Galilee

• 1. Introduction

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  Galilee is a region in northern Israel and southern Lebanon that has been inhabited, fought over, and renamed for more than three thousand years. Its name appears in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions from the 15th century BC, when scribes recorded the military campaigns of Tuthmosis III against the Canaanite kings who ruled there. What the hieroglyphs meant exactly is still debated: the signs can be read as GLL, or interpreted through an Akkadian root meaning "to roll." The Hebrew word for the region, Galil, simply means "district" or "circle." The Arabic name, Al-Jalil, means "illustrious" or "grand." A single place, many languages, each word a small clue to who was in charge at the time. What makes Galilee worth understanding is not just what it is today, but how it became that way: through Assyrian deportations, Hasmonean conquest, Roman administration, Jewish scholarship, Christian pilgrimage, Arab migration, Ottoman reorganization, and modern military conflict. Every layer of that history is still physically present in the landscape.

• 2. The Land Itself

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  Mount Meron anchors the upper part of the region and receives rainfall in the range of 900 to 1,200 millimeters a year. That rainfall feeds a landscape unusual for this part of the world: prickly juniper, Lebanese cedar growing in a small grove on Meron's slopes, cyclamen, paeonia, and Rhododendron ponticum. Birds migrate annually through the Hula-Jordan corridor between Africa and colder climates, and streams and waterfalls are concentrated in the Upper Galilee. The lower terrain around the Sea of Galilee supported a very different kind of economy. Towns near the lake processed salted, dried, and pickled fish for export, with Tarichaea (also called Magdala) as a noted center for that trade. Inland, the village of Shihin, near Sepphoris, supplied most of the region's storage jars, while Kefar Hananya in the Upper Galilee manufactured tableware that reached markets as far as the Golan Heights, the Decapolis, and the Beth Shean Valley. The geography divided Galilee into distinct economic zones long before modern administrative lines were drawn.

• 3. Assyrians, Hasmoneans, and the Question of Who Lived Here

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  Archaeological survey by Zvi Gal in Lower Galilee indicates the area went largely deserted after the Assyrian conquest in the 8th century BC, with the local Israelite population deported to Assyria after 732 BCE. Yardenna Alexandre found traces of minor, short-lived Israelite settlements in the Nahal Zippori basin, built by survivors of that conquest. Elsewhere, the land emptied out, though artefacts found at Cana point to an Assyrian presence. The Hasmonean king Aristobulus I began annexing Galilee during his reign of 104-103 BCE, and a significant wave of Jewish settlement followed. Sites including Yodfat, Meiron, Sepphoris, Migdal, and Arbel all show archaeological evidence of settlement from that period. Josephus, drawing on the account of Timagenes of Alexandria, claimed Aristobulus had forcibly converted the Iturean population to Judaism. Schurer accepted this account and argued that the Jewish Galilee of Jesus's day was populated by the offspring of those Iturean converts. Other scholars have proposed voluntary conversion, at least in the Eastern Upper Galilee. But archaeological evidence has not supported either position. Iturean material culture appears clearly in the northern Golan Heights and on Mount Hermon, not in the Galilee, placing that territory outside Hasmonean borders during the relevant period.

• 4. Herod Antipas and the Making of Roman Galilee

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  After the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, the Roman emperor Augustus appointed his son Herod Antipas as tetrarch of Galilee. Antipas paid tribute to Rome in exchange for protection and was permitted to govern as he chose, even minting his own coins, which bore only agricultural designs that his Jewish subjects found acceptable. He rebuilt the city of Sepphoris, which a rebel named Judah had plundered in 4 BCE, and founded the new city of Tiberias in either 18 CE or 19 CE. Both cities became Galilee's major cultural centers, predominantly Jewish but shaped by Greco-Roman influence. Josephus records no instance of Antipas using force to suppress an uprising during his long reign, though many Jews likely resented him as not sufficiently devout. His marriage late in his reign to his half-niece Herodias, who was already married to another uncle, brought serious consequences. According to both Josephus and the Gospel of Mark, the itinerant preacher John the Baptist publicly criticized Antipas over the marriage, and Antipas had him imprisoned and then beheaded. In around 39 CE, at Herodias's urging, Antipas traveled to Rome to seek elevation from tetrarch to king. The Romans charged him with storing arms, stripped him of power, and sent him into exile, ending a reign of forty-three years. A Jewish mob later destroyed his palace during the Great Revolt of 66-73 CE.

