Whose Wine Was the Holy Land's?

Welcome to the Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers, If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Imagine for a moment that you're standing in a dusty field south of Tel Aviv. It's an ordinary morning in an ordinary Israeli town called Yavneh. There's a soccer pitch behind you, apartment cranes on the horizon. Bulldozers are waiting because this field is about to become another neighborhood with another school and another falafel shop on the corner. But the bulldozers can't move yet because in Israel, before you build the future, the law says you must first check For the past. And so a team of archaeologists begins to dig. And what comes out of that dusty field stops them cold. 5 enormous wine presses, treading floors the size of living rooms, warehouses, kilns, tens of thousands of clay wine jars. Some intact, their clay stoppers still in place. An entire industrial city of wine sleeping under the soccer field for 1,500 years. And when the numbers come in, they were almost unbelievable. This single complex produced 2 to 3 million liters of wine Every single year. That's the output of a large, modern Israeli winery, achieved by sandaled feet and gravity in the 5th century. The archaeologists called it the largest wine production center of the entire ancient world. Now here's where it gets interesting. When the reporters asked the obvious question, who owned it? The archaeologists gave an honest answer. They said, we don't know. But the headlines didn't say, we don't know. The story that spread was a story about a Christian city, a Christian empire, and a Christian wine bottled in the Holy Land and shipped to the world. And somewhere in that telling, a question got buried deeper than the wine presses themselves. Where are the Jews? Because think about it. This is the land of their Mishnah. Yavneh. Yavneh, the city where Rabban Yochanan ben Zakai rebuilt Jewish life from the ashes of Jerusalem. The city where the Sages sat. Our sources tell us in a vineyard. And every Shabbat, in every Jewish home in this land, someone lifted a cup of wine and said Kiddush. Every wedding, every brit, every festival, every Seder— 4 cups for every single person at the table. A Jewish world without wine is a halachic impossibility. So who was making it? And is it possible, just possible, that some of the most celebrated wine of the ancient world, the wine praised in Gaul and poured in Constantinople, came off Jewish treading floors? Today, here on the kosher terroir, a construction site, a mystery, a synagogue by the sea with a floor made of stones and starlight, And the question that no one thought to ask. I'm Simon Jacob. Pour yourself a glass, and let's dig. Let's go back to that field, and let me tell you how this actually happened, because the discovery itself is a very Israeli story. In Israel, archaeology isn't a hobby. It's a law. Before any major construction project breaks ground, the Israeli Antiquities Authority conducts what it calls a salvage excavation— a rescue dig. The idea is simple, and when you think about it, rather beautiful. In this land, you cannot simply pour a foundation without first asking the ground what it remembers. Most of the time, the ground remembers small things: a cistern, some pottery, a wall. In Yavneh, starting in 2019, the ground remembered an empire. The Israeli Lands Authority was preparing an enormous tract for new housing. Yavneh is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. So the IAA sent a team. Led by 3 archaeologists: Eli Haddad, Liat Nedav-Ziv, and Dr. John Seligman. They expected a big dig. They did not expect what they found. For 2 years, the excavation kept growing. First one winepress, then another, then another, until they had uncovered 5 of them, Spread across a square kilometer. And when I say winepress, I don't want you to picture a little rock-cut basin you've seen on a hike in the Judean Hills, the kind where a family trod on its own harvest. No, each of these was a factory. Picture it with me: a treading floor, plastered and gleaming, big enough to park several cars. Where workers crushed the grapes under their bare feet, hour after hour, in the Mediterranean heat. From that floor, the juice ran down into fermentation compartments, and from there into vast collection vats. Hexagonal ones, elegantly cut, each holding tens of thousands of liters. And around the rims, the excavators found something that made them stop. Decorations— carved conch shells ornamenting the presses. Someone hadn't just built an industrial facility. Someone wealthy had built a showpiece, a winery that was meant to be seen, meant to impress. 