Places

# Jerusalem Jerusalem has remained the spiritual and intellectual heart of Jewish learning across nearly two thousand years of exile, diaspora, and return. Perched on the stony hills of Judea, this ancient city—ruled by Romans, Byzantine Christians, Muslim caliphates, Crusaders, Ottomans, and finally restored to Jewish sovereignty in 1948—never ceased to draw sages seeking to study Torah in the very place where the Second Temple once stood. The Jewish community here, though often small and struggling under foreign rule, maintained an unbroken chain of learning and mysticism: the city's narrow stone alleyways in the Old City's Jewish Quarter became pathways to yeshivas where kabbalah flourished, especially from the sixteenth century onward when mystical teachings transformed the study of Jewish law and theology. The climate is cool and dry on the heights, with Jerusalem's limestone buildings glowing pale gold in the Mediterranean sun. What made Jerusalem irreplaceable was not merely its holy history but the conviction that studying and teaching Torah within its walls carried cosmic significance—that the city itself was a living connection to revelation. Today, Jerusalem pulses with dozens of major yeshivas and study halls, their students debating Talmud in the same streets where Jewish learning has never truly been interrupted.

161 teachers · 327 works

# Rome In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Rome lay within the Papal States, the territorial domain of the Catholic Church, though its temporal glory as an empire had long faded. The city sprawled across its famous hills along the Tiber River, a landscape of crumbling ancient monuments, medieval fortifications, and Romanesque churches that dominated the skyline. The Jewish community of Rome was among Europe's most ancient, tracing roots to the second century BCE, and it flourished in a precarious but resilient position under papal authority; while confined to restricted quarters and subject to discriminatory laws, Roman Jews maintained a sophisticated intellectual and commercial life, with Hebrew scholarship and biblical commentary flourishing despite—or perhaps because of—the community's isolation. The Jewish quarter itself, densely packed and vibrant, became a center of learning where skilled scribes copied manuscripts and rabbinical discussions drew on centuries of local tradition. What made Rome extraordinary for Torah study was not merely its learned scholars but the tangible presence of antiquity itself: the community lived amid the ruins of pagan temples and Roman law, giving their interpretations of Jewish law a unique resonance, as if they were rebuilding Jewish civilization in the very streets where Roman power had once reigned supreme.

103 teachers · 303 works

The intellectual capital of the Greek world, where Socrates questioned in the agora and four great schools—Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, the Stoa, and Epicurus' Garden—took root within a single square mile.

78 teachers · 367 works

Alexandria (al-Iskandariyya) is the great Mediterranean port-city of northern Egypt, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE and a leading centre of learning in antiquity. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt (642) it remained a major commercial and scholarly hub; the Shadhili Sufi Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari (d. 1309) took his nisba from the city, and the modernist reformer Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) was active in Egypt's intellectual life there and in Cairo.

53 teachers · 110 works

New York City is one of the great centers of Jewish history in the modern world, a place where generations of immigrants turned exile into renewal. From the first Sephardic Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam in the 1600s, to the vast waves of Eastern European Jews who filled the Lower East Side with synagogues, yeshivas, newspapers, pushcarts, and prayer, the city became a living crossroads of Jewish memory and creativity. In its streets, Jewish tradition met America, giving rise to new forms of learning, activism, literature, commerce, and communal life that continue to shape Jewish identity across the world.

43 teachers · 39 works

Galilee center; home of Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and his Hasidic disciples after aliyah.

40 teachers · 54 works

# Vilna 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.

34 teachers · 53 works

# Tzfat 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.

34 teachers · 29 works

Major post-1492 Sephardi center under Ottoman protection. Home of R. Yehudah Rosanes (Mishneh L'Melech) and many other Acharonim.

30 teachers · 38 works

Major 16-17c. Ashkenazi center; Maharal and Kli Yakar both served here.

28 teachers · 81 works

Major Sephardi-influenced center; home of Megalleh Amukkot (Nathan Nota Spira) and Maor VaShemesh (Kalonymus Kalman Epstein).

28 teachers · 31 works

Major center of Polish Jewry and Hasidic publishing.

25 teachers · 6 works

# Volozhin 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.

24 teachers · 7 works

Modern center of multiple Hasidic dynasties (Lubavitch in Crown Heights, Satmar in Williamsburg, Bobov in Borough Park) plus Modern Orthodox communities.

23 teachers · 10 works

# Berlin Berlin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a city of extraordinary intellectual ferment and rapid transformation, first under Prussian rule and then, after 1871, as the capital of a unified German empire. The city's climate—cold winters, moderate summers—and its position on the Spree River made it a commercial and cultural hub that drew talented people from across Europe and beyond. The Jewish community there grew from a modest presence to become one of Europe's largest and most culturally vital, numbering in the tens of thousands by the early twentieth century; Berlin Jews were notably integrated into the city's life, prominent in law, medicine, philosophy, and the arts, yet simultaneously anxious about their belonging. For Torah learning and Jewish thought, Berlin became a crucible where traditional Jewish scholarship encountered modern philosophy, science, and literary criticism, creating new forms of Jewish intellectual life that would reshape Jewish identity across the globe. The city was home to a flourishing press of Jewish newspapers and scholarly journals, a network of yeshivas and study circles where ancient texts were debated in modern languages, and synagogues of striking architectural ambition—particularly the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburgerstrasse, its golden dome a symbol of Jewish confidence in the city's future, built in 1866 and standing as a beacon of Enlightenment-era Jewish aspiration.

23 teachers · 4 works

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

21 teachers · 45 works

# London From the Norman Conquest onward, London was the beating heart of Christian England, yet by the late eleventh century it harbored a thriving Jewish community whose scholars would shape medieval European Judaism. The city itself—crowded, bustling, hemmed by the Thames and ancient Roman walls—belonged to the Christian kings of England, though Jews enjoyed periods of relative protection punctuated by expulsion and danger. The medieval London Jewish quarter near the Old Jewry was compact but learned, home to wealthy merchants and scribes whose expertise in biblical commentary and halakhic reasoning attracted students from across Christendom; the great theologians and exegetes who worked here produced manuscripts that circulated throughout the Jewish world. By the early modern period, after the expulsion of 1290 and a long absence, Jews quietly returned—first as crypto-residents, then openly from the seventeenth century onward—and London became a cosmopolitan center where Sephardic and Ashkenazi traditions mingled. In the modern era, particularly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the city transformed into one of world Jewry's foremost centers of learning and culture, its yeshivas and scholarly institutions drawing seekers of Torah from every continent. The fog-wrapped medieval lanes gave way to Victorian neighborhoods and twentieth-century suburbs, yet London's Jewish intellectual legacy—forged in manuscript and amplified in print—endures as a testament to centuries of resilience and creative thinking.

21 teachers · 10 works

Major Central European Jewish center pre-Holocaust. Home of Isaac of Vienna (Or Zarua), R. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch's training, R. Akiva Eger's son-in-law Chatam Sofer.

20 teachers · 3 works

# Brisk 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.

19 teachers · 2 works

19 teachers · 1 work

# Salonika (Thessaloniki) 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.

19 teachers · 0 works

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.

18 teachers · 66 works

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

18 teachers · 16 works

Lviv (German Lemberg, Polish Lwów), the historic capital of eastern Galicia (today in western Ukraine), held one of the major rabbinates of the region. Rabbi Joshua Falk, author of the Sma and Drisha u-Perisha, headed a yeshiva there in the early seventeenth century, and Rabbi Jacob Joshua Falk, author of the Pnei Yehoshua, served in its chief rabbinate from 1717. The city remained a leading center of Galician Torah scholarship and Hebrew printing into the modern era.

18 teachers · 11 works

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.

17 teachers · 3 works

16 teachers · 168 works

Babylonian Geonic academy

16 teachers · 53 works

R. Samson Raphael Hirsch's lifelong rabbinate (1851-1888); a center of 19c. German Orthodoxy.

16 teachers · 27 works

# Worms Along the Rhine River in the Rhineland, Worms was a thriving medieval trading town under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, its fortunes tied to the vital commerce flowing along Europe's greatest waterway. The city's climate was temperate but often gray, the Rhine's mists mingling with smoke from forges and workshops that made Worms a center of metalwork and wine production. Its Jewish community, though small compared to the Christian majority, was exceptionally learned and prosperous, protected by imperial charters that granted them unusual autonomy and trading privileges. Jews lived in a distinct quarter near the Rhine, their position as moneylenders and merchants giving them wealth and—paradoxically—both security and resentment from Christian neighbors. Worms became a beacon of Torah learning, its yeshivas drawing students from across Europe, and its scholars were consulted on matters of Jewish law from distant communities. The city's great Jewish synagogue, with its Romanesque stone arches and carved reliefs, stood as a architectural declaration of the community's permanence and pride, a monument to learning that would survive centuries of upheaval.

15 teachers · 26 works

# Cairo Under the rule of the Ayyubid dynasty and later the Mamluk sultanate, medieval Cairo stood as the intellectual and commercial heart of the Islamic world, a sprawling metropolis where the Nile's annual floods sustained both agriculture and commerce. The city's climate—scorching summers and mild winters—created a rhythm of life centered around the river and the bazaars that lined its banks, their arched passages offering refuge from the blazing heat. The Jewish community of Cairo, numbering in the thousands, occupied the Fustat quarter and nearby neighborhoods, enjoying a status unique among medieval Islamic cities: they served as merchants, physicians, and administrators, often enjoying the protection of sultans who valued their commercial acumen and multilingual abilities. The *Geniza*—a repository of discarded Hebrew documents hidden in a synagogue's attic—would later reveal the richness of Cairo's Jewish intellectual life, where legal scholars, philosophers, and grammarians engaged in fierce debate. The city drew luminaries from across the Mediterranean world, and its great synagogues became centers of Talmudic study and Jewish law, making Cairo a beacon for those seeking both spiritual guidance and the cosmopolitan exchange of ideas that only a city of merchants, scholars, and traders could offer.

15 teachers · 23 works

Major Sephardi/Ashkenazi printing center; home of Elazar Rokeach (Maaseh Rokeach).

15 teachers · 5 works

# Mir, Belarus 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.

15 teachers · 4 works

Major Mizrahi center; home of Yosef Hayyim (Ben Ish Chai).

14 teachers · 213 works

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.

14 teachers · 1 work

13 teachers · 12 works

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.

13 teachers · 3 works

# Venice In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Venice was the jewel of Mediterranean trade—a maritime republic whose merchant galleys connected Europe to the Ottoman Empire and beyond, ruled by an oligarchy of patrician families whose power rested on commerce and naval supremacy. The city rose from its lagoon like a dream of marble and water, its canals lined with warehouses bulging with spices, silks, and precious goods, while the great Basilica of San Marco dominated the skyline as a symbol of Venetian pride and wealth. Jews had been permitted to settle in Venice for centuries, drawn by its role as a crossroads of Christian and Muslim worlds; by the fifteenth century, the community was small but prosperous, composed largely of merchants, physicians, and moneylenders who lived under carefully negotiated restrictions and periodic renewals of their charter. Though forbidden from owning property in most of the city, Venetian Jews occupied a precarious but culturally fertile space, their status as trusted intermediaries in international trade granting them a unique visibility and protection. The Jewish scholars who gathered in Venice during these decades found in the city not only safety but access to the vast networks of information and texts flowing through its ports—a place where Hebrew learning could flourish alongside the hum of commerce, and where a Jewish sage might sit in study while the bells of San Marco rang across the water.

13 teachers · 0 works

Home of Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (Ramchal) during his early years.

12 teachers · 5 works

Major Sephardi Kabbalistic center; Abraham Azulai's Chesed LeAvraham composed here.

12 teachers · 2 works

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.

12 teachers · 0 works

# Telz (Telšiai), Lithuania 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.

12 teachers · 0 works

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.

11 teachers · 4 works

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.

11 teachers · 0 works

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.

11 teachers · 0 works

# Usha 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.

11 teachers · 0 works

# Toledo, Castile (1437–1575) Toledo in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries stood as one of Christendom's jewels, perched dramatically on a hilltop surrounded on three sides by the Tagus River, while Christian Castilian kings ruled from their throne. The city's climate swung sharply—scorching summers that sent residents to shaded courtyards, winters that froze the winding streets carved into stone. Though Christian conquest had transformed the peninsula centuries before, Toledo's Jewish quarter remained a vital enclave, home to physicians, scholars, administrators, and merchants who served the royal court and conducted vigorous trade. The community, though diminished from its medieval heights, produced towering halakhic authorities whose writings would shape Jewish practice for centuries; yeshivas hummed with Talmudic debate while Jewish families lived in proximity to Arab and Christian neighbors in this cosmopolitan triangle of faiths. The city itself was famous across Europe for its damascene metalwork and sword-making, its narrow alleys climbing impossibly steep hillsides, and its cathedral dominating the skyline—yet Toledo remained an intellectual crossroads where Jewish scholars could still gather, write, and establish precedents that would guide diaspora communities long after political upheaval would force the final exiling of Spain's Jews.

10 teachers · 7 works

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

10 teachers · 2 works

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.

10 teachers · 0 works

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.

9 teachers · 71 works

Smyrna, modern İzmir on the Aegean coast of Turkey, was a leading Ionian Greek polis and a major center of rhetoric and learning under Rome. The sophist Marcus Antonius Polemon taught there, the orator Aelius Aristides was closely associated with the city, and it was one of several places claiming to be the birthplace of Homer. The mathematician Theon of Smyrna and the epic poet Quintus Smyrnaeus take their names from it.

9 teachers · 62 works

Home of the Rashba (Shlomo ibn Aderet, 1235-1310) and R. Aharon HaLevi (the Ra'ah). Major 13c. Catalan Jewish center.

9 teachers · 26 works

Zaragoza (Arabic Saraqusta), on the Ebro in the Aragon region of northeastern Spain, was the capital of the Upper March of al-Andalus and of an independent taifa kingdom in the 11th century, a centre of philosophy and science. The philosopher Ibn Bajja (Avempace, d. 1138) was born and educated there before its conquest by Christian Aragon in 1118.

9 teachers · 17 works

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.

9 teachers · 14 works

9 teachers · 0 works

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.

8 teachers · 3 works

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

8 teachers · 2 works

Egypt (Mitzrayim) is central to the Torah's narrative of the Israelites: Abraham sojourned there during a famine, Joseph rose to power there, and the descendants of Jacob were enslaved before the Exodus under Moses. In later centuries Egypt -- and especially Alexandria and, in the medieval period, Fustat (Old Cairo) -- was home to major Jewish communities; Maimonides served there as nagid in the twelfth century.

8 teachers · 0 works

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.

8 teachers · 0 works

# Mantua Nestled on the banks of the Mincio River in northern Italy, Mantua was a jewel of Renaissance culture under the rule of the Gonzaga family, whose enlightened patronage transformed the city into a beacon of art and learning. The city's position amid the marshlands and lakes of the Po Valley gave it a melancholic beauty and, paradoxically, protection from invaders—those very waters that made travel arduous also made conquest difficult. The Jewish community of Mantua, though small in absolute numbers, wielded outsized influence in the cultural and intellectual life of the city; scholars, physicians, and merchants who had fled persecution elsewhere established themselves here, creating a vibrant center of Hebrew learning that would become celebrated across Europe. By the sixteenth century, Mantua had become a place where Jewish printers produced some of the most beautiful Hebrew books of the age, their works treasured by collectors and scholars alike. The community worshipped in multiple synagogues tucked within the densely built quarters near the Palazzo Ducale, and the city's relative tolerance—rooted in the Gonzagas' pragmatic appreciation of Jewish commercial acumen and cultural contribution—made Mantua a refuge and a refuge where Jewish intellectual life could flourish amid the splendor of Renaissance Italy.

8 teachers · 0 works

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.

8 teachers · 0 works

# Slabodka 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.

8 teachers · 0 works

# Radin 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.

7 teachers · 8 works

New York City, in the United States. In the 20th century its theological institutions—notably Union Theological Seminary—hosted figures such as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr and visitors including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky.

7 teachers · 3 works

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.

7 teachers · 2 works

Region of medieval Spain where Joseph Gikatilla, Abraham Abulafia, and the Zohar's compositional circle worked. Coordinates anchored at Madrid as a regional centroid.

7 teachers · 2 works

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

7 teachers · 2 works

# Mainz 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.

7 teachers · 1 work

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.

7 teachers · 0 works

# Lod (Lydda) 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.

7 teachers · 0 works

# Nehardea 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.

7 teachers · 0 works

# Tzippori 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.

7 teachers · 0 works

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.

6 teachers · 1133 works

Major Sephardi center; where Chaim Vital lived from 1594 and wrote much of the Shaar collection.

6 teachers · 65 works

The Rambam's birthplace (1138). Medieval Cordoba was a leading center of Sephardi philosophy and Talmud under the Caliphate of Cordoba.

