Emmaus-Nicopolis

At the foot of the Judean hills, where the coastal plain of the Shephelah gives way to the first slopes rising toward Jerusalem, stood a city whose name has traversed Jewish, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic history: Emmaüs, which became Nicopolis. Emmaüs — also known as Nicopolis, Amwas, or Imwas — is an archaeological site located approximately thirty kilometers west of Jerusalem, at the boundary between the Judean hills and the Ayalon Valley. Its position commanded one of the most strategic road junctions in the Holy Land: the point where the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem forks into two, the northern route via Beth-Horon and the southern route via Kiryat-Yéarim.

This crossroads explains the locality's longevity and importance. The importance of Emmaüs varied across the centuries: a regional administrative center from the first century BCE, it became a city from the third to the seventh century CE. A site of Memory for Judaism — the theater of a founding Maccabean victory — and a site of Memory for Christianity — one of the traditional locations of the appearance of the risen Christ — Emmaüs-Nicopolis is a place where tradition and the archive are inextricably intertwined. The present work sets out to disentangle these threads, scrupulously distinguishing what belongs to documentary establishment from what belongs to transmitted Memory. As contemporary Jewish historiography has reminded us, thinking about the past of Israel always requires articulating the material trace with the received narrative [Goldberg, Penser l'histoire juive].

It is amid the tumult of the Maccabean revolt that Emmaüs enters Jewish history. In the 2nd century BCE, Judea rose up against Seleucid domination and the policy of forced Hellenization imposed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The Battle of Emmaüs took place around September 165 BCE during the Maccabean revolt, between the Judean rebels led by Judas Maccabaeus and an expedition of the Seleucid Empire commanded by the generals Gorgias, Ptolemy son of Dorymenes, and Nicanor, near Emmaüs.

The account, preserved in the First Book of Maccabees, makes the plain of Emmaüs the stage of a decisive confrontation. Lysias chose Ptolemy son of Dorymenes, Nicanor, and Gorgias, powerful men among the Friends of the king, and sent with them forty thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry to invade and devastate the land of Judah; setting out with their full force, they came and camped near Emmaüs in the plain. The distress of the Jewish people was such that, according to the biblical account, when the merchants of the region learned of their power, they came to the camp bringing a great quantity of silver and gold, as well as shackles, to purchase the Israelites as slaves.

Tradition remembers above all the tactical boldness of Judas. The battle was won by the Maccabean rebels, who marched by night and surprised the Seleucid camp while many soldiers were absent. The Hasmonean account, transmitted from generation to generation, places in the mouth of the rebel leader an exhortation to restraint in the face of plunder: Judas said to the people: "Do not be greedy for plunder, for we have a battle before us, and Gorgias and his army are near us in the mountain; stand firm first against your enemies and defeat them, and after that you may boldly take the spoils."

This episode belongs to the register of the founding Memory of Hasmonean Judaism: it is a heroic narrative, transmitted by a historiography itself engaged in the legitimation of the dynasty. The critical study of ancient Judaism invites us to read these sources as constructions bearing a theological and political purpose, rather than as simple military accounts [Mimouni, Le judaïsme ancien]. Emmaüs thus becomes, for Jewish consciousness, a toponym laden with the Memory of deliverance.

Beyond the narrative of battle, Emmaüs acquired a genuine administrative function within the structures of Hasmonean and then Roman Judea. Its position at the mouth of the Ayalon valley made it a point of control over access routes toward the capital. A regional administrative center from the first century BCE, it was devastated by the Romans in 4 BCE and was thereafter reduced to the status of a simple village.

This destruction was part of the turmoil that followed the death of Herod the Great, when the Roman army suppressed the uprisings that set Judea ablaze. Emmaüs, as a strategic stronghold, paid the price. Yet its geographical value kept it within the military and administrative network of the province. Under Roman domination, the locality remained an anchor point: by virtue of its strategic position, Emmaüs played a role in controlling the region's roads.

The trajectory of Emmaüs illustrates the plasticity of settlements in Judea: by turns a chief town, a ruined village, and then a promoted city, the locality embraced the vicissitudes of power. The legal status of an agglomeration — kômê (village) or polis (city) — was not a mere administrative nuance, but a marker of prestige, taxation, and local autonomy whose stakes communities knew well how to measure. The history of Emmaüs at the turn of the Common Era is thus that of a locality whose importance was ceaselessly reshaped by the balance of power, while its function as a gateway to Jerusalem never once faltered.

Emmaüs occupies a singular place in Christian Memory on account of the Gospel narrative of the appearance of the risen Jesus to two disciples on the road to Emmaüs (Gospel of Luke, chapter 24). The identification of this site with the city of Judea has nonetheless been the subject of long-standing discussion, for the manuscripts of the Gospel diverge on the distance — sixty or one hundred and sixty stades from Jerusalem — which complicates the localization.

The patristic tradition, for its part, decided in favor of our city. The Church Fathers unanimously considered this town to be the Emmaüs of the Gospels. This consensus was largely sustained by the authority of Julius Africanus, himself a native of the place. According to a Byzantine source cited by the archaeologists of the site, Africanus was from Emmaüs, a village of Palestine toward which Cléophas and his companion were traveling, and which, having subsequently received the right to become a city at the time of Africanus's embassy, took the name of Nicopolis.

