Places

Jerusalem, in the Judean hills, is a sacred city for Jews, Christians and Muslims. In the Hebrew Bible it is King David's capital and the site of Solomon's Temple; the First Temple was destroyed by Babylon in 586 BCE and the Second Temple, rebuilt from about 516 BCE, by Rome in 70 CE. Christians revere it as the place of Jesus's crucifixion and, in their faith, his resurrection; in Islamic tradition it is the destination of the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey and the first direction of prayer, marked by the Dome of the Rock (691-92) and al-Aqsa Mosque. It was ruled in turn by Rome and Byzantium, by Muslim dynasties from 638, by Crusaders (1099-1187), Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans (1517-1917), and by Britain. Divided between Israel and Jordan from 1948 to 1967, it has since been under Israeli control. Israel regards the city as its capital; Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state; most countries do not recognize sovereignty over the whole city.

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Aelia Capitolina was the Roman colony that the emperor Hadrian founded around 130 CE on the ruins of Jerusalem, largely destroyed in 70 CE; this entry stands for the same site, today's Jerusalem, across its later history. Under Roman rule Jews were barred from the city except to mourn on Tisha B'Av, a ban that lasted until the Muslim conquest of 636/637. Under Constantine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built there, and the Christian chronographer Julius Africanus lived nearby at Emmaus. The Roman name lingered for centuries, surviving in the early Arabic name Iliya. Jewish life later revived, and from the 18th and 19th centuries Jerusalem grew into a major centre of Torah study and rabbinic life.

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Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.

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Athens, the capital of Greece since 1834, was the leading intellectual centre of the classical Greek world. Socrates taught there, and four major philosophical schools took root in the city: Plato's Academy, founded around 387 BCE, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa of Zeno, and Epicurus' Garden. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule Athens remained a place of study that drew students from across the empire; in the 4th century CE the Christian writers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus studied there together, while Neoplatonist teachers kept lecturing. Emperor Justinian's ban on pagan teaching of philosophy in 529 is generally taken to mark the end of the city's ancient history.

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Berlin, the capital of Germany on the Spree, is documented from the thirteenth century and became the capital of Prussia in 1701 and of the German Empire in 1871. Its Academy of Sciences, founded in 1700 with Leibniz as first president, and its university, opened in 1810, made it a leading centre of mathematics, physics, chemistry and medicine. Jews were readmitted in 1671; Moses Mendelssohn made the city a hub of the Jewish Enlightenment, and the New Synagogue of 1866 marked the community's later prominence. In Christian thought, Friedrich Schleiermacher helped found the university, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer later studied and lectured. Under Nazi rule its Jews were driven out or deported; the Wall divided the city from 1961 to 1989.

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New York City, in the US state of New York, stands on the homeland of the Lenape people. Dutch settlers founded New Amsterdam in the 1620s; the English took it in 1664 and renamed it, and it served as the national capital from 1785 to 1790 before its five boroughs were consolidated in 1898. Its Jewish history began in 1654, when 23 refugees from Recife in Brazil arrived. Between 1880 and 1924 mass migration from Eastern Europe made the Lower East Side a crowded Yiddish-speaking district, and the city became a centre of yeshivas and rabbinical seminaries, among them Yeshiva University, founded in 1886. About 960,000 Jews live in the five boroughs today. Its universities include Columbia, founded in 1754.

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Alexandria is the main Mediterranean port of northern Egypt and the country's second city. Founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, it became the capital of the Ptolemies, whose Museum and Great Library made it the leading centre of Hellenistic learning. It also held one of the largest Jewish communities of antiquity, where the Greek Bible translation known as the Septuagint was produced and Philo wrote. Church tradition traces its patriarchate to Mark the Evangelist, and its catechetical school was led by Clement and Origen. Arab forces under Amr ibn al-As took the city in 641, and it remained a commercial and scholarly hub of the Islamic world; the Sufi master Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari was born there.

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London, on the Thames in south-east England, is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. Founded by the Romans as Londinium, it has had a bishop since 604 and is the seat of St Paul's Cathedral. Jews settled there after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and were expelled from England in 1290; a small Sephardi community was allowed to remain from 1656, and London became the centre of British Jewish life. The Royal Society, founded there in 1660, made it a hub of science, and by the nineteenth century it was the world's largest city. In the twentieth century it gained institutions such as the Buddhist Society (1924) and the London Central Mosque (1977).

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Washington, D.C., is the capital of the United States, a federal district on the Potomac River formed from land given by Maryland and Virginia. Congress authorized the site in the Residence Act of 1790, and the government moved there from Philadelphia in 1800, when the second president, John Adams, moved into the newly finished White House. It has since been the seat of the federal government and of national institutions such as the Smithsonian museums. Its religious life includes Washington National Cathedral and, among more recent communities, the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, a Buddhist vipassana centre founded by the teacher Tara Brach in 1998.

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Paris, on the Seine, is the capital of France. Its university grew out of the cathedral schools around 1150 and was chartered in 1200; the Sorbonne, a theological college founded around 1257, later lent it its name. The Academy of Sciences, founded in 1666 under Louis XIV, helped make the city a leading centre of European science. Paris had a medieval Jewish community, whose copies of the Talmud were burned in 1242 after the Disputation of Paris, and today it has Europe's largest Jewish population. In 1884 the Islamic reformers Muhammad Abduh and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani published their journal al-Urwa al-Wuthqa there, and in the 1950s the Sri Lankan monk Walpola Rahula studied Mahayana Buddhism at the Sorbonne.

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Perched on a limestone ridge nearly three thousand feet above sea level in the Galilee mountains, Tzfat was ruled by the Ottoman Empire during its golden age of Jewish learning—a period when the city transformed into perhaps the world's greatest center of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. The mountain air was cool and thin, the stone buildings huddled together against winter winds, while terraced olive groves tumbled down the surrounding slopes toward the Mediterranean basin. In the sixteenth century, Tzfat's Jewish community swelled to perhaps eight thousand souls, many of them refugees from Spain and North Africa who brought with them advanced learning, deep piety, and an urgent hunger to understand the mystical dimensions of Torah in the aftermath of catastrophe. The city became a magnetic pole for spiritual seekers: yeshivas multiplied, scholars debated late into the evening, and the streets filled with intense conversations about divine emanation and the hidden names of God. Most striking was the emergence of Tzfat as the birthplace of Lurianic Kabbalah—a revolutionary system of mystical thought that would reshape Jewish spirituality for centuries—taught in the synagogues and study halls that dotted the Old City's winding alleys, where students gathered not merely to learn but to participate in what they believed was the cosmic restoration of the universe through their devotion and mystical intention.

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Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, was founded around 20 CE by Herod Antipas and named for the emperor Tiberius. After the Sanhedrin settled there around 220 it became a leading centre of Jewish learning: by tradition beginning with Rabbi Yochanan bar Nappacha, the Jerusalem Talmud took shape there (scholars date its completion to about 400), and the Masoretes of Tiberias later devised the Tiberian vocalisation of Hebrew. After the Muslim conquest around 636 it was the capital of the district of Jund al-Urdunn, and the hadith scholar al-Tabarani was born there in 873. Maimonides was buried in Tiberias, and in 1783 the Hasidic leader Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk moved there from Safed with his followers.

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Prague, on the Vltava, is the capital of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. It became a bishopric in 973, and under Charles IV in the fourteenth century an imperial capital with Charles University, the oldest university in Central Europe. Jan Hus preached at its Bethlehem Chapel, and the city was central to the Bohemian Reformation. Around 1600 the court of Rudolf II drew astronomers including Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Its Jewish Town, with the medieval Old-New Synagogue, was one of the great Ashkenazi centres, where rabbis such as Judah Loew (the Maharal) and Yechezkel Landau served. In the twentieth century Prague was capital of Czechoslovakia, and in the 1920s it sheltered Russian Orthodox émigré scholars.

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Constantinople, today Istanbul in Turkey, was the Greek colony of Byzantium until Constantine I refounded it as the imperial capital in 330, and for over a millennium it was the capital of the Byzantine Empire and a centre of Greek learning and Christian authority: the council of 381, which Gregory of Nazianzus led for a time, affirmed the Nicene Creed and ranked the city's bishop second only to Rome's, and Hagia Sophia rose in 537. Jews are recorded there from the late fourth century. Sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, it fell to the Ottomans in 1453, serving as their capital and a seat of Islamic learning until 1923; after 1492 Sephardi exiles made it a leading Jewish centre.

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Nestled in the forests of Lithuania where the Neris River winds through rolling terrain, Vilna rose as the intellectual capital of Eastern European Jewry under the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and later the Russian Empire. Winters brought bitter cold and deep snow; summers were brief and lush. The city itself—with its red-brick fortifications, winding medieval streets, and the great cathedral dominating the skyline—was home to a Jewish community that by the eighteenth century numbered in the thousands, forming perhaps a quarter of the city's inhabitants. Vilna's Jews, largely merchants and craftspeople, had carved out a semi-autonomous quarter with their own institutions, printing presses, and communal governance. But it was as a beacon of Torah learning that Vilna truly earned its renown: the city became synonymous with rigorous, rationalist study of Jewish texts, producing generations of scholars whose methods and insights shaped religious life across Eastern Europe and beyond. The great yeshivas and the legendary libraries—particularly the vast collection of Jewish manuscripts and printed books that one prominent sage accumulated—made Vilna a destination for serious students of Talmud from distant communities, transforming this northern outpost into a place where Jewish intellectual life reached its most sophisticated flowering.

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Postwar Lithuanian-Israeli Orthodox center; Chazon Ish's residence.

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Vienna, on the Danube, is the capital of Austria. It grew from the Roman legionary camp of Vindobona, begun around 97 CE, and became the residence of the Habsburg emperors; Ottoman armies besieged it in 1529 and 1683 without taking it. Its university, founded in 1365, is often called the oldest in the German-speaking world, St. Stephen's Cathedral is its principal church, and Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis here. Jews are recorded from the 1190s; in the 13th century Isaac ben Moses, author of Or Zarua, headed its rabbinical court and yeshiva. The community was destroyed in 1420-21 and expelled in 1670, then grew to about 200,000 by the 1920s; some 65,000 Viennese Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

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Frankfurt am Main, on the Main river in Hesse, Germany, became an imperial city in 1372. Holy Roman kings were elected here, by law from 1356, and from 1562 to 1792 they were also crowned here, and in 1848 the first elected German parliament met in its St. Paul's Church. Philipp Jakob Spener, the city's Lutheran chief pastor from about 1666 to 1686, is regarded as the father of Pietism. From 1462 its Jews were confined to the Judengasse, early modern Germany's largest Jewish community. The Chatam Sofer was born here in 1762, and Samson Raphael Hirsch led its Orthodox Israelitische Religionsgesellschaft from 1851 until his death in 1888. Most of its Jews fled or were killed in the Holocaust.

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Warsaw, on the Vistula, has been Poland's capital since Sigismund III moved the royal court there from Kraków in 1596. A predominantly Catholic city, it became a diocese in 1798 and an archdiocese in 1818. In the nineteenth century its Jewish community grew into the largest in Europe, and the city became a leading centre of Hebrew and Yiddish publishing and of Hasidic and rabbinic life; before the Second World War Jews were about 30 percent of the population. Under German occupation they were confined to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, and most were deported to Treblinka in 1942; the ghetto uprising began on 19 April 1943. The city was largely razed after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and later rebuilt.

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Kraków, on the Vistula in southern Poland, was the seat of Polish kings from the eleventh century until the court moved to Warsaw in 1596. Copernicus studied in the 1490s at its Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364. Jews lived in the city from the late thirteenth century, and after 1495 they were concentrated in neighbouring Kazimierz, which became the main spiritual and cultural centre of Polish Jewry, a leading seat of Ashkenazi learning; Moses Isserles, born in Kraków, founded a yeshiva there in 1549. Under German occupation its Jews were forced into a ghetto in 1941, and most were murdered. Karol Wojtyła was archbishop of Kraków when he was elected Pope John Paul II in 1978.

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Tel Aviv, founded in 1909 as a Jewish garden suburb of Jaffa, grew into the first modern all-Jewish city and a major center of Israeli life. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook served as rav of neighboring Jaffa and its surrounding settlements from 1904 (before becoming Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel), in the years when Tel Aviv was first taking shape. Tel Aviv's own chief rabbinate was later held by Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel, elected its chief rabbi in 1923 and afterward the first Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel, and in time by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau.

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Lviv (Polish Lwów, German Lemberg), in western Ukraine, was founded around 1250 by Daniel of Galicia and named for his son Lev. It passed to Poland in 1349, became the capital of Habsburg Galicia in 1772, and joined Soviet Ukraine in 1946 and independent Ukraine in 1991. Its university traces its charter to 1661, and the city gave its name to the Lwów School of Mathematics. Jews lived there from the city's early years, with a Jewish district recorded under Lev in the late thirteenth century, and the city held a major rabbinate: Joshua Falk headed its yeshiva and Jacob Joshua Falk became chief rabbi in 1717. The Jewish community, about a third of the population in 1939, was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust.

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In the late eighteenth century, Volozhin was a modest town in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, nestled among forests and small rivers in a region governed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the Russian partitions of the 1790s brought it under Tsarist rule. The climate was harsh and continental—long, bitter winters that froze the landscape, short summers that burst into surprising green. The Jewish community, though small in absolute numbers, was culturally outsized and intensely devoted to intensive Torah study in ways that distinguished it from surrounding shtetls. What made Volozhin remarkable was its emergence as a new kind of Jewish intellectual center: a yeshiva founded in the late eighteenth century that became a model for the study of Talmud throughout Eastern Europe, attracting scholars from across the region who sought rigorous, systematic analysis of Jewish law and philosophy. Unlike the older academies of Poland, this institution emphasized intellectual method and rational inquiry alongside tradition, creating a fresh approach to learning that would influence Jewish education for generations. The yeshiva's fame eventually drew hundreds of students to this backwater town, transforming it into a beacon of Jewish scholarship despite its geographical isolation and the poverty that characterized much of Lithuanian Jewish life.

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Nestled on the Bug River in the northwestern reaches of the Russian Empire, Brisk was a city of sharp winters and deep forests, where the murmur of Yiddish mingled with Russian and Polish in its crowded streets. The Jewish community there—numbering several thousand by the early twentieth century—had flourished for centuries under various rulers, from Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth through Russian imperial governance, creating a densely woven culture of commerce, piety, and intense intellectual life. The city became legendary as a powerhouse of Talmudic reasoning, home to a yeshiva whose analytical method—sharp, systematic, almost geometrical in its approach to logical contradiction and textual precision—influenced Jewish learning across Eastern Europe and eventually throughout the diaspora. Brisk's Jewish quarter pulsed with the energy of a thriving commercial center; kosher shops and prayer houses lined narrow lanes where merchants haggled and students debated late into candlelit nights. When tragedy came—the Holocaust would devastate this vibrant world almost utterly—the city's intellectual legacy proved indestructible, carried forward by survivors and their descendants who transplanted Brisk's uncompromising approach to Torah study into Jerusalem, America, and communities worldwide, ensuring that the sharp light of its particular genius never fully dimmed.

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Baghdad, on the Tigris, is the capital of modern Iraq. The Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded it in 762 as his capital, and for five centuries it was a leading centre of Islamic learning, with the House of Wisdom, the Nizamiyya madrasa and many jurists, Sufis and scientists; Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, eponym of the Qadiriyya order, is buried there. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the caliphate, and the city later passed to Ottoman rule. It was also a seat of the patriarchs of the Church of the East and of the exilarch who headed Babylonian Jewry. Its Jewish community, whose foremost nineteenth-century rabbi was Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai), almost entirely emigrated to Israel in 1950-52.

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Major Polish-Jewish center; home of R. Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin.

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Brooklyn, coextensive with Kings County, is one of the five boroughs of New York City. It began as the Dutch village of Breuckelen, chartered in 1646, remained an independent city until it was consolidated into New York in 1898, and is today the most populous borough. Roughly a fifth of its residents are Jewish, and since the mid-twentieth century it has been a world centre of Orthodox and Hasidic life: Chabad-Lubavitch has had its headquarters in Crown Heights since 1940, Satmar is centred in Williamsburg and Bobov in Borough Park, alongside many yeshivas and Modern Orthodox congregations. Several American Buddhist teachers, among them Bernie Glassman and Bhikkhu Bodhi, were born in Brooklyn.

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Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, grew from a dam on the Amstel River built in the later thirteenth century and received city rights around 1300. In the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age it was one of Europe's chief commercial cities, and its relative religious tolerance drew refugees. Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal settled there from the late sixteenth century, later joined by a larger Ashkenazi population; Menasseh ben Israel opened the city's first Hebrew press in 1626, and the Portuguese Synagogue, inaugurated in 1675, is still in use. Protestant debate was lively too: Jacobus Arminius was a pastor at the Old Church from 1588. Most Dutch Jews were deported and murdered during the Nazi occupation.

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Ofen is the German name for Buda, on the west bank of the Danube (today part of Budapest, Hungary). It was the seat of Hungary's oldest organized Jewish community, with congregations recorded from the medieval period through the Ottoman occupation. Rabbi Ephraim HaKohen, author of the responsa Sha'ar Ephraim, served as rav of Buda (Ofen) in the seventeenth century.

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Cairo, at the head of the Nile delta, grew from two foundations: Fustat, the garrison town built by the Arab conquerors in 641, and al-Qahira ('the Victorious'), the walled city founded by the Fatimid dynasty in 969, where the mosque of al-Azhar opened in 970-72 and became a great centre of learning. Under the Ayyubids (from 1171) and the Mamluks (1250-1517) it was one of the largest cities of the Islamic world. Fustat's Jewish community, home to Maimonides in the 12th century, left the Cairo Geniza, a vast store of medieval documents. Later ruled by the Ottomans and, from 1882, under British occupation, Cairo is the capital of modern Egypt.

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Yavneh lay along the coastal plain of Roman-controlled Judea, a modest town whose significance belied its humble size and location between the Mediterranean and the Judean hills. Under Roman imperial rule—particularly after the catastrophic siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE—this small port settlement became unexpectedly vital to Jewish survival and learning. When the Temple fell and pilgrimage worship ended, Yavneh transformed into a beacon of scholarly refuge: the great sage Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai established an academy there where Torah study, legal reasoning, and rabbinic authority could flourish beyond Rome's direct surveillance. The town's Jewish community, though numerically small, punched far above its weight, attracting scholars and students who gathered to debate Halakha and preserve oral tradition when the Jewish world seemed to be collapsing. The wind-swept streets and modest buildings of Yavneh hosted what amounted to an intellectual revolution—the very idea that Jewish civilization could survive and even thrive without the Temple, sustained instead by devoted study and argument in a humble schoolhouse. For nearly a century, this unassuming Judean town held the future of rabbinic Judaism in its hands.

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Cambridge is a university city in eastern England, United Kingdom. Its university dates from about 1209. In the Reformation era Thomas Cranmer studied and held a fellowship at Jesus College, and the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer spent his last years in Cambridge, dying there in 1551. From Isaac Newton's time onward the university was strong in mathematics and physics, a tradition continued at the Cavendish Laboratory, opened in 1874 with James Clerk Maxwell as its first professor. Later, the Cairo Genizah fragments that Solomon Schechter brought from Egypt became the Taylor-Schechter collection at the University Library, Muhammad Iqbal took a degree at Trinity College in 1906, and C. S. Lewis held a chair at Magdalene College from 1954.

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Where the Chatam Sofer led the major Hungarian yeshiva (1806-1839) and defined the Hungarian-Charedi anti-Reform position.

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Venice is a city built on islands in a lagoon of the Adriatic in northeastern Italy, capital of the Veneto region. For about eleven centuries, until Napoleon ended it in 1797, it was an independent republic ruled by doges and grew rich as a maritime trading power; it joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. St Mark's Basilica stands at its centre, and since 1451 the city has been the seat of a patriarchate whose holders included three future popes, Pius X, John XXIII and John Paul I. In 1516 the republic confined its Jews to the Ghetto, and the city became a leading centre of Hebrew printing, where Daniel Bomberg issued the first complete printed Babylonian Talmud (1519-1523).

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In the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Salonika stood as the jewel of Ottoman Jewry, a thriving Mediterranean port city where Sultan Mehmed II's relatively tolerant rule created unprecedented opportunity for Jewish settlement and learning. After 1492, when Spain's Jewish expulsion sent thousands of Sephardic refugees fleeing eastward, many found their way to this bustling crossroads—where the Aegean's salt winds mingled with the aromas of spice markets and synagogues rose alongside mosques in a landscape of remarkable religious pluralism. The Jewish community swelled to perhaps fifty thousand souls, making Salonika the largest Jewish city in the world by the mid-sixteenth century, with dozens of congregations organized by Spanish, Italian, Greek, and North African origin. Scholars and mystics converged here, transforming modest harbor streets into corridors of textual authority where Hebrew printing presses thundered into the night and the traditions of Spanish Jewry merged with Kabbalistic innovation. The city's fame rested not on a single institution but on this critical mass of intellectual energy—a place where exiled sages could rebuild their learning in freedom, where Ottoman tolerance created space for Jewish autonomy, and where the Mediterranean trade that enriched the city's coffers also enriched its libraries and study halls.

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Padua, the Roman Patavium, is a city in the Veneto region of northern Italy that was ruled by the Republic of Venice from 1405 until 1797; the Roman historian Livy was a native of the area. Its university, conventionally dated to 1222, is one of the oldest in the world: Galileo held its chair of mathematics from 1592 to 1610, and Copernicus was among those educated there. The Basilica of Saint Anthony was begun around 1230. Padua also had a long-established Jewish community, with a ghetto and a synagogue completed in 1548, and Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (Ramchal) was born in its ghetto in 1707.

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Grodno (Hrodna), a city in western Belarus near the Lithuanian and Polish borders, had a large Jewish community and was a noted center of Lithuanian Torah learning. Until 1939 it was home to the Sha'ar HaTorah yeshiva headed by Rabbi Shimon Shkop, one of the most influential roshei yeshiva of the Lithuanian world, whose analytical method shaped a generation; the yeshiva fled to Vilna at the Soviet occupation while Shkop, too ill to travel, died in Grodno.

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One of the two great Babylonian academies of the Geonic era (alongside Sura). Active from ~250 CE through ~1040; seat of the Geonim Sherira and Hai. Located near present-day Fallujah, Iraq.

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Babylonian Geonic academy

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Worms, on the left bank of the Rhine in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, grew from the Celtic settlement of Borbetomagus into a Roman town and a major medieval city. Its Jewish community, established by the late tenth century with a synagogue first built in 1034, was one of the three ShUM communities of the Rhineland, whose sites UNESCO inscribed as World Heritage in 2021; Rashi studied at its yeshiva in the 1060s, and the city remained a seat of rabbinic learning for centuries. In Christian history Worms gave its name to the Concordat of 1122 and to the Diet of 1521, at which Martin Luther was declared a heretic, and William Tyndale's English New Testament was printed there by 1526.

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Hebron (Arabic al-Khalil) is a city in the southern West Bank, about 30 km south of Jerusalem, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the Levant. According to the Bible, Abraham bought the Cave of the Patriarchs (Machpelah) there as a family tomb, and the site is holy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Herod the Great built the enclosure that still stands over it, later a church and then the Ibrahimi Mosque. Sephardi kabbalists settled there after the expulsion from Spain, and in 1924 the Slabodka yeshiva moved to Hebron until the 1929 massacre of Jews. Since the 1997 Hebron Protocol, the city has been divided between Palestinian Authority and Israeli administration.

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Göttingen is a university city in Lower Saxony, Germany, first recorded as the village of Gutingi in 953. Its university, the Georgia Augusta, was founded in 1734 by George II, king of Great Britain and elector of Hanover, and opened in 1737. Beginning with Carl Friedrich Gauss it became a leading centre of mathematics and the natural sciences, reaching a peak around 1900 under David Hilbert and Felix Klein and attracting foreign students such as J. Robert Oppenheimer. Nazi civil-service laws after 1933 forced out many of its faculty, especially those of Jewish origin. In theology, Karl Barth held his first professorship at Göttingen from 1921 to 1925.

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Munich is the capital of Bavaria in southern Germany and the seat of the Catholic archdiocese of Munich and Freising. In the fourteenth century the Franciscan philosopher William of Ockham found refuge here at the court of Emperor Louis IV and died here in 1347. Its Ludwig Maximilian University, moved here in 1826, became a leading centre of physics and chemistry, where Wilhelm Röntgen and Arnold Sommerfeld taught. Eugenio Pacelli, later Pius XII, served as papal nuncio in Munich from 1917, and Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, studied there and was archbishop in 1977-82. Gershom Scholem earned his doctorate at the university with a thesis on the Sefer ha-Bahir, and Muhammad Iqbal received his doctorate there in 1907.

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Barcelona is a Mediterranean port and the capital of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. Roman Barcino was a modest colony that had a bishop by late antiquity; around 393 Bishop Lampius ordained the Christian poet Paulinus of Nola a priest there. In the Middle Ages the city was the seat of the counts of Barcelona and, from 1137, the leading city of the Crown of Aragon. Its Jewish community, documented from the ninth century, became a major centre of Torah study, home to rabbis such as Judah ben Barzilai, Shlomo ibn Aderet (the Rashba) and Aharon HaLevi. In 1263 Nahmanides defended Judaism there in the Disputation of Barcelona. The riots of 1391 effectively ended the community.

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In the heart of Belarusian Lithuania, the small town of Mir rose to become one of Eastern Europe's greatest centers of Jewish learning during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perched on the banks of the Miranka River and overshadowed by the imposing Castle of Mir—a Renaissance fortress that dominated the town's skyline—this community of roughly four thousand Jews thrived under the rule of successive Polish and Russian administrations, surviving tsarist restrictions through resilience and ingenuity. The town's marketplace bustled with merchants and artisans, but Mir's true glory lay in its great yeshiva, a sprawling academy that drew hundreds of students from across Europe to study Talmud under masters of legendary acuity; the institution became synonymous with rigorous intellectual discipline and innovative interpretation of Jewish law. What made Mir exceptional was not mere size but its particular scholarly culture—a place where dialectical sharpness and ethical depth intertwined, where poverty-stricken scholars lived on meager rations yet produced some of the era's most penetrating works of Jewish thought. The town's brick synagogue stood at its spiritual heart, a modest yet dignified structure where the community gathered to pray and debate until the Holocaust destroyed nearly everything in 1941.

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Paris, on the Seine, is the capital of France. In the twelfth century its cathedral and abbey schools, including Saint-Victor (founded 1108), drew teachers of theology and philosophy, and by 1200 they had grown into the University of Paris, later known for its College of Sorbonne. Medieval Paris also had a Tosafist yeshiva under Rabbi Yehiel; after the 1240 Disputation of Paris, wagonloads of Talmud manuscripts were burned there in 1242. In 1534 Ignatius of Loyola and fellow students made the vows at Montmartre from which the Jesuits grew. As royal capital it hosted the Academy of Sciences from 1666, and in the twentieth century Russian Orthodox emigres founded the St Sergius Institute there.

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Minsk hosted one of the largest Litvish Jewish communities in the Russian Empire. R. Yerucham Yehuda Leib Perlman (Gadol of Minsk, 1835-1896) served as its chief rabbi; the city also produced the founders of the Mussar movement and major roshei yeshiva of the next century.

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Breslau, now Wrocław, lies on the Oder river in southwestern Poland and is the principal city of Silesia. A bishopric was founded here in 1000. The city passed to the Bohemian crown in the 14th century and to the Habsburgs in 1526, and Prussia annexed it in the 1740s; the Reformation reached it in 1518. It remained German until 1945, when it became part of Poland and its German population was expelled. Its university took its modern form in 1811. The Jewish community was among Germany's most important: its Jewish Theological Seminary, opened in 1854 under Zecharias Frankel with Heinrich Graetz on the faculty, was the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe, and the Nazis closed it in 1938.

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New York City, in the US state of New York, began as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1620s, was renamed by the English in 1664, and took its present five-borough form in 1898. Its universities, Columbia among them (founded 1754), made it a major centre of science and scholarship; B. R. Ambedkar earned his doctorate in economics at Columbia. Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, counted Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among its faculty and hosted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a fellow in 1930, and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky also worked in the city. In 1930 Sokei-an founded what became the First Zen Institute of America there, an early landmark of Buddhism in the United States.

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Kovno (Kaunas) was the Lithuanian Torah center where R. Yisrael Salanter taught and the Slabodka and Kovno Kollels flourished. R. Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor served as its chief rabbi (1864-1896), making Kovno the responsa capital of Lithuanian Jewry. R. Avraham Dov Kahana-Shapiro (Devar Avraham) succeeded him.

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England, the largest country of the United Kingdom, is used here when a person's exact birthplace or residence within England is not recorded, as with the fourteenth-century Augustinian mystic Walter Hilton, author of The Scale of Perfection. Christianity was present there by late antiquity and was renewed by Roman missionaries from 597. The kingdom was unified in the tenth century and joined Scotland in 1707 to form Great Britain. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge date from the Middle Ages, the Royal Society was founded in 1660, and the Industrial Revolution began in eighteenth-century England, making the country a major centre of science.

