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Founding
Founding of Tiberias
city in Galilee, Israel
- 20 CE
- Middle East
Founding
city in Galilee, Israel
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Tiberias ( ty-BEER-ee-əs; Hebrew: טְבֶרְיָה, Ṭəveryāⓘ; Arabic: طَبَرِيَّا, romanized: Ṭabariyyā) is a city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel. A major Jewish center during Late Antiquity, it has been considered since the 18th century one of Judaism's Four Holy Cities, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed. In 2024, it had a population of 52,123.
Tiberias was founded around 20 CE by Herod Antipas and was named after Roman emperor Tiberius. It became a major political and religious hub of the Jews in the Land of Israel after the destruction of Jerusalem and the desolation of Judea during the Jewish–Roman wars. From the time of the second through the tenth centuries CE, Tiberias was the largest Jewish city in Galilee, and much of the Mishna and the Jerusalem Talmud were compiled there. Tiberias flourished during the Early Muslim period (c. 7th–10th centuries CE), when it served as the capital of Jund al-Urdunn and became a multi-cultural trading center. The city's importance declined in some periods due to earthquake damage and foreign incursions. After the Galilee earthquake of 1837, the city was rebuilt and grew steadily following the First Jewish Aliyah in the 1880s.
During the Ottoman period, Tiberias had a predominantly Muslim population in the early centuries, while from the late Ottoman period, the city became increasingly mixed and at times, had a Jewish majority or plurality. By the late Ottoman and early British Mandate period, it remained a mixed city with significant Jewish, Muslim, and Christian population. By the late Mandatory Palestine period, it had a majority Jewish population, but with a significant Arab community. During the 1947–1948 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, fighting broke out between the Jewish residents of Tiberias and its Palestinian Arab minority. As the Haganah took over, British troops evacuated the entire Palestinian Arab population; they were refused reentry after the war, such that today the city has an almost exclusively Jewish population. After the war ended, the new Israeli authorities destroyed the Old City of Tiberias. A large number of Jewish immigrants to Israel subsequently settled in Tiberias.
Today, Tiberias is an important tourist center due to its proximity to the Sea of Galilee and religious sanctity to Judaism and Christianity. The city also serves as a regional industrial and commercial center. Its immediate neighbour to the south, Hammat Tiberias, which is now part of modern Tiberias, has been known for its hot springs, believed to cure skin and other ailments, for some two thousand years.
The city of Tiberias was named after the Roman Emperor Tiberius.
A Midrash regarding the city's name appears in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Megillah 6A:
"Rabbi Yirmiya said: [...] And why is it called Tiberias? Because it sits at the navel (tabur) of the Land of Israel".
Rashi, in his commentary, provides two interpretations of the Midrash. The first explains the word "navel" (tabur) as referring to the lowest point in the Land of Israel. The second interpretation suggests that Tiberias is situated at the geographical center of the Land of Israel. Ishtori Haparchi later substantiated this claim through measurements of the entire land, demonstrating its accuracy.
Jewish tradition holds that Tiberias was built on the site of the ancient Israelite village of Rakkath (or Rakkat), first mentioned in the Book of Joshua (Josh 19:35). In Talmudic times, the Jews still referred to it by this name.
The city is mentioned directly only in John 6:23, noting that boats from Tiberias came near the place where Jesus had fed the 5,000.
Tiberias was founded sometime around 18–20 CE in the Herodian Tetrarchy of Galilee and Perea by the Roman client king Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas made it the capital of his realm in Galilee and named it after the Roman emperor Tiberius. The city was built in immediate proximity to a spa which had developed around seventeen natural mineral hot springs, Hammat Tiberias. Tiberias was at first a strictly pagan city, but later became populated mainly by Jews, with its growing spiritual and religious status exerting a strong influence on balneological practices. Conversely, in Antiquities of the Jews, the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus calls the village with hot springs Emmaus, today's Hammat Tiberias, located near Tiberias. This name also appears in his work The Jewish War.
Under the Roman Empire, the city was known by its Koine Greek name Τιβεριάς (Tiberiás, Greek: Τιβεριάδα, romanized: Tiveriáda).
