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'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]

Contents

History

Antiquity

Middle Ages

Modern Times

Current

Other transliterations

Twin Cities

Notes

External links

History

Antiquity

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 (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.

Middle Ages

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.

Modern Times

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.

Current

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 Yitzhar Hirschfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is leading long-term archaeological excavation at Tiberias, in which many volunteers participate. Update: Prof. Hirschfeld died suddenly of a stroke in November 2006. The excavation is currently on hold and not accepting volunteers.

Other transliterations

★ Standard Hebrew: Təverya

★ Tiberian Hebrew: Ṭəḇeryāh

Twin Cities

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

Notes

1. Josephus, ''Antiquities of the Jews''

External links

★ 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