6 teachers · 52 works

The greatest Greek city of the West—a Corinthian colony that grew into a Mediterranean superpower, fended off both Athens and Carthage, and gave the world the comic poet Epicharmus and the towering genius of Archimedes.

6 teachers · 21 works

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

6 teachers · 9 works

6 teachers · 6 works

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

6 teachers · 2 works

Los Angeles, California, USA, was an early West Coast centre of American Zen. The pioneer Japanese teacher Nyogen Senzaki opened a meditation 'zendo' there from the 1920s, and the Sōtō priest Taizan Maezumi founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967, training a generation of Western teachers.

6 teachers · 2 works

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.

6 teachers · 2 works

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.

6 teachers · 0 works

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.

6 teachers · 0 works

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

6 teachers · 0 works

# Mahoza 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.

6 teachers · 0 works

One of the oldest cities of Sumer, sacred to Inanna and Anu, in the southern Iraqi marsh-plain east of the Euphrates. The pin marks the findspot of the excavated tablet.

5 teachers · 429 works

# Narbonne In the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, Narbonne stood as one of southern France's most prosperous Mediterranean ports, its narrow streets flowing downhill toward the harbor where merchant ships brought spices, silks, and scholars from across the known world. The city belonged to the counts of Toulouse and remained nominally under Occitanian rule, though power shifted constantly between local lords and the distant French crown. The Jewish quarter thrived in this cosmopolitan atmosphere—wealthy merchants and accomplished scholars formed a community of perhaps three thousand souls, making Narbonne one of Europe's most significant Jewish centers of its age. The city's Jewish intellectuals were renowned throughout Christendom and the Islamic Mediterranean for their mastery of Hebrew grammar, biblical commentary, and philosophy; they maintained correspondence with leading Jewish thinkers in Spain, Egypt, and the Levant, and their yeshiva attracted students seeking rigorous training in Torah and Talmud. The harbor itself became legendary in Jewish memory—Narbonne's port represented a gateway where Mediterranean learning flowed into Western Europe, where a Jew might walk past Christian merchants and Muslim traders, and where the manuscripts that would reshape European Jewish thought were copied, debated, and shipped onward to distant communities hungry for new understanding.

5 teachers · 26 works

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.

5 teachers · 24 works

A great Ionian city crowned by the Temple of Artemis—one of the Seven Wonders—and home to the enigmatic Heraclitus, who taught that all things flow and that strife is the father of all.

5 teachers · 6 works

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.

5 teachers · 4 works

Medieval Paris was a center of Tosafist Torah scholarship in northern France. Rabbi Yechiel of Paris headed the great yeshiva of Paris, reputed to have had some three hundred students, in the early thirteenth century; he was the chief Jewish defender in the Disputation of Paris (1240) against the convert Nicholas Donin, a confrontation that led to the public burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242.

5 teachers · 3 works

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.

5 teachers · 3 works

Metz, a city in Lorraine in northeastern France, was home to one of the wealthiest and most prominent Jewish communities in early-modern France. After Jewish resettlement was permitted in the mid-sixteenth century, the community flourished from 1648 until the French Revolution, maintaining a large yeshiva and choosing distinguished chief rabbis; among those who led it were Rabbi Jonah Teomim-Fraenkel and, in the eighteenth century, Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz (1742-1750).

5 teachers · 2 works

Rhodes is the largest of the Dodecanese islands in the southeastern Aegean, off the southwest coast of Asia Minor. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods it was a renowned center of rhetoric, philosophy, and astronomy: the Stoic Panaetius was a native, the Stoic polymath Posidonius (himself born at Apamea) ran his school there, and the astronomers Hipparchus and Geminus worked on the island.

5 teachers · 2 works

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.'

5 teachers · 2 works

Center of Yemenite Jewry; home of Yihya Qafih (the Wars of God).

5 teachers · 2 works

Seat of Sochatchover Hasidic dynasty; Shem MiShmuel composed here.

5 teachers · 2 works

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.

5 teachers · 1 work

Chicago, in Illinois, United States. In the 20th century it was a major centre of American theological education; Paul Tillich taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School in his later years.

5 teachers · 1 work

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.

5 teachers · 1 work

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

5 teachers · 1 work

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.

5 teachers · 1 work

# Akko 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.

5 teachers · 0 works

5 teachers · 0 works

Corinth, on the isthmus linking the Peloponnese to mainland Greece, was a wealthy commercial polis and the ancient name survives in modern Korinthos. The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope spent much of his later life there, and according to tradition met Alexander the Great in the city. Earlier it was governed by the archaic tyrant Periander, counted among the Seven Sages. Rome destroyed Corinth in 146 BC and refounded it as a colony in 44 BC.

5 teachers · 0 works

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

5 teachers · 0 works

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).

5 teachers · 0 works

Kiev (Kyiv), the historic capital of Ukraine, had its Jewish population grow rapidly in the nineteenth century despite Tsarist restrictions that for a time barred most Jews from residence in the city. Wealthy merchant families such as the Brodskys financed synagogues, a hospital, and schools, making Kiev an important center of Jewish economic, educational, and political life in the Russian Empire, though the community also suffered pogroms in 1881 and 1905.

5 teachers · 0 works

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.

5 teachers · 0 works

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.

5 teachers · 0 works

# Lunel 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.

4 teachers · 45 works

The Champagne city where Rashi (1040-1105) lived and ran a celebrated yeshiva. The center of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish learning before the Crusades.

4 teachers · 39 works

The great city on the Euphrates that gave its name to Babylonia, capital under Hammurabi and again under the Neo-Babylonian kings. The pin marks the findspot of the excavated tablet.

4 teachers · 35 works

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.

4 teachers · 34 works

Major North African Jewish center of the 10c-11c. Home of R. Chananel ben Chushiel and R. Nissim Gaon, who served as the bridge between the Babylonian Geonim and the Sephardi Rishonim.

4 teachers · 29 works

# Tudela 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.

4 teachers · 29 works

4 teachers · 16 works

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 AD.

4 teachers · 7 works

Breslau (Polish Wrocław), the principal city of Silesia (today in southwestern Poland), had a large and influential Jewish community in the modern era. In 1854 it became home to the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe and a leading center of Wissenschaft des Judentums; its founding head was Rabbi Zacharias Frankel, the founder of the positive-historical school of Judaism.

4 teachers · 4 works

Don Isaac Abarbanel's residence after fleeing Spain; major Italian-Sephardi hub.

4 teachers · 3 works

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.

4 teachers · 2 works

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.

4 teachers · 1 work

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.

4 teachers · 1 work

Regensburg, a city in Bavaria on the Danube, had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the German lands, attested from the early eleventh century until the expulsion of 1519. It was the seat of Rabbi Judah ben Samuel he-Chasid of Regensburg (d. 1217), a central figure of the Chassidei Ashkenaz (German Pietists) and a principal author associated with the Sefer Chasidim.

4 teachers · 1 work

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

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

Gaza hosted a Jewish community for most of its history. R. Yisrael Najara (c. 1555-1625), composer of the Shabbat zemer 'Yah Ribbon Olam', served as Av Beit Din of Gaza in his final years.

4 teachers · 0 works

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

# Lisbon In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lisbon stood as the jewel of the Portuguese maritime empire, its harbors crowded with caravels returning from African voyages and Indian spice routes under the House of Aviz. The city perched on a dramatic confluence of river and sea, its steep hills and narrow alleys climbing toward the Moorish castle, while ocean winds carried salt and ambition through streets thick with merchants and translators. The Jewish community of Lisbon was among Europe's most prosperous and learned, numbering several thousand souls despite increasingly restrictive royal policies—rabbinical families possessed both wealth from banking and commerce and an intellectual heritage stretching back through medieval Spanish Jewry. This was a city where Torah learning flourished in an atmosphere of precarious splendor; Jewish philosophers, legal authorities, and biblical commentators gathered in academies while simultaneously facing mounting pressures from a monarchy veering toward forced conversion and Inquisitorial scrutiny. The famous Judariá, or Jewish quarter, pulsed with the energy of a community producing some of the era's most significant halakhic and mystical works, even as Portugal's golden age gradually darkened for its Jews, culminating in expulsion decrees that would scatter this vibrant diaspora to the Ottoman lands and beyond.

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

Mount Sinai (Har Sinai, also called Horeb) is the mountain in the Sinai wilderness where, according to the Torah, God revealed Himself to the people of Israel and gave the Torah to Moses after the Exodus from Egypt. Its precise geographic location is not certain; it is traditionally identified with a peak in the southern Sinai Peninsula.

4 teachers · 0 works

4 teachers · 0 works

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

Shanghai, a port city in China, became a refuge for thousands of European Jews during World War II, including the Mir Yeshiva, which relocated there from Kobe, Japan, in 1941 and continued its studies in the Shanghai ghetto for the duration of the war -- the only major European yeshiva to survive the Holocaust intact.

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

4 teachers · 0 works

Tarsus, in the Cilicia region of southern Turkey near the Mediterranean, was a frontier fortress-town (thaghr) on the border between the Abbasid caliphate and the Byzantine Empire, a base for the seasonal jihad campaigns and a gathering place for ascetics and warriors. The traditionist and ascetic Abd Allah ibn al-Mubarak (d. 797), famed for combining hadith scholarship with frontier devotion, died at Hit on the Euphrates after campaigning in this border zone.

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

4 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 559 works

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.

3 teachers · 236 works

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.

3 teachers · 32 works

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.

3 teachers · 18 works

Seville's Jewish community was one of the largest in Castile before the 1391 massacres, which began here under the agitation of Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez. The destruction of the Sevillian Jewish community signaled the start of Iberian Jewry's century-long decline toward the 1492 expulsion.

3 teachers · 8 works

# Boston Through the twentieth century, Boston—a city that had long anchored American commerce and learning—became an unexpected center of rigorous Jewish scholarship. Under American sovereignty, in a climate of harsh winters and intellectual ferment, the city's Jewish community, though modest in numbers compared to New York, developed an outsized reputation for yeshiva study and legal precision. The West End neighborhood and later Brookline housed a thriving community of Eastern European immigrants and their descendants who built institutions dedicated to preserving classical Torah learning in the New World. By the mid-twentieth century, Boston's yeshiva became known throughout American Jewry as a place where the most demanding methods of textual analysis—close reading of Talmudic argumentation, rigorous logical disputation—were not merely preserved but revitalized for a new generation. The city's universities and libraries, the intellectual seriousness of its broader culture, seemed to resonate with the Jewish scholars who made their home there. What made Boston distinctive was neither size nor ancient roots, but rather the conviction that in America's quiet, cold Northeast, the full depth of Jewish legal reasoning could flourish and inspire, even as Jewish life transformed across the ocean.

3 teachers · 6 works

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.

3 teachers · 6 works

The Baal Shem Tov's home

3 teachers · 6 works

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.

3 teachers · 5 works

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

3 teachers · 5 works

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.

3 teachers · 5 works

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

3 teachers · 5 works

Ayodhyā, in modern Uttar Pradesh, India, was known in antiquity as Sāketa. According to the tradition recorded in later sources, the Buddhist poet Aśvaghoṣa — author of the Buddhacarita, an epic life of the Buddha — was born at Sāketa around the late first or early second century CE.

3 teachers · 4 works

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.

3 teachers · 4 works

# Lucena In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Lucena flourished under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate and its successor taifa kingdoms, nestled in the fertile valley of Córdoba province in southern Spain where olive groves and irrigation channels transformed the arid landscape into productive wealth. The city's Jewish community—among the largest and most prosperous in all of Al-Andalus—numbered in the thousands and enjoyed a status rarely matched elsewhere in medieval Europe, with Jews serving as merchants, physicians, administrators, and patrons of learning rather than facing the rigid restrictions imposed upon their brethren in Christian lands. Lucena became legendary as a center of Jewish scholarship and legal tradition, a place where the yeshiva thrived and rabbinical authority flourished; wealthy families invested in the education and intellectual life of the community with such vigor that the city became known as a fortress of Torah study. The streets buzzed with the commerce of a cosmopolitan hub where Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic mingled in the marketplace, while the Jewish quarter pulsed with the energy of courts of law, scriptoria copying manuscripts, and academies debating the fine points of halakha. So central was Lucena to Jewish life that it stood as a beacon of possibility—proof that Jews could achieve security, dignity, and spiritual greatness under Islamic rule.

3 teachers · 4 works

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

3 teachers · 3 works

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.

3 teachers · 3 works

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

3 teachers · 2 works

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

3 teachers · 2 works

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.

3 teachers · 2 works

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.

3 teachers · 2 works

Nuremberg, a city in Franconia (Bavaria), southern Germany, had an important medieval Jewish community. Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel HaKohen, author of the halachic work known as the Mordechai, was killed in Nuremberg during the Rintfleisch massacre of 1298; later the city was associated with the fifteenth-century authority Rabbi Yaakov Weil (the Mahari Weil).

3 teachers · 2 works

3 teachers · 2 works

Tyre (Arabic Sur), an ancient Phoenician port on the Mediterranean coast of southern Lebanon, was a fortified coastal town of Bilad al-Sham, taken by the Crusaders in 1124 and recovered for Islam in 1291. As a Mediterranean harbour it lay on the routes travelled by scholars of the Syrian coast.

3 teachers · 2 works

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.

3 teachers · 1 work

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.

3 teachers · 1 work

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.

3 teachers · 1 work

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.

3 teachers · 1 work

3 teachers · 1 work

R. Elimelech's Hasidic court

3 teachers · 1 work

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).

3 teachers · 1 work

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.

3 teachers · 1 work

3 teachers · 1 work

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

# Caesarea Built by King Herod the Great in the 1st century BCE on the Mediterranean coast and named to honor the Roman emperor, Caesarea became one of the most magnificent cities in the Roman East, ruled directly by imperial governors who made it their administrative center. The city commanded a dramatic coastline where the sea breeze tempered the hot, arid climate of the Levantine coast, while Herod's engineering marvels—an artificial harbor, grand theaters, temples, and a hippodrome—transformed raw shoreline into a cosmopolitan port. Though predominantly pagan and Greco-Roman in character, Caesarea hosted a substantial Jewish population whose status reflected the city's political importance; here lived both prosperous merchants and scholars who engaged deeply with Greek learning and Roman law, creating a unique intellectual culture where Jewish and Hellenistic thought intersected. The city served as a crucial center for Jewish legal discussion and interpretation during the tannaitic period, and its harbor made it a gateway through which Jewish travelers, ideas, and texts flowed to communities throughout the Mediterranean world. The massive stone amphitheater, still partially standing, echoes with the memory of both Roman spectacles and the crowds who gathered to hear great teachers debate the intricacies of Torah in this strangest of Jewish cities—one where Torah scholarship flourished in the shadow of pagan temples and imperial power.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

16c. Italian-Jewish center; Sforno's main residence.

3 teachers · 0 works

Fez (Fas), in north-central Morocco, was founded in the early 9th century by the Idrisid dynasty and became the political and intellectual capital of medieval Morocco, home to the Qarawiyyin mosque-university. The historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) taught there for a period, and the Maliki jurist Ahmad al-Wansharisi (d. 1508), author of al-Mi'yar, was active in the city.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

Gaul was the Roman name for the broad region of western Europe covering modern France and neighboring lands; the coordinates here point to Lugdunum (modern Lyon), its principal Roman city. The Stoic polymath Posidonius traveled in Gaul and recorded ethnographic observations of the Celtic peoples, an important source for ancient knowledge of the Gauls.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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 BC, early in his career and before he settled in Athens. Aristotle spent time on Lesbos conducting biological research after leaving Assos.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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 AD 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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

Paris, the capital of France, was a centre of European Buddhist scholarship. The Sri Lankan scholar-monk Walpola Rahula taught and researched there, associated with the Sorbonne, during the period in which he engaged with Western academic study of Buddhism.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

Tlemcen (Tilimsan), near the Moroccan border, was a major Algerian Jewish center; R. Ephraim Encaoua (the Maharankawa) and R. Yosef Mashash (Mayim Chayim) both served here.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

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.

3 teachers · 0 works

3 teachers · 0 works

Antioch (Antakya), today in the Hatay province of southern Turkey near the Syrian border, was a major late-antique city that came under Muslim rule after the conquest of Syria, was retaken by the Byzantines in 969, and changed hands repeatedly during the Crusades. The poet al-Ma'arri (d. 1057) came from nearby Ma'arrat al-Nu'man; the astronomer al-Battani (d. 929) was active in the wider Syrian region.

2 teachers · 102 works

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.

2 teachers · 59 works

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.

2 teachers · 48 works

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.

2 teachers · 35 works

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.

2 teachers · 29 works

Bukhara's Jewish community traces to the Babylonian exile. R. Yosef Maman al-Maghribi arrived from Morocco c. 1793 and 're-Sephardicized' the community, introducing Sephardic prayer-rite, Hebrew literacy, and Maimonidean law.

2 teachers · 25 works

R. Nachman's Hasidic court

2 teachers · 9 works

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.