• 5. Scholarship and Demographic Shift

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  Judah ha-Nasi's redaction of the Mishnah in the late second and early third century CE marked what rabbinic sources describe as the political and cultural peak of Jewish life in Galilee. Academic research on the Jerusalem Talmud, the principal work of the amoraim in Palestine, places most of its editing in Tiberias; the majority of the sages named in it, and most of the settlements referenced, were Galilean. Talmudic scholar Yaacov Sussmann described the halt to the Jerusalem Talmud's compilation as happening "as if severed by a sharp and sudden blade." The stoppage coincided with broader demographic change. In approximately 320 CE, Christian bishop Epiphanius reported that the major cities and villages of Galilee were entirely Jewish at that point. Within a century or two, that had changed: Jewish sites were abandoned, Christian villages appeared on or near deserted locations, and settlements including Rama, Magdala, Kafr Kanna, Daburiyya, and Iksal shifted from Jewish to Christian or mixed populations. According to Shimon bar Yochai legend in medieval Hebrew sources, that most famous of tannaim wrote the Zohar while living in Galilee, a tradition that reinforced the region's weight in Jewish mystical memory. Eastern Galilee retained a Jewish majority until at least the 7th century, when raids by nomadic groups and inadequate central protection accelerated depopulation there as well.

• 6. Safed, the Ottomans, and the Spanish Expulsion

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  Jewish immigrants driven out of Spain in 1492 arrived in waves into the Galilee, particularly in Safed and its surroundings. These arrivals included scholars and urban elites who transformed what had been a rural Jewish community into an urban center whose influence extended well beyond the Upper Galilee. Safed became an international center of cloth weaving and manufacturing, as well as a key site for Jewish learning. Today it remains one of Judaism's four holy cities and a center for kabbalah. The Ottoman administrative framework shifted several times over the region. During the Early Ottoman era, Galilee was governed as the Safad Sanjak, initially part of Damascus Eyalet from 1549 to 1660, then part of Sidon Eyalet from 1660 to 1864. In the 18th century it was renamed Acre Sanjak. The Arab leader Daher al-Umar ruled Galilee for 25 years before the Ottoman loyalist Jezzar Pasha retook the region in 1775. In 1831, Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt took control of the territory until 1840, a period that saw the violent 1834 Arab revolt and the Safed Plunder that greatly reduced the Jewish community there. Major earthquakes in 1834 and 1837 leveled most of the region's towns. In 1866, Galilee's first hospital, the Nazareth Hospital, was founded under the leadership of American-Armenian missionary Dr. Kaloost Vartan, assisted by German missionary John Zeller.

• 7. Modern Galilee

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  After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, nearly the entire Galilee came under Israeli control. Large portions of the population fled or were expelled, leaving dozens of villages empty, though a substantial Israeli Arab community remained in and near cities including Nazareth, Acre, Tamra, Sakhnin, and Shefa-'Amr. In 2006, the region held 1.2 million residents, of whom 47% were Jewish. The eastern Galilee is nearly entirely Jewish and contains two of Judaism's four holy cities, Safed and Tiberias. The central Galilee, surrounding cities like Nazareth and Sakhnin, has an Arab majority of 75%. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Palestine Liberation Organization launched attacks on Upper and Western Galilee from Lebanon. Israel launched Operation Litani in 1979 and Operation Peace for Galilee in 1982, both citing the protection of Galilee citizens as an objective. In May 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli troops from southern Lebanon. Despite that withdrawal, Hezbollah continued launching Katyusha rockets at Upper Galilee communities. The 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict brought round-the-clock rocket fire across the whole of Galilee, with long-range missiles reaching as far south as the Jezreel Valley and the Jordan Valley below the Sea of Galilee. As of 2011, the region was attracting significant internal migration of Haredi Jews moving there partly in response to rising housing prices in central Israel, adding yet another demographic layer to one of the most repeatedly resettled landscapes in the world.

• 8. Pilgrimage and the Living Table

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  In April 2011, Israel unveiled the Jesus Trail, a 40-mile (60-km) hiking trail designed for Christian pilgrims that links sites connected to the life of Jesus and his disciples. The trail includes Tabgha, the traditional site of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the Mount of Beatitudes, where tradition places the Sermon on the Mount, ending at Capernaum on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. An older trail, the yam leyam (Hebrew for "sea-to-sea"), takes hikers from the Mediterranean coast through the Galilee mountains toward Meron and then down to the Kinneret. The cuisine of the region is as layered as its history. Safed cheese, originating in the mountains of the Upper Galilee, is a regional specialty. Tilapia from the Sea of Galilee, Jordan River, and surrounding streams is baked with celery, mint, and lemon juice, or topped with tahini in Tiberias, while coastal communities substitute yogurt and add sumac. Galilean kubba is flavored with cumin, cinnamon, cardamom, concentrated pomegranate juice, onion, parsley, and pine nuts and served as meze with tahini dip. The Karmiel Dance Festival, the Acre Festival of Alternative Theater, and an olive harvest festival are among the annual events that draw visitors from across Israel and abroad. The Israeli government is co-funding the Galilee Finance Facility, organized by the Milken Institute and Koret Economic Development Fund, to bring industrial parks and employment to a population that still depends heavily on agriculture and tourism.