The stamps of Israel are among the most popular of any country in the world. Israel is a major economic player, with a high per capita income and large foreign currency earnings which gives its citizens money to spend on hobbies. Further, Israel has a very well educated population, another predictor of philatelic popularity. And lastly, Israel is a country with a religious affiliation, the homeland of the Jews, and as such its stamps are popular with Jews of the Diaspora, living around the world. And increasingly, with the Jewish homeland being tied up in fundamentalist Christian eschatology, Israeli stamps have found new collectors who were not part of its traditional strength.
Israeli stamps are a relatively easy specialty. The country did not exist before 1948 and its creation by the United Nations from a Palestinian area that had been controlled by the British was followed by millions. Its first stamps were avidly collected and put away so that even today a complete Israel collection can be purchased for under $1000, even including some pretty nice specialty albums. Israel does have one neat philatelic twist that does not exist with the collecting of the stamps of any other country: tabs. Tabs are the bottom selvedge labels from the sheets of stamps that usually contain explanations about the stamps (or in the case of the first postage due set, they are blank) and most of the first few issues of tabs are quite pricey. It wasn’t until Israeli stamps had been collected for a few years that tabs became popular. It seems that the dealers who had put away sheets of the first issues noticed the designs in the selvedge and began marketing tabs as a way to sell some material in which they were overstocked. It isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that a mainstay of our hobby began as a way to pry a little more money from collectors.