Tiberias
Tiberias is a town on the western shore of the
Sea of Galilee, Lower
Galilee,
Israel. It was named in honour of the emperor
Tiberius.
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.
Tiberias's name in the
Roman Empire was its Greek form, ???e???? , 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.
Encyclopedia
Tiberias is a town on the western shore of the
Sea of Galilee, Lower
Galilee,
Israel. It was named in honour of the emperor
Tiberius.
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.
Tiberias's name in the
Roman Empire was its Greek form,
??ße???? , 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.
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. 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 European 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 recieved 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.
Today, Tiberias is Israel's most popular holiday resort in the northern half of the country.
A controversial body that claims to be the Sanhedrin was established in October, 2004 in a meeting in Tiberias .
Prof. Yizhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is leading long-term archaeological excavation at Tiberias. Volunteers are welcome to join and help uncover this most spectacular historical site.
Other transliterations
Twin Cities
Tiberias is
twinned with:
Montpellier,
France, since 1983
Worms,
Germany, since 1986
St Paul,
Minnesota,
United States, since 1996
Tulsa,
Oklahoma,
United States Village of Great Neck,
New York,
United StatesExternal links