In the days of Herod Antipas, some of the most religiously orthodox Jews, who were struggling against the process of Hellenisation, which had affected even some priestly groups, refused to settle there: the presence of a cemetery rendered the site ritually unclean for the Jews and particularly for the priestly caste. Antipas settled many non-Jews there from rural Galilee and other parts of his domains in order to populate his new capital, and built a palace on the acropolis. The prestige of Tiberias was so great that the Sea of Galilee soon came to be named the Sea of Tiberias; however, the Jewish population continued to call it Yam HaKineret, its traditional name. The city was governed by a city council of 600 with a committee of ten until 44 CE, when a Roman procurator was set over the city after the death of Herod Agrippa I. The city is estimated to have had a population between 4,500 and 15,000 during the first century CE.
Tiberias is mentioned in John 6:23 as the location from which boats had sailed to the opposite, eastern side of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd seeking Jesus after the miraculous feeding of the 5000 used these boats to travel back to Capernaum on the north-western part of the lake.
In 61 CE, Herod Agrippa II annexed the city to his kingdom whose capital was Caesarea Philippi.
During the First Jewish–Roman War, the Jewish rebels took control of the city and destroyed Herod's palace, and were able to prevent the city from being pillaged by the army of Agrippa II, the Jewish ruler who had remained loyal to Rome. Eventually, the rebels were expelled from Tiberias, and while most other cities in the provinces of Judaea, Galilee and Idumea were razed, Tiberias was spared this fate because its inhabitants had decided not to fight against Rome. It became a mixed city after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE; with Judea subdued, the surviving southern Jewish population migrated to Galilee. An epitaph found in Taenarum, Laconia (modern Kyparissa, Greece) records a man named Justus, son of Andromache, from Tiberias. He is believed to have been a first- or second-generation refugee displaced from Tiberias in the aftermath of the revolt.
There is no direct indication that Tiberias, as well as the rest of Galilee, took part in the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, thus allowing it to continue to exist, despite a heavy economic decline due to the war. Following the expulsion of Jews from Judea after 135 CE, Tiberias and its neighbour Sepphoris (Hebrew name: Tzippori) became the major Jewish cultural centres.
According to the Talmud, in 145 CE, Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai, who was very familiar with Galilee, hiding there for over a decade, "cleansed the city of ritual impurity", allowing the Jewish leadership to resettle there from the Judea, which they were forced to leave as fugitives. The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, also fled from Jerusalem during the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome, and after several attempted moves, in search of stability, eventually settled in Tiberias in about 220 CE. It was to be its final meeting place before its disbanding in 425 CE. When Johanan bar Nappaha (d. 279) settled in Tiberias, the city became the focus of Jewish religious scholarship in the land and the so-named Jerusalem Talmud was compiled by his school in Tiberias between 230–270 CE. Tiberias' 13 synagogues served the spiritual needs of a growing Jewish population. Tombs of famous rabbis Yohanan ben Zakkai, Akiva and Maimonides are also located in the city.
During the Byzantine period, Tiberias was incorporated into the province of Palaestina Secunda. In the 6th century Tiberias was still the seat of Jewish religious learning. In light of this, the Letter of Simeon of Beth Arsham urged the Christians of Palaestina to seize the leaders of Judaism in Tiberias, to put them to the rack, and to compel them to command the Jewish king, Dhu Nuwas, to desist from persecuting the Christians in Najran.
In 614, Tiberias was the site where, during the final Jewish revolt against the Byzantine Empire, parts of the Jewish population supported the Persian invaders; the Jewish rebels were financed by Benjamin of Tiberias, a man of immense wealth; according to Christian sources, during the revolt Christians were massacred and churches destroyed. In 628, the Byzantine army returned to Tiberias upon the surrender of Jewish rebels and the end of the Persian occupation after they were defeated in the battle of Nineveh. A year later, influenced by radical Christian monks, Emperor Heraclius instigated a wide-scale slaughter of the Jews, which practically emptied Galilee of most its Jewish population, with survivors fleeing to Egypt.
