The Islamization of the Holy Land, 634–1800 9781802700312

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THE MEDIEVAL ISLAMICATE WORLD Further Information and Publications www.arc-humanities.org/our-series/arc/miw/

THE ISLAMIZATION OF THE HOLY LAND, 634 –1800

by

MICHAEL EHRLICH

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Chapter 1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Chapter 2. Coastal Plain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Chapter 3. Galilee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter 4. Samaria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Chapter 5. Judea and Jerusalem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

Chapter 6. Negev . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Chapter 7. Discussion and Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Biblio­graphy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figures Figure 1: The Great Mosque of Ramla, a former Crusader church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Figure 2: The centre of Early Islamic Tiberias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Figure 3: Jish (Gush Ḥalav) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Figure 4: Archaeo­logical remains from the Byzantine period in Zababdeh . . . . . . . . . 87

Figure 5: The mosque in the narthex of the synagogue of Susiya . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Figure 6: The mosque near the southern church of Shivta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Maps Map 1:

Map 2:

Map of the Holy Land including regional sub-divisions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

The Desert Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

To my parents Hannah (née Friedländer) and Felix Ehrlich In memoriam

PREFACE This book is the product of several undergraduate courses and seminars I have taught during the last few years about conversion, urbanization, pilgrimage, and migration in the Middle East. Many of its concepts, insights, and ideas were developed and crystallized during the courses’ preparation and through discussions held with my students. I am grateful to them for their collaboration and feedback. Many friends and colleagues shared their vast knowledge with me and helped me finish this ambitious project. We have discussed different related subjects, and they shared publications with me and provided me with photos and illustrations: Prof. Mustafa Abbasi, Prof. Reuven Amitai, Arie Bar, Prof. Haim Ben-David, Dr. Katia Cytryn-Silverman, Dr. Eyal Davidson, Prof. Nahem Ilan, Dr. Raphael Lewis, Prof. Joseph Patrich, Ron Peled, Dr. Kate Raphael, Meir Roter, Dr. Doron Sar-Avi, Raffi Shalev, and Prof. Yinon Shivtiel. I also miss the fruitful discussions with my colleague Prof. Ronnie Ellenblum, who passed away a year ago. We seldom agreed, but his innovative, intriguing, and sometimes provocative ideas and insights significantly contributed to this research. I am always in debt to my great teachers, Prof. Yvonne Friedman and Prof. Yaacov Lev, who accompanied my career from its earliest stages. I often discussed this book with them, and they were always kind, supportive, responsive, and insightful. Arc Humanities Press staff have been professional and helpful. I would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer, whose comments were greatly beneficial and significantly improved the book’s final version. I am also grateful to Marty Friedlander for editing the book’s final version. My family continuously tolerated me during the long process of this book’s writing, including the challenging days of quarantine we experienced. My eldest son Yishay was the first to read the book and made many helpful and valuable comments. I want to heartfully thank him, my other children, Netta and Gilad, and especially my wife Bracha. It would have been impossible to bring this project to an end without their love and support. Jerusalem, January 2022

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 ce, Syria was a battered region. It had been afflicted by frequent outbreaks of the “Justinianic Plague” for nearly a century and was still recovering from the recent Sasanian conquest in 614 and Byzantine reconquest in 629.1 These events facilitated the Muslim conquest of Syria, starting in 634. This conquest, and the various processes and events that followed it, eventually led to the conversion to Islam of most of the local population. Conversion occurred in many other regions, as well. In most areas conquered by the Muslims around the Mediterranean, religious conversion was accompanied by a shift from the vernacular languages to Arabic, emigration of local elites and immigration of Muslims, many of them Arabs, and changes in the urban network, as well as substantial changes to the plans of those Roman–Byzantine cities that continued to exist during the Early Islamic period. The aim of this book is to answer three basic questions: when, where, and under what circumstances did the majority of the Holy Land’s population become Muslim? Its working hypothesis is that the causes that led to the conversion of most of the Holy Land’s population, as well as the survival of some religious communities, are essentially social and geo­graphic in nature, rather than theo­logical. Namely, conditions in some regions facilitated conversion, whereas in other areas they did not. Consequently, local communities in those areas resisted conversion more vigorously. This book does not deal with issues such as the economic or social pressure exerted by Muslim authorities. Those measures were presumably imposed indiscriminately on all religious communities, in all regions, and in rural areas as well as urban ones. I suggest that two parallel processes were the main catalysts of Islamization: deurbanization and urbanization. In areas where existing urban nuclei were abolished, nearby rural communities converted to Islam. Similarly, the establishment of an urban centre in a previously rural region facilitated the conversion of the nearby villages’ populations. However, in areas where the pre-existing cities endured, the minorities managed to survive. In my opinion, the continuous existence of cities over the centuries allowed for the survival of religious and social institutions, which played a vital role in the survival of urban and rural religious communities. However, wherever these cities ceased to exist, the religious communities collapsed.2 The communities’ collapse gave   Abbreviations used in the notes are listed at the head of the Biblio­graphy below. To ease finding the full citations, all works cited in the Biblio­graphy are only given in short form below. If pagination is not indicated then the whole article or book is meant. *

1  Hugh Kennedy, “Justinianic Plague in Syria and the Archaeo­logical Evidence,” in Plague and the End of Antiquity, ed. Lester K. Little (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8–98; Schick, The Christian Communities, 68–84. 2  Fierro, “The Islamisation of al-Andalus,” 202; Mí�kel de Epalza, “Falta de obispos y conversion al Islam de los cristianos de Al-Á� ndalus,” Al-Qantara 15 (1994): 385–400 at 388–90.

2

Chapter 1

rise to emigration of the elites, as well as conversion of the remaining followers of the religion who remained behind. This emigration was often accompanied by the immigration of a Muslim population. Arab tribes migrated to the Holy Land throughout the Byzantine period. These tribes converted to Christianity, and later to Islam, through a different mechanism that is typical to tribal societies.3 Tribal conversion is usually initiated by a foreigner, such as Saint Remi in the case of Clovis, or the rabbi in the story of the Khazars’ conversion to Judaism.4 I will not address the historicity of these events. Nevertheless, they faithfully reflect the mechanism of tribal conversion. Ordinarily, tribal chiefs were reluctant to initiate such processes. The introduction of a new religion risks potential discontent from the dignitaries whose positions could be jeopardized by the changes. Likewise, chiefs were intolerant toward conversion attempts initiated by inferior members of the tribe. Such a proposal was likely to be interpreted as an infringement of the chief’s authority. The conversion is usually characterized by a swift, top-to-bottom process. The conversion includes the entirety of the tribe. Those who do not convert usually leave the tribe.5 In the 630s, when the Muslims conquered the Holy Land, the local population included Christians, Jews, and Samaritans.6 The relative size of these groups is unknown, but it is universally accepted that the Christians were the largest community. It is also accepted that during the Byzantine period, the Holy Land’s Samaritan and Jewish communities underwent a long process of decline.7 In the late Byzantine period, Christian communities existed almost everywhere in the country. According to Gil, the Christian inhabitants of Jerusalem were mainly Chalcedonians. However, he suggested that a large percentage of the Christians who lived in the countryside belonged to non-Chalcedonian churches.8 Hagith Sivan demonstrated that non-Chalcedonians who lived in the region of Gaza lost ground during the sixth and seventh centuries. Thus, it seems likely that the Chalcedonian church became increasingly dominant throughout most of the Holy Land shortly before the Muslim conquest. Nevertheless, non-Chalcedonians were still numerous in areas such as the Negev and the Decapolis.9 The Samaritans mainly lived in the region around Neapolis (Nablus) and in the coastal plain, whereas most of the 3  Gil, A History of Palestine, 18–20.

4  Yehuda HaLevy, The Kuzari, 141–42, 656–71; Michel Rouche, Clovis (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 253–85; Carole M. Cusack, Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples (London: Cassell, 1998), 63–87; Peter B. Golden, “The Conversion of the Khazars to Judaism,” in The World of the Khazars, ed. Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, and András Róna-Tas (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 123–62. 5  Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medi­eval Period, 114. 6  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 333–37.

7  Lee I. Levine, “Between Rome and Byzantium in Jewish History: Documentation, Reality, and the Issue of Periodization,” in Continuity and Renewal: Jews and Judaism in Byzantine-Christian Pales­ tine, ed. Lee I. Levine (Jerusalem: Dinur Centre for the Study of Jewish History, 2004), 22–40 [in Hebrew]; Hagith Sivan, Palestine in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16–48, 113; Pummer, The Samaritans, 35. 8  Gil, A History of Palestine, 447–48

9  Sivan, Palestine in Late Antiquity, 342–43.



Introduction

3

Jews lived in the Galilee region, especially in Tiberias and its vicinity, and in the coastal cities. However, Samaritans and Jews also lived beyond these cities and their environs. Samaritan rebellions during the fifth and sixth centuries were crushed by the Byzantines and as a result, the main Samaritan communities began to decline.10 Similarly, the Jewish community strove to recover from the catastrophic results of the Bar Kokhva revolt (132–135 ce). Although some of these attempts were relatively successful, the Jews never fully recovered. During the Late Roman and Byzantine periods, many Jews emigrated to thriving centres in the diaspora, especially Iraq,11 whereas some converted to Christianity and others continued to live in the Holy Land, especially in Galilee and the coastal plain.12 During the Byzantine period, the three provinces of Palestine included more than thirty cities, namely, settlements with a bishop see.13 After the Muslim conquest in the 630s, most of these cities declined and eventually disappeared. As a result, in many cases the local ecclesiastical administration weakened, while in others it simply ceased to exist. Consequently, many local Christians converted to Islam. Thus, almost twelve centuries later, when the army led by Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in the Holy Land, most of the local population was Muslim. Only Nablus and Jerusalem maintained their urban status throughout the entire period. In my opinion, it is not a coincidence that religious minorities survived in these two cities. To this day, Jerusalem is the see of a Greek Orthodox patriarchate, whereas Nablus is the centre of the Samaritan religion. Both of these cities include a relatively substantial community of its respective religion’s adherents. The fates of other cities varied. Some cities, such as Acre, were destroyed and later rebuilt,14 while others, such as Caesarea, declined until their eventual abandonment;15 some other cities, such as Sepphoris, became townships or villages.16 Non-muslim indigenous communities did not survive in these cities. However, indigenous communities did survive in places such as Safed, which was a village until the Crusader period, and Gaza, which declined before the Crusader period. Safed emerged as a city and Gaza reemerged during the Mamluk period. 10  Alan D. Crown, “The Byzantine and Muslim Period,” in The Samaritans, by Alan D. Crown (Tübingen: Mohr, 1989), 70–78 at 72–74; Pummer, The Samaritans, 139–41. 11  In Jewish sources Iraq is usually called Babylon.

12  Ze’ev Safrai, The Missing Century (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 73; Uzi Leibner, “The End of the Amoraic Period in the Land of Israel: Periodization, History, and Archaeo­logy,” Tarbiz 86 (2019): 575–610 at 576–80 [in Hebrew]. 13  Arnold H. M. Jones, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 278–81; Philip Zymaris, “Episcopacy,” in The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, ed. John A. McGuckin (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) 1: 222–24; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 354–55.

14  Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 128–29; Thomas Philipp, Acre: The Rise and the Fall of a Palestinian City 1730–1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 6–7. 15  Kenneth G. Holum, King Herod’s Dream: Caesarea on the Sea (New York: Norton, 1988), 237–41; Yael D. Arnon. Caesarea Maritima: The Late Periods (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 12. 16  Seth Ward, “Sepphoris in Sacred Topo­graphy,” in Galilee through the Centuries, ed. Eric M. Meyers (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 391–406 at 391–96.

4

Chapter 1

The Holy Land is the fertile region closest to al-Ḥijāz, namely the western region of the Arabian Peninsula. Therefore, it probably would have attracted many immigrants from the arid neighbouring peninsula. This is likely, because in normal circumstances, migrants tend to travel short distances.17 Such immigration also occurred during earlier periods but was intensified during the Early-Islamic period. However, although some Muslims did immigrate to the Holy Land, as well as to other adjacent regions, many others did not intend to settle in the nearest fertile region, but rather to conquer vast territories far beyond it. Nevertheless, the Muslim armies were of limited size, a fundamental datum that dictated many of their actions.18 Thus, they tended to conquer cities by agreement rather than by force, and did not leave behind large garrisons and large groups of settlers.19 Accordingly, most of the Muslims who participated in the conquest of the Holy Land did not settle there, but continued on to further destinations. For most of the Muslims who settled in the Holy Land were either Arabs who immigrated before the Muslim conquest and then converted to Islam, or Muslims who immigrated after the Holy Land’s conquest. Both groups constituted a tiny minority among a mostly Christian population. The residents of the Byzantine Empire, especially those who lived in urban settlements, considered the Arab conquerors to be inferior, barbaric, and even non-human or bestial creatures. If so, how did the Muslims manage to convert most of the Holy Land’s population? Many of them considered the Christian defeat by the Arabs to be a manifestation of God’s wrath. Sophronius, the last patriarch of Byzantine Jerusalem, wrote: The godless Saracens entered the holy city of Christ our Lord, Jerusalem, with the permission of God and in punishment for our negligence…. They took with them men, some by force, others by their own will, in order to clean that place and to build that cursed thing intended for their prayer, and which they call a mosque.20

A strong and vigorous sceptre to break the pride of all the barbarians, and especially of the Saracens who, on account of our sins, have now risen against us unexpectedly and ravage all with cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity.21

Maximus the Confessor, who died in 662, also described the miseries he experienced: For indeed, what is more dire than the evils which today afflict the world…. To see a barbarous people of the desert overrunning another’s lands as though they were their own; to see civilisation itself being ravaged by wild and untamed beasts whose form alone is human.22

17  Ernst G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Statistical Society 48, no. 2 (1885): 167–227 at 198.

18  Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 119; Hoyland, In God’s Path, 42; J. W. Jandora, “Developments in Islamic Warfare: The Early Conquests,” Studia Islamica 64 (1986): 101–13; Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests (Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2008), 57; Levtzion, “Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization,” 8. 19  Ehrlich, “From Church and Forum to Mosque and Sūq,” 298–301. 20  Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 63.

21  Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 69. 22  Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 78.