1,500 years before wine tourism, somebody in Yavneh understood branding. Between the presses stood 4 large warehouses, where the wine aged in long, slender clay amphorae. And here's the detail I love: they didn't ship the jars in; they made them right there. The team found the kilns. An on-site pottery works firing the amphorae by the thousands. Vertical integration, 5th-century style. From vineyard to press to jar to warehouse, all in one compound. And the jars themselves? The archaeologists collected tens of thousands of fragments, but some amphorae came out of the earth whole. Intact, slender clay vessels that once held the finest, White wine of the age, a few of them remarkably with their clay stoppers found in place, sealed by hands that have been dust for a millennium and a half. When the team ran the numbers on the facility's capacity, the estimate came out at two to three million liters of wine per year. Eli Haddad. Stood in the middle of it all and told reporters simply, the proportions here are incredible. And one thing more, because the ground wasn't finished talking. Digging deeper, the team found another winepress— older, much older— 2,300 years old, from the Persian period, the era of Ezra and Nehemiah. Which means wine had been made on this ground for 800 years before the great Byzantine factory was ever built. Yavna wasn't a place where a winery simply happened to land. Yavna was wine country and had been layer under layer for most of recorded history. So now we have our facility. The largest of the ancient world. Beautiful, wealthy, sophisticated, and astonishingly productive. Which raises the next question: 2 to 3 million liters a year is far, far more than any city drinks. Where was all that wine going? For the answer to that, I need to tell you about the most famous wine You've never heard of. In the wine world today, we take something for granted: that a place name on a label means something. Champagne, Barolo, Chablis. Say the words, and a wine appears in your mind—a style, a quality, and a place. We think of that. as a modern invention— the French appellation system, 1935. But it isn't modern at all, because 1,500 years ago, from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, there was a place name that did exactly that. You could say it in Constantinople, in Alexandria, in Rome, and even in places as far away as Gaul. And everyone knew precisely what you meant. Vinum Gazetum, Gaza wine. Sometimes they called it Ashkelon wine. Same product, sister port. And here's the thing every wine lover will appreciate: it wasn't named for where the grapes grew. The vineyards sprawling across the whole southern country. The coastal plain, the Judean foothills, and astonishingly deep into the Negev Desert. No, it was named for the harbors it shipped from. Gaza and Ashkelon weren't the vineyards; they were the label, the brand. This made the first great appellation in the history of wine, and it belonged. You might ask, what was it like in the glass? The sources describe a white wine, light, sweet, and prized. In an age when most wine was rough, young, and watered down for safety, Gaza wine was the luxury pour, the special occasion bottle. And people paid for it everywhere. Archaeologists identify the trade by its packaging, a distinctive elongated cigar-shaped clay amphora that scholars call the Gaza jar. And those jars turned up in an almost unbelievable spread of places: Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Carthage in North Africa, Spain, southern France, and I want you to hear this one clearly, as far away as Britain. 1,500 years before Carmel opened its first London office, wine from the Holy Land was already landing on British shores. The literary record backs up the archaeology. Roman and Byzantine writers praised Gaza wine By name. There's a wonderful story told by Gregory of Tours in 6th century France about a pious widow of Lyon who honored her late husband by donating wine for the daily Mass at his grave. And not just any wine— Gaza wine, the best money could buy— until Gregory tells us a scoundrel of a subdeacon began drinking the good Gaza wine himself and pouring cheap vinegary swill for the church. Even the wine fraud stories— 1,600 years old! Some things in this industry, my friends, never change. So, what powered this boom? In a word, pilgrims. From the 4th century on, once the Empire became Christian, The Holy Land became the destination of the age. Monasteries multiplied. Pilgrims came by ship by the thousands to walk where the Bible happened. And when they sailed home, the ships that carried them carried something else in the hold: the wine of the holy places. Drink this and you drink the land itself. It was Terroir as theology. Marketing