Tiberias Attractions

History

Herod Antipas, son of Herod I and ruler of the country in the time of Jesus, founded Tiberias in A.D. 17 and named it after the Roman Emperor Tiberius. The new town lay between Hammat (Hammath) and Raqqat (Rakkath), which are mentioned in the Old Testament as fortified cities in the territory of the tribe of Naphtali (Joshua 19,35). Since it was built over the cemetery of Hammath it was regarded by pious Jews as unclean, and at first the town was inhabited only by pagans. Jesus himself, who did much of his teaching in this area, seems never to have come here. Herod Antipas's successor Agrippa II also had his residence in Tiberias, which he embellished with paved streets, a palace and a bath-house. After the end of the Jewish War, in A.D. 70, he moved his capital to Sepphoris.

At the end of the second century Rabbi Simeon Bar Yohai declared the town clean, and it then became the seat of the Sanhedrin. The head of the Sanhedrin, who had the style of Nasi (Prince), was the highest spiritual authority of Jewry until the office was abolished by the Emperor Theodosius II in 429. From the third century onwards Tiberias was the spiritual center of the Jews. It was now known as Teverya, a name which the Jews derived not from the Emperor Tiberius but from the Hebrew word tabur ("navel"), since they regarded the town as the navel of the world. It was here that the Mishnah (c. 200) and the Jerusalem Talmud (c. 400) were completed and the vocalic signs of the Hebrew alphabet were devised. Here too were - and are - the tombs of a number of famous rabbis.

In the fourth century a Jewish convert to the Christian faith, Joseph of Tiberias, built churches in his native town and in other places, and there is known to have been a Christian bishop here in the sixth century. After the Persian conquest in 614 and the Arab conquest in 636 Jewish scholars joined the community in Babylon or went to Jerusalem. From 1099 to 1187 Tiberias lay within the dominions of Tancred, Prince of Galilee, and the kings of Jerusalem. Then in 1247 the Mameluke Sultan Baibars destroyed the town, which thereafter remained uninhabited until the time of the Ottomans (from 1517 onwards).

In 1562 Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent granted the town to a Jewish refugee from Spain, Don Joseph Hanassi, whom he had previously created duke of the Greek island of Naxos, and his aunt Gracia Mendes. They established a Jewish state in Galilee under Ottoman overlordship, but this was short-lived. In the 17th century Tiberias fell into ruin, and was not reoccupied until the Druze emir Daher el-Amr rebuilt the town and its citadel in 1738 and resettled it with Jews. Soon afterwards, in 1765, a first group of Jewish immigrants from Poland also settled here. Many inhabitants lost their lives in an earthquake in 1837, but after the disaster Tiberias was once again rebuilt. Around 1940 the town had a population of 12,000, half of them Arabs and half Jews. Since 1948 the population has been entirely Jewish.