Introduction

5

Such texts manifest the notion held by Byzantine elites. However, I suggest that although Samaritans, Jews, and non-Chalcedonian Christians were happy to see the Byzantine authorities and supporters leave, they did not admire the Muslim conquerors. On the contrary, they had not struggled to preserve their religion and way of life under the hostile Byzantine regime merely to convert to Islam shortly afterwards. Moreover, the Muslims did not coerce people to convert; on the contrary, they allowed conquered populations to retain their properties and to continue practicing their religions.23 These people were defined as People of the Book (ahl al-Kitāb), and they became protected persons (ahl al-Ḍimma). These conditions should have enabled the continuation of the previous situation, meaning that the local Christian majority should have been preserved. Had the Christians retained their social status, many Muslims would probably have converted to Christianity or left the area. Yet, the opposite occurred. Most of the so-called “civilized” population eventually converted to Islam. The Holy Land’s transformation from an area populated mainly by Christians into a region whose population was predominantly Muslim was the result of two processes: immigration and conversion. I will demonstrate that while local Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan inhabitants emigrated from the Holy Land, Muslims, many of them Arab, immigrated to the area. Additionally, many of the non-Muslims who remained in their homes converted to Islam over the centuries, through various processes. The pace of Islamization of Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan communities varied, even within the same region. Christian communities managed to survive in larger numbers than Jewish and Samaritan ones, either because they were better organized or because of their superior numbers, or for both reasons. Jewish communities, which were on the verge of extinction, recovered following the arrival of Jews from various diaspora communities, whereas Christian immigration was limited, and Samaritan immigration was rare.24

Chrono­logical and Geo­graphical Scope

This book deals with the Islamization of the Holy Land’s population from 634 until 1800 ce. The area called the “Holy Land” includes the modern-day State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, as well as the western administrative governorates of the Kingdom of Jordan, from Irbid in the north to Karak in the south, and South Lebanon up to the Litanī� River (see Map 1 below). This termino­logy is useful because the region’s borders have changed in the course of the different periods. Byzantine Palestine included an extensive area now included in northern and southern Jordan but excluded important regions such as the southern district of Phoenicia. The Early Islamic period provinces of Jund Filasṭīn and Jund al-Urdunn included Phoenicia but excluded the southern districts of modern-day Israel and Jordan. At its zenith, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem also included areas beyond the scope of this study, to the north of Beirut. Be that as it may, the Crusader Kingdom was never called Palestine. 23  Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early-Muslim Empire, 32–34. 24  Pummer, The Samaritans, 159–60.

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Chapter 1

The names “Palestine” and “the Holy Land” were used interchangeably by Western medi­eval and early modern authors, who often referred to Biblical and classical borders. In the late nineteenth century, the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund published an extensive survey titled The Survey of Western Palestine. This voluminous work included modern-day Israel, excluding some significant regions such as the Negev desert. It also included the Palestinian territories, except the southern part of the Gaza Strip, and South Lebanon up to the Litanī� River.25 The title “Western Palestine” implies that the fund’s researchers considered the Jordan River’s eastern bank to be Eastern Palestine. Yet, today this division is irrelevant. The use of modern terms such as Palestine, Israel, or Jordan is, of course, inaccurate and anachronistic. Through the course of history, these toponyms referred to different areas than the ones they demarcate today. Therefore, “The Holy Land” seems the most adequate name for describing the area included in this study. The chrono­logical span of this book is divided into five main periods: Early Islamic (634–1099), Crusader (1099–1260), Ayyubid (1187–1250), Mamluk (1260–1517), and Early Ottoman (1517–1800). Before the seventh century, Islam did not exist, but Arabs lived in the area and Arab tribes migrated to the Holy Land and its vicinity during the centuries that preceded the Muslim conquest.26 These Arabs spoke Arabic, so there was a certain degree of knowledge of Arabic in the region prior to the Muslim conquest. I decided to limit the scope of this book to the end of the eighteenth century, since the events and innovations introduced during the following century caused dramatic changes in the Holy Land’s demo­graphy. These events included the growing involvement of foreign powers in Middle Eastern affairs, and especially in the Holy Land, since Napoleon’s invasion in 1798–1799, the vast Egyptian immigration during the nineteenth century’s first half,27 and eventually the increasing Jewish immigration beginning in the early nineteenth century, culminating in the immigration of the proto-Zionists who established new Jewish settlements from 1882 onward.28 Likewise, the great advancements made in naval transport made the Holy Land much more accessible.29 Presumably, the demo­graphic changes in the Holy Land during the nearly twelve hundred years covered in this volume (excluding the Crusader period) were primarily induced by local or regional forces. The events from 1800 onward were connected to global occurrences that were not necessarily related to the Middle Eastern reality. 25  Charles Warren and Claude Reignier Conder, The Survey of Western Palestine, 9 vols. (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1882). 26  Irfan Shahī�d, “Arab Christianity in Byzantine Palestine,” Aram 15 (2003): 227–37.

27  Reuven Aharoni and Gideon Kressel, “Egyptian Immigrants in the Bilad Al-Sham”, Jama’a 12 (2004): 201–48.

28  Arie Morgenstern, The Return to Jerusalem: The Jewish Resettlement of Israel 1800–1860 (Jerusalem: Shalem, 2007) [in Hebrew].

29  Ruth Kark, Jaffa: A City in Evolution 1799–1917 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1990), 220; Leila Tarazi-Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 61–84.



Introduction

7

This book focuses on five areas. In chapter 2: the Coastal Plain, including the Shefela (i.e., the foothills of the Judean mountains); chapter 3: Western, Lower, and Upper Galilee, Jabal ʿĀmil, the Decapolis region, and the Golan Heights; chapter 4: Samaria; chapter 5: Jerusalem and the Judean Mountains, including the region of Karak; and chapter 6: the Negev. I maintain that there are substantial differences between the nature of these regions’ Islamization and its pace. Even neighbouring regions, such as Lower and Upper Galilee, underwent independent and different processes. Therefore, a holistic view of the area requires researching them independently of one another.

Conversion and Islamization

Map 1: Map of the Holy Land including regional subdivisions (© Reuven Soffer).

According to Andrew Peacock, Islam­ ization includes aspects that extend beyond mere religious conversion.30 Peacock notes that scholars sometimes use “Islamization” as a synonym for “conversion to Islam.” Nonetheless, in the book he edited, “Islamization,” he does not enforce a single definition of Islamization, but expresses hope that the “wide variety of ways in which Islamization can be understood is reflected in the various essays collected here.”31 Such an attitude is laudable in a collection of essays. However, other authors have used their own definitions for Islamization, and in this book, I will use my own. 30  Peacock, “Introduction: Comparative Perspectives of Islamisation,” 1–8. 31  Peacock, “Introduction: Comparative Perspectives of Islamisation,” 9–10.

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Chapter 1

I define the process of Islamization on the basis of three criteria: first, religious conversion; second, Arabization, i.e., the replacement of vernacular languages with Arabic; and third, “Islamization of the Landscape.”32 Religious conversion is an obvious criterion for Islamization, but Arabization is not. There are millions of non-Muslims whose first language is Arabic, while most of the Muslims around the world do not speak Arabic. In some areas of Greater Syria, Iraq, and North Africa, communities became Arabicspeaking without converting to Islam. However, in most cases, wherever Arabic replaced earlier vernacular languages, many of their speakers adopted Islam. Therefore, conversion is the only condicio sine qua non for Islamization. However, even though the other two processes are not obligatory, they have both occurred in the Holy Land. The term “Islamization of the Landscape” was coined by Yehoshua Frenkel and Nimrod Luz. However, these scholars mostly dealt with the “Islamization of the Landscape” during the Mamluk period. They referred to the increasing numbers of Islamic elements in the topo­graphy of the Holy Land, such as mosques, shaykhs’ tombs, etc. in the local landscape during this period. Jacob Lassner studied different aspects of Islamization in Umayyad Jerusalem as well.33 I suggest a different perspective. Even though the Holy Land’s landscape became dotted with elements such as monumental mosques (some of which were formerly Crusader churches) and shaykhs’ tombs during the Mamluk period, these processes began much earlier. Likewise, Umayyad Jerusalem is a unique case, and so, basing a general theory about the Islamization of the Holy Land in the Umayyad period on it is problematic. I shall refer hereafter to Islamization of the Landscape in a much broader sense: the shifting of capital cities, the abolition of fora as well as of leisure facilities, and so on, throughout the centuries that followed the Muslim conquest. A fundamental study related to these issues is Hugh Kennedy’s 1985 ground-breaking article “ From Polis to Madina: Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria.”34 Kennedy, who does not deal with conversion in his article, clearly demonstrated that the Arab conquest of Syria was accompanied by extensive cultural changes in the urban sphere. I suggest that changes occurred in rural settlements as well, and that those changes played a vital role in the Islamization of the rural segments of the Holy Land’s population.

The Ocean and the Islands

Between 634, when the first Muslim forces arrived in the Holy Land, and 1800, the religious profile of the local population altered dramatically. What had been an area with a Christian majority and substantial Jewish and Samaritan minorities became home to 32  Yehoshua Frenkel, “Baybars and the Sacred Geo­graphy of Bilād al-Shām: a Chapter in the Islamization of Syria’s Landscape,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 25 (2001): 153–70; Luz, “Aspects of Islamization.” 33  Jacob Lassner, Medi­eval Jerusalem: Forging an Islamic City in Spaces Sacred to Christians and Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60–80. 34  Kennedy, “From Polis to Madina.”



Introduction

9

an overwhelmingly Muslim majority, with several Christian communities, a few Jewish communities, and a handful of Samaritans.35 Yet, although it is undeniable that by the start of the Ottoman period a large majority of the Holy Land’s population was Muslim, a close examination clearly reveals that there were substantial regional variations in the degree of conversion, and that the various religious communities converted at different times and through diverse processes. Moreover, while it is true that over the centuries most of the region’s population converted to Islam, some religious communities did manage to survive. What was it that enabled those communities’ survival? I suggest that the durability of communities was largely dependent on the survival of religious administration. Religious administration, especially Christian, was usually an urban institution. As mentioned above, almost none of the Holy Land’s cities were continuously inhabited as cities between the Muslim conquest and 1800. I suggest that the collapse of cities provoked a chain reaction that led to the abolition of bishoprics, and eventually to the conversion to Islam of most of the region’s population. In Jerusalem, the surviving local patriarchate supported the local Christian community of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which still exists today.36 Other Christian enclaves survived around Nazareth and in the southern district of modern-day Jordan.37

Sources

“Why, in the abundant medi­eval Arabic literature devoted to the religious community of Islam, is there so little information on conversion to that religion?”38 Bulliet’s question faithfully describes one of the main obstacles in writing about medi­eval conversions in the Islamic world. The paucity of conversion stories is also typical of the Holy Land. Sources regarding conversion are scarce. There are narratives about tribal conversions, but the grassroots conversions of rural and urban communities were usually long processes, which, in many cases, were only mentioned in passing by contemporaries. And since most of the Holy Land’s residents lived in cities and villages, documentation of their conversion process is very poor. Most existing documents are from the Crusader period or later. Some of them, such as waqfiyyat, may indicate the religious profile of a certain population. Likewise, pilgrim accounts occasionally reference details such as the ethnicity and religion of a region’s inhabitants. However, narrative sources about the history of a certain region are rare. A contemporary chronicle, such as the Chronicle of Zuqnī�n, which describes the hardships which befell a Christian community in northern Syria in detail, does not exist in the Holy Land.39 The most similar source, a Samaritan 35  Schick, The Christian Communities, 12–13.

36  Pacini, “Socio-Political and Community Dynamics,” 279.

37  Pacini, “Socio-Political and Community Dynamics,” 272; Marcus Milwright, The Fortress of the Raven (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 51. 38  Richard W. Bulliet, “Conversion Stories in Early Islam,” in Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi J. Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 123–33. 39  The Chronicle of Zuqnīn, trans. Harrak.

10

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chronicle published by Milka Levy-Rubin to be discussed below, reused earlier materials, but was composed five hundred years after the events it describes.40 According to Levy-Rubin, based on comparison with other sources, the author used materials of a contemporary well-acquainted individual, who, generally speaking, should be trusted as a reliable source.41 A similar attitude should be applied to al-Ashrafānī�’s book ʿUmdat al-ʿArāfīn,42 a seventeenth-century history book which chronicles the Druze history since its inception in the eleventh century. It includes many otherwise unknown details about the dawn of this religion’s history. This information seems to be reasonable; namely, it provides a logical explanation to the situation in al-Ashrafānī�’s days, and it does not contradict other reliable sources. However, since in many cases it is a single information source, it should be used cautiously. Since 1997, Moshe Sharon has published a corpus of Arabic inscriptions from modern day Israel and Palestinian territories up to the letter “J” (including the first Jerusalem volume).43 Nonetheless, as far as this research is concerned, the information included in such a corpus about Islamization is very sporadic. Archaeo­logical findings provide further information on conversion, such as the existence of mosques and other Muslim structures, which will be discussed below. Growing evidence suggests that an ever-increasing part of the local population used mosques, which indicates that the Islamization process advanced during the Early-Islamic period. Previous Studies

Many studies during the last decades have dealt with conversions in the Holy Land, and elsewhere in the Middle East, during the Muslim rule. Yet, these works were mostly confined either to a single religion, an isolated region, or a specific period. This review is mostly chrono­logical; however, when a scholar has published more than one study on a particular subject, I have reviewed all their relevant works before returning to the chrono­logical order. Up to the mid–1980s, the dominant approach was that Islamization equalled decline. In 1976 Moshe Sharon published an extensive article titled “Process of Destruction and Nomadization in Eretz Israel under Islamic Rule.” This article’s main argument was that the Muslim rule’s neglect, especially under the Abbasid dynasty, allowed for the infiltration of nomad tribes, who eventually destroyed local agriculture. According to Sharon, these events accelerated the decay and destruction of the Holy Land’s non-Muslim communities.44 The idea that the Holy Land’s population decreased as a result of nomadic incursions was popular during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1984, the Israeli journal Cathedra published a discussion between three leading researchers entitled: “The Pen40  The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin.