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Haifa, the northern Israeli port city, hosted a small but ancient Jewish community on Mount Carmel. After 1900 it grew into a major Sephardic-Mizrachi center; R. Yosef Mashash served as its Chief Sephardi Rabbi (1964-1974).

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Mantua is a city in Lombardy, northern Italy, ringed by lakes formed from the Mincio River. The Roman poet Virgil was born in a village nearby. From 1328 to 1708 the Gonzaga family ruled it, and their court became a leading centre of Renaissance art, humanist schooling and music. Mantua also had one of Italy's notable Jewish communities: a Hebrew press was active there in the fifteenth century, and the city produced rabbis, physicians, kabbalists and scholars before a ghetto was imposed in 1612. In the nineteenth century Giuseppe Sarto, later Pope Pius X, was its bishop from 1884.

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Posen (Polish Poznań), the principal city of Great Poland (Wielkopolska), held one of the most important rabbinates in Poland for centuries. The Maharal (Judah Loew ben Bezalel) was born in Posen and led its community, and later its rav was Rabbi Akiva Eiger, the leading halachic authority of his generation, who served there from 1815 until his death in 1837. Other major authorities were associated with the city's rabbinate and yeshiva.

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Seat of Yaakov Emden (the 'Yaavetz'); major anti-Sabbatean center.

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Egypt, the Nile valley and delta in northeast Africa, was home to one of the world's oldest states, ruled by pharaohs from about 3000 BCE. In the Torah's narrative Abraham sojourned there, Joseph rose to power there and the Israelites were enslaved before the Exodus; historians find no direct evidence for these events, though many think the story may preserve older memories. Greek traders and travellers knew Egypt from the 7th century BCE; Alexander's conquest (332 BCE) brought Ptolemaic and then Roman rule (from 30 BCE), with Alexandria a capital of Greek learning and home to a large Jewish community. After the Arab conquest (639-642) Fustat and then Cairo became its centres; Maimonides lived and wrote in Fustat in the 12th century.

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Where the Rambam lived for several years after fleeing Almohad Cordoba (~1160-1165), before emigrating to Eretz Yisrael and ultimately Egypt.

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Slobodka (Lithuanian Vilijampolė), a suburb of Kovno (Kaunas) in Lithuania, was home to the Knesses Yisrael yeshiva, the flagship Mussar yeshiva of the Lithuanian world. It was led by Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (the Alter of Slabodka), who built it into a leading institution producing many of the roshei yeshiva and rabbinic leaders of the next generation; in 1925 the Alter and many students moved to Hebron, re-establishing the yeshiva there.

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Slutsk, a town in central Belarus south of Minsk, was a major center of Lithuanian Torah scholarship. Its yeshiva was founded in 1897 by Rabbi Yaakov Dovid Willowski (the Ridvaz), then rav of the town, with students drawn from the Slabodka yeshiva; Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer served as rosh yeshiva and, from 1903, as rav of Slutsk for about two decades, joined by his son-in-law Rabbi Aharon Kotler. After World War I the yeshiva relocated to nearby Kletsk under Rabbi Kotler.

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In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Telz stood as a modest but vibrant Jewish center in northwestern Lithuania, a region under Russian Imperial rule following the Partitions of Poland. The city itself—surrounded by forests and lakes in a landscape of gentle hills—was predominantly Lithuanian, with a Jewish population that grew steadily to become a significant minority of the town's inhabitants. What made Telz remarkable was not its size or political importance, but rather its emergence as one of Eastern Europe's most influential yeshivas, a scholarly institution that drew ambitious young men from across the Pale of Settlement who came to master Talmudic reasoning. The yeshiva's reputation for intellectual rigor and innovative pedagogy transformed a provincial Lithuanian town into a pilgrimage site for serious Torah students, and its alumni spread its methods far and wide, even establishing branches elsewhere. By the turn of the twentieth century, Telz had become synonymous with a particular style of Talmudic study—precise, logical, and deeply engaged—and its scholars were sought after as teachers and communal leaders throughout the Jewish world, making this quiet corner of Lithuania a beacon for those dedicated to preserving and advancing Jewish learning.

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Toledo is a hilltop city in central Spain, enclosed on three sides by a bend of the Tagus. Once Roman, it became the Visigothic capital in the sixth century and seat of an archdiocese whose cathedral remains Spain's primate church. Under Muslim rule from 711, it later became capital of an eleventh-century taifa kingdom, home to the astronomer al-Zarqali. After Alfonso VI took it in 1085, scholars there translated Arabic and Hebrew works into Castilian and Latin. Its large Jewish community produced leading rabbinic authorities despite repeated violence until the 1492 expulsion. In the sixteenth century Teresa of Ávila founded a convent there, and John of the Cross, imprisoned in its Carmelite monastery, composed much of his Spiritual Canticle.

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Bialystok was a major Lithuanian-Polish Jewish center on the seam between Litvish and Hasidic worlds. R. Chaim Halberstam (Sanz dynasty) and R. Chaim Soloveitchik both had students teaching here. The city was 70% Jewish in 1900 (41,000 Jews); the community was annihilated in the Bialystok Ghetto uprising of August 1943.

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Hebron, a city in the Judean Hills (today in the southern West Bank), is one of the most ancient cities in the Land of Israel and central to the biblical narrative of the patriarchs. According to the Torah, Abraham purchased the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron as a burial site; tradition holds that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are buried there. Hebron was also King David's first capital, where he reigned for seven years before taking Jerusalem.

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Leipzig is the largest city of Saxony in eastern Germany. Its trade fair traces its origins to 1190, and its university, founded in 1409, counts Leibniz, born in the city in 1646, among its students and Werner Heisenberg among its professors; the city was also a centre of German publishing from 1764 to 1945. In 1519 Johann Eck debated Martin Luther at the Pleissenburg castle, and Johann Sebastian Bach worked at St Thomas Church from 1723 until 1750. A Jewish community of more than 11,000 in 1933 was destroyed under Nazi rule: its synagogue was burned in 1938 and the remaining Jews were deported in 1942-43. The 1989 Monday demonstrations began at St Nicholas Church.

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In the shadowed years after Rome's brutal suppression of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Usha emerged as a quiet haven in the rolling hills of lower Galilee, a sanctuary where Jewish learning could breathe again. The Roman Empire held dominion over the region with an iron grip, yet the small town—nestled between fertile valleys and olive groves—became an unexpected center of rabbinic reconstruction. Here, a community of sages regathered to rebuild the shattered institutions of Jewish law and practice, establishing what would become the foundation of the Mishnah itself. Though modest in size, Usha's Jewish population punched far above its weight, drawing scholars from across the Roman territories who came to study, debate, and codify the oral traditions that Rome's legions could not destroy. The town's relative obscurity and distance from imperial surveillance made it ideal for this delicate work—far enough from Caesarea's Roman governors to operate with a measure of autonomy, yet close enough to the roads that connected Galilee's villages and towns. In its modest schoolhouses and study halls, a generation of brilliant minds wrestled with questions of law, ethics, and continuity, ensuring that Judaism would not perish with the state, but would transform and endure.

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Damascus, the capital of Syria, is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. It was the seat of the Aramean kingdom of Aram-Damascus and later a Roman city. According to the Book of Acts, Ananias received the newly converted Saul (Paul) there, and the city remains the seat of several Eastern churches. Damascus was the capital of the Umayyad caliphate from 661 to 750, and under the Seljuks, Ayyubids and Mamluks its many madrasas made it a leading centre of Islamic learning; it was under Ottoman rule from 1516. Jews lived there from at least Roman times, and the kabbalist Hayyim Vital settled in the city in 1594.

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Zaragoza, on the Ebro in the Aragon region of northeastern Spain, was founded under Augustus as the Roman colony of Caesaraugusta (Arabic Saraqusta). In al-Andalus it was capital of the Upper March and, from 1018, of an independent taifa kingdom, later ruled by the Banu Hud, where the philosopher Ibn Bajja (Avempace) was born. Its Jewish community flourished in the same era, when the poet-philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol and the grammarian Jonah ibn Janah worked there. Alfonso I of Aragon conquered the city in 1118 and made it his capital. The Jewish community escaped the 1391 riots, partly through the intervention of Hasdai Crescas, and remained until the expulsion of 1492. Its university trained the neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

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In the eleventh century, Mainz stood as one of the great river cities of the Rhineland, governed by the Archbishop-Elector whose dual authority as both prince and churchman made it a center of considerable medieval power and cultural sophistication. The Rhine itself was Mainz's lifeblood—its waters brought merchants, wines, and goods from across Europe, while the cathedral's spires dominated a skyline of timber-framed houses clustered tightly against stone walls. The Jewish community here was prosperous and intellectually vibrant, numbering in the hundreds and renowned throughout Europe for the depth of its learning; Mainz had become a beacon for Torah study, drawing scholars who came to engage with the city's most brilliant minds and to participate in a culture of meticulous textual interpretation that was reshaping Jewish thought. The yeshiva functionaries and learned families of Mainz were known for their piety and rigor, making the city a standard-bearer for a particular style of dense, questioning scholarship. Yet this flourishing would prove tragically fragile: the Rhineland Jewish communities, Mainz foremost among them, faced devastating violence during the Crusades in 1096, a catastrophe that would forever mark the region's memory and religious consciousness, even as the city itself continued as a center of commerce and archiepiscopal grandeur.

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Nikolsburg (Czech Mikulov), a town in southern Moravia (today the Czech Republic), was the seat of the Chief Rabbinate of Moravia from the late sixteenth century until 1851 and Moravia's most populous Jewish community. The Maharal of Prague (Judah Loew ben Bezalel) served as rav here before moving to Prague, and the post was later held by Rabbi Mordechai Benet (rabbi of Nikolsburg and Chief Rabbi of Moravia, 1789-1829) and by the chasidic master Rabbi Shmelke Horowitz of Nikolsburg, among other leading authorities.

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Córdoba, on the Guadalquivir in Andalusia, southern Spain, came under Roman rule in the 3rd century BCE and, as Colonia Patricia, became capital of the province of Baetica; Seneca was a native. Taken by Muslim forces in 711 or 712, it became the seat of the Umayyad emirate founded by Abd al-Rahman I in 756 and of the caliphate proclaimed in 929, which ended in 1031. Its Great Mosque was begun in the 780s. The city was the birthplace of the Islamic scholars Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), later its chief judge, and the Quran commentator al-Qurtubi, and of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (usually dated 1138). Ferdinand III of Castile captured Córdoba in 1236, and the mosque became a cathedral.

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Boston, capital of Massachusetts in the United States, was founded by English Puritan settlers in 1630 and was central to the American Revolution, from the Boston Tea Party of 1773 to the siege of 1775-1776. With Harvard in neighbouring Cambridge, it is a major hub of higher education and research. Its first Jewish congregation, Ohabei Shalom, dates to 1842 and built the first synagogue in Massachusetts in 1852. Later immigration from Eastern Europe enlarged the community, which spread from inner-city neighbourhoods such as the West End to suburbs such as Brookline. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik settled in Boston in 1932 and in 1937 pioneered the Maimonides School, one of the city's first Jewish day schools.

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Los Angeles, in Southern California, is the second most populous city in the United States. It was founded as a Spanish pueblo in 1781 on the site of the Tongva village of Yaanga, passed to Mexico after 1821 and to the United States in 1848, and was incorporated in 1850. Its Jewish community dates to the 1860s, when the congregation now known as Wilshire Boulevard Temple was founded, and Los Angeles County today has the second-largest Jewish population in the country. The city was also an early centre of American Zen: Nyogen Senzaki opened a meditation hall there in the 1930s, and Taizan Maezumi founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967.

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Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, lies on the Mediterranean beside the ruins of ancient Carthage. In Roman times Carthage became an early centre of Christianity. After the Arab conquest of 698, Tunis grew around the Zaytuna Mosque, whose school became a major centre of Islamic learning in North Africa. From 1229 the city was capital of the Hafsid kingdom, the birthplace of the historian Ibn Khaldun in 1332, and a refuge for Andalusian Muslims and Jews. Its Jewish community, centred on the Hara quarter, was later joined by merchants from Livorno known as Grana. Tunis passed to the Ottomans in 1574, became a French protectorate in 1881 and the capital of independent Tunisia in 1956.

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Bonn, a city on the Rhine in western Germany, had a medieval Jewish community (home in the twelfth century to the liturgical poet and chronicler Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn). In the modern era its university was where Samson Raphael Hirsch, later the leader of German Neo-Orthodoxy, studied alongside the future Reform leader Abraham Geiger.

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Major center of Italian-Sephardi Kabbalah; home of Yosef Ergas (Shomer Emunim).

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Ionia was the central stretch of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, in modern western Turkey, together with the islands of Samos and Chios, settled in antiquity by Ionian Greeks. Its cities, among them Miletus, Ephesus, Colophon and Phocaea, formed the Ionian League, and Smyrna, first an Aeolian town, later became Ionian. Sixth-century BCE Miletus was home to Thales and Anaximander, the first Greek natural philosophers. Ionia came under Lydian and then Persian rule, revolted around 500 BCE, and became part of the Roman province of Asia in 133 BCE; the satirist Lucian of Samosata went there for his education. Under Ottoman rule Sephardi Jews, arriving after 1492, made Smyrna (Izmir) one of their principal urban centres.

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Kelm (Lithuanian Kelmė), a small town in Samogitia in northwestern Lithuania, was a central seat of the Mussar movement. Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv (the Alter of Kelm), a foremost disciple of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, was born there and founded the Kelm Talmud Torah (around 1862), a select institution focused on character refinement through intensive Mussar study that trained many leaders of the Lithuanian yeshiva world.

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Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, Russia), then the capital of East Prussia, had a Jewish community of note and was an important center of Hebrew printing in the modern era. Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement, spent his final years working to strengthen Orthodox Jewish life in Germany and Prussia and died in Königsberg in 1883.

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Smyrna, modern İzmir on the Aegean coast of Turkey, was an ancient Greek city refounded in the fourth century BCE and, under Rome, a leading port of the province of Asia. It was a centre of rhetoric: the sophist Marcus Antonius Polemon taught there, the orator Aelius Aristides was closely associated with it, and it was one of several places claiming to be Homer's birthplace. Its church is one of the seven addressed in the Book of Revelation, and its second-century bishop Polycarp, to whom Ignatius of Antioch wrote and whom Irenaeus knew in his youth, was martyred there. The mathematician Theon of Smyrna and the epic poet Quintus Smyrnaeus take their names from the city.

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Narbonne is a town in Occitanie, southern France, near the Mediterranean coast; medieval Jewish sources counted it as part of Provence. Rome founded it in 118 BCE as Narbo Martius, capital of Gallia Narbonensis, and modern scholars incline to place the emperor Carus's birth there. It later passed to the Visigoths, to Andalusian Muslim forces in 719 and to the Franks in 759. In the Middle Ages it was ruled by viscounts and was an archiepiscopal see, held in 1259-1261 by the future Pope Clement IV. Its Jewish community, about 2,000 strong in the twelfth century, was a leading centre of Talmud study and biblical exegesis, home to the Kimhi family, until the French expulsion of 1306.

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Lhasa is the historic capital of central Tibet (now the Tibet Autonomous Region of China), situated in the valley of the Kyichu river at roughly 3,650 metres. From the seventeenth century it was the seat of the Dalai Lamas and the centre of the Tibetan Buddhist (Gelug-led) government, with the Potala Palace as the institutional and ceremonial heart of Tibetan Buddhism; many of the Dalai Lamas resided, taught, and were enthroned there.

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In the nineteenth century, Radin was a small town in the Grodno region of Belarus, lying at the crossroads between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires—a position that shaped its character and fortunes. The landscape was one of forests and gentle waterways, with modest wooden houses clustered around a marketplace where merchants traded grain and timber alongside household goods. Though Radin was home to only a few thousand souls, its Jewish population was substantial and remarkably cohesive, living in close quarters and maintaining their own religious and communal institutions with intensity. The town became a beacon of Jewish learning, drawing students from across Eastern Europe who sought to study with its most celebrated teachers and absorb the spiritual atmosphere that seemed to permeate its streets. The great yeshiva that flourished there became so renowned that Radin's name was whispered with reverence in Jewish communities from Warsaw to Vilna, making this quiet backwater a center of intellectual and spiritual gravity far beyond its size—a place where Torah study was not merely an obligation but the very heartbeat of communal life.

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R. Yaakov Lorberbaum (Netivot HaMishpat) served as rabbi here for 30+ years.

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Sana'a, high in the mountains of western Yemen at about 2,300 metres, is the country's largest city and historic capital. It began as a town of the kingdom of Saba (Islamic sources credit its founding to Shem, son of Noah). Early Islamic sources say its Great Mosque was built around 630 on the orders of the Prophet Muhammad. For long periods it was the seat of the Zaydi imams, and its walled Old City is a World Heritage Site. Jews returning from the Mawza exile settled in a quarter of the city in 1680, and Sana'a was a centre of Yemenite Jewish learning until most of the community emigrated to Israel around 1949-50. Since 2014 it has been held by the Houthi movement.

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Haran (Hebrew Charan) was an ancient city in upper Mesopotamia (its site lies near Harran in southeastern Turkey, on the Syrian border). According to the Torah, it was where Abraham's family settled after leaving Ur, from where Abraham departed for Canaan, and where Jacob later dwelt with his uncle Laban and married Leah and Rachel.

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Brody, a town in eastern Galicia (today in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine), was one of the great centers of Jewish commerce and learning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was renowned for the Brody Kloiz, an elite house of study supported by the community's wealthy merchants where leading Galician scholars gathered; the young Yechezkel Landau (later author of the Noda BiYehudah) studied there, and the Baal Shem Tov's brother-in-law Rabbi Avraham Gershon of Kitov was among its scholars.

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Chicago, in Illinois, United States, was organised as a town in 1833 and grew rapidly, rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871. During the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition the city hosted the first World's Parliament of Religions, where Anagarika Dharmapala represented Theravada Buddhism. The University of Chicago became a major research centre: Enrico Fermi's team achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction there in 1942, and the theologian Paul Tillich taught there from 1962 until his death in 1965. The city's Jewish community founded institutions such as the Hebrew Theological College in 1921, now in suburban Skokie. Chicago is also the birthplace of Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025.

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Basel, on the Rhine in northwestern Switzerland, a bishop's seat since the eighth century, hosted the Council of Basel (1431-1449), and its university, founded in 1460, is the oldest in Switzerland. An early printing centre, the city was home to Erasmus, who died there in 1536; it adopted the Reformation in 1529, and the first edition of Calvin's Institutes was published there in 1536. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Bernoulli family and Leonhard Euler, all natives of the city, made it a centre of mathematics. Its medieval Jewish community was destroyed in the massacre of 1349 during the Black Death; in 1897 Basel hosted the First Zionist Congress, convened by Theodor Herzl, and many later ones.

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Izmir (historically Smyrna), a port city on the Aegean coast of western Anatolia, became one of the foremost Sephardic Jewish centers of the Ottoman Empire after waves of settlement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its rabbinate produced major halachic authorities, including Rabbi Chaim Benveniste, author of the Kenesset HaGedolah, who led the community in the seventeenth century, and Rabbi Chaim Palagi (1788-1868), a prolific posek who became chief rabbi of the city. Izmir was also the birthplace of Shabbetai Tzvi.

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Lisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. Muslim forces took it in 711; in 1147 Afonso Henriques captured it with the help of crusaders; it became the kingdom's capital around 1255. It was the birthplace of Pope John XXI, the only Portuguese pope, and from the late fifteenth century the departure point for most Portuguese voyages of exploration, among them Vasco da Gama's of 1497; Francis Xavier sailed from here for India in 1541. Its important Jewish community, whose members included Isaac Abarbanel, treasurer to King Afonso V, was forcibly converted in 1497, and about 2,000 converts were killed in the Lisbon massacre of 1506. An earthquake devastated the city in 1755.

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Oxford, on the Thames in southern England, grew from a Saxon settlement at a river crossing, the 'ford of the oxen'. Teaching is recorded there by 1096 and the university grew quickly after 1167, making it the oldest in the English-speaking world. In English church history, the Protestant bishops Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were burned there in 1555-56; the Holy Club formed by John and Charles Wesley in 1729 is often called the root of Methodism; and the Oxford Movement of 1833-45, led in part by John Henry Newman, took its name from the city. Its medieval Jewish community ended with the expulsion of England's Jews in 1290. In 1939-43 penicillin was developed into a usable medicine in its laboratories.

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Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, grew up around the College of New Jersey, founded in 1746 and moved to the town ten years later, now Princeton University. George Washington's forces won the Battle of Princeton there in January 1777. The town is also home to Princeton Theological Seminary, the oldest seminary of the Presbyterian Church (USA), and to the Institute for Advanced Study, founded in 1930, whose early members included Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel and which J. Robert Oppenheimer later directed. Jonathan Edwards was briefly president of the college in 1758, and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky later taught at the university.

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Slabodka rose as a distinctive Jewish quarter across the Neman River from Kaunas in nineteenth-century Lithuania, governed by the Russian Empire following the Partitions of Poland. The landscape was modest—low wooden buildings huddled against the water's edge, fields and forests stretching beyond—yet its climate of intellectual rigor made it a beacon for Torah study across Eastern Europe. A relatively small but extraordinarily accomplished community of perhaps five thousand Jews transformed this modest suburb into a powerhouse of Jewish learning through its celebrated yeshiva, which drew gifted students from across the diaspora who came to absorb a distinctly introspective, philosophical approach to rabbinic interpretation. The yeshiva's approach—emphasizing deep psychological insight and moral character development alongside textual mastery—created a new model of Jewish education that rippled through the Jewish world. What made Slabodka remarkable was how this humble river town, despite lacking the prestige or resources of older centers, became known as the "mother of yeshivas," spawning branches and influencing educational institutions wherever its alumni established themselves, fundamentally reshaping how Torah would be taught in the modern era.

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Girona (Gerona), a city in Catalonia, Spain, was the seat of one of the earliest schools of Kabbalah in the thirteenth century. The Geronese circle, including Rabbi Ezra ben Solomon, Rabbi Azriel of Gerona, and Rabbi Jacob ben Sheshet, developed speculative Kabbalah from the teachings of Isaac the Blind, and the city was the birthplace of Nachmanides (Ramban), who absorbed and transmitted this mystical tradition. Much of the terminology of later Kabbalah was first formulated here.

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Metz, in Lorraine in northeastern France, was the Roman town of Divodurum and, from the sixth to eighth centuries, a residence of the Merovingian kings of Austrasia. A largely self-governing city of the Holy Roman Empire from the twelfth century, it passed to France in 1552. Its Gothic cathedral of Saint-Étienne dates from the thirteenth century, and the preacher Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet served there as canon and archdeacon in the 1650s. Jews are recorded from at least 888, and medieval scholars such as Eliezer ben Samuel were linked to the city. Jews were readmitted after the French takeover, and the community grew to nearly 3,000 by 1748, keeping a yeshiva and choosing rabbis such as Jonah Teomim-Fraenkel and Jonathan Eybeschütz (1742-1750).

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A powerful Ionian island once ruled by the tyrant Polycrates—birthplace of Pythagoras, home of the Eleatic monist Melissus, and the island whose son Aristarchus first dared to set the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the cosmos.

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Baltimore, Maryland, became a major center of American Orthodox Torah life with the founding of Yeshivas Ner Yisroel (Ner Israel Rabbinical College) in 1933 by Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchok Ruderman, a disciple of the Alter of Slabodka. It was the first major yeshiva established outside the New York area and grew, under Rabbi Ruderman's leadership, into one of the most influential yeshivas in North America.

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Meknes was the seat of the Alaouite court under Moulay Ismail (1672-1727). Its Jewish community produced the Berdugo dynasty — R. Refael Berdugo (Mishpatim Yesharim, 1747-1821) was its most influential posek.

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Regensburg, on the Danube in Bavaria, southern Germany, began as the Roman fortress Castra Regina, built in 179. Saint Boniface re-established its bishopric in 739, and Albertus Magnus served briefly as its bishop from 1260. The city adopted the Reformation in 1542, and from 1663 to 1806 it was the permanent seat of the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire; Johannes Kepler died there in 1630. Its Jewish community, documented from the late tenth century and the oldest on record in Bavaria, produced scholars such as the liturgical poet Ephraim ben Isaac and Judah ben Samuel he-Hasid (d. 1217), principal author of Sefer Hasidim, until about 800 Jews were expelled in 1519; Jews were readmitted in 1669.

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Babylonia in the exile era refers to Mesopotamia (Iraq) during and after the Babylonian Exile, when the population of the Kingdom of Judah was deported by Nebuchadnezzar following the destruction of the First Temple (586 BCE). The biblical books of Ezekiel and Daniel are set among the exiles in Babylonia, and the Esther narrative unfolds in the Persian period that followed; this community became the seed of the great Babylonian Jewish center.

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Be'er Sheva (Beersheba), in the northern Negev (today a major city in southern Israel), is prominent in the Torah's patriarchal narratives. According to the biblical account, Abraham and Isaac dug wells and made covenants there, and the phrase 'from Dan to Beersheba' marked the traditional southern boundary of the Land of Israel.

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Edirne (Adrianople) was the Ottoman capital before Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and remained one of the empire's largest Sephardic centers after 1492. R. Yosef Karo wrote the bulk of the Beit Yosef here between 1522 and 1554 before relocating to Tzfat. The city's Beit Midrash housed Karo, R. Yosef Taitazak, and R. Yitzchak Caro.

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In the early centuries of the Common Era, Lod was a thriving city in the coastal plain of Roman-controlled Judea, a crucial junction where roads converged and merchants gathered. The Mediterranean climate brought mild winters and hot, dry summers to this bustling commercial hub, where caravans laden with goods moved constantly between the port cities and the inland regions. The Jewish population here was substantial and prosperous—Lod became one of the great centers of rabbinic learning in the Talmudic period, rivaling Jerusalem itself in prestige. The city's marketplace was legendary, its scholars renowned, and its sages engaged in fierce legal debates that shaped Jewish law for generations to come. What made Lod exceptional was its unique character as both a seat of Torah learning and a seat of commerce; scholars and merchants walked the same streets, and the yeshiva stood near the caravanserai. The city remained a vital Jewish center even after the Bar Kokhba revolt devastated the region, testament to its economic importance and the depth of its religious life. Ancient sources record Lod's great study hall as a place where voices of sages echoed through the decades, debating everything from ritual practice to the laws of the marketplace itself.

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Milan, in the Po plain of northern Italy, is the capital of Lombardy and the country's economic centre. As Roman Mediolanum it served as a capital of the Western Roman Empire from the late third century until 402, and in 313 Constantine issued the Edict of Milan there, granting toleration to Christians and others. Its bishop Ambrose (374-397), the city's patron saint, baptised Augustine. Under the Visconti and Sforza dukes it became a leading Renaissance city, where Leonardo da Vinci worked at court and painted the Last Supper; Spanish and then Austrian rule followed. Jews were expelled in the sixteenth century, but a community re-formed in the nineteenth and opened the city's central synagogue in 1892.

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Mount Sinai (Har Sinai, also called Horeb) is, according to the Torah, the mountain in the wilderness where God revealed Himself to Israel and gave the Torah to Moses after the Exodus; the tradition is also honoured in Christianity and Islam. Its original location is uncertain and several sites have been proposed, but since late antiquity it has been identified with Jabal Musa, a 2,285-metre peak in Egypt's southern Sinai Peninsula. Christian monks were living there by the late fourth century, and the Byzantine emperor Justinian built St Catherine's Monastery at its foot in 548–565; it is often described as the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery. Ascetic writers such as John Climacus, author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, lived there.

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Nehardea flourished in Babylonia during the second and third centuries, when the Parthian Empire held sway over the region's vast plains and waterways. Situated on the Euphrates River, the city benefited from its position as a trade crosspost where merchants, goods, and ideas flowed between the Mediterranean world and distant Asia. The Jewish community there was substantial and prosperous, with rights of self-governance that allowed it to flourish in relative security—a marked contrast to the persecutions Jews sometimes faced elsewhere. The yeshiva of Nehardea became renowned throughout Jewish lands as a center of legal reasoning and textual interpretation, drawing students eager to engage in rigorous debate over Jewish law and practice. The city's scholars developed distinctive methods of analyzing rabbinic disputes, earning Nehardea a reputation that would echo through subsequent generations of Jewish learning. The great synagogue, with its towering ark and elaborate decoration, stood as a symbol of the community's confidence and pride, and the sight of scholars gathered at the riverbank, debating points of law, became an enduring image of intellectual vigor in the Jewish Babylonian diaspora.

