursor of Tel Aviv. The city was named Tel Aviv in 1909; Arab riots in Jaffa in the 1920s then drove more Jews to Ahuzat Bayit, spurring further growth. These Jews were joined by immigrants from Europe, mostly Poland, and a decade later by an influx of German Jews fleeing the Nazis. These new, urban arrivals -- unlike the pioneers from earlier immigrant waves -- brought with them an appreciation for the arts and a penchant for sidewalk cafés, making the strongest social and cultural impact Tel Aviv had seen.

Tel Aviv's beginning as a string of separate neighborhoods helps to explain its eclectic (some would say discordant) appearance. Mediterranean-style buildings jostle each other in the shadow of towering skyscrapers. In the 1930s and '40s, Tel Aviv was named "white city," the world's only city dominated by the International Style of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe -- an aesthetic of functional forms, flat roofs, and whitewashed exteriors that became known as Bauhaus. By the 1950s, many of these buildings fell into disrepair or were demolished. But Tel Aviv still has the largest collection of Bauhaus buildings in the world, which won it a place on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Tel Aviv has come a long way in its short life. Today, the white city area homes are undergoing renovation and reemerging as gentrified residences. The old charm of Neveh Tzedek -- a neighborhood that had long been forgotten as the city spread north and west -- has recently been reborn as the city's cultural center thanks to the Suzanne Dellal Center for Dance and Theater, with its surrounding area a wonderful place to wander among galleries, boutiques, and eateries. The working-class neighborhood of Florintine is still rather drab during the day, but after dark it comes alive with pubs and dance clubs that are favorites with the 20s to 30s crowd. It's hard to imagine the scene just 90 years ago, when this teeming metropolis was nothing but sand.