41  The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin, 10–19. 42  al-Ashrafānī�, ʿUmdat al-ʿArāfīn, ed. ʿAzām.

43  CIAP.

44  Sharon, “Process of Destruction and Nomadization,” 24–25.



Introduction

11

etration of Arab Tribes in Eretz Israel during the First Century of Islam,” suggesting that this migration had a significant negative effect on the region’s prosperity.45 In 1979, Richard Bulliet published a seminal book about conversion to Islam during the medi­eval period.46 Aside from Bulliet’s quantitative methodo­logy, he notes that the Islamization of a region’s population had particular characteristics. Therefore, the pace of Islamization, and the methods by which the population of a specific area becomes Islamized, vary between regions. However, the chapter in Bulliet’s book dedicated to the Islamization of Syria is too general and does not allow us to understand the processes the region underwent during the medi­eval period. Also in 1979, Bulliet was among the contributors to a volume edited by Nehemia Levtzion.47 The book deals with the conversion to Islam of the population in areas from western Africa to China and Indonesia. The wide geo­graphical range of this book, and the different methods used to spread the Islamic message, are reflected in Levtzion’s introduction, “Toward a Comparative Study of Islamisation.” Levtzion’s book did not include an independent study concerning the Islamization of Syria and the Holy Land.48 Levtzion and Bulliet also contributed to a volume called Conversion and Continuity, published in 1990 following a conference in Toronto. This volume deals with the survival of various Christian communities across the Muslim world between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries. Bulliet examines the scarcity of conversion stories in medi­eval Islam, whereas Levtzion’s contribution highlighted the survival of Christian communities in Syria and Palestine, and the role played by nomads in the conversion process.49 This volume also includes an article by Hadia Dajani-Shakeel about the Holy Land’s population during the Crusader period. However, unlike other articles in the book, this article does not discuss the conversion or survival of communities, but rather the relations between Franks and the Christian indigenous population.50 In 1980, Shelomo Dov Goitein, the renowned researcher of the Cairo Geniza, published a compendium of Hebrew articles entitled Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times.51 This collection includes many articles that shed light on Jewish com45  Multiple contributors, “Discussion: The Penetration of Arab Tribes in Eretz Israel during the First Century of Islam,” Cathedra 32 (1984): 51–74 [in Hebrew]. 46  Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medi­eval Period.

47  Nehemia Levtzion, Conversion to Islam (New York: Holmes and Meyers, 1979).

48  Bulliet, “Conversion Stories in Early Islam,” 123–34; Levtzion, “Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization.”

49  Nehemia Levtzion, “Conversion to Islam in Syria and Palestine and the Survival of Christian Com­munities,” in Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi J. Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 289–311.

50  Hadia Dajani-Shakeel, “Natives and Franks in Palestine: Perceptions and Interaction,” in Indi­ genous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi J. Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 161–84. 51  Shelomo D. Goitein, Palestinian Jewry in Early Islamic and Crusader Times (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1980) [in Hebrew].

12

Chapter 1

munal life in the Early Islamic and Crusader periods, but only sporadically refers to conversion.52 In 1983, Moshe Gil published a three-volume study of Palestine’s history in the Early Islamic period, based on Cairo Geniza documents.53 The text volume of this monumental research was translated into English in 1992. Gil explicitly suggested that the local population of Palestine suffered immensely during the Muslim conquest, and that many villages were destroyed and uprooted. He also suggested that many synagogues and churches were destroyed during the conquest.54 As stated above, Hugh Kennedy’s article “From Polis to Madina” does not deal directly with conversion. Nevertheless, it changed the perception that the Muslim conquest provoked dramatic and swift changes in Syria’s urban sphere. Kennedy’s thennovel approach, that the changes were gradual and extended over a long period, beginning even before the Muslim conquests, mostly addresses the physical manifestations of the cultural changes in Syrian cities. This attitude also had substantial implications on the cultural and religious aspects of urban life during the Early Islamic period.55 There are important differences between the studies published before Kennedy’s “From Polis to Madina” and those published afterward. While earlier studies tended to ascribe a major role to the physical destruction that allegedly accompanied the Muslim conquest and emphasized the role of nomads in the Islamization processes, later studies minimized the destruction’s extent during the conquest and described Islamization as a gradual process. Sidney Griffith and Robert Schick published extensive research concerning the fate of the Christian communities of Palestine under Muslim rule. Griffith examined the cultural background of Islamization and dedicated an important part of his studies to the Arabization of Christians in the Fertile Crescent. Schick examined the survival of Christian communities in Palestine during the first centuries of Muslim rule. Milka Levy-Rubin published extensive studies about the conversion and survival of non-Muslim communities during the Early Islamic period. She summarizes her view in her book Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire. Levy-Rubin’s opinion is that the conquered land’s population played a key role in the establishment of reciprocal relations with the Muslim elites. Levy-Rubin also highlights the economic hardships and severe restrictions imposed on non-Muslim communities, particularly on the Samaritans during the second half of the ninth century, and especially during the rule of Aḥmad ibn Tūlūn (868–884).56 52  Goitein, Palestinian Jewry, 242.

53  Moshe Gil, Palestine during the First Muslim Period (634–1099), 3 vols. (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1983) [in Hebrew]. 54  Gil, A History of Palestine, 61.

55  Kennedy, “From Polis to Madina.”

56  Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque; Schick, The Christian Communities; Milka Levy-Rubin, “New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period—The Case of Samaria,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 23 (2000): 257–76; Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early-Muslim Empire; The Continuatio of the Samaritan



Introduction

13

An article by Clive Foss about Syria during the transition between the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods features regions that are beyond the scope of this study.57 Alan Walmsley’s book provides an excellent and useful summary of the archaeo­ logical excavations and offers new attitudes for the study of the geo­graphical history of the region during the Early Islamic period.58 In 1998, Ronnie Ellenblum argued that the Franks settled in the Western Galilee region and the southern parts of Samaria because these areas were populated by indigenous Christians. Eastern Galilee and the central and northern districts of Samaria were originally settled by Jews and Samaritans, who suffered under Roman–Byzantine rule and were more vulnerable than Christians. Consequently, these regions’ populations converted earlier, and they were home to a larger percentage of Muslims.59 However, Ellenblum’s book dealt with Frankish rural settlement, not with Islamization, and hence his research on this subject is far from exhaustive. He provides two case studies, suggesting that the reality he describes in these regions indicates that Franks settled in areas populated by indigenous Christians. However, a thorough re-examination of relevant data indicates that while the population of these regions included a significant Muslim segment during the Crusader period, there is little evidence of significant indigenous Christian presence in them. In a later book, Ellenblum suggests that many non-Muslim communities suddenly collapsed during the eleventh century; Ellenblum maintains that ethnic and non-Muslim communities suffered more than their Muslim neighbours during the severe hardships of the tenth and eleventh centuries, including two major earthquakes and many years of drought. These disasters triggered emigration and destabilized regimes and existing social structures, culminating in civil disorder, political chaos, and military invasions. In a later essay, Ellenblum repeats his view about the linkage between climatic calamities and conversion to Islam. He maintains that climatic disasters, such as relatively long-lasting famines and earthquakes, stirred up internal unrest, leading to popular and governmental persecutions of non-Muslim communities. Ellenblum goes on to emphasize the role played by migration in the conversion of indigenous peoples, positing that these sorts of occurrences fostered conversion among many of those who chose to remain in the area despite the hardships.60 Gideon Avni surveyed the Byzantine-Muslim transition of Palestine through an archaeo­logical prism. Avni’s book is based on a very detailed and up-to-date archaeo­ logical database. He also observed regional variations between the different areas he Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin, 95, 102.

57  Clive Foss, “Syria in Transition, A.D. 550–750: An Archaeo­logical Approach,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997): 189–269. 58  Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria.

59  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 213–76, 282–87.

60  Ronnie Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7–11, 163–95, 228–48; Ellenblum, “Demo­g raphic, Geo­g raphy and Accelerated Islamization in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Religious Conversion: History, Experience and Meaning, ed. Ira Katznelson and Miri Rubin (London: Routledge, 2016), 66–80.

14

Chapter 1

researched.61 Although Avni’s book does not deal directly with Islamization, the author does dedicate a chapter to the topic. Avni suggests that Christians remained the largest religious community in the Holy Land until the end of the Crusader period. Although literary sources indicate that minorities were persecuted and harassed both by the government and by Muslim grassroots activity, Avni believes archaeo­logical discoveries may indicate that Muslims and non-Muslims co-existed during the Early Islamic period.62 Thomas Carlson scrutinizes Syria’s Islamization on the basis of ten geo­graphic texts dating from the Early Islamic period to the Ottoman conquest.63 Benjamin Z. Kedar wrote an extensive article about the Muslims under Frankish rule. Kedar presents various strategies used by the Muslims to cope with the Frankish challenge.64 Although Kedar deals with a limited period of time, during which Islamization was probably halted, his observations on the mechanisms employed by the Muslims during this period are highly relevant for this study. Kedar also wrote articles about the Samaritans and the Jews during the Crusader period, in which he describes the contemporary Samaritan population and its relatively respectful relationship with the Frankish authorities.65 Nimrod Luz published an important article about the role played by Sufis in the Islamization of the hinterland of Jerusalem. He notes that Sufis settled in the rural hinterland of Jerusalem and changed its cultural landscape by building various Muslim religious buildings in the countryside. These activities attracted Muslims to settle in areas previously inhabited by Christians. Luz emphasizes that almost no Christian religious remains, such as churches destroyed or converted into mosques, survive in this area. However, he suggests that the actions ascribed to Sufis brought about the Islamization of many of the rural area’s inhabitants. Moreover, one of Luz’s case studies demonstrates that when a Sufi settled in a Christian village, the local population converted to Islam.66 In his article, Reuven Amitai includes several important observations about the Islamization of the southern Levant. Amitai notes that parts of the region remained predominantly Christian up until the Crusader period, and that Islamization was presumably halted during the Crusader period, with the significant leap in the rate of conversion probably occurring during the Mamluk period. He asserted that many Oriental Christians left the country following the Mamluk conquest, and that substantial “Syrian” communities were established in Latin Cyprus.67 However, Amitai’s case study deals with a rather limited area. Therefore, it would be prudent to examine whether similar occurrences took place elsewhere in the Holy Land. 61  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 351–52.

62  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 331–37.

63  Thomas Carlson, “Contours of Conversion: The Geo­graphy of Islamization in Syria,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 135 (2015): 791–816.

64  Benjamin Z. Kedar, “The Subjected Muslims in the Frankish Levant,” in Muslims under Latin Rule, ed. James M. Powell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135–74. 65  Kedar, “Samaritan History: The Frankish Period.”

66  Luz, “Aspects of Islamization”.

67  Amitai, “Islamisation in the Southern Levant,” 158–62.



Introduction

15

A sub-discussion about Islamization is the point at which most of the Holy Land population had converted to Islam. According to Joshua Prawer, when the First Crusade arrived in Palestine “the overwhelming majority of the native population of Syria and Palestine was already Moslem.”68 Moshe Gil suggests that on the eve of the First Crusade, most of the rural Palestinian population was still Christian.69 Ronnie Ellenblum and Avni also believe that the majority of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem’s indigenous population was Christian.70 Yet the statistical data to support such theories does not exist, and as a matter of fact, these theories are based on random literary descriptions of low credibility and on archaeo­logical excavations. These descriptions cannot provide a solid basis for such far-reaching conclusions about the ratio of Christians to Muslims during these periods. For example, if the region of Jerusalem still had a substantial Christian population in 1100, it does not necessarily imply that this was the case in the coastal plain as well. Furthermore, there is no indication of the size of the population in each region. Therefore, any attempt to ascertain whether Muslims were the largest segment of the Holy Land’s population in 1100 seems to be mere speculation. Yet, about five centuries later, non-Muslims were a tiny minority within a relatively large Muslim population.71 Of course, the Franks did not foster Islamization during the first Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187). The second Latin Kingdom (1191–1291) occasionally controlled areas beyond the Levant coastal plain. However, other regions were first dominated by the Ayyubids (until ca. 1250), and later by the Mamluks. Subsequently, the most intensive Islamization processes in the Holy Land probably occurred during the Mamluk period.

Urbanization and De-urbanization—Physical Aspects Umayyad and Abbasid Periods

During the first century of their rule, the Muslim authorities moved the occupied districts’ capital cities. For example, Damascus replaced Antioch as the capital city of al-Shām, Ramla became the capital of Jund Filasṭīn, replacing Caesarea, the capital of Palestina Prima, and Cordoba became the capital of al-Andalus instead of Toledo. These changes were most likely the outcome of a premeditated policy. The rearrangement of the capital cities must have provoked a large-scale reshuffling of provincial elites. People whose families enjoyed generations of close ties with local, provincial, or even imperial authorities now found themselves in decaying cities far from the decisionmaking centres and alienated by the new authorities. The new regional capitals were either established in pre-existing cities of secondary importance, such as Tiberias, or in newly founded cities, such as Ramla. This situation probably led to the emigration 68  Joshua Prawer, The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 52.

69  Gil, A History of Palestine, 170–72.

70  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 20–30; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 331–37.

71  Cohen and Lewis, Population and Revenues, 19–41; Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­ graphy, 52–53; Carlson, “Contours of Conversion,” 791.

16

Chapter 1

of Byzantine-period elites from regional capitals, either to Christian-dominated areas or to the new administrative centres.72 For example, although it seems that Caesarea, Palestina Prima’s capital city, was not destroyed in the Muslim conquest, its built-up area contracted and its population diminished drastically during the Early Islamic period.73 I suggest that the discernible decline of Caesarea was to a certain degree caused by the emigration of local elites. On the other hand, a city like Ramla, the capital city of Jund Filasṭī�n, established by the Muslims, thrived during the same period.74 A similar occurrence happened in Palestina Secunda, where the regional capital was moved from Scythopolis to Tiberias, while the province of Palestina Tertia was altogether abolished.75 Ramla’s population included Muslim immigrants and indigenous inhabitants from nearby localities who wanted to enjoy the opportunities offered by the new city. Tiberias was a secondary city in Palestina Secunda, and as such, already had resident elites. However, Muslim immigrants, who probably settled there at the authorities’ initiative, replaced the local elites who left the area. Byzantine regional elites included people who worked in the regional administration as well as bureaucratic officials, military personnel, clergy, landowners, and traders. Their emigration had a devastating effect on the welfare of those who remained behind. However, there were probably differences between emigration from central cities and emigration from secondary ones. Secondary cities had their own elites, but most of these elites were of secondary importance in the regional hierarchy. Palestina Prima had two major cities: Caesarea and Jerusalem. While Caesarea was home to the province’s administration, Jerusalem was a patriarchal see from the mid-fifth century onward, upgrading its regional status.76 Nonetheless, regional centres were not the only ones to decline during the Early Islamic period. Many secondary cities were also affected. The coastal cities, for example, seem to have declined during the Umayyad period. According to al-Balādhurī�, Muʿāwiya, the first Umayyad caliph, found the coastal cities in ruins, and settled them with people of diverse origins.77 However, the archaeo­logical evidence does not support al-Balādhurī�’s description. Excavations have not revealed substantial indications that the Palestinian coastal cities were severely damaged in the Muslim conquest. Moreover, even after these supposed settlement activities during the Umayyad period, the extent of which is vague, the coastal cities are known to have sharply declined during the Abba72  Milka Levy-Rubin, “Changes in the Settlement Pattern of Palestine Following the Arab Conquest,” in Shaping the Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims in an Age of Transition 400–800 C.E., ed. Kenneth G. Holum and Hayim Lapin (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2011), 155–72.

73  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 49; Donald Whitcomb, “Qaysāriyah as an Early Islamic Settlement,” in Shaping the Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims in an Age of Transition 400–800 C.E., ed. Kenneth G. Holum and Hayim Lapin (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2011), 65–84 at 79–82; CIAP 2: 198–99. 74  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition,159–83.

