הרב יודן בר טרפון

Rabbi Yudan bar Tarfon was an amora of Eretz Yisrael in the Byzantine era, preserved to us in a single teaching — and in stone. In the Yerushalmi, in the sugya of the fig tree’s maturity, Rabbi Yehoshua‘s shitah that a fig bears from its sixth year is challenged from the young trees seen bearing earlier; the answer stands in the name of Rabbi Yudan bar Tarfon: the fig’s trunk races ahead and reaches a grown tree’s thickness, but its fruit waits for the sixth year. The teaching appears twice, in Sheviit and in Orlah, the whole of his surviving Torah.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a kever matzeyva (tombstone) surfaced from the ancient Jewish cemetery of Yafo — carved in Hebrew-Aramaic letters with the name of a chacham, Yudan son of Tarfon — dated by the archaeologists to the fourth or fifth century. Bought by the collector Ustinov and sold with his antiquities, it stands today in the museum of the University of Oslo in Norway. The rarity of the Greek-derived name Tarfon in the literature of Chazal, the dating and the place join to identify the man of the stone with the man of the Yerushalmi — making Rabbi Yudan bar Tarfon one of the only sages of Chazal whose trace survives in both the Talmud and the ground of Eretz Yisrael itself.