The basement of a former strip club in the historic area of Lesser Poland, purchased 15 years ago, has accidentally revealed a historic Jewish site - a mikveh or Jewish ritual purification bath...
One of the most controversial organizations in history, the Spanish Inquisition has been poorly understood by the general public. This period of religious persecution, which took place between 1478...
Ashkenazi Jews, who migrated into Holy Roman Empire territories around the 1st millennium AD, also settled in parts of England but how they were treated is less understood. Now, genome analysis of...
Archaeologists from Israel’s Antiquities Authority have announced an intriguing new discovery . In the city of Beit Shemesh, just 22 kilometers (14 miles) west of Jerusalem in Israel , they unearthed...
Ashkenazi Jews are a Jewish ethnic group who have their earliest ancestors from the indigenous tribes of Israel…at least on one side of the family tree. A study published in 2013 in Nature...
Archaeologists in Almazán Spain are boxed into a corner with a double-edged mystery in which a missing carved stone holds the answer to why eleven bodies were buried beneath a massive medieval...
One of the great mysteries of the New Testament is the Star of Bethlehem and the magi (the three kings or wise men) who “followed” the star to pay their respects to the newborn Jesus . Most...
The name of the Torah has a complicated history. It has been thought to mean a multitude of things including “instruction”, “law”, and “teaching”. The Torah is often misunderstood to represent the...
The gothic horror novel, Frankenstein , is one of the most well-known stories in which man tries to play god by attempting to manufacture a living being. A similar story, that of the golem, exists in...
The fall of Babylon is a historical event that occurred in 539 BC. This event saw the conquest of Babylon by the Achaemenid Empire under Cyrus the Great and marked the end of the Neo-Babylonian...
The people who lived in the area known as the Southern Levant - which is now recognized as Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Syria - during the Bronze Age (circa 3500-...
It is not possible to genetically identify any person living or past as a Jew. Gerald Massey, a Victorian self-taught Egyptologist, researcher and author, explained it thus: “To follow the Jews as...
In Jerusalem, archaeologists have unearthed a very rare find. They have revealed a coin that was issued by Jewish rebels against Roman rule from the 2 nd century AD. It was minted by the last Jewish...
The twelve tribes of ancient Judaism were united into a single kingdom under the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon. The destruction of this kingdom and the forced exile of its population is known as...
The Essenes were a Jewish sect that flourished around the end of the Second Temple Period, i.e. between the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. The main source of information regarding this...
Herod the Great was a Roman client king of Judaea (known also as the Herodian kingdom) who lived during the 1st century BC. He was also the founder of the Herodian dynasty, whose members, like Herod...
Archaeologists working at Mount Zion in Jerusalem have unearthed a rare, gold and silver jewel and a Scythian arrowhead in a layer of ash that dates to the Babylonian destruction of the city (587 BC...
Does a hidden garden hold the encoded secrets of the Kabbalists? Hidden away in a cul-de-sac at the base of the towering medieval walls of Girona, Catalonia, Spain, is a tranquil garden. A statue of...
In the 6th-century BC, the armies of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah. They tore down the city walls, burned the temples, and ran down every person who tried to escape. The few...
Separate archaeological teams working at the vast ancient site of Shiloh city on the West Bank are confident they have made finds consistent with the area being the location of an ancient tabernacle...
An ancient blue dye, known as tekhelet, once adorned the precious robes of kings, priests, and high-ranking Jews. But around two millennia ago, this highly-valued commodity became lost to the pages...
Troglodyte (which means ‘cave dweller’) cave houses are a type of dwelling that may be found in certain parts of the world. In Libya, this unique type of house can be found in the Jabal Nasufah (...
A team of archaeologists from Tel Aviv University have returned to Masada in Israel, after a 11-year hiatus, in order to excavate previously unexplored areas of the desert mountain fortress,...
The Cave of the Patriarchs is a very famous site in the Middle East. Known as Ibrahim Mosque or the Sanctuary of Abraham today, it appears in the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran. Legends tell of a...