75  Katia Cytryn-Silverman, “The Umayyad Mosque of Tiberias,” Muqarnas 26 (2009): 37–61.

76  Rauf Abu Jaber, “Arab Christians in Jerusalem,” Islamic Studies 40 (2001): 587–600 at 589. 77  Al-Balādhurī�, Futūḥ al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 128.



Introduction

17

sid period (750–878).78 This decline is reflected in the contraction of the built-up area and the inferior building quality of dwellings, as well as of public facilities.79 Other cities, such as Jarash and Baysān, continued to exist, yet their size and living standards were inferior to those of earlier periods, as well.80 Perhaps the most visible physical remains of the Muslims’ urbanization activities are the mosques built in city centres. Construction of a large and impressive mosque in the centre of a city is a clear example of landscape Islamization. Yet, the construction of a mosque in the city’s centre did not necessarily reflect the conversion of its population. The construction was the result of the government’s motivation to manifest the supremacy of Islam. For example, Saint Willibald, who visited Tiberias while its Umayyad mosque was under construction, recorded the existence of many churches and synagogues in the city.81 Likewise, about three centuries after the construction of the monumental Dome of the Rock and al- Aqṣā Mosque in Jerusalem, al-Muqaddasī� noted that the city of Jerusalem was mainly inhabited by Christians.82 Namely, no matter how splendid the mosque built by the government was, it did not necessarily reflect the local population’s religion, nor did it instigate its conversion to Islam. Perhaps, in a certain way, the opposite is correct; namely, humble mosques built by local inhabitants imply that their builders were determined to have a place to pray together. Consequently, the construction of a mosque in a rural settlement, where the government’s interest in manifesting the superiority of Islam was limited, probably suggests that at least some of the local residents had converted to Islam.83 Many of the first mosques were built near pre-existing churches, a phenomenon discussed in many studies, including a recently published book by Mattia Guidetti, who believes this phenomenon reflected Muslim veneration of the holy sites of earlier religions.84 This is problematic, because the contiguity of mosques and churches was a widespread phenomenon, starting with the earliest stages of Muslim conquests. In other words, it seems doubtful that Muslim authorities in Zaragoza, for example, found the local Christian saints attractive enough to become an integral part of their religious life.85 Likewise, does the proximity of a mosque to the synagogue of the remote Jewish village discovered in Khirbat Susiya indicate that Muslims venerated local Jewish saints?86 78  Elad, “The Coastal Cities,” 151–53.

79  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 49.

80  Achim Lichtenberger and Rubin Raja, “Middle Islamic Jerash through the Lens of the Longue Durée,” in Middle Islamic Jerash, ed. Achim Lichtenberger and Rubina Raja (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 5–36 at 5–9; Mazar, Excavations at Tel Beth-Shean, 1: 42–44; CIAP 2: 198–222. 81  Tobler, Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae, 26.

82  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 166–67.

83  Ehrlich, “From Church and Forum to Mosque and Sūq,” 303–4; Mattia Guidetti, In the Shadow of the Church: The Building of Mosques in Early Medi­eval Syria (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 67–70.

84  Guidetti, In the Shadow of the Church, 67–70.

85  José Antonio Hernández Vera, “La mezquita aljama de Zaragoza a la luz de la información arqueológica,” Ilu. Revista de ciencias de las religiones, Anejos 10 (2004): 65–91 at 75.

86  Steven H. Werlin, Ancient Synagogues of Southern Palestine, 300–800 C.E.: Living on the Edge

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Chapter 1

Since the sources on this matter are not explicit, it is impossible to discard such an explanation. In some cases, it definitely could have been the reason for the proximity or the replacement of the church by a mosque, as occurred in Damascus. However, Damascus’ cathedral was dedicated to Saint John, who was also venerated by the Muslims.87 Therefore, the Muslim motivation to take over or to build a mosque nearby was evident. Nevertheless, in most places the local saints were probably not venerated by the Muslims or were unknown to them. In such places, the Muslims would have had no apparent reason to build their mosque near the cathedral. Moreover, as noted by Guidetti, many of the Muslims were newly converted from Christianity. In these circumstances, it would have been advisable to distance the new converts from their former houses of prayer. The converts’ family members and friends still prayed in the area, and socialization with such people could have brought with it the risk of re-conversion to Christianity. It seems unlikely to base a general assumption regarding the Muslim mosque-building policy on the exceptional cases of Christian figures venerated by Islam. Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Saint John are mentioned in the Qurān and are also venerated by Muslims. However, those few examples do not give any indication that the Muslims venerated local saints across their vast empire, or that they gave the local cults any legitimacy. Therefore, I suggest that mosque–church contiguity was the result of planning constraints rather than religious motivations. Specifically, I propose that in many cases, mosques were built near the cathedral as a result of low land availability.88 When the Muslims conquered the region, the cities they found had already stood for centuries. The last city established by the Romans in Syria was Philippopolis (est. 244 ce).89 Consequently, many of the city centres were densely built. Since the Muslims did not usually destroy churches in conquered cities, the only suitable land for construction of a central mosque was, in many cases, the forum, where many cathedrals were built.90 The Muslims fostered trade, and the decrease of commercial activity was not in their best interests. Therefore, the abolition of the fora, which impacted the cities’ commercial activity, demanded substantial alteration of the cities’ urban plans. For example, in Jerusalem, where a mosque was built in the forum adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Muslims divided the nearby Cardo into three parallel streets.91 As a result, the number of shops in the Cardo was tripled. The same phenomenon has been observed in Aleppo, as well.92 Yet, unlike the majestic, wide cardines, these streets were narrow and functional. They enabled trade, but not meetings or socialization. Likewise, the Muslims (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 180.

87  Nancy Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92–97; Guidetti, In the Shadow of the Church, 68. 88  Ehrlich, “From Church and Forum to Mosque and Sūq,” 302–4.

89  Arthur Segal, “Roman Cities in the Province of Arabia,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 40 (1981): 111. 90  CIAP 2: 207–14.

91  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 123.

92  Ross Burns, Aleppo: A History (London: Routledge, 2017), 81–82.



Introduction

19

built a new market in Baysān, the former capital of Palestina Secunda.93 The construction of Baysān’s market during the last years of the Umayyad dynasty reflects Caliph Hishām’s decision to invest in economic infrastructure projects in order to increase future revenues. I suggest that in many cases, the transformation of various cities’ landscapes and street plans were not only culturally inspired, but purely practical, as well. Many cities in and near the Jordan Rift Valley were destroyed by a strong earthquake in January 749.94 Yet, although the damage inflicted by the earthquake on neighbouring cities, such as Tiberias and Hippos, should have been roughly equivalent, Tiberias reached its zenith during the Abbasid period, beginning in 750, whereas Hippos became a neglected hamlet.95 The Abbasid caliphate decided to lavishly invest in Tiberias, not in the reconstruction of Hippos. In this situation, the residents of Hippos who survived the earthquake had two gloomy options: emigrating to one of the nearby cities, such as Tiberias or Damascus, or remaining in a ruined city with no means of rebuilding even the most basic infrastructure. In other cities, such as Baysān and Jarash, the Abbasid authorities invested a limited amount of money so that they could continue to exist as urban centres, yet only as pale shadows of their classical past.96 Yet, not only cities affected by the earthquake declined during the Abbasid period. Even inland cities, which were apparently less affected by the earthquake than those in the Jordan Valley, such as Sepphoris and Bayt Jibrī�n, were in decline.97 In other words, the decline of most of the Holy Land’s cities indicates that de-urbanization was not the result of natural disasters, but of a premeditated policy, or at least collateral damage caused by the Abbasid policy. The Abbasid policy in the region had three main pillars: first, the Abbasids favoured Iraq over Syria;98 second, the Arab residents of Syria were often closely associated with the Umayyad dynasty, the Abbasids’ nemesis; and third, the Abbasids fostered commerce with eastern regions such as China and India.99 Contemporary Holy Land city dwellers would probably have been convinced that Abbasid policy towards Syria would not change. Despite the damage inflicted by the earthquake, recovery was possible in most cases, and many people did manage to recuperate from its devastating results. However, the Abbasid policy, based on the above rationales, was seemingly permanent. Therefore, 93  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 62–64.

94  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 75.

95  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 71–86, 93.

96  Lichtenberger and Raja, “Middle Islamic Jerash,” 5–9; Mazar, Excavations at Tel Beth-Shean, 1: 42–44; CIAP 2: 198–222. 97  CIAP 2: 120–21; Ward, “Sepphoris in Sacred Topo­graphy.” 98  Elad, “The Coastal Cities,” 152.

99  Hamidreza Pashazanous, Majid Montazer-Zohouri, and Talia Ahmadi, “Sea Trade between Iran and China in the Persian Gulf Based on the Excavations of Sī�rāf City,” Indian Journal of Economics and Development 2, no. 2 (2014): 6–13 at 10–12; Aḥmed A. el-Ashker and Rodney Wilson, Islamic Economics: A Short History (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 155; Brigitta Hårdh, “Oriental–Scandinavian Contacts on the Volga as Manifested by Silver Rings and Weight Systems,” in Silver Economy in the Viking Age, ed. James Graham-Campbell and Gareth Williams (Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2007), 135–47; Christophe Picard, The Sea of the Caliphs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2018), 98–110.

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even the people who initially remained in their homes found it increasingly difficult to stay once the Abbasid policy was enforced. The physical manifestation of Abbasid policy was the decay of pre-existing cities and the establishment of the Holy Land’s coastal plain as a border dotted with smallto medium-sized cities, such as Caesarea and Arsūf, as well as many forts known as ribāṭāṭ (sing. ribāṭ).100 As noted by Kennedy, these cities lost their classical aspect: their churches were either in a state of decay or were destroyed completely, their main streets became winding alleys, and most of their classical period civic buildings ceased to exist as such. A significant outcome of the decline of many Byzantine period cities throughout the region was the collapse of the ecclesiastical administration. The decline or disappearance of many cities prompted the departure of the local ecclesiastic administration. The Christian communities’ economic system relied on revenue gained from endowments, contributions, tithes, and church property. Local communities may also have enjoyed donations from the occasional pilgrim, but it seems that these economic means were not sufficient to cope with the increasing needs. Moreover, the Christian communities suffered from cutting of imperial support, emigration of the local Christian society’s upper socio-economic echelons, the decline in pilgrimage, and the heavy land taxes. In addition, natural disasters, such as earthquakes, caused the Christian communities to deteriorate even further. Consequently, it became increasingly difficult to support communal welfare networks, maintain decaying buildings, rebuild ruined or otherwise unusable ones, and support the local clergy. In this gloomy reality, only those who were unable to liquidate their property who did not have a realistic prospect of continuing their lives elsewhere remained in the decaying cities. Rural communities, usually dependent on the urban religious institutions, became even more vulnerable. There is scant information about the rural population during these periods. However, villagers would have had even fewer options than their urban counterparts. The impoverishment of nearby cities triggered a steep decline in demand for the commodities that villagers sold there; their assets were usually less lucrative than urban properties, and they lacked the basic education and skills that may have facilitated their absorption in other regions. Moreover, resuming their agricultural work in the destination settlements was almost impossible since they could not afford to purchase new property in those places. These phenomena explain the decrease in the number of rural settlements in the Holy Land, and the contraction of the areas of surviving settlements.101 Likewise, while during the Early Islamic period mosques mushroomed across the Holy Land’s rural areas, there are few churches and synagogues known to be built in these areas. This suggests that many local inhabitants emigrated after the Muslim conquest, and that the remaining inhabitants converted to Islam rather quickly. Although many cities declined during the Early Islamic period, others thrived. As Avni observed, despite the gradual decline of many of the Holy Land’s cities, some cit100  Jörg Feuchter, “Ribāṭ”, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. Emad el-Din Shahin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2: 343–45; Elad, “The Coastal Cities,” 146–67. 101  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 363–64.



Introduction

21

ies, such as Ramla and Tiberias, became important centres and attracted newcomers, Muslims and members of other religions. However, the local non-Muslim communities in these cities had complex relationships with the neighbouring rural communities. For example, Ramla was established near Lydda. The new Muslim city probably absorbed many of Lydda’s Christian residents and inherited its hinterland, whose population was mainly Christian. Throughout the period, the Christian community of Ramla lost ground to the new Muslim community. The majority of immigrants who settled in Ramla and its vicinity were Muslims, and an increasing number of Christians either converted to Islam or emigrated from the region. As a result, although there were Christians in the city and its environs when the Muslims occupied the area, by the time the Crusaders conquered the land, a large part of the region’s population was Muslim.102 For example, al-Muqaddasī� wrote that the name of one of the gates of Ramla was “The Gate of the Mosque of ʿAnnaba,” implying that the residents of ʿAnnaba were Muslims.”103 There are several indications that the rural population of the region of Ramla/​Lydda included a significant percentage of Muslims during the Crusader period. Seawulf, one of the first pilgrims to arrive in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1102–1103), wrote that Muslims assaulted Christian pilgrims all along the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem.104 Willibrand of Oldenburg (1212) noted that the inhabitants of Bayt Nūba were Muslims.105 On the other hand, although it is possible that indigenous Christian villagers lived in the area during the Crusader period, the evidence that could support this option is scarce. These data indicate that although some of the region’s Christian communities may have survived until the Crusader period, substantial evidence suggests that when the Crusaders conquered the area, most of Ramla’s hinterland was Muslim. Tulunid and Fatimid Periods

The short Tulunid period (884–905) constitutes an important landmark in the Holy Land’s urban history. After nearly 150 years of Abbasid Asian orientation, the Tulunids resumed naval activities in the eastern Mediterranean area. Thus, Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn renovated the port of Acre and built a fortress in Jaffa.106 This change of policy had a significant effect on the urban network of the Holy Land. I suggest that this was a decisive step toward the Islamization of the Holy Land. The decline of the inland cities caused the enfeeblement of inland non-Muslim communities. The coastal cities, which began to recover during this period, became home to relatively large Muslim communities, especially during the Fatimid period. It seems, however, that the reconstruction and fortifica102  Itamar Taxel, “Rural Settlement Processes in Central Palestine, ca. 640–800 c.e.: The RamlaYavneh Region as a Case Study,” Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research 369 (2013): 157–99 at 189–93. 103  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 165.

104  Peregrinationes tres, ed. Huygens, 63–64.

105  Peregrinatores medii aevi quatuor, ed. Laurent, 184.

106  CIAP 1: 24; al-Balawī�, Sirat Aḥmad ibn Tūlūn, 351; Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 163; The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin, 104.