2 teachers · 8 works

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.

2 teachers · 8 works

# Granada Nestled in a fertile valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Granada in the eleventh century became one of Al-Andalus's most dazzling cities under Berber and later taifa rule, when Muslim emirates fragmented Iberian power into competing kingdoms. The city's mild Mediterranean climate and abundant water—fed by mountain streams and ingenious irrigation systems—made it a paradise of gardens, orchards, and silk production that drew merchants and scholars from across the Islamic world and beyond. The Jewish community here flourished as physicians, philosophers, poets, and administrators, their status rising and falling with each dynastic shift but never disappearing, supported by the cosmopolitan trade networks that flowed through the city's bustling markets and caravanserais. Granada became a beacon of Hebrew intellectual life, where Torah learning intertwined with Arabic philosophy and secular sciences in the courts of Jewish patrons and in the narrow lanes of the Jewish quarter. The city's legendary gardens—later immortalized in the Alhambra's palace grounds—symbolized a rare moment of convivencia, when Muslims, Christians, and Jews created together a civilization of breathtaking artistic refinement, making Granada a place where Jewish thought could flourish alongside the highest achievements of medieval Islamic culture.

2 teachers · 7 works

Nicomedia, modern İzmit in northwestern Turkey, was the capital of the kingdom of Bithynia and later a principal residence of Roman emperors. The historian Arrian, author of the Anabasis of Alexander, was a native of Nicomedia.

2 teachers · 7 works

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.

2 teachers · 7 works

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.

2 teachers · 5 works

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.

2 teachers · 5 works

The chief city of Boeotia—rich in myth as the home of Oedipus and the Seven against Thebes, birthplace of the great lyric poet Pindar, and, for one brief generation, the dominant military power of all Greece.

2 teachers · 5 works

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.

2 teachers · 4 works

Carthage, near modern Tunis on the coast of Tunisia, was the Phoenician-founded power destroyed by Rome in 146 BC at the end of the Third Punic War and later refounded as a Roman colony. The historian Polybius witnessed and recorded its final destruction. Under Rome, Carthage was the milieu of the Latin author and Middle Platonist Apuleius, who studied and lectured there.

2 teachers · 3 works

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.

2 teachers · 3 works

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.

2 teachers · 3 works

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.

2 teachers · 3 works

Boulder, Colorado, USA, is the home of Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in North America, founded in 1974 by the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Boulder became a hub of his Shambhala/Kagyu-Nyingma community in the West.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

Cambridge, the English university city, is connected to the Islamic stream through the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), who studied at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1905 and took a degree there before continuing his studies in Germany.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

Seat of Naftali Tzvi Horowitz (Zera Kodesh).

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

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.

2 teachers · 2 works

Tunis in the medieval and early modern periods was a flourishing North African port city ruled successively by Arab dynasties, then the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onward, its whitewashed medina rising behind harbor walls where ships from across the Mediterranean brought spices, silks, and scholars. The city enjoyed a mild climate tempered by sea breezes, though summers burned fierce and water was precious—a reality that shaped both daily life and the careful layout of its fountains and hammams. The Jewish community of Tunis was one of North Africa's most vital, numbering in the thousands by the medieval period and concentrated in their own quarters, where they maintained Hebrew schools, courts applying rabbinic law, and a thriving textile and banking trade that made them indispensable to the city's economy despite periodic restrictions and taxes imposed by Muslim rulers. For centuries, Tunis was a beacon of Jewish learning and piety, a place where traditions from Spain mixed with the customs of North Africa to create a distinctive Mediterranean Jewish culture. The Great Synagogue of Tunis, rebuilt several times over the centuries, stood as a symbol of communal endurance—a place where worshippers gathered not only for prayer but for the transmission of texts, responsa, and the living memory of Jewish law that sustained diaspora life far from the land of Israel.

2 teachers · 2 works

Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, is the home of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the programme that adapted Buddhist-derived mindfulness practice into a secular clinical context.

2 teachers · 2 works

Algiers (al-Jaza'ir), the port-capital on the Mediterranean coast of present-day Algeria, was founded in its Islamic form in the 10th century and became a major centre of the Ottoman Maghrib from the 16th century. The Algerian emir and Sufi scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri (d. 1883) takes his nisba from the country of which Algiers is the capital.

2 teachers · 1 work

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

2 teachers · 1 work

Emesa, modern Homs in western Syria, was a city on the Orontes that rose to prominence under Rome, notably for its cult of the sun god Elagabal. It was the home city of the novelist Heliodorus, author of the Aethiopica, who describes himself as a Phoenician of Emesa.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), on the Bosphorus straddling Europe and Asia in modern Turkey, became the capital of the Ottoman Empire after its conquest by Mehmed II in 1453 and the seat of the Ottoman caliphate and the Shaykh al-Islam. 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.

2 teachers · 1 work

# Lakewood, New Jersey 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.

2 teachers · 1 work

2 teachers · 1 work

# Liozna 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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

Sardis was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia in western Asia Minor (modern Sart, Turkey), later a major city under Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman rule. It figures in Xenophon's Anabasis as the gathering point from which Cyrus the Younger launched his expedition. The sophist and historian Eunapius, author of the Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, was a native of Sardis.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

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.

2 teachers · 1 work

Acre (Akko), a Mediterranean port city in the northern Land of Israel, was the Crusader capital during the thirteenth century and home to a significant Jewish community, including a circle of French Tosafist scholars who immigrated there. Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (Nachmanides, the Ramban) settled in Acre after his arrival in the Land of Israel in 1267 and lived there until his death around 1270.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

Arles, a city in Provence in southern France, had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the region, attested since late antiquity, and was a notable center of medieval Provençal Jewry, with scholars and physicians, until the Jews were expelled from Provence at the end of the fifteenth century.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Ávila, a city in Castile, central Spain, was a center of Jewish mysticism in the late thirteenth century. The kabbalist Rabbi Moses de León, who first circulated the Zohar, settled in Ávila and spent his final years there until his death around 1305.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Crete (then called Candia under Venetian rule, 1204-1669) was home to a sophisticated Sephardic-Romaniote-Italian community; produced Eliyahu Capsali (1483-1555) and R. Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia, 1591-1655).

2 teachers · 0 works

Cyrene was a Greek colony in Cyrenaica, in modern eastern Libya near Shahhat, founded by settlers from Thera in the seventh century BC. It was the birthplace of Aristippus, a follower of Socrates and founder of the hedonistic Cyrenaic school of philosophy, which took its name from the city.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

# Hamburg During the nineteenth century, Hamburg flourished as a major port city of the German Confederation and later the unified German state, its harbor thronged with merchant ships carrying goods across the North Sea and Baltic. The city's cool, maritime climate and strategic position at the mouth of the Elbe River had made it a commercial powerhouse for centuries, and by the early 1800s it was experiencing rapid modernization and growth. The Jewish community of Hamburg, numbering several thousand by mid-century, occupied a distinctive place in European Jewish life: relatively prosperous, German-speaking, and deeply engaged with the intellectual currents of the surrounding society, yet committed to maintaining Jewish tradition and learning. This was a community caught between worlds—the old Jewish practices of Eastern Europe and the new possibilities of Enlightenment Europe—and Hamburg became a crucible for reimagining how Jews could be both authentically Jewish and fully German. The city's Portuguese Jewish cemetery and its innovative synagogues, including the striking neoclassical temple that hosted reforming services alongside traditional ones, reflected this creative tension. Here in this bustling harbor town, some of the nineteenth century's most consequential debates about Jewish identity, religious practice, and modernity were hammered out in study halls and pulpits, shaping Jewish communities far beyond Hamburg's foggy shores.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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).

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Kolkata (Calcutta), the capital of West Bengal in eastern India, was an early centre of the modern Buddhist revival and study. The Maha Bodhi Society long maintained its headquarters there, and the city was the home of the laywoman meditation teacher Dipa Ma, who taught insight (vipassanā) practice to students in her Calcutta apartment.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Marseille (Marseilles), a Mediterranean port in Provence, southern France, had a medieval Jewish community. The philosopher and translator Rabbi Samuel ibn Tibbon, famed for his Hebrew translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, settled in Marseille around 1211 and died there about 1232; the twelfth-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela also recorded the city's community.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Modena under the Este dynasty hosted a thriving Jewish community; R. Aaron Berechiah of Modena (d. 1639) authored Ma'avar Yabok here, the foundational text for Sephardic-Italian mourning ritual.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

New Haven, Connecticut, United States, seat of Yale. Jonathan Edwards graduated from Yale (1720) and was closely tied to the New England Congregationalism centred there.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

Riga, the capital of Latvia, had a substantial Jewish community in the modern era and was a center of Jewish cultural and religious life in the Baltic. The Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn resided there for several years in the late 1920s before relocating his court; Riga was also the birthplace of the scholars Nechama and Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Saint Petersburg, the imperial capital of Russia, despite restrictions on Jewish settlement was home to a community of Jewish merchants and professionals and a center of communal organization. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad chasidut, was imprisoned in the city in 1798; his liberation on the 19th of Kislev is marked annually by Chabad.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Sinope, modern Sinop on the Black Sea coast of northern Turkey, was a Greek colony of Pontus, founded by settlers from Miletus. It was the birthplace of Diogenes the Cynic, who was exiled from the city and went on to live in Athens and Corinth.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

# Speyer 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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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

2 teachers · 0 works

Valladolid, a city in Castile, central Spain, had a Jewish community in the medieval period. The kabbalist Rabbi Moses de León resided in Valladolid (along with Guadalajara) during the years he composed and circulated the Zohar, before settling in Ávila.

2 teachers · 0 works

Varanasi (Benares), on the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, India, near Sārnāth, is one of the holiest cities of India and a centre of learning. The Nyingma teacher Tarthang Tulku worked there at the Sanskrit university in the years before he emigrated to the United States to teach Tibetan Buddhism.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Wiesbaden, in the German state of Hesse, was the birthplace, in 1878, of Anton Gueth, who as Nyanatiloka Mahāthera became one of the first Europeans to be ordained as a Theravāda Buddhist monk and a noted translator of Pāli texts.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

2 teachers · 0 works

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.

2 teachers · 0 works

Zurich, a city in northern Switzerland and the centre of Zwingli's Reformation. It was also the birthplace of the radical Reformation: Conrad Grebel and the first Anabaptists broke from Zwingli and performed believers' baptism there in 1525.

2 teachers · 0 works

Beijing, the capital of China. Matteo Ricci settled there in 1601 with imperial permission, founded the mission at the Ming court, and died and was buried in the city in 1610.

1 teacher · 999 works

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.

1 teacher · 384 works

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.

1 teacher · 384 works

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.

1 teacher · 182 works

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.

1 teacher · 178 works

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.

1 teacher · 145 works

Where the Rambam lived and composed Mishneh Torah + Guide of the Perplexed (~1170-1204).

1 teacher · 94 works

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.

1 teacher · 71 works

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

1 teacher · 62 works

A coastal town on the Tyrrhenian shore of Latium, prized by wealthy Romans for its seaside villas, where the orator and philosopher Cicero kept a beloved estate—and met his death.

1 teacher · 59 works

An Aegean island off the coast of Asia Minor, renowned as the home of Hippocrates and the great medical school that made his name a byword for the physician's art.

1 teacher · 50 works

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.

1 teacher · 36 works

Burdigala, modern Bordeaux in southwestern France, was the chief city of Roman Aquitania. It was the home of the fourth-century Latin poet and teacher Ausonius, who taught rhetoric there before being summoned to the imperial court and who celebrated his native city in verse.

1 teacher · 26 works

# Aleppo During the medieval and early modern centuries, Aleppo stood as one of the Ottoman Empire's greatest commercial hubs, its fortunes rising with the spice trade that flowed from the Indian Ocean northward through the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean. Perched in northwestern Syria on the edge of the Anatolian plateau, the city endured scorching summers and mild winters, its famous bazaar—the Souk al-Madina—sprawling for miles in a dizzying maze of vaulted stone corridors where merchants hawked silks, perfumes, and precious metals. The Jewish community there, numbering several thousand by the sixteenth century, enjoyed considerable prosperity and considerable autonomy: they lived in their own quarter, governed their own courts, and maintained an intellectual life centered on Talmudic study and Hebrew poetry. Aleppo became renowned across the Jewish world as a seat of learning and scribal excellence, particularly celebrated for the meticulous copying of sacred texts. The city's most famous Jewish treasure was a magnificent medieval Hebrew Bible, copied with extraordinary precision and adorned with careful notations, which would later inspire reverence and become a beacon of cultural memory for Jews dispersed across the world.

1 teacher · 13 works

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.

1 teacher · 10 works

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.

1 teacher · 10 works

Kāśī (Varanasi, Banaras) is a city on the Ganges in Uttar Pradesh, north India, and a major pilgrimage and learning centre. It figures in the traditional life of Ādi Śaṅkara, who is said to have taught and debated there.

1 teacher · 7 works

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

1 teacher · 7 works

# Guadalajara, Castile 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.

1 teacher · 6 works

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

1 teacher · 6 works

The 'Victory City' Augustus founded to commemorate Actium, later home to the exiled slave-philosopher Epictetus, whose Stoic school here shaped emperors and ethics for centuries.

1 teacher · 6 works

A panhellenic colony in southern Italy, founded under Athenian leadership on the site of old Sybaris, planned by the philosopher-architect Hippodamus and chosen by Herodotus, the 'Father of History,' as his adopted home.

1 teacher · 6 works

Bologna, a city in north-central Italy, had a medieval and Renaissance Jewish community and was an early center of Hebrew printing. The biblical commentator and physician Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno (c. 1475-1550), author of a widely studied commentary on the Torah, lived and taught in Bologna.

1 teacher · 5 works

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.

1 teacher · 4 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

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

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

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

1 teacher · 3 works

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 BC introduced his ornate rhetorical style to the Greek mainland.

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

Orange, a town in Provence in southern France, was where the great medieval philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and biblical commentator Rabbi Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides, the Ralbag, 1288-1344) lived for much of his life. As part of the region under papal and local protection, its Jewish community was spared the general expulsions from the Kingdom of France.

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 3 works

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

1 teacher · 3 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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

1 teacher · 2 works

1 teacher · 2 works

Berkeley, California, USA, was an early hub of Tibetan Buddhism in America. The Nyingma teacher Tarthang Tulku, one of the first Tibetan lamas to settle in the United States, made Berkeley his base, establishing the Tibetan Nyingma Meditation Center there in 1969 and relocating his Dharma Publishing house to the area in the early 1970s.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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

1 teacher · 2 works

Successor seat of the Ruzhin dynasty after 1842.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 2 works

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

1 teacher · 2 works

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

1 teacher · 2 works

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is the area where the teacher Tara Brach founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington in 1998, one of the larger Western vipassanā (insight meditation) communities, drawing on the Theravāda-derived insight tradition.

1 teacher · 2 works

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. Thomas Merton died there in 1968 while attending a conference on monasticism and interreligious dialogue.

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

R. Levi Yitzchak's Hasidic court

1 teacher · 1 work

Bertinoro, a town in the Romagna region of north-central Italy (province of Forlì-Cesena), was the birthplace, around 1445, of Rabbi Obadiah ben Abraham of Bertinoro, author of the standard commentary on the Mishnah that bears his name. He later emigrated to Jerusalem, where he became a leader of the community.

1 teacher · 1 work

# Béziers 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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

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 AD best known for a Phoenician History purporting to draw on the older writer Sanchuniathon.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

R. Menachem Nachum's Hasidic court

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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).

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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

1 teacher · 1 work

Homs (classical Emesa), in west-central Syria on the Orontes, was an important city of Bilad al-Sham. It is traditionally the burial place of the companion and general Khalid ibn al-Walid (d. 642), whose mosque and tomb stand there; the poets al-Buhturi (d. 897) and Abu Tammam (d. c. 845) are associated with the region of Syria.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

Seat of Yechezkel Panet (Mareh Yechezkel).

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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 BC.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

# Mezeritch 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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

Mosul (biblical Nineveh) was a major center of Iraqi-Kurdish Jewry. The community produced R. Yaakov Manasheh and R. Yosef Hayyim's correspondents; nearly the entire community emigrated to Israel between 1950-52 in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.'

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

Northern France (the regions of Champagne and the Île-de-France) was, from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the heartland of the Tosafist school of Talmudic study, beginning with Rashi of Troyes and continuing through his descendants and disciples. This node represents medieval northern French Jewry broadly; the Torah commentator Rabbi Chizkiyah ben Manoach (the Chizkuni) worked in this milieu in the thirteenth century. The exact town is not specified.

1 teacher · 1 work

Orléans, a city on the Loire in north-central France, had a medieval Jewish community and was the home of Rabbi Joseph Bekhor Shor of Orléans, a twelfth-century Tosafist and biblical commentator. A student of Rabbeinu Tam, he was among the last of the northern French exegetes to write a Torah commentary in the plain-sense (peshat) tradition.

