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Tiberias
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Tiberias טְבֶרְיָה طبرية |
|
  Tiberias
|
|
| Coordinates: | |
|---|---|
| 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) | |
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]
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Tiberias was built at 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.
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 to Tiberias. It was in fact its final meeting place before its disbandment. 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 Jewish revolt started coming into aid of the Persian invaders.
Under Byzantine and Arab rule, the city declined and was devastated by wars and earthquakes in the Middle Ages. Despite this decline, the community of masoretic scholars flourished at Tiberias from the beginning of the 8th to the end of the 10th centuries. 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.
In 1558, Doña Gracia, a former marrano Jew, rented the site 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 Hassidic Jews.
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 one of the Jewish Four Holy Cities, along with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Safed.
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 fmilies fled their homes for fear of more retribution.[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]
Today, Tiberias is Israel's most popular holiday resort in the northern half 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 long-term archaeological excavation at Tiberias, with the participation of many volunteers, until his death in November 2006.
- Standard Hebrew: Təverya
- Tiberian Hebrew: Ṭəḇeryāh
Tiberias is twinned with:
Montpellier, France, since 1983
Worms, Germany, since 1986
Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States, since 1996- Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
- Great Neck Plaza, New York, United States, since 2002
Wuxi, People's Republic of China, since 2007- Saint-Raphael, France, since 2007
- ^ Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.2.3
- ^ United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (.JPG). United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
- ^ Israel National News (.JPG). Israel National News. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
- ^ The Rosenblits' Website (.JPG). The Rosenblits' Website. Retrieved on 2007-11-29.
- Official Homepage Hebrew
- Tiberias - City of Treasures: the official website of the Tiberias Excavation Project and information about how you can volunteer and help excavate the site
- Three early photos of Tiberias
