ruins of Biblical Jezreel adjacent to the present kibbutz of the same name, courtesy, Wikipedia |
Under Roman rule, Greco-Roman
immigrants began to arrive in the town, but it remained a largely Jewish town
even after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70. In the course of the succeeding Byzantine
Christian rule, Jezreel began to be taken over by Christian immigrants causing
many Jews to leave. At the beginning of Arab hegemony, Jezreel was left with a tiny
Jewish minority. In the 12th century, Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, a traveler
from Spain, found there one Jewish inhabitant, a dyer. The Jewish population
fluctuated since then until the last Jew left around the 18th or 19th
centuries.
The modern kibbutz Jezreel was founded during
Israel’s War of Independence. During the war, the strategically situated Arab
village of Zaʿrīn served as a vantage point from which Arab units harassed
Jewish settlements in the Harod Valley
and tried to block communications with nearby Afulah. A Palmaḥ group took the
village in an attack on May 30, 1948. A few weeks later a group of Israel-born
youth established the kibbutz on the abandoned site. Today, the kibbutz
contains a Monument to the Fallen, a
music school Bet HaMusika, Maytronics
a robotic pool cleaning company, Neomis Café,
and the Emek Chen Potter Studio
In 1987, a
bulldozer working near the site accidentally uncovered ancient structures, and
a salvage dig was
conducted leading to the major dig under the direction of David Ussishkin and John
Woodhead over seven seasons (1990-1996). Staff and volunteers from about
25 countries (the largest groups were from United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark)
joined the dig.
Renewed
excavations began in the summer of 2012 under the new directorship of Dr. Norma
Franklin of the University of Haifa Zinman Institute of Archaeology, and Dr.
Jennie Ebeling of the University of Evansville. The excavations uncovered
a casemate wall and four projecting towers surrounding the
ancient Israelite fortress, built with a combination of well-cut ashlars,
boulders and smaller stones, and an upper level of mud-brick, all covering an
area of almost 11 acres.
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