1 teacher · 1 work

Pella, in central Macedonia in northern Greece, was the capital of the Macedonian kingdom from the late fifth century BC. 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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

Seat of Radomsker Hasidism; Tiferet Shlomo composed here.

1 teacher · 1 work

Home of Menachem Recanati (Recanati on the Torah).

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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

1 teacher · 1 work

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

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

A Roman legionary fortress on the Danube frontier—the future site of Vienna—best remembered as the place where the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius is traditionally said to have died on campaign.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

Center of Meshullam Feivush Heller (Yosher Divrei Emet).

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

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.

1 teacher · 1 work

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Aden hosted a major Jewish community at the southern tip of Arabia, with its own distinctive nusach (Nusach Aden) and a vibrant Maimonidean halachic tradition. Most of the community was airlifted to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet (1949-50).

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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

1 teacher · 0 works

Alessandria, a city in Piedmont, northwestern Italy. It was named after Pope Alexander III in the 12th century; the city is associated with Pius V's career in the surrounding region.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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).

1 teacher · 0 works

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 BC during the Peloponnesian War. Ancient tradition lists Amphipolis among the campaigns in which Socrates saw military service.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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 AD author of De Materia Medica, the foundational ancient pharmacological work.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Aquileia was a major Roman city at the head of the Adriatic in northeastern Italy (modern Friuli–Venezia Giulia). The physician Galen was present there with the imperial court during an outbreak of plague in the late 160s AD, an episode he records.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Avignon, a city in Provence in southern France, had a long-standing Jewish community that, as part of the papal Comtat Venaissin, survived the expulsions from the Kingdom of France. It was associated with the polymath Rabbi Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides, Ralbag), one of the foremost Jewish philosophers, astronomers, and Bible commentators of the Middle Ages, who lived in the region in the fourteenth century.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Basel, a city on the Rhine in northwestern Switzerland, has a Jewish community of long standing and a central place in modern Jewish history as the site of the First Zionist Congress, convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897, which founded the World Zionist Organization and adopted the Basel Program. Several later Zionist congresses were also held there.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. The Christian apologist and writer C. S. Lewis was born there in 1898.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Bern, the capital of Switzerland, had a medieval Jewish community that suffered persecution, including a blood-libel accusation in 1294, in the wake of which Jews were maltreated, fined, and driven from the town. Jewish life later returned in the modern era, and Bern became home to an organized community within Swiss Jewry.

1 teacher · 0 works

Bethlehem (Hebrew Beit Lechem), a town in the Judean Hills south of Jerusalem, is associated in the Torah with the matriarch Rachel, who according to the biblical account died in childbirth and was buried on the road to Bethlehem; Rachel's Tomb there has long been a site of Jewish pilgrimage. The town is also the setting of the Book of Ruth and the home of King David.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Bikrampur, in the Munshiganj district of modern Bangladesh, was a centre of the Pāla-era Buddhist world in eastern Bengal. It is traditionally given as the birthplace, around 982 CE, of Atiśa (Dīpaṃkara Śrījñāna), the great scholar-abbot who later travelled to Tibet and helped reinvigorate Buddhism there.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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 BC on his return from a journey to Greece.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Byzantium was a Greek colony founded by Megara on the European side of the Bosporus, on the site of the later Constantinople and modern Istanbul, Turkey. Xenophon and the surviving Ten Thousand passed through Byzantium near the end of their march, as recorded in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

R. Yosef Albo's home town for most of his life.

1 teacher · 0 works

Calcutta (Kolkata), capital of West Bengal on the Hooghly River, was a centre of the Indian nationalist movement in the early 20th century. Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) was active there as a journalist and political leader during this period, before his turn to spiritual life and move to Pondicherry.

1 teacher · 0 works

Udbodhan House (the 'Mother's House') is a building in northern Kolkata, West Bengal, established by the Ramakrishna Order. It served as the Kolkata residence of Sri Sarada Devi (1853–1920), Sri Ramakrishna's wife, in her later years.

1 teacher · 0 works

Cambridge, in eastern England, is the seat of the University of Cambridge. Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) studied at King's College, Cambridge, in the early 1890s before returning to India.

1 teacher · 0 works

Canterbury, a city in southeast England, served as the primatial see of the English church and the historic center of English Christianity from the late sixth century onward.

1 teacher · 0 works

Capua, a town in Campania, southern Italy, was one of the places where the kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia, founder of prophetic Kabbalah, studied and taught in the thirteenth century. In the early 1260s he studied Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed there under Rabbi Hillel of Verona, and he later returned to teach a circle of students in Capua.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

The Carduchian Mountains were the rugged highlands north of the Tigris, in the borderlands of modern southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, inhabited by the warlike Carduchi (often associated with the later Kurds). Xenophon's Ten Thousand fought their way through this difficult country during their northward retreat, as recounted in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Carnuntum was a major Roman legionary fortress and town on the Danube frontier in the province of Pannonia, east of modern Vienna in present-day Austria. The emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius spent time there during the Marcomannic Wars, and part of his Meditations is traditionally said to have been written on the Danube campaigns.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Cerasus was a Greek colony of Sinope on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, in the area of modern Giresun, northeastern Turkey. Xenophon records that the Ten Thousand halted there during their coastal march, as told in the Anabasis. (The town's name is traditionally connected with the cherry, said to have been brought to Rome from this region.)

1 teacher · 0 works

Cesena, a city in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy. It was the home town of the Braschi family and produced Pope Pius VI and Pope Pius VII.

1 teacher · 0 works

Chalcis ad Belum was a town of Coele-Syria in northern Syria, commonly identified with Qinnasrin (Chalcis ad Belum), south of Aleppo. It is traditionally given as the birthplace of the Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus, founder of the Syrian school of Neoplatonism (though some scholars argue for a different Chalcis).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Champāraṇya (Champaran) is a town in the Raipur district of Chhattisgarh, central India—distinct from the better-known Champaran in Bihar. It is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Vallabhācārya (1479–1531), founder of the Puṣṭimārga school of Kṛṣṇa devotion.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Chhapaiya is a village in the Gonda district of Uttar Pradesh, north India, in the Awadh region near Ayodhyā. It is the birthplace of Sahajānanda Swami—Swaminarayan (1781–1830), founder of the Swaminarayan Sampradāya.

1 teacher · 0 works

Chicago, in the U.S. state of Illinois, was the host city of the World's Parliament of Religions in 1893. There Swami Vivekananda delivered the addresses that introduced Vedānta and Yoga to a Western audience and made his reputation in the West.

1 teacher · 0 works

Chios is a large Greek island in the eastern Aegean, off the coast of Asia Minor near Smyrna. It was one of several places that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, and was the seat of the Homeridae, a guild that recited the Homeric poems.

1 teacher · 0 works

Chittor (Chittorgarh) is a historic fort city in southern Rajasthan, north-west India, capital of the Sisodia Rajputs of Mewar. It is associated with the Kṛṣṇa-devotional poet Mīrābāī (c. 16th c.), who by tradition married into the Mewar royal house.

1 teacher · 0 works

Chongye (Chonggye), in the Yarlung area of south-central Tibet, is the old heartland of the Tibetan kings, with their royal tombs nearby. The Fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso, was born in 1617 at Chingwar Taktse castle in the Chongye valley.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Chrysopolis was a town on the Asian shore of the Bosporus opposite Byzantium, on the site of the modern Üsküdar district of Istanbul, Turkey. Xenophon records that the Ten Thousand encamped at Chrysopolis near the close of their long march, as told in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Citium (Kition) was an ancient city on the southern coast of Cyprus, on the site of modern Larnaca, with Phoenician as well as Greek population. It was the birthplace of Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, who taught in the Painted Stoa at Athens.

1 teacher · 0 works

Città di Castello, a town in the upper Tiber valley of Umbria, central Italy. It is linked to the career of medieval popes such as Celestine II.

1 teacher · 0 works

Clermont (modern Clermont-Ferrand), a city in the Auvergne, central France. Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095; Blaise Pascal was born in the city in 1623.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Cologne (Köln), a city on the Rhine in western Germany, had one of the oldest Jewish communities in the German lands, attested in Roman times and again from the early medieval period. It was the birthplace, around 1269, of Rabbi Jacob ben Asher (the Baal HaTurim), author of the Arba'ah Turim, who later emigrated with his father, the Rosh (Asher ben Yechiel), to Toledo in Spain.

1 teacher · 0 works

Comino, a small island in the Maltese archipelago, is recorded as the place where the kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia, founder of prophetic Kabbalah, spent his final years and died sometime after 1291, having withdrawn there in his later life.

1 teacher · 0 works

Corbeil, a town near Paris in northern France (today Corbeil-Essonnes), was a center of Tosafist scholarship in the thirteenth century. It was associated with Rabbi Peretz ben Elijah of Corbeil (Rabbeinu Peretz), a leading Tosafist who wrote glosses and additions on earlier rabbinic works, including the Semak of Isaac of Corbeil.

1 teacher · 0 works

Corduba, modern Córdoba in southern Spain (Andalusia), was the capital of the Roman province of Hispania Baetica. It was the birthplace of the Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger), as well as of his father Seneca the Elder and the poet Lucan.

1 teacher · 0 works

Coronea was a town of Boeotia in central Greece, the site of a battle in 394 BC in which a Spartan army defeated a coalition of Greek states. Xenophon was present on the Spartan side; the engagement is described in his Hellenica.

1 teacher · 0 works

Corsica is a large mountainous island in the western Mediterranean, north of Sardinia, in Roman times a province. The Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger was exiled to Corsica from AD 41 to 49 under the emperor Claudius, and wrote consolatory works there during his banishment.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Cossipore (Kashipur) Garden House is a rented villa in the Cossipore neighbourhood of northern Kolkata, West Bengal, where Sri Ramakrishna spent his final months in 1885–1886 during his terminal illness, attended by his young disciples including Vivekananda.

1 teacher · 0 works

Cotyora was a Greek colony of Sinope on the Black Sea coast of Pontus, in the area of modern Ordu, northeastern Turkey. Xenophon's Ten Thousand stopped there during their march along the coast, as recounted in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Crestone Mountain Zen Center, at Crestone in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of southern Colorado, USA, is a Sōtō Zen practice centre. It was established by Richard Baker, the American Dharma heir of Shunryū Suzuki, after he left the San Francisco Zen Center.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Cunaxa was the site, on the Euphrates in Babylonia north of ancient Babylon (in modern Iraq), of the battle in 401 BC at which Cyrus the Younger was killed fighting his brother Artaxerxes II. Xenophon, who marched with Cyrus's Greek mercenaries, describes the battle and its aftermath in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Daklha Gampo is a monastery in the Dakpo region of south-central Tibet, founded in 1121 by Gampopa, the principal disciple of Milarepa. It was the seat from which the Dakpo Kagyu lineage spread; the future First Karmapa, Düsum Khyenpa, came there to study under Gampopa.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dakshineswar is a locality on the east bank of the Hooghly River north of Kolkata, West Bengal, site of the 1855 Kālī temple where Sri Ramakrishna served as priest. His wife and spiritual partner Sri Sarada Devi (1853–1920) lived there during his tenure.

1 teacher · 0 works

Damanhour, a city in the Nile Delta of northern Egypt, is best known in Jewish tradition as the burial place of Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira (the Abir Yaakov, 1806-1880), the great Moroccan kabbalist. He fell ill and died in Damanhour while traveling toward the Land of Israel, and his tomb there has become a site of pilgrimage.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dampierre (Dampierre-en-Yvelines) was the seat of R. Yitzchak of Dampierre (Ri HaZaken, d. c. 1189), Rabbenu Tam's nephew and successor as head of the Tosafist school. He was the second-most-cited Tosafist after his uncle and shaped the entire trajectory of Ashkenazi Talmudic methodology.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dan Chökhor is a village in the Kham region of eastern Tibet. It was the birthplace, in 1805, of Lungtok Gyatso, the Ninth Dalai Lama, who died as a child — the first of several Dalai Lamas who did not reach adulthood.

1 teacher · 0 works

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

1 teacher · 0 works

Darjeeling, a hill town in West Bengal, northern India, near the borders of Sikkim and Nepal, has a substantial Tibetan-Buddhist population. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, spent part of his early-twentieth-century exile from Tibet in the Darjeeling area.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

R. Yosef Albo (Sefer HaIkarim) born here; took part in the Tortosa Disputation 1413-14.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dehu is a town on the Indrāyaṇī River in the Pune district of Maharashtra, western India. It is the birthplace and home of the Vārkarī sant-poet Tukārām (17th c.), composer of Marathi abhaṅgas.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Delium was a sanctuary and town on the coast of Boeotia in central Greece, the site of a battle in 424 BC in which the Boeotians defeated an Athenian army. Socrates fought as a hoplite at Delium, where ancient sources praise his composure during the Athenian retreat.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Denkhok, in the Denma area of the Derge region of Kham (eastern Tibet, now near the Sichuan border), was the birthplace, in 1910, of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, one of the most influential Nyingma masters of the twentieth century, who later did much to preserve Tibetan Buddhism in exile.

1 teacher · 0 works

Derge (Dege) is a region of Kham in eastern Tibet (now in Sichuan, China), famous for its great printing house (parkhang) and as a centre of the nineteenth-century non-sectarian (Rimé) movement. It was the birthplace, in 1846, of the Nyingma scholar-polymath Jamgön Ju Mipham Gyatso.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Dhaka, the capital of present-day Bangladesh, on the Buriganga River, was (in the Shahbagh / Siddheshwari area) an early centre of Anandamayi Ma's life in the 1920s–1930s, where her devotional community first formed.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dhamma Dena is a desert meditation retreat centre at Joshua Tree, California, USA. It was founded by Ruth Denison, a German-born teacher of vipassanā in the lineage of the Burmese master U Ba Khin, who was among the first women authorised to teach in that tradition in the West.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Dölpo is a high, remote region of the Tibetan cultural world in what is now northwestern Nepal. It was the birthplace, in 1292, of Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, the master who systematised the 'empty-of-other' (shentong) view and became the great exponent of the Jonang tradition — and from whose homeland he took his name.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Drak and Yarlung area of south-central Tibet is the heartland of the old Tibetan kings and an early centre of Tibetan Buddhism. In the Nyingma tradition it is connected with Yeshe Tsogyal, the eighth-century consort and disciple of Padmasambhava, who is traditionally counted among the foremost early holders of his teachings.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dresden, the capital of Saxony in eastern Germany, had a Jewish community from the eighteenth century that built a notable synagogue (designed by Gottfried Semper) in the nineteenth. It was a center of modern German-Jewish cultural and religious life until the Nazi period.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Dublin, the capital of Ireland. John Henry Newman founded and served as first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin (1854-1858), the setting of his Idea of a University.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Dvārakā is a coastal town at the western tip of the Saurāṣṭra (Kāṭhiawar) peninsula in Gujarat, on the Arabian Sea, associated in tradition with the city of Kṛṣṇa. It is traditionally counted among the four cardinal monastic seats (āmnāya maṭhas) attributed to Ādi Śaṅkara.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Dvārakā (Dwarka) is a coastal town at the western tip of the Saurāṣṭra peninsula in Gujarat, on the Arabian Sea, a pilgrimage town associated in tradition with Kṛṣṇa. It is linked with the Kṛṣṇa-devotee poet Mīrābāī, whose life-story closes there by tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Dzachukha is a high nomadic region of northern Kham (eastern Tibet, now in Sichuan, China). It was the birthplace, in 1808, of Patrul Rinpoche, the wandering Nyingma teacher and Rimé figure best known as the author of 'The Words of My Perfect Teacher,' a classic exposition of the preliminary practices.

1 teacher · 0 works

Dzongsar Monastery, in the Derge area of Kham (eastern Tibet, now in Sichuan, China), was the principal seat of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, the nineteenth-century master who, together with Jamgön Kongtrül, was a leading figure of the non-sectarian (Rimé) movement. It became known for its great collection of Rimé teachings.

1 teacher · 0 works

Eihei-ji, in modern Fukui Prefecture (historic Echizen), Japan, is one of the two head temples of the Sōtō Zen school. It was founded by Dōgen in 1244 after he left Kōshō-ji, and remains a principal centre of Sōtō monastic training to the present day.

1 teacher · 0 works

Ein Gedi is an oasis on the western shore of the Dead Sea, in modern Israel. According to the Book of Samuel, David hid from King Saul in the wilderness and caves of Ein Gedi during his flight; the site is also praised in the Song of Songs.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Emden, a port town in East Frisia in northwestern Germany, had a Jewish community of long standing. Rabbi Jacob Emden (the Ya'avetz, 1697-1776), the prominent halachist, anti-Sabbatean controversialist, and son of the Chacham Tzvi, took his surname from the town, where he served as rabbi from 1728 to 1733.

