Onkelos the Proselyte

35 CE–120 CE · Tannaim · Eretz Yisrael (travels)

Onkelos (1st-2nd c. CE), the famed convert to Judaism, is the traditional author of Targum Onkelos — the authoritative Aramaic translation of the Torah accepted as canonical by the rabbis (Megillah 3a: 'Targum of the Torah was uttered by Onkelos the Proselyte from the mouths of R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua'). The Bavli and Tosefta preserve narratives of his conversion under R. Yehoshua ben Chananya and R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, and identify him as the nephew of Emperor Hadrian (or Titus, in some variants). Modern scholarship identifies him with — or as a parallel to — the Greek translator Aquila of Sinope. His Targum is recited weekly alongside the Torah reading (shnayim mikra v'echad targum) and printed in every Mikraot Gedolot.

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Did you know?

Onkelos, in every Chumash, was a contemporary of Rabbi Akiva
The Targum of Onkelos sits beside the words in nearly every printed Chumash. Its author walked the same Roman-ruled world as Rabbi Akiva in the early second century.
How we know
Onkelos c. 35–120 CE; Rabbi Akiva c. 50–135 CE — overlapping lifetimes in the Tannaitic period.
Meet Rabbi Akiva →
The Roman aristocrat behind the Aramaic translation in every Chumash
The Talmud relates that Onkelos — author of the authoritative Aramaic translation of the Torah printed beside the parsha in nearly every Chumash — was a nephew of the Roman emperor himself, who converted to Judaism and became a student of Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua.
How we know
Talmud, Gittin 56b and Avodah Zarah 11a: Onkelos the convert, nephew of the Roman emperor (Titus; per the Vilna Gaon, Hadrian), pupil of R. Eliezer and R. Yehoshua. Tannaitic era, c. 35–120 CE.

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Eretz Yisrael (travels)Land of Israel

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

Eretz Yisrael (travels) in this era

Roman legions held dominion over Eretz Yisrael during these turbulent centuries, their grip tightening after the catastrophe of 70 CE when the Second Temple burned and Jerusalem fell. The Jewish community, though devastated and scattered, rebuilt itself with fierce intellectual energy—the great academies at Yavneh, Lod, Usha, and Tzippori became the pulsing heart of Jewish learning, where sages debated Halakha and preserved oral tradition in the absence of Temple sacrifice. The Bar Kochba uprising (132–135 CE) brought brief hope and brutal Roman retaliation, reshaping both the physical landscape and communal consciousness. In the Galilee, particularly around Tzippori and Caesarea, thriving towns hosted academies where Torah interpretation flourished despite Roman occupation; the scholar Rav would later carry this learning eastward. Markets bustled with pilgrims and traders; synagogues—simpler now than the destroyed Temple—became the spiritual anchors where communities gathered. This was an era of creative survival, when sages transformed catastrophe into a revolution of memory and textual study that would sustain Judaism for two thousand years.

See other sages who lived in Eretz Yisrael (travels)→

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Onkelos the Proselyte’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.