| Muki Tzur The church bells rang throughout England at the beginning of December 1917 : Jerusalem had been conquered by Allenby’s army , after 400 years of Ottoman rule , and thirty years of British control of the city had begun . For Jerusalemites ( about 28 , 000 Jews and 22 , 000 Arabs ) , this was the end of a nightmarish period : food , order , the return of those who had been expelled . A cultural and political revolution was at hand . The Balfour Declaration had been issued a few weeks before the conquest , the great revolution had erupted in Russia . What could Jerusalem expect in the new world ? Eliezer Ben-Yehuda , who a few years earlier had attempted to institute a new calendar that began with the destruction of the Temple , lost no time in proclaiming ( from the United States , his temporary domicile ) that , with the city’s liberation from Turkish rule , a new era had begun . Jerusalem musicologist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn dug through his archives , extracted a Hasidic melod...
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