SEA OF GALILEE

Sea of Galilee, southern shore, courtesy, Wikipedia

The Sea of Galilee is a freshwater lake in Israel. Called Yam Kinneret in Hebrew (from “kanar” - “harp”), because it is shaped like a harp, it is the lowest freshwater lake on Earth and the second-lowest lake in the world (after the Dead Sea), at various times between 650 and 750 feet below sea level. It is approximately 13 miles long and 8 miles wide, and its maximum depth is approximately 141 feet. The lake is fed partly by underground springs but its main source is the Jordan River, which flows through it from north to south and exits the Sea at the Degania Dam.

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 8^th to 10^th 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 16^th 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 18^th 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.