| Summary/Abstract |
Ahmed Djemal Pasha, Military Governor of the Levant during World War I, instigated two major deportations of Jews from Jaffa during the course of the war, and numerous lesser ones. On 17 December 1914, a day that came to be known as ‘Black Thursday’, the Ottoman ruler of Jaffa, under Djemal’s command, ordered the mass deportation of ‘enemy subjects’, including 6,000 Russian-born Jewish residents of Jaffa. Over the course of the next three months, a few thousand more Russian-born Jews were expelled from Palestine or fled just ahead of the deportations. In total 11,277 Jews were exiled, leaving on various ships that took them from Jaffa to Alexandria. This article describes the ‘Black Thursday’ deportation based on testimonies of those who either witnessed it or were its victims, and briefly on the two works of documentary fiction that provide a rounded context for the many accounts.
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