1 teacher · 0 works

Erfurt, a city in Thuringia in central Germany, had a Jewish community from the late eleventh century that was annihilated in the massacre of 1349 during the Black Death persecutions. Its rich medieval heritage survives in one of Europe's oldest synagogue buildings, the buried 'Erfurt Treasure,' and an important collection of Hebrew manuscripts.

1 teacher · 0 works

Ernakulam is the mainland part of the city of Kochi, on the coast of Kerala, south-west India. It is the birthplace of Swami Chinmayananda (1916–1993), founder of the Chinmaya Mission and a noted expositor of Vedānta.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Fano, an Adriatic port in the Marche, central Italy. It is associated with the activity or origins of certain popes of the papal states.

1 teacher · 0 works

# Fayyum In the tenth century, Fayyum lay in the lush Nile Delta region of Egypt, an agricultural oasis ruled by the Fatimid Caliphate, whose Islamic dynasty governed with cosmopolitan tolerance toward Christian and Jewish minorities. The city's landscape was marked by canals, date palms, and fertile fields that fed Cairo and beyond—a place where water meant wealth and survival. The Jewish community of Fayyum, though smaller than Alexandria's, held considerable intellectual prestige; Jews served as merchants, physicians, administrators, and scribes, their literacy and connections to Mediterranean trade networks making them valuable to Fatimid authorities. The city became a significant center of Jewish learning precisely because it drew scholars who corresponded across the Islamic world, creating networks of legal responsa and theological debate. One of Fayyum's most striking features was its role as a hub for the transmission of Geonic wisdom from Baghdad eastward and westward—the city's yeshivas were places where ancient rabbinic texts were copied, commented upon, and debated, their teachings carried onward by merchants and wandering scholars who left the oasis to teach in synagogues from the Levant to Spain. Here, in the shadow of pharaonic monuments, Jewish sages kept alive the interpretive traditions that would shape Jewish law for centuries.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Fermo, a city in the Marche, central Italy, an ancient archiepiscopal see. It is linked to the career of Sixtus V and other figures of the papal states.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Frankfurt an der Oder, a city on the Oder River in eastern Germany (distinct from Frankfurt am Main), had a Jewish community and was a notable center of Hebrew printing. Rabbi Joseph Teomim, author of the influential halachic super-commentary Pri Megadim, served as its rabbi from 1782 until his death in 1792.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Gadhada (Gadhpur) is a town on the Ghelō River in the Botad district of Gujarat, western India. It was a principal centre of Sahajānanda Swami—Swaminarayan (1781–1830), where much of his later life and many of his discourses (the Vacanāmṛt) are set.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Galle, a historic port city on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, was a centre of the late-nineteenth-century Buddhist revival. The American Theosophist Henry Steel Olcott, a Western convert who campaigned for Buddhist education and revival on the island, was active in the Galle area, where he and Helena Blavatsky formally took the Buddhist precepts in 1880.

1 teacher · 0 works

Gandhāra was an ancient region centred on the Peshawar valley of modern Pakistan (extending into eastern Afghanistan), a major hub of Buddhism whose Greco-Buddhist art shaped the first figural images of the Buddha. The pilgrim Xuanzang travelled through Gandhāra in the seventh century and recorded its monasteries and stūpas, by then largely in decline.

1 teacher · 0 works

Gathar, in the Minyak area of Kham (eastern Tibet, now in the Garzê prefecture of Sichuan, China), was the birthplace, in 1838, of Khedrup Gyatso, the Eleventh Dalai Lama, who like several of his predecessors died young.

1 teacher · 0 works

Gayā is a city on the Phalgu River in Bihar, eastern India, an ancient pilgrimage town noted for ancestral (śrāddha) rites. It was at Gayā in 1509 that Chaitanya Mahāprabhu received initiation, the turning point of his life toward Kṛṣṇa devotion.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Golok (Golog) is a high nomadic region of the Amdo cultural area in eastern Tibet, now in Qinghai province, China. It was the birthplace, in 1934, of Tarthang Tulku, a Nyingma teacher who became one of the first Tibetan lamas to settle in the United States.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Gorakhpur is a city in eastern Uttar Pradesh, north India, on the Rāptī River. It is the birthplace of Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952), author of Autobiography of a Yogi and founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship.

1 teacher · 0 works

Govardhan is a town in the Mathurā district of Uttar Pradesh, in the Braj region, beside Govardhan Hill, which Hindu tradition associates with Kṛṣṇa lifting the hill. It is linked with Vallabhācārya (1479–1531), founder of the Puṣṭimārga, whose principal shrine (Śrīnāthjī) originated at nearby Govardhan Hill.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Gravesend, in Kent, England, was the birthplace, in 1832, of Sir Edwin Arnold, the poet and journalist whose epic poem 'The Light of Asia' (1879) presented the life and teaching of the Buddha to a wide Victorian readership and helped shape Western interest in Buddhism.

1 teacher · 0 works

Greiva (Grīva), a town in the Courland region of Latvia (today part of Daugavpils), was the birthplace of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook in 1865. Kook later became a rav in Latvia and Lithuania before emigrating to the Land of Israel, where he became Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

The temple known today as Bailin (Cypress Grove) Temple, in Zhaoxian (old Zhaozhou) county, Hebei province, China, was the run-down Guanyin monastery where the Chan master Zhàozhōu Cóngshěn settled around the age of eighty and taught for some forty years. The master took his name from the locality.

1 teacher · 0 works

Loj is a village near Junagadh in the Kāṭhiawar (Saurāṣṭra) peninsula of Gujarat, western India. It is where the young Sahajānanda (the future Swaminarayan) joined the religious order of his guru Rāmānand Swami around 1799–1800.

1 teacher · 0 works

Gujranwala is a city in the Punjab province of present-day Pakistan, north of Lahore. It is the birthplace of Papaji (H. W. L. Poonja, 1910–1997), the Advaita teacher associated with Ramana Maharshi (the region was part of undivided British India at his birth).

1 teacher · 0 works

Gungthang is a district of southwestern Tibet, near the Nepalese border. The yogi and poet Milarepa was born in the eleventh century at Kya Ngatsa (also called Tsa) in Gungthang, before becoming the foremost disciple of Marpa and one of the most beloved figures of the Kagyu tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

Gymnias was a city in the interior of Armenia or the Pontic highlands of northeastern Asia Minor, named in Xenophon's Anabasis as a place the Ten Thousand reached on their march; there a local guide undertook to lead them within sight of the sea. Its exact location is uncertain.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Gyurmey Rupa is a locality near Sakya in the Tsang region of central Tibet. It was the birthplace, in 1391, of Gendun Drup, the disciple of Tsongkhapa who founded Tashilhunpo Monastery and was later recognised as the First Dalai Lama.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Halicarnassus was a Greek city of Caria on the southwest coast of Asia Minor, on the site of modern Bodrum, Turkey. It was the birthplace of Herodotus, the 'Father of History,' author of the Histories of the Greco-Persian Wars.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Halle (Halle an der Saale), a city in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Its university was a centre of Lutheran Pietism under August Hermann Francke, who founded the famous Francke Foundations (orphanage and schools) there; Schleiermacher later taught at Halle.

1 teacher · 0 works

Hamada, in the Aboshi area of modern Himeji in Hyōgo Prefecture (the old province of Harima), Japan, was the birthplace, in 1622, of Bankei Yōtaku, the Rinzai Zen master celebrated for his accessible teaching of the 'Unborn' (fushō).

1 teacher · 0 works

Hanau, near Frankfurt in the German state of Hesse, was the birthplace, in 1901, of Siegmund Feniger, who as Nyanaponika Thera became a noted German-born Theravāda monk, co-founder of the Buddhist Publication Society in Sri Lanka and author of 'The Heart of Buddhist Meditation.'

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Hara, a post-town on the Tōkaidō road near Mount Fuji in the old province of Suruga (now Numazu, Shizuoka Prefecture), Japan, was the birthplace, in 1686, of Hakuin Ekaku, the Rinzai Zen master who revitalised the school and systematised its kōan curriculum.

1 teacher · 0 works

Harvard University is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, across the Charles River from Boston. Ram Dass (Richard Alpert, 1931–2019) was a psychology professor there in the early 1960s before travelling to India and meeting Neem Karoli Baba.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Hierapolis was a Greco-Roman city of Phrygia in southwestern Asia Minor, beside the hot springs at modern Pamukkale, Turkey. It was the birthplace of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born there into slavery before his later career teaching at Rome and Nicopolis.

1 teacher · 0 works

Hino is a district in the Fushimi area southeast of Kyoto, Japan. It was the birthplace, in 1173, of Shinran, founder of the Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) school, who was born into the aristocratic Hino family before becoming a disciple of Hōnen.

1 teacher · 0 works

Hoa Lư, in modern Ninh Bình province, northern Vietnam, was the capital of the Đinh and Early Lê dynasties and of the early Lý dynasty before the move to Thăng Long (Hanoi). The monk Vạn Hạnh served as a religious adviser at the Hoa Lư court and was instrumental in the rise of Lý Công Uẩn to the throne.

1 teacher · 0 works

Holešov, a town in Moravia (today in the eastern Czech Republic), had a long-established Jewish community with a well-preserved historic synagogue. Rabbi Shabbatai HaKohen (the Shach), author of the Siftei Kohen commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, served as rav of Holešov until his death in 1662 or 1663 and is buried in its Jewish cemetery, a site of pilgrimage.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Huế, in central Vietnam, was the imperial capital of the Nguyễn dynasty and remains a major centre of Vietnamese Buddhism. The Zen teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, founder of the Plum Village tradition of 'engaged Buddhism,' entered monastic life at Từ Hiếu Temple near Huế as a young novice.

1 teacher · 0 works

Husakiv (Hoshakov), a village in eastern Galicia (today in Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine), was the birthplace, in 1740, of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, where his father served as rabbi. Levi Yitzchak became one of the most beloved chasidic masters, known as the compassionate 'defender of Israel,' and author of Kedushat Levi.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Huzal (Huzal) was a settlement in Talmudic-era Babylonia, mentioned in rabbinic literature as a place of ancient sanctity and learning. It is associated in the Talmud with sages of the amoraic period. Its precise location is not securely identified.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Ionia was the central stretch of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor (modern western Turkey) settled by Greeks, together with the offshore islands; its leading cities included Miletus, Ephesus, and Smyrna. It was the cradle of early Greek natural philosophy (the Milesian thinkers) and the home region of the satirist Lucian of Samosata's literary milieu.

1 teacher · 0 works

Issus was a town of Cilicia near the head of the gulf of the same name (the Gulf of İskenderun), on the borders of Cilicia and Syria in modern southern Turkey. The Greek army of the Ten Thousand passed through Issus with Cyrus the Younger; Xenophon records the march in the Anabasis. (The same plain was later the site of Alexander's 333 BC victory over Darius III.)

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Jayrambati is a village in Bankura district, West Bengal, in eastern India, near Kamarpukur. It is the birthplace of Sri Sarada Devi (1853–1920), the wife and spiritual partner of Sri Ramakrishna.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Jiangdu, a district of Yangzhou in Jiangsu province, China, was the birthplace, in 1927, of Hsing Yun, who entered monastic life as a youth at Qixia Monastery near Nanjing and later founded the Fo Guang Shan order of humanistic Buddhism in Taiwan.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Hongzhou region of Jiangxi province, China, was the teaching base of the Chan master Mazu Daoyi, from which his lineage took the name the Hongzhou school. Mazu's decades of teaching in Jiangxi made the region a centre of Tang-dynasty Chan, and he is sometimes called 'Jiangxi Daoyi' after it.

1 teacher · 0 works

Jingzhou, in the area of modern Hubei province, China, was the birthplace (in 538) of Zhiyi, the sixth-century master regarded as the de facto founder of the Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism, who later settled on Mount Tiantai in Zhejiang.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Jonang, in the Tsang region of central Tibet, is the monastery and valley that gave its name to the Jonang tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Dölpopa Sherab Gyaltsen served as its abbot in the fourteenth century, built its Great Stūpa, and made it the centre of his shentong (empty-of-other) teaching.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Jyotirmaṭha (Joshimath) is a Himalayan town in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, north India, near the pilgrimage shrine of Badarīnāth. It is traditionally counted among the four cardinal monastic seats attributed to Ādi Śaṅkara, the northern āmnāya maṭha.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kafri was a town in Talmudic-era Babylonia, located about twenty kilometers south of Sura (in central Iraq). It was the birthplace of Rav (Abba Arikha), founder of the academy of Sura, and the seat of the exilarch Mar Ukva, who held his rabbinical court there.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Kainchi / Nainital region of Uttarakhand, north India, lies in the Kumaon Himalaya. Its Kainchi Dham ashram was the centre of Neem Karoli Baba's community, and where the American teacher Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) met him in the late 1960s.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kainchi Dham is an ashram in the Nainital district of Uttarakhand, north India, in the Kumaon Himalaya, founded in 1964. It is the ashram most closely associated with Neem Karoli Baba (d. 1973).

1 teacher · 0 works

Kālaḍi is a village on the Periyār (Pūrṇā) River in the Ernakulam district of Kerala, south-west India. It is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Ādi Śaṅkara (traditionally 8th c.), the foremost expositor of Advaita Vedānta.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kalyāṇa (modern Basavakalyan) is a town in the Bidar district of Karnataka, south India. As the capital of the later Western Chālukya / Kalachuri kingdom, it was the centre of Basava's activity (12th c.) and of the Anubhava Maṇṭapa, the assembly of the Vīraśaiva (Liṅgāyat) movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kamarpukur is a village in Hooghly district, West Bengal, in eastern India. It is the birthplace of Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886), the Bengali mystic and devotee of the goddess Kālī.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kanagawa Prefecture, in the greater Tokyo area of Japan, includes Kamakura, a historic centre of Japanese Zen. The Sōtō Zen priest Shunryū Suzuki, who later founded the San Francisco Zen Center, served at temples in this region of Japan before emigrating to the United States in 1959.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kāñcīpuram is a historic temple city in northern Tamil Nadu, south India, on the Vegavati River, a centre of both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava worship (the Varadarāja temple). Rāmānuja (traditionally 1017–1137) studied and lived here in his early years before moving to Śrīraṅgam.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kankhal is a historic quarter of Haridwar on the Ganges in Uttarakhand, north India, a long-standing pilgrimage locality. It is the site of an ashram of Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982) and of her samādhi shrine.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kanyākumārī (Cape Comorin) is the southernmost tip of mainland India, in Tamil Nadu, where the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean meet. In 1892 Swami Vivekananda meditated on a rock just offshore (now the Vivekananda Rock Memorial) at a turning point before his journey to the West.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kapilavastu was the capital of the Śākya clan and, by tradition, the childhood home of Siddhārtha Gautama before his renunciation. Its location is contested between two excavated sites — Tilaurakot in southern Nepal and Piprahwa in Uttar Pradesh, India — both of which present archaeological evidence; the map point lies in the Nepal–India border area between them.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kashan, on the edge of the central Iranian desert, was a town noted for its ceramics (whence the term 'kashi' for tilework) and a centre of Shi'i learning. The philosopher and traditionist al-Fayd al-Kashani (d. 1680), a student of Mulla Sadra and major figure of the Safavid intellectual world, took his nisba from the city.

1 teacher · 0 works

A locality in the Kashmir Valley near Mahādeva mountain, in the Harvan area behind the present Shalimar Bagh north-east of Srinagar. Tradition associates this place with Vasugupta (9th–10th c.), to whom the Śiva Sūtras, a foundational text of Kashmir Shaivism, are attributed—he is said to have found their teaching at a rock on the mountain.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kastoria, a town in Macedonia in northern Greece, had a significant Romaniote (Byzantine-Greek) Jewish community in the medieval period. It was the home of Rabbi Tobiah ben Eliezer, the eleventh-century Talmudist and author of the midrashic Torah commentary Lekach Tov (also called Pesikta Zutarta).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kedārnāth is a Himalayan temple town in the Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand, north India, at about 3,580 m in the Garhwal Himalaya, site of one of the major Śiva shrines (a jyotirliṅga). Tradition associates the end of Ādi Śaṅkara's life with Kedārnāth.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kempen, a town in the lower Rhineland of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was the birthplace of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380), from whom he took his name; he is traditionally credited with The Imitation of Christ.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kennin-ji, in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, Japan, is reckoned among the oldest Zen temples in the city. It was founded in 1202 with Eisai (Yōsai), who had brought the Linji (Rinzai) Zen lineage from China, as its founding abbot; in its early years it combined Zen with Tendai and Shingon practice.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Khánh Hòa is a coastal province of south-central Vietnam. It was the birthplace of the monk Thích Quảng Đức (born in Hội Khánh village, Vạn Ninh district), who became known worldwide for his 1963 self-immolation in Saigon in protest at the treatment of Buddhists.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kheora is a village in the Brahmanbaria district of present-day Bangladesh (Tripura region of undivided Bengal). It is the birthplace of Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982), the Bengali mystic.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kiryas Joel, incorporated 1977 in Monroe NY, is the global headquarters of the Satmar Hasidic dynasty (the Aroni faction). With over 30,000 residents and the highest birth rate of any US municipality, it serves as the symbolic capital of the post-Holocaust Satmar revival under R. Yoel Teitelbaum and his successors R. Moshe Teitelbaum and R. Aharon Teitelbaum.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kominato, in the old province of Awa (now part of Chiba Prefecture, Japan), was a coastal fishing community and the birthplace, in 1222, of Nichiren, founder of the Nichiren school of Japanese Buddhism, who taught the supremacy of the Lotus Sūtra.

