Stuttgart’s automotive story begins at the very origins of the modern car. In the late nineteenth century, the region of Swabia in southwest Germany became a gathering point for engineers experimenting with engines in ways the world had never seen. In Cannstatt, just outside Stuttgart, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach developed a compact high speed gasoline engine beginning in 1883. By 1885 they had installed it in a motorized two wheeler, an important step toward the modern automobile. At the same time, in the years 1885 and 1886, Karl Benz working in nearby Mannheim built the first purpose designed automobile, the Benz Patent Motorwagen.

Daimler’s company, Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, introduced a new powerful automobile in 1901 that was named Mercedes at the request of Daimler’s sales partner, Emil Jellinek, who named it after his daughter. The success of that car made Mercedes the brand name for all of the company’s automobiles. In 1926, Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft and Benz and Company merged to form Daimler Benz. From that moment forward, the cars produced by the company carried the combined name Mercedes Benz. The corporate entity retained the Daimler name for most of the twentieth and early twenty first centuries, eventually becoming Daimler AG. In 2022, after more than one hundred years of using Mercedes primarily as a product brand, the company renamed itself Mercedes Benz Group and spun off its commercial vehicle division as a separate company known as Daimler Truck.

That legacy deepened with the arrival of Porsche. In 1931, Ferdinand Porsche opened his design and engineering offices in Stuttgart. From there came the sports cars that would become icons of precision, performance, and design. Stuttgart was no longer merely building automobiles. It was defining an engineering culture that influenced the global industry.

Today, Stuttgart remains a world capital of automotive innovation. Mercedes Benz and Porsche anchor the region with research centers, production facilities, museums, and thousands of careers devoted to pushing the automobile into its next chapter. Few cities are as deeply woven into the past, present, and future of the automobile as Stuttgart.

In Judaism, besides Jerusalem, there are a few other cities, that are deeply woven into the past, present and future of the Jewish people. This week, the Torah focuses on one of them: Hebron.

Hebron is about 30 km south of Jerusalem, in the Judean hills. At present, it’s around a 40-minute drive from Jerusalem, depending on traffic and the time of day.

In this week’s Torah portion, named Chayei Sarah (literally “the lives of Sarah”), we’re told about the passing of Abraham’s wife and partner, Sarah, first Matriarch of the Jewish nation, who dies at the ripe old age of 127 years old. We calculate the year as 1,677 BCE (a little over 3,700 years ago). She dies in what then was the Hittite city of Hebron, built apparently even before the great Egyptian city of Luxor. Abraham wants to bury her there, and even though he is a long-time resident, he doesn’t own any land. He negotiates with a local Hittite landowner for a particular cave and ends up buying the cave plus an entire field for an exorbitant price. There is an ancient tradition that the cave that Abraham bought, called Maarat Hamachpela (literally, “the doubled cave”) is also the burial place of Adam and Eve.

Eventually, Abraham would be buried there, as well as their son Isaac, with his wife, Rebecca, and their son Jacob with his wife, Leah. These three founding couples, the three initial generations of the Jewish people would be buried there. The issue was so important, that Jacob would make his sons, particularly Joseph, vow he would return Jacob’s remains from Egypt to be buried in Hebron.

Four hundred years later (around 1,272 BCE), after the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of the land of Israel, Joshua grants Hebron to Caleb, prince of the Tribe of Judah.

More than two centuries after that, when King David is first installed as king, he starts in the city of Hebron (1,010 BCE). Seven years after that, in his effort to unite all the tribes of Israel, he establishes Jerusalem as the capital city.

Six centuries later, after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the 70-year Babylonian exile and the return and construction of the Second Temple. Hebron is resettled under the leadership of Nehemiah (440 BCE).

Thereafter, it would remain a place of constant Jewish presence and pilgrimage for the rest of history.

Here is a listing of some of those accounts throughout history:

• Josephus (93 CE)
• Mishna (200 CE)
• Bereshit Rabbah (400 CE)
• Talmud (500 CE)
• Madaba Map (560 CE)
• Cairo Geniza letters (7th-10th centuries)
• Maimonides (1165 CE)
• Benjamin of Tudela (1170 CE)
• Ramban (1267 CE)
• Avraham Avinu Synagogue (1540 CE)
• Ottoman Tax Records (1500s – 1900s)
• Beit Hadassah Medical Clinic (1893 CE)

So, there is an ongoing written record, for one of the most ancient cities on the entire planet, going back almost 4,000 years, that had a continuous Jewish presence from the time of Abraham until it was brutally stopped in 1927, with the Arab massacre of the Jewish population of Hebron. After the 1967 Six-Day war, Jews returned once again to this ancestral city.

This was a short historical recap to connect the purchase of Sarah’s burial plot to the rest of Hebron’s history.

After Sarah’s burial, Abraham concerns himself with finding a bride for his son Isaac. Abraham dispatches his trusted servant, whom tradition names as Eliezer, to Abraham’s hometown of Haran, to find a bride from his brother’s family. After some drama and divine intervention, Eliezer is successful and brings Rebecca, daughter of Betuel (Abraham’s nephew) and sister of Lavan (who we will meet again in a few weeks) back to Isaac.

After Isaac is successfully married to Rebecca, Abraham himself remarries a woman named Ketura, who tradition identifies as his former maidservant, Hagar. They have six children together, who Abraham sends eastward. Abraham dies at the advanced age of 175 years old and is buried by his sons, Isaac and Ishmael.

The Torah ends the week’s portion with the genealogy of Ishmael, the 12 princes that descended from him and that Ishmael lived to an age of 137 years old. Next week the narrative continues with the story of Isaac and Rebecca and their twin boys, Esau and Jacob.