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Beneath Roman rule and perched on a commanding hill in lower Galilee, Tzippori thrived as one of the wealthiest and most Hellenized cities in the Jewish homeland during the second century. The city's Mediterranean climate and fertile surroundings supported olive groves and vineyards that fed both local markets and distant trade routes; its position on major roads made it a natural crossroads for merchants and travelers. The Jewish community here was prosperous and numerous, with a reputation for Greek sophistication that sometimes troubled more conservative sages—the city's intellectual culture blended Torah learning with Greco-Roman arts in ways that sparked ongoing debate about authenticity and continuity. Tzippori became increasingly important as a center of Jewish scholarship and communal authority, particularly as the Temple lay in ruins and the Sanhedrin sought to preserve halakhic tradition through oral transmission and debate. The city's grand Roman theater, with its tiered stone seats overlooking the valley, stood as an enduring symbol of the cultural tensions that defined Jewish life here: a place where sages wrestled with how to keep Torah alive in a world of marble colonnades and pagan spectacle, all while maintaining the bonds of a tight-knit, learning-focused Jewish society amid the bustle of cosmopolitan urban life.

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Ungvar (today Uzhhorod, in the Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine, historically Hungary) was a major center of Carpathian Jewry with an important yeshiva and rabbinate. Rabbi Meir Eisenstädter (the Maharam Ash) led its community, and Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried, author of the widely used Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, served there as a dayan and composed his famous abridged code in the town.

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Chang'an, modern Xi'an in Shaanxi province, China, was the capital of the Sui and Tang dynasties and one of the great Buddhist translation and study centres of medieval East Asia. The translator Kumārajīva was brought there in 401 to head an imperial translation bureau; the pilgrim Xuanzang returned there from India to translate the texts he had gathered; and Kūkai studied esoteric Buddhism in the city before founding the Japanese Shingon school.

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Syracuse is a city on the southeastern coast of Sicily, Italy. Founded by colonists from Corinth around 733 BCE it became one of the largest cities of the Greek world, resisting both Athens and Carthage. Plato visited three times, hoping to influence its rulers Dionysius I and II, and the comic poet Epicharmus and the pastoral poet Theocritus are associated with it. The mathematician Archimedes was killed when Rome took the city in 212 BCE, after which it became the capital of Roman Sicily. According to the Book of Acts, Paul stayed there for three days, and its early Christian catacombs survive. It was briefly the Byzantine capital (663-668) before the Arab conquest of 878.

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Aleppo (Halab), in northwestern Syria, is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with settlement possibly reaching back to the sixth millennium BCE. From 944 it was the seat of the Hamdanid emirate of Sayf al-Dawla, whose court drew the poet al-Mutanabbi and the philosopher al-Farabi. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks it gained new madrasas and remained a centre of Islamic scholarship and trade, and in 1516 it passed to the Ottomans, under whom it was one of the empire's chief commercial cities. Its long-established Jewish community kept the Aleppo Codex, a tenth-century Hebrew Bible manuscript, for some six centuries, until the synagogue holding it was burned in the 1947 riots; the surviving portion is now in Jerusalem.

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Medieval Iberian Peninsula; home to many Rishonim including Nahmanides, Ran, Rashba, and Yosef ibn Habib.

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Bologna, the Roman Bononia, is the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region in north-central Italy. Its university, traditionally dated to 1088, is often called the oldest in continuous operation; Nicolaus Copernicus studied there, and later members of its faculty included Ulisse Aldrovandi, Bonaventura Cavalieri and Maria Gaetana Agnesi. The city was under papal rule for most of the period from 1506 until 1860, when it joined the Kingdom of Italy. Its religious history includes the Dominican friary of San Domenico, which Girolamo Savonarola entered in 1475, and a medieval and Renaissance Jewish community that was an early centre of Hebrew printing; the Torah commentator Ovadiah Sforno founded a yeshiva in Bologna and died there around 1550.

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Castile is a historic region of central Spain. It began as a county of the Kingdom of León, became a kingdom in the eleventh century, and was united with León in 1230 under Ferdinand III, forming the Crown of Castile, which led the Christian conquest of much of Iberia. The 1469 marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon joined the two crowns, laying the basis of the Spanish monarchy. Castile's large medieval Jewish communities produced major scholars, including kabbalists such as Joseph Gikatilla and Moses de León, whom most modern scholars regard as the main author of the Zohar; Jews who would not convert were expelled in 1492. Map coordinates are placed at Madrid as a regional centroid.

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Seat of the Karliner-Stoliner Hasidic dynasty; Aaron the Great of Karlin and Aaron II (Beit Aharon).

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Nuremberg, in Franconia, Bavaria, southern Germany, grew around an imperial castle first mentioned in 1050 and became a Free Imperial City, a frequent seat of imperial diets and keeper of the imperial regalia. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance it was a centre of art, publishing and science, where the astronomer Regiomontanus settled in 1471. Its medieval Jewish community suffered the Rintfleisch massacre of 1298, in which the halakhist Mordechai ben Hillel was killed, and a pogrom in 1349; in the fifteenth century Rabbi Jacob Weil served there and established a yeshiva. The city became Lutheran during the Reformation. In the twentieth century it hosted the Nazi rallies and, after the Second World War, the Nuremberg trials.

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Kalisz, a city in central Poland (Greater Poland), is home to one of the oldest documented Jewish communities in the country. In 1264 Duke Bolesław the Pious of Greater Poland issued the Statute of Kalisz, a charter granting the Jews legal protections and communal autonomy that became the foundation of Jewish rights across medieval Poland. The community remained a long-established center of Polish Jewish life into the modern period.

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Akko in the medieval and early modern Galilee was a crossroads of empires and faiths, shifting between Crusader, Muslim, and Ottoman rule, yet always humming with commerce and Jewish vitality. Perched on the Levantine coast where green hills meet blue sea, the city's harbor made it one of the Mediterranean's most coveted ports—a place where spice merchants, pilgrims, and scholars brushed shoulders in narrow stone-paved streets. The Jewish community there, never large but intellectually luminous, became a center of mystical and legal learning that drew rabbis from across Europe and the Islamic world. After the Crusaders were expelled in the late thirteenth century and Ottoman rule stabilized the region centuries later, Akko evolved into a haven for Jewish refugees fleeing Spanish expulsion and European persecution, making it a beacon of Kabbalistic study and Talmudic debate. The city's great synagogues, built and rebuilt across generations, stood as monuments to Jewish resilience; here, in this ancient port where the very stones held memories of prophets and kings, scholars reconciled the rational and mystical strands of Judaism, their learning reflecting Akko's own layered identity—a place where East and West, tradition and innovation, had always met.

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Beit Lechem (Bethlehem), a town in the Judean Hills south of Jerusalem, appears throughout the Tanach. According to the Torah, the matriarch Rachel died and was buried on the road to Bethlehem; it was the setting of the Book of Ruth, and the Book of Samuel records it as the home and birthplace of King David.

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Beth-El ('House of God') was a town in the hill country north of Jerusalem (its site lies near modern Beitin in the West Bank). In the Torah it is the place where Jacob dreamed of the ladder reaching to heaven and named the site; it later served as an important cultic center in the period of the Israelite kingdoms.

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Edinburgh has been recognised as Scotland's capital since at least the fifteenth century and is today the seat of the devolved Scottish Parliament. The city was central to the Scottish Reformation of the sixteenth century: John Knox served as minister of St Giles' and led the movement from Edinburgh, dying there in 1572. Its university grew from a town college founded under a royal charter of James VI in 1582. In the second half of the eighteenth century Edinburgh was a leading centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, home to thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith, and its intellectual reputation and neoclassical architecture earned it the nickname 'Athens of the North' in the early nineteenth century.

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Florence is the capital of Tuscany in central Italy. A leading city of the Italian Renaissance under the Medici, it hosted the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1439), which briefly reunited the Latin and Greek churches, was the city of the Dominican friar Savonarola, and produced several Medici popes. Galileo became court mathematician and philosopher to the Medici grand duke in 1610, spent his last years under house arrest at Arcetri on the city's edge, and is buried in Santa Croce. Its Jewish community was confined to a ghetto created by Cosimo I de' Medici in 1571 until emancipation in 1848, and its Great Synagogue was completed in 1882.

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Kaunas (Yiddish Kovno), the second city of Lithuania, was a major center of Jewish religious and cultural life. Rabbi Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor served as its chief rabbi from 1864 until his death in 1896, becoming one of the foremost halachic authorities of his era; the Kovno Kollel was named for him, and its suburb of Slobodka housed the famous Knesses Yisrael Mussar yeshiva. Kaunas was also the birthplace of the Talmud scholar Louis Ginzberg.

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Kyiv (Kiev), on the Dnieper, is the capital of Ukraine. It was the capital of Kievan Rus, whose rulers adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the late tenth century, and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves), founded in the eleventh century, became a major Orthodox pilgrimage centre. Jews are recorded there from the tenth-century Kievan Letter, and the twelfth-century scholar Moses of Kiev corresponded with the Babylonian academy. Under the Russian Empire Jews were at times barred from the city. In the nineteenth century the community nonetheless grew into a major economic and educational centre, and it suffered pogroms in 1881 and 1905. In 1941 the Nazis murdered most of the city's remaining Jews at Babyn Yar.

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Home of the Kotzker Rebbe (R. Menachem Mendel Morgensztern, 1787-1859), founder of the radical-truth-seeking Kotzk Hasidic dynasty.

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Mahoza, a thriving commercial hub in Babylonia during the third and fourth centuries, lay along the Tigris River in the heart of the Sassanid Persian Empire under the Shahanshah kings. The city's location made it a natural crossroads for merchant caravans traveling between the Persian Gulf and northern Mesopotamia, and its climate—hot, arid summers tempered by the river's life-giving waters—supported both agriculture and trade. The Jewish community in Mahoza was substantial and prosperous, comprising merchants, landowners, and scholars who enjoyed considerable autonomy under Sassanid rule, which generally permitted Jewish self-governance in legal and religious matters. The city became a renowned center of Torah study, attracting students and scholars from across the Diaspora who came to debate Talmudic law in its academies. The bustling riverfront markets, where goods from India and China mingled with local produce and craftwork, formed the backdrop for a Jewish community that balanced commercial success with intense intellectual life, making Mahoza a beacon of learning in Babylonian Judaism during a period when the oral traditions were being systematically compiled and refined.

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Under the Almohad dynasty, which ruled Morocco with an iron grip devoted to strict Islamic orthodoxy, Marrakech sprawled across the arid plains of central Morocco—a jeweled oasis ringed by snow-capped Atlas Mountains, its terracotta walls glowing rose-gold at sunset. The city's Jewish community, though restricted and taxed heavily as dhimmis (protected but subordinate minorities), numbered in the thousands and formed a vital mercantile class, controlling much of the trade in spices, leather, and cloth that flowed through the medina's labyrinthine souks. Despite their precarious legal status, Moroccan Jews cultivated rich traditions of Hebrew learning and mysticism, with Marrakech serving as a notable center for both Talmudic study and Kabbalah. The city's mellah—the Jewish quarter—pulsed with its own life: kosher butchers and bakers, synagogues where Shabbat prayers echoed in Judeo-Arabic, and scholarly circles where the tensions between faith and survival in an uncertain world kindled serious Torah interpretation. The very geography of Marrakech reinforced its insularity: surrounded by desert and mountains, cut off from European shores, it became a crucible where Moroccan Jewish identity deepened, distinct from both Ashkenazi traditions and the intellectual world of medieval Spain just across the sea.

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Shanghai, on China's east coast, is the country's most populous city and a direct-administered municipality. Under the Ming it was the home of the scholar-official Xu Guangqi, who became a Catholic and worked with Matteo Ricci on the first Chinese translation of part of Euclid. Opened as a treaty port in 1842, it grew into a cosmopolitan trading city with foreign settlements. During the Second World War it took in close to 20,000 Jewish refugees from Central Europe, including the Mir Yeshiva, which arrived from Kobe, Japan, in 1941 and continued its studies in the Hongkou district, where the Japanese confined stateless refugees from 1943. The physicist Tsung-Dao Lee was born here in 1926.

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Shklov, a town on the Dnieper in eastern Belarus, was a major Jewish commercial center in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an important yeshiva and one of the largest Hebrew printing operations in the Russian Empire; it was also a center of the early Haskalah. Rabbi Israel of Shklov, a leading disciple of the Vilna Gaon, led the Perushim who emigrated to the Land of Israel, departing from Shklov.

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In the heart of medieval Navarre, nestled along the Ebro River in northern Spain, Tudela flourished as a cosmopolitan crossroads under Christian rule in the twelfth century. The city sat at the intersection of Islamic and Christian worlds—a place where commerce, scholarship, and faith mingled in the narrow streets of its busy marketplace. Tudela's Jewish quarter was among the most vibrant in Christian Spain, home to several hundred families whose legal status, while subject to royal authority, afforded them remarkable intellectual freedom. Here, Hebrew grammarians and biblical commentators worked alongside merchants and physicians, creating a distinctive culture of learning that influenced Jewish scholarship across the Mediterranean. The community's prosperity and scholarly achievement rested partly on its commercial vitality; Tudela was a crucial stopping point on trade routes connecting the Atlantic ports to the Levant, and Jewish traders played a central role in this economy. The yeshiva and synagogue that anchored the quarter drew students and visitors seeking instruction in Torah interpretation and Hebrew linguistics, making Tudela a beacon for Jewish intellectual life in Christian lands during an era when many Jewish centers in Islamic Spain were beginning their slow decline.

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Würzburg is a city on the Main river in Franconia, Bavaria, southern Germany. Saint Boniface founded its bishopric in 742, and its prince-bishops ruled the region for centuries, building the Baroque Würzburg Residence, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its university was founded in 1402 and refounded in 1582; there, in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays. The medieval Jewish community was a seat of Talmudic study, where Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, author of the Or Zarua, taught the young Meir of Rothenburg, though it suffered massacres in 1147 and 1298. In the nineteenth century Seligman Baer Bamberger, the 'Würzburger Rav', served as rabbi from 1840 to 1878 and was a leading figure of German Orthodoxy.

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Zurich, on Lake Zurich in northern Switzerland, is the country's largest city. It began as the Roman customs post of Turicum, grew around the Fraumünster abbey founded in 853, and joined the Swiss Confederation in 1351. From 1519 Huldrych Zwingli led the Swiss Reformation from the Grossmünster, and after his death Heinrich Bullinger headed the Reformed church there; the Zurich Bible was printed in 1531. Jews are recorded from 1273 but were expelled in 1423, and a new community formed after equal rights were granted in 1862. The federal polytechnic, ETH Zurich, founded in 1854, counts Albert Einstein among its alumni, and the city is today a major financial centre.

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One of the oldest cities of Sumer (modern Warka, southern Iraq), sacred to Inanna and Anu, where some of the earliest known writing was found (c. 3300-3000 BCE). The Sumerian King List and later epics name Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh among its early kings; these figures are known through legend and later tradition. Uruk remained a temple city into the Seleucid period, and many late scholarly tablets were excavated here; for a tablet, the pin marks where it was found.

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Babylon, whose ruins lie at modern Hillah in Iraq, about 85 km south of Baghdad, was the great city on the Euphrates that gave its name to Babylonia. Hammurabi made it his capital, and it was capital again under the Neo-Babylonian kings, when Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it. After his capture of Jerusalem in 587 BCE many Judeans were deported there, the exile remembered in the Hebrew Bible, and Babylonia remained a major centre of Jewish life for centuries. Cyrus of Persia took the city in 539 BCE. In the early third century BCE the priest Berossus wrote a Greek history of Babylonia. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the pin marks the excavated city.

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Kairouan, in central Tunisia, was founded around 670 by the Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi and grew around its Great Mosque into one of the chief centres of Islamic learning in North Africa. It was the capital of the Aghlabids (800-909); the Fatimids, who overthrew them, moved their capital elsewhere, and the Zirids later revived the city until the Banu Hilal sacked it in 1057. Kairouan also had a major Jewish community, a centre of Talmudic scholarship into the eleventh century, where Chananel ben Chushiel and Nissim ben Jacob led the academy and bridged the late Geonim and the early Rishonim. The physician Ibn al-Jazzar also worked there. Its old city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Ephesus was an ancient Greek city on the Ionian coast, near modern Selçuk in western Turkey, famed for the nearby Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. A member of the Ionian League and home of the philosopher Heraclitus, it came under Roman control in 129 BCE. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul spent about three years there, first teaching in the city's synagogue; Ephesus received one of the Pauline letters, is among the seven churches addressed in the Book of Revelation, and may be where the Gospel of John was written. It hosted Christian councils in the 5th century, among them the Council of Ephesus in 431.

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The Kashmir Valley, in the present-day Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, is a Himalayan basin drained by the Jhelum River and centred on Srinagar. From roughly the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the homeland of the non-dual Shaiva tradition known as Kashmir Shaivism, whose exegetes—among them Somanānda, Utpaladeva, Kṣemarāja, and the commentator Jayaratha—were active here.

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Naples, capital of the Campania region in southern Italy, began as a Greek settlement, refounded as Neapolis in the sixth century BCE. Tradition places Virgil's tomb in the city; papyri of the Epicurean Philodemus, recovered from the Villa of the Papyri at nearby Herculaneum, are kept in its National Library. Frederick II founded its university in 1224, where Thomas Aquinas studied and later taught. From the late thirteenth century until 1816 it was capital of the Kingdom of Naples and an important Catholic see. Its Jewish community dates back to Roman times; after the 1492 expulsion from Spain, Isaac Abarbanel served its king until the French took the city in 1495, and Jews had left Naples by 1541.

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Yangon (formerly Rangoon) is the largest city of Myanmar (Burma), in the country's south near the Andaman coast. In the twentieth century it became a hub of the modern Burmese vipassanā (insight meditation) revival: the prime minister U Nu invited Mahāsi Sayādaw to lead the meditation centre established there (the Mahāsi Sāsana Yeiktha) in 1947, from which the 'Mahasi method' spread internationally.

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Rhodes is the largest of the Dodecanese islands of Greece, in the southeastern Aegean off the coast of Asia Minor. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods it was a renowned centre of rhetoric, philosophy and astronomy: the Stoic Panaetius was a native, the Stoic Posidonius ran his school there, and the astronomers Hipparchus and Geminus worked on the island. Herod the Great met Octavian at Rhodes around 30 BCE and was confirmed as king of Judea. The island was later held by the Knights Hospitaller, the Ottomans and Italy before joining Greece in 1947. Its ancient Jewish community built the Kahal Shalom synagogue in 1577, the oldest in Greece; most of the community was deported and killed under German occupation.

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The San Francisco Zen Center, in San Francisco, California, is one of the largest Sōtō Zen organisations outside Japan. It was established in 1962 by the Japanese Sōtō priest Shunryū Suzuki and his American students; Suzuki's talks there became the basis of the influential book 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.'

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Seat of Sochatchover Hasidic dynasty; Shem MiShmuel composed here.

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Cluj (German Klausenburg, Hungarian Kolozsvár), the principal city of Transylvania (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), had a large Jewish community. Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner served as its chief rabbi from 1877 to 1923, and it later gave its name to the Sanz-Klausenburg chasidic dynasty, founded there by Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam, a great-grandson of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz.

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Manchester, a city in northwestern England, grew from the Roman fort of Mamucium into what is often called the world's first industrialised city, the cotton centre nicknamed Cottonopolis. It became a major centre of science: John Dalton formulated his atomic theory while teaching there in 1803, and Ernest Rutherford's work at the university in the 1910s established the atomic nucleus. Its Jewish community began with about fourteen families who settled in 1786, grew greatly with immigrants fleeing the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, and is now the second-largest in Britain after London, with many synagogues, yeshivot and communal institutions.

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Lithuanian-Belarusian shtetl where the Aruch HaShulchan (R. Yechiel Michel Epstein) served as rabbi for ~30 years; also home to the Novardok branch of the Mussar movement.

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Petach Tikvah, a city in central Israel east of Tel Aviv, was the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement in the Land of Israel, founded in 1878 by pioneers from Jerusalem. Reconstituted by First Aliyah immigrants in 1882, it became known as Em HaMoshavot ('Mother of the Settlements') and grew into a major city.

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Founding town of the Belz Hasidic dynasty (Sar Shalom of Belz, R. Yehoshua Rokeach).

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Corinth, on the isthmus linking the Peloponnese to mainland Greece, was a wealthy commercial polis and host of the Isthmian Games, and its ancient name survives in modern Korinthos. In the archaic period it was ruled by the tyrant Periander, counted among the Seven Sages. The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope spent much of his later life there and, according to tradition, met Alexander the Great in the city. Rome destroyed Corinth in 146 BCE and Julius Caesar refounded it as a colony in 44 BCE. According to the Acts of the Apostles, Paul lived there for eighteen months, and his letters to the church at Corinth form part of the New Testament.

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Fürth, a city in Franconia (Bavaria), southern Germany, was for centuries the foremost center of Jewish religious life in the region, earning the name 'the Franconian Jerusalem.' From the seventeenth century it housed a renowned yeshiva and was one of the leading centers of Hebrew printing in Germany, with numerous communal institutions including an early Jewish hospital.

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Kobe, a port city in Japan, became an unexpected wartime refuge for Eastern European Jewry. In 1940-1941, several hundred refugees -- including students and faculty of the Mir Yeshiva -- escaped Lithuania on transit visas issued by the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara, reaching Kobe via the Pacific, where the yeshiva briefly re-established itself before relocating to Shanghai after the outbreak of the Pacific War. The Mir was the only major European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact.

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Kolkata (Calcutta), capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, grew from the English East India Company's settlement of 1690 and served as the de facto capital of British India until 1911. Home of the University of Calcutta, the first modern university in South Asia, it was a hub of the Bengal Renaissance. From 1798 Jews from Aleppo and then Baghdad settled in the city and built several synagogues; the community peaked at over 6,000 during the Second World War before emigrating. The city was also an early centre of the modern Buddhist revival: the Maha Bodhi Society moved its offices there in 1892 and remains there, and the laywoman Dipa Ma taught insight meditation in Calcutta from 1967.

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Leiden is a city in the province of South Holland in the western Netherlands. After it withstood a Spanish siege in 1574 during the Dutch Revolt, William of Orange founded Leiden University there in 1575. It is the oldest university in the country, and by the 1640s it was the largest Protestant university. Its scholars included the theologian Jacobus Arminius, professor from 1603 until his death in 1609, whose views on predestination gave rise to the Remonstrant controversy. Leiden also became a centre of science and medicine, with one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe and modern medical teaching begun by Herman Boerhaave in the early eighteenth century.

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Lomza housed the renowned Lomza Yeshiva, founded in 1883 by R. Eliezer Shulevitz (Lev Eliezer), which trained generations of Polish-Litvish rabbis. Branches were established in Petach Tikvah (1926) and the Lomza Yeshiva of Petach Tikvah continues to this day.

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Marburg is a university town in Hesse, central Germany. Its university, founded in 1527 by Landgrave Philip I of Hesse, is the oldest Protestant university still operating, and in 1529 Philip brought Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli together there for the Marburg Colloquy. The Elisabethkirche is among the earliest purely Gothic churches north of the Alps outside France. The university's scholars have included the natural scientists Robert Bunsen and Denis Papin and the theologian Rudolf Bultmann; the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, a founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, taught there from 1873. Emil von Behring, the first Nobel laureate in medicine, founded the Behring works in the town.

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Nitra, a city in western Slovakia, was the seat of the Nitra yeshiva, led by Rabbi Shmuel Dovid Ungar and his son-in-law Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl. It was the last functioning yeshiva in German-occupied Europe during the Holocaust; Weissmandl was a central figure in wartime rescue efforts, and the yeshiva was later re-established in the United States.

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Samaria (Shomron) was the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel, established by King Omri in the ninth century BCE; its site lies in the hill country north of Shechem (in the northern West Bank). In the biblical narrative it was the setting for the activity of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, who confronted the kings of Israel.

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Ostroh (Ostrog), a town in Volhynia (today in Rivne Oblast, western Ukraine), was one of the oldest and most important Jewish communities of Volhynia and a representative at the Council of Four Lands. From the early sixteenth century it housed a celebrated yeshiva; its most renowned head was Rabbi Shmuel Eliezer Eidels (the Maharsha), author of the standard Chiddushei Halachot va-Aggadot on the Talmud, who served as av beit din and rosh yeshiva there for some seventeen years until his death in 1631.

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Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, became home to a Sephardic Jewish community after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, established under Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century. For centuries it was one of the principal Sephardic communities of the Balkans, with a Ladino-speaking culture; the famed medieval Sarajevo Haggadah, carried from Spain, is preserved there.

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Shechem, in the hill country of Samaria (near modern Nablus in the West Bank), is among the first places named in the Torah's account of the patriarchs: Abraham built an altar there upon entering Canaan, and Jacob purchased a parcel of land nearby. It later became a significant city in the period of the Israelite tribes.

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Sighet (Sighetu Marmației), a town in the Maramureș region of northern Romania (historically Hungary), was the seat of the Sighet chasidic dynasty of the Teitelbaum family. Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum (the Yetev Lev) became its rabbi in 1858; the dynasty's later scion Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum went on to found the Satmar community.

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Tykocin (Yiddish Tiktin), a town in the Podlasie region of northeastern Poland, was for centuries the leading Jewish community of Podlasie. Jews settled there from 1522, and its imposing fortified synagogue, built in 1642, was among the largest in the country; the community supported a notable rabbinate and produced rabbis and scholars known by the surname Tiktiner.

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Zamość, a Renaissance planned town in southeastern Poland (Lublin region), had a Jewish community uniquely founded in 1588 by Sephardi Jews invited by the town's founder, Jan Zamoyski; it built a notable late-Renaissance synagogue and grew into a major Polish Jewish community. Rabbi Shlomo Kluger, later the renowned Maggid and posek of Brody, grew up in Zamość.

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Kyoto was the imperial capital of Japan for over a thousand years and a principal centre of Japanese Buddhism, home to head temples of many schools. The Sōtō Zen founder Dōgen was born in Kyoto in 1200 and, after returning from China, established his first temple (Kōshō-ji) on its outskirts before moving to Echizen to found Eihei-ji.

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Troyes, in Champagne in northeastern France, is the capital of the Aube department. From the late ninth century it was the capital of the counts of Champagne, and its medieval fairs drew merchants from across Christendom. A church council held there in 1129 recognised the Knights Templar, and Pope Urban IV, a cobbler's son from the city, began its Gothic Basilica of Saint-Urbain in 1262. Troyes was also the home of Rashi (1040–1105), who studied in the Rhineland and returned to lead the local rabbinic court and teach; his grandsons, including Rashbam and Rabbeinu Tam, were among the most prolific of the Tosafists.

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Perpignan, the chief town of Roussillon (today in southern France, then part of the Crown of Aragon/Principality of Catalonia), had a significant medieval Jewish community attested from the late twelfth century. It was the birthplace of Rabbi Menachem HaMeiri (1249-1306), author of the Beit HaBechirah, one of the great medieval Talmud commentaries, and a notable center of Catalan-Provençal Jewish scholarship.

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Seville, on the Guadalquivir River in southwestern Spain, is the capital of Andalusia. Known to the Romans as Hispalis, it was the see of Archbishop Isidore (c. 600-636), the encyclopedist of Visigothic Spain. After the Muslim conquest it was called Ishbiliya; it flourished as a centre of Andalusi learning and in the twelfth century became a seat of the Almohad state, whose minaret survives as the Giralda, and Ibn Rushd served as a judge there. Castile captured the city in 1248. Its large Jewish community was devastated by the 1391 massacres, which began in Seville under the agitation of Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez. From 1503 the Casa de Contratacion gave Seville a monopoly on trade with the Americas.

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Apamea on the Orontes, in northwestern Syria near modern Qalaat al-Madiq, was a major Hellenistic city founded by the Seleucids. It was a significant philosophical center: the Stoic Posidonius and the Neopythagorean/Middle Platonist Numenius were both natives, and the Neoplatonist Iamblichus founded his influential school there in the early fourth century CE.

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A wealthy Greek colony on the Thracian coast that—despite a reputation for foolish citizens—produced two of antiquity's sharpest minds: the atomist Democritus and the sophist Protagoras.

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Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in California, United States, named after the philosopher George Berkeley. It grew up around the University of California, created in 1868, which became a leading centre of physics. Ernest Lawrence founded his cyclotron laboratory there in 1931, and the element berkelium is named after the university. In the 1960s the campus was the scene of the Free Speech Movement. Berkeley was also an early base of Tibetan Buddhism in America: the Nyingma teacher Tarthang Tulku established the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center there in 1969 and later moved his Dharma Publishing house to the area.

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Tyre (Arabic Sur) is a city on the coast of southern Lebanon and was one of the chief ports of ancient Phoenicia; the Hebrew Bible describes its king Hiram supplying cedar for Solomon's Temple. Alexander the Great took it in 332 BCE after building a causeway to the island city. Under Rome it produced Greek writers such as the geographer Marinus, the orator Maximus and probably the Neoplatonist Porphyry. It became a Christian see whose cathedral was dedicated around 315 with a sermon by Eusebius, and Origen is said to have died there. Arab forces took Tyre in 640; it fell to the Crusaders in 1124 and to the Mamluks in 1291.

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Ubon Ratchathani is a province and city in the Isan (northeastern) region of Thailand, near the Lao and Cambodian borders. It is a heartland of the Thai Forest Tradition (kammaṭṭhāna): Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta, regarded with his teacher Ajahn Sao as the tradition's founder, was born in the province, and Ajahn Chah later established his forest monastery Wat Nong Pah Pong here.

