Jaffa

City and former port in west Israel, from 1950 part of Tel Aviv-Yafo. The port of Jaffa was closed in 1965 when the modern port at Ashdod 31 km/19 mi to the south was opened. The combined city is a major tourist centre.

Jaffa's name is found on the tower of Egyptian pharaoh Thotmes II at Karnak among the cities mentioned as being captured by the pharaoh. Later it became a Phoenician city and then, for a thousand years, Philistine, during which time the logs for Solomon's temple, after being floated down from the ports of Lebanon by Hiram, were landed at Jaffa. Under the Maccabees, Jaffa became mainly Jewish. From 64 BC Jaffa was within the Roman province of Syria. It was in the house of Simon the Tanner at Jaffa that St Peter saw the vision recorded in Acts ix.43. During the Crusades, Baldwin I signed the Treaty of Jaffa with the Genoese. The city then became a county, but in 1187 it was captured and destroyed by the brother of Saladin and then retaken by British king Richard the Lionheart. In 1267 it was again sacked, this time by the Marmeluke sultan Bibars, and in 1799 it was stormed by Napoleon. It was captured by the British field marshal Edmund Allenby in 1917. The strike over Jewish immigration, which developed into internal disorder throughout Palestine in 1936, began in Jaffa, which remained a centre of Arab nationalism until its capture by the Jews in May 1948.