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10 Why Maimonides Is Buried in Tiberias T O L D B Y A S E P H A R D I C N A R R A T O R T O D O V N O Y Before his death, Maimonides left instructions that he was to be buried in EretzYisra’el, the Land of Israel; but he failed to specify where. When he died on foreign ground (in Egypt) all the Jews of that country mourned for him. After seven days, they placed his body in a coffin and took it to the Land of Israel. At the border, the coffin was met by representatives of every community in the Holy Land. When the emissaries learned from the Egyptian Jews that Maimonides had not explicitly stated where he should be laid to rest, they began to quarrel among themselves. All wanted their town to be the final resting place of the Great Tzaddik.* Said Jerusalem: “I am the navel of the world, the once and future site of the Holy Temple. The place for the tzaddik is on the Mount of Olives.” Countered Hebron: “The Patriarchs and Matriarchs sleep their eternal sleep in me. The place for the tzaddik is in the Cave of Machpelah.” Asserted Safed: “What greater man have we had among us, since the last of the Holy Scriptures were committed to writing, than Rabbi Simeon bar Yoh.ai? The place for the tzaddik is alongside his grave, in Meron.” The representatives of Tiberias stood silent and chagrined, for they had nothing to allege against the claims of the other holy cities. Finally, they decided to load the coffin on the back of a camel and let the camel wander where it would. At whatever place the camel first kneeled, that would be the burial site for the holy man, for they would see this as a sign from on high and an indication of Heaven’s decree. Day after day the camel journeyed northward, a vast throng following in its wake, but never once did its knee touch the ground. Only when it reached the outskirts of Tiberias did the camel finally kneel. They buried him in that place, and that is where Maimonides rests to this day. 62 * A person of great piety. COMMENTARY FOR TALE 10 (IFA 549) Recorded by Dov Noy in Jerusalem in 1955 from a Sephardic Jew.1 Cultural, Historical, and Literary Background Maimonides, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, one of the most illustrious figures in Judaism, was a physician, philosopher, and halakhist who is known in Jewish societies by the acronym Rambam. He was born in Cordova, Spain, on March 30, 1135, and died in Cairo, Egypt, on December 13, 1204. The tombstone in Tiberias that is traditionally considered to mark his grave lacks any identifying inscriptions, thus giving room for speculations and legends about the individual who had been laid to rest there. According to a seventeenth-century tradition recorded by the JewishEgyptian chronicler Joseph ben Isaac Sambari (1640–1703), Maimonides was buried in his house of study, “in a synagogue that at present is called the synagogue of the Western [Tunisian] Jews and later was carried to Eretz Yisra’el and buried in Tiberias.” The same source includes an oral anecdote reporting that the people who carried his bones had forgotten one of his toes. Later, a wise man of Egypt appeared in a dream to one of them and revealed where the toe was left. The people retrieved the toe and buried it in Tiberias.2 This tradition survived among Egyptian Jews who, until the twentieth century , identified a small structure next to the ancient synagogue of Maimonides in Cairo as the place where he was buried before his bones were carried to Tiberias. Shtober3 also noted a thirteenth-century Arabic source that cited the tradition of carrying Maimonides’ coffin to Tiberias for burial. The description in Sambari’s text apparently refers to the custom of second burial. During the thirteenth century, there were two rival traditions about Maimonides ’ burial place. Shlomoh ibn Verga4 (mid-fifteenth century to early sixteenth), reported a tradition stating that Maimonides was buried near the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Ibn Verga obtained this information from a chronicle by Yom Tov Sanzolo (late twelfth century to early thirteenth), a rabbi of Spanish origin living in Turkey.5 Samuel ben Samson, a French Jew who emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1211 and then traveled there extensively, described the...

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