Tel Aviv History
In 2009, Tel Aviv celebrated the 100th anniversary of its foundation. Within 100 years, the city emerged as Israel’s business, cultural and secular centre that attracts over 2.5 million visitors each year with its spectacular beaches, warm climate, vibrant night life scene and very hospital and liberal population that makes everyone feel welcome in their city. But over one century ago, what is today a modern metropolis used to be only sand dunes.
History of Tel Aviv is closely connected with the ancient port of Jaffa (an integral part of Tel Aviv since 1950) when the territory of today’s Israel was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. In the 18th and especially the 19th century, the fortified port of Jaffa began to grow thanks to the trade with Europe. It was the 19th century when the first Jews began moving into the port but in 1882, the Jewish population in Jaffa accounted for less than 10% of the total population. However, they were soon joined by new Jewish immigrants who responded to the First Aliyah or the first wave of Jewish migration to Israel that started in 1882. But instead of moving into Jaffa, some choose to settle in the sand dunes north from the port and built Neve Tzedek which became the first Jewish neighbourhood outside Jaffa and the core of the future city of Tel Aviv.
In the early 20th century, the Jewish community inside and outside Jaffa continued to increase and in 1906, a group of Jews formed the so-called Ahuzat Bayit (“homestead”) society with a goal to create a Hebrew urban centre. Two years later, the society purchased a piece of land north-east from Jaffa and in 1909, 66 Jewish families parcelled out the land by lottery on what is today the Rothschild Boulevard. The event is traditionally considered the foundation of Tel Aviv. The name Tel Aviv (“Old New Land”) was adopted one year later.
The Hebrew urban centre as imagined by the Ahuzat Bayit society continued to grow with a brief interruption during the First World War. After the Jaffa Riots in 1921, many Jews left the port city and moved into Tel Aviv increasing its population from 2,000 in the early 1920s to 34,000 in the mid-1920s as well as boosting the city’s economic development. Jaffa, on the other hand, started to decline as a business hub.
At the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948, Tel Aviv had a population of over 200,000. By the early 1960s when the city gained its first skyscrapers, the population nearly doubled and represented about 16% of Israel’s total population. The steady growth, however, was followed by a period of decline also due to high real estate prices and by the late 1980s, the population dropped to 317,000. But in the early 1990s, Tel Aviv experienced a new wave of immigration, mostly from the countries of the former Soviet Union. At the same time, it began to emerge as the centre of the Silicon Wadi, an area with concentration of high-tech industries which is second in importance only to the California’s Silicon Valley.