The 1660 destruction of Tiberias[1] occurred during the
Druze power struggle in the Galilee, in the same year as the
destruction of Safed. The destruction of
Tiberias by the Druze resulted in abandonment of the city by its Jewish community,[2][3] until it was rebuilt by
Zahir al-Umar in early eighteenth century. Altshuler however attributes the destruction of Tiberias in 1660 to an earthquake.[4] The destruction could have also been a combination of both events.
Tiberias in the sixteenth century
As the
Ottoman Empire expanded along the southern Mediterranean coast under sultan
Selim I, the
Catholic Monarchs began establishing
Inquisition commissions. Many
Conversos, (
Marranos and
Moriscos) and
Sephardi Jews fled to the Ottoman provinces, settling at first in
Constantinople,
Salonika,
Sarajevo,
Sofia and
Anatolia. The Sultan encouraged them to settle in Palestine.[5][6] In 1558, a Portuguese-born
marrano,
Doña Gracia, was granted tax collecting rights in Tiberias and its surrounding villages by
Suleiman the Magnificent. She envisaged the town becoming a refuge for Jews and obtained a permit to establish Jewish autonomy there.[7] In 1561 her nephew
Joseph Nasi, the Sultan-appointed Lord of Tiberias,[8] encouraged Jews to settle in Tiberias.[9] Securing a firman from the Sultan, he and
Joseph ben Adruth rebuilt the city walls and laid the groundwork for a textile (
silk) industry, planting
mulberry trees and urging craftsmen to move there.[9] In 1624, when the Sultan recognized
Fakhr-al-Din II as Lord of Arabistan (from Aleppo to the borders of Egypt),[10] the
Druze leader made Tiberias his capital.
The 1660 destruction
The destruction of
Tiberias by the Druze resulted in the
Jewish community fleeing entirely.[2][3] Unlike
Tiberias, which became desolate for many years, the nearby city of
Safed recovered from its
destruction by Arabs in 1660 relatively quickly,[11] not becoming entirely abandoned,[12] remaining an important Jewish center in the Galilee.
Aftermath
In the 1720s,
Zahir al-Umar a
Bedouin ruler of Ottoman
Galilee, fortified the town of
Tiberias and signed an agreement with the neighboring Bedouin tribes to prevent looting.
Richard Pococke, who visited Tiberias in 1738, witnessed the building of a fort to the north of the city, and the strengthening of the old walls, attributing it to a dispute with the
pasha (ruler) of Damascus.[13] Under Zahir's patronage, Jewish families were encouraged to settle in
Tiberias.[14] He invited
Chaim Abulafia of
Smyrna to rebuild the Jewish community.[15]
^A Descriptive Geography and Brief Historical Sketch of Palestine. P.409. "Sultan Seliman surrounded it with a wall in 5300 (1540), and it commenced to revive a little, and to be inhabited by the most distinguished Jewish literati; but it was destroyed again in 5420 (1660)."
^
abJoel Rappel, History of Eretz Israel from Prehistory up to 1882 (1980), Vol.2, p.531. 'In 1662 Sabbathai Sevi arrived to Jerusalem. It was the time when the Jewish settlements of Galilee were destroyed by the Druze: Tiberias was completely desolate and only a few of former Safed residents had returned..."
^
abBarnay, Y. The Jews in Palestine in the eighteenth century: under the patronage of the Istanbul Committee of Officials for Palestine (University of Alabama Press 1992)
ISBN978-0-8173-0572-7 p. 149
^Altshuler, M. The Messianic secret. Chapter 8:The beginning of redemption in Galilee.
Hebrew: ספר – הסוד המשיחי[1]Archived 2018-03-14 at the
Wayback Machine
^Toby Green (2007) Inquisition; The Reign of Fear Macmillan Press
ISBN978-1-4050-8873-2 pp xv–xix
^Sidney Mendelssohn. The Jews of Asia: especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. (1920) p.241. "Long before the culmination of Sabbathai's mad career, Safed had been destroyed by the Arabs and the Jews had suffered severely, while in the same year (1660) there was a great fire in Constantinople in which they endured heavy losses..."
^Gershom Gerhard Scholem (1976-01-01). Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Princeton University Press. p. 368.
ISBN978-0-691-01809-6. "In Safed, too, the [Sabbatai] movement gathered strength during the autumn of 1665. The reports about the utter destruction, in 1662 [sic], of the Jewish settlement there seem greatly exaggerated, and the conclusions based on them are false. ... Rosanes' account of the destruction of the Safed community is based on a misunderstanding of his sources; the community declined in numbers but continued to exist."