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Algiers (al-Jaza'ir), the capital of Algeria, is a Mediterranean port that began as a Phoenician trading post and was the Roman town of Icosium. Its Islamic-era city was founded in the 10th century by the Zirid ruler Buluggin ibn Ziri. From 1516 it was the capital of the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, then of French Algeria after the invasion of 1830, and it has been the capital of independent Algeria since 1962. After the anti-Jewish violence in Spain and the Balearic Islands in 1391, refugee rabbis including Isaac ben Sheshet and Simeon ben Zemah Duran settled there and led its Jewish community; most Algerian Jews left for France or Israel around 1962.

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Buda, on the west bank of the Danube (today part of Budapest, Hungary), was the seat of Hungary's oldest organized Jewish community, with roots in the thirteenth century. During the Ottoman occupation of Hungary (1526-1686) its community included both Ashkenazi and Sephardi congregations. In the modern era the united city of Budapest became the largest Jewish center in Hungary.

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Jaffa (Yafo), an ancient Mediterranean port (today part of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel), had a growing Jewish community in the late Ottoman period as a gateway for immigration to the Land of Israel. From 1904 Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook served as rav of Jaffa and its surrounding new agricultural settlements, a formative chapter before he became Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel.

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Łódź, a major industrial city in central Poland, was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland, second only to Warsaw, growing rapidly with the textile industry through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the eve of World War II its Jewish population exceeded 200,000. It was the birthplace of the kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag (the Baal HaSulam).

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Byzantium was a Greek colony settled by Megara around 657 BCE on the European shore of the Bosporus, on the site of the later Constantinople and modern Istanbul, Turkey. Xenophon and the surviving Ten Thousand passed through it near the end of their march, as he records in the Anabasis. Constantine refounded the city as Constantinople in 330, and it was the Byzantine capital until the Ottoman conquest of 1453. Jews lived there through the Byzantine centuries, and after the 1492 expulsion from Spain the Ottoman city received Sephardi refugees, among them the brothers David and Samuel ibn Nahmias, who set up a Hebrew press there in 1493, the first printing press in the Ottoman Empire.

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Modern Casablanca's Jewish community swelled from a few hundred in 1900 to over 80,000 by 1950 — Morocco's largest. R. Shalom Mashash served as chief rabbi here before being called to Jerusalem in 1978.

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Chicago, in the U.S. state of Illinois, was incorporated as a town in 1833 and grew into one of the largest cities in the United States. Jews began arriving soon afterwards: German Jewish immigrants founded the city's first congregation, Kehilath Anshe Mayriv, in 1847, and from the 1870s a larger wave from Eastern Europe settled around Maxwell Street on the Near West Side. By 1930 the community numbered about 275,000, and West Rogers Park is today the hub of the city's Orthodox life. In 1893, during the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago hosted the World's Parliament of Religions, where Swami Vivekananda's opening-day address made Vedanta known to a wide Western audience; the Reform rabbi Kaufmann Kohler was among the keynote speakers.

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Eisenstadt (Hungarian Kismarton), a town in the Burgenland region (today in eastern Austria), was the leading community of the Sheva Kehillot ('Seven Communities') of Jews who settled under the protection of the Esterházy princes after the 1670 expulsion from Vienna. Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt (author of Panim Me'irot) served as its rabbi from 1714, and in the nineteenth century Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer led a modern yeshiva there.

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Fürth, a city in Franconia (Bavaria), southern Germany, was for centuries the foremost center of Jewish religious life in the region, known as 'the Franconian Jerusalem.' From the seventeenth century it housed a renowned yeshiva and was one of the leading centers of Hebrew printing in Germany.

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Gaza is a city on the Mediterranean coast in the Gaza Strip; Egyptian records mention it from the 15th century BCE. A Philistine city, it fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and later came under Rome. Christianity spread there from the mid-3rd century, and Bishop Porphyry hastened conversion around 400; the church historian Sozomen came from a nearby village. Arab forces under Amr ibn al-As took Gaza in the 630s, and the jurist al-Shafi'i was born there in 767. Jews lived there for long periods: Israel Najara served as a rabbi there in his last years, and Nathan of Gaza lived there from 1663.

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Hamburg, on the Elbe estuary in northern Germany, is the country's second-largest city and one of its three city-states. It became an archbishopric under the missionary Ansgar in the 830s, and the deposed Pope Benedict V died there in exile in 965. It later grew into a leading Hanseatic port, and the Bible translator William Tyndale probably stopped there after leaving England in 1524. Portuguese Sephardic Jews settled from the late 16th century and Ashkenazim formed a community in the 1660s; Jacob Sasportas served as a rabbi there from 1665 to 1673, Samson Raphael Hirsch was born there in 1808, and the Reform Hamburg Temple was founded in 1818. The physicist Heinrich Hertz was born in Hamburg in 1857.

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Lampsacus was a Greek city on the eastern shore of the Hellespont (Dardanelles), in modern northwestern Turkey near Lapseki. The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras spent his final years and died there. It was also a stronghold of Epicureanism: Epicurus taught at Lampsacus before moving to Athens, and his close associate Metrodorus was a native of the city. The Peripatetic Strato of Lampsacus, later head of Aristotle's Lyceum, was also born there.

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Marseille is a Mediterranean port in Provence, southern France, and the country's second-largest city. Greek settlers from Phocaea founded it as Massalia around 600 BCE, and it kept its independence until a Roman siege in 49 BCE. In late antiquity it was a centre of Gallic monasticism: John Cassian founded the abbey of Saint-Victor there around 415, and the priest and writer Salvian spent his later years in the city. The medieval town had a Jewish community, recorded by the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela; the philosopher-translator Samuel ibn Tibbon, known for his Hebrew version of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, settled there and died around 1230. Its Jewish community today is one of Europe's largest.

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Mattersdorf (today Mattersburg, in Burgenland, eastern Austria) was one of the Sheva Kehillot ('Seven Communities') under Esterházy protection and a noted center of Torah study. Among the authorities associated with its yeshiva and rabbinate was Rabbi Shimon Sofer, a son of the Chatam Sofer; the name 'Mattersdorf' was later given to a Jerusalem neighborhood by its survivors.

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Salant (Lithuanian Salantai), a small town in northwestern Lithuania, is closely tied to the origins of the Mussar movement. It was the home of Rabbi Yosef Zundel of Salant, a disciple of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, who was the principal teacher of Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin; the latter came to be known as 'Salanter' after the town where he first achieved renown.

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Sátoraljaújhely (Yiddish Ihel), in northeast Hungary, was the seat of R. Moshe Teitelbaum (Yismach Moshe, 1759-1841) and his descendants — including the early Satmar Teitelbaum dynasty before its move to Satmar (Satu Mare). R. Aharon Roth (Reb Arele) led his early Hasidic following here.

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Tarsus, on the Cydnus River in Cilicia (southern Turkey), is one of Anatolia's oldest cities. Under the Persians it was the seat of the local Cilician rulers, and under Rome (from the 60s BCE) the capital of the province of Cilicia and a renowned centre of Greek learning, home of the Stoic Athenodorus, tutor of Augustus. The Book of Acts names it as the apostle Paul's home city. After the Arab conquests it became the chief Abbasid fortress on the Byzantine frontier (rebuilt 787-788) until Byzantium retook it in 965; it was later ruled by Armenian, Mamluk and Ottoman powers.

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Tiktin is the Yiddish name for Tykocin, a town in the Podlasie region of northeastern Poland and for centuries the leading Jewish community of the area. Jews settled there from 1522, and its large fortified synagogue, completed in 1642, was among the most impressive in Poland.

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Turin, the capital of Piedmont in northwestern Italy, grew from the Roman colony of Augusta Taurinorum. Its Christian history includes Maximus, remembered as its first bishop around 400, whose sermons survive in large number. Turin became the capital of the Duchy of Savoy in 1563, later of the Kingdom of Sardinia, and from 1861 to 1865 served as the first capital of unified Italy. Its university, founded around 1404, educated Joseph-Louis Lagrange and counted Amedeo Avogadro and Giuseppe Peano among its professors, while the exiled French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy held a chair in the city in the early 1830s. The cathedral houses the relic known as the Shroud of Turin.

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Ujjayinī, modern Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, India, is an ancient city on the Shipra river, once capital of the kingdom of Avanti and today a major Hindu pilgrimage centre with the Mahakaleshwar temple and a twelve-yearly Kumbh Mela. Ashoka served as viceroy there. It was long a centre of Indian astronomy: Brahmagupta worked there, Varahamihira is associated with the Avanti region, and its meridian served as the reference longitude of classical Indian astronomical texts. It is also given as the home of the sixth-century monk Paramārtha, who reached China in 546 and became a principal transmitter of Yogācāra teachings there.

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Beijing, in northern China, is the capital of the People's Republic of China. Kublai Khan built it as the Yuan capital Dadu (Khanbaliq) in the late thirteenth century; the Ming made it their main capital in 1420, the year the Forbidden City was completed, and it was the Qing capital from 1644. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci settled there in 1601 with imperial permission and died there in 1610, and his collaborator Xu Guangqi later led a calendar reform at the Ming court that drew on European astronomy. In 1653 the Fifth Dalai Lama visited the young Shunzhi Emperor there, and the White Dagoba in Beihai Park was built to honour the visit. It is home to Peking and Tsinghua universities.

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Capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire on the east bank of the Tigris opposite modern Mosul; the Kuyunjik mound held Ashurbanipal's great library. A pin here marks where the tablet was unearthed, not where its text was first composed.

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A great southern city sacred to the moon-god Nanna (modern Tell el-Muqayyar), capital of the Third Dynasty of Ur. The pin marks the tablet's findspot; the small adjacent mounds of Diqdiqqah are grouped here.

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In the twelfth century, Lunel sat in the verdant heartland of Provence, a limestone plateau dotted with olive groves and vineyards, under the rule of the Counts of Toulouse and then the ambitious House of Anjou. The town's position on the rim of Mediterranean trade routes made it prosperous: merchants moving silk, spices, and dyed cloth passed through its gates, and the River Vidourle nourished its fields. Lunel's Jewish community, though modest in numbers, had become a beacon of Hebrew learning and mystical study that drew scholars across the Jewish world. The town was famous for its school of Kabbalists and for translating Arabic philosophical and scientific texts into Hebrew, acts of intellectual preservation that made it a crossroads between Islamic Spain and Christian Europe. Its yeshiva and the gardens where learned Jews debated scripture and reason became legendary in Jewish memory—a place where a small, protected minority cultivated some of the deepest thinking of the medieval Jewish world.

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Bucharest, the capital of Romania, had one of the largest Jewish communities in the Balkans, with Sephardi and Ashkenazi congregations. Rabbi Meir Leibush Weisser (the Malbim), the renowned biblical commentator, served as chief rabbi of Bucharest in the mid-nineteenth century, where his opposition to communal reformers led to bitter conflict.

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Guangzhou (Canton), in Guangdong province on the Pearl River, was the principal southern Chinese seaport and a gateway for Buddhism arriving by the maritime route. The Yogācāra translator Paramārtha worked and died in the city in the sixth century; the future Sixth Chan Patriarch Huineng received his full ordination at the Faxing (now Guangxiao) monastery there; and the pilgrim Yijing passed through on his sea voyages to and from India.

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Liangzhou, the area of modern Wuwei in Gansu province, China, was a strategic oasis garrison town on the Hexi Corridor of the Silk Road and an early conduit for Buddhism entering China. The translator Kumārajīva was held there for some seventeen years after his capture from Kucha before being taken on to Chang'an in 401; pilgrims such as Xuanzang also passed through the city on the route west.

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Medieval Provençal town (modern Vauvert), home of Rabbi Abraham ben David (Raavad III) and an early Kabbalistic circle including his son Isaac the Blind. The published Sefer HaBahir circulated from here.

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Granada is a city in Andalusia, southern Spain, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. It became a major city of al-Andalus in the 11th century as capital of the Zirid taifa kingdom, where the Jewish statesman and poet Samuel ibn Naghrillah served as grand vizier; a massacre of the city's Jews followed in 1066. From the 13th century Granada was capital of the Nasrid emirate, the last Muslim-ruled state in Iberia, whose rulers built the Alhambra and whose court attracted Muslim scholars. The Catholic Monarchs took the city in 1492, and it became Christian over the 16th century; the Carmelite John of the Cross was prior of a monastery there and wrote major works in Granada.

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Held in tradition to be the first city, sacred to the god Enki (modern Tell Abu Shahrain) in the far south. The pin marks the tablet's findspot.

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The Baal Shem Tov's home

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Dvinsk (today Daugavpils, in southeastern Latvia) was a major center of Jewish scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notable for having two of the era's greatest rabbinic minds serving its community simultaneously: Rabbi Meir Simcha of Dvinsk (author of the Meshech Chochmah and Or Sameach), rav of the misnagdic community, and Rabbi Yosef Rosen (the Rogatchover Gaon, author of Tzofnas Paneach), rav of the chasidic community.

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Seat of the Chabad dynasty from the second Rebbe (Dov Baer Schneuri) onward.

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The prosperous Ionian port where Greek philosophy was born, as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes first sought to explain the cosmos through nature rather than myth.

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Continuation of the Izhbitz school; home of the Leiner dynasty (Sod Yesharim, Beit Yaakov).

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Ayodhyā is a city on the Sarayu River in Uttar Pradesh, India, known in antiquity as Sāketa. In the Rāmāyaṇa it is the capital of the kingdom of Kosala and the birthplace of Rāma; Hindu tradition links its founding to Manu and his son Ikṣvāku, whose royal line had the sage Vasiṣṭha as priest. It is counted among the seven most important Hindu pilgrimage sites. Early Buddhist and Jain texts say the Buddha and Mahāvīra visited the city, and later tradition records the poet Aśvaghoṣa, author of the Buddhacarita, as born at Sāketa.

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The Insight Meditation Society is a Theravāda-rooted retreat centre in Barre, Massachusetts, USA. It was founded in 1975 by Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Jacqueline Schwartz, opening its retreat centre in 1976, and became a central institution in the transmission of vipassanā (insight) meditation to the West.

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Lucena is a town in the province of Córdoba in Andalusia, southern Spain. Under Muslim rule, first the emirate and caliphate of Córdoba and later the Zirid taifa of Granada, it lay within the orbit of Córdoba, a leading centre of Andalusian Islamic learning, and was known as a predominantly Jewish town: a ninth-century responsum describes it as a city of many Jews with no gentiles in its midst. In 1088 Isaac Alfasi settled there and led its Talmudic academy, which was later headed by his pupil Joseph ibn Migash. The Almohad conquest of 1148 ended its role as a Jewish centre, and the academy's heirs moved to Toledo. Castile took the town in 1240.

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Seat of the Ger Hasidic dynasty; home of the Chiddushei HaRim and Sefat Emet.

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Panopolis, modern Akhmim in Upper Egypt on the east bank of the Nile, was a center of Greek learning in late antiquity. It was the birthplace of the epic poet Nonnus, author of the Dionysiaca, and of the poet Triphiodorus.

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Seat of the Apter Rov (Avraham Yehoshua Heschel); Ohev Yisrael composed here.

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Boulder, Colorado, USA, is home to the University of Colorado, which opened in 1877, and to federal research centres such as NIST and the National Center for Atmospheric Research; the physicist George Gamow taught at the university from 1956 until his death in 1968. In 1974 the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa founded the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), in 1988 the first Buddhist-inspired school to gain US regional accreditation, and the town became a Western hub of his community. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, held a chair at Naropa and died in Boulder in 2014.

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Seat of the radical Izhbitz Hasidic school (Mei HaShiloach lineage).

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Kletsk, a town in central Belarus, was the home of a major Lithuanian yeshiva in the interwar period. After World War I the Slutsk yeshiva relocated here, and under Rabbi Aharon Kotler it operated for some two decades as one of the leading yeshivot of Poland and Lithuania before the outbreak of World War II forced it to flee to Vilna.

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Monsey, a hamlet in Rockland County, New York, northwest of New York City, is one of the largest centers of Orthodox and chasidic Jewish life in the United States. It grew rapidly from the mid-twentieth century into a hub of yeshivot and chasidic communities; among the leading Torah figures who lived there was Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky.

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Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, is the second most populous city in New England after Boston and by the mid-nineteenth century was one of the region's largest manufacturing centres. It was the birthplace of the rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard, who taught physics at its Clark University, and of Dwight Goddard, a former Christian missionary in China who compiled the influential anthology A Buddhist Bible (1932). It is home to the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), adapting Buddhist-derived mindfulness practice for a secular clinical setting.

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Babylonia was the region of Mesopotamia (central and southern Iraq) that, after the exile of Judah, became one of the principal homes of the Jewish people. Already in the Second Temple period it had an established community -- the sage Hillel the Elder came from Babylonia to the Land of Israel -- and in the Talmudic era its academies, led by figures such as Rav (Abba Arikha), made it the dominant center of rabbinic Judaism.

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Béziers in the medieval County of Toulouse lay at the heart of Occitania, a prosperous Provençal region where the warm, dry winds of the Mediterranean shaped both its vineyards and its cosmopolitan character. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before the devastating Albigensian Crusade swept through the south, Béziers was home to a significant and influential Jewish community, many of whom were merchants, physicians, and scholars fluent in the sophisticated Occitan culture surrounding them. The city's Jews enjoyed a measure of security unusual for their time, living in relative proximity to Christians and Muslims within its bustling fortified walls overlooking the Orb River. This openness made Béziers a center of remarkable intellectual vitality, where Torah study flourished alongside secular learning—Jewish scholars here engaged deeply with secular philosophy, medicine, and mathematics imported from the Islamic world. The tragedy of 1209, when Crusaders massacred much of the city's population including its Jewish quarter, remains one of the darkest chapters in Provençal Jewish history; a legend claims the commander declared "Kill them all, God will know His own," though the exact words may be apocryphal. Before that catastrophe, Béziers represented what Provençal Jewry at its finest could achieve in learning and integration.

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Istanbul, on the Bosporus straddling Europe and Asia in modern Turkey, stands on the site of the Greek colony of Byzantium. Constantine refounded it as Constantinople in 330, and as capital of the eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire it received Justinian's Hagia Sophia, designed by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus and dedicated in 537. Mehmed II conquered the city in 1453, and it was the Ottoman capital until 1922, seat of the Ottoman caliphate and of the Shaykh al-Islam. The astronomer Ali Qushji died there in 1474, the chief jurist Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574) served there, and the polymath Katib Celebi (d. 1657) and the reformer Said Nursi (d. 1960) were active in the city.

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In the early twentieth century, Lakewood emerged as an unlikely refuge for European Jewish learning transplanted to the American Pine Barrens. This quiet resort town in central New Jersey, founded as a wealthy retreat but gradually declining as fashionable tourism moved elsewhere, became home to one of America's most rigorous yeshivas when established in the 1940s. The surrounding landscape—dense forests, sandy soil, and relative isolation—created a contemplative world apart from the bustling immigrant neighborhoods of New York and Philadelphia, where most American Jews then concentrated. The yeshiva's arrival transformed Lakewood's character, drawing serious Torah students and their families who built a thriving Orthodox community amid the pines. What began as a single institution of intensive Talmudic study grew into a scholarly ecosystem of interconnected institutions and homes, where the cadence of prayer and study replaced the rhythms of resort life. By mid-century, Lakewood had become an outpost of Lithuanian-Jewish intellectual tradition in America, a place where Eastern European methods of rigorous textual analysis took root in New Jersey soil, eventually establishing a pattern of yeshiva-centered community life that would influence Jewish education across North America for generations to come.

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Nestled in the rolling hills of White Russia—then part of the expanding Russian Empire under Catherine the Great—Liozna was a modest town where forests gave way to fertile plains and winter snows lay thick for months each year. Though small and remote by European standards, Liozna became a thriving Jewish community of several hundred souls, many engaged in commerce and crafts, living under the complicated tolerance and restrictions that governed Jewish life in imperial Russia. The town's significance lay not in its size but in its reputation as a luminous center of mystical Judaism and intensive Talmudic study, drawing students and seekers from across Eastern Europe who came to learn from its most celebrated teachers. Liozna's modest wooden synagogue and study halls became a beacon for those hungry for a new synthesis of Jewish practice—one that married rigorous scholarship with spiritual inwardness—making this quiet provincial town an unexpected powerhouse of religious innovation. Visitors spoke in wonder of the intense intellectual fervor and contemplative devotion that seemed to transform the very air of the place, as if this corner of White Russia had become a spiritual vortex drawing Jewish consciousness eastward.

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R. Elimelech's Hasidic court

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Adullam was a town in the Judean foothills (Shephelah), southwest of Jerusalem. According to the Book of Samuel, David took refuge in the cave of Adullam while fleeing King Saul, and men gathered to him there. The area is preserved today in the Adullam region of Israel.

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Beit She'an, a town in the Beit She'an Valley at the junction of the Jezreel and Jordan valleys in northern Israel, is an ancient site mentioned in the Tanach and a major city in the Roman-Byzantine period. The fourteenth-century geographer Rabbi Ishtori HaParchi settled there as a physician and completed his Kaftor VaFerach (1322), the first Hebrew book on the geography of the Land of Israel.

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Belfast, the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, grew in the 19th century into an industrial centre known for linen and shipbuilding; it received city status in 1888, and the Harland & Wolff yard built the RMS Titanic. The physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, was born there in 1824 and began his schooling at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, where his father taught. The city's Jewish community was served from 1915 to 1919 by Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, later Chief Rabbi of Ireland and then Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel. The Christian writer C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898.

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Caesarea Maritima lies on the Mediterranean coast of modern Israel. Herod the Great rebuilt an earlier Phoenician harbour town here around 22-10 BCE, naming it after Augustus, and after 6 CE it served as the seat of the Roman governors of Judaea. According to the Book of Acts, Peter baptized the centurion Cornelius here and Paul was held prisoner for two years. In the third century Origen taught in the city, whose library was among the largest of its time, and Eusebius later served as its bishop. Caesarea was also a centre of rabbinic learning, with an academy associated with Hoshaiah Rabbah and later Rabbi Abbahu. Muslim forces took it in 640; its ruins are now a national park.

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Calcutta (Kolkata) is the capital of West Bengal, on the Hooghly River in eastern India, and was the capital of British India until 1911. It was a focus of the 19th–20th-century Hindu renaissance: Swami Vivekananda was born there, and Sri Aurobindo and A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda were active in the city.

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Cincinnati, Ohio, was a major center of nineteenth-century American Jewish life and the cradle of the American Reform movement. In 1875 Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise founded Hebrew Union College there, the first permanent Jewish institution of higher learning in the United States, having earlier established the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in the city.

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Cologne (Köln), on the Rhine in western Germany, was founded by the Romans in 50 CE as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium. Its Jewish community is among the oldest in the German lands, attested by a decree of Constantine in 321; Jacob ben Asher, author of the Arba'ah Turim, was probably born there around 1270 and later lived in Toledo. Cologne's bishops became archbishops in 795, its Gothic cathedral was begun in 1248 and completed in 1880, and the city was a hub of medieval scholastic and mystical learning: Albert the Great taught at its Dominican house and died there in 1280, Duns Scotus died there in 1308, and its university was chartered in 1388.

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Crete, the largest Greek island, was home to the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation and was conquered by Rome in 69 BCE. Later Byzantine, it was held by an Andalusian Arab emirate from the 820s until its reconquest in 960-961, and was then a Venetian colony from the early thirteenth century until the Ottoman conquest of 1669; under Venice the island was called Candia after its capital, modern Heraklion. The monk Gregory of Sinai learned hesychast prayer on Crete. Its Jewish community, Romaniote in origin, produced the chronicler and chief rabbi Elijah Capsali (c. 1485-after 1550), the philosopher Elia del Medigo (born in Candia c. 1458) and the scholar Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591-1655), who attended Galileo's lectures in Padua.

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Dresden, on the Elbe, is the capital of Saxony in eastern Germany. As the seat of the Electors and later Kings of Saxony, it gained Baroque landmarks such as the Zwinger and the Lutheran Frauenkirche. Its Protestant court drew religious figures: the Pietist Philipp Jakob Spener became chief court chaplain in 1686, Count Zinzendorf, later a bishop of the Moravian Church, was born there in 1700, and Paul Tillich taught at its technical university in the late 1920s. Zacharias Frankel was its chief rabbi from 1836 to 1854, and the Semper-designed synagogue of 1840 was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. Allied bombing in February 1945 devastated the city, and the Frauenkirche was rebuilt in 1994–2005.

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Dubno, a town in Volhynia (today in Rivne Oblast, western Ukraine), was by the eighteenth century the largest Jewish community in Volhynia -- 'Dubno the Great' (Dubno Rabbati) -- and a representative at the Council of the Four Lands. It is best known as the home of Rabbi Yaakov Kranz, the Dubno Maggid, the celebrated preacher famed for his parables, who lived there for some eighteen years.

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Ferrara, a city in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, was ruled by the Este family from the thirteenth century until 1598, when it passed to the Papal States; its Renaissance centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1438 it hosted the opening sessions of the council that later moved to Florence and sought union between the Latin and Greek churches, and it was the birthplace of the friar Girolamo Savonarola. Its Jewish community has a continuous history since the Middle Ages: the Ladino Ferrara Bible was printed here in 1553, a ghetto was imposed in 1627, and in the eighteenth century Rabbi Isaac Lampronti compiled the Talmudic encyclopedia Pachad Yitzchak in the city.

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Fez (Fas), in north-central Morocco, was founded by Idris I in 789 and expanded by Idris II in 809. The Qarawiyyin mosque, founded in 857-859 by Fatima al-Fihri, grew into one of the Islamic world's great centres of learning. Under the Marinids (13th-15th centuries) Fez was again the capital and gained many madrasas. Scholars and Sufis such as Ibn Khaldun and al-Wansharisi worked there, and the Tijani order has been centred in the city since 1789. Fez also had one of Morocco's oldest and largest Jewish communities. The poet Dunash ben Labrat was born there, Maimonides lived there around 1159-1165, and Jews later lived in the Mellah beside the Marinid royal district.

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Frauenkirchen, a town in the Burgenland region of eastern Austria, was one of the Sheva Kehillot ('Seven Communities') of Jews who settled under the protection of the Esterházy princes. It maintained a Jewish community and rabbinate until the Holocaust.

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Gaul was the Roman name for a broad region of western Europe covering modern France, Belgium, Luxembourg and neighbouring lands; the coordinates here point to Lugdunum (modern Lyon), capital of the province of Gallia Lugdunensis. Inhabited by Celtic peoples, it saw Greek settlement at Massalia (Marseille), Roman conquest of the south by 121 BCE, and Julius Caesar's subjugation of the rest between 58 and 51 BCE. The Stoic Posidonius travelled there and recorded observations of the Celts, and the satirist Lucian later lectured in Gaul. Christianity took root early: some 48 Christians were martyred at Lugdunum in 177, after which the church there grew under Bishop Irenaeus. From the late fifth century Gaul came under Frankish rule.

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Geneva, in southwestern Switzerland where the Rhône leaves Lake Geneva, was an Allobrogian town taken by Rome in 121 BCE and had a bishop by the fifth century. In the sixteenth century it became a centre of the Protestant Reformation: John Calvin led its church from 1541, earning it the name 'Protestant Rome', and the Academy he founded in 1559, now the University of Geneva, drew students such as Jacobus Arminius, who studied there under Theodore Beza. John Knox ministered to the city's English congregation from 1556 to 1559. Geneva joined the Swiss Confederation in 1815, and in modern times it has hosted the League of Nations, the Red Cross and many United Nations agencies.

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Gibeah was a town in the territory of Benjamin, north of Jerusalem. According to the Book of Samuel, it was the home and capital of Saul, the first king of Israel. Its site is generally identified with Tell el-Ful, north of Jerusalem, though this is debated.

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Halle (Halle an der Saale) is a city in Saxony-Anhalt, eastern Germany, whose early growth rested on salt production; it is first documented in 806. The composer George Frideric Handel was born there in 1685. Its university, founded in 1694 and now joined with Wittenberg's as the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, became a centre of Lutheran Pietism under August Hermann Francke, who founded the Francke Foundations, a complex of schools and an orphanage. Friedrich Schleiermacher taught theology there from 1804 to 1807. The university also drew Jewish students, among them the future Orthodox rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, who earned his doctorate there in 1844, and the mathematician Georg Cantor taught there from 1869 to 1913.

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Har Nof, developed in the early 1990s on the western edge of Jerusalem, is a Litvish-Anglo Haredi neighborhood. Home to Yeshivat Toras Moshe, Yeshivas Yad Aharon, and the synagogue of R. Moshe Twersky (murdered in the 2014 attack). R. Aharon Feldman, R. Beinish Ginsburg, and many transplanted American-Litvish rabbis live here.

