Ninety years ago, late August, 1929, the U.S. Beatrice Daily Sun (Beatrice, Nebraska), proclaimed,  “MOSLEMS SATE BLOOD LUST.  Even Little Children Die By Knife in Jehad” (Aug. 29, 1929; p.8). This brief report conveyed with grisly accuracy the Arab Muslim jihad [jehad] depredations against the Jews of Hebron which began with the insolated stabbings (one fatal) of two yeshiva students on Friday, August 23^rd, followed by a raging massacre the next morning, during which 66 Jews were butchered within two-hours:

In practically every instance death was caused by swords or knives. Even young children of two and three years, many of them girls, did not escape the savagery of the attack.

While the greatest carnage of Jews was in Hebron, the Arab Muslim jihad rampages, which continued through August 29^th, extended to Jerusalem 31 killed, 119 wounded; Safed 20 killed, 39 wounded; Jaffa 8 killed, 33 wounded; Haifa 6 killed, 67 wounded; Ramla 1 killed, 1 wounded; Beisan 25 wounded; Acre 3 wounded; and Nazareth 1 wounded. Even a strained “balanced” account of the 1929 Arab Muslim jihad—which ignores 1300 years of chronic jihad-imposed dhimmitude and Islamic antisemitism, with sporadic paroxysms of mass-murderous jihad violence against Jews, within their ancestral homeland—concedes, regarding the total of 133 Jews killed, and 241 injured:

A large majority of the Jews slain were unarmed and were murdered in their homes by Arabs. Most of the Arab dead were killed as they attacked Jewish settlements or neighborhoods. Most of the Arabs were felled by bullets fired by the British armed forces…

Jerusalem historian and journalist Pinchas Grayevsky (d. 1941) provided this graphic 1929 description of the brutal murder of Hebron pharmacist Ben-Zion Gershon:

For forty years, this Jew dressed the wounds and treated the illnesses of the most wretched Arabs, generally without asking for any compensation, as he received a salary from the community or from Hadassah. Over his lifetime, this man saved hundreds and thousands of Arabs from dying of diseases of all kinds, from going blind or becoming handicapped…On the day of the riots Arabs broke into the home of this poor Jew, and instead of having mercy on him for being one-legged, they cut off both of his hands. The very same Arabs whose eyes had been cured by him of trachoma [a potentially blinding infection caused by C. trachomatis, if untreated] and blindness stood over him and gouged out his eyes. The same Arabs whose wives and daughters he had saved from miscarrying and from gynecological illnesses now seized his eldest daughter, raped her, and killed her. They also stabbed his wife four times with a knife and brought a nail-studded club down on her head.

Historian Jerold Auerbach’s somber 2009 analysis Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel summarizes the Muslim atmospherics, and offers harrowing details—rape, torture, beheadings, throat slitting, and mutilation—from eyewitness reports of other merciless assaults on Hebron’s Jews:

 

In August 1929, Palestinian Arabs were incited to impassioned fury by the harangues of Haj Amin-al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. His allegations that Jews intended to “usurp” the Western Wall and endanger Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount aroused his followers throughout Palestine… [Saturday, Aug.24^th] cars filled with Arabs from nearby villages, screaming Allah akbar (Note: “Allah is greater”) and Itbach al Yahud (“Kill the Jews”), sped through the streets of Hebron. Rabbi Bemzweig recounted, “Right after eight o’clock in the morning we heard screams. Arabs, armed [with iron bars, sledgehammers, knives, and axes], had begun breaking into Jewish homes…

…[F]amily members and yeshiva students, had crowded into Eliezer Dan Slonim’s spacious house, where they believed that his esteem in the Hebron community would protect them…Virtually the entire Slonim family, including his wife Hannah and their son, his father-in-law, the chief rabbi of Zichron Yaakov, and his wife, was slaughtered. The sole survivor, one-year-old Shlomo, was discovered, blood drenched and wounded, beneath the corpses of his relatives. His look of abject terror, captured in a photograph, reflected the horror he had witnessed but could not begin to describe. A visiting tourist, Y. L. Grodzinsky, heard “the shrieks of the women and the babies’ wailing” reverberate through the Slonim house. When he emerged from hiding, he saw “a sea of blood” from victims with “knife and hatchet wounds in their heads. . . . A few bodies had been slashed and their entrails had come out.” Twenty-two Jews were murdered there.