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tion projects carried out by Ibn-Tūlūn were primarily of a military nature rather than a commercial one. While Mediterranean trade during the Tulunid period was still rather minor, Ibn Tūlūn had a fleet, which was docked at Acre, whose port was reconstructed on his orders.107 Although these infrastructure projects were probably motivated by military objectives, they had a long-range impact on the Holy Land’s urban network. A major change to the coastal cities occurred during the Fatimid period (969–1099). During this period, the coastal cities recovered, and some of them, such as Ascalon and Tyre, became important cities.108 The Persian traveller Nāsir-i Khusraw reports that the city of Acre had a rectangular shape and its mosque was in the city’s centre.109 This plan might indicate that Ibn Tūlūn not only renovated the city’s port, but also that he, or the Fatimids, reconstructed the entire city according to a plan which resembles earlier cities, such as the Umayyad city of ʿAnjār.110 The Fatimids also fostered Shi’ite immigration to the coastal cities, as well as to Tiberias and its surroundings.111 Crusader Period

The Crusader period (1099–1291) introduced important changes to the urban–religious landscape. During its first years, the Crusaders massacred indigenous populations in coastal cities as well as in Jerusalem. As a result, although some of the indigenous inhabitants survived the massacres and deportations (excluding Jerusalem, which became exclusively Christian), the Frankish newcomers became the dominant elites in these settlements. They transformed mosques into churches and introduced other innovations to the occupied urban tissues. It seems that most of the coastal cities were large enough to accommodate both the surviving indigenous population and the Frankish immigrants. Some cities, such as Acre and Jaffa, absorbed so many newcomers that they had to expand beyond their Early Islamic walls.112 Still in the inland cities the Frankish modus operandi was quite different. Except for Jerusalem, these cities were conquered by the Crusaders without significant resistance and their populations were neither massacred nor deported. In these cities, the Franks established exclusive, new, Frankish neighbourhoods.113 Once these were abandoned by the Franks, they were inhabited by the indigenous residents who had lived nearby during the Crusader period, and became the cities’ urban nuclei up to the modern era. 107  Thierry Bianquis, “Autonomous Egypt from Ibn Tūlūn to Kāfūr,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, vol. 1, ed. Carl F. Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 86–119 at 99. 108  CIAP 1: 133–37.

109  Sefer Nameh, ed. Schefer, 48–49.

110  Robert Hillenbrand, “Anjar and Early Islamic Urbanism,” in The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Gian-Pietro Brogiolo and Bryan Ward-Perkins (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 60–98. 111  Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 9–27.

112  Michael Ehrlich, “Urban Landscape Development in Twelfth Century Acre,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18 (2008): 257–74; Boas, Crusader Archaeo­logy, 41–42, 50.

113  Ehrlich, “The Frankish Impact on the Urban Landscape,” 41–42.



Mamluk and Ottoman Periods

Introduction

23

The Mamluk conquest had a dramatic impact on the Holy Land’s urban network, as well as on the religious profile of its inhabitants. The Mamluks destroyed the coastal cities they conquered. As a result, the Holy Land’s coastline, which for many centuries was a thriving and urbanized area, was deserted. Famous cities such as Caesarea, Acre, and Tyre fell into ruin, and ports were silted up and scarcely visited by ships. The Frankish population disappeared, yet most of the indigenous non-Muslim population also left the region. Thus, in the late sixteenth century Ottoman census, almost the entire coastal plain population was Muslim.114 The Mamluks also established administrative centres in Gaza, Safed, and Karak, which were cities and towns of secondary and tertiary importance during the Crusader period. These cities were in areas with substantial Jewish communities, such as in Safed, or Christian ones, in Gaza and Karak, which resisted conversion to Islam until the Mamluk period. Jerusalem, which was home to a relatively large Christian community in the city itself and its hinterland, became a Muslim city as well, and many of the rural inhabitants of the city’s environs became Muslim. I suggest that the establishment of Mamluk cities in hitherto rural areas was a key element in the final stage of the conversion of the Holy Land’s population. The Ottomans did not introduce major changes to the Holy Land’s urban network. They used the same cities their predecessors had, and the religious profile of the area remained roughly unchanged throughout the period. Re-organization of Urban Populations

Muslims were involved in urbanism, either by establishing new cities or by developing pre-existing ones. If the shifting of capital cities included a reshuffling of the regional elites, new elites should have emerged to replace those that were pushed aside. Newly established cities, such as Ramla, had no previous elites to replace. Nonetheless, a functioning capital city demanded skilled manpower able to run the region’s affairs. According to several sources, a large percentage of the residents of Ramla were former inhabitants of nearby Lydda.115 Although this narrative seems to be reliable, it is doubtful whether there was enough efficient, skilled manpower among the inhabitants of Lydda to administer a province. Nimrod Luz suggested, based on Early Islamic period sources, that the reason for the foundation of Ramla in spite of Lydda’s existence was its founders’ desire to bring Lydda down. Luz suggested that Lydda’s survival as an independent urban nucleus was made possible because Lydda was one of Jund Filasṭī�n’s two capital cities before the establishment of Ramla, the other being Jerusalem. Luz’s theory is a very intriguing one; nevertheless, there is not enough evidence to give it significant support. Thus, although Luz acknowledged that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence indicating that the Umayyads planned to convert Jerusalem into a capital city, he rejected this suggestion, arguing that there is no clear-cut proof to support it. Hence, it is obvious that the theory that Jerusalem and Lydda were co-capitals of Filasṭī�n before 114  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 137–60, 190–94. 115  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 178–80.

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the establishment of Ramla is also not supported.116 Whether personal motivation was the main reason for the establishment of Ramla, I think the answer should be negative. Although personal motives cannot be disregarded, Ramla was not an isolated phenomenon. The Muslims certainly did not establish new cities throughout the caliphate only to satisfy personal ambitions. Moreover, if Ramla was established as an affront to Lydda’s inhabitants, they should have been banned from holding high-ranking positions of the provincial administration. In other words, although many of Lydda’s residents probably settled in Ramla, the new city’s elite were Umayyad clients who were both loyal and skilled enough to run an effective administration, whereas former residents of Lydda occupied lower social and administrative strata. In Tiberias, the Muslims upgraded a city that was of secondary importance during the Byzantine period into the capital of al-Urdunn. In this case, they had to consider both the local elites as well as the existing buildings in the city’s centre. Also in this case the Umayyads should have moved fresh and able manpower to Tiberias to manage provincial affairs. These issues are broadly addressed in the chapters to come. However, the transfer of the capitals to nearby cities also had positive outcomes for the non-Muslim communities of the former capitals. Despite the emigration of local elites, some leading figures probably remained in the cities, for various reasons. In particular, this was the case in Jerusalem, where Christians remained the largest community up to the Crusader period and have survived as a substantial community until the present day.117 I suggest that although the indigenous secular leaders, who may have come from various social strata, certainly play an important role in the preservation of the local community, clergymen, especially of high rank, were more influential than other stakeholders in the survival of a religious minority.

Emigration and Immigration Christians and Muslims

The continuous decline of urban Christian communities triggered a chain reaction in rural communities. The ecclesiastical administration mirrored the imperial administration, and both were concentrated in the cities. Decline of cities brought with it the collapse of rural communities. These were dependent on the cities, not only economically and administratively, but also for the spiritual aspects of their existence. Once the urban community disappeared, the rural population was almost certain to follow suit. Who emigrated and when? There were seven major migration-inducing events affecting the Christian and Muslim populations, as well as many more of secondary importance. The Muslims conquered most of the cities of the Holy Land peacefully. Many of the capitulation agreements, known in the singular as amān, included a clause that 116  Luz, “The Construction of an Islamic City in Palestine,” 30–31; Luz, “Lod and Ramla and not Ramlod: On a Geo­graphic Anomaly and the Longue Durée of Urban History,” in Lod “Diospolis—City of God”: Collected Papers on the History and Archaeo­logy of Lod, ed. Alon Shavit, Tawfiq Daʿadli, and Yuval Gadot (Rehovot: Tagliot, Israeli Institute of Archaeo­logy, 2015–2018), 21–41 [in Hebrew]. 117  Pacini, “Socio-Political and Community Dynamics,” 279.



Introduction

25

ensured free passage for those wishing to leave the now-occupied cities. One example is the well-known letter to the residents of Jerusalem, attributed to the second caliph ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, which included clear stipulations that ensured safe passage for those who wanted to leave the city.118 The first to emigrate, immediately after the Muslim conquest, were leading figures in the Byzantine imperial and military administration, as well as prominent members of the clergy. These people lived mostly—but not exclusively—in provincial capitals, such as Caesarea and Scythopolis, as well as in other principal cities. Provincial cities did not only suffer from the emigration of the local elites: the Muslims demoted their provincial status, from capitals to secondary cities. This change fostered further emigration of local elites: not only had they fallen out of favour with the government, but they did not have any prospects of reclaiming their status in the newly demoted cities, even after the hostilities ended. People who did not belong to the Byzantine administrative elite were less motivated to emigrate. Since the capitulation agreements enshrined property rights and religious freedom, the gloomy prospect of becoming penniless beggars in alien territories may have persuaded many potential emigrants to stay. However, those who remained were converted to Islam through a long process, to be discussed hereafter. Finally, many ordinary residents of the Holy Land belonged to non-Chalcedonian churches, which were considered heterodox by the Patriarchate of Constantinople.119 They probably knew that they were unlikely to be welcomed by Chalcedonian communities, which constituted a majority of the nearby Christian communities that remained under Byzantine rule. Most of those who decided to emigrate were probably members of the local and regional elite who had the means to emigrate and to become respectable citizens. Their attempt to rebuild their lives outside their native land would have been based on at least one of three possibilities: first, they already possessed property at their destination; second, they left early enough to be able to liquidate their property before it lost its value; third, they had adequate liquidity and movable assets to establish themselves in their new home. As the previous elites left, those who remained behind were those who did not want to emigrate or could not do so. The departure of the elites created a vacuum in urban life. A well-known description of Bethlehem from the first half of the twentieth century vividly portrays the feelings of those who chose to stay in the town or were not able to emigrate: The severe poverty which befell Palestine toward the end of the nineteenth century caused young men of Bethlehem to immigrate in large numbers to South and Central America. The First World War further increased the people’s poverty and misery. At the beginning of the 1920s, the effect of immigration was clearly visible in the many vacant

118  Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early-Muslim Empire, 52–53.

119  Yossi Soffer, “The View of Byzantine Jews in Islamic and Eastern Christian Sources,” in Jews in Byzantium: Dialects of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Stroumsa, and Rina Talgam (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 845–70 at 861–64.

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houses and buildings whose owners had left and in the state of disrepair and neglect, which characterized hundreds of homes and surrounding fields of the town.120

Despite this description of a different event, one that occurred many centuries after the events discussed in this book, and in dissimilar circumstances, I believe it also faithfully describes the feelings of the inhabitants of the Holy Land’s main cities who remained in their homes after the Muslim conquest. The emigration of local elites would have had a devastating effect on the remaining inhabitants. Many of these cities’ dwellers were described in the Jewish sources of the Roman–Byzantine period as baʿal habayit, i.e., property owners. These were not necessarily rich people, but they usually possessed at least a modest property, whose main asset was a house (bayit) or any other immovable property. They owned their home, and perhaps other property, such as gardens, fields, and orchards.121 When the elites emigrated, the supply of real estate increased dramatically, and consequently, the value of their dwellings collapsed. Likewise, the elites constituted an important share of the local markets’ purchasing power. Their emigration certainly affected the demand for luxury products, but probably also decreased demand for everyday commodities. Subsequently, the markets’ turnover and revenues declined, and the people who remained in these cities found themselves trapped in ever-impoverished settlements. Remaining in their homes meant a continuous decline of their standards of living, whereas emigration would compel them to live in poor suburbs of distant cities. Bearing in mind that the Muslims enshrined property and guaranteed religious freedom of the conquered population, most locals probably preferred to stay in their homes during the Muslim rule’s early stages. Yet, although the emigration of the elites and natural disasters had an impact on the Holy Land’s urban network, the harm inflicted by them was reparable in the medium or long range. Arabic sources composed more than a century after the events they describe provide a different point of view on the fate of Palestine’s coastal cities during the conquest. According to al-Balādhurī�, not long after the conquest, the coastal cities were already in ruins.122 However, archaeo­logical excavations, discussed in detail in the chapter on the coastal plain, do not support this description.123 Al-Balādhurī� also wrote that Muʿāwiya, the first Umayyad Caliph, diverted migrants from distant regions to Palestine’s coastal cities. These two descriptions suggest that even though the coastal cities were not destroyed, at least not to the extent described by al- Balādhurī�, Muʿāwiya, and perhaps later caliphs as well, had to make an effort to revive or to maintain the coastal cities. 120  Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well: A Boyhood in Bethlehem (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 47. 121  Yael Wilfand, Poverty, Charity, and the Image of the Poor in Rabbinic Texts from the Land of Israel (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2014), 42–44. 122  Al-Balādhurī�, Futūḥ al-Buldān, ed. de Goeje, 128. 123  Elad, “The Coastal Cities,” 151–53.



Introduction

27

According to al-Yaʿqūbī�, Arab and Muslim immigrants settled in various cities in the Holy Land: From the city of Damascus to the military district of Jordan is four stages. The first is Jāsim, a dependency (ʿamal) of Damascus; then Khisfī�n, also a dependency of Damascus; then Fī�q, with its well-known pass. One goes from there to the city of Tiberias which is the main city of (the military district of) Jordan…. The people of the city of Tiberias are tribesmen of Ashʿar, who are the majority there. The military district of Jordan has the following rural districts: Tyre which is the main city of the coast…is inhabited by a mixture of people…. The city of Acre is also on the coast. Qadas is one of the most majestic of rural districts. Then come Baysān, Faḥl, Jarash, and al-Sawād. The people of these rural districts are a mixture of Arabs and non-Arabs (ʿAjam)…. The rural districts of Jordan were conquered in the caliphate of ʿUmar b. Khaṭṭāb by Abū ʿUbayda b. al-Jarrāḥ, except for the city of Tiberias, whose people sued for a treaty of peace….