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Heidelberg lies on the Neckar where it leaves its valley for the Rhine plain, in Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany. Its university, founded in 1386, is the oldest in Germany. The city was a seat of government of the Electors Palatine, whose castle still overlooks the old town; French troops took town and castle in 1689, and the area was almost completely destroyed in 1693. In April 1518 Martin Luther defended his theology there at the Heidelberg Disputation, where Martin Bucer heard him and became his follower, and Elector Frederick III later commissioned the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism. The chemist Robert Bunsen taught at the university from 1852 to 1889, and the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal studied there in 1907.

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Kfar Hasidim, a moshav in the Zevulun Valley east of Haifa in northern Israel, was founded in the mid-1920s by chasidic immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah, who drained the area's malarial swamps to establish farms. The future Chief Rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Goren, grew up there.

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Kobrin (Kobryn), a town in the Brest region of southwestern Belarus, had an established Jewish community and was the seat of the Kobrin chasidic dynasty, related to the Slonim-Karlin chasidic line.

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Kobryn (Kobryn), a town in the Brest region of southwestern Belarus, had a long-established Jewish community and was the seat of the Kobryn chasidic dynasty, an offshoot of the Slonim-Karlin chasidic tradition. It also supported Lithuanian-style Torah scholarship.

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Leuven (Louvain), a city in Flanders, Belgium, seat of the old University of Louvain (founded 1425). Erasmus helped found its Collegium Trilingue, and the theologian Cornelius Jansen (Jansenius), whose Augustinus sparked the Jansenist controversy, was its professor and chancellor.

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Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine; Yiddish Lemberg) was the capital of Eastern Galicia and one of the great Jewish-Polish cities — home to over 100,000 Jews before WWII and the seat of generations of major rabbinic figures. R. Yaakov Yehoshua Falk (Pnei Yehoshua), R. Tzvi Hirsch Berlin, and the Sabbatean Disputation of 1759 all took place here.

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Mattersburg (historically Mattersdorf), a town in the Burgenland region of eastern Austria, was one of the Sheva Kehillot ('Seven Communities') of Jews settled under Esterházy protection and a long-standing center of Torah scholarship until the community was destroyed in the Holocaust.

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Mezritch (Mezhirichi, in Volhynia, today in Rivne Oblast, western Ukraine) was the seat of Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, the principal disciple and successor of the Baal Shem Tov. From Mezritch the Maggid led the chasidic movement, training the circle of disciples who spread chasidut across Volhynia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Poland.

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Midian was a region inhabited by the Midianite people, generally located in the northwestern Arabian Peninsula east of the Gulf of Aqaba. According to the Torah, Moses fled to Midian after leaving Egypt, married Zipporah the daughter of the Midianite priest Jethro, and encountered the burning bush there.

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Montpellier, a city in Languedoc in southern France, had one of the most important Jewish communities of the region from the eleventh century and was a noted center of Jewish medicine and philosophy. In the early thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries it was a focal point of the Maimonidean Controversy over the study of philosophy, involving figures such as Rabbi Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier and members of the ibn Tibbon family of translators.

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Mytilene is the principal city of the Aegean island of Lesbos, off the northwest coast of Asia Minor. Epicurus taught there for a period around 311 BCE, early in his career and before he settled in Athens. Aristotle spent time on Lesbos conducting biological research after leaving Assos.

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A modern Israeli development town founded in 1956, Netivot became the home and burial place of R. Yisrael Abuhatzeira (Baba Sali, 1889-1984). The annual hilula on 4 Shevat at his tomb is the largest Sephardic pilgrimage in modern Israel.

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New Delhi, the capital of India, was the seat of national government where B. R. Ambedkar served as independent India's first law minister and chief architect of its constitution. He died in Delhi in 1956, shortly after his public conversion to Buddhism.

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New Haven is a coastal city in Connecticut, United States, founded in 1638 by English Puritans as one of America's first planned towns. The Collegiate School moved there in 1716 and was soon renamed Yale. The theologian Jonathan Edwards graduated from it in 1720, and the city long remained a centre of New England Congregationalism. In 1863 Yale awarded the first American doctorate in engineering to the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, a New Haven native. Later Jewish immigration left a lasting mark on the city, which had a yeshiva by the twentieth century, and the Zen teacher Philip Kapleau was born there.

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Palmyra was a wealthy caravan city in the Syrian desert, on the trade routes between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia (modern Tadmur, Syria). In the third century CE it became the seat of Queen Zenobia's short-lived empire. The Greek rhetorician and critic Cassius Longinus served as Zenobia's chief counsellor at Palmyra and was executed by the emperor Aurelian after the city's fall in 273; the historian and sophist Callinicus likewise spent time at Zenobia's court.

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Pandharpur is a temple town on the Bhīmā (Chandrabhāgā) River in the Solapur district of Maharashtra, western India, centred on the temple of Viṭṭhala (Viṭhobā). It is the focal pilgrimage site of the Vārkarī devotional tradition associated with the sant-poets Jñāneśvar, Nāmdev, and Tukārām.

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Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, about 16 km northeast of downtown Los Angeles; it was incorporated in 1886 and has staged the Tournament of Roses parade since 1890. It is a major centre of science. The California Institute of Technology, founded in 1891 as Throop University, set up a biology division under Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1928, and its early growth was shaped by George Ellery Hale, founder of the nearby Mount Wilson Observatory. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the city's largest employer. Pasadena is also the birthplace of B. Alan Wallace, the American scholar and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.

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Pavia, on the Ticino in Lombardy, northern Italy, was the Roman town of Ticinum and served as capital of the Lombard kingdom from 572 to 774. Its church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro is said to hold the tombs of St Augustine and of the philosopher Boethius, who according to tradition was imprisoned and executed near the city around 524. The university, founded in 1361 under the Visconti, became a long-standing centre of medicine and science. German Jewish families settled in Pavia from 1389, and the jurist Joseph Colon spent his last years and died there around 1480; the community was ordered out of the city in 1597.

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Peniel (Penuel) was a place on the east side of the Jordan River, near the Jabbok stream (in modern Jordan). According to the Torah, it is where Jacob wrestled with a divine being through the night and was given the name Israel, naming the place Peniel ('the face of God').

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Philippopolis is modern Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second-largest city. A Thracian settlement in origin, it was taken by Philip II of Macedon in the 340s BCE and named after a Philip; Rome incorporated it in 46 CE, also calling it Trimontium, and the Goths sacked it in 250. The miaphysite leader Philoxenus of Mabbug is recorded as having died there in exile in 523. Contested for centuries between Byzantium and Bulgaria, it came under Ottoman rule in the 14th century as Filibe. Sephardic Jews settled there in the 16th and 17th centuries, the community numbered over 2,000 in 1885, and most of its members left after 1948.

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Ponevezh (Lithuanian Panevėžys), a city in northern Lithuania, was the seat of the Ponevezh yeshiva, founded in 1919 and led by Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman (the Ponevezher Rav). After the yeshiva and the community were destroyed in the Holocaust, Rabbi Kahaneman re-established the Ponevezh yeshiva in Bnei Brak, Israel, in 1944, where it became one of the foremost Lithuanian yeshivot in the world.

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Provence (the Languedoc region of southern France) was the cradle of Kabbalah as a written tradition; R. Yitzchak Sagi Nahor (Isaac the Blind, c. 1160-1235) of Posquières/Lunel/Narbonne was the founding figure.

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Riga, the capital of Latvia, was founded in 1201 as the seat of the bishop of Livonia, joined the Hanseatic League in 1282, and was later ruled by Sweden (1621-1710) and the Russian Empire (1710-1917); its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The chemist Wilhelm Ostwald was born there and taught at the Riga Polytechnic. Riga had a substantial Jewish community: the Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn lived there in 1927-29 and 1930-34, and the scholars Yeshayahu and Nechama Leibowitz were born there. Under Nazi occupation its Jews were forced into a ghetto, and some 24,000 Latvian Jews were murdered at Rumbula in 1941.

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Shushan (Susa) was a capital of the Persian Empire (its ruins lie near modern Shush in southwestern Iran). It is the setting of the Book of Esther, in which the events of the Purim story unfold at the royal court of Ahasuerus. Nehemiah served as a royal official in Shushan before leading the return to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls.

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Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, stands on the site of Roman Serdica. The edict of toleration issued there in 311 by the emperor Galerius was the first to legalise Christianity, and a church council met in the city in 343. After centuries of Ottoman rule, Sofia became the capital of the new Bulgarian state in 1879. Its mainly Sephardic Jewish community opened the Sofia Synagogue, one of the largest in Europe, in 1909. Modern figures linked to the city include the Russian émigré theologian Georges Florovsky, whose family settled there in 1920, and Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, who served as papal envoy to Bulgaria in the 1920s and 1930s.

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St. Petersburg, the imperial capital of Russia, was the seat of government and, despite restrictions on Jewish residence, home to a Jewish community of merchants, professionals, and communal leaders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was to St. Petersburg that Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad chasidut, was brought when imprisoned in 1798 on false charges; his release on the 19th of Kislev is commemorated by Chabad chasidim.

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The Negev is the arid southern region of the Land of Israel (today southern Israel). In the Torah's patriarchal narratives, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob journeyed and pastured their flocks in the Negev; in the modern era it became a major area of Jewish agricultural settlement.

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Tlemcen is a city in northwestern Algeria, near the Moroccan border. A Roman outpost called Pomaria, it grew from the merger of the early Islamic settlement of Agadir with the Almoravid foundation of Tagrart, whose Great Mosque still stands. From 1236 to 1554 it was capital of the Zayyanid kingdom, whose madrasas made it a leading centre of learning in the central Maghreb, and the Sufi master Abu Madyan, buried nearby, is venerated as its patron. It came under Ottoman rule in the mid-sixteenth century and later became part of French Algeria. Tradition credits the founding of its Jewish community to the physician-rabbi Ephraim Alnaqua (d. 1442), and in the twentieth century Rabbi Yosef Messas served as its chief rabbi.

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Varanasi, also called Benares or Kashi, lies on the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, northern India, and is among the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities. Once centre of the kingdom of Kashi, it is one of Hinduism's holiest places, known for its riverside ghats, its cremation grounds and the Kashi Vishwanath temple to Shiva. Just to the northeast lies Sarnath, where Buddhist tradition holds that the Buddha gave his first teaching, and tradition places the physician Sushruta, to whom the Sushruta Samhita is attributed, in the city. It has long been a seat of Sanskrit learning; the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Tarthang Tulku taught there in the 1960s.

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Varanasi (Kāśī, also Banaras) is a city on the left bank of the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, north India, and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities and pilgrimage centres of the subcontinent. It is associated with the Hindi devotional poets Tulsīdās and Kabīr and with Vallabhācārya, founder of the Puṣṭimārga.

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Verona, on the Adige in the Veneto region of northern Italy, became a Roman colony in 89 BCE. Zeno, bishop from 362 to 380, is the city's patron saint, and the basilica of San Zeno stands over his shrine. Pope Lucius III held a synod at Verona in 1184 and died there in 1185, and his successor Urban III resided in the city. It passed to Venice in 1405. Jews lived there in the early Middle Ages, were expelled in the tenth century, and returned in the twelfth, when tosafists such as Eliezer ben Samuel of Verona were active; a ghetto was created in 1599. The physician Girolamo Fracastoro, a pioneer of contagion theory, was a native.

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Vizhnitz in Bukovina is the seat of the Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty, founded by R. Menachem Mendel Hager of Vizhnitz (1830-1884). One of the largest surviving Hasidic courts in Israel today.

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Vṛndāvan is a temple town on the Yamunā River in the Mathurā district of Uttar Pradesh, in the Braj region associated in tradition with the youth of Kṛṣṇa. It is a major centre of Kṛṣṇa devotion linked with Chaitanya Mahāprabhu and his successors, and with later figures including A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda and Neem Karoli Baba.

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Zürich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of its canton; it began as the Roman settlement of Turicum. From 1519 Huldrych Zwingli, preaching at the Grossmünster, made it a leading centre of the Protestant Reformation, and in January 1525 Conrad Grebel and his circle performed there the first known adult baptism associated with the Reformation, a founding moment of the Anabaptist movement. A medieval Jewish community, attested from 1273, was destroyed in the Black Death persecution of 1349, and Jews were barred from the city from 1423 until the 19th century; a new community was founded after Jewish emancipation in 1862. The University of Zurich dates from 1833.

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Nanjing, in the Yangtze River delta of eastern China, is the capital of Jiangsu province. As Jiankang it was the capital of the Eastern Jin and Southern dynasties between 317 and 589. The Ming dynasty ruled from Nanjing from 1368 until 1421, after which it remained the secondary, southern capital, the meaning of its name. In the late 16th century Jesuit missionaries led by Matteo Ricci established a presence there. Nanjing was the capital of the Republic of China in 1927-37 and 1946-49, and in 1937-38 it suffered the Nanjing Massacre under Japanese occupation.

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Luoyang, in modern Henan province, China, was a capital of several dynasties and one of the earliest centres of Chinese Buddhism — traditionally the site of the White Horse Temple, regarded as the first Buddhist temple in China, and near the Longmen Grottoes. The pilgrim Yijing returned to Luoyang in 695 after his sea voyage, where he was received by Empress Wu Zetian.

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Antioch, on the Orontes at the site of modern Antakya in southern Turkey, was founded around 300 BCE by Seleucus I, was a Seleucid capital and then capital of Roman Syria. It was a centre of Hellenistic Judaism and of Greek rhetoric, where Libanius taught. According to the New Testament, followers of Jesus were first called Christians there; Ignatius was an early bishop, John Chrysostom was born there, and the city became the seat of one of the great patriarchates. Arab forces took it in 637 for the caliphate; the Byzantines recaptured it in 969, and after Seljuk rule it was a Crusader principality from 1098 until the Mamluk sultan Baybars razed it in 1268.

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Fustat, now part of Old Cairo in Egypt, was founded in 641 by the Arab commander Amr ibn al-As after the Muslim conquest and became the first capital of Muslim Egypt; its Mosque of Amr was the first mosque built in the country. It remained the economic centre after the Fatimids founded Cairo just to the north in 969, and the Fatimid astronomer Ibn Yunus worked at an observatory on nearby Mount Mokattam. The city was deliberately set on fire in 1168 to keep it from a Crusader army. Its Ben Ezra Synagogue held the Cairo Geniza, and Moses Maimonides settled there in 1166; after his death in 1204 his son Abraham succeeded him as head of Egyptian Jewry.

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Kos is a Greek island in the Dodecanese, in the southeastern Aegean. It is thought to be the birthplace of Hippocrates, and in the Hellenistic period it had a medical school and a sanctuary of Asclepius, whose ruins survive; the physician Praxagoras, born on the island around 340 BCE, was the first to stress the diagnostic value of the pulse. Kos had a Christian bishop by 325, when one attended the Council of Nicaea. The Knights Hospitaller fortified it in the fourteenth century, it passed to the Ottomans in 1523 and to Italy in 1912, and it became part of Greece in 1947.

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The chief city of the island of Euboea—a prosperous colonizing power in the archaic age, and the place where Aristotle died in 322 BCE after fleeing Athens.

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Peshawar, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of modern Pakistan, was known in antiquity as Puruṣapura, a capital of the Gandhāra region and of the Kushan empire. According to the Tibetan historian Tāranātha and other accounts, the Yogācāra masters and half-brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu were born there in the early centuries CE.

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Bordeaux, ancient Burdigala, is a port on the Garonne in southwestern France and today the capital of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. Under Rome it was a commercial centre with schools of rhetoric and grammar, where the 4th-century poet Ausonius taught before being summoned to the imperial court; his pupil Paulinus, later bishop of Nola, was born in the city. After Eleanor of Aquitaine married the future Henry II of England, Bordeaux was ruled by the English crown until 1453. Its archbishop Bertrand de Got was elected Pope Clement V in 1305, and a university was founded in 1441. The city later grew rich on Atlantic trade and wine, and its historic port is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Bukhara, an oasis city on the Zarafshan River in present-day Uzbekistan, was a Silk Road trading centre long before Islam. After the Arab conquests it became, in the 9th-10th centuries, the capital of the Samanid dynasty and a leading centre of Arabic and Persian learning. Genghis Khan's army sacked it in 1220; it recovered under later rulers, was the capital of the Khanate (later Emirate) of Bukhara from the 16th century, and came under Russian protection in 1868 and Soviet rule in 1920. It has also long been home to an ancient Jewish community, the Bukharan Jews.

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Samarkand is a city in southeastern Uzbekistan, today the country's second largest. Known to the Greeks as Marakanda, the Sogdian city was taken by Alexander the Great in 329 BCE. Umayyad forces under Qutayba ibn Muslim captured it around 710, and under the Samanids (875-999) it was one of the leading cities of the eastern Islamic world. Genghis Khan's armies sacked it in 1220, but Timur made it his capital in 1370, and his grandson Ulugh Beg built a madrasa on the Registan square and, in 1428, an astronomical observatory. The city was also home to a large Bukharan Jewish community, most of which emigrated from the 1970s on. Its historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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R. Nachman's Hasidic court

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Megara is a Greek city on the isthmus between Attica and the Peloponnese, roughly midway between Athens and Corinth. It gave its name to the Megarian school of philosophy, founded by Euclid of Megara, a follower of Socrates. After Socrates' death Plato and other associates are said by ancient tradition to have withdrawn to Megara; the Cynic writer Teles also worked there.

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Nicomedia, modern İzmit in Kocaeli Province, northwestern Turkey, was refounded by King Nicomedes I of Bithynia in 264 BCE on the site of the older Greek colony of Astacus, and became the metropolis of Roman Bithynia. The historian Arrian, author of the Anabasis of Alexander, was a native. In 286 Diocletian made it his eastern capital; the Christian writer Lactantius taught rhetoric there at the emperor's request, and the persecution of Christians began there in 303 with the destruction of a church. Constantine died at a villa near the city in 337, and a great earthquake struck it in 358.

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Polonne (Polnoye), a town in Volhynia (today in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, western Ukraine), was an early center of the chasidic movement. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef HaKohen of Polnoye, a leading disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, served there; his Toldot Yaakov Yosef (1780) was the first published chasidic book and a principal record of the Baal Shem Tov's teachings.

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Munkács (today Mukachevo, in the Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine, then part of Hungary/Czechoslovakia) was a major center of Carpathian Jewry and the seat of the Munkács chasidic dynasty of the Spira (Shapira) family. Its best-known rebbe, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira (the Minchas Elazar, d. 1937), was a leading halachist, Kabbalist, and outspoken anti-Zionist voice.

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Thebes, today the town of Thiva, is the chief city of Boeotia in central Greece and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities. In Greek myth it is linked with Cadmus and is the setting of the stories of Oedipus and the Seven against Thebes. Historically it was the birthplace of the lyric poet Pindar and of the Cynic philosopher Crates, teacher of Zeno of Citium. After defeating Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BCE it briefly dominated Greece, until Alexander the Great destroyed it in 335 BCE; it was rebuilt and in Byzantine times became a centre of silk production. Christian tradition places the tomb of Luke the Evangelist there, in the church that bears his name.

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Spirit Rock Meditation Center is an insight (vipassanā) meditation retreat centre in Woodacre, Marin County, California, USA. It grew out of the Insight Meditation West group and was established in the mid-1980s by a group of teachers including Jack Kornfield and Sylvia Boorstein, becoming a leading West Coast centre of the Western Theravāda-derived insight movement.

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Alon Shvut, a community in the Gush Etzion region of the Judean Hills (in the West Bank, south of Jerusalem), is the home of Yeshivat Har Etzion, a leading hesder yeshiva combining advanced Talmud study with army service. Founded in 1968, it was led for decades jointly by Rabbi Yehuda Amital and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and became a major center of Religious Zionist Torah scholarship.

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Carthage, beside the Lake of Tunis near modern Tunis in Tunisia, was founded by Phoenician settlers (tradition names Queen Dido as founder). It grew into a Mediterranean power until Rome destroyed it in 146 BCE at the end of the Third Punic War, a sack the historian Polybius witnessed. Julius Caesar refounded it, and it became the centre of the Roman province of Africa, where Apuleius studied. Carthage was a major centre of Latin Christianity: Tertullian wrote there, Cyprian was its bishop until his martyrdom in 258, its councils such as that of 397 shaped the Western church, and the Donatist controversy divided it. Vandals, Byzantines and finally, in 698, Umayyad forces took the city.

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A powerful Greek city of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) where Pythagoras founded his secretive brotherhood, fusing mathematics, music, and the transmigration of souls into a single way of life.

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A Greek colony on the coast of southern Italy (Magna Graecia) where Parmenides and his pupil Zeno founded the Eleatic school, daring to argue that all reality is one and unchanging—and that motion itself is an illusion.

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A region of the northwestern Peloponnese that guarded the sanctuary of Olympia and its Games, and whose native sons included the sophist Hippias and Pyrrho, founder of Greek Skepticism.

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Seat of Pinchas of Korets (Midrash Pinchas) and a major early Hasidic center.

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Orange is a town in Provence, southern France, about 21 km north of Avignon. In 105 BCE two Roman armies fought the Cimbri and Teutones here, and around 35 BCE veterans of the Second Legion founded the colony of Arausio, whose theatre and triumphal arch are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Church synods met here in 441 and 529; the second, presided over by Caesarius of Arles, sided with Augustine on grace against what was later called Semipelagianism. Later a small principality of the Holy Roman Empire, Orange passed in 1544 to William the Silent and the House of Orange-Nassau, and France gained it in 1713. The Jewish philosopher Gersonides lived here as well as in Avignon.

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Town of R. Meir of Rothenburg (Maharam, ~1215-1293), leading Ashkenazi authority of the 13c.

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Buchach (Polish Buczacz, today in Ternopil Oblast, western Ukraine), a town in eastern Galicia, had a vibrant Jewish community with both chasidic and maskilic currents. It was the birthplace of the rabbinic scholar Rabbi Meshulam Igra and the longtime home of Rabbi Avraham David Wahrman, who served as its rav; it was also the birthplace of the Nobel laureate Hebrew author Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who set much of his fiction there.

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Colophon was one of the Ionian Greek cities, inland from the coast of Lydia in western Asia Minor (modern Turkey). It was the birthplace of the pre-Socratic philosopher and poet Xenophanes, known for his critique of anthropomorphic depictions of the gods, and of the Hellenistic poet and physician Nicander.

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Seat of Chaim Tyrer (Be'er Mayim Chaim).

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Seat of Tzvi Elimelekh Shapira (Bnei Yissaschar, Agra DeKala).

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Kandy, in the central highlands of Sri Lanka, was the last royal capital of the Sinhalese kingdom and is home to the Temple of the Tooth Relic, a major pilgrimage site. It is also the seat of the Buddhist Publication Society, an English-language publisher of Theravāda texts long associated with the German-born monk Nyanaponika Thera and, later, the American monk Bhikkhu Bodhi.

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The Kathmandu Valley, in central Nepal, is an ancient centre of both Newar Buddhism and, more recently, the Tibetan-Buddhist diaspora, with great stupas at Boudhanath and Swayambhunath. In exile, the Nyingma masters Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (who established Shechen Monastery near Boudhanath) and Dudjom Rinpoche were closely associated with the valley.

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Komarno, a town in eastern Galicia (today Komarno, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine), was the seat of the Komarno chasidic dynasty, noted for its devotion to Kabbalah. Its central figure, Rabbi Yitzchak Eizik Yehuda Yechiel Safrin of Komarno (1806-1874), was a prolific kabbalistic author whose Torah commentary Heichal HaBerachah drew on the teachings of the Arizal and the Baal Shem Tov.

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Seat of the Kozhnitzer Maggid (Israel Hopstein); Avodat Yisrael composed here.

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Mill Valley, in Marin County, California, USA, was the later home of Lama Anagarika Govinda, the German-born interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism and author of 'The Way of the White Clouds,' who settled in the area in his final years.

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Oldenburg, a town in northwestern Germany, was the site of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch's first rabbinic position: he served as Landesrabbiner (chief rabbi) of the principality of Oldenburg from 1830 to 1841, the period in which he wrote his influential early works on Judaism.

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Prusa, modern Bursa in northwestern Turkey, was a city of Bithynia at the foot of Mount Olympus (Uludağ). It was the home city of the orator and philosopher Dio Chrysostom (Dio of Prusa). The mathematician and astronomer Theodosius is also commonly associated with Bithynia.

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Seat of Naftali Tzvi Horowitz (Zera Kodesh).

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Śrīraṅgam is a temple town on an island in the Kāverī River at Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, south India, site of the Raṅganātha temple, the foremost shrine of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition. It was the principal seat of Rāmānuja (traditionally 1017–1137) and of his predecessor Yāmunācārya.

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The wealthiest and most powerful Greek colony of southern Italy—a Spartan foundation famed for its harbor, its Pythagorean philosopher-statesman Archytas, and its long resistance to the rise of Rome.

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Bobov (Polish Bobowa), a village in western Galicia (today in southern Poland), gave its name to the Bobov chasidic dynasty. It was founded by Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam (1847-1906), a grandson of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz, who settled in Bobowa and established a chasidic court and a network of Eitz Chaim yeshivot; the dynasty was rebuilt in Brooklyn after the Holocaust.

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A Dorian Greek city on the southwest coast of Asia Minor, renowned for its medical school and as the home of Eudoxus—the brilliant mathematician and astronomer who modeled the heavens with concentric spheres.

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Colombo is the largest city and commercial capital of Sri Lanka, on the island's west coast. It was the birthplace of the Buddhist reformer Anagārika Dharmapāla (born David Hewavitarne in 1864), founder of the Maha Bodhi Society, and a centre of the modern Sri Lankan Buddhist revival; the activist A.T. Ariyaratne, founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement, was also long active in the city.

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Emesa, modern Homs in western Syria, is a city on the Orontes River that rose to prominence under Rome, notably for its cult of the sun god Elagabal, and gained wider influence when Emperor Septimius Severus married into a family of Emesene notables. The novelist Heliodorus, author of the Aethiopica, describes himself as a Phoenician of Emesa. Christianity took hold in the city relatively late because of the strength of the sun cult, but it became a bishopric, and the hymn-writer Romanos the Melodist was born there in the late 5th century. Muslim forces took the city in 637, and as Hims it became the capital of a district of Islamic Syria.

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Gadara was a city of the Decapolis, near modern Umm Qais in northwestern Jordan, and a noted center of Greek literary culture. It produced the Cynic philosopher and satirist Menippus, the Epicurean Philodemus, the poet Meleager, and the Cynic philosopher Oenomaus of Gadara.

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Seat of Yechezkel Panet (Mareh Yechezkel).

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Kfar Hasidim, a moshav east of Haifa in northern Israel, founded in the mid-1920s by chasidic pioneers of the Fourth Aliyah, became home to the Knesset Chizkiyahu yeshiva. The Mussar teacher Rabbi Eliyahu Lopian served as mashgiach there in his later years.

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Lycopolis, modern Asyut in Upper Egypt on the west bank of the Nile, was a Greco-Egyptian city. It is generally given by ancient sources as the birthplace of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus, founder of Neoplatonism. The later epic poet Colluthus was also a native of Lycopolis.

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Pinsk, a city in the Polesia region of southern Belarus, had a large Jewish community and was a major center of both Lithuanian Torah learning and chasidut. Its suburb of Karlin gave its name to the Karlin (Karlin-Stolin) chasidic dynasty, founded in the 1760s by Rabbi Aharon the Great of Karlin, a disciple of the Maggid of Mezeritch, from where chasidut spread through Lithuania and Belorussia.

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Seat of Radomsker Hasidism; Tiferet Shlomo composed here.

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Ramerupt, a village in the Champagne region of northern France, was a center of Tosafist Torah scholarship in the twelfth century. Rabbi Jacob ben Meir (Rabbeinu Tam), a grandson of Rashi and the leading Tosafist of his generation, lived in Ramerupt and ran his yeshiva there, to which scholars traveled from afar; his brother Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (the Rashbam) was also associated with the town.

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Sanz (Polish Nowy Sącz), a town in western Galicia (today in southern Poland), was the seat of the Sanz chasidic dynasty. Rabbi Chaim Halberstam (the Divrei Chaim, 1793-1876) served as rav of Nowy Sącz from 1830 and founded there a major chasidic court and a leading Galician yeshiva; the dynasty he founded spread widely through his sons and descendants.

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Sardis was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor (near modern Sart, Turkey), ruled by kings such as Croesus until the Persian conquest around 547 BCE. It then served as a Persian provincial capital at the end of the Royal Road, and in Xenophon's Anabasis it is the gathering point for Cyrus the Younger's expedition. Under Hellenistic and Roman rule it remained a major city, with a Jewish community settled by Antiochus III whose large synagogue has been excavated. It was also one of the seven churches of Asia in the Book of Revelation, and Melito was its second-century bishop. The sophist and historian Eunapius was born there.

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Founding town of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty (R. Yoel Teitelbaum, 1887-1979). Post-Holocaust, the dynasty's center is in Brooklyn/Williamsburg.

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Sidon, modern Saida on the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon, was one of the great cities of ancient Phoenicia. It is named as the home of the astrologer Dorotheus of Sidon, whose verse work on astrology was widely influential in antiquity.

