The Kosher Terroir - Whose Wine Was the Holy Land's

[00:00] Welcome to the Kosher Terroir.

[00:02] I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem.

[00:06] Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers.

[00:18] If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. If you're relaxing at home, please pour yourself a glass of wonderful kosher wine, sit back, relax, and enjoy.

[00:32] Imagine for a moment that you're standing in a dusty field south of Tel Aviv. It's an ordinary morning in an ordinary Israeli town called Yavne. There's a soccer pitch behind you. Apartment cranes on the horizon. Bulldozers are waiting, because this field is about to become another neighborhood, with another school, and another falafel shop on the corner.

[00:59] But the bulldozers can't move yet. Because in Israel, before you build the future, the law says you must first check for the past.

[01:10] And so, a team of archaeologists begins to dig.

[01:14] And what comes out of that dusty field stops them cold.

[01:19] Five enormous wine presses. Treading floors the size of living rooms. Warehouses. Kilns. Tens of thousands of clay wine jars. Some intact, their clay stoppers found in place. An entire industrial city of wine, sleeping under the soccer field for 1,500 years.

[01:39] And when the numbers come in, they were almost unbelievable. This single complex produced two to three million liters of wine every single year. That's the output of a large modern Israeli winery. Achieved by sandaled feet and gravity in the 5th century. The archaeologists called it the largest wine production center of the entire ancient world.

[02:05] Now here's where it gets interesting. When the reporters asked the obvious question—who owned it?—the archaeologists gave an honest answer. They said, "We don't know."

[02:17] But the headlines didn't say "we don't know." The story that spread was a story about a Christian city, a Christian empire, and a Christian wine, bottled in the Holy Land and shipped to the world.

[02:33] And somewhere in that telling, a question got buried deeper than the wine presses themselves.

[02:40] Where are the Jews?

[02:42] Because think about it. This is the land of the Mishnah. Yavne. Yavne, the city where Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai rebuilt Jewish life from the ashes of Jerusalem. The city where the Sages sat. Our sources tell us in a vineyard. And every Shabbat, in every Jewish home in this land, someone lifted a cup of wine and said Kiddush. Every wedding, every brit, every festival. Every Seder, four cups for every single person at the table. As Mishnah Pesachim 10:1 mandates, even the poorest must be provided these four cups from the public tzedakah. A Jewish world without wine is an halachic impossibility.

[03:30] So who was making it? And is it possible, just possible, that some of the most celebrated wine of the ancient world—the wine praised in Gaul and poured in Constantinople—came off Jewish treading floors?

[03:46] Today, here on the Kosher Terroir, a construction site, a mystery, a synagogue by the sea with a floor made of stones and starlight. And the question that no one thought to ask.

[04:01] I'm Simon Jacob. Pour yourself a glass, and let's dig.

[04:06] Let's go back to that field. And let me tell you how this actually happened, because the discovery itself is a very Israeli story.

[04:17] In 2019, the Israel Antiquities Authority began what they call a salvage excavation. It's standard procedure before a new neighborhood goes up. The dig was led by Dr. Jon Seligman, Dr. Elie Haddad, and Liat Nadav-Ziv. And for two years, as they dug deeper, the scale of what they found kept expanding.

[04:41] They didn't just find wine presses. They found perfection.

[04:45] Each of the five mega-presses was built on a massive scale. The treading floors, where workers crushed the grapes with their feet, fed into giant octagonal vats. Beautifully constructed. Symmetrical. Designed to handle oceans of juice.

[05:01] The archaeologists found the kilns. And on-site pottery works firing the amphorae by the thousands. This was vertical integration, 5th century style. From vineyard to press to jar to warehouse. All in one compound.

[05:17] And the jars themselves. They collected tens of thousands of fragments. But some amphorae came out of the earth whole. Intact, slender clay vessels that once held the finest white wine of the age. A few of them, remarkably, with their clay stoppers found in place. Sealed by hands that have been dust for a millennium and a half.

[05:44] This was the famous Gaza jar. The torpedo-shaped vessel that carried the brand of the Holy Land across the Mediterranean.

[05:54] We know this wine was famous because the literary record backs up the archaeology. Roman and Byzantine writers praise Gaza wine by name.