genius, honestly. The Holy Land brand, working as hard then as it does now. And behind the brand stood an industrial network that staggered the imagination. Down in the Negev Highlands, the desert where it barely rains, the towns of Shivta, Alusa, And Avdat engineered runoff agriculture, catching flash flood waters on an estimated 100,000 terraces to grow grapes in the wilderness, wine from the desert of Avram Avinu, shipped to the dinner tables of Gaul. And on the coastal plain, at the crossroads of the Great Sea Highway and the Sorik River, Perfectly positioned between vineyard and harbor sat the biggest production node of them all: Yavneh, our winery. One more image before we move on. Those slender Gaza jars dug up in Yavneh. Identical jars were documented and displayed in Gaza City's own museum collections. Cataloged there in the years before the current war, a reminder that long before Gaza meant what it means in today's headlines, its harbor, a port called Mayumas, was one of the great wine ports of the world. Hold on to that name, Mayumas. We're going back there later in this episode. And what was found there may change how you hear this entire story. But first, let's talk about what the archaeologists said about all this, and more importantly, what they didn't say. Now, I want to be very careful in this section, because it would be easy— and it would be lazy— to set up the archaeologists as the villains of this story. They're not. In fact, when you go back and read what the excavation team actually said in October 2021, you find something admirable: restraint. So, let's be precise. Here is what the archaeologists and the Israeli Antiquities Authority told the world. They said the winery dates from around the year 500. The Byzantine period. They said the wealth on display, those carved conch shells, the sheer polish of the place, points to rich and powerful owners. They said that Byzantine Yavneh was, in Dr. John Seligman's words, first and foremost a Christian town. And that's true. By the year 500, Yavneh had a bishop. It appeared on the famous Madaba mosaic map with churches. The empire itself was Christian, and the region's cities were Christian majority, and the wine's biggest customers were churches and pilgrims across the Christian Mediterranean. But Seligman said something else in the very same breath, and this is the part that tends to fall Out of the retellings, he said that Jews and Samaritans lived in Yavneh during the same period, and the team went further. They themselves brought up the Mishnah. They pointed out that after the Churban, the destruction of Jerusalem, the sages relocated to Yavneh, and that our sources describe the Chachamim of Yavneh sitting bekarim. In a vineyard, they connected their own Persian period wine press to a continuous wine tradition on that ground stretching back centuries before Byzantium. These are not people ignorant of Jewish history. This is the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Karen Bayavna reference came from them unprompted. And on the question everyone wanted answered— who owned it?— they gave the only honest answer available: we don't know. We don't know. Sit with that phrase, because everything that happens next is a case study in how we don't know turns into we know. Here's the problem: archaeology Identifies the owners of the winepress from context. Find a press inside a monastery, it's Christian. Find a press in a Galilean village with a synagogue, it's Jewish. But this press, an industrial complex on the edge of a large, mixed, cosmopolitan city, the excavators found no inscription. No church on the premises, no cross, no menorah, no mikveh, no name. The winepress, carved into stone and plaster, has no religion. All they could offer was demographic probability. It was a majority Christian town, so statistically you leaned towards Christianity. But watch what happens as the story traveled. The IAA said, operator unknown, Christian-majority town. The world's headlines compressed that to massive Byzantine winery. And Byzantine in a headline reads Christian. Then came the commentary. One Orthodox news outlet added its own gloss, and I quote, Based on the date and location, it probably was not kosher. That line did not come from the archaeologists; it came from the echo chamber. And by the end of the news cycle, the largest winery ever found in the land of the Mishnah, in Yavneh, of all cities on earth, had been quietly filed away under someone else's history. Each individual step was defensible. The sum of the steps was not. The excavators were careful. The echo chamber was not. And here's what troubles me— what should trouble any of us who live inside a world of halacha: every