From the military district of Jordan to the military district of Palestine is three stages. The old main city of Palestine was a city called Ludd (Lydda). However, when Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik became caliph, he had the city of Ramla built; he destroyed the city of Ludd and transferred the people of Ludd to al-Ramla….The people of the city are a mixture of Arabs and non-Arabs, and its non-Muslims are Samaritans…Palestine has the following districts: Ī� lyā, which is Jerusalem; Amwās; Nablus…its people being a mixture of Arabs and non-Arabs, and Samaritans; Sebastia, which is a dependency of Nablus; Caesarea a city on the coast, one of the most impregnable cities of Palestine, and the last of the region’s cities to be conquered…and Yubnā which is an old city on a hill…. The people of this city are a group of Samaritans…. Jaffa on the coast, which the people of al-Ramla use as a port…Bayt Jibrī�n, an old city whose people are a group of Jūdhām…ʿAsqalān on the coast; Gaza on the coast…. The populace of the military district of Palestine is a mixture of Arabs from Lakhm, Judhām, ʿĀ� mila, Kinda, Qays, and Kināna.124

This description indicates that the Muslim immigration was a well-organized endeavour. When immigration is not orchestrated, people tend to settle in convenient locations. Therefore, ports or cities with good employment opportunities are likely to become attractive immigration destinations. However, when people in organized groups, such as tribes, settle in less attractive destinations, a hidden hand, most often the government, is probably involved in their settlement. Al-Yaʿqūbī�’ does not mention immigrants among the populations of important Roman–Byzantine cities, such as Caesarea, Gaza, and Ascalon. Furthermore, this description indicates that although emigrating elites from principal cities left their luxurious properties behind, Muslim immigrants did not occupy them, an impression corroborated by archaeo­logical findings.125 The fact that these immigrants settled in new governmental centres and not elsewhere implies that they were established there by governmental initiative. In these cities, they became socio-cultural agents who fostered the processes of Islamization and Arabization. The vacuum created by the emigration of elites was filled by immigrants because their fealty to the Muslim authorities would have been considered doubtful. 124  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 327–30; English translation: The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī, ed. Mathew S. Gordon et al., 3 vols. (Leiden; Brill, 2018), 1: 164–66.

125  Yosef Porath, Caesarea Maritima, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2013) 1: 6; Avni, Byzantine-Muslim Transition, 54–55, 71.

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Al-Yaʿqūbī�’ distinguishes between Tiberias, which was conquered by agreement, and rural settlements, which were occupied without a treaty, saying that in the Holy Land’s periphery there were Arabs of tribal origin, at least some of whom resided in these areas even before the Muslim conquest. It seems unnecessary to emphasize that not all Arab tribes that settled in central urban nuclei were nomads.126 Rather, they included welleducated people who were likely to provide leadership to the provincial administration. Since many leading scholars of the past do not distinguish between the two, it seems worthwhile to mention it, nevertheless. During the 740s, Umayyad authorities settled Syrian immigrants in various Andalusian cities, according to the Syrian and Egyptian administrative districts the immigrants came from. Al-Yaʿqūbī� describes this settlement process in detail: Before reaching the city of Cordoba from Tudmī�r, the traveler arrives at a city called Elvira, which was settled by Arabs who had come from the military district (jund) of Damascus….To the west (of Cordoba) is a city called Reyyo, which was settled by (men from) the military district of Jordan…. West of Reyyo there is a city called Sidonia, which was settled by (men from) the military district of Ḥimṣ. West of Sidonia is a city called Algeciras which was settled by Berbers, with a few Arabs of mixed origins. West to the city of Algeciras is a city called Seville….West of Seville is a city called Niebla which was settled by Arabs who first entered the area with Ṭāriq, the client (mawlā) of Mūsā b. Nuṣayr al-Lakhmī�.127

These immigrants arrived shortly before the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate in 750, and in the ensuing years, the Andalusian cities probably absorbed even more Syrian immigrants. The Syrian districts included a relatively high percentage of Umayyad clients and loyalists who faced a grim future under the new Abbasid administration, and therefore, those who could afford a one-way trip to the Iberian Peninsula probably crossed the sea. Moreover, as these people had arrived in Syria only a few generations earlier, their family traditions there were new or non-existent, and their social networks in Syria were still forming. Al-Yaʿqūbī� describes them as distinctive groups in the Holy Land’s urban population. Consequently, the possibility of restarting their lives in the Iberian Peninsula could have been an enticing option. However, in this case as well, there is a clear imprint of governmental intervention. The fact that people who migrated from certain areas were resettled together, and became the leading population groups in certain regions, suggests both that the Umayyad government in al-Andalus organized this immigration and that these new residents were already a cohesive group when they immigrated. In other words, this immigration was characterized by people who shared 126  Francisco del Rio Sánchez, “Arab Tribalism and Urban Environments: Alternative Models of Social Organization,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 10 (2019): 367–77.

127  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje , 354–55; The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī, ed. Gordon, 1: 191–92; Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal (London: Longman, 1996), 36; Eduardo Manzano-Moreno, “Los ŷund-s sirios en al-Andalus,” Al-Qantara 14 (1993): 327–59; ManzanoMoreno, “Conquest and Settlement: What al-Andalus Can Tell Us about the Arab Expansion at the Time of the Umayyad Caliphate,” in The Umayyad World, ed. Andrew Marsham (London: Routledge, 2021), 314–31 at 326–27.



Introduction

29

a common background prior to their emigration from the Holy Land, and probably even before they settled there. Unlike the Byzantine elites who emigrated after the Muslim conquest, new immigrants did not in this case replace the elite Muslim emigrants. Those who took their place in the social, economic, and administrative hierarchy were the lower echelons of the local society. Therefore, despite the Muslim character of this emigration, it further weakened the Holy Land’s urban network and consequently triggered the decline of non-Muslim religious communities. In his book, the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes includes a short entry about the fate of the Palestinian-Christian communities during the civil war between Al-Amī�n and Al- Maʾmūn:128 In the same year (812–813) many of the Christians of Palestine, monks and laymen, and from all Syria arrived in Cyprus, fleeing the excessive misdeeds of the Arabs…129

This emigration would have further weakened the already-enfeebled Christian communities that still survived in Palestine, almost two centuries after the Muslim conquest. Theophanes does not mention specific locations from which these refugees came. The 812–813 unrests seem to have been one hardship too many for some Christian communities, which had managed to survive until the beginning of the ninth century. In short, these three emigrations greatly affected the Holy Land’s urban population. The only surviving cities were Tiberias and Ramla, the regional capitals, as well as Tyre, Jerusalem, Nablus, and perhaps Ascalon too. Other cities, such as Caesarea, were marginalized, and were significantly less populated than in the Byzantine period.130 During the Fatimid period (969–1099), the coastal cities regained their importance. Some of them, such as Tripoli, Tyre, and Ascalon, became thriving commercial centres.131 Unfortunately, there is no direct evidence of a substantial wave of immigration to the Syrian coastal cities. Nonetheless, these cities, which were marginalized and neglected for centuries, became developed and fortified cities during the Fatimid period. Thus, a century later, while principal inland cities such as Nablus, Tiberias, and Ramla were conquered by the Seljuks, and later on by the Crusaders, practically without resistance, many coastal cities mounted vigorous resistance to the invaders.132 Such resistance cannot be explained by a natural increase in the population. Moreover, Geniza documents refer to Jews of Maghrebi origin who lived in Palestine’s coastal cities.133 These Jewish immigrants were probably not the only newcomers who settled in the Syrian coastal 128  Hugh Kennedy, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World (Cambridge, MA: De Capo, 2004), 85–111. 129  The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, trans. Mango and Scott, 683. 130  CIAP 1: 253–54; 4: 23–24.

131  David Barmoullé, Les Fatimides et la mer (909–1171) (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 201–2; Luz, The Mamluk City, 36; Hayat Salam-Liebich, The Architecture of the Mamluk City of Tripoli (Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1983) 3–5; CIAP 1: 133–34. 132  Aziz Başan, The Great Seljuqs: A History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 88–92; Michael Brett, The Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 215–18. 133  Gil, A History of Palestine, 612–31.

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cities. They were presumably preceded by a much larger group of Muslim immigrants who also settled in these cities. Ibn al-ʿArabī�’s (1092–1095) description of the residents of the Holy Land’s coastal cities as Shiʿites may indicate that some of these residents arrived in the region following the Fatimid occupation.134 The first stages of the Crusader conquest were characterized by large-scale massacres and deportations from most of the coastal cities and from Jerusalem. The murdered and deported residents were replaced by immigrants of European ancestry, who subsequently left the area in two waves of emigration, the first after the Frankish defeat near the Horns of Ḥaṭṭī�n in 1187 and the second following the Mamluk conquests (1260–1291). These occurrences had dramatic and long-lasting effects on Jerusalem’s population, as well as on that of the coastal cities. During the Crusader period, Jerusalem became an exclusively Christian city. During the thirteenth century, Muslim and Jewish communities settled in Jerusalem, yet these communities were established by newcomers, rather than by descendants of those deported a century earlier. Before the Crusader period, the population of the Holy Land’s coastal cities was apparently mostly Muslim, with a substantial Shi’ite presence. The massacres and deportations of the Crusades during the first decade of the twelfth century caused a sharp decline in the population. Presumably, many of those who managed to survive the siege and were ransomed by other Muslims preferred to live far beyond the reach of the Crusaders. The Crusaders had a positive impact on the survival of communities considered heretical by the Muslims, such as the Druze. The Druze religion, established in the eleventh century, was in its infancy when the Crusaders conquered the area.135 Presumably, the Crusaders did not differentiate between the various Muslim sects. They allowed those who collaborated with them to live respectable lives and persecuted those who did not. Approximately two centuries later, when the Crusaders were forced out of the region, attempts to uproot the Druze religion were too challenging for the Muslim authorities, who failed to coerce the Druze to become mainstream Islamic believers. The Mamluks destroyed most of the coastal cities, which remained in ruins for centuries.136 They also established new administrative centres in Safed and in Gaza in place of earlier centres, such as Ascalon and Tiberias.137 These new centres, along with Jerusalem, attracted immigrants both from destinations in the surrounding areas, such as indigenous residents of Frankish Acre and Tyre, as well as from afar.138 They also included members of the Mamluk administration, as well as Sufis who promoted Islam among the remaining local residents.139 134  Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 9–37.

135  Kais M. Firro, A History of the Druzes (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 8–17.

136  David Ayalon, “The Mamluks and Naval Power: A Phase of the Struggle between Islam and Christian Europe,” Proceedings of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities 1, no. 8 (1967): 1–12. 137  Luz, The Mamluk City, 38–39.

138  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem.” 139  Luz, “Aspects of Islamization.”



Jews

Introduction

31

The Jewish communities were much more limited in size than the Christian and Muslim communities. Like other religious communities, they were affected both by emigration and immigration, as well as by conversion. In 70 ce, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, nearly all Jews worldwide were farmers. Over a millennium later, in 1170, the famous Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited the Holy Land, by which time the transition of Jews from agricultural to urban occupations was almost complete. Nearly every Jew in the world, as well as in the Holy Land, was an urban dweller with vocational skills suited to that environment, while the majority of human society remained agricultural in nature.140 Urban Jewish communities in the Holy Land migrated from one location to another throughout this period. When the Muslims conquered the region, urban Jewish communities existed in Tiberias, Sepphoris, and Scythopolis, as well as in some coastal cities.141 By the middle of the Abbasid period, almost all of the pre-existing urban Jewish communities except for Tiberias seem to have disappeared, but new communities were established in Jerusalem and Ramla. Later, during the Fatimid period, new Jewish communities emerged in coastal cities, while Ramla and Jerusalem became the most important Jewish centres. Tiberias lost its prominence as a result of the transfer of Yeshivat Eretz Israel (the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel), the most important Jewish institution of the region, to Jerusalem.142 There are clear indications that some of the Jews who lived in Jerusalem and in the coastal cities were of Maghrebi descent. Moreover, some of the heads of the Yeshiva were of the same origin.143 Residents of the coastal cities and of Jerusalem, where most of the Jewish population of the Holy Land resided prior to the arrival of the Crusaders, were massacred or deported during the Crusader conquest.144 As a result, the Holy Land’s urban Jewish communities nearly ceased to exist during the first decade of Crusader rule. This did not include the relatively large communities of Tyre and Ascalon, which were only conquered in the later stages of the Crusader period (1124 and 1153) and did not suf140  Shelomo D. Goitein, Jewish Education in Muslim Countries (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1962), 16 [in Hebrew]; Goitein, “Jewish Society and Institutions under Islam,” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale /​ Journal of World History 11 (1968): 170–84 at 173; Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (London: Routledge, 1984), 67; Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, “From Farmers to Merchants: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish Economic History,” IZA Discussion Papers 670, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Journal of the European Economic Association, 5, no. 5 (2007): 885–926. 141  Ze’ev Safrai, The Missing Century (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 65–82.

142  Benjamin Z. Kedar, “When Did the Palestinian Yeshiva Leave Tiberias?” in Pesher Naḥum: Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature from Antiquity through the Middle Ages Presented to Norman (Naḥum) Golb, ed. Joel L. Kraemer and Michael G. Wechsler (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012), 117–20. 143  Gil, A History of Palestine, 612–31.

144  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 21–45.

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fer massacres or deportations.145 In other words, during the early stages of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem only a handful of Jews lived in the kingdom’s urban communities. Some of the Holy Land’s Jews may have emigrated to neighbouring Damascus. This assumption is based not only on the eventual transfer of the Yeshiva to this city, but also on Benjamin of Tudela’s description (ca. 1170), which noted that the local Jewish administration was composed of individuals associated with the Yeshiva.146 This suggests that the Yeshiva that was established in Damascus only a few decades earlier had become the most important Jewish institution, and its dignitaries had replaced the Damascene Jewish elite. Presumably, Jews from the nearby Holy Land, especially from Tiberias, emigrated to Damascus in the tenth to twelfth centuries and established a diaspora community there. When the Yeshiva left Jerusalem during the 1070s, it was temporarily established in Tyre, but as the situation stabilized it moved to Damascus and then to Cairo.147 The Holy Land’s Jewish communities were substantially reinforced by Jews who immigrated from Europe during the Crusader period. The arrival of these Jews, including a significant number of leading Jewish scholars during the thirteenth century, such as Rabbi Jonathan of Lunel, Rabbi Samson of Sens, and Naḥmanides, enabled Acre’s Jewish community to become one of the most important Jewish centres in the world. However, the prosperity of Acre’s Jewish community did not last. The destruction of Acre and Tyre by the Mamluks inevitably brought an end to these Jewish communities. While some of their members found their way back to Europe, others emigrated to nearby destinations, such as the new, emerging communities of Safed and Jerusalem.148 During the fourteenth century, the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Safed, and probably also Hebron and Gaza absorbed additional Jews from Europe. This immigration intensified further shortly before and after the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.149 Jews continued to immigrate to the Holy Land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In most cases, these waves of immigration were limited in scope. The newcomers settled mainly in Safed and Jerusalem, but also in other cities, such as Acre, Tiberias, Hebron, and Gaza. Archaeo­logical data suggest that many rural Jewish communities ceased to exist during the Early Islamic period. This conclusion is based on the destruction and abandonment of Byzantine-period synagogues. Only a handful of synagogues continued to function throughout the Early Islamic period, indicating that these communities were among the few to survive. The destruction or abandonment of synagogues and the dis145  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 49–54. 146  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 30.