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Soli was a Greek coastal city in Cilicia, in southern Asia Minor (modern south-central Turkey, near Mersin). It was the birthplace of the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus, the school's most important systematizer, and of the poet Aratus, author of the astronomical poem Phaenomena.

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Aachen, in North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany, borders both Belgium and the Netherlands. The Romans developed its hot springs into a spa town, and from 792 Charlemagne spent most winters there, making it the centre of his court; he built the Palatine Chapel, now the cathedral, and was buried in it after his death in 814. His adviser Alcuin of York led the palace school at the heart of the Carolingian revival of learning. German kings were crowned at Aachen from 936 to 1531. In the modern era its technical university, now RWTH Aachen, became a leading engineering school, where Arnold Sommerfeld taught from 1900 to 1906.

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Acre (Akko; Arabic Akka), at the northern end of Haifa Bay in northern Israel, was settled about 3000 BCE and in Hellenistic times was called Ptolemais. Taken by the Crusaders in 1104, it became the chief port of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and its capital in the thirteenth century, until the Mamluks captured it in 1291. Pope Gregory X was there on crusade when elected in 1271. Its Jewish community drew French scholars, and Nachmanides settled and taught in Acre after arriving in 1267, dying around 1270. Revived under Ottoman-era governors in the eighteenth century, it withstood Napoleon's siege of 1799. Today it is a mixed Jewish and Arab city; its Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Ancona is an Adriatic port and the capital of the Marche region of central Italy. Greek settlers from Syracuse gave it shape around 387 BCE, and the emperor Trajan enlarged its harbour, where his triumphal arch of 115 CE stands. It became part of the Papal States in 1532. Pope Pius II died there in 1464 while gathering a crusade, and the future Pope Benedict XIV became its bishop in 1727. Its Jewish community, one of the few allowed to remain in the Papal States after 1569, suffered under Paul IV, who confined it to a ghetto in 1555; in 1556 more than twenty Portuguese conversos accused of returning to Judaism were executed. The mathematician Vito Volterra was born there in 1860.

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Antwerp's post-WWII Jewish community of about 18,000 is one of Europe's most concentrated Hasidic-Haredi populations, dominated by Belz, Satmar, and Pshevorsk Hasidism. The community's economic backbone is the Antwerp diamond trade; the Belz, Satmar, and Machsike Hadas synagogues are the central institutions.

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Arles, on the Rhône at the head of the Camargue delta in Provence, southern France, began as a Greek trading post and became the Roman city of Arelate, whose monuments are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The emperor Constantine II was born there in 316, and in 314 it hosted the first church council called by Constantine I. Its bishops were leading figures of the church in Gaul, above all Caesarius, bishop from 502 to 542. Arles also had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the region, documented from the fifth century, and was a centre of medieval Provençal Jewry, where the translator Samuel ibn Tibbon lived, until the expulsion orders of 1498–1501.

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Aruṇācala is a hill at Tiruvannamalai in the northern interior of Tamil Nadu, south India, site of the Annāmalaiyar (Śiva) temple. In the 20th century it was the home of the sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950); his disciple Papaji (H. W. L. Poonja) met him there.

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Avignon, on the Rhône in Provence, southern France, was known in Roman times as Avennio. From 1309 to 1377 seven successive popes resided here. John XXII began the Palace of the Popes in 1316, and Clement VI bought the city from Queen Joanna I of Naples in 1348. Together with the neighbouring Comtat Venaissin it then remained papal territory until France annexed it in 1791, and this papal enclave treated Jews better than the Kingdom of France did. The Jewish philosopher and astronomer Gersonides lived in Avignon and Orange, and in 1342 Clement VI had part of his astronomical work translated into Latin. The historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Ávila, capital of its province in Castile and León, central Spain, is known for its medieval walls, begun in 1090; its old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jews are recorded there from 1144, and by the late thirteenth century its community was among the largest in Castile, until the expulsion of 1492. The kabbalist Moses de León, who first circulated the Zohar, settled in Ávila and died in 1305 at Arévalo while returning home. The Carmelite reformer Teresa of Ávila was born there in 1515 and founded her first Discalced Carmelite convent, San José, in the city in 1562.

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Bauska (Yiddish Boisk), a town in the Courland (Kurzeme) region of southern Latvia, had a long-established Jewish community. Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook served as its rav from 1897 to 1903 -- the period in which he first published his writings on Zionism -- before leaving for Jaffa in the Land of Israel.

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Berezhany (Polish Brzeżany), in Eastern Galicia, was the seat of R. Shalom Mordechai Schwadron (the Maharsham) for over 40 years; one of the most-consulted halachic addresses of late-19th-century Galician Jewry.

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Bern is the federal city and de facto capital of Switzerland, probably founded in 1191 by the dukes of Zähringen. It joined the Swiss Confederacy in 1353 and was chosen as the seat of the federal government in 1848; its old town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The medieval Jewish community suffered persecution: in 1294, on the pretext of a blood-libel accusation, many Jews were executed and the rest expelled. A Jewish community exists in the city today. Albert Einstein worked at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern from 1902 to 1909, the period of his 1905 papers on relativity and the photoelectric effect, and the Bible scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann studied at its university.

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Bikrampur, now part of Munshiganj District in Bangladesh, is a historic region on the Padma River in eastern Bengal. It became an administrative centre under the Chandra kings in the tenth century and later a regional capital of the Sena dynasty, whose king Lakshman Sen withdrew there after his defeat in 1205. In the Buddhist world of Pāla-era Bengal it is remembered as the birthplace, around 982 CE, of Atiśa (Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna), most probably at the village of Vajrayogini; he became a senior scholar at Vikramaśīla before leaving for Tibet in 1040. Under the Mughals it was a pargana, and in modern times many Bengali families traced their roots to the area, including that of the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose.

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Bobruisk, a city in central Belarus on the Berezina River, had a large Jewish community -- a majority of the city's population in the nineteenth century -- and was a center of both Lithuanian Torah scholarship and Chabad chasidut. The Torah scholar Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein, author of the Torah Temimah, was associated with the town.

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Bodh Gaya, in modern Bihar, India, is the most important Buddhist pilgrimage site, traditionally identified as the place where Siddhārtha Gautama attained awakening beneath the Bodhi tree; the Mahābodhi Temple complex there is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Sri Lankan reformer Anagārika Dharmapāla campaigned through his Maha Bodhi Society to restore the long-neglected shrine.

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Bombay (now Mumbai) hosted three distinct Jewish communities: the Bene Israel (ancient Konkani Jews), the Baghdadi-Sephardic community (led by the Sassoon family from the 1830s), and the smaller Cochin-Indian community. R. Avraham Reuven (Halevi) and the Sassoon family endowed Bombay's central synagogues and schools.

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Boston is the capital of Massachusetts, on the north-east coast of the United States. It was a U.S. port of arrival and lecturing for Indian teachers: Paramahansa Yogananda arrived there in 1920 and addressed the International Congress of Religious Liberals, and A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda landed at Boston's Commonwealth Pier in September 1965 before continuing to New York.

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Brescia, a city in Lombardy, northern Italy, was the Roman Brixia and later a Lombard ducal seat, whose monastery of San Salvatore-Santa Giulia is now a UNESCO site. An ancient bishopric, it was ruled by Venice from 1426 until the Napoleonic era. In 1491-94 the Jewish printer Gershom Soncino worked here, issuing a small-format Hebrew Bible in 1494 that Luther later used for his translation, and the city's canons included the Christian Hebraist Marco Marini. The mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia was born here and survived the French sack of 1512. Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, was born at nearby Concesio and was schooled and ordained in Brescia.

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Burgos, the medieval Castilian royal capital, hosted a major Jewish community from the 11th to 15th centuries. R. Todros HaLevi Abulafia (Otzar HaKavod) served here, and Burgos played a central role in 14th-century Castilian Jewish life until the 1391 pogroms and the eventual 1492 expulsion.

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Caesarea Maritima was a port city on the Mediterranean coast of modern Israel. Herod the Great built it around 22-10 BCE on the site of a Phoenician harbour town, and it later became the Roman provincial capital. According to Josephus, a clash beside one of its synagogues helped spark the Jewish revolt of 66 CE, and around 300 CE Rabbi Abbahu headed a rabbinic academy there. It was also an early Christian centre: Origen worked there, and its church library, built up by Pamphilus, served Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, and drew scholars such as Gregory of Nazianzus. Arab forces took it in 640; it was later a Crusader port until the Mamluks destroyed its defences in 1265.

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Canterbury, a city in Kent in southeast England, was the Roman town of Durovernum Cantiacorum. In 597 Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great, became its first archbishop, and Canterbury has since been the primatial see of the English church; its archbishops have included Anselm and, during the Reformation, Thomas Cranmer. The murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the cathedral in 1170 made it a major pilgrimage destination and the goal of the pilgrims in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The cathedral is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the King's School, often called the oldest secondary school in the United Kingdom, counts the writer on Zen and Buddhism Alan Watts among its pupils.

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Caozhou, the area of modern Heze in Shandong province, China, was the birthplace of two major Tang-dynasty Chan masters: Línjì Yìxuán, founder of the Linji (Japanese Rinzai) school, and Zhàozhōu Cóngshěn, the master famed for the 'Mu' (wú) kōan. Both later established their teaching seats elsewhere in northern China.

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Cesena is a city in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, co-capital of the province of Forlì-Cesena. Roman Caesena was a garrison town, and from 754 the city formed part of the papal domains. It prospered under Malatesta rule (1379-1465), when Malatesta Novello built the Malatestiana Library, described as Europe's first public library, and Cesare Borgia made it the capital of his duchy in 1500. Popes Pius VI and Pius VII were born in Cesena, and Pius VIII served as its bishop. The Torah commentator Obadiah Sforno was born in Cesena around 1475.

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Cleveland, Ohio, became a major American center of Lithuanian-style Torah learning when the Telshe Yeshiva, originally founded in 1875 in Telšiai (Telz), Lithuania, was re-established there in 1941 by its surviving roshei yeshiva, Rabbi Elya Meir Bloch and Rabbi Chaim Mordechai Katz, after fleeing the Holocaust. Known today as the Rabbinical College of Telshe, it relocated to suburban Wickliffe in 1957.

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Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark, on the island of Zealand beside the Øresund strait. Tradition dates its founding to the fortress built by Bishop Absalon in 1167, and by the early 15th century it had become the royal capital. The University of Copenhagen, inaugurated in 1479 under Catholic auspices, was reshaped after Denmark adopted the Lutheran Reformation in 1536. The city has been home to notable figures in science and thought: the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) spent almost his entire life there, and in 1921 Niels Bohr founded the university's Institute for Theoretical Physics, now the Niels Bohr Institute.

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Cyrene was a Greek colony near modern Shahhat in northeastern Libya, founded about 631 BCE under Battus I by settlers from Thera. In the 4th century BCE Aristippus, a follower of Socrates, founded the Cyrenaic school of philosophy there. The city later passed to the Ptolemies and in 96 BCE to Rome, and it was largely destroyed in 115 CE during the Diaspora Revolt. According to the Gospels, Simon of Cyrene carried Jesus' cross, and Coptic tradition holds that Mark the Evangelist came from Cyrene and was its first bishop. Earthquakes in 262 and 365 ruined the city, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982.

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The Dakshineswar Kālī Temple is a temple to the goddess Kālī on the east bank of the Hooghly River north of Kolkata, West Bengal, built in 1855. It was the residence and place of worship of Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886), whose disciple Swami Vivekananda first met him there.

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Danzig (Polish Gdańsk), a Baltic port city, had a Jewish community that grew after Prussian annexation in 1793 and built a Great Synagogue in 1887; in the interwar period it was the Free City of Danzig and a transit point for Jewish emigration. Rabbi Yisrael Lipschutz, author of the Mishnah commentary Tiferet Yisrael, served as its rabbi from 1837 to 1860.

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Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus in Phocis, central Greece, was the site of the most famous oracle of Apollo and was regarded as the religious center of the Greek world. The biographer and Platonist philosopher Plutarch served for many years as a priest at the Delphic sanctuary, and several of his essays concern the oracle. Tradition connects the fabulist Aesop with a death at Delphi.

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Dessau, a town in Anhalt in eastern Germany, is best known in Jewish history as the birthplace, in 1729, of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and central figure of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah). The mishnaic commentator Rabbi Yisrael Lipschütz (author of the Tiferet Yisrael) also served in the region.

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Drepung Monastery, just west of Lhasa, is one of the three great Gelug monastic universities of central Tibet. It was founded in 1416 by Jamyang Choje, a disciple of Tsongkhapa; the Second Dalai Lama built the Ganden Podrang residence there in 1518, and it became the principal seat of the early Dalai Lamas, several of whom (including the Second and Fourth) studied and resided there before the Potala was built.

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Erfurt, the capital of Thuringia in central Germany, is first recorded in 742, when Boniface founded a bishopric there, and grew into a prosperous medieval trading town. Its Jewish community, dating from the late 11th century, included the scholar Alexander Suslin, killed in the massacre of 1349 during the Black Death persecutions; Jacob Weil later served as its rabbi, and the Old Synagogue and the buried Erfurt Treasure are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Christian figures tied to the city include Meister Eckhart, prior of its Dominican house from 1294, Martin Luther, who studied at its university from 1501 and entered the Augustinian monastery in 1505, and the Pietist August Hermann Francke, who preached there in 1690-91.

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Évreux was the seat of the three Evreux brothers — R. Moshe, R. Shmuel, and R. Yitzchak of Évreux — Tosafists whose ethical-pietistic teachings were preserved in 'Shitah Mekubetzet' and 'Sefer HaMussar'. Their tradition shaped Sephardic Talmudic methodology after their writings reached Provence and Spain.

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Frankfurt an der Oder is a city on the Oder River in eastern Germany, opposite the Polish town of Słubice and distinct from Frankfurt am Main. A member of the Hanseatic League from 1430, it was home to the Viadrina, Brandenburg's first university, founded in 1506 and closed in 1811, whose students included the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt; it was re-established as a European university in 1991. The city also had a Jewish community and was a notable centre of Hebrew printing, where a complete Talmud was printed in 1697-99. Rabbi Joseph Teomim, author of the halachic super-commentary Pri Megadim, served as its rabbi from 1782 until his death in 1792.

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Freiburg im Breisgau is a city at the southwestern edge of the Black Forest in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded by the dukes of Zähringen in 1120, it placed itself under Habsburg protection in 1368. Its university, founded in 1457, is one of the oldest in Germany, and its Gothic Minster was finished by 1513. Erasmus moved there after Basel accepted the Reformation and lived there for several years. Since the 1820s the city has been the seat of a Catholic archdiocese, and the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner was born there in 1904 and studied philosophy at the university. Much of the old centre was destroyed in an air raid in November 1944 and was rebuilt on its medieval plan.

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Gades, modern Cádiz in southwestern Spain, was an ancient Phoenician foundation on the Atlantic coast beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, the westernmost major city of the classical Mediterranean world. The Stoic Posidonius is reported to have stayed there to observe the Atlantic tides, which he connected with the moon. The historian Polybius also traveled in the far west.

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Gateshead, near Newcastle, is the heart of British Litvish Orthodoxy. The Gateshead Yeshiva (founded 1929), Gateshead Kollel (1941), and Gateshead Seminary made it the largest Torah center in postwar Europe. R. Aryeh Leib Gurwicz, R. Leib Lopian, and R. Avraham Gurwicz led the institutions through the late 20th century.

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Groningen is the capital of the province of the same name in the northern Netherlands. A member of the Hanseatic League in the Middle Ages, it was captured by forces under Maurice of Nassau in 1594 and joined the Dutch Republic. Its university, founded in 1614, is the second oldest in the country; Johann Bernoulli was its professor of mathematics from about 1695 to 1705, and his son Daniel Bernoulli was born in the city in 1700. The region was an early centre of Anabaptism, and Menno Simons, after breaking with the Catholic priesthood in 1536, was ordained an Anabaptist elder by Obbe Philips around 1537, reportedly at Groningen.

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Haining, in Zhejiang province, China, was the birthplace of two leading figures of modern Chinese Buddhism: the reformer Taixu (born 1890), founder of the Wuchang Buddhist Institute and an advocate of 'humanistic Buddhism,' and his disciple the scholar-monk Yinshun, who later became a major Buddhist intellectual in Taiwan.

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Hanau, on the Main about 25 km east of Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse, was the seat of the Counts of Hanau and later capital of the County of Hanau-Münzenberg. In 1597 Count Philipp Ludwig II invited French and Walloon-Dutch Protestant refugees to found a new town beside the old one, and he also let Jews settle, re-establishing a community from 1604; Jews are first recorded there in 1313. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Hanau was an important centre of Hebrew printing. The Brothers Grimm were born there, as was Siegmund Feniger (1901), who became the Theravada monk Nyanaponika Thera and co-founded the Buddhist Publication Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka, in 1958.

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Hanipol (Annopol, in Volhynia, western Ukraine) is where the Maggid of Mezeritch, Rabbi Dov Ber, died and was buried in 1772. The early chasidic master Rabbi Meshulam Zusha of Hanipol -- a disciple of the Maggid and brother of Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk -- settled there, spread chasidut in the region, and is buried beside his teacher.

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Heraclea Pontica, modern Karadeniz Ereğli on the Black Sea coast of northwestern Turkey, was a Greek colony founded by Megara. It was the home city of the late-antique geographer Marcian of Heraclea, who compiled and epitomized earlier coastal surveys (periploi).

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Italy, in southern Europe, is treated here as the country as a whole. Rome is the seat of the papacy, and the popes ruled the Papal States in central Italy until Italian forces took Rome in 1870, completing the unification begun when the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861; the country became a republic in 1946. Italy also has one of the oldest Jewish diasporas, attested in Rome by the 2nd century BCE. In the Renaissance it was a centre of Hebrew printing, where the Soncino press issued the first complete printed Hebrew Bible in 1488, and of Jewish biblical commentary: Isaac Abarbanel spent his last years in Italy, and Ovadiah Sforno taught in Rome and Bologna.

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Johannesburg holds about 70% of South African Jewry (~50,000), historically of Lithuanian (Litvish) origin. The Sandton and Glenhazel neighborhoods house the bulk of the Orthodox community; Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein and Yeshivah Maharsha are based here.

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Kāñcīpuram, in modern Tamil Nadu, India, was the capital of the Pallava dynasty and an important centre of learning where Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism all flourished. It is associated with the Theravāda commentator Dhammapāla, said to have been born there, and with the Buddhist logician Dignāga, who is reported to have studied or taught in the region.

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Kashan is an ancient city in Isfahan province, central Iran, on the edge of the Dasht-e Kavir desert, with the prehistoric mound of Tepe Sialk nearby. It was famed for medieval lustre ceramics and later for carpets and silk, and it was a retreat for Safavid shahs. The city was also a centre of Shi'i learning: the philosopher and traditionist Mohsen Fayz Kashani (1598-1680), a student of Mulla Sadra, was born and died there. The astronomer Jamshid al-Kashi was born there in 1380. Kashan's long-established Jewish community suffered forced conversion under Shah Abbas II, and in the twentieth century it largely moved to Tehran, Israel and elsewhere.

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Kępno is a town in the Greater Poland Voivodeship of Poland. It received town rights around 1283. Annexed by Prussia in 1793, it was known as Kempen under Prussian rule until it returned to Poland in 1920. Jews settled here in the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth it was a Jewish shtetl, though most Jews left after 1850, many for Wrocław and Berlin. Samuel Holdheim, later a radical Reform rabbi in Berlin, was born here in 1806, and the Malbim was rabbi of Kempen from 1845 to 1859.

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Kfar Chabad, founded in 1949, is the Israeli headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch and a near-exact 1:1 replica of 770 Eastern Parkway built at the Rebbe's instruction. Home to the Tomchei Temimim yeshiva, Chabad teachers' institutes, and the central beit knesset of Israeli Chabad.

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Kokonor (Qinghai Lake) is a large saltwater lake in the Amdo region of northeastern Tibet, in modern Qinghai province, China. The grasslands around the lake were a meeting ground of Tibetan and Mongol Buddhist worlds; the Third Dalai Lama, Sönam Gyatso, was active in this region during the missions that brought Gelug Buddhism to the Mongols in the late sixteenth century.

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Lelów in Lesser Poland is the seat of the Lelov Hasidic dynasty, founded by R. Dovid Biderman of Lelov (1746-1814), a senior disciple of the Chozeh of Lublin.

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Lincoln hosted one of medieval England's largest Jewish communities; the surviving 12th-century 'Jew's House' is among Britain's oldest extant townhouses. The 1255 blood-libel of 'Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln' was a paradigmatic medieval anti-Jewish accusation, leading to 19 Jewish executions. R. Yosef of Lincoln (Yom Tov of Joigny's circle) was a Tosafist.

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Lithang (Litang), in the Kham region of eastern Tibet (now in the Garzê prefecture of Sichuan, China), is home to a major Gelug monastery. It was the birthplace, in 1708, of the Seventh Dalai Lama, Kelzang Gyatso; the line of the Tenth Dalai Lama is also connected with the region.

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Madurai is an ancient city on the Vaigai River in Tamil Nadu, south India. By the seventh century it was the main capital of the Pandya kings, and Tamil tradition holds that the third Sangam, an assembly of poets, met there. The great temple of Meenakshi and Sundareswarar, whose present structure largely dates from the seventeenth century, stands at its centre. The Nayak dynasty ruled from Madurai from 1559 to 1736, and in 1801 it passed under British East India Company control. The mathematician Augustus De Morgan was born there in 1806, and in 1896 the young Ramana Maharshi, living there with his uncle, had the experience of self-inquiry that shaped his teaching before he left for Arunachala.

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Málaga, a port on the Mediterranean coast of Andalusia, southern Spain, was founded by Phoenicians as Malake around 770 BCE and later became Roman Malaca. Taken by Arab and Berber forces in the early eighth century, it was an important harbour of al-Andalus under the Cordoban caliphate and the taifa kingdoms, and in the fifteenth century the main port of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The botanist and pharmacologist Ibn al-Baytar (d. 1248) was born there. Its Jewish community produced the poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol, born in Málaga around 1021, and Samuel ibn Naghrillah is said to have settled there after leaving Córdoba. Castile took the city in 1487 after a long siege.

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Mannheim, a city in Baden in southwestern Germany, had a notable Jewish community with the Lemle Moses Klaus, a learning and study foundation established in 1708. Rabbi Yaakov Ettlinger, author of the Talmud commentary Aruch LaNer and a leader of German Orthodoxy, served as district rabbi seated in Mannheim from 1826 and founded a yeshiva there that trained future leaders including Samson Raphael Hirsch.

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Traditional burial site of R. Shimon bar Yochai; major Lag BaOmer pilgrimage site.

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Messana, modern Messina, lies at the northeastern tip of Sicily on the strait separating the island from the Italian mainland. It was the birthplace of the Peripatetic philosopher Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle known for his geographical and political writings.

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Messina, a port city in Sicily (then under the Crown of Aragon), had a Jewish community in the medieval period until the expulsion of Jews from Sicily in 1492. The kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia, founder of 'prophetic' or ecstatic Kabbalah, settled in the Messina region of Sicily from about 1281 and taught his system there for roughly a decade.

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Modena, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, was refounded as the Roman colony of Mutina in 183 BCE. Its Romanesque cathedral, with the Torre Civica and Piazza Grande, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Pope Adrian III died near Modena in 885 and was buried at the nearby abbey of Nonantola. After Ferrara passed to the papacy in 1598, Modena became the main seat of the Este dukes, and it had a notable Jewish community: the kabbalist Aaron Berechiah of Modena (d. 1639) wrote Ma'avar Yabbok, an influential book of prayers and teachings on the sick, the dying and the dead, and the scholar Abraham Rovigo was born there around 1650.

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Modi'in was a town in the Judean foothills (its ancient site lies between Jerusalem and the coastal plain, near the modern Israeli city of Modi'in). It is known as the home of the priestly Hasmonean family: according to the account of the Maccabean revolt, Mattathias and his sons, including Judah Maccabee, launched the revolt against the Seleucids from Modi'in in the second century BCE.

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Mount Hiei, overlooking Kyoto in Japan, is the site of Enryaku-ji, the head temple of the Tendai school founded by Saichō in the early ninth century. As a major centre of learning it trained many of the founders of later Japanese Buddhist schools — including Hōnen, Shinran, Dōgen, Eisai and Nichiren, all of whom studied there before establishing their own movements.

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Mount Moriah is identified in Jewish tradition with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. According to the Torah, it is the mountain where Abraham was commanded to offer Isaac (the Akeidah); the Book of Chronicles identifies it as the site on which Solomon built the First Temple.

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Mount Nebo is a ridge in the highlands of Moab, east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea (in modern Jordan). According to the Torah, it is the place from which Moses viewed the Promised Land before his death, and where he died and was buried, his grave unknown.

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Mount Tiantai, in Zhejiang province, China, gives its name to the Tiantai school of Buddhism, whose de facto founder Zhiyi settled there in the sixth century. The Japanese monks Saichō (founder of Tendai) and later Eisai (founder of Japanese Rinzai Zen) both travelled to Mount Tiantai to study, carrying its teachings back to Japan.

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Nālandā, in modern Bihar, India, was one of the great Buddhist monastic universities (mahāvihāras) of the ancient world, flourishing especially under the Gupta and Pāla dynasties before its destruction around the end of the twelfth century. The Chinese pilgrims Xuanzang and Yijing both studied there for years and left detailed accounts; its ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Nemyriv (Nemirov), a town in Podolia (today in Vinnytsia Oblast, western Ukraine), was the hometown of Rabbi Nathan Sternhartz (Reb Noson, 1780-1844), the chief disciple and scribe of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who recorded and transmitted his teachings and preserved the Breslov movement after the rebbe's death. The town's Jewish community also suffered greatly in the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1648.

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Netanya, on Israel's central coastal plain, became home to Kiryat Sanz — a Sanz-Klausenburg Hasidic neighborhood founded by R. Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam in 1956. Laniado Hospital, also founded by him, is the dynasty's central institution. Kiryat Sanz remains the global Sanz-Klausenburg headquarters.

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Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital across the Tigris from modern Mosul in northern Iraq. Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian) was briefly its bishop in the 7th century before withdrawing to solitude.

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Evanston, Illinois, USA, is the home of Northwestern University, where the Sri Lankan scholar-monk Walpola Rahula held an academic post; he was among the first Buddhist monks to serve as a professor at a Western university.

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Palma, the chief city of the island of Majorca (Mallorca), then part of the Crown of Aragon, had a significant medieval Jewish community until the anti-Jewish violence of 1391 and the forced conversions that followed. Rabbi Shimon ben Tzemach Duran (the Tashbetz) practiced medicine in Palma before fleeing, in the wake of the 1391 persecutions, to Algiers, where he became a leading halachic authority of North African Jewry.

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Peki'in is a village in the Upper Galilee of northern Israel with a long-standing Jewish presence dating back to antiquity. In the Talmudic period it is associated with the tanna Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya; according to a well-known tradition, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son hid from the Romans in a cave at Peki'in.

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Pergamon was a major Greek city in Mysia, northwestern Asia Minor, near modern Bergama, Turkey; it was the capital of the Attalid kingdom and famous for its library. The physician Galen was born and trained there before his career at Rome. In late antiquity Pergamon was also the seat of a Neoplatonist school, among whose students was Eusebius of Myndus.

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Peshischa (Polish Przysucha), a town in central Poland (Radom region), was the seat of an influential school of chasidut. Founded by Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak (the 'Holy Jew'), it was led after 1813 by Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, whose intellectual, individualist approach combining Talmudic study with chasidic spirituality shaped the later Kotzk and Ger schools.

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Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania in the northeastern United States, was founded in 1682 by the Quaker William Penn as a colony open to religious freedom. The Declaration of Independence was adopted there in 1776, and the city served as the nation's capital at intervals until 1800. Its Jewish community dates to the colonial era, with Congregation Mikveh Israel tracing its origins to 1740; the city later became a centre of Jewish scholarship as home to the Jewish Publication Society (1888) and Dropsie College (chartered 1907), where the scholar Henry Malter taught. Philadelphia was also the birthplace, in 1917, of Robert Aitken, the American Zen teacher who co-founded the Diamond Sangha in Hawaiʻi.

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Pisa, on the Arno near the Ligurian Sea in Tuscany, central Italy, was one of the Italian maritime republics; its eleventh- and twelfth-century wealth built the cathedral complex of the Piazza del Duomo with its leaning bell tower. The city became an archbishopric in 1092. Pope Eugene III was a Pisan, and Pope Gregory VIII died there in 1187 while trying to reconcile Pisa and Genoa for a crusade. Florence took control of the city in the early fifteenth century. Pisa's university, among the oldest in Italy, educated Galileo Galilei, who was born in the city in 1564 and later held its chair of mathematics. In the early eighteenth century the Livorno-born kabbalist Joseph Ergas founded a yeshiva in Pisa.

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Pruzhany, a town in the Brest region of southwestern Belarus, had a long-established Jewish community within Lithuanian Jewry. Among the rabbis associated with the town was Rabbi Yoel Sirkes (the Bach), author of the Bayit Chadash commentary on the Tur, early in his rabbinic career.