During the Muslim conquest of Syria, Tiberias capitulated to the Arab commander Shurahbil ibn Hasana in c. 636. As part of the agreement, half the houses and churches were ceded to the Muslims, the other half to the Christians. Tiberias thereafter became the capital of Jund al-Urdunn (the military district of [the River] Jordan). Its territory corresponded with the Byzantine province of Palaestina Secunda (Palestine II, i.e. the Galilee and southern Lebanese mountains) with the additions of the Mediterranean coastal towns of Acre and Tyre and Jerash east of the Jordan River. Caliph Umar (r. 634–644) allowed 70 Jewish families from Tiberias to form the core of a renewed Jewish presence in Jerusalem.
The Umayyads, who ruled the caliphate (Islamic empire) in 660–750, developed Tiberias and its district, building palaces and places of entertainment at nearby Khirbat al-Minya and Sinnabra. A Greek inscription credits the first Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya I for restoring the Roman-era bathworks at Hammat Gader in 663. The presaging of the inscription with a cross and the use of Greek both signal an effort by Mu'awiya to appease the Christians who formed the majority of his subjects. During this period, Tiberias was a center of trade between Egypt and the Umayyad capital at Damascus, particularly in small wares and agricultural products. Trade was particularly intensive between Tiberias and the other major inland towns of its district, Beisan and Jerash, as well as with Damascus, as indicated by numistatic evidence. Accommodating this trade was a large market in the middle of Tiberias and shops at its southern end.
The town became home to a mixed population of Muslims, Christians and Jews. The Muslims were concentrated in the southern quarter, while the Jews resided in the north side. Jewish studies flourished around the town's Eretz Israel Academy. The oral traditions of ancient Hebrew, still in use today, were codified in Tiberias. One of the leading members of the Tiberian Masoretic community was Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, who refined the oral tradition now known as Tiberian Hebrew. Both the Codex Cairensis and the Aleppo Codex were written in Tiberias. The Tiberian vocalization was devised here in the 7th–8th centuries. Willibald visited in 724 and noted several churches and synagogues. In 808, Tiberias had five churches and one convent. Although it was likely a mosque was founded in Tiberias not long after the Muslim conquest, the first known mention of a mosque is by the Jerusalemite geographer al-Muqaddasi in 985, who wrote that it stood in the market and was "large and fine", its floors laid with pebbles resting on stone drums. An imposing mosque, 90 metres (300 feet) long by 78 metres (256 feet) wide, resembling the Great Mosque of Damascus, was raised at the foot of Mount Berenice next to a Byzantine church, to the south of the city, as the eighth century ushered in Tiberias's golden age, when the multicultural city may have been the most tolerant of the Middle East.
Al-Muqaddasi described the city as long and narrow, its houses built between the hills and the Sea of Galilee, its market extending between its two gates and its cemetery on the hillside. The inhabitants obtained their water from the lake, where fish were in abundance. Al-Muqaddasi wrote of its hot and unhealthy climate, noting that its inhabitants, depending on the time of year, contended with fleas or wasps, gorged on jujube or sugar cane, walked naked amid the heat and wallowed in muddy streets. In the vicinity of town were eight natural hot baths which bathers used to treat skin ailments.
Tiberias was plagued by incursions by the radical Shi'ite Qarmatians at the beginning of the tenth century. During that period, the Academy of Eretz Israel left Tiberias for Jerusalem. Later in the same century, the region came under the control by the Fatimid Caliphate. By this time, Tiberias had experienced its last period of prosperity; dried fruit, oil, and wine had been exported to Cairo via the Via Maris, and the city was also known for its mat industry.
In 1033, Tiberias was again destroyed by an earthquake. A further earthquake in 1066 toppled the great mosque. Nasir-i Khusrou visited Tiberias in 1047, and describes a city with a "strong wall" which begins at the border of the lake and goes all around the town except on the water-side. Furthermore, he describes
numberless buildings erected in the very water, for the bed of the lake in this part is rock; and they have built pleasure houses that are supported on columns of marble, rising up out of the water. The lake is very full of fish. [] The Friday Mosque is in the midst of the town. At the gate of the mosque is a spring, over which they have built a hot bath. [] On the western side of the town is a mosque known as the Jasmine Mosque (Masjid-i-Yasmin). It is a fine building and in the middle part rises a great platform (dukkan), where they have their mihrabs (or prayer-niches). All round those they have set jasmine-shrubs, from which the mosque derives its name.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Tiberias”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.