retelling of the story treated wine in Byzantine Palestine as a Christian commodity, with Jews as, at most, spectators. But that picture cannot be right, not because of anything buried in the ground, but because what we know was happening every Friday night, in every Jewish home, in every Jewish village in Eretz Yisrael. Because There was one thing a historian can say with more confidence than almost any claim archaeologists will ever produce: wherever there were Jews, there was wine. And in the next few minutes, I want to show you that the proof isn't in the stones at all. The proof is in the halacha. So, let me ask you a question that sounds simple. Could a Jewish community in the year 500 anywhere on earth, but certainly in Eretz Yisrael, exist without wine? Walk through the week with me. Friday night arrives, Kiddush on wine. Shabbat day, Kiddush on wine. Shabbat goes out, Havdalah on wine. A baby boy is born at his bris. A cup of wine. A couple stands under a chuppah. Wine for the Birkat Roushin, and wine for the Sheva Brachot. And then 7 more days of Sheva Brachot, usually, each with its own cup of wine. Wine with festivals. Wine at benching after festive meals. And once a year, Pesach. Not just one cup, but four, arba kosot, for not just the head of the household, but for every single person at the Seder. The Mishnah says that even the poorest Jew in Israel must have four cups, and if he cannot afford them, the community's tzedakah fund must provide them. Think about that a minute. Wine in Jewish life. Is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. A Jewish community without wine is like a Jewish community without a mikvah. It's not a community with something missing. It's a contradiction in terms. Now, in the Byzantine period, the Land of Israel held a large Jewish population. This is the great age of the Galil. Tiberias, and the villages of the Golan. It is precisely the era of the synagogue-building boom. Capernaum, Bahram, Chorazin, dozens more with their carved lintels and mosaic floors. Real communities, substantial, organized, often prosperous. Every one of them making kiddush. Every Friday night. So where did their wine come from? Not from their Christian neighbors. And this is where halacha stops being background and becomes evidence, because Hazal built an entire legal architecture around exactly this question: yayin nesach—wine for adulterous libation. Forbidden at the highest level, and beyond it, the broader decree of Stam Yaynam, ordinary wine of a non-Jew, forbidden to drink even with no libation in sight, a rabbinic fence guarding against the closeness that leads to intermarriage. These laws were ancient already in the year 500. They fill Mesechet of Odazara with case after case. What if a Gentile worker touches the wine in the press? What if a Jew and a Gentile own a press together? What may be sold? What may be handled? What is lost? Now ask yourself the lawyer's question: Who legislates like that? You do not build an elaborate wall of law around the commodity your community doesn't produce. Nobody writes detailed regulations for the hypothetical. The very existence of Stam Yehinam, the sheer granularity of those press floor cases, is testimony that Jews were growing, treading, Fermenting, storing, and selling wine in quantity as a living industry. The halacha is the fossil record. And there's more. The Talmud Yerushalmi compiled in Teveria, in this very land, in the generations leading right into our period. And the Yerushalmi is soaked in wine. The agricultural, Mitzvot that apply only to Eretz Yisrael. Orlah, the first 3 years of the vine. Klayim, in the vineyard. Tshumot and masrot, from the vintage. Shmitah, for the vines. These are not laws for wine buyers. These are laws for wine growers. You only tithe the harvest. That you harvest. An entire halakhic literature of vineyard-owning Jews, written in the Galilee, in exactly the centuries when the export boom was roaring just a few days' ride to the south. So, here is the thesis of this episode, and I want to be very careful, because I haven't seen anyone else frame it this way. The halakhic wall around wine ran in only one direction. A Jew could not drink the wine from a Christian neighbor. But a Christian neighbor had no objection whatsoever— none— to drinking wine made by a Jew. No church law barred it. Which means that in the great wine economy of Byzantine Palestine, Jewish producers faced no religious barriers to selling, only to buying. Jewish wine could flow outward into the export stream, into the amphorae, into the ships, and into the cellars of Gaul, and nothing about the product would ever announce its maker. Because here's the final piece: a Gaza jar carries no