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Pum Nahara was a settlement in Talmudic-era Babylonia (central Iraq) that hosted a rabbinic academy in the amoraic period. It is associated in the Talmud with sages including Rav Kahana. Its precise location is not securely identified.

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Purī is a coastal city in Odisha, eastern India, on the Bay of Bengal, site of the Jagannātha temple (12th c.). It is traditionally counted among the four cardinal monastic seats attributed to Ādi Śaṅkara, and was a central place of Chaitanya Mahāprabhu's later life.

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Rabat, a city on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, had a long-established Jewish community within Moroccan Sephardi Jewry. It was the birthplace, in 1847/48, of Rabbi Raphael Aharon ben Shimon, who later served for some thirty years as Chief Rabbi of Cairo and was a figure in the bringing to light of the Cairo Genizah.

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Ramah (Ramah/Ramathaim) was a town in the hill country of Ephraim or Benjamin in the biblical period. According to the Book of Samuel, it was the home and burial place of the prophet Samuel, who judged Israel and anointed its first kings. Its precise identification is debated among scholars.

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Rostov-on-Don, a city in southern Russia, became the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement from about 1915 to 1924. The fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom DovBer Schneersohn (the Rashab), moved there during World War I, died in Rostov in 1920, and is buried in the city; his son, the sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, led the movement from there before leaving the Soviet Union.

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Rudnik nad Sanem in southern Galicia was the birthplace of R. Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam, founder of the modern Sanz-Klausenburg Hasidic dynasty. The town was part of the broader Sanz-Hasidic region of late-Hapsburg Galicia.

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Saint Petersburg, on the Neva river at the head of the Gulf of Finland in northwestern Russia, was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and was the capital of the Russian Empire from 1712 to 1918. Peter founded its Academy of Sciences in 1724, and the Peter and Paul Cathedral became the burial place of the emperors. It was renamed Petrograd in 1914 and Leningrad in 1924, regaining its original name in 1991. Its Jewish community consecrated the Grand Choral Synagogue in 1893. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad Hasidism, was held in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1798; Chabad marks his release on 19 Kislev each year.

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Salé lies on Morocco's Atlantic coast, facing Rabat across the mouth of the Bou Regreg river. Andalusi families probably founded the town in the 11th century. Its Great Mosque dates from 1196, and the Marinids added a madrasa, a hospital and a Sufi lodge in the 14th century. The Andalusi Sufi Ibn Ashir, later the city's patron saint, drew disciples here, among them Ibn Abbad al-Rundi, and the vizier Ibn al-Khatib spent his first exile in the town. Morisco refugees from Hornachos settled here after Spain's 1609 expulsion, and in 1627 Salé and Rabat formed a corsair republic. The town also had a mellah; Chaim ibn Attar was born here around 1696 and later ran a yeshiva here.

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Sārnāth, near Varanasi in modern Uttar Pradesh, India, is the pilgrimage site traditionally identified as the deer park where the Buddha gave his first teaching (the 'turning of the wheel of Dharma') after his awakening. The Sri Lankan reformer Anagārika Dharmapāla and his Maha Bodhi Society worked to restore the site and re-establish a Buddhist presence there in the early twentieth century.

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Saurāṣṭra is the Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat in western India, between the Gulf of Kutch and the Gulf of Khambhat. Its history includes the Junagadh rock inscription of the ruler Rudradāman (about 150 CE), the Maitraka kingdom whose capital Valabhī was a centre of learning where grants were made to Brahmins, Buddhists and Jains, and the temple of Somnath. The seventh-century astronomer Bhāskara I may have been born in the region. According to one strand of Tibetan biographical tradition, the eighth-century Madhyamaka master Śāntideva, author of the Bodhicaryāvatāra, was born a prince of Saurāṣṭra before becoming a monk at Nālandā, although the earliest surviving biography places his birth in southern India.

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Scotland occupies the northern part of the island of Great Britain and is a country of the United Kingdom. Christianity reached it through Roman influence in the south and through missionaries such as Columba on Iona in the sixth century, and a Kingdom of Scotland emerged in the ninth century. The Reformation of 1560 broke with papal authority, and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland is today its largest church. The crowns of Scotland and England were joined in 1603 and the kingdoms united in 1707. In the eighteenth century the Scottish Enlightenment made the country a leading intellectual centre. The twelfth-century Victorine theologian Richard of Saint-Victor is usually described as Scottish, though his origins are uncertain.

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Shiloh was a town in the hill country of Ephraim (its site lies at Khirbet Seilun, north of Beth-El, in the West Bank). According to the Book of Joshua and the Books of Samuel, the Tabernacle (Mishkan) stood at Shiloh for centuries during the period of the Judges, making it the central sanctuary of Israel before the establishment of Jerusalem; Eli the priest officiated there.

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Sicily, the large island off southern Italy. In the 7th-8th centuries its Greek-speaking, monastically dense church produced several popes of the so-called Byzantine papacy, including Agatho and Sergius I.

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Sinope, modern Sinop on the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey, was founded by Ionian Greek settlers from Miletus and became one of the chief ports of the region. It was the birthplace of Diogenes the Cynic, who was exiled from the city and went on to live in Athens and Corinth, and it later served as capital of the kingdom of Pontus, whose king Mithridates VI Eupator was born and buried there. In the 2nd century CE the city produced the Christian teacher Marcion, said by Epiphanius to be the son of a local bishop, who was excommunicated by the church of Rome around 144. Sinope later passed under Byzantine, Seljuk and Turkish rule.

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Slonim, a town in western Belarus, was the seat of the Slonim chasidic dynasty, founded by Rabbi Avraham Weinberg (1804-1883), author of Yesod HaAvodah. The community supported a yeshiva and chasidic court; the Slonim dynasty survives today in Israel.

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Slutzk (Slutsk), a town in central Belarus, was a major center of Lithuanian Torah scholarship. Its yeshiva, founded in 1897 by the Ridvaz, was led by Rabbi Isser Zalman Meltzer and Rabbi Aharon Kotler before relocating to nearby Kletsk after World War I.

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Under the rule of the German princes and Holy Roman Empire, Speyer rose along the Rhine River as one of medieval Europe's most important cathedral cities and a center of Christian imperial power—yet it became equally renowned as a thriving hub of Jewish learning and life. The city's strategic location on a major trade route, surrounded by the region's rolling vineyards and the broad Rhine itself, made it a magnet for merchants, scholars, and craftspeople. By the eleventh century, Speyer's Jewish community had grown into one of the Rhineland's most prosperous and intellectually vibrant settlements, home to renowned yeshivas and scholars whose influence radiated across all of northern Europe. The community enjoyed a remarkable period of relative security and autonomy, even obtaining a charter of privileges from the local bishop that granted them legal protections unusual for medieval Jewish life. Yet Speyer's greatest tragedy came during the First Crusade in 1096, when massive pogroms devastated the community—a watershed moment that transformed Jewish consciousness and left permanent marks on the city's Jewish memory. The imposing Speyer Cathedral, begun in 1025, still towers over the city today, a monument to the Christian empire that both sheltered and threatened the Jewish world that flourished in its shadow.

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Śrīvijaya was a maritime Buddhist kingdom of insular Southeast Asia (roughly seventh to twelfth centuries), generally centred on Palembang on Sumatra, in modern Indonesia, and a major centre of Buddhist learning on the sea route between China and India. The Chinese pilgrim Yijing stopped there to study and translate texts; according to the Tibetan tradition, Atiśa later studied for many years under the teacher Dharmakīrtiśrī (Serlingpa) in the Śrīvijaya realm.

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Śṛṅgeri (Sringeri) is a temple town on the Tuṅgabhadrā (Tunga) River in the Chikkamagaluru district of Karnataka, south-west India. It is traditionally held to be the site of the first of the maṭhas founded by Ādi Śaṅkara, and was later led by Vidyāraṇya, the 14th-century Advaita scholar and Sringeri pontiff.

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Strasbourg is the principal city of Alsace in northeastern France, on the Rhine. A free imperial city from the 13th century, it became French in 1681, was German again from 1871 to 1918, and is today a seat of the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. In the 14th century it was a centre of German mysticism, where the Dominicans Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler preached, and in the 16th a centre of the Protestant Reformation under Martin Bucer, with John Calvin among its figures; its university grew from a gymnasium founded in 1538. The medieval Jewish community was destroyed in the massacre of 1349; Jewish life later revived, and modern Strasbourg is an important centre of French Jewry.

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Stratyn (Stretin) in Eastern Galicia is the seat of the Stretin Hasidic dynasty, founded by R. Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein of Stretin (1780-1854).

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The Tafilalt oasis on the edge of the Sahara is the cradle of the Abuhatzeira dynasty — R. Yaakov Abuhatzeira (Abir Yaakov, 1808-1880) was born here, and his descendants down to Baba Sali traced their saintly lineage to this remote desert region.

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Tehran is the capital of Iran; its metropolitan area has absorbed the ancient city of Rey. A modest town in the Middle Ages, it was made the capital by Agha Mohammad Khan of the Qajar dynasty in 1786 and grew into the country's political and intellectual centre. It gained the Dar al-Funun college in 1851, was at the heart of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, and gained the University of Tehran in 1934. The Qajar court drew Muslim reformers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani in the 1880s. Tehran also became home to most of Iran's Jews, and the Kashan-born Yedidya Shofet (1908-2005) served there as chief rabbi of Iran.

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Trieste, a port city in northeastern Italy (historically under Habsburg rule), had a notable Jewish community. It was the birthplace, in 1800, of Rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto (Shadal), the eminent biblical scholar, grammarian, and poet, who went on to teach at the Rabbinical College of Padua.

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Tripoli, the Mediterranean port that is Libya's capital and largest city, was founded by the Phoenicians in the seventh century BCE as Oea, one of the 'three cities' that gave Tripolitania its name. Muslim armies took it around 643, and it was later ruled by dynasties based in Kairouan and in Cairo, including the Fatimids. Held for a time by the Knights of St John, it fell to the Ottomans in 1551 and was colonised by Italy in 1911. Its Jewish community, part of a regional presence going back to antiquity, was revived in the mid-sixteenth century by the Spanish-born kabbalist Shimon Lavi, author of the Zohar commentary Ketem Paz; most Libyan Jews emigrated after the Second World War.

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Tus is an ancient city of Khurasan in northeastern Iran, near modern Mashhad. The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid died there in 809, and the imam Ali al-Rida was buried in 818 beside him at nearby Sanabad; the shrine that grew around his tomb gave Mashhad its name. The poet Ferdowsi, born in a village near Tus, died and was buried there, and the theologian al-Ghazali was born in its district and died there in 1111. Other figures associated with the city include Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Shaykh Tusi and Jabir ibn Hayyan. The Mongols sacked Tus in 1220.

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Ulm is a city on the Danube in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany, founded around 850. As a free imperial city it prospered through trade in the late Middle Ages, and in 1377 its citizens began building Ulm Minster, whose 161.5-metre steeple, completed in 1890, makes it the second-tallest church in the world. The Dominican mystic Henry Suso spent his final years in Ulm and died there in 1366. The city became Protestant during the Reformation in 1530. Johannes Kepler completed the printing of his Rudolphine Tables there in 1627, and Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in 1879. Bombing in 1944 destroyed much of the old town.

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Where R. Nachman of Breslov died (1810) and is buried; massive annual Rosh Hashanah Breslover pilgrimage.

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Ur Kasdim ('Ur of the Chaldees') is named in the Torah as the original homeland of Abraham, from which his family set out toward Canaan. It is commonly identified with the ancient Sumerian city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq), though some traditions and scholars locate it in northern Mesopotamia.

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Valladolid is a city in north-central Spain, today the seat of government of Castile and León. By the fifteenth century it was a residence of the kings of Castile; Isabella and Ferdinand married there in 1469, Christopher Columbus died there in 1506, and it briefly served as the royal capital from 1601 to 1606. Its university dates from 1241. In 1550-1551 it hosted the Valladolid debate over the treatment of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, in which Bartolomé de las Casas argued. The city also had a medieval Jewish community; the kabbalist Moses de León, who circulated the Zohar and whom most modern scholars regard as its main author, lived in Guadalajara and Valladolid before settling in Ávila.

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Vitebsk, a city in northeastern Belarus, had a significant Jewish community and was an early center of chasidut in White Russia. Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, a leading disciple of the Maggid of Mezeritch, led the chasidim of the region before emigrating to the Land of Israel in 1777 at the head of a group of some three hundred followers, settling ultimately in Tiberias.

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Vitry-le-François is a town on the Marne in northeastern France. It was built in 1545 at the order of King Francis I, whose name it bears, to replace the older town of Vitry-en-Perthois, which imperial forces destroyed in 1544. The medieval Vitry was the home of Rabbi Simhah ben Samuel, a pupil of Rashi who died in 1105; his Machzor Vitry collects rules of religious practice together with responsa of Rashi and other authorities. The mathematician Abraham de Moivre was born in Vitry-le-François in 1667 to Protestant parents and later moved to England to escape the persecution of Huguenots.

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Wiesbaden, the capital of the German state of Hesse, is one of Europe's oldest spa towns; the Romans knew its thermal springs as Aquae Mattiacorum, and in 1806 it became the capital of the Duchy of Nassau. Abraham Geiger, later a leading figure of Reform Judaism, served as the city's rabbi in the 1830s and edited a journal of Jewish scholarship there. Wiesbaden was also the birthplace, in 1878, of Anton Gueth, who as Nyanatiloka became one of the first Europeans ordained as a Theravada Buddhist monk, in Burma in 1904, and a noted translator of Pali texts. The city's main synagogue was destroyed in the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938.

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Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, became one of the foremost centers of Hungarian and chasidic Orthodoxy in America after World War II. It is the seat of the Satmar chasidic community, established there from 1947 by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe; it was also a base of Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, the builder of the Torah Vodaas yeshiva and a key figure in American Torah education.

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York is a city in northern England at the meeting of the rivers Ouse and Foss. The Romans founded it as Eboracum in 71 CE. Constantine the Great was proclaimed emperor there in 306, and a bishop from York attended the Council of Arles in 314. It later became the seat of a Northumbrian archbishopric and cathedral school, where the scholar Alcuin trained before joining Charlemagne's court, and then the Viking town of Jorvik. York had a Jewish community in the twelfth century that met a tragic end in March 1190: besieged by a mob in the royal castle keep, now Clifford's Tower, many chose to die rather than be killed or forcibly baptized.

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Ziklag was a town in the northern Negev or southern Judean foothills in the biblical period. According to the Book of Samuel, the Philistine king of Gath granted Ziklag to David during his flight from King Saul, and David used it as a base. Its exact location is debated among scholars.

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Zolkiev (Polish Żółkiew, today Zhovkva, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine), a town in eastern Galicia, was one of the major centers of Hebrew printing in Poland from the late seventeenth century, when the family of the Amsterdam printer Uri Feibush Halevi established presses there; the operation later moved to Lemberg in 1782.

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The religious capital of the Lagash state (modern Tello/Telloh), seat of the god Ningirsu and source of the Gudea inscriptions. Kept distinct from the city of Lagash itself. The pin marks the tablet's findspot.

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Samye, in the Yarlung valley of central Tibet (Lhokha region, near the Tsangpo river), is traditionally regarded as the first Buddhist monastery built in Tibet, constructed in the late eighth century under King Trisong Detsen. According to Tibetan tradition the tantric master Padmasambhava was invited to subdue the obstacles to its construction, and the abbot Śāntarakṣita ordained the first Tibetan monks there.

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A royal capital of the Neo-Assyrian empire (biblical Calah, modern Nimrud) on the Tigris, with palaces and temple archives. The pin marks the tablet's findspot.

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A small town in Boeotia famous twice over—as the battlefield where Philip II of Macedon crushed Greek liberty in 338 BCE, and as the lifelong home of the biographer and Platonist priest Plutarch.

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Capital of the small kingdom of Commagene on the upper Euphrates, remembered above all as the hometown of Lucian, the brilliant satirist who wrote in dazzling Greek though he came from this far eastern frontier.

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The short-lived capital built by Sargon II (modern Khorsabad) northeast of Nineveh. The pin marks where the tablet or inscription was found.

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Formiae, today Formia in the province of Latina, Lazio, lies on the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy along the Appian Way, roughly midway between Rome and Naples. First recorded in 338 BCE, it became a resort where wealthy Romans built seaside villas; Cicero owned one and was killed on the Appian Way near the town in 43 BCE, and a tower tomb there is traditionally identified as his. In Christian tradition Saint Erasmus, later venerated as Saint Elmo, patron of sailors, was martyred near Formiae around 303. After the fall of Rome its people moved to hilltop settlements under Gaeta, which were reunited as Formia in 1863.

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Anurādhapura, in north-central Sri Lanka, was the island's ancient royal capital and the seat of the Mahāvihāra, the great monastery that became the stronghold of orthodox Theravāda Buddhism. The fifth-century commentator Buddhaghosa worked at the Mahāvihāra there, where he composed the Visuddhimagga ('Path of Purification') and his Pāli commentaries.

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Rouen was the capital of Norman Jewry and a major rabbinic center until the 1306 expulsion. Recent archaeological discoveries beneath the Palais de Justice revealed a 12th-century Romanesque yeshiva building — one of the oldest surviving Jewish educational structures in Europe.

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An ancient northern-Sumerian city (modern Tell al-Uhaymir) whose kingship was a byword for hegemony in the Sumerian King List. The pin marks the tablet's findspot.

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A remote Greek colony on the Black Sea coast of what is now Romania, forever marked as the bleak place of exile where the Roman poet Ovid spent his last embittered years writing letters home.

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Seat of the Piaseczno Rebbe (Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the 'Aish Kodesh'); martyred in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943.

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In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Guadalajara stood as a prosperous Castilian town nestled on the Tagus River's plateau, governed by Christian monarchs who increasingly consolidated power over the fragmented kingdoms of Iberia. The city's dry, temperate climate and strategic location made it a thriving commercial center where merchant routes converged, bringing both wealth and cultural exchange. The Jewish community of Guadalajara was notably prosperous and well-integrated into civic life, with prominent families serving as royal financiers, physicians, and administrators; at its height, several hundred Jewish families called the city home, living in a designated quarter yet maintaining close commercial and intellectual ties to Christian neighbors. The city became recognized as a center of Hebrew learning and Jewish jurisprudence, where scholars engaged in spirited debate over Jewish law and philosophy, drawing students from surrounding regions. Particularly striking was the magnificent synagogue the community erected—a testament to their security and influence—which stood as one of the grandest Jewish places of worship in medieval Castile, before the catastrophic expulsions of 1492 shattered the elaborate medieval coexistence that Guadalajara had epitomized for centuries.

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Seat of Shneur Zalman of Liadi (Alter Rebbe); origin of the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty.

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Nicopolis, near modern Preveza in northwestern Greece, was founded by Octavian in 29 BCE to commemorate his victory at nearby Actium in 31 BCE, and it later became the capital of the Roman province of Epirus. After Domitian expelled philosophers from Rome around 93 CE, the Stoic Epictetus founded a school there, and his pupil Arrian recorded his teaching. The Epistle to Titus, attributed to Paul, names Nicopolis as a place to spend the winter, and according to the Liber Pontificalis Pope Eleutherius was born there. The city had bishops by the fourth century and many basilicas, but it declined after repeated warfare and was abandoned after the eighth century.

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Thurii was an ancient Greek city on the Gulf of Taranto, in what is now Calabria in southern Italy. It was founded in 443 BCE on or near the site of Sybaris by settlers sent out under Pericles as a panhellenic colony; its regular street plan is attributed to Hippodamus, Protagoras is said to have drawn up its laws, and according to ancient tradition Herodotus joined the colonists and made it his home. Later allied with Rome and held for a time by Hannibal, it received a Roman colony named Copia in 194 BCE. Silt from the Crathis river eventually left the site inland and it was abandoned; its ruins lie in the Sybaris archaeological park near Sibari.

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Shiraz, in the Fars province of southern Iran, is the historic capital of the Fars region and a celebrated centre of Persian poetry and philosophy. The poet Hafiz (d. c. 1390) lived and is buried there, and the philosopher Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), founder of the 'transcendent theosophy' school, was born and taught in the city; the philosopher Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1311) also took his nisba from it.

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Gerasa, modern Jerash in northwestern Jordan, was a city of the Decapolis well preserved from the Roman period. It was the birthplace of the Neopythagorean mathematician Nicomachus, author of the Introduction to Arithmetic.

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Hamadan (ancient Ecbatana), in the Zagros highlands of western Iran, was a Median and later Persian capital and a major city of the medieval Jibal region. The philosopher-physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) spent his final years there and is buried in the city, and the mystic Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadhani (executed 1131) took his nisba from it.

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A humble farming village in Boeotia on the slopes of Mount Helicon, where the poet Hesiod kept sheep and received from the Muses the inspiration for the earliest Greek poetry of the gods and of working the land.

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A Babylonian city sacred to the god Nabu (modern Birs Nimrud), twin to Babylon. The pin marks the tablet's findspot.

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Corbeil (today Corbeil-Essonnes, near Paris in northern France) was the home of Rabbi Isaac of Corbeil, a thirteenth-century Tosafist and son-in-law of Yechiel of Paris. He authored the Sefer Mitzvot Katan (Semak, also titled Amudei Golah), a widely circulated abridged code of the commandments completed in 1277.

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Dharamsala, and specifically the upper settlement of McLeod Ganj, in Himachal Pradesh, northern India, has been the seat of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile since 1960. It is the principal centre of the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora.

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A small Cycladic island in the Aegean, modest in itself but cherished in Greek tradition as the burial place of Homer, the poet at the fountainhead of all Greek literature.

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Lahore, in the Punjab of present-day Pakistan, was a major city of the Ghaznavid, Delhi Sultanate, and Mughal periods and a great centre of Islamic culture in South Asia. The Sufi al-Hujwiri (Data Ganj Bakhsh, d. c. 1072) settled and is buried there, his shrine a major pilgrimage site; the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938) lived and is buried in the city.

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Leontini, modern Lentini in southeastern Sicily, was a Greek colony founded by settlers from Naxos. It was the birthplace of the sophist and rhetorician Gorgias, who as an envoy to Athens in 427 BCE introduced his ornate rhetorical style to the Greek mainland.

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The 'Great City' of Arcadia, founded as a federal bulwark against Sparta and birthplace of Polybius, the historian who explained to the Greeks how Rome came to rule the world.

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Plum Village is a Buddhist monastery and practice centre in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, established in 1982 by the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh and his community. It became the principal seat of his 'engaged Buddhism' and mindfulness teachings and one of the largest Buddhist monasteries in the West.

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Tabriz, in Azerbaijan province of northwestern Iran, was a major commercial city and at times a capital under the Ilkhanid Mongols and the Aq Qoyunlu and early Safavids. The Qur'an commentator al-Baydawi (d. c. 1286), author of the widely studied Anwar al-Tanzil, served as qadi in the city; the philosopher Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i (d. 1981) was born nearby and took the nisba Tabrizi.

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A fortress-city of Pontus in northern Asia Minor, set dramatically in a river gorge beneath the rock-cut tombs of its old kings, and chiefly remembered as the birthplace of Strabo, antiquity's greatest geographer.

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A Greek colonial town whose name was borne by many cities, remembered in the history of ideas as the home of Diogenes of Apollonia, the last of the great Presocratic natural philosophers, who made air the divine source of all things.

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An antediluvian Sumerian city of the King List, sacred to Dumuzi, between Uruk and Lagash. The pin marks the findspot.

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Ceos (modern Kea) is an island of the Cyclades in the western Aegean, near the coast of Attica. It was the birthplace of the lyric poet Bacchylides and of his uncle, the poet Simonides; the sophist Prodicus was likewise a native of the island.

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Chaiya is a district of Surat Thani province in southern Thailand, an area with ancient ties to the Śrīvijaya period. It was the birthplace, in 1906, of Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu, the influential reformist Thai monk who founded the forest monastery Suan Mokkh ('Garden of Liberation') outside the town.

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Gampo Abbey is a Tibetan-Buddhist (Shambhala/Kagyu-Nyingma) monastery at Pleasant Bay on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. Established in 1984 under Chögyam Trungpa, it became closely associated with the American nun Pema Chödrön, who served as its resident teacher and director.

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Yonkers, New York, USA, was the base of the socially engaged Buddhist work of Bernie Glassman, the American Zen teacher who founded the Greyston network of community businesses and social services there and, with his wife, the Zen Peacemaker order.

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Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, USA, has a long-established Buddhist presence rooted in Japanese immigration. The American Zen teacher Robert Aitken, co-founder of the Diamond Sangha, established the Koko An Zendo and the Diamond Sangha in Honolulu in 1959.

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The Insight Meditation Center is a vipassanā (insight) practice centre in Redwood City, California, USA, on the San Francisco Peninsula. It was founded by Gil Fronsdal, a teacher and translator in the Western insight tradition who also holds Sōtō Zen transmission.

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The Island Hermitage is a forest monastery on a small island in a lagoon at Dodanduwa, in the Galle district of southern Sri Lanka. It was established in 1911 for the German-born monk Nyanatiloka Mahāthera, one of the first Europeans to be ordained as a Theravāda bhikkhu, and became an early centre for Western monastics.

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Kanazawa, in Ishikawa Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast, was the birthplace, in 1870, of D. T. Suzuki (Suzuki Daisetsu), the scholar and writer who did more than any other single figure to introduce Zen Buddhism to the English-speaking world.

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Laodicea on the Lycus was a wealthy Greek city of Phrygia in western Asia Minor, near modern Denizli, Turkey, on the river Lycus. It is given as the home city of the rhetorician known as Menander Rhetor (Menander of Laodicea), author of treatises on epideictic speeches.

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Seat of the Ruzhin Hasidic dynasty (Yisrael Friedman). The dynasty later relocated to Sadigura after Tsarist persecution.

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Successor seat of the Ruzhin dynasty after 1842.

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The Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, in Santa Barbara, California, USA, is a research and teaching organisation founded by B. Alan Wallace to bring together Buddhist contemplative training (especially śamatha meditation) and scientific study of the mind.

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Seat of Aaron HaLevi Horowitz of Strashelye, a leading Chabad disciple of the Alter Rebbe.

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A Sumerian city (modern Tell Fara), home in tradition of the flood-hero Ziusudra. The pin marks the tablet's findspot.

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A magnificent and immensely wealthy Greek city of southern Sicily—adorned with its still-standing Valley of the Temples—and the home of Empedocles, the philosopher-poet who taught that all things are made of four roots bound and parted by Love and Strife.

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Seat of Chaim Chaykl of Amdur, an early Karliner Hasidic figure.

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Aphrodisias was a Greek city of Caria in southwestern Asia Minor (modern Geyre, Turkey), celebrated for its sanctuary of Aphrodite and its school of sculpture. It was the home of Chariton, author of Chaereas and Callirhoe, generally regarded as the earliest surviving Greek prose romance.

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Balangoda is a town in the Ratnapura district of Sri Lanka. It was the birthplace, in 1896, of Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Thera, an eminent twentieth-century Sinhalese scholar-monk and teacher, who took his monastic name from his home town.

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Bangkok, on the Chao Phraya River, is the capital and largest city of Thailand. It grew from a village under the Ayutthaya kingdom, and in 1782 King Rama I moved the capital across the river from Thonburi to Rattanakosin Island, a date taken as the city's founding. The Grand Palace and Buddhist temples such as Wat Pho and Wat Arun stand at its historic core, and it is the seat of the national government and a centre of Thai Theravada Buddhism. The Catholic monk Thomas Merton died near the city in December 1968, at a retreat centre in neighbouring Samut Prakan, while attending a monastic conference.

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R. Levi Yitzchak's Hasidic court

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Bertinoro is a hill town in the province of Forlì-Cesena, in the Romagna area of Emilia-Romagna, north-central Italy. Its castle, built around the year 1000, hosted the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1177, and the town was the seat of a Catholic diocese from 1360 until it was united with Forlì in 1986. Bertinoro was the birthplace, around 1445-1450, of Rabbi Obadiah ben Abraham, known as the Bartenura, whose commentary on the Mishnah became the standard one printed with the text. He reached Jerusalem in 1488 and became a leader of its Jewish community, dying there around 1515.

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Bobowa (Yiddish Bobov), a small town in southern Galicia, was the seat of the Bobover Hasidic dynasty founded by R. Shlomo Halberstam in 1893. The Bobov yeshiva and beit midrash there grew into one of the largest pre-war Galician Hasidic centers; the community was annihilated in WWII.

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Byblos, modern Jbeil on the coast of Lebanon, was one of the oldest continuously inhabited Phoenician cities. It was the home of Philo of Byblos, a Greek-writing author of the late first/early second century CE best known for a Phoenician History purporting to draw on the older writer Sanchuniathon.

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, home of Harvard University, has been an important centre of American Buddhist study and practice. The teacher Lama Surya Das, an American-born lama in the Tibetan tradition, founded the Dzogchen Center there in 1991 to host meditation retreats.

