Necropolis of Bet Shearim

After the destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews were forbidden from Jerusalem. Rabbi Judah compiled the Mishnah in the Galilee, and when he died, the site became the primary Jewish burial place.

The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE shattered the center of Jewish life. The Bar Kokhba revolt (132-135 CE) and its failure made things worse: Jews were forbidden from Jerusalem entirely. The question of how Judaism could survive without its Temple, without its city, without its sacred geography required an answer. Rabbi Judah the Patriarch provided one. As head of the Sanhedrin (the Jewish supreme council) and leader of the Jewish community in the Galilee, he gathered the oral laws that had accumulated over centuries and compiled them into the Mishnah—a text that could travel, that could be studied anywhere, that did not require access to destroyed buildings. He was wealthy and politically astute, reportedly on friendly terms with Emperor Marcus Aurelius. When he died in 217 CE in Sepphoris, he was buried at Bet She'arim. His burial made the site sacred. Jews from across the diaspora—from places whose names survive in the inscriptions—sent their dead to be buried near the compiler of their law. The catacombs filled over centuries with the diaspora's dead, gathered around a single grave.