hashgacha. Vinum Gazetum was a geographic brand, not a confessional one. Wine of the Holy Land told the buyer where it came from, never whose hands pressed it. Is it possible then that some of the most celebrated wine of the ancient world came off Jewish treading floors? Halachically, economically, demographically. Not only possible, it would be strange if it hadn't. But I promised you more of an argument, and I promised you evidence. So come with me now, down the coast from Yavneh, to that harbor whose name I asked you to remember. Mayumas, the port of Gaza, where in 1965, under an Egyptian administration, workmen struck a floor made of stone and starlight. The Six-Day War is still 2 years away. In the Rimel district, near the shoreline, workmen are digging. And the earth gives up a floor, a mosaic floor, enormous, richly colored— reds, golds, greens— laid by a master's hand. The Egyptian authorities take a look at this magnificent Byzantine pavement, note the robed figure with a harp at its center, and reach the obvious conclusion: They've found the remains of an ancient church. It was a reasonable guess. It was also wrong, because when scholars looked closely at the central figure, a crowned king sitting playing a lyre, wild animals gathered peacefully around him to listen, they found floating inside his halo letters. Not Greek letters, Hebrew letters. Dalet, Vav, Dalet. David, David. David HaMelech, King David. The sweet singer of Israel, crowned and playing for the animals. A Jewish king rendered in the artistic language of the age, the way a Jewish patron Who was fully at home in that cosmopolitan world, would have commissioned him. This was no church; this was a synagogue, and not a modest one. Roughly 26 meters by 30, five aisles. For comparison, that's in the range of a grand synagogue of the Galilee, one of the largest ancient synagogues ever found in Eretz Israel. And now, location, location, location. Where was this synagogue standing? Not in Gaza's inland city, but in the port, in Mai Yumas, the harbor district, the very docks from which Vinum Gazitum, the most famous wine of the age, was loading onto ships bound for Egypt and Italy. And Gaul at that very hour. The Jews of Mayumas built their synagogue with a view of the export economy. They didn't live near the trade, they lived in it. But the floor wasn't finished speaking, because Byzantine mosaics, like modern shul plaques, come with donor dedications. And this one carried an inscription in Greek, the commercial language of the coast, that gives 3 precious things: a date, 2 names, and a profession. The date: the year 508 to 509 of the Common Era. Stop and let that land. Not roughly the Byzantine period, Not circa 508, the exact peak of the Gaza wine boom. The same generation, give or take, in which the great Yavneh facility up the coast was pressing its millions of liters. The name Menachem and Yeshua. 2 brothers, sons of a man named Yishai. Menachem and Yeshua, the sons of Jesse. You want Jewish names by the harbor of Gaza? There they are, set in stone. And the profession? The inscription described them as wood merchants, timber traders. These were businessmen of the port, import-export men, wealthy ones, wealthy enough to floor a 5-aisle synagogue in mosaic work of imperial quality, the kind of commission that in any age says, our community has arrived. So, let's put the picture together plainly. In the exact moment the Christian wine of the Holy Land was conquering the tables of Europe, a prosperous community of Jewish merchants was operating at the principal port Of export, praying, doing business, dedicating monuments, a few hundred meters from the wine docks. Did Menachem and Yehoshua deal in wine as well as timber? The stone doesn't say. But I'll tell you what the stone does say. It says Jews were not spectators in this economy. They were players in it. Standing on that dock, watching those jars, maybe brokering them, maybe filling them, and certainly on Friday night in a five-aisled synagogue above the harbor, lifting a cup of wine from somewhere and saying "Borei prihagafen" over the Mediterranean. And by the way, the port community wasn't alone. In Gaza's Great Mosque, of all places, a reused column was found long ago bearing a carved menorah, shofar, and lulav, with the name of Hananya bar Yaakov. The Jewish footprint in Byzantine Gaza runs deeper than one building. The synagogue itself did not last. Sometime in the first half of the 7th century, right around the Islamic conquest, it burned. 