147  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 111.

148  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem,” 711, 714–16.

149  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem,” 717–20; Israel Yuval, “Alms from Nuremberg to Jerusalem (1375–1392),” Zion 46 (1981): 182–97 [in Hebrew]; Enrique Cantera Montenegro. “El regreso de los judí�os hispanos a Tierra Santa,” Espacio, Tiempo Y Forma Serie III Historia Medi­eval 17 (2004): 105–11.



Introduction

33

appearance of Jewish communities is particularly evident in Lower Galilee, which had been a Jewish bastion in Byzantine Palestine, but also in other regions such as the Golan Heights and Judea. However, some isolated Jewish communities that were distant from cities and important roads continued to exist, especially in the Upper Galilee, and perhaps also in southern Judea, until the Mamluk period. The Galilean communities were severely impacted by the establishment of the Mamluk regional capital in Safed and by the outbreak of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century.150 Yet, rural Jewish communities continued to exist in some Galilean villages until the twentieth century, usually not the Jewish communities that existed prior to the Mamluk period. Samaritans

The Samaritan community declined in size during the various Muslim periods.151 Unlike the Christians, they could scarcely rely on foreign support, and unlike the Jews, they could not rely on a large number of immigrants from the diaspora. As time went by, the once-flourishing community declined, either because people left the region, or because many of those who remained converted to Islam. Given the circumstances, the Samaritans provide a good example of a community’s struggle to survive in challenging conditions. Milka Levy-Rubin suggests that many Samaritans converted during the rule of the Abbasids and the Tulunids (878–905).152 This suggestion is based on a single chronicle composed in the 1350s. However, Levy-Rubin demonstrated that this late chronicle is based on earlier sources, of which the most important had meticulously described events, people, and places in ninth century Samaria. The chronicle describes the hardships the Samaritans suffered under the rule of the Abbasid dynasty and claims that many Samaritans had converted as a result of these afflictions. These hardships included earthquakes, droughts, persecutions by local governors, high taxes imposed on religious minorities and anarchy.153 Yet, although this chronicle deals mainly with the Samaritans, it can be assumed that the situation of other religious minorities during this period was not substantially different. Thus, despite these hardships and the undeniable decline of the Samaritan community during the Early Islamic period, the situation of the Samaritan community during this period was actually better than that of the Jews. For example, according to the count provided by Benjamin of Tudela, Samaritan communities outnumbered Jewish communities in the Holy Land. This indicates that, despite the

150  Michael Ehrlich, “Is the Book The Paths of Jerusalem (Shviley DeYerushalem), Attributed to Rabbi Issac Chelo, a Forgery?” Jerusalem and Eretz Israel 6 (2008): 68–69 [in Hebrew]; Ehrlich, “From Gush Ḥalav to Safed: The Transfer of the Medi­eval Jewish Settlement in Upper Galilee,” Jerusalem and Eretz-Israel 12–13 (2020): 366 [in Hebrew]. 151  Crown., “The Byzantine and Muslim,”79–80; Kedar, “Samaritan History: The Frankish Period,” 85–87; The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin, 27–42; Pummer, The Sama­ri­ tans, 142–49; Oren Tal and Itamar Taxel, Samaritan Cemeteries and Tombs in the Central Coastal Plain (Münster: Ugarit, 2015), 202–5. 152  Pummer, The Samaritans, 149.

153  The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin, 29–36.

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hardships described in the chronicle, there were still many Samaritans living in the Holy Land, as well as in central cities beyond the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, such as Damascus and Alexandria.154 However, during the Mamluk period, the Samaritan conversion process accelerated, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the community was on the brink of extinction. Emigration and Conversion

The direct effect of emigrations was felt mainly by the urban population. The emigrants usually included elite groups, who had dominated the cities’ social and economic life. These emigrants left a void that usually remained unfilled. At the same time, the emerging elites, those who previously could have been considered middle class or even upper-middle class, were not able to fill the gap left by the former high echelons. Impoverishment of the urban communities resulted in decreased contributions to ecclesiastical institutions at a time of dire need. The Muslim occupation also separated leading ecclesiastical institutions such as the Patriarchate of Jerusalem from their patrons in the Byzantine Empire. The empire was now an external and hostile power. Moreover, the great Muslim conquests greatly diminished its sources of income. As a result, the Holy Land’s Christian communities found themselves in a very peculiar situation. They were relatively large, but their institutions were weak and fragile. They lost their privileged social status, many of their leaders left the region, and they also lost sources of income such as tax collection and operation of the bureaucracy and the civil administration. Consequently, as time passed and more calamities occurred, the Christian communities failed to respond to their members’ needs. The charity system collapsed, churches decayed, vacant positions remained empty, and so on.155 I will demonstrate that, although Christian communities weakened under the various Muslim regimes, the rate of their conversion varied in the Holy Land’s different regions. Thus, while the Christian communities of Galilee were decimated during the Early Islamic period, a significant Christian community survived in the region of Gaza until the Mamluk period. These processes did not occur in a vacuum. Simultaneous to the decline of the Christian communities, Muslims became the main stakeholders in the emerging urban centres, mosques were built, some of them lavishly decorated, and Muslim charitable institutions received generous endowments. The thriving Muslim communities attracted increasingly more people. Some joined Islam because of their enchantment with the new religion and its culture, while others converted to Islam for practical reasons, such as greater social mobility and access to charity.

154  Pummer, The Samaritans, 183–87.

155  Schick, The Christian Communities, 107–8; Levy-Rubin, “The Reorganisation of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” 216–20.



The Proposed Model

Introduction

35

This study’s working hypothesis is that most of the Holy Land’s population did not become Muslim through a linear process. Furthermore, the Islamization of the population varied from region to region and from one religious community to another. As far as this study is concerned, the question of whether the Christians constituted a majority or a minority of the Holy Land’s population when the Crusaders arrived in the Levant is irrelevant. Since there is no available statistical data for this period, all opinions on this issue are no more than speculation. At best, they are generalizations based on anecdotal mentions in contemporary sources. Since the Islamization of the various regions differed in its timing and pace, it is possible that there was still a Christian majority in a specific region, whereas in a neighbouring area, Muslims already outnumbered Christians at the time of the Crusaders’ arrival. However, the ratio of Christians to Muslims countrywide prior to the Mamluk period is unknown. Urbanization deals with various actions taken by the Muslim authorities, such as the shifting of regional capitals. De-urbanization was a manifestation of the Muslim policy of working with a less extensive urban network than that of the Roman–Byzantine period. A striking example of Muslim urbanization policy was the shifting of regional capital cities. During the Roman–Byzantine period, the regional capital of Palestina Prima was Caesarea and the capital of Palestina Secunda was Scythopolis. During the Early Islamic period, Caesarea was replaced by Ramla, and Scythopolis by Tiberias.156 This policy was not merely a local phenomenon. The Muslims changed regional capitals throughout their vast empire. For example, Syria’s capital was shifted from Antioch to Damascus, the Egyptian capital from Alexandria to Fustāt, and the Spanish one from Toledo to Cordoba. This decision was made by the Muslim authorities at a very early stage, with the main purpose of reshuffling the regional elites as well as the governmental machinery. The result of this process was that new elites emerged, whereas former regional leaders lost their social position, which caused many of them to emigrate. Many of the new elites were Arab Muslims, who subsequently had an ever-growing impact on the new centres’ inhabitants. Therefore, even if the shifting of regional capitals was intended to facilitate the everyday administration of the new empire, it had a long-lasting effect on the religious profile of the local population. Former regional capitals did not disappear. Rather, they were relegated to serving as local, less important centres. In many cases, the departure of governmental organs was followed by the emigration of high-ranking officers and local dignitaries who could afford to re-establish themselves elsewhere. These departures were not compensated for by new immigrants, who preferred to settle in the new centres. As a result of the emigration of local elites and the lack of immigration, the lower social echelons that did not emigrate became the new elites. Still, they had neither the economic power nor the political acumen to successfully replace the former elites. These conditions led to the impoverishment of these communities, and a lack of funds to invest in communal activi156  Gil, A History of Palestine, 110–13.

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ties. As a result, many Roman–Byzantine period cities became towns and villages, and some were eventually abandoned altogether. A by-product of this policy was the collapse of the ecclesiastic administration. The church adopted the imperial Roman–Byzantine pattern of administration; bishoprics were established in Roman civitates. As those cities disappeared, the many episcopal sees became little more than titular bishoprics.157 Moreover, during the Byzantine period, the empire invested large sums in the Holy Land’s main pilgrimage shrines, monasteries, and other religious institutions.158 Notwithstanding the impact of imperial investments and pilgrimage on the Holy Land’s economy during the Byzantine period, the Muslim occupation triggered a deep economic crisis for the ecclesiastical institutions. Presumably, once the Muslims conquered the land, the investments and contributions dropped sharply and Church-owned land was confiscated, especially during the Abbasid period.159 The emigration of the elites from Roman–Byzantine cities is manifested in the rehabilitation of Semitic city names. For example, Ptolemais was called ʿAkkā, Scythopolis became Baysān, and so on.160 These changes occurred about a millennium after these cities first received Greek or Roman names. Clearly, the return of the Semitic names was the result of continuous use of these names by local residents. Perhaps it was only the Romanized elites, the Byzantine administration, and the ecclesiastical institutions that used the Romanized names in their formal dealings. Although in official documents the Graeco-Roman names were the only ones to appear, everyday practice was likely quite different. The local names appeared in unofficial records. For example, Jewish religious codi, such as the Mishna and Talmud, almost exclusively used local names and ignored Graeco-Roman names. When the local Romanized elites emigrated, Semitic names reappeared even in Greek-language records, such as ecclesiastical sources. The Muslim authorities probably did not object to the return of Semitic names. Places established during the Hellenistic and Roman periods had Graeco-Roman names such as Neapolis and Paneas, which were not replaced during Muslim rule. Instead, they were adapted to Arabic; Neapolis became Nabulūs and Paneas became Bāniyās.161 Muslim urbanization took in two different forms. The Muslims established some new cities, such as Ramla and Qaywarān, but for the most part, they Islamized existing cities, such as Tiberias and Jerusalem. The use of pre-existing cities was far cheaper than the foundation of entirely new ones. It therefore seems likely that establishment of a new city occurred only in cases when using an existing one was impractical. De157  Schick, The Christian Communities, 107–8; Levy-Rubin, “The Reorganisation of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” 218–20. 158  Doron Bar, “Population, Settlement and Economy in Late Roman and Byzantine Palestine (70–641 AD),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 67 (2004): 307–20 at 315.

159  Bernard Hamilton and Andrew Jotischky, Latin and Greek Monasticism in Crusader States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 299.

160  CIAP 1: 22, 2: 196–97.

161  Elitzur, Ancient Place Names in the Holy Land, 32–33, 71–72.



Introduction

37

urbanization then is the process of degeneration of cities, as a result of governmental action or neglect. The Muslim caliphate was based on a less extensive urban network than its Roman– Byzantine predecessor. This phenomenon became more evident following the success of the Abbasid revolt in 750 ce. Perhaps the Abbasids concluded that the overhead expenses of maintaining an extensive urban network such as the Roman one, in an empire as gigantic as theirs, was too expensive. Therefore, they decided to reduce administrative expenses by using fewer urban nuclei. At the same time, many of the cities that existed in the Umayyad Amirate of al-Andalus prior to the Muslim conquest continued to exist, and even flourish, during the Umayyad period, and many of them still exist today as cities, such as Zaragoza, Qadiz, Cordoba, and Toledo. In the Syrian context, the Abbasid revolt was preceded by a strong earthquake in 749, which caused severe damage to many cities and villages.162 The most serious damage was inflicted on cities along the Jordan Rift Valley, such as Scythopolis, Hippos, and Tiberias.163 Yet although the damage inflicted on these neighbouring cities should have been roughly the same, the long-lasting effects of the earthquake varied dramatically. While the city of Scythopolis (Baysān) declined and became a town, and the earthquake proved to be the coup de grâce of Hippos, Tiberias emerged from the catastrophic event as the largest city in the region. The urban area of Tiberias during the Abbasid and Fatimid periods was larger than ever before and would not be so large again until the British Mandate period (1918–1948).164 Although there are no data about the population of Tiberias prior to the Ottoman period, it seems that during the Abbasid period, the city’s population was larger than during the Byzantine period, prior to the Muslim conquest, and larger that it was during the Crusader period, as well. The city expanded and merged with nearby Ḥamat, which had been an independent urban area until the Umayyad period.165 Reconstruction of the city did not rely upon the resources of the local population, which would have been very limited following a disaster such as the 749 earthquake. The only actor that could afford to underwrite such a project was the caliphate itself. The diverse fates of neighbouring cities indicates that the governmental desire to contribute to the rebuilding efforts varied, with some cities favoured and others much less so. Presumably, the caliphate financed the rebuilding of Tiberias, but did not contribute significantly to the rebuilding of Baysān. An inscription from the year 794–5 found over the old miḥrāb of the mosque of Baysān indicates that the government 162  Yoram Tsafrir and Gideon Foerster, “The Dating of the ‘Earthquake of the Sabbatical Year’ of 749 c.e. in Palestine,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55 (1992): 231–35. 163  On the damage in Tiberias, see Cytryn-Silverman, “Tiberias’ Houses of Prayer in Context,” 243*; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 325.

164  Arthur Segal et al., Hippos–Sussita of the Decapolis (Haifa: The Zinman Institute of Archaeo­logy, 2013), 63; Avni, Byzantine Muslim Transition, 64–65; Yosef Stepansky “Das kreuzfahrerzeitliche Tiberias: Neue Erkenntisse.” in Burgen und Städte der Kreuzzugszeit, ed. Mathias Piana (Petersberg: Imhof, 2008), 384–95. 165  David Stacey. Excavations at Tiberias, 1973–1974: The Early Islamic Periods (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2004), 247; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 72–88.