The significance of this point lies precisely at the intersection of transmitted narrative and archive. The same figure — Julius Africanus — connects the Gospel memory and the institutionally attested event of the city's elevation. A Christian scholar and writer born in Jerusalem, Julius Africanus, who claimed to have questioned descendants of those close to Jesus, restored Emmaüs to the map. The Christian tradition of Emmaüs-Nicopolis cannot therefore be held to be a mere late legend: it rests upon a third-century witness whose public actions are moreover documented. That said, the plurality of competing sites claiming to be the Lucan Emmaüs forbids any definitive certainty: we are here in the domain of the probable, where Memory and History respond to one another without ever quite merging.

The best-established event in the history of Emmaüs is its promotion to the rank of Roman city at the beginning of the third century. The city was renamed Emmaüs Nicopolis in the year 221 by the emperor Élagabal, who conferred upon it the title of polis ("city") at the request of a delegation from Emmaüs.

The driving force behind this undertaking was, once again, Julius Africanus. According to Byzantine historians, Julius Africanus led a delegation of the inhabitants of Emmaüs before the Roman emperor Élagabal to request that the place be granted the status of polis. The same source details the exceptional abilities of this man, whose erudition earned him an audience at the imperial court: in his letter to Aristide, Africanus wrote magnificently on the apparent divergence of genealogies on account of the generations found in the evangelists Matthew and Luke.

The very name of the new city — Nikopolis, "city of victory" — resonates as a distant echo of ancient triumphs, whether the Maccabean victory or the Roman victories. Nicopolis was the name of Emmaüs under the Roman Empire until the conquest of Palestine by the Rashidun Caliphate in 639. The promotion of a village to the rank of city was not a gratuitous symbolic act: it conferred upon the community a civic territory, magistracies, sometimes a currency, and a recognized place in the hierarchy of provincial settlements. This episode, attested by converging written sources, constitutes the firmest foundation of the documented history of Emmaüs.

During the Byzantine period, Emmaüs-Nicopolis was a prosperous city, endowed with monumental buildings whose traces have been uncovered by archaeology. Among the archaeological remains left by the Byzantine era at Emmaüs are notably the ruins of two basilicas. The preservation of these vestiges was remarkable: the apse of the southern basilica, with its three apses, has been almost entirely preserved.

The city was not exclusively Christian. A Jewish presence there is attested by epigraphy. At the end of the nineteenth century, near the city of Jaffa, a Hebrew epitaph dating from the Byzantine period was found bearing the inscription: "Resting place of Lazar, son of Yehoshoua. Peace of Emmaüs, peace." This funerary testimony, modest yet eloquent, attests to the Memory of a Jewish community connected to Emmaüs during the Byzantine period, and confirms that the city harbored, like so many others in Palestine, a mixed confessional fabric.

Rabbinical sources and the rich Byzantine documentation allow us to reconstruct the image of a living city, endowed with hydraulic infrastructure — the region was renowned for its springs — and a diverse population. The History of Emmaüs fits here into the vast movement by which late-antique Judaism negotiated its place within an Empire that had become Christian, a process that historiography has long analyzed [Mimouni, Le judaïsme ancien]. The city remained an active center until the Arab conquest.

The decline of Emmaüs-Nicopolis was sealed by a dual event: a deadly epidemic and the Islamic conquest. The plague of Emmaüs in 639, mentioned in Muslim sources, is said to have caused up to 25,000 deaths in the city. This "plague of Amwas" occupies a notable place in Arab historiographical Memory, as it carried off several eminent companions of the Prophet who were stationed in the region.

That same year marked the political turning point. Nicopolis remained the name of Emmaüs under the Roman Empire until the conquest of Palestine by the Rashidun Caliphate in 639. The city then reverted, under its Arabized form of Amwas or Imwas, to the status of a village, preserving nonetheless, in its name, the phonetic memory of ancient Emmaüs.

The epilogue played out in the twentieth century. The Arab village of Amwas was razed during the Six-Day War in 1967; today, Emmaüs lies at the crossroads of Latroun, between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, on the grounds of Canada Park. Thus, after more than two millennia of continuous occupation, the village fabric disappeared, leaving the site to its archaeological and memorial vocation. This scholarly rediscovery had begun much earlier: archaeological excavations were carried out on the site in 1880–1888 and in 1924–1930, and once again Christian pilgrims flocked to Emmaüs. The passage from a living place to a place of archaeological Memory closes the long cycle of a city that was in turn a Hasmonean battlefield, an evangelical station, a Roman polis, and a Byzantine market town.

The history of Emmaüs-Nicopolis unfolds as a succession of strata where Memory and archive never cease to dialogue. From the Maccabean victory — the founding narrative of Hasmonean Judaism — to the imperial promotion of 221, from the disputed evangelical episode to the Byzantine basilicas unearthed by archaeology, the city offers a striking condensation of the great transformations of the Holy Land. Its position as a gateway controlling the road to Jerusalem made it perpetually a contested prize, and its very name, Nicopolis, sealed in stone the Memory of a "city of victory."

What distinguishes Emmaüs is precisely the density of its superimposed memories: Jewish first, through the Maccabees and the epitaph of Lazar, Christian next, through Cléophas and Julius Africanus, Islamic finally, through the plague of Amwas. Confronting these traditions with the material record — epigraphy, basilicas, stratigraphic excavations — remains the historian's task, in the awareness that every reconstruction of the Jewish past is also an act of Memory and interpretation [Goldberg, Penser l'histoire juive]. Emmaüs-Nicopolis, today silent beneath the trees of the Canada park, continues to attest to this junction point where attested event and transmitted narrative face one another, sometimes confirming, sometimes nuancing, never ceasing to illuminate each other.