130 years of life, give or take. The mosaics were eventually lifted and carried to safety. King David and his lyre were displayed in the Israel Museum and later in the Museum of the Good Samaritan. The building is gone, though the questions it raises Are very much alive. So we have a mystery winery in Yavneh, a halachic argument that Jewish wine production never stopped, and Jewish merchants standing at the export gate at the height of the boom. What may we honestly conclude, and where must we honestly stop? Let's weigh it. The way Dayanim weigh evidence. Every good Dayan knows that there are levels of knowing. So let's rule honestly, level by level. What is certain? That Byzantine Eretz Yisrael was the greatest wine exporter of its world, and Yavneh its greatest known factory. That the land's population was mixed. Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan. The Jews required wine constantly, produced it continuously, and wrote a living legal literature about growing it. And that a wealthy Jewish merchant community stood at the export harbor at the boom's exact peak. All of that is documented in stone, in clay, and in the shahs. What is probable? That Yavneh's mega-facility itself, sitting in the bishop's city, in an imperial economy, was Gentile-owned, or perhaps a great estate or church enterprise. Probably, not proven. And probable ownership at the top says nothing about the hands throughout the system, the growers, who supplied the grapes, the small presses feeding the same ports, the brokers on the docks. An export economy is a web, not a building, and Jews and Samaritans lived all through that web. What is possible— and here's the exciting part— even testable. Could archaeology ever identify a distinctly Jewish winery? That sounds unanswerable, but it isn't. Jewish researchers have documented wine presses with mikvaot built right beside them. Ritual baths at the treading floor in the Judean hills and beyond. Why would a mikva sit next to a wine press? Because the Mishnah demands wine for the Beit HaMikdash and And trumah be made into hara, ritual purity. Workers immersing before treading. A mikveh beside a press is as close to a hashgacha in stone as the ancient world could give us. That research frontier is real. It's Israeli, and it's exactly the kind of question this discovery should reopen. For the Byzantine period, and what is unknowable? Whose feet on a given harvest morning in the year 508 actually trod the grapes at Yavneh? Archaeology sees stone and clay; it cannot see intention, ownership, or bracha. And halacha, for its part, insists on realities. No excavation will ever surface. The weekly Kiddush in a thousand homes that leaves no amphora behind. Two ways of knowing. Each sees what the other cannot. And the honest gap between them, that's not a weakness in the story. That gap is where the best questions live. It's where this episode has lived for the last half hour. So let me close where we began, in Yavneh, in a vineyard. The Mishnah tells us that after the Churban, when the world had ended and had to be rebuilt, the Chachamim gathered in Yavneh, in the Kerem, in the vineyard, and for centuries commentators have debated what that meant. Was it a literal vineyard, vines and soil and shade, or a metaphor, the students seated in rows upon rows, like vines, which is how the Rishonim understands it? Rows of vines, rows of scholars. For 2,000 years, you had to choose a reading. And then, in 2021, under a soccer field, a bulldozer stopped, and the ground offered its own commentary. Actual presses, actual vats, 8 centuries of actual wine under the city of the sages. Maybe the machloket Was never a machloket. Maybe in Yavneh, both readings were always true: Torah and Teruah growing out of the same ground. And the story didn't end; it only paused. Today, right now, Israeli researchers are planting vines descended from Byzantine grape pips on the ancient. Terraces of the Negev, varieties that may have filled those Gaza jars. Marawi, Bituni, Debuki are back in bottles with Hashgachot on the label, and once again export manifests leaving the ports of Israel read "Wine of the Holy Land." Only this time, 1,400 years later. Nobody has to wonder whose hands pressed it. Two million liters a year, and not one label survived, not one name. So the next time you make kiddush, look at the bottle in your hand for a moment before the bracha. The winery, the region, the hashkacha, the vintage. Because a bottle of wine is also a document, it tells the future who we were. The Jews of Mayamas didn't leave us a bottle; they left us a floor and a king with a harp, and two brothers, sons of Ishai, who wanted to be remembered. Tonight they are. L'chaim. This is Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of The Kosher Terroir. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to The Kosher Terroir, please check out our many past episodes.