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was involved in construction of this mosque, which stood beyond the borders of the Byzantine city or in its outskirts.166 Amihai Mazar, who excavated the mound of Beth-Shean, was uncertain if the residential district built there during the Early Islamic period was from the Umayyad or the Abbasid period.167 This might suggest that the mosque and the residential district on the mound did not belong to the same settlement. Final conclusions would require further research. One way or another, Abbasid Baysān was definitely smaller and humbler than its Byzantine and Umayyad predecessors. In the case of Hippos, it seems that the surviving population decided that rebuilding the city was beyond its economic capabilities and decided to abandon the city. Cities affected by the earthquake were not the only ones to decline or disappear completely during the Abbasid period. Many cities that were apparently not seriously affected by the earthquake, such as Sepphoris and Beth Guvrin, declined as well. Hence, I would like to suggest that in most cases, the 749 earthquake accelerated already existing processes of urban decline but did not trigger them.168 The earthquake’s collateral damage was the effect it had on many cities’ hinterlands, even if the physical damage inflicted on a village, as well as the casualties that village suffered, were bearable. The decrease, or in extreme cases, the annulation, of the cities’ purchasing power made it impractical to market local yields. The impoverishment of rural communities rose at an almost exponential rate. People had to decide whether to remain in their lands and barter with their equally poor neighbours, or to emigrate to the poor suburbs of distant cities. Neither option seems to have been attractive, but in the same way that people now emigrate from rural areas that cannot provide their basic needs to poor neighbourhoods of Cairo, Manila, Mexico City, and other metropolises, many medi­eval farmers who faced similar challenges decided to emigrate as well. The Abbasid urban policy had a significant effect on the non-Muslim communities. These communities were more vulnerable than their Muslim neighbours, and consequently, they became even poorer and had fewer community members; their organizations were dismantled, and eventually they disappeared. As a result, members of these communities either emigrated to new destinations with larger Christian, Jewish, or Samaritan communities, or remained in decaying cities and impoverished villages until they converted to Islam. There is a third type of regional settlement pattern, found in regions that lacked a central city, for example, the Upper Galilee prior to the thirteenth century. In the Roman Empire, the lack of a city was a clear manifestation of an area’s remoteness and economic unattractiveness. Since Roman culture was mainly spread through cities, local rural communities survived for longer periods. In regions in which cities did not exist, indigenous communities were more likely to preserve their own culture. This situation changed when a city was established, such as in the area around Safed. After the establishment of the Mamluk centre there, new elites immigrated to the city. The existence of socio-economic elites in a city such as Safed, which had been a remote town prior to the 166  CIAP 2: 221–22.

167  Mazar, Excavations at Tel Beth-Shean, 1: 42–43.

168  Ward, “ Sepphoris in Sacred Topo­graphy,” 392–93; CIAP 2: 120–21.



Introduction

39

thirteenth century, certainly impacted the religious profile of the area.169 The establishment of the Mamluk regional centres in Safed, which was surrounded by Jewish rural settlements, as well as in Karak, whose population included many Christians, and in Gaza, which also had a significant Christian community, provoked the Islamization of the only regions where Islam had hitherto been less dominant. Thus, although the Mamluks probably established their regional capitals on the basis of strategic and administrative considerations, the consequence of these specific sites being selected was a dramatic decline in the local population’s non-Muslim communities.170

New Religions and Religious Movements Established in the Holy Land Over the centuries, the Holy Land has witnessed the establishment of various religions and sects. This chapter does not deal with theo­logy. It seeks to understand the extent to which the establishment of these groups in the Holy Land or in its environs contributed to their success. Karaites

The Karaites split from mainstream Judaism in Iraq in or around the eighth to ninth centuries. They renounce the authority of post-biblical Jewish religious interpretations, which are found mostly but not exclusively, in codi such as the Mishna, Talmud, and Midrash. The Karaite movement was established in Iraq; however, its identity was forged in Jerusalem during the tenth century. According to many scholars, the Karaite community of Jerusalem in the tenth to eleventh centuries was the most important Karaite community in the movement’s history.171 There was, of course, a theo­logical aspect to the establishment of the community called “Mourners of Zion,” or “Roses,” as they called themselves in Jerusalem. They regarded their immigration to Jerusalem as a fundamental stage of the messianic era.172 I suggest that the establishment of a flourishing community in Tulunid Jerusalem, far from the Rabbanite elite that lived under the Abbasid caliphate in Iraq, granted the Karaites freedom and facilitated their success. Moreover, until the Karaite immigration to Jerusalem, the Yeshiva of the Holy Land, the highest local Jewish institution, resided in Tiberias, rather than in Jerusalem. The establishment 169  Joseph Drory, “Founding a New Mamlaka: Some Remarks Concerning Safed and the Organi­ zation of the Region in the Mamluk Period,” in The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society, ed. Amalia Levanoni and Michael Winter (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 163–87; Or Amir, “Muslim Religious Life in the Safed Area during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries According to a ‘New-Old’ Source,” Cathedra 156 (2015): 42–46 [in Hebrew].

170  Amitai, “Islamisation in the Southern Levant,” 171–72.

171  Daniel J. Lasker, “Karaites and Jerusalem: from Anan ben David to the Karaite Heritage Center in the Old City,” in Next Year in Jerusalem: Exile and Return in Jewish History, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2019), 99–110; Yoram Erder, “The Split Between the Rabbanite and Karaite Communities in the Geonic Period.” Zion 78, no. 3 (2013): 321–49 [in Hebrew]. 172  Erder, “The Negation of the Exile,” 110–11, 119–26.

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of the Karaite community in Jerusalem probably played an essential role in the decision of the Yeshiva of the Holy Land to transfer its activities to Jerusalem.173 The Karaite presence in Jerusalem was eliminated in 1099, when the city was conquered by the Crusaders and its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were either massacred or deported. Druze

Modern books about the Druze only dedicate a few pages to their earlier history.174 The Druze assert that the Fatimid caliph al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh had been revealed as divine in 1017.175 Following his mysterious disappearance in 1021, the Druze split from Ismaʿili Shiʿi Islam and developed as an independent religion, especially in some mountainous regions of Bilād al-Shām.176 I do not offer an alternative Druze history, but I believe that the limited available material provides vital clues toward an understanding of the early history of the Druze. Some of the tribes that lived in the mountainous regions of Bilād al-Shām converted to the religion en masse. These conversions provide a good example of tribal conversion. The missionaries who preached the new religion were outsiders, and those who did not adhere to the new faith found themselves cast out. Moreover, the remote and hostile regions where these tribes lived facilitated their survival following their conversion.177 Last but not least, these regions were dominated by the Crusaders for a period ranging between several decades and 150 years. Although Crusader-period references to the Druze are scarce, it seems that the Crusader authorities did not distinguish between the Druze and Muslim communities. Presumably, as long as they obeyed the rules, fulfilled their duties, and paid taxes, the authorities treated them as simply another nonChristian minority. However, the Jewish pilgrim Benjamin of Tudela, the first Western writer to describe the Druze, noted that they were fighting against the Franks of Sidon.178 It seems that the Druze described by Benjamin of Tudela were not rebels, but in fact lived outside the Frankish realm. Throughout the period of Frankish presence in the Levant, the Druze enjoyed a kind of impunity, it seems. I suggest that the Franks were not particularly hostile toward them, and the Muslims were preoccupied with attempts to eradicate the Frankish presence in the area, rather than wasting time and resources in battling a heterodox group. By the time the Franks eventually left the region, the Druze were already a mature religion, with spiritual leadership, ritual, and worship centres. That being the case, later Muslim rulers had to invest substantial effort to successfully eradicate the Druze. Since they did not do so, the community has survived to this day. 173  Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 65.

174  Kais M. Firro, A History of the Druzes (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 25–28; Salman H. Falah, The Druze in the Middle East (New York: Druze Research and Publications Institute, 2002), 7–14; Abbas Halabi, The Druze: A New Cultural and Historical Appreciation (Reading: Ithaca, 2015), 15–21. 175  Halabi, The Druze, 16.

176  Halabi, The Druze, 17–21; Falah, The Druze in the Middle East, 11–12.

177  Halabi, The Druze, 2–3.

178  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 18.



Sabbateans

Introduction

41

The Jewish Sabbatean movement is named after its leader, Shabtai Zevi (1626–1676). In 1664 or early 1665, this individual was proclaimed the Messiah in Gaza by a local charismatic rabbi, Nathan of Gaza (1643–1683).179 There were good reasons for a Jewish messiah to have been proclaimed in the Holy Land. However, this so-called Messiah’s revelation and proclamation in Gaza are of particular interest. Gaza was not a typical “Jewish city.” During the Biblical era, it was part of the Philistine pentapolis. Jewish sources from the Roman–Byzantine period mention Gaza only sporadically, and there is no reference to its Jewish community, nor to Jewish sages who may have lived or acted there. Jews lived in Gaza, at least from the fourteenth century onwards, but during the Mamluk period, the city’s Jewish community was eclipsed by those of Jerusalem and Safed.180 In such a peripheral area, an individual such as Nathan of Gaza, who was then about twenty-two years old, could act without fear of the better-known contemporary rabbis, many of whom would have been more wary of proclaiming Shabtai Zevi as the messiah. Rabbis in the communities of Safed and Jerusalem who opposed Shabtai Zevi did so post factum, as the Sabbatean movement was gaining momentum, making it more difficult to oppose. After Nathan of Gaza’s proclamation, Zevi was for the most part active in other regions. Following Shabtai Zevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666, the Jewish community of Gaza returned to its usual status. The Greek–Catholic Melkite Church

In 1708, Euthymus Saifi, the bishop of Tyre and Sidon, formed a union with Rome with regard to doctrine and acceptance of the Pope as supreme head of the Church.181 This initial union culminated in the 1724 schism, which led to the establishment of the Greek– Catholic Melkite Church. As Haddad and Descy demonstrated, the schism stemmed from multiple causes.182 However, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this step was initiated by an ecclesiastical official of medium rank, who led a tiny Christian community in an isolated area in a remote ecclesiastical province. Specifically, I suggest that the launching of this schism in the distant town of Tyre provided it with sufficient momentum to establish a viable church, which today includes millions of worshippers.

179  Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zvi Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 215. 180  For further information on the Jews of Gaza in Mamluk times, see Amitai, “The Development of a Muslim City in Palestine,” 175–77.

181  Cornel Zwierlein, “Interaction and Boundary Work: Western Merchant Colonies in the Levant and the Eastern Churches 1650–1800,” Journal of Modern European History 18, no. 2 (2020): 156–76 at 162.

182  Robert M. Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society:An Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 52–56; Serge Descy, Introduction à l’histoire et l’ecclésio­logie de l’église Melkite (Beirut: Saint Paul, 1986), 33–47.

Chapter 2

COASTAL PLAIN This chapter deals with the Holy Land’s littoral, from Tyre in the north to Rafaḥ

in the south. North of Jaffa, the width (west to east) of this area does not exceed twenty kilometres. The littoral’s southern part (between Jaffa and Rafaḥ) includes the region of the Judean foothills, known as Shefela in Hebrew, and its average width is about forty kilometres.

Early Islamic Period

During the Roman–Byzantine periods, the coastal plain was the most important region of the provinces of Palestine and Phoenicia. The capital cities of these two provinces, Caesarea and Tyre, were large port cities. Both cities also had metropolitan archiepiscopal sees and were home to many churches of different types and sizes that were spread throughout the area, of which the remains of about one hundred have been found.1 During this period, many of the provincial political, cultural, administrative, and religious elites of Palestine and Phoenicia lived in Caesarea and Tyre, and in nearby cities.2 This period of prosperity ended once the area was conquered by the Muslims. Although the Muslims did not destroy the coastal cities, they moved the administrative centres of their nascent empire inland.3 Scholars concur that the Muslims transferred the capital of Palestina Prima from Caesarea to Ramla. However, since Ramla was only founded about seventy years after the conquest, it is clear that the Muslims established a temporary capital until Ramla was ready to serve as a provincial capital. Scholars suggested that this provisional capital was either ʿAmwās, Lydda, or Jerusalem.4 After the 710s, the capital was transferred to Ramla; as far as this study is concerned, the exact venue of the previous capital city is irrelevant. The province of Phoenicia was dismantled following the conquest, and its southern district, which included Tyre, was annexed to Jund al-Urdunn, whose capital city was Tiberias.5 Subsequently, the coastal cities declined. Some of them, such as the satellite cities that had evolved during the Byzantine period around Ascalon and Gaza, ceased to exist as cities.6

1  Patrich et al., Churches of the Holy Land. I would like to thank Prof. Patrich who kindly shared with me the information included in this corpus before its publication. 2  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 25. 3  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 27.

4  Yāqūt, Muʿajam al Buldān, 4: 107–8; Amikam Elad, Medi­eval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 28; Luz, “The Construction of an Islamic City in Palestine,” 30–31; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 339; Suleiman A. Mourad, “Umayyad Jerusalem: From a Religious Capital to a Religious Town,” in The Umayyad World, ed. Andrew Marsham (London: Routledge, 2021), 393–408. 5  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 27. 6  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 27.

44

Chapter 2

The coastal plain was apparently the area of Holy Land that was most affected by the Muslim conquest. It lost its privileged status, and subsequently, many members of the highest echelons of provincial society who resided in the coastal plain emigrated, never to return. Later, Umayyad clients were settled in some of the region’s cities.7 They were probably relatively few in number, and they did not settle in all of the area’s cities. Moreover, some of these newcomers probably left the region around the time of the Abbasid revolt in 750 and emigrated to al-Andalus.8 According to Theophanes, many Christians emigrated from Palestine during the civil war between al-Amī�n and al-Maʼmūn in 812–813.9 As a result, the region’s population, as well as its relative importance in the Holy Land’s socioeconomic matrix, declined. The region’s cities declined and some of them became no more than frontier posts (ribāṭāt).10 The city of Ramla, which stands about fifteen kilometres from the seashore, was established in the 710s. It was built near pre-existing Lydda and became the capital city of Jund Filasṭī�n. The transfer of the region’s capital from Caesarea to Ramla indicates that the Muslims preferred to establish their administrative centres rather far from the coastline, in Jund Filasṭī�n as well. During the seventy years or so prior to the establishment of Ramla, the Muslim authorities, especially the Umayyads, probably gave serious thought to establishing their capital in Jerusalem. The construction of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqṣā Mosque, as well as of the nearby administrative complex, indicates that they had big plans for Jerusalem. However, even if there was an Umayyad plan to establish a regional administrative centre in Jerusalem, not to mention a caliphal compound, Ramla’s establishment in effect relegated these buildings to serving local affairs and little more.11 The establishment of Ramla led to the decline of neighbouring Lydda, which was a thriving city during the Byzantine period, with a substantial Christian community, a bishop see, and a popular pilgrimage shrine. Since the Christian population in Ramla at the time is well documented, and Lydda’s community simultaneously declined, it seems reasonable to suggest that many of Lydda’s Christian residents preferred to move to the new and prosperous nearby city rather than stay in their decaying home town.12 Ramla’s Christian community was probably the largest in the entire coastal plain from the time of its establishment until the Crusader period, yet it was not an episcopal see, 7  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 328–30.

8  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 353–55.

9  The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, trans. Mango and Scott, 683.

10  Yumna Masarwa, “Transforming the Mediterranean from a Highway into a Frontier: The Coastal Cities of Palestine during the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods,” Antiquité Tardive 19 (2012): 149–67 at 161–65; Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