[06:04] There's a wonderful story told by Gregory of Tours in his work Glory of the Confessors in sixth-century France about a pious widow of Lyon who honored her late husband by donating wine for the daily mass at his grave. And not just any wine—Gaza wine, the best money could buy. Until, Gregory tells us, a scoundrel of a subdeacon began drinking the good Gaza wine himself and pouring cheap, vinegary swill for the church. Even the wine fraud stories are 1,600 years old. Some things in this industry, my friends, never change.

[06:47] So what powered this boom? In a word, pilgrims.

[06:51] From the fourth century on, as the Roman Empire turned Christian, pilgrims flooded into the Holy Land. Monasteries multiplied. The desert bloomed with agriculture to feed them. And when these pilgrims went home, they wanted a taste of the holy places to take with them.

[07:12] Drink this, and you drink the land itself. It was Terroir as theology. The Holy Land brand.

[07:20] And to meet that demand, the coastal plain and the Negev turned into a massive vineyard. Down in the Negev Highlands, cities like Shivta, Elusa, and Avdat engineered brilliant run-off agriculture, catching flash-flood waters in terraces to grow grapes in the desert.

[07:39] And on the coastal plain, at the crossroads of the great sea highway and the Sorek River, perfectly positioned between vineyard and harbor, sat the biggest production node of them all.

[07:54] Yavne. Our winery.

[07:55] One more image before we move on. Those slender Gaza jars, dug up in Yavne? Identical jars were historically documented in Gaza City's own museum collections prior to recent events. A reminder that long before Gaza meant what it means in today's headlines, its harbor, a port called Maiumas, was one of the great wine ports of the world.

[08:22] Hold on to that name. Maiumas. We're going back there later in this episode. And what was found there may change how you hear this entire story.

[08:35] But first, let's talk about what the archaeologists said about all this. And more importantly, what they didn't say.

[08:43] When the scale of Yavne became clear, the scholarly consensus formed quickly. The archaeologists pointed to the sheer size of the operation and the broader demographics of the Byzantine Empire. The empire was Christian. The pilgrims driving the market were Christian. The destination markets in Europe were Christian.

[09:06] Therefore, the logic went, this was a Christian enterprise.

[09:10] Some scholars speculated it might have been owned by the state. Others suggested it belonged to a wealthy Christian bishop or a monastery. The archaeologists themselves were careful. Dr. Seligman told reporters they couldn't know the identities of the owners.

[09:28] But in the press releases, and the articles that followed around the world, the nuance vanished. The story hardened into a fact: Christian wine, Christian city, Christian empire.

[09:41] And the Jews? They weren't in the story. They were simply assumed to be gone, or marginalized, or drinking their own modest, uncommercial wine quietly in the background.

[09:54] But is that true? Let's look at the facts on the ground.

[10:00] In the 5th and 6th centuries, the very height of this wine boom, the Jewish population of Eretz Yisrael was substantial. Yes, they had lost the revolts against Rome centuries earlier. Yes, Jerusalem was off-limits. But the Jews hadn't vanished. They had relocated and rebuilt.

[10:20] The Galilee was densely Jewish. The Golan was Jewish. The southern Hebron Hills were Jewish. And the coastal plain, right where Yavne sits, had significant Jewish and Samaritan populations.

[10:34] And these Jews were drinking wine. Constantly.

[10:37] What about the Jews? Halacha stops being background and becomes evidence.

[10:42] Yayin Nesech. Wine dedicated or poured as a libation for idolatrous worship. Forbidden at the highest level.

[10:50] And beyond it, the broader decree of Stam Yeinam. Ordinary wine touched or produced by non-Jews, forbidden to drink even with no libation in sight, a rabbinic fence guarding against the closeness that leads to intermarriage.

[11:06] The Talmud Yerushalmi, compiled in Tiberias in this exact era, is soaked in wine. The laws of Orlah, Kilayim, Trumot, Maasrot, Shmita. Whole tractates dedicated to the agricultural realities of the land. You do not write a massive, complex legal literature about wine production if you aren't producing wine.

[11:29] The Jews of Byzantine Palestine were growing grapes. They were treading grapes. They were making wine. They had to be.

[11:38] So what happens when a Jewish winegrower wants to sell his surplus? Does the Christian market reject it?

[11:47] Here is the most fascinating detail of all.

