Tiberias (British English: ; American English: ; , Tverya; , abariyyah) 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]

History

Antiquity

Tiberias was established in around AD 20 by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, it became the capital of his realm in Galilee. It was named in honor of Antipas' patron, the Roman Emperor Tiberius. There is a rabbinical tradition that the site was of the destroyed village of Rakkat. Josephus describes the building of Tiberias by Herod Antipas near a village called Emmaus.^[2]

Tiberias's name in the Roman Empire (and consequently the form most used in English) was its Greek form, ???????? (Tiberiás, Modern Greek ????????? 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. During the First Jewish?Roman War when most other cities in Palestine were razed, Tiberias was spared as its inhabitants remained loyal to Rome.^[3] 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 during the final Jewish revolt against the Byzantine Empire the Jewish population supported the Persian invaders. Following the Umayyad 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.

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.

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 the early 18. century, Tiberias was under the rule of the Arab-Bedouin ruler Dhaher al-Omar. Around 1730, Dhaher and his brother Youssef settled in Tiberias. He fortified the town and made agreement with the neighbouring Bedouin tribes to prevent their looting raids. Accounts from that time tell of the great admiration which the people had for Dhaher, especially for his war against bandits on the roads. Richard Pococke, who visited Tiberias in 1727, witnessed the building of a fort to the north of the city, and the strengthening of the old walls, and attributed it to a disagreement with the pasha (ruler) of Damascus.^[4]

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.

In 1938, Arab militants murdered 20 Jews in Tiberias as part of the 1936?1939 Arab revolt in Palestine.^[5] In 1948, 9 Jews were massacred in Tiberias, and many Jewish families fled their homes for fear of more slaughter.

Between the 8 and 9 April sporadic shooting broke out between Palestinian Jewish and Palestinian Arab neighbourhoods of Teberias. On 10 April 1948, the Haganah, launched a violent mortar barrage against the Palestinian Arab residents.^[6] The British Mandatory authorities demanded that the entire Jewish population of Tiberias immediately remove itself from Tiberias or be prepared to suffer British shelling in support of the Arab attack. The Haganah counterattacked the ?Arab Liberation Army? commanded by Fawzi al-Qawuqji, and captured Arab villages and neighborhoods which were deemed hostile. They razed these Arab villages to the ground and partly caused the exodus, under British military protection, of the entire Arab population. As a result of these conflicts, Tiberias and Safed, where the population had been mixed, became all-Jewish cities.^[7]

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

In October 2004, a controversial group of rabbis claiming to represent varied communities in Israel undertook a ceremony in Tiberias, claiming to have established a new Sanhedrin.^[8]

Sport

Hapoel Tiberias represented the city in the top division of football for several seasons in the 1960s and 1980s, but eventually dropped into the regional leagues and folded due to financial difficulties.

Following Hapoel's demise, a new club, Ironi Tiberias, was established, which currently plays in Liga Alef.

Twin cities

Tiberias is twinned with:

• Córdoba, Argentina
• Montpellier, France, since 1983
• Worms, Germany, since 1986
• Tudela, Navarre, Spain
• Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States, since 1996
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
• 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

Gallery

<gallery> Image:Tiberias1862.jpg|View of Tiberas, 1862 Image:Tiberias pre-1946.JPG|View of Tiberas prior to 1946 Image:JPF-TiberiasNorthward.JPG|The view northward from Tiberas across the Sea of Galilee. Image:Tiberias_israel_night_byBantosh.JPG|Tiberias at night. </gallery>

References

See also

• Balady citron

External links

• City council website
• Tiberias - City of Treasures: The official website of the Tiberias Excavation Project
• Three early photos of Tiberias University of Chicago

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