Yavne

Salvage excavations carried out in 2001 by the Israel Antiquities Authority uncovered several burials at the northern foot of the original tell. Most of the burials are dated to the later Iron Age. One burial points to a late Bronze Age occupation.

A large Philistine favissa (deposit of cultic artifacts) was discovered on Temple Hill.[3] Two excavation seasons in the 2000s led by Professor Dan Bahat revealed some Iron Age remains. Pottery sherds of the Iron Age and Persian period were discovered at the surface of the tell.[5]

The ancient harbour of Jabneh has been identified on the coast at Minet Rubin (Arabic) or Yavne-Yam (Hebrew), where excavations have revealed fortification going back to the Bronze Age Hyksos.[5] It was in use from the Middle Bronze Age until the 12th century CE, when it was abandoned.[6] 2 Maccabees 12:8–9 refers to the burning of the harbour and its fleet on the direction of Judas Maccabeus.

In Roman times, the city was known as Iamnia, also spelled Jamnia. It was bequeathed by King Herod upon his death to his sister Salome. Upon her death it passed to Emperor Augustus, who managed it as a private imperial estate, a status it was to maintain for at least a century.[7] After Salome's death, Iamnia came into the property of Livia, the future Roman empress, and then to her son Tiberius.[8]

During the First Jewish-Roman War, when the Roman army had quelled the insurrection in Galilee, the army then marched upon Iamnia and Azotus, taking both towns and stationing garrisons within them.[9] According to rabbinic tradition, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and his disciples were permitted to settle in Iamnia during the outbreak of the war, after Zakkai, realizing that Jerusalem was about to fall, sneaked out of the city and asked Vespasian, the commander of the besieging Roman forces, for the right to settle in Yavne and teach his disciples.[10][11] Upon the fall of Jerusalem, his school functioned as a re-establishment of the Sanhedrin.[12]

Mamluk minaret, Yavne

When disputes were rampant in Israel regarding basic halakhic norms, it was in Yavne, according to the Jerusalem Talmud (Berakhot 1:4), that a Divine voice (Hebrew: bat ḳol) was heard declaring that, while both schools of thought espoused to the words of the Living God, the Halacha, in practical matters, is in accordance with the School of Hillel. To counter a perceived threat to the emerging rabbinical authority posed by heterogeneous groups of Jews who embraced ideas that were thought to be unacceptable by the assembly, Talmudic tradition has it that it was in Yavne where Samuel the Less, during the days of Rabban Gamliel II, enacted the " twelfth benediction " in the daily prayer, known as the benediction against apostates and heretics (Hebrew: minim).[13]

Byzantine period finds from excavations include an aqueduct east of the tell, and a kiln.[14][15]

The Islamic historian al-Baladhuri (died 892 CE) mentioned Yibna as one of ten towns in Jund Filastin conquered by the Rashidun army led by 'Amr ibn al-'As in the early 7th century.[16]

In 2007, remains ranging from the Early Islamic period until the British Mandate period were uncovered.[17] An additional kiln, and part of a commercial/industrial area were uncovered at the west of the tell in 2009.[18]

The Crusaders called the city Ibelin and built a castle there in 1141. Two excavation seasons led by Professor Dan Bahat starting in 2005 revealed the main gate. Its namesake noble family, the House of Ibelin, was important in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and later in the Kingdom of Cyprus. Salvage excavations at the west of the tell unearthed a stash of 53 Crusader coins of the 12th and 13th centuries.[18]

Benjamin of Tudela (1130–1173) identified Jamnia (Jabneh) of classical writers with the Ibelin of the Crusades. He places the ancient city of Jamnia at three parasangs from Jaffa and two from Ashdod (Azotus).[19]

Ibelin was first sacked by Saladin before his army was comprehensively routed at the Battle of Montgisard in late 1177. In August 1187, Yavne was retaken and burnt to the ground, and ceased for some time to form part of the Crusaders' kingdom.[20]

Ibelin's parish church was transformed into a mosque, to which a minaret was added during the Mamluk period in 1337. The minaret survives until today, while the mosque (the former Crusader church) was blown up by the IDF in 1950.[3][21]

Maqam Abu Hurayra, described as "one of the finest domed mausoleums in Palestine", is located in Yavne. Since the 12th century, it has been known as a tomb of Abu Hurairah, a companion (sahaba) of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.[22][23] Abu Hurairah is buried in Medina, Saudi Arabia however he was also venerated in various places in Palestine in Ramle and also in Yavne.[24] After 1948 the shrine has been adopted by Jews who came primarily from Arab countries and believe that the tomb is the burial place of Rabbi Gamaliel of Yavne.[22][23] The Jewish claimants to the site say that it was originally a Jewish sacred burial place and was Islamized later, but there is no record of Jewish pilgrimage there in the decades before 1948.[25]

For the Arab village of Yibna during the Ottoman and Mandate periods (to 1948), see Yibna. In mid-March 1948, a contingent of Iraqi soldiers moved into the village. In a Haganah reprisal on 30 March, two dozen villagers were killed. On April 21, the Iraqi village commander was arrested in Jaffa for drunkenly shooting two Arabs.[26]

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  Yavne 1945
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  Yibna 1945

City of Yavne

Yavne water park

During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, residents of Zarnuqa sought refuge in Yibna, but left after the villagers accused them of being traitors.[27]

On 27 May, following the fall of Al-Qubayba and Zarnuqa, most of the population of Yibna fled to Isdud, but armed males were refused entry. On 5 June, when Israeli troops arrived, they found the village almost deserted apart from a few old people who were ordered to leave.[27]

After 1948, a number of Israeli villages were founded on Yibna land: Kfar HaNagid and Beit Gamliel in 1949, Ben Zakai in 1950, Kfar Aviv (originally: "Kfar HaYeor") in 1951, Tzofiyya in 1955.[28] According to Walid Khalidi, a railroad crosses the village. The old mosque and minaret, together with a shrine can still be seen, and some of the old houses are inhabited by Jewish and Arab families.

Yavne was established in October 1948 as a transition camp for Jews from Arab countries, Iran and Europe. The first built neighbourhood was established in early 1949. In the early years, Yavne was a poor town, with the inhabitants subsisting on small trade, as farm and industry laborers, and on agriculture in their yards. The town had a population of 1,600 in 1953. The town gradually developed. In the 1960s, several enterprises moved from Tel Aviv to Yavne, and industries in the city came to include leather, textiles, and metallurgy. The population had grown to 10,100 in 1970. Yavne was a stagnant backwater city until the mid-1970s, when Mayor Meir Shitrit, who assumed office in 1974, began to develop the city as a low-density suburban satellite of Tel Aviv by building homes targeted at middle class families who could commute to Tel Aviv while living in Yavne and improving the school system. Yavne rapidly developed as a result and was granted city status in 1986. By the mid-1990s, the population had risen to 25,600.[29]