Pumbedita

Pumbedita was an ancient city in what is now Iraq, known above all as the seat of the Pumbedita Academy, one of the two great Talmudic academies of Babylonia alongside Sura. Its Aramaic name is usually explained as the mouth of the Bedita, a river that has never been identified. The academy was founded by Judah ben Ezekiel around 260 CE, after the academy at Nehardea was destroyed during the Persian and Palmyrene war, and it became a principal centre of rabbinic scholarship in the tradition that produced the Babylonian Talmud. Tradition says the city had a Jewish population from the days of the Second Temple, and from the seventh century under Arab rule it was called Al-Anbar, the granaries. The exact site has never been securely identified. Proposals based on medieval geographers, rabbinic sources and the twelfth century traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who reports about 3,000 Jews there, point to locations on the Euphrates, but none is confirmed by archaeology.