Tiberias

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Tiberias
טְבֶרְיָה
طبرية
Tiberias (Israel )
Tiberias
Tiberias
Location within Israel
Coordinates: 32°47′23″N 35°31′29″E / 32.78972, 35.52472
Country Israel
District North
Founded 18AD
Government
 - Mayor Zohar Oved
Area
 - Total 10 km² (3.9 sq mi)
Population (2006)
 - Total 40,000
Time zone IST (UTC+2)
 - Summer (DST) IDT (UTC+3)
Website: official website (Hebrew)
View of Tiberas
View of Tiberas
View of Tiberas prior to 1946
View of Tiberas prior to 1946

Coordinates: 32°47′23″N, 35°31′29″E

Tiberias (British English: /taɪˈbɪəriæs, -əs/; American English: /taɪˈbɪriəs/; Hebrew: טְבֶרְיָה‎, Tverya; Arabic: طبرية‎, Ṭabariyyah) is a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, Lower Galilee, Israel. It was named in honour of the emperor Tiberius.[1]

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Antiquity

Tiberias was built in about AD 20 by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great on the site of the destroyed village of Rakkat, and it became the capital of his realm in Galilee. It was named in honor of Antipas' patron, the Roman Emperor Tiberius.

Tiberias's name in the Roman Empire (and consequently the form most used in English) was its Greek form, Τιβεριάς (Tiberiás, Modern Greek Τιβεριάδα Tiveriáda), an adaptation of the taw-suffixed Semitic form that preserved its feminine grammatical gender.

The view northward from Tiberas across the Sea of Galilee.
The view northward from Tiberas across the Sea of Galilee.

During Herod's time, the Jews refused to settle there; the presence of a cemetery rendered the site ritually unclean. However, Antipas forcibly settled people there from rural Galilee in order to populate his new capital. The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, fled from Jerusalem during the Great Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, and after several stations eventually settled in Tiberias. It was in fact its final meeting place before its disbandment in the early Byzantine period. Following the expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem after 135, Tiberias and its neighbor Sepphoris became the major centers of Jewish culture. The Mishnah, which grew into the Jerusalem Talmud, may have begun to have been written here.

In 613 it was the site where the final Jewish revolt against the Byzantine Empire started coming into aid of the Persian invaders. Following the Arab conquest, the Caliphate allowed 70 Jewish families from Tiberias to form the core of a renewed Jewish presence in Jerusalem. The caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty also built one of its series of square-plan palaces (the most impressive of which is Hisham's Palace near Jericho) on the waterfront to the north of Tiberias, at Khirbet al-Minya.

[edit] Middle Ages

Under Byzantine and Arab rule, the city declined and was devastated by wars and earthquakes in the Middle Ages including the largest earthquake, in 749, which destroyed many synagogues. Despite this decline, the community of masoretic scholars flourished at Tiberias from the beginning of the 8th century to the end of the 10th. These scholars created a systematic written form of the vocalization of ancient Hebrew, which is still used by all streams of Judaism. The apogee of the Tiberian masoretic scholarly community is personified in Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, who refined the vocalization system now know as Tiberian Hebrew and is also credited with putting the finishing touches on the Aleppo Codex, the oldest existing manuscript of the Hebrew scriptures, another indication of Tiberias' centrality to Hebrew scholarship and medieval Judaism as a whole.

During the crusades it was the central city of the Principality of Galilee in the Kingdom of Jerusalem; the region was sometimes called the Principality of Tiberias, or the Tiberiad. Saladin besieged it during his invasion of the kingdom in 1187, and in October of that year defeated the crusaders at the Battle of Hattin outside the city. Around this time the original site of the city was abandoned, and settlement shifted north to the present location.

Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known in English as Moses Maimonides, a leading Jewish legal scholar, philosopher and physician of his period, died in 1204 and was buried in Tiberias, creating one of the city's important pilgrimage sites.

[edit] Modern Times

In 1558, Doña Gracia, a former marrano Jew, was given the site and its surrounding villages as a gift from Suleiman the Magnificent. She restored the city walls, built a yeshiva and encouraged Sephardi Jews fleeing the Inquisition to settle the city. Tiberias flourished again for a hundred years. It was devastated again, and again resettled by Hasidic Jews.

In 1746, rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, a leading ethicist and kabbalist of his generation, died of the plague in the nearby Mediterranean port city of Akko and was buried overlooking Tiberias, next to a site traditionally venerated as the grave of Rabbi Akiva.

In the 18th and 19th centuries Tiberias received an influx of rabbis who established the city as a center for Jewish learning. During this time Tiberias became recognized as one of the Jewish Four Holy Cities, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed.

1837 earthquake devastates Tiberias.

In 1938, Arab militants murdered 20 Jews in Tiberias as part of the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine.[2]

In 1948, 9 Jews were massacred in Tiberias, and many Jewish families fled their homes for fear of more slaughter.[3]

In April, 1948, the Arab residents of Tiberias, which was within the Palestine Partition Plan’s recommended boundaries for the proposed Jewish State, launched an assault against the Jewish residents. The British Mandatory authorities demanded that the entire Jewish population of Tiberias remove itself or be prepared to suffer British shelling in support of the Arab attack. The Haganah counterattacked the “Arab Liberation Army” commanded by Fawzi el-Kaukji, and captured Arab villages and neighborhoods which they deemed hostile. They razed these Arab villages to the ground and caused the exodus, under British military protection, of the entire Arab population. As a result of actions such as these, Tiberias and Safed, where the population had been mixed, became all-Jewish cities.[4]

[edit] Current

Tiberias at night.
Tiberias at night.

Today, Tiberias is Israel's most popular holiday resort in the northern part of the country.

In October 2004 (Tishrei 5765), a controversial group of rabbis claiming to represent varied communities in Israel undertook a ceremony in Tiberias [1], claiming to have established a new Sanhedrin.

Professor Yizhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem led a long-term archaeological excavation at Tiberias, with the participation of many volunteers, until his death in November 2006.

[edit] Other transliterations

[edit] See also

[edit] Twin Cities

Tiberias is twinned with:

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.2.3
  2. ^ United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (.JPG). United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
  3. ^ Israel National News (.JPG). Israel National News. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
  4. ^ The Rosenblits' Website (.JPG). The Rosenblits' Website. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.

[edit] Further Reading

Helga Dudman with Elisheva Ballhorn, Tiberias, 1988.

[edit] External links

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