| Pumbedita 259 to 5th century CE There had been a Jewish community at Pumbedita, a town on the banks of the Euphrates River, since before the Roman period. In 259 CE, after the armies of Palmyra destroyed the Jewish academy at Nehardea, the scholar Judah bar Ezekiel began a new academy at Pumbedita. For the following century this academy remained the center of Jewish religious learning in Babylonia. Its scholars maintained strong ties with scholars in Tiberias, Palestine. After 352 the academy went into decline and survived in the shadow of the greater academy of Sura. |
| Hiersolyma Jerusalem 326 to 363 CE Helena, the Christian mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, traveled to Jerusalem in 326. The city was claimed as a Christian holy place, and Helena ordered the destruction of a temple which earlier Romans had built to Venus. Constantine ordered that a church be built where Jesus' crucifixion and burial were said to have taken place. Jerusalem soon became an important destination for Christian pilgrims. Jews were officially permitted into the city only on the 9th of Av, a day of lamentation for the destruction of the Temple. The Emperor Julian (360-363), a pagan who favored Judaism, promised to rebuild the Jewish Temple. Construction was even begun, but Julian's death put a stop to the work. |
| Sura 219 to 5th century CE The town of Sura was situated near a fork in the river Euphrates, in the midst of a rich agricultural region. In 219 Rav founded a Jewish academy here that became one of the two most influential academies of Babylonia. The other leading academy, at Nehardea, was probably founded in the same year. Many Jews of the region were engaged in agriculture and some of the scholars at the academy were also farmers. The commentaries of the scholars at Sura and other academies were ultimately collected into the Babylonian Talmud. The Sura academy was the principal academy of Babylonia during the first century of its existence. It rose again to preeminence under Rav Ashi (367-427) and declined after his death. |
| Madina Yathrib 300 to 632 CE The oasis of Yathrib had been settled by Arab Jewish tribes as early as the Roman period. In the early centuries of the Common Era its population was primarily Jewish. Over the centuries, pagan Arab tribes had immigrated to Yathrib and settled here as subjects of the Jewish tribes. By the 6th century, however, the pagan tribes had become more powerful politically than their Jewish counterparts. By the beginning of the 7th century the Jewish population of Yathrib numbered between 8,000 and 10,000. Muhammad came to Yathrib from Mecca in 622 to arbitrate a dispute among its local tribes. He gained leadership over the tribes and brought them together as followers of his religious teachings. When two Jewish tribes objected to his rule, he expelled them from the city (624, 626). He massacred the men of a third Jewish tribe in 627 and sold their women and children into slavery. Yathrib became the base from which Muhammad waged war against Mecca until the tribes of Mecca sued for peace and accepted him as their spiritual and political leader. |
| Mecca 500 to 632 CE From the end of the 5th century the town of Mecca had been developing as a settlement of the Arab Quraysh tribe, a way station along the overland trade route on the west coast of Arabia. It was also the site of a shrine to Allah, a god who oversaw covenants made between the nomadic Bedouin Arab tribes, who were often at war with one another. A market town and trading center, Mecca received Jewish and Christian merchants, as well some who loosely followed Jewish ways but did not adhere to orthodoxy. In about 610, a Meccan merchant named Muhammad began to have visions and to preach a new religion. His efforts to reform Meccan society met with hostility, and, in 622, he withdrew with his followers to Yathrib (Madina). Over the next eight years Meccan forces clashed with the forces of Muhammad until finally, in 628, a truce was declared. The leaders of Mecca finally accepted Muhammad's religious teachings in 630 and agreed to follow his authority. |
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