Mamluk Tiberias

Tiberias is conquered  634 CE. It served as the regional capital from 636 CE. But Bet Shean took its place, following the Rashidun conquest.

The Caliphate allowed 70 Jewish families from Tiberias to form the core of a renewed Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the importance of Tiberias to Jewish life declined. The Caliphs of the Umayyad Dynasty built palaces on the waterfront to the north of Tiberias, at Khirbat al-Minya. Tiberias was revitalised in 749, after Bet Shean was destroyed in an earthquake.

The eighth century seen as Tiberias’s golden age. A mosque, 90 metres long by 78 metres wide resembling the Great Mosque of Damascus, was built at foot of Mount Berenice next to a Byzantine church, to the south of the city. The city was one of the most tolerant of the Middle East.

Jewish scholarship flourished from the beginning of the 8th century to the end of the 10th., when the oral traditions of ancient Hebrew were codified. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher  refined the oral law. He also finished the Aleppo Codex, the oldest existing manuscript of the Hebrew scriptures