1 teacher · 0 works

Korets in Volhynia is associated with R. Pinchas Shapiro of Koretz (1726-1791), a close colleague of the Baal Shem Tov and a foundational figure of early Hasidic thought.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kōshō-ji, at Uji near Kyoto, Japan, was the first independent temple founded by the Sōtō Zen master Dōgen, on land connected with his mother's family, after his return from China. He taught there in the 1230s before leaving in 1243 to establish Eihei-ji in Echizen.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kosov in Pokuttia (Western Ukraine) is the birthplace of the Kosov-Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty; R. Menachem Mendel Hager of Kosov (1768-1825) founded the court here.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kucha was an oasis kingdom on the northern Silk Road, on the rim of the Tarim Basin in what is now Xinjiang, China, and a major centre of Buddhism in Central Asia. It was the birthplace of the great fourth–fifth-century translator Kumārajīva, who was later taken east into China and rendered many Mahāyāna scriptures into Chinese.

1 teacher · 0 works

Kūḍalasaṅgama is the confluence of the Kṛṣṇā and Malaprabhā rivers in the Bagalkot district of Karnataka, south India, a Liṅgāyat pilgrimage site. It is associated with Basava (12th c.), who by tradition spent his youth there and where his memorial stands.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kuśinagara (Kushinagar), in modern Uttar Pradesh, India, is the pilgrimage site traditionally identified as the place where the Buddha passed into final nirvāṇa (parinirvāṇa) and was cremated. It is one of the four principal Buddhist pilgrimage places associated with events in the Buddha's life.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lahaul is a high Himalayan valley in Himachal Pradesh, northern India, with a strongly Tibetan-Buddhist culture. It was near here, at a remote cave in the area, that the British-born nun Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo undertook a celebrated multi-year solitary retreat in the Drukpa Kagyu tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

Larissa is the principal city of the plain of Thessaly in central Greece, and retains its ancient name. The sophist Gorgias of Leontini is reported to have spent his later years and died at Larissa, where he had pupils.

1 teacher · 0 works

Leeds, a city in Yorkshire, northern England, developed a large Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, growing with immigration from Eastern Europe, and became one of the principal Jewish centers in provincial Britain.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Leipzig, a city in Saxony, eastern Germany, developed a significant Jewish community in the modern era, drawn by its famous trade fairs, with many members of Eastern European origin. It became a notable center of Jewish commerce and communal life before the Nazi era.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Leningrad is the Soviet-era name (1924-1991) for St. Petersburg, Russia. Under Soviet rule its Jewish community, like Jewish life across the USSR, was subjected to severe restrictions on religious practice, though clandestine Torah study and communal life persisted in the city.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lhodrak is a region of southern Tibet, near the modern border with Bhutan. It was the home of Marpa the Translator (Marpa Lotsāwa), the eleventh-century founder of the Kagyu lineage in Tibet, whose estate and teaching seat at Drowolung lay in Lhodrak; it was there that his disciple Milarepa underwent his famous trials.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lilybaeum, modern Marsala at the western tip of Sicily, was founded by the Carthaginians and became an important Roman port. The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry, a pupil of Plotinus, is reported to have spent time in Sicily, where he composed part of his work.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Linji Temple, at Zhenzhou (modern Zhengding in Hebei province, China), is the monastery where the ninth-century master Línjì Yìxuán taught after about 851. The temple, on the bank of the Hutuo river, gave its name to the master and to the Linji school of Chan (Japanese Rinzai Zen).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lokachi, a town in Volhynia (today in Volyn Oblast, western Ukraine), is recorded as the birthplace, around 1704, of Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezeritch, who became the principal disciple and successor of the Baal Shem Tov and the chief architect of the early chasidic movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mount Washington is a hilltop neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. In 1925 Paramahansa Yogananda established there the international headquarters of the Self-Realization Fellowship.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lục Tổ Pagoda, in the Tiên Du district of Bắc Ninh province in northern Vietnam, was an important temple of early Vietnamese Buddhism. It was associated with the monk Vạn Hạnh, the tenth–eleventh-century master and royal adviser who helped Lý Công Uẩn found the Lý dynasty.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lucknow is the capital of Uttar Pradesh, north India, on the Gomtī River. It was the home in his later years of Papaji (H. W. L. Poonja, 1910–1997), the Advaita teacher in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Lumbinī, in the Rupandehi district of southern Nepal near the Indian border, is traditionally identified as the birthplace of Siddhārtha Gautama, the Buddha. The site, marked since antiquity by the Aśokan pillar and the Māyādevī temple, is a major pilgrimage destination and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Madurai is an ancient temple city on the Vaigai River in southern Tamil Nadu, south India, site of the Mīnākṣi temple. It is the city where the young Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) had, in 1896, the experience of self-inquiry that shaped his teaching, before he left for Aruṇācala.

1 teacher · 0 works

Maghar is a town in the Sant Kabir Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, north India, on the Āmī River. It is the place where the poet-saint Kabīr (15th c.) is traditionally said to have died, and where his memorial and grave/samādhi stand.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Māhiṣmatī is an ancient city on the Narmadā River usually identified with modern Maheshwar in the Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh, though its precise location is debated. It is traditionally given as the home of the Mīmāṃsā scholar Maṇḍana Miśra.

1 teacher · 0 works

Māhiṣmatī is an ancient city on the Narmadā River usually identified with modern Maheshwar in the Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh (its exact location remains debated). It is the traditional setting of Ādi Śaṅkara's debate with the Mīmāṃsā scholar Maṇḍana Miśra, said to have lived there.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Málaga (Arabic Malaqa), a port-city on the Mediterranean coast of al-Andalus (modern Andalusia, Spain), was an important harbour under the Cordoban caliphate, the taifa kingdoms, and the Nasrids of Granada. It is the birthplace of the botanist and pharmacologist Ibn al-Baytar (d. 1248), author of the great Compendium of simple drugs and foodstuffs.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Mandalay, on the Irrawaddy river in central Myanmar (Burma), was the last royal capital of the Burmese kingdom and remains a major centre of Theravāda Buddhist learning. It was the birthplace, in 1924, of S. N. Goenka, the lay teacher of Indian descent who later spread the vipassanā method of his teacher U Ba Khin around the world.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Maribor, a city in the Styria region of present-day Slovenia, had a medieval Jewish community with a synagogue (still preserved) before the expulsion of Jews from the Austrian duchies at the end of the fifteenth century. It was the birthplace, in 1390, of Rabbi Israel Isserlein, author of the Terumat HaDeshen.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Mathurā is a city on the Yamunā River in Uttar Pradesh, north India, in the Braj region. It is where Dayānanda Sarasvatī studied Sanskrit grammar and the Vedas under the blind teacher Virājānanda Dandeeśa in the early 1860s, a formative phase before he founded the Ārya Samāj.

1 teacher · 0 works

Maui is an island of the U.S. state of Hawaiʻi, in the central Pacific. It was the home of the American teacher Ram Dass (Richard Alpert, 1931–2019), author of Be Here Now, in his later years until his death there in 2019.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Meaux, a town in the Île-de-France region near Paris, was the birthplace of Rabbi Yechiel of Paris (known in Latin as 'Vives of Meaux'), the thirteenth-century Tosafist who headed the great yeshiva of Paris and was the chief Jewish defender at the 1240 Disputation of Paris before later emigrating to Acre.

1 teacher · 0 works

Medinaceli, a town in Castile (today in Soria province, central Spain), was the birthplace, around 1248, of the kabbalist Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla, a disciple of Abraham Abulafia and author of Sha'arei Orah ('Gates of Light'), one of the most influential systematic works on the Kabbalah of the sefirot.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Memel (today Klaipėda, on the Baltic coast of Lithuania), historically a Prussian port city, had a Jewish community that served as a frontier point between German and Russian-Lithuanian Jewry. The young Rabbi Yosef Yozel Horowitz, later the 'Alter of Novardok' and founder of the Novardok Mussar movement, frequented Memel as a merchant in his youth, and it was there that he first met Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the encounter that drew him to the Mussar movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

The Merta region of the Nagaur district of Rajasthan, north-west India, including the village of Kuḍkī (Kudki). It is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Mīrābāī (c. 16th c.), the Rajput princess and Kṛṣṇa-devotional poet.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mespila was the name Xenophon gives in the Anabasis to the ruined city the retreating Ten Thousand passed on the Tigris, generally identified with the abandoned Assyrian capital of Nineveh, opposite modern Mosul in northern Iraq. Xenophon describes its great walls without knowing it had been Nineveh.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mhow, a town in Madhya Pradesh, central India, was the birthplace, in 1891, of B. R. Ambedkar, the jurist and social reformer who led the drafting of the Indian constitution and, near the end of his life, publicly converted to Buddhism, founding the modern Navayana ('new vehicle') Buddhist movement among India's Dalits.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mieza was a Macedonian town near Pella, in the region of modern Naoussa in northern Greece, where a sanctuary of the Nymphs (the Nymphaeum) was located. According to ancient tradition, Philip II engaged Aristotle to tutor the young Alexander the Great there.

1 teacher · 0 works

Milan is a northern Italian city that served as the western capital of the Roman Empire and became a pivotal center of early Christianity through its influential bishopric.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Mimasaka was an old province in the inland part of what is now Okayama Prefecture, Japan. It was the birthplace, in 1133, of Hōnen, the monk who founded the Jōdo-shū (Pure Land) school of Japanese Buddhism, centred on the recitation of the name of Amida Buddha.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Mithilā is a cultural region of the eastern Gangetic plain, chiefly in northern Bihar (India) and the adjoining Nepali Tarai, historically the kingdom of Videha. It is associated with Vācaspati Miśra (fl. c. 9th–10th c.), the polymath commentator on several schools of Indian philosophy, who is traditionally placed in this region.

1 teacher · 0 works

Modi'in was a town in the Judean foothills, the ancestral home of the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family, from which the revolt against Seleucid rule was launched in the second century BCE. In the Talmudic period it is associated with the tanna Rabbi Elazar of Modi'in (Elazar HaModa'i). The modern Israeli city of Modi'in is named for it.

1 teacher · 0 works

Modrzyce (now part of Dęblin) in central Poland was the seat of the Modzitz Hasidic court founded by R. Yisrael Taub in 1889. The court was famous for its extensive niggun repertoire — the largest in Hasidic history — and many of its compositions are sung worldwide today.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Moravia, a historic region of the Czech lands (today the eastern Czech Republic), had a deeply rooted Jewish presence with a strong rabbinic culture; its Chief Rabbinate was seated for centuries at Nikolsburg (Mikulov). Among the many scholars born in Moravia was Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi (the Chacham Tzvi), the noted halachic authority of the early eighteenth century.

1 teacher · 0 works

Moscow, the capital of Russia. In the early 20th century it was a centre of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance associated with thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Mount Kōya (Kōyasan), in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, is the monastic complex established by Kūkai in 819 as the headquarters of the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, which he had founded after studying in Tang-dynasty Chang'an. It remains the seat of Shingon and a major pilgrimage centre.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mount Song, in Henan province, China, is one of the sacred mountains of China and the site of the Shaolin Monastery. By Chan tradition the semi-legendary Indian monk Bodhidharma, regarded as the first patriarch of Chinese Chan, settled at Shaolin on Mount Song, where he is said to have meditated facing a wall for nine years.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mount Theches was the height in the Pontic highlands of northeastern Asia Minor from which, according to Xenophon's Anabasis, the marching Ten Thousand first caught sight of the Black Sea and raised the famous cry 'Thalatta! Thalatta!' ('The sea! The sea!'). Its precise location is debated.

1 teacher · 0 works

Mount Tiantong, near Ningbo in Zhejiang province, China, is the site of the Tiantong Temple, a major Chan (Zen) monastery. The Japanese monk Dōgen trained there under the Caodong master Tiantong Rujing in the early thirteenth century and received the lineage transmission he carried back to Japan to found the Sōtō school.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Mumbai, the capital of Maharashtra on India's west coast, is the site of the Global Vipassana Pagoda near Gorai, a large dome built under the vision of S. N. Goenka. Its foundation was laid in 2000 and it opened in 2009 as a monument and meditation hall in the tradition of his teacher U Ba Khin.

1 teacher · 0 works

Munich, the capital of Bavaria in southern Germany, is connected to the Islamic stream through the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), who was awarded his doctorate by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1907 for his thesis 'The Development of Metaphysics in Persia.'

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Myndus was a small Greek city of Caria, on the coast of the Halicarnassus (Bodrum) peninsula in southwestern Asia Minor (modern Gümüşlük, Turkey). It was the home of the Neoplatonist philosopher Eusebius of Myndus, a pupil of Aedesius in the Pergamene school known for his relatively rationalist stance against theurgy.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Nabadwip (Navadvīpa) is a town on the Bhagirathi–Hooghly River in Nadia district, West Bengal, a historic centre of Sanskrit learning and Vaiṣṇava devotion. It is the birthplace (1486) of Chaitanya Mahāprabhu, founder-inspirer of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Najd al-Walid, a village in the Ta'izz region of Yemen, was the birthplace, around 1619, of Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, the foremost poet of Yemenite Jewry, whose Diwan of some 550 religious poems became central to Yemenite Jewish liturgical and home tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

Nangchen is a region of Kham in eastern Tibet (now in Qinghai province, China). It was near here, at Surmang, that Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche — the eleventh Trungpa tulku, later a major teacher in the West — was born in 1939 and held his monastic seat before going into exile.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Naresh (Narsh) was a town in Talmudic-era Babylonia, near Sura on the Euphrates (central Iraq). In the amoraic period it was the seat of the academy led by Rav Papa (d. 375). Its precise location is not securely identified today.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Narsi Bahmani is a village in the Nanded district of Maharashtra, western India. It is, by one tradition, given as the birthplace of the sant-poet Nāmdev (13th–14th c.), a leading voice of the Marathi Vārkarī movement (other accounts place his birth elsewhere).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

The Chittagong region of southeastern Bangladesh has a long-standing Buddhist (Barua) community. Near Chittagong was the early home of Dipa Ma (Nani Bala Barua), the laywoman who, after training in Burma, became a renowned teacher of insight meditation and an influential figure for the Western vipassanā movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Kathmandu Valley of Nepal was, in the eleventh century, a centre of Indian Buddhist learning on the route between India and Tibet. The Tibetan translator Marpa passed through Nepal on his journeys to India, where he studied with Newar and Indian masters before carrying the teachings back to Tibet.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

New York City, in the U.S. state of New York, is the largest city in the United States. It is where A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in 1966, beginning the worldwide Hare Krishna movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

Newāse (Nevasa) is a town on the Pravarā River in the Ahmadnagar (Ahilyanagar) district of Maharashtra, western India. It is traditionally held to be where Jñāneśvar (13th c.) composed his Marathi commentary on the Bhagavadgītā, the Jñāneśvarī.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Nisibis (today Nusaybin in southeastern Turkey, on the Syrian border) was a city in northern Mesopotamia with an ancient and important Jewish community. In the tannaitic and early amoraic periods it was home to the famous academy of Rabbi Judah ben Bathyra, which drew students from the Land of Israel and was a refuge for Palestinian scholars during periods of persecution.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Nowy Korczyn (Yiddish Naysthot / Neustadt), a town in southern Poland (Świętokrzyskie region), had a long-established Jewish community. It was the birthplace, in 1753, of the chasidic master Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Epstein, a disciple of Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk and author of the foundational chasidic work Maor VaShemesh, who later led the chasidim of Kraków.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Nyal is a district of southern Tibet, in the Lhokha (Lhoka) region. It was the birthplace, in 1079, of Gampopa (Dakpo Lharjé), the physician-monk who became Milarepa's foremost disciple, unified the Kadam and Mahāmudrā streams, and founded the Dakpo Kagyu tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Nysa was a Greek city of Caria, in the Maeander valley of southwestern Asia Minor (near modern Sultanhisar, Turkey), known as a seat of learning. The geographer Strabo studied there in his youth under the grammarian Aristodemus, and describes the city in his Geography.

1 teacher · 0 works

Oḍḍiyāna was an ancient region most commonly identified by scholars with the Swat valley of modern Pakistan, traditionally regarded as a cradle of Vajrayāna (tantric) Buddhism and the Dzogchen teachings. In the Tibetan tradition it is the homeland of Padmasambhava, said to have been miraculously 'lotus-born' there; the precise location of Oḍḍiyāna is debated.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Okopy (Okop), a village in Podolia on the historic Polish-Wallachian frontier (today in western Ukraine), is traditionally identified as the birthplace, in 1698, of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of the chasidic movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Lhoka (Lhokha) region of south-central Tibet was the birthplace, in 1856–57, of Trinley Gyatso, the Twelfth Dalai Lama; sources place his birth in the Ölkha area of Lhoka. He died in his teens.

