Tiberias (British English: ; American English: /taɪˈbɪriəs/; , Tverya; طبرية, Ṭabariyyah) is a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, Lower Galilee, Israel. It was named in honour of the emperor Tiberius.
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 most famous personage from Tiberias was Saint Peter, the chief apostle of Christ and his most loved disciple. During the First Jewish–Roman War when most other cities in Palestine were razed, Tiberias was spared as its inhabitants remained loyal to Rome. The Sanhedrin, the Jewish court, fled from Jerusalem during the Great Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire, and after several stations eventually settled in Tiberias. It was in fact its final meeting place before its disbandment in the early Byzantine period. 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 during the final Jewish revolt against the Byzantine Empire the Jewish population supported the Persian invaders. Following the Umayyad conquest, the Caliphate allowed 70 Jewish families from Tiberias to form the core of a renewed Jewish presence in Jerusalem. The caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty also built one of its series of square-plan palaces (the most impressive of which is Hisham's Palace near Jericho) on the waterfront to the north of Tiberias, at Khirbet al-Minya.
The Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi writing in 985 AD, recounts that Tabariyyah is "the capital of Jordan Province, and a city in the Valley of Canaan..The town is narrow, hot in summer and unhealthy. [] There are here eight natural hot baths, where no fuel need be used, and numberless basins besides of boiling water. The mosque is large and fine, and stands in the market-place. Its floor is laid in pebbles, set on stone drums, places close one to another." Muqaddesi further describes that those who suffers from scab, or ulcers, and other such-like diseases come to Tiberias to bath in the hot springs for three days. Afterwards they dip in another spring which is cold, wherupon [] they become cured.
Nasir-i Khusrou visited in 1047, and describes a city with a "strong wall" which begin at the border of the lake and goes all around the town except on the water-side. Furthermore, he describes
During the crusades it was occupied by the Franks, soon after the capture of Jerusalem and it was given in fief to Tancred who made it his capital 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.
Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known in English as Moses Maimonides, a leading Jewish legal scholar, philosopher and physician of his period, died in 1204 and was buried in Tiberias, creating one of the city's important pilgrimage sites.
Yakut, writing in the 1220s, described Tiberias as a small town, long and narrow. He also describes the "hot salt springs, over which they have built Hammams which use no fuel. Tabariyyah was first conquered by (the Arab commander) Shurahbil in the year 13 (634 AD) by capitulation; one half of the houses and churches were to belong to the Muslims, the other half to the Christians.
In the early 18. century, Tiberias was under the rule of the Arab-Bedouin ruler Dhaher al-Omar. Around 1730, Dhaher and his brother Youssef settled in Tiberias. He fortified the town and made agreement with the neighbouring Bedouin tribes to prevent their looting raids. Accounts from that time tell of the great admiration which the people had for Dhaher, especially for his war against bandits on the roads. Richard Pococke, who visited Tiberias in 1727, witnessed the building of a fort to the north of the city, and the strengthening of the old walls, and attributed it to a disagreement with the pasha (ruler) of Damascus. it was under Dhaher's patronage that Jewish families were encouraged to settle in Tiberias around 1742.
In 1746, rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, a leading ethicist and kabbalist of his generation, died of the plague in the nearby Mediterranean port city of Akko and was buried overlooking Tiberias, next to a site traditionally venerated as the grave of Rabbi Akiva.
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 recognized as 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. In 1948, 9 Jews were massacred in Tiberias, and many Jewish families fled their homes for fear of more slaughter.
Between the 8 and 9 April sporadic shooting broke out between Palestinian Jewish and Palestinian Arab neighbourhoods of Teberias. On 10 April 1948, the Haganah, launched a violent mortar barrage against the Palestinian Arab residents. The British Mandatory authorities demanded that the entire Jewish population of Tiberias immediately remove itself from Tiberias or be prepared to suffer British shelling in support of the Arab attack. The Haganah counterattacked the “Arab Liberation Army” commanded by Fawzi al-Qawuqji, and captured Arab villages and neighborhoods which were deemed hostile. They razed these Arab villages to the ground and partly caused the exodus, under British military protection, of the entire Arab population. As a result of these conflicts, Tiberias and Safed, where the population had been mixed, became all-Jewish cities.
Today, Tiberias is Israel's most popular holiday resort in the northern part of the country.
In October 2004, a controversial group of rabbis claiming to represent varied communities in Israel undertook a ceremony in Tiberias, claiming to have established a new Sanhedrin.
Following Hapoel's demise, a new club, Ironi Tiberias, was established, which currently plays in Liga Alef.
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