[11:50] The Halachic wall ran in only one direction. A Jew could not drink wine from a Christian neighbor. But a Christian neighbor had no objection whatsoever to drinking wine made by a Jew. No church law barred it.

[12:08] Which means that in the great wine economy of Byzantine Palestine, Jewish producers faced no religious barriers to selling into the export market. Jewish wine could flow outward into the amphorae, into the ships, and into the cellars of Gaul. And nothing about the product would ever announce its maker.

[12:31] Because here is the final piece. A Gaza jar carries no hashgacha.

[12:36] Vinum Gazetum was a geographic brand, not a confessional one. Wine of the Holy Land told the buyer where it came from. Never whose hands pressed it.

[12:49] Is it possible then, that some of the most celebrated wine of the ancient world came off Jewish treading floors? Halachically, economically, demographically—not only possible, it would be strange if it hadn't.

[13:04] But I promised you more of an argument, and I promised you evidence. So come with me now, down the coast from Yavne, to that harbor whose name I asked you to remember.

[13:19] Maiumas. The port of Gaza.

[13:21] Where in 1965, under an Egyptian administration, workmen struck a floor made of stone and starlight.

[13:29] The six-day war is still two years away. In the Rimal district near the shoreline, workmen are digging the foundation for a casino. And the earth gives up a floor. A mosaic floor. Enormous. Thirty meters long by 26 meters wide.

[13:48] The Egyptian authorities take a look at this magnificent Byzantine pavement. Note the robed figure with a harp at its center. And seeing a crowned king sitting, playing a lyre, with wild animals gathered peacefully around him to listen, they decide it's a beautiful depiction of Orpheus. The mythological Greek musician charming the beasts.

[14:12] But then someone looked closer. They found, floating inside his halo, letters. Hebrew letters.

[14:19] Daled, Vav, Daled.

[14:20] David. David the King.

[14:22] The sweet singer of Israel, crowned and playing for the animals. A Jewish king, rendered in the artistic language of the age.

[14:32] The way a Jewish patron who was fully at home in that cosmopolitan world would have commissioned it. This was no church. This was a synagogue. And not a modest one. A massive five-aisled structure standing a few hundred meters from the Mediterranean Sea.

[14:53] The very docks from which Vinum Gazetum, the most famous wine of the age, was loaded onto ships bound for Egypt and Italy and Gaul. At that very hour, the Jews of Maiumas built a synagogue with a view of the export economy. They didn't live near the trade. They lived in it.

[15:17] But the floor wasn't finished speaking. Because Byzantine mosaics, like modern shul plaques, come with donor dedications. And this one carried an inscription in Greek. The commercial language of the coast that gives us three precious facts: a date, two names, and a profession.

[15:37] The date: The year 508 to 509 of the common era. Right at the peak of the Gaza wine boom. The same generation that Yavne's mega-winery was pressing its millions of liters.

[15:52] The names: Menachem and Yeshua. Two brothers, sons of a man named Yishai (or Isas).

[15:59] You want Jewish names by the harbor of Gaza? There they are. Set in stone.

[16:06] And the profession? The inscription described them as wood merchants. Timber traders.

[16:11] These were businessmen of the port. Import-export men. Wealthy enough to floor a five-aisle synagogue in mosaic work of imperial quality. The kind of commission that says in any age, 'Our community has arrived.'

[16:27] So let's put the picture together plainly. In the exact moment that Christian wine of the Holy Land was conquering the tables of Europe, a prosperous community of Jewish merchants was operating at the principal port of export. Praying, doing business, dedicating monuments a few hundred meters from the wine docks.

[16:51] Did Menachem and Yeshua deal in wine as well as timber? Did they own presses in the hinterland? The stone doesn't say.

[17:01] But I'll tell you what the stone does say. It says that Jews were not spectators in this economy. They were players in it. Standing on those docks, watching those jars. Maybe brokering them. Maybe filling them. And certainly, on a Friday night, in a five-aisle synagogue by the sea, lifting a cup of it and saying, 'Borei Pri HaGafen' over the Mediterranean.

[17:30] And by the way, the port community wasn't alone. In Gaza's Great Mosque of all places, a reused column was found long ago bearing a carved menorah, a shofar, and a lulav, with the name Hananiah bar Yaakov. The Jewish footprint in Byzantine Gaza runs deeper than one building.