1 teacher · 0 works

Olympia, in the territory of Elis in the western Peloponnese, was the great panhellenic sanctuary of Zeus and the site of the Olympic Games. It was a setting for public oratory: the sophist Gorgias of Leontini is reported to have delivered an Olympic Oration there urging concord among the Greeks.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Ovruch (Avritch), a town in Volhynia (today in Zhytomyr Oblast, northern Ukraine), was the seat of the chasidic master Rabbi Avraham Dov of Ovruch (Avritch), author of the Bat Ayin. He served as rav of Ovruch before emigrating to the Land of Israel in 1831, where he became a leader of the chasidic community of Safed.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pājaka is a village near Udupi in coastal Karnataka, south-west India. It is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Madhva (Madhvācārya, 13th c.), the founder of the Dvaita (dualist) school of Vedānta.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Palpung Monastery, in the Derge area of Kham (eastern Tibet, now in Sichuan, China), is the seat of the Tai Situ lineage of the Karma Kagyu school. It was the home base of the nineteenth-century polymath Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö Tayé, who established his Tsadra retreat centre nearby and was a leading figure of the non-sectarian (Rimé) movement.

1 teacher · 0 works

Pampore is a town in the Kashmir Valley near Srinagar, in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, long known as the valley’s saffron-growing center. It is associated with the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic-poet Lal Ded (Lalleśvarī), composer of the Śaiva vākhs: by tradition she was married into a family here, though her birthplace is more often placed at Pandrethan, closer to Srinagar. Her verses, still sung in Kashmiri across communities, made her one of the best-loved voices of Kashmir Śaivism.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Kuru–Pañcāla region was a heartland of late-Vedic culture in the western Gangetic plain (parts of present-day Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh). It is the milieu of much of the Brāhmaṇa and early Upaniṣadic literature, associated with the sage Uddālaka Āruṇi.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Papunya (Papunia) was a settlement in Talmudic-era Babylonia. It is associated in the Talmud with the amora Rabbi Acha bar Yaakov, who is described as a leading sage there. Its precise location is not securely identified.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pasadena, California, USA, is associated with B. Alan Wallace, the American scholar, translator and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism and contemplative science, who has worked in the region as part of his study and teaching of meditation.

1 teacher · 0 works

Patras, a port city in the Peloponnese of western Greece, was visited by the kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia during his travels in the thirteenth century. It was in Patras, in 1279, that he wrote Sefer ha-Yashar, the first of his prophetic books.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pattamadai is a town on the Tāmraparnī River in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu, south India. It is the birthplace of Swami Sivananda Saraswati (1887–1963), founder of the Divine Life Society.

1 teacher · 0 works

Pavia, a city in Lombardy, northern Italy, a Lombard royal capital. The philosopher Boethius was imprisoned and executed near Pavia c. 524, and his relics are venerated in the city.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Pemakö is a remote, sacred region of southeastern Tibet straddling the great bend of the Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) river, regarded in the Nyingma tradition as a 'hidden land' (beyul). It was the birthplace, in 1904, of Dudjom Rinpoche (Jigdral Yeshe Dorje), who became a supreme head of the Nyingma school.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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').

1 teacher · 0 works

Perinthus was a Greek city on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara (the Propontis) in eastern Thrace, in modern European Turkey near Marmara Ereğlisi. It is named as the home city of the sophist Rufus of Perinthus, a rhetorician of the Second Sophistic.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Petra, in modern southern Jordan, was the rock-cut capital of the Nabataean kingdom and later the chief city of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea. The third-century sophist and historian Callinicus, who taught rhetoric at Athens and later attached himself to Zenobia's court, is described by ancient sources as coming from Petra (Arabia Petraea), though some accounts place his origin in Syria.

1 teacher · 0 works

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, was the birthplace, in 1917, of Robert Aitken, the American Zen teacher who co-founded the Diamond Sangha in Hawaiʻi and became an influential figure in Western Zen and socially engaged Buddhism.

1 teacher · 0 works

Philae was an island sanctuary in the Nile near Aswan in Upper Egypt, the site of a major temple of Isis that remained active into late antiquity. The geographer Strabo visited the southern frontier of Roman Egypt in this region and describes the area in his Geography.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Philippopolis (modern Plovdiv, Bulgaria), a city of ancient Thrace. The miaphysite leader Philoxenus of Mabbug died in exile there c. 523.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pisa, a city in Tuscany, north-central Italy, had a Jewish community in the medieval and early-modern periods. The kabbalist and halachist Rabbi Yosef Ergas (1685-1730), author of the kabbalistic introduction Shomer Emunim and a leading opponent of Sabbateanism, taught at a yeshiva in Pisa, though he spent most of his career as rabbi in nearby Livorno.

1 teacher · 0 works

Pitane was a Greek city of Aeolis, on the coast of Mysia in northwestern Asia Minor (near modern Çandarlı, Turkey). It was the birthplace of the astronomer and mathematician Autolycus of Pitane, whose works on the moving sphere are among the oldest surviving Greek mathematical treatises. (Pitane was also the birthplace of the Academic philosopher Arcesilaus.)

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pohrebyshche, a town in Podolia (today in Vinnytsia Oblast, western Ukraine), was the birthplace, in 1796, of Rabbi Yisrael Friedman, the Ruzhiner Rebbe -- a great-grandson of the Maggid of Mezeritch who founded the influential Ruzhin chasidic dynasty and, after imprisonment in Russia, re-established his court in Sadigura, Bukovina.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pondicherry (Puducherry) is a coastal city in south-east India on the Bay of Bengal, a former French colony. Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) settled there in 1910 and founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the centre of his later spiritual work.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Porto's medieval Jewish community produced R. Yitzchak Aboab II (1433-1493), the 'Last Gaon of Castile', who fled the 1492 expulsion to Portugal and died here that same year.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Potidaea was a Greek city on the Pallene peninsula of Chalcidice in northern Greece, a Corinthian colony whose revolt helped precipitate the Peloponnesian War. Socrates served as a hoplite in the Athenian siege of Potidaea (432–429 BC), an episode recalled in Plato's dialogues.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Rāmānanda (traditionally 14th–15th c.), the Vaiṣṇava teacher regarded as founder of the Rāmānandī Sampradāya, is by most Indian accounts said to have been born at Prayāga (Allahabad / Prayagraj) at the Ganges–Yamunā confluence in Uttar Pradesh. He lived for most of his life in Varanasi, where he taught a Rāma-centred devotion in the vernacular.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Pune (Poona), in Maharashtra, western India, was the seat of the British-era Deccan College, of which the poet Sir Edwin Arnold served as principal from 1856. His years in India informed his later poem on the life of the Buddha, 'The Light of Asia.'

1 teacher · 0 works

Pune is a city in western Maharashtra, India, on the Muṭhā–Mulā rivers, a major cultural and educational centre. It is where Swami Chinmayananda began his series of public Vedānta discourses (jñāna-yajñas) in 1951, launching the work that became the Chinmaya Mission.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Qingzhou is a historic prefecture-area in modern Shandong province, China, on the coastal region where the pilgrim Faxian came ashore around 414 CE on his return by sea from India and Sri Lanka, before travelling on to translate the texts he had brought back.

1 teacher · 0 works

Quanzhou, a port city in Fujian province, China, was a great medieval maritime trade hub and a centre of several religions, Buddhism among them. It was the birthplace, in 1840, of Xuyun (Hsu Yun), the long-lived Chan master who became one of the most influential figures in the revival of Chinese Buddhism in the early twentieth century.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Rājapur, in the Chitrakoot/Banda region of southern Uttar Pradesh, north India, on the Yamunā River. It is, by one tradition, given as the birthplace of the poet Tulsīdās (16th c.), author of the Rāmcaritmānas (other accounts give different birthplaces).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Ranchi is the capital of Jharkhand, eastern India, on the Chota Nagpur plateau. In 1917 Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) founded a residential school for boys there, the institutional seed of the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Raseiniai (Yiddish Rasein), a town in Samogitia in western Lithuania, had a long-established Jewish community and a notable rabbinate. Rabbi Moshe Soloveichik (father of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik) served there, as did other figures of the Lithuanian rabbinic world.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Ravenna, a city in Emilia-Romagna, northeastern Italy. Capital of the Western Roman Empire from 402 and later of Ostrogothic and Byzantine Italy, it was the see of Peter Chrysologus (5th-c. bishop and Doctor of the Church) and the home of the statesman-monk Cassiodorus.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Rishikesh, in the Muni Ki Reti area on the Ganges in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand, north India, is a Himalayan-foothills town long associated with ascetic life. There Swami Sivananda Saraswati founded the Divine Life Society (1936) and his ashram.

1 teacher · 0 works

Rishikesh and Uttarkashi, on the Ganges (Bhāgīrathī) in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand, north India, are centres of monastic study. There Swami Chinmayananda studied Vedānta under Swami Tapovan Maharaj in the late 1940s before beginning his public teaching.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the largest city of southern Vietnam, was the setting in June 1963 for the self-immolation of the monk Thích Quảng Đức at a city intersection — a protest against the persecution of Buddhists under the Diệm government that became an iconic moment of modern Buddhist history.

1 teacher · 0 works

Sakon Nakhon is a province in the Isan (northeastern) region of Thailand. The forest monastery Wat Pa Suddhawat there was a residence of Ajahn Mun Bhuridatta, the great teacher of the Thai Forest Tradition, who died at the monastery in 1949.

1 teacher · 0 works

Salamanca, a city in Castile and León, western Spain, seat of a celebrated university. Its 16th-century theology faculty (the 'School of Salamanca') shaped Catholic thought; Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross were active in the region of Castile.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Salé (Sla), across the Bou Regreg river from Rabat, hosted a major Sephardic-Andalusi community after 1609 (Morisco refugees) and 1492. R. Refael Encaoua (Toafot Re'em, 1848-1935) served here.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

San Diego is a city on the Pacific coast of southern California, USA. It is associated with the overseas teaching work of Swami Chinmayananda (1916–1993) and the Chinmaya Mission in the United States; he died there in 1993.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Sanuki was the old province corresponding to modern Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku, Japan. It was the birthplace, in 774, of Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), founder of the Shingon school; the temple Zentsū-ji, said to stand on the grounds of his family home, marks his birthplace and is a major site on the Shikoku pilgrimage.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Saurāṣṭra is the peninsular region of Gujarat in western India (the Kathiawar peninsula). According to the Tibetan historians Butön and Tāranātha, the eighth-century Madhyamaka master Śāntideva — author of the Bodhicaryāvatāra — was born a prince of Saurāṣṭra before renouncing the throne and entering the monastic life at Nālandā.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Scillus was a small town in Elis, in the western Peloponnese, near Olympia. After his return from the expedition of the Ten Thousand and his service with Sparta, Xenophon was granted an estate at Scillus, where he lived for many years and wrote several of his works.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Segovia, a city in Castile, central Spain, had an important medieval Jewish community. The kabbalist Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla, author of Sha'arei Orah, lived in Segovia for many years and is associated with the city's circle of Castilian mystics.

1 teacher · 0 works

Seikkhun is a village in the Shwebo area of the Sagaing region in upper Myanmar (Burma). It was the birthplace, in 1904, of Mahāsi Sayādaw, the monk whose method of insight (vipassanā) meditation became one of the most widely practised in the modern Theravāda world.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Seoul (historically Hanseong) was the capital of the Joseon kingdom. The Sŏn master Hyujeong (Sŏsan Daesa) is honoured for raising and organising monk-soldier militias that joined the campaign against the Japanese during the invasions of the 1590s; together with Ming forces his monks took part in the recapture of Pyongyang in 1593, part of the wider effort that drove the Japanese from the capital region.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Serampore (Srirampur) is a town on the Hooghly River in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, eastern India, north of Kolkata, and a former Danish colonial settlement. It was the seat of Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936), the Kriyā Yoga teacher and guru of Paramahansa Yogananda.

1 teacher · 0 works

Serampore (Srirampur) is a town on the Hooghly River in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, eastern India, north of Kolkata. It was the site of the hermitage (ashram) of Sri Yukteswar Giri, the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda.

1 teacher · 0 works

Shabaz (Shabbez), a small town near Ta'izz in Yemen, gave its name to Rabbi Shalom Shabazi, the great Yemenite Jewish poet, who lived there after his father's death before settling in nearby Ta'izz. His surname al-Shabazi derives from the town.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Sharhorod (Shargorod), a town in Podolia (today in Vinnytsia Oblast, western Ukraine), had a long-established Jewish community. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef HaKohen, later the famous chasidic master of Polnoye, served as rav of Sharhorod for several years before becoming a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov around 1748.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Shechantziv (Shekhantzib) was a settlement in Talmudic-era Babylonia. It is associated in the Talmud with the amora Rav Idi bar Avin. Its precise location is not securely identified today.

1 teacher · 0 works

Shifang, in the Hanzhou area of what is now Sichuan province, China (north of modern Chengdu), was the birthplace of the eighth-century Chan master Mazu Daoyi, founder of the Hongzhou school whose vigorous, spontaneous teaching style shaped the 'golden age' of Tang Chan.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Shizuoka Prefecture, on the Pacific coast of central Japan, was the birthplace, in 1885, of Hakuun Yasutani, the Zen master who founded the Sanbō Kyōdan lineage blending Sōtō and Rinzai practice and who taught several of the first Western Zen teachers.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Shuangcheng, in northeastern China (Manchuria) — at the time part of Jilin province, now a district of Harbin in Heilongjiang — was the birthplace, in 1918, of Hsuan Hua, the Chan master who later moved to the United States and founded the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in California, a major centre of Chinese Buddhism in the West.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Sicily, the large island off the southern tip of Italy. In late antiquity it was a Greek-speaking, monastically rich part of the Latin and then Byzantine church and produced several popes of the early medieval period.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Accounts of the birthplace of the blind Hindi poet-saint Sūrdās (c. 15th–16th c.) differ: some place it at Sīhī near Delhi, others at Runakta on the Agra–Mathurā road. He was chiefly active in the Braj region around Mathurā, where the coordinates here are set, and is celebrated for the Kṛṣṇa-devotional poetry of the Sūrasāgara.

1 teacher · 0 works

Siknin (Sikhnin; today Sakhnin in the Lower Galilee, northern Israel) was a Jewish town in the Roman-Talmudic period, counted among the Galilean settlements noted in rabbinic sources. It is associated in tradition with the tanna Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion, one of the Ten Martyrs.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Skvyra (Yiddish Skver), a town in Kyiv Oblast, central Ukraine, was the seat of the Skver chasidic dynasty, a branch of the Chernobyl dynasty founded in the nineteenth century by Rabbi Yitzchak Twersky, a son of the Maggid of Chernobyl. After emigration to the United States, the dynasty established the village of New Square in Rockland County, New York.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Angelo Roncalli, the future John XXIII, served as apostolic visitor and delegate to Bulgaria (based in Sofia) in the 1920s-30s.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Songgwangsa, on Mount Jogye near Suncheon in South Jeolla Province, South Korea, is one of the principal monasteries of Korean Sŏn (Zen) Buddhism. The Goryeo-era master Jinul rebuilt and reorganised it as the seat of his reform movement around 1190, and it became known as a 'sangha jewel' temple of the Jogye tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Sapânța (Spinka) in Maramureş is the seat of the Spinka Hasidic dynasty, founded by R. Yitzchak Eizik of Spinka (1838-1909).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Śrīnagara (Srinagar) is the principal city of the Kashmir Valley, in Jammu and Kashmir, on the Jhelum River. It is associated with Abhinavagupta (c. 950–1016 CE), the polymath philosopher and aesthetician who synthesised the Kashmir Shaiva traditions in works such as the Tantrāloka.

1 teacher · 0 works

Śrīperumbudūr is a town in the Kāñcīpuram district of Tamil Nadu, south India, west of Chennai. It is the birthplace of Rāmānuja (traditionally 1017–1137), the foremost teacher of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta and the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition.

1 teacher · 0 works

Śrīraṅgam, the Kāverī-island temple town at Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, was the principal seat of Rāmānuja (traditionally 1017–1137), who by tradition returned here after years in Melkote (Karnataka) to lead the Śrī Vaiṣṇava community.

1 teacher · 0 works

Śrīraṅgam, the Kāverī-island temple town at Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, was a chief centre of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava tradition. It is associated with Piḷḷai Lokācārya (13th–14th c.), a leading teacher of the Teṅkalai school.