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Charax Spasinou was a Hellenistic port city at the head of the Persian Gulf, in the region of Characene (Mesene) in southern Mesopotamia, in modern southern Iraq. It is the place from which the geographer Isidore of Charax took his name; he wrote the Parthian Stations, a survey of the overland route across the Parthian empire.

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R. Menachem Nachum's Hasidic court

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Chislehurst, in the historic county of Kent (now Greater London), England, was the birthplace, in 1915, of Alan Watts, the British-born writer and lecturer who popularised Zen and Asian philosophy for Western audiences through his books and talks.

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Chuang Yen Monastery, in Carmel (Kent), New York State, USA, is a large Chinese Buddhist monastery known for housing one of the largest indoor Buddha statues in the Western hemisphere. It has been associated with the American Theravāda translator-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi, who has lived and taught there.

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An Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor, birthplace of Anaxagoras—the philosopher who brought natural science to Athens and taught that a cosmic Mind set the universe in order.

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Corycus was a coastal town of Cilicia in southern Asia Minor (near modern Kızkalesi, Turkey), associated with the Corycian cave. It is sometimes given as the home of the poet Oppian, author of the Halieutica, a didactic poem on fishing (though Anazarbus in Cilicia is also named in the sources).

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Coucy (Coucy-le-Château), a town in northern France (Picardy), was the home of Rabbi Moses of Coucy, a thirteenth-century Tosafist best known as the author of the Sefer Mitzvot Gadol (Semag), an influential code of the 613 commandments completed in 1247. He was also one of the rabbis who defended the Talmud at the 1240 Disputation of Paris.

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Deer Park Buddhist Center, at Oregon, Wisconsin, USA, is a Tibetan Gelug centre. It was founded in 1975 by Geshe Lhundub Sopa, a Tibetan scholar-monk who became a longtime professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison; the Dalai Lama gave a Kālacakra initiation there in 1981.

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Dipeyin (Dabayin) township is in the Sagaing region of upper Myanmar (Burma). It was the birthplace, in 1846, of Ledi Sayadaw, the scholar-monk and Abhidhamma authority who was a major figure in the modern Burmese revival of vipassanā (insight) meditation.

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Fo Guang Shan, in the Dashu district of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, is the headquarters monastery of the Fo Guang Shan order, one of the largest Buddhist organisations in the Chinese-speaking world. It was founded in 1967 by Hsing Yun as the base of his 'humanistic Buddhism' movement.

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Seat of the Homiler Rebbe (Yitzchak Eizik Epstein), a Chabad disciple of the Alter Rebbe.

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Homs, the ancient Emesa, lies on the Orontes river in western Syria and is the capital of Homs Governorate. In the Roman period it was ruled by an Arab dynasty and was a centre of worship of the sun god Elagabal, whose hereditary high priest became the emperor Elagabalus (reigned 218-222). Forces under Khalid ibn al-Walid took the city in 637, and it became an important city of Bilad al-Sham; Khalid died in 642 and Homs is traditionally his burial place, where his mosque and tomb stand. The city later passed through Umayyad, Abbasid, Hamdanid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman rule.

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Igatpuri, near Nashik in Maharashtra, India, is the location of Dhamma Giri, the principal meditation centre of the worldwide vipassanā network founded by S. N. Goenka, established there in 1976 and home of the Vipassana Research Institute.

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Ingyinbin is a village in the Khin-U township of the Sagaing region in upper Myanmar (Burma). It was the birthplace, in 1896, of Webu Sayādaw, a revered Burmese meditation master noted for his emphasis on continuous mindfulness of breathing (ānāpāna) over scholastic study.

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Knossos, near modern Heraklion on the island of Crete, was the largest Bronze Age Minoan palace site and remained an important city in the historical Greek period. Ancient tradition makes it the home of Epimenides, a semi-legendary seer and purifier of the seventh or sixth century BCE.

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Providence, Rhode Island, USA, is the headquarters of the Kwan Um School of Zen, an international Korean Sŏn (Zen) network. It was founded there in 1983 by the Korean master Seung Sahn, who had come to the United States in 1972 and established the Providence Zen Center.

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La Salle, Illinois, USA, was the home of the Open Court Publishing Company, where the German-American philosopher Paul Carus worked and wrote. Carus authored 'The Gospel of Buddha' (1894) and helped bring Buddhist texts and the teacher D. T. Suzuki to a Western readership.

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A prosperous Greek colony on the Gulf of Taranto in southern Italy where Pythagoras spent his final years, making the town a lasting shrine of the Pythagorean brotherhood.

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In the eighteenth century, Mezeritch (also called Mezhibozh) lay in Volhynia, a region of Eastern Europe now in Ukraine, under the dominion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—a vast confederation of Christian nobility and merchant towns strung across forests and fertile plains. The town itself sat amid rolling woodland and river valleys, where winters froze the roads solid and summers brought thick mud and abundant grain harvests. By the early 1700s, Mezeritch had become home to a thriving Jewish community of merchants, scholars, and craftspeople, many of whom traded in the grain and timber that made the region economically vital. The town earned its greatest fame as a beacon of Jewish spiritual innovation: it became the cradle of the Hasidic movement, a revolutionary approach to faith that emphasized direct experience of the Divine, ecstatic prayer, and the spiritual power of a rebbe's words and deeds. Pilgrims traveled from distant towns to sit in the study house and listen to teachings that would reshape Judaism across Eastern Europe, transforming Mezeritch from a provincial Polish town into one of the most spiritually influential centers of Jewish life in the modern world.

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Mithilā was the ancient kingdom of Videha, a region straddling the present India–Nepal border in the eastern Gangetic plain (northern Bihar and the adjoining Nepali Tarai). In the Upaniṣadic literature it is the court of King Janaka and the setting for the dialogues of the sage Yājñavalkya, a central voice of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.

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Mosul is a city on the Tigris in northern Iraq; the ruins of ancient Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, lie on its eastern side. Arab Muslim forces took it in the 630s or early 640s. It later flourished under the Hamdanids and, from 1127, as the seat of the Zengid dynasty, and it was a centre of Islamic scholarship where the historian Ibn al-Athir lived and worked. The Mongols sacked it in 1262, and the Ottomans later ruled it for centuries. Its mixed population included Assyrian Christians and an old Jewish community, and in the seventeenth century Asenath Barzani led a yeshiva there. Nearly all Iraqi Jews left for Israel in 1950-52. The Islamic State held it in 2014-2017.

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Nagpur, in Maharashtra, India, is the site of Deekshabhoomi, where on 14 October 1956 B. R. Ambedkar publicly embraced Buddhism together with several hundred thousand followers, launching the mass Dalit Buddhist (Navayana) conversion movement. A large stūpa now marks the site.

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Nanjing (in Jiangsu) and Wuchang (now part of Wuhan in Hubei), China, were centres of the modernising Buddhist reform led by the monk Taixu in the early twentieth century. Taixu founded the Wuchang Buddhist Institute in 1922 to train monks for his programme of 'humanistic Buddhism.'

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The lone Greek trading-city on the Nile Delta, Greece's window into Egypt for centuries and the hometown of Athenaeus, whose sprawling 'Deipnosophistae' preserved a banquet's worth of lost Greek learning.

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Northern France, the regions of Champagne and the Île-de-France around Paris, was the heartland of the medieval French monarchy, and its cathedral schools gave rise around 1150 to the University of Paris, a leading centre of Latin Christian learning. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries it was also the heartland of the Tosafist school of Talmudic study, beginning with Rashi of Troyes and his descendants; the Torah commentator Chizkiyah ben Manoach (the Chizkuni) worked in this milieu. The region's Jews endured the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 and royal expulsions culminating in 1394. In 1804 Pope Pius VII attended Napoleon's coronation at Notre-Dame de Paris. This entry represents the region broadly; no single town is specified.

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Orléans is a city on the Loire in north-central France. A Gallic town destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BCE, it was later a Merovingian royal capital, and in 1429 Joan of Arc lifted the English siege of the city. Its university, founded in 1306 and known especially for law, drew John Calvin in 1528 and Theodore Beza, who studied law there from 1535 to 1539, and the city later sheltered many Protestants. Orléans also had a medieval Jewish community and was home to the twelfth-century Tosafist Joseph Bekhor Shor, a pupil of Rabbeinu Tam whose Torah commentary kept closely to the plain sense of the text.

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Pella, in central Macedonia in northern Greece, was the capital of the Macedonian kingdom from the late fifth century BCE. It was the seat of Philip II and the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Alexander's close companion and general Hephaestion was a Macedonian connected to the royal court.

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Perga was a Greek city of Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor near modern Antalya, Turkey. It was the birthplace of the mathematician Apollonius of Perga, author of the Conics, a foundational treatise on conic sections.

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Home of Menachem Recanati (Recanati on the Torah).

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Rochester, in New York State, USA, is the home of the Rochester Zen Center, one of the oldest Zen centres in the United States. It was founded in 1966 by Philip Kapleau, the American teacher whose book 'The Three Pillars of Zen' helped introduce Zen practice to a Western audience.

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Seat of Moshe Teitelbaum (Yismach Moshe), founder of the Sigheter-Satmar lineage.

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Shasta Abbey, near Mount Shasta in northern California, USA, is a Sōtō Zen training monastery. It was established in 1970 by Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, an English-born woman who trained in Japan and founded the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives.

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Silistra, a town on the lower Danube (today in northeastern Bulgaria, on the Romanian border), had a Sephardic Jewish community under Ottoman rule. Rabbi Eliezer Papo, author of the widely beloved ethical work Pele Yoetz, served as rabbi of Silistra from about 1819 until his death in 1826, and his grave there became a pilgrimage site.

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Seat of Moshe Chaim Ephraim (Degel Machaneh Ephraim, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov).

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Taiwan became, in the second half of the twentieth century, a major centre of Chinese Buddhism and of the 'humanistic Buddhism' reform movement. The scholar-monk Yinshun, a disciple of Taixu, settled there and became its most influential Buddhist intellectual, shaping a generation of Taiwanese Buddhist thought.

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Tarragona, a port city in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Iberian Peninsula, with roots in the Roman period, and a flourishing aljama in the medieval era until the persecutions of 1391. Rabbi Isaac Arama, author of the homiletic Torah commentary Akeidat Yitzchak, served as rabbi and preacher in Tarragona in the fifteenth century.

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Tashi Jong is a Tibetan-exile settlement and Drukpa Kagyu monastic community in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh, northern India. The nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo has been associated with this community, in whose tradition she trained, and later founded a nunnery (Dongyu Gatsal Ling) in the same region.

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Annaṃbhaṭṭa (17th c.), author of the logic primer Tarka-saṅgraha, came of a Telugu (Tailaṅga) Brahmin family of the Andhra country of south-eastern India and settled in Varanasi (Banaras), the northern centre of Sanskrit learning where he taught. The coordinates here mark Varanasi, his place of activity.

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Thetford, in Vermont, USA, was a home of Dwight Goddard, the American author and Buddhist who compiled 'A Buddhist Bible' (1932), an anthology of Buddhist texts that became an early and influential gateway to Buddhism for English-speaking readers.

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Udon Thani is a province in the Isan (northeastern) region of Thailand. The forest monastery Wat Pa Ban Tat there was founded and led by Ajahn Mahā Bua, a prominent disciple of Ajahn Mun and master of the Thai Forest Tradition.

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Walpola is a village in the Galle district of southern Sri Lanka. It was the birthplace, in 1907, of Walpola Rahula, the scholar-monk and author of the widely read introduction 'What the Buddha Taught,' who took his monastic and family name from his home village.

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Wat Asokaram, in Samut Prakan province just southeast of Bangkok, Thailand, is a forest-tradition monastery founded by Ajahn Lee Dhammadharo, a leading disciple of Ajahn Mun and an important teacher of the Thai Forest Tradition, who established it in the mid-twentieth century.

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Yunnan, a province of southwestern China bordering Southeast Asia, was one of the regions where the Chan master Xuyun (Hsu Yun) carried out his lifelong work of restoring ruined monasteries; he rebuilt and revived a number of temples in the province as part of the early-twentieth-century renewal of Chinese Buddhism.

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Center of Meshullam Feivush Heller (Yosher Divrei Emet).

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The Zen Center of San Diego, in San Diego, California, USA, was established in 1983 by Charlotte Joko Beck, the American Zen teacher whose books 'Everyday Zen' and 'Nothing Special' and her 'Ordinary Mind' approach were influential in Western Zen.

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Zolkiew (Polish Żółkiew, today Zhovkva, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine), a town in eastern Galicia, was one of the major centers of Hebrew printing in Poland from the late seventeenth century. A press established there around 1692 by the family of the Amsterdam printer Uri Feibush Halevi made Zolkiew, alongside Lublin and Kraków, a leading hub of Hebrew publishing until the presses were transferred to Lemberg in 1782.

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The Abbey of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, France, royal burial church of the French monarchy. Peter Abelard was briefly a monk there; under Abbot Suger it pioneered Gothic architecture.

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Abydos was a Greek city on the Asian shore of the Hellespont (Dardanelles), at its narrowest point opposite Sestos, in modern northwestern Turkey. Famous in legend for the story of Hero and Leander, it is named in connection with Palaephatus, the author of a rationalizing treatise On Unbelievable Tales.

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Adayapalam (Aḍaiyappalam) is a village near Arani, in the Tiruvannamalai district of northern Tamil Nadu, south India. It is the birthplace of Appayya Dīkṣita (16th c.), the prolific Advaita and Śiva-Advaita scholar.

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Aden is a port on the Gulf of Aden in southern Yemen, east of the Bab al-Mandab strait. Known to Greek writers as Arabia Emporion, it was long a transshipment point for Red Sea trade. In the Islamic era it passed among several Yemeni dynasties and flourished under the Rasulids (13th-15th centuries). The Ismaili missionary Ibn Hawshab preached here briefly, with little success, before basing himself inland. Britain seized Aden in 1839, and it was later the capital of South Yemen (1967-1990). Its ancient Jewish community was found in 1489 to be well versed in Maimonides; after deadly riots in 1947, nearly all its members left by 1967, many through Operation Magic Carpet to Israel.

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Ahvaz (medieval al-Ahwaz/Suq al-Ahwaz), on the Karun river in the Khuzestan region of southwestern Iran, was the chief city of the surrounding district. It served as a regional administrative and commercial centre in the early Islamic period and lay within the wider area of scholarly activity in lower Iraq and Khuzestan.

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Ajmer is a city in central Rajasthan, north-west India, in the Aravalli hills. Dayānanda Sarasvatī (1824–1883), founder of the Ārya Samāj, died there in 1883.

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Akbra (Akhbara) was a village near Safed in the Upper Galilee in the Roman-Talmudic period. It is associated in rabbinic tradition with the amora Rabbi Yannai, who is said to have resided there.

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Āḷandī (Alandi) is a town on the Indrāyaṇī River in the Pune district of Maharashtra, western India. It is the place associated with the samādhi (final resting shrine) of Jñāneśvar (13th c.) and a major Vārkarī pilgrimage centre.

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Aleksandrów Łódzki, near Łódź in central Poland, is the seat of the Aleksander Hasidic dynasty, founded by R. Yehiel Danziger (1828-1894).

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Alessandria is a city in Piedmont, northwestern Italy. It was founded in 1168 as a stronghold of the Lombard League against Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and named after Pope Alexander III, and it withstood Barbarossa's siege of 1174-75. It passed to the Duchy of Savoy after the Peace of Utrecht and was fortified with a star-shaped citadel, and the Battle of Marengo was fought on its territory in 1800. Pope Pius V was born in 1504 at nearby Bosco, now Bosco Marengo. A Jewish ghetto was established in 1724, and the synagogue on Via Milano was attacked by Fascist supporters in December 1943.

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Alexandria is an independent city in Northern Virginia, United States, on the Potomac River bordering Washington, D.C. Established in 1749, with a teenage George Washington helping to lay out the town, it was later included in the federal District of Columbia and went back to Virginia after residents voted for retrocession in 1846. Its Old Town holds the third historic district designated in the United States. The rocket engineer Wernher von Braun died in Alexandria on 16 June 1977 and is buried in its Ivy Hill Cemetery.

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Amarapura is a township beside the Irrawaddy River in Mandalay Region, Myanmar, about 11 km south of Mandalay city. King Bodawpaya of the Konbaung dynasty founded it as his new royal capital in May 1783, and it was the seat of his court for the rest of his reign; he died there in 1819 and his tomb is in the town. It served as capital again from 1842 until Mandalay replaced it in 1859. The town is known for silk weaving.

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Amboise is a town on the Loire in central France whose château was once a residence of the French royal court and the scene of a failed Huguenot conspiracy in 1560. Leonardo da Vinci spent his last years at the nearby manor of Clos Lucé from 1516 and died there in 1519; he was buried at Amboise. The Algerian resistance leader and Sufi scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (d. 1883), after surrendering to the French, was held with his family at the château from November 1848 until Napoleon III freed him in 1852.

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Amnyang, in the area of modern Gyeongsan in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, was within the Silla kingdom and is given as the birthplace, in 617, of Wŏnhyo — one of the most important thinkers in the history of Korean Buddhism, known for his commentaries and his teaching of doctrinal reconciliation (hwajaeng).

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Amol, on the Haraz river near the Caspian coast in Mazandaran province, northern Iran, was a chief city of the Tabaristan region from Sasanian times into the early Islamic period. It was the birthplace of the historian and Qur'an commentator al-Tabari (839-923), author of the universal History and a major tafsir, and the physician Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari, author of the medical encyclopedia Firdaws al-Hikma, is also said to have been born there. From 864 the Zaydi Alid rulers of Tabaristan made Amol their capital, and the future Zaydi imam of Yemen, al-Hadi ila'l-Haqq Yahya, stayed there with his family in the 880s before returning to Arabia.

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Amphipolis was a strategically important Greek city on the Strymon river in Macedonia/Thrace, in northern Greece. It was the site of a battle in 422 BCE during the Peloponnesian War. Ancient tradition lists Amphipolis among the campaigns in which Socrates saw military service.

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Anazarbus was a city of Cilicia in southern Asia Minor (near modern Dilekkaya, Adana province, Turkey). It is generally given as the birthplace of Pedanius Dioscorides, the first-century CE author of De Materia Medica, the foundational ancient pharmacological work.

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Anju, in South Pyongan Province in what is now North Korea, was the birthplace, in 1520, of the Sŏn master Hyujeong (Sŏsan Daesa), an important Joseon-era figure who wrote influential guides to Sŏn practice and later led monk-militia in defence of Korea against the Japanese invasions of the 1590s.

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Āpegāv (Apegaon) is a village on the Godāvarī River in the Aurangabad (Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar) district of Maharashtra, western India. It is traditionally given as the ancestral village of Jñāneśvar (Dnyāneshwar, 13th c.), author of the Jñāneśvarī.

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Aquileia, near the head of the Adriatic in northeastern Italy (Friuli-Venezia Giulia), was founded as a Roman colony in 181 BCE and grew into one of the empire's major trading and military cities, with perhaps 100,000 inhabitants by the second century. Galen was there with the imperial court during a plague in the late 160s. It became an important Christian see, whose bishops later bore the title patriarch. Around 370 Rufinus met Jerome while living in an ascetic community there; in 381 a council at Aquileia organised by Ambrose of Milan deposed two bishops accused of Arianism, and Bishop Chromatius later commissioned Rufinus's Latin translation of Eusebius. Attila destroyed the city in 452; its basilica and ruins are a UNESCO site.

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Araba (Arav; today Arraba/Arrabe in the Lower Galilee, northern Israel) was a village in the Roman-Talmudic period. According to the Talmud, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai resided there for eighteen years; his disciple, the early tanna and noted pious man Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, also lived in Arav and is traditionally buried there.

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Arpinum, modern Arpino in the Lazio region of central Italy, was a town in the Volscian hills southeast of Rome. It was the birthplace of the orator, statesman, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (and earlier of the general Gaius Marius).

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Nimbārka (traditionally c. 12th–13th c.), founder of the Nimbārka Sampradāya and proponent of the dvaita–advaita (bhedābheda) theology, is described in tradition as a Telugu (Tailaṅga) Brahmin; accounts of his birthplace differ, variously placing his family in the Andhra country on the Godāvarī, in Maharashtra, or in the Bellary region. He was chiefly active in the Mathurā–Vṛndāvana (Braj) area, where the coordinates here are set, settling near Govardhana.

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Sāyaṇa (14th c.), celebrated for his comprehensive commentaries on the Vedas, was active in the Vijayanagara region of Karnataka (around Hampi) under the patronage of the Vijayanagara empire, where he served as a minister. This place marks his sphere of activity.

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Assos was a Greek city on the coast of the Troad in northwestern Asia Minor (modern Behramkale, Turkey), near the territory of Atarneus ruled by Aristotle's patron Hermias. After leaving Plato's Academy, Aristotle spent several years at Assos, where he taught and married before moving on to Lesbos.

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Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas, on the Colorado River in Central Texas. Chosen in 1839 as capital of the Republic of Texas, it was briefly called Waterloo before being renamed for Stephen F. Austin, and it remained the seat of government after Texas joined the United States. The University of Texas at Austin held its first classes in 1883. The physicist Steven Weinberg joined that university in 1982 and worked there until his death in Austin on 23 July 2021.

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Ayodhyā is a city on the Sarayū (Ghaghara) River in Uttar Pradesh, north India, identified in tradition as the birthplace and capital of Rāma. It is closely associated with the poet Tulsīdās (16th c.), author of the Awadhi Rāmcaritmānas.

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Babylonia (the region of Mesopotamia, in central and southern Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates) was the great center of Jewish life and learning for well over a millennium. Following the Babylonian exile, it became home to a large Jewish population; in the Talmudic period its academies at Sura, Pumbedita, and Nehardea produced the Babylonian Talmud, and in the subsequent Geonic period (roughly the seventh to eleventh centuries) the Geonim of Sura and Pumbedita were the foremost halachic authorities of the Jewish world.

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Badaratittha was an ancient Theravāda monastery (vihāra) on the coast of what is now Tamil Nadu, India, south of modern Chennai. According to the Gandhavaṃsa and other sources it was the residence of the commentator Ācariya Dhammapāla, the early Theravāda exegete from Kāñcīpuram.

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Bagnols-sur-Cèze, a town in the Languedoc region of southern France (today in the Gard department), was the birthplace, in 1288, of Rabbi Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides, the Ralbag), one of the foremost Jewish philosophers, astronomers, and biblical commentators of the Middle Ages. He later lived in nearby Orange and Avignon.

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Balkh (ancient Bactra), in northern Afghanistan in the historic region of Khurasan, was one of the great cities of the pre-modern Islamic east, an early centre of Hanafi law and Sufism known as 'the mother of cities.' The family of Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273) came from the Balkh region before migrating west, and the early Qur'an commentator Muqatil ibn Sulayman (d. 767) took his nisba al-Balkhi.

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Bamberg, a city in Franconia, Bavaria, Germany, an imperial bishopric founded by Henry II. Pope Clement II, a German bishop, was buried in Bamberg cathedral—the only papal tomb in Germany.

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A site on the banks of the Narmadā River in the Omkareshwar region of Madhya Pradesh, central India. Tradition holds that the young Ādi Śaṅkara met his teacher Govinda Bhagavatpāda in a riverside cave here and was initiated into renunciation.

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Baroda (Vadodara) is a city in eastern Gujarat, western India, on the Viśvāmitrī River, formerly the seat of the Gaekwad princely state. Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) lived and worked there in the Baroda state service from 1893 to 1906, a period of his early writing and yoga.

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Basavana Bagewadi is a town in the Vijayapura (Bijapur) district of Karnataka, south India. It is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Basava (Basaveśvara, 12th c.), the social reformer and central figure of the Vīraśaiva (Liṅgāyat) movement and its vacana poetry.

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Be'er Yaakov, a town in central Israel near Ramla, is home to the Be'er Yaakov yeshiva, founded in 1948 by Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Shapira (rosh yeshiva) and Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe (mashgiach ruchani), at the encouragement of the Chazon Ish. Rabbi Wolbe, a leading Mussar figure and author of Alei Shur, guided the yeshiva for some three decades.

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Belur Math is the headquarters of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, on the west bank of the Hooghly River near Kolkata, West Bengal. Established by Swami Vivekananda on land acquired in 1897 (the relics of Sri Ramakrishna were installed there in 1898), it is the monastic centre of the Ramakrishna movement; the present main temple was consecrated in 1938.

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Madhusūdana Sarasvatī (c. 1540–1640), the Advaita Vedānta philosopher and Krishna devotee, was born into a Bengali Brahmin family in a village of the Faridpur area—in the Kotalipara region of present-day Gopalganj district, Bangladesh. He later settled in Varanasi as a leading expositor of Advaita.

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Jīva Gosvāmī (c. 1513–1598), the systematic theologian of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, was born at Rāmakeli in the Gauḍa region of Bengal (Malda district, present-day West Bengal). He spent most of his life in Vṛndāvana, where he was one of the Six Gosvāmīs and developed the theology of acintya-bhedābheda. The coordinates here mark Vṛndāvana, his chief place of activity.

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Berytus is modern Beirut, the capital and largest city of Lebanon. Named as Biruta in the 14th-century BCE Amarna letters, it became a Roman colony in 14 BCE and was famed for its school of Roman law, one of the empire's three official law schools under Justinian, until an earthquake in 551 forced the students to Sidon. The hymnographer Romanos the Melodist was ordained deacon there before moving to Constantinople. Taken by Muslim forces in 635 and held by the Crusaders, with a break in 1187-97, from 1110 to 1291, the city later came under Ottoman and then French rule. It has large Christian communities and had a Jewish community, centred on Wadi Abu Jamil, that numbered 9,000 in 1948 before dwindling.

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Bethlehem is a city in the West Bank south of Jerusalem; since the Oslo Accords it has been administered by the Palestinian Authority. In the Hebrew Bible it is where the matriarch Rachel died and was buried, the setting of the Book of Ruth and the home town of King David; Rachel's Tomb at its entrance has long drawn Jewish pilgrims. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke place the birth of Jesus there, though historians are divided on whether he was born in Bethlehem or Nazareth. Constantine commissioned the Church of the Nativity over the traditional site in the fourth century. John Cassian lived as a monk nearby, and Jerome spent over three decades there, completing his Latin Bible translation.

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A cave on the Bhairam (Bhairava) hill near Beerwah, in the Budgam area of the Kashmir Valley. By tradition it is one of the sites associated with the Kashmir Shaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016 CE), where he is said to have withdrawn in his final years.

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Birmingham is a major city in the West Midlands of England. It grew early in the Industrial Revolution as a town of skilled workshops, home to the Soho Manufactory and the steam engine developed by Matthew Boulton and James Watt, and members of its Lunar Society linked scientific inquiry with industry; the scientist Francis Galton was born there in 1822. It gained city status in 1889 and its own university in 1900. In 1849 John Henry Newman founded the Birmingham Oratory, the first Oratorian house in England, which apart from four years in Ireland was his home from 1852 until 1890.

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Bombay (Mumbai) is the capital of Maharashtra, on the west coast of India on the Arabian Sea. It was the home of Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981), the Advaita teacher of the Navanātha lineage whose talks were published as I Am That.

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Bombay (Mumbai) is the capital of Maharashtra, on the west coast of India on the Arabian Sea. It is where Dayānanda Sarasvatī founded the reformist Ārya Samāj in 1875.

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Bordowa (the old name Ālipukhuri / Batadrava) is in the Nagaon district of Assam, north-east India, in the Brahmaputra valley. It is the birthplace of Śrimanta Śankardev (1449–1568), the saint-reformer who founded the Ekaśaraṇa (neo-Vaiṣṇava) tradition of Assam.

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Bristol is a port city in southwest England, chartered in 1155 and by the later Middle Ages one of the largest towns in the country. John Cabot sailed from it to North America in 1497, and in the eighteenth century its merchants were heavily involved in the Atlantic slave trade. It became a cathedral city in 1542 and was an early stronghold of the Methodist revival. John Wesley began open-air preaching there in 1739 and built the New Room, the oldest purpose-built Methodist chapel, while George Whitefield preached outdoors at nearby Kingswood. The physicist Paul Dirac was born in Bristol and studied at its university.

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British Malaya (the Malay Peninsula under British rule, in present-day Malaysia) is where Swami Sivananda Saraswati (1887–1963), before becoming a monk, worked for several years as a medical doctor in the early 20th century.

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Brundisium, modern Brindisi on the Adriatic coast of Apulia in southeastern Italy, was the principal Roman port for sailings to Greece and the East. The poet Virgil died there in 19 BCE on his return from a journey to Greece.

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Brussels, the capital of Belgium, grew from a settlement on the Senne whose traditional founding date is 979. It became a seat of the dukes of Brabant and then a princely capital of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands, where Charles V abdicated in 1555. The anatomist Andreas Vesalius was born there in 1514. The mystic Jan van Ruusbroec served as a priest at St Gudula's before leaving in 1343 for the hermitage of Groenendaal in the Sonian Forest. After the Belgian Revolution of 1830 Brussels became the national capital, and the future Pope Leo XIII was papal nuncio to Belgium in 1843-1846. It now hosts major European Union institutions and NATO.

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