[17:53] The synagogue itself didn't last. Sometime in the first half of the seventh century, right around the Islamic conquest, it burned. A hundred and thirty years of life, give or take. The mosaics were eventually lifted and carried to safety. King David and his lyre spent time displayed at the Israel Museum, and found their permanent public home in the Museum of the Good Samaritan. The building is gone, though the questions it raises are very much alive.

[18:29] So we have a mystery winery in Yavne. A halachic argument that Jewish wine production never stopped. And Jewish merchants stationed at the greatest wine port of the ancient world.

[18:42] What can we honestly conclude? And where must we honestly stop? Let's weigh the evidence the way Dayanim weigh evidence. Every good judge knows there are levels of knowing.

[18:56] So let's rule honestly, level by level.

[18:59] What is certain? That Byzantine Eretz Yisrael was the greatest wine exporter of its world, and Yavne its greatest known factory. That the land's population was mixed—Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan. That Jews required wine constantly, produced it continuously, and wrote a living legal literature about growing it. And that a wealthy Jewish merchant community stood at the export harbor at the boom's exact peak. All of that is documented in stone, clay, and the Shas.

[19:34] What is probable? That Yavne's mega-facility, sitting in a bishop's city in a Christian empire, was Gentile-owned or state-run. Probably. Not proven, but probable. And probable that ownership at the top says nothing about the hands throughout the system. The growers who supplied the grapes, the small presses feeding the ports, the brokers on the docks. An export economy is a web, not a building, and Jews and Samaritans lived all through that web.

[20:08] What is possible? And here is the exciting part, even if it's testable only in theory. Could archaeology ever identify a distinctly Jewish winery? That sounds unanswerable, but it isn't. Researchers like Dr. Boaz Zissu and the late Dr. David Amit have documented winepresses with mikva'ot built right next to them—primarily from the Second Temple and Roman periods, though whether this extended into the Byzantine era remains an open question—with ritual baths at the treading floor. Why? Because the Mishnah demands wine for the Temple be made in Taharah, ritual purity. A mikvah beside a press is as close to a hechsher in stone as the ancient world could give us. That research frontier is real. It's Israeli, and it's exactly the kind of question this discovery should reopen for the Byzantine period.

[21:09] And what is unknowable? Whose feet on a given harvest morning in the year 508 actually trod the grapes at Yavne. Archaeology sees stone and clay; it cannot see intention, ownership, or bracha.

[21:24] And halacha, for its part, insists on realities no excavation will ever unearth. The weekly kiddush in a thousand homes that leaves no amphora behind.

[21:36] Two ways of knowing. Each seeing what the other cannot. And the honest gap between them is where the best questions live. It's where this episode has lived for the last half hour.

[21:51] So let me close where we began. In Yavne. In a vineyard.

[21:57] The Mishnah tells us that after the Churban, when the world had ended and had to be rebuilt, the Chachamim gathered in Yavne. Our sources say they sat 'B'Kerem d'Yavne'—in the vineyard of Yavne.

[22:12] For centuries, commentators have debated what that meant. Was it a literal vineyard, vines and soil and shade? Or was it a metaphor—the students sitting in rows like planted vines? The Yeshiva as a vineyard of Torah.

[22:29] I used to think it was a metaphor.

[22:33] But after looking at the archaeology, after seeing the scale of wine production that surrounded that city, maybe we don't have to choose. Maybe they sat in rows like vines, precisely because they were surrounded by actual vines. Because Yavne was wine country.

[22:53] The Sages sat in the vineyard of Yavne, and the wine they drank, and the wine they blessed, and the wine they made, didn't vanish. The industry they built sustained their children, and their children's children, right into the Byzantine boom.

[23:12] The labels are lost. The jars are broken. But the tradition of making it and blessing it never snapped.

[23:21] So the next time you make Kiddush, look at the bottle in your hand for a moment before the bracha. The winery, the region, the hashgacha, the vintage.

[23:34] Because a bottle of wine is also a document. It tells the future who we were.

[23:41] The Jews of Maiumas didn't leave us a bottle. They left us a floor. And a king with a harp. And two brothers named Menachem and Yeshua who wanted to be remembered.

[23:56] Tonight they are. L'chaim.