1 teacher · 0 works

Śrīvilliputtūr is a temple town in the Virudhunagar district of Tamil Nadu, south India, site of the Vāṭapatraśāyi temple. It is the home of Āṇṭāḷ, the only woman among the twelve Āḷvār poet-saints, composer of the Tamil Tiruppāvai.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Stagira (or Stageira) was a Greek city on the Chalcidice peninsula in northern Greece. It was the birthplace of Aristotle, who is for this reason often called 'the Stagirite.'

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Stolin, a town in Polesia (now western Belarus), became the second seat of the Karlin-Stolin Hasidic dynasty after R. Aharon HaGadol of Karlin's successors moved the court here in the early 19th century. Karlin-Stolin is famous for its ecstatic, shouting prayer style (Karliner davening).

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Strasbourg, the principal city of Alsace in northeastern France, had a medieval Jewish community that was destroyed in the massacre of February 1349 during the Black Death persecutions. Jewish life later returned to the region, and in the modern era Strasbourg became, with the rest of Alsace, an important center of French Jewry.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Stymphalus was a town of northeastern Arcadia, in the central Peloponnese, set by a lake famous in myth for the Stymphalian birds slain by Heracles. The military writer Aeneas Tacticus, author of a surviving treatise on withstanding siege, is traditionally identified with Aeneas of Stymphalus, an Arcadian general of the mid-fourth century BC.

1 teacher · 0 works

Sulmo, modern Sulmona in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, was a town of the Paeligni in the central Apennines. It was the birthplace of the Roman poet Ovid, who refers to it in his verse.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Sydney is home to Australia's second-largest Jewish community (~50,000), centered in the Eastern Suburbs (Bondi, Vaucluse, Bellevue Hill). The community is led by the Great Synagogue, the South Head Synagogue, Yeshiva-Lubavitch, and the Sydney Yeshiva Gedolah.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Syracuse, a city in central New York State, has had an organized Jewish community since the nineteenth century. Among those associated with it was Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz, later Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, who served as a congregational rabbi in Syracuse early in his career.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Ta'izz, a city in the southern highlands of Yemen, was a center of Yemenite Jewish life. The greatest of the Yemenite Jewish poets, Rabbi Shalom Shabazi (c. 1619-c. 1720), settled there and built a synagogue and ritual bath; he is buried in Ta'izz, and his grave has long been venerated by Jews and Muslims alike.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tachau (Czech Tachov), a town in western Bohemia (today the Czech Republic), was the home of Rabbi Moses ben Hisdai Taku, a thirteenth-century Tosafist and polemicist. In his treatise Ketav Tamim he argued forcefully against both the philosophical rationalism of Maimonides and Saadia Gaon and the esoteric theology of the German Pietists, defending a literalist reading of Scripture and aggadah.

1 teacher · 0 works

Taktser (Chinese Hongya) is a village in the Amdo region of northeastern Tibet, in modern Qinghai province, China. It was the birthplace, in 1935, of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, who was recognised there as a small child and taken to Lhasa.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tanak is a district in the Tsang region of central Tibet, near Shigatse. It was the birthplace, in 1475, of Gendun Gyatso, later recognised as the Second Dalai Lama, who built the Ganden Podrang residence at Drepung.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tankara is a town in the Morbi district of Gujarat, western India, in the Kāṭhiawar (Saurāṣṭra) peninsula. It is the birthplace of Dayānanda Sarasvatī (1824–1883), founder of the reformist Ārya Samāj.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tashilhunpo Monastery, at Shigatse in the Tsang region of central Tibet, is one of the great Gelug monasteries. It was founded in 1447 by Gendun Drup, the disciple of Tsongkhapa later recognised as the First Dalai Lama, whose remains are interred there; it subsequently became the traditional seat of the Panchen Lamas.

1 teacher · 0 works

Taxila was an ancient city of the Gandhara region, in modern northern Pakistan northwest of Islamabad, and a noted center of learning. The skeptic philosopher Pyrrho of Elis accompanied Alexander the Great's expedition into India and, according to ancient sources, conferred there with Indian sages (the so-called gymnosophists), an encounter later linked to the development of his thought.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tehran became the seat of Iran's largest Jewish community after the Qajar dynasty made it the capital in 1786. R. Yedidya Shofet (1908-1995) served as its chief rabbi during the formative 20th century.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tetouan was refounded by Sephardic refugees from the 1492 expulsion and remained the principal Spanish-Sephardi (megorashim) center of northern Morocco. R. Yitzchak Bengualid and the Bengio family were active here.

1 teacher · 0 works

Thakpo Langdun, in the Dakpo (Dagpo) region of south-central Tibet, was the birthplace, in 1876, of Thubten Gyatso, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the reformist ruler who declared Tibet's independence and modernised aspects of its government in the early twentieth century.

1 teacher · 0 works

Thapsacus was an ancient crossing point on the Euphrates in Syria, the place where armies forded the river on the route between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Xenophon records that Cyrus the Younger's army, including the Greek mercenaries, crossed the Euphrates at Thapsacus in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Wilderness (the Sinai desert and surrounding deserts) is, according to the Torah, where the people of Israel wandered for forty years after the Exodus from Egypt and before entering the Land of Israel, led by Moses. Much of the Torah's narrative and law-giving, including the building of the Tabernacle, is set during this period of wandering.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Thobgyal, at Lhari Gang in the Tsang region of central Tibet, was the birthplace, in 1758, of Jamphel Gyatso, the Eighth Dalai Lama, during whose reign the Norbulingka summer palace was built in Lhasa.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, in Northumberland, northern England, is a Sōtō Zen monastery and the European head temple of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives. It was founded in 1972 by Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett, the English-born founder of Shasta Abbey in California.

1 teacher · 0 works

Thūppul (Thiruthanka) is a quarter of Kāñcīpuram in northern Tamil Nadu, south India. It is the birthplace of Vedānta Deśika (1268–1369), the Śrī Vaiṣṇava philosopher-poet and leading systematiser of the Vaṭakalai school.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tiruchuzhi (Tiruchuli) is a town in the Virudhunagar district of Tamil Nadu, south India, with an ancient Śiva temple. It is the birthplace of the sage Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950).

1 teacher · 0 works

Tirukkurukūr (modern Āḷvārtirunagari) is a town in the Tirunelveli (Thoothukudi) district of Tamil Nadu, south India. It is the birthplace of Nammāḷvār, the foremost of the twelve Āḷvār poet-saints, composer of the Tamil Tiruvāymoṻi.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tirunārāyaṇapuram (Melkote) is a hill temple town in the Mandya district of Karnataka, south India, site of the Cheluvanārāyaṇa temple. By tradition Rāmānuja (1017–1137) spent some years here during a period away from Śrīraṅgam, establishing it as a Śrī Vaiṣṇava centre.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tiruvāthavūr (Thiruvathavur) is a village near Melur, north-east of Madurai on the Vaigai River, in Tamil Nadu, south India. It is the birthplace of Māṇikkavācakar (9th c.), the Śaiva Tamil poet-saint and author of the Tiruvācakam.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tluste (today Tovste, in Ternopil Oblast, western Ukraine), a town in the Podolia/Galicia borderland, was where the young Israel ben Eliezer (the future Baal Shem Tov) lived and worked around 1730, in the years before he revealed himself as a chasidic master and settled in Medzhybizh.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tölung (Tölung Dechen) is a valley district immediately west of Lhasa, central Tibet, the site of Tsurphu Monastery. The lineage of the Third Dalai Lama, Sönam Gyatso, is connected with the area near Lhasa where he was born in 1543.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tortosa was the site of the catastrophic Disputation of Tortosa (1413-14), forced upon 22 Jewish scholars by Antipope Benedict XIII over twenty months. The disputation directly triggered mass conversions across Aragon and accelerated the decline of Iberian Jewry.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Trebizond, modern Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey, was a Greek colony of Sinope in the region of Pontus. It was the first Greek coastal city the retreating Ten Thousand reached after their march out of the interior; Xenophon records their relief at sighting the sea in the Anabasis.

1 teacher · 0 works

Trier (Augusta Treverorum), on the Moselle River in western Germany, was Rome's northernmost imperial capital and the oldest episcopal see north of the Alps, making it a pivotal early center of Western Christianity.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tripoli (Arabic Tarabulus al-Gharb), the Mediterranean port that is the capital of present-day Libya, was a North African coastal city of mixed Berber and Mediterranean population that came under Muslim rule in the 7th century and was later part of the Fatimid and Ottoman domains. The Fatimid jurist al-Qadi al-Nu'man (d. 974) is connected to the western Fatimid lands of which Tripoli was a part. [Libyan Tripoli, not the Lebanese one.]

1 teacher · 0 works

Tripoli hosted a long-continuous Sephardic-Maghrebi Jewish community dating from antiquity. R. Avraham Miguel Cardozo lived and wrote here in the late 17th century; the community was decimated by post-1948 riots and emigration to Israel.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Tsang is one of the great provinces of central Tibet, centred on Shigatse and the seat of Tashilhunpo Monastery. The Gelug scholar-monk Geshe Lhundub Sopa, later a longtime professor in the United States, was born in the Tsang region in 1923.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Tsongkha valley lies in the Amdo region of northeastern Tibet, in modern Qinghai province, China. It was the birthplace, in 1357, of Tsongkhapa, the reformer and scholar who founded the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism; the great Kumbum Monastery was later built near his birthplace.

1 teacher · 0 works

Tsurphu Monastery, in the Tölung valley west of Lhasa, central Tibet, was founded in 1189 by Düsum Khyenpa, the First Karmapa. It became the principal seat of the Karmapas, the head lineage-holders of the Karma Kagyu school, and the centre from which their reincarnation (tulku) line was maintained.

1 teacher · 0 works

The lands of the Tümed Mongols, in what is now the Inner Mongolia / Mongolia region, were brought into the Gelug Buddhist fold in the late sixteenth century under Altan Khan. The Fourth Dalai Lama, Yönten Gyatso (born 1589), was a great-grandson of Altan Khan and the only Mongol ever recognised as a Dalai Lama.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Turfan, in the eastern Tarim Basin of modern Xinjiang, China, was a Silk Road oasis and the site of the kingdom of Gaochang, an important Buddhist centre. The pilgrim Xuanzang stopped at Gaochang in 630 on his westward journey, where the local king became his patron and pressed him to stay.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Udupi is a temple town on the coast of Karnataka, south-west India, site of the Kṛṣṇa temple founded by Madhva (Madhvācārya, 13th c.) and of the eight maṭhas (the Aṣṭamaṭhas) of his Dvaita Vedānta order.

1 teacher · 0 works

Udutaḍi (Udatadi) is a village in the Shivamogga (Shimoga) district of Karnataka, south India, near Banavāsi. It is traditionally held to be the birthplace of Akka Mahādevī (12th c.), the Vīraśaiva woman vacana-poet.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Ujjayinī, modern Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh, India, was an ancient royal and intellectual city on the Shipra river. It is given as the birthplace of the sixth-century Indian monk Paramārtha (Kulanātha), who travelled to China and became a principal transmitter of the Yogācāra teachings there.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Unawatuna is a village near Galle in southern Sri Lanka. It was the birthplace, in 1931, of A. T. Ariyaratne, the Buddhist activist who founded the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement, an influential village self-help and 'engaged Buddhist' development organisation.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Urgyeling, near Tawang in the Mon region (now in Arunachal Pradesh, India), was the birthplace, in 1683, of Tsangyang Gyatso, the unconventional poet recognised as the Sixth Dalai Lama, remembered for his lyric verse and his refusal of full monastic vows.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Valencia (Arabic Balansiya), a port-city on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Spain, was the capital of a taifa kingdom in al-Andalus before its conquest by the Christians (briefly by El Cid, definitively by Aragon in 1238). The Qur'an-reciter and poet al-Shatibi (al-Qasim ibn Firruh, d. 1194), author of the Shatibiyya poem on the seven readings, was born nearby and connected to the city.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Valley of Elah is a valley in the Judean foothills (Shephelah) southwest of Jerusalem, in modern Israel. According to the Book of Samuel, it was the site of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines at which the young David defeated the Philistine champion Goliath.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Vijayanagara (its ruins at Hampi, on the Tuṅgabhadrā River in the Ballari/Vijayanagara district of Karnataka, south India) was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire (founded 14th c.). The Advaita scholar and Sringeri pontiff Vidyāraṇya was associated with the empire's foundation and served its early rulers.

1 teacher · 0 works

Vikramaśīla was one of the great Buddhist monastic universities of the Pāla period, founded by King Dharmapāla around the late eighth century at a site now identified with Antichak in Bhagalpur district, Bihar, India. It was a major centre of tantric Buddhist learning; Atiśa served as one of its abbots before departing for Tibet, and the university was destroyed during the invasions of the late twelfth century.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Vīranārāyaṇapuram (modern Kāṭṭumannārkōil), near Chidambaram in the Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, south India. It is the birthplace of Nāthamuni (c. 9th–10th c.), the first of the Śrī Vaiṣṇava ācāryas, who compiled the Tamil hymns of the Āḷvārs into the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham.

1 teacher · 0 works

The Vīranārāyaṇapuram area (modern Kāṭṭumannārkōil), near Chidambaram in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu, was the family seat of Nāthamuni's lineage. It is given as the birthplace of his grandson Yāmunācārya (Āḷavandār, c. 10th c.), the Śrī Vaiṣṇava teacher who later led the community at Śrīraṅgam.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

Vitry (the medieval Vitry, in the Champagne region of northern France) was the home of Rabbi Simchah of Vitry, an eleventh-to-twelfth-century Talmudist and close disciple of Rashi. He compiled the Machzor Vitry, an important early compendium of liturgical law and custom that also preserves responsa of Rashi and other authorities.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Region of early Hasidic expansion. Mezeritch (Dov Baer the Maggid) is in Volhynia.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Waldheim, in Saxony, Germany, was the birthplace, in 1898, of Ernst Lothar Hoffmann, who as Lama Anagarika Govinda became a German-born interpreter of Tibetan Buddhism and founder of the Ārya Maitreya Maṇḍala order.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

This node marks the captivity of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (the Maharam), the leading German Tosafist of the thirteenth century. Seized in 1286 while attempting to emigrate to the Land of Israel, he was imprisoned in the fortress of Wasserburg and then at Ensisheim in Alsace. By tradition he refused to allow the Jewish community to pay the large ransom demanded, fearing it would encourage the seizure of other rabbis, and he died in prison around 1293.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Wiener Neustadt, a town in Lower Austria south of Vienna, became a center of Talmudic study in the fifteenth century under Rabbi Israel Isserlein, the foremost halachic authority of German Jewry in his day and author of the responsa Terumat HaDeshen. Isserlein served as rabbi and av beit din there from 1445 until his death in 1460, attracting many students.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Würzburg, a city in Franconia in southern Germany, had a Jewish community from at least the eleventh century and was a noted medieval center of Talmudic study, with famous yeshivot, until the Rintfleisch massacre of 1298. Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, author of the Or Zarua, taught in Würzburg, and the young Meir of Rothenburg studied there.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Yodfat (Greek Jotapata) was a fortified Jewish town in the Lower Galilee. During the Great Revolt against Rome, it was besieged and destroyed by the forces of Vespasian in 67 CE after a 47-day siege; its Jewish commander, Yosef ben Matityahu, was captured there and went on to write, as Flavius Josephus, the principal histories of the revolt.

1 teacher · 0 works

York, a city in Yorkshire in northern England, had a Jewish community in the twelfth century that met a tragic end in March 1190, when, amid anti-Jewish riots, much of the community took refuge in the royal castle keep (Clifford's Tower) and, besieged by a mob, many chose to die rather than be killed or forcibly baptized -- among the worst massacres of medieval Anglo-Jewry.

1 teacher · 0 works

Yoru is an old district of south-central Tibet, in the area of the Dra valley near Yarlung. The Nyingma master Longchen Rabjam (Longchenpa), the great fourteenth-century systematiser of the Dzogchen teachings, was born there in 1308.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Zhydachiv in Eastern Galicia is the seat of the Zhidachov Hasidic dynasty, founded by R. Tzvi Hirsch Eichenstein of Zhidachov (1763-1831).

1 teacher · 0 works

Zidichov (today Zhydachiv, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine), a town in eastern Galicia, was the seat of the Zidichov chasidic dynasty, distinguished by its emphasis on Kabbalah. Its founder, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh Eichenstein of Zidichov (1763-1831), was a noted Kabbalist who urged the study of the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah and printed kabbalistic works.

1 teacher · 0 works

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.

1 teacher · 0 works

1 teacher · 0 works

Kaifeng, in Henan province, China, was the capital (Bianjing) of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127). Under the Song the city saw a renewal of Buddhism; temples and pagodas multiplied, and the imperially patronised Xiangguo Temple was a major monastic centre.

0 teachers · 648 works

The cult centre of Enlil and the scholarly heart of Sumer (modern Nuffar); its Old Babylonian scribal school produced most surviving Sumerian literature. The pin marks where the tablet was found.

0 teachers · 561 works