Sea of Galilee, southern shore, courtesy, Wikipedia |
During the
time of Joshua, the lake was shared by three of the tribes of Israel – Naphtali
along the entire western coast, Gad which possessed the southern tip, and the
eastern portion of Menashe which possessed the entire eastern coast. The
first-century historian Flavius Josephus was so impressed by
the area that he wrote, "One may call this place the ambition of
Nature"; he also reported a thriving fishing industry with 230 boats. In
1986, archaeologists discovered one such boat, nicknamed the Jesus Boat.
In the New
Testament, much of the ministry of Jesus occurs on the shores
of the Sea of Galilee. At that time, the Sea was surrounded by small villages –
all Jewish – and among them, there was an intense activity of trading and
ferrying. One of Jesus' famous teaching episodes, the Sermon on the Mount,
is supposed to have been given on a hill overlooking the Sea. Many of his
miracles are also said to have occurred here including his walking on
water and his feeding five
thousand people in the town of Tabgha. The village of Capernaum also figures prominently in
the New Testament (see Capernaum).
In 135
CE, after the Bar Kokhba revolt was
put down and Jews were banished from Jerusalem, the center of Jewish culture
and learning shifted to the region of Galilee and the Kinneret, particularly
the city of Tiberias which was founded as a Roman
city, built on the ancient Israelite town of Rakkat, but soon became Jewish
again. In 235, the Sanhedrin moved
to the city and made it its permanent home. Tiberias was now a major rabbinic
center.
Around the year 350, a small Christian
chapel was built in the town of Tabgha by a Jewish convert
to Christianity, Joseph of Tiberias. According to Epiphanius, Joseph was a contemporary
of Emperor Constantine, a Rabbinical scholar, member of the Sanhedrin and a disciple
of Hillel II.
Following his conversion, Emperor Constantine gave him the rank of count (comes), and gave him
permission to build churches in the Galilee, including around the
Sea of Galilee, specifically in Jewish towns which didn't yet have a Christian
community. The chapel founded by Joseph was eventually rebuilt as the Church of the Multiplication.
In c. 370,
the Jerusalem Talmud was
compiled in Tiberias. In 614 a monk of Mt. Sinai went to Tiberias to become a Jew.
He received the name of Abraham, and married a Jewess of that city. From
the 8th to 10th centuries, the Masoretic activity of
Biblical literature, emanating from the city, flourished under the ben Asher
family, and later, the Aleppo Codex was compiled there. Tiberias remained a
rabbinic center until the Crusader period when its population diminished
substantially. Still important to Jewry, at the beginning of the twelfth century the Jewish community
in Tiberias numbered about fifty families; and at that time the best
manuscripts of the Torah were said to be found there. The city became
the burial place of Maimonides in c.
1205.
In the
latter 16th century under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Tiberias saw
a significant revival of its Jewish community under an Ottoman Jewish courtier,
Don Yoseph Nasi, who invited the communities in the Diaspora to resettle in the
city. Then a few years after Nasi’s death, the city fell victim to constant Arab
civil wars and major battles between Ottoman and Druze forces in and around
Lebanon. The final destruction came in 1660 when the Arabs plundered the city
and the Jews fled for their lives. In the mid 18th century, the
Bedouin sheikh Zahir al Umar conquered the Galilee and invited the Jews to
rebuild their communities. Jewish leadership then fell to Rabbi Haim Abulafia
who made Tiberias the center of his activities. Since then, with the exception
of the events in c. 1743 when armed Jews allied with armed Arabs to repel an
invading force from Damascus under Suleiman Pasha, the city’s Jewish community
not only survived but even prospered at times. It was centered around the Tomb of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNes. The old cemetery was located a few miles to
the north of the tomb.
In 1837, an earthquake destroyed
most of the city, while in 1865 and 1866 the ravages of the cholera forced the
leaders of the community to apply to Europe for aid, appeals being printed in
nearly all the Jewish weekly periodicals. The appeals eventually bore fruit and
conditions have much improved. In 1889, the community acquired its own physician.
By 1900, the city had a Jewish majority.
In 1908,
Jewish pioneers established the Kinneret Farm next to the moshav Kinneret (established earlier that
year) in the immediate vicinity of the lake. The farm trained Jewish immigrants
in modern agricultural methods. One group of youths from the training farm
established the first kibbutz, Degania in 1909-1910 (also see
here). Another group founded Kvutzat Kinneret in 1913. The
Jewish settlements around Kinneret Farm are considered the cradle of the
kibbutz culture of early Zionism.
In c. 1910, the first Jewish family
settled in the Arab settlement of Tzemach.
They came from Damascus. For years, they remained the only Jewish family in the
settlement until 1920, when the “Labor Brigade” of the halutzim paved a road from Tiberias to Tzemach leading
to the establishment of a small Jewish community.
Ginosar was founded on the eve of Purim in March 1937
by a group of young Socialist
Zionists, on Palestine Jewish Colonization
Association (PICA) land that had been leased to the settlement
of Migdal. It was built as one of the tower and stockade settlements in the area
during the bloody Arab riots from 1936 to 1939, and was closely aligned with
the Mapai party.
Kibbutz Ein Gev was established later that year, also as a "tower and stockade" settlement. It quickly established itself as a
viable community. The original settlers were immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Germany,
Austria, and the Baltic countries.
On May 15,
1948, Syria invaded the newborn State of Israel in order to annihilate the
Jewish communities in the north, and captured territory along the Sea of
Galilee. In the course of the war, most of the Arabs in the area fled. Under
the 1949 armistice
agreement, Syria ended up occupying the northeastern shoreline of
the Sea. The agreement, though, stated that the armistice line was "not to
be interpreted as having any relation whatsoever to ultimate territorial
arrangements."
Immediately after the war, the
village of Maagan was founded on the site of Tzemach by immigrants from Transylvania. The
community of HaOn was established in
August 1949 as a Nahal outpost
near Ein Gev. The founders of
the kibbutz were 120 members of two groups: the Nacham group of Polish immigrants who
arrived in Israel in
1947 and underwent training in Kvutzat Kinneret and a
group of immigrants from the Habonim movement in Hungary who immigrated by
way of the detention camps in Cyprus and were trained
in Kfar Giladi. A
Turkish youth group joined the kibbutz three months after their aliya.
In the 1950s, Israel formulated a plan to link the Kinneret with the rest of the country's water infrastructure via the National Water Carrier, in order to supply the water demand of the growing country. The carrier was completed in 1964. The Israeli plan, sparked political and sometimes even armed confrontations with Syria which remained in possession of the lake's northeastern shoreline until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when Israel liberated that portion of the lake along with the Golan Heights.
No comments:
Post a Comment