Nisibis: Frontier on the Road

Twice a year, the Jews of a Mesopotamian frontier town collected the Temple tax - the half-shekel every adult male owed to Jerusalem - and pooled the donations of the wider region with their own. The coins were too valuable, and the road too dangerous, to send in dribs and drabs. So Nisibis became a strongroom. Money for the Temple gathered there, was guarded there, and travelled to Jerusalem in one well-defended convoy. Josephus, who recorded the arrangement in the first century, names two such treasuries on the eastern edge of the Jewish world. Nisibis was one.

That single fact tells you what kind of place this was. Nisibis sat on the great road between empires - the city the Romans and the Parthians, and later the Sasanians, fought over for centuries because whoever held it held the gate. For the Jews who lived there, the frontier was not a problem to be survived but a position to be worked. A community trusted to hold other people's sacred money is a community with standing, with security, and with reach in both directions down the road.

The school that students crossed a border to reach

Nisibis was not only a counting-house. In the second century it held a celebrated academy under Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra, and the academy's reputation was extraordinary for a place so far from the Galilean heartland of the rabbis. The sages applied the verse "that which is altogether just shalt thou follow" to the school itself: follow, they said, Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra to Nisibis. Students crossed from the Land of Israel into Parthian territory to study there. In the geography of Jewish learning, that is a long way to walk for a lesson, and they walked it.

There is a confidence in that arrangement that is easy to miss. The Jewish world did not regard Mesopotamia as exile in the sense of banishment from anywhere worth being. Babylonia and its frontier towns were a second centre of gravity, with their own great teachers and their own claims. Nisibis, perched on the very rim, drew the curious eastward rather than holding them back. A frontier school that the heartland recommends by name is not a backwater. It is a destination.

The town's later fortunes followed the roads that made it. It changed hands between Rome and Persia, fell under Arab rule, and slid down the centuries as the trade routes shifted. Yet Jewish life there proved stubborn. When the traveller Benjamin of Tudela passed through in the twelfth century, he still found a Jewish community of some size, with synagogues that local tradition tied to Ezra the Scribe. Empires came and went over the same crossing. The Jews kept turning up at it.

A community of the crossing

By the third century the picture cooled. Christianity grew strong in Nisibis - it would become a famous Christian theological centre - and relations between the town and the rabbis of the Land of Israel grew more distant. The academy of Judah ben Bathyra belonged to an earlier, warmer moment. But the Jewish presence did not vanish with the academy. It thinned, persisted, and outlasted more than one empire that had assumed it was passing through.

None of this left a single great monument, and that is precisely the point. Nisibis is a community of the road rather than of the ruin. Its importance lies in motion: tax-money carried west, students drawn east, languages and goods and arguments moving through a town that empires kept fighting over. Some Jewish histories are written in stone. This one is written in traffic.