Haifa חיפה
A town at the foot of Carmel, named in the Talmud: "Rabbi Avdimi of Haifa". The twentieth century made it a port, and the city where Jew and Arab share a street more often than anywhere else in the country.
In the Talmud Haifa is an ordinary place a sage comes from: "Rabbi Avdimi of Haifa" says the words that would be repeated ever after—that with the destruction of the Temple prophecy was taken from the prophets and given to the sages (Bava Batra 12a). Of Jewish Haifa in those centuries little more is known.
The town lies at the foot of Carmel—the mountain where Elijah contended with the prophets of Baal—and in Jewish memory the mountain holds firmer than the town.
Modern Haifa grew in the twentieth century, and grew fast: the railway, and in 5693 a deep-water port that made it the country's chief sea gate and the chief door of the illegal immigration before the war. Here too, from 5672, the Technion was built—the first higher technical school in Hebrew, and the argument over its language of instruction became the argument over whether Hebrew would be a language of science.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Bava Batra 12a — «Rabbi Avdimi of Haifa»: prophecy given to the sages
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the port of 1933, the Technion from 1912
Basis: Talmud and midrash.