Executive Summary
This earthquake occurred on 26 May 1834 in Palestine during the 1834 revolt at the time of the siege of Jerusalem by the fellahin; who entered the city on the day after the earthquake. There are reports that there were ten days of aftershocks (Macalister, 1918).Macalister, P. R. A. S. (1918)
This earthquake took place during a Revolt against the Ottoman Pasha Ibrahim. A first hand account of this earthquake can be found in a Quarterly Report of the Palestine Exploration Fund of 1918 where a letter originally written in Welsh was translated to English from the magazine Y Gwyliedydd - Vol. XII [1835], p. 27. Below is an excerpt from the letter describing the earthquake.The man who wrote the letter was in Jerusalem when the earthquake struck.
To increase our misery, an earthquake, one of the strongest ever felt in Palestine, destroyed many houses, and levelled to the earth that part of the city wall which passes the temple of the Muhammadans. The monastery of Bethlehem was rendered uninhabitable, and many of the inhabitants were killed in the ruin of their houses. For ten days earthquakes continued to rock the city, though none of them was by any means so severe as the first.
Spyridon, S. N. (1938) pp. 92-93
At six o'clock on Sunday morning, May 13th, there was an earthquake. It lasted but three seconds, but it was so 'violent that the dome of the Catholicon was cracked in seven places and all the plaster fell off.Migowski et. al. (2004)
Migowski et. al. (2004) assigned a 1834/1837 AD date to a 3 cm. thick seismite in the 1997 GFZ/GSI En Gedi core. Migowski et. al. (2004) suggests that the 1834 seismite may have been masked (aka overprinted) by the 1837 seismite.
Ken-Tor et. al. (2001)
Ken-Tor et. al. (2001) assigned a seismite known as Event G in Nahal Ze 'elim to the 1834 and/or 1837 earthquakes.
Figure 2. The lithology and chronology of a composite section exposed in Ze'elim Plain. The section is described from two outcrops exposed in different gullies 300 m apart. The correlation between the outcrops is based on the sedimentary sequence, laminae counting, and 14C dates. Ages presented in 4c years B.P. Deformed units (mixed layers and liquefied sands) are marked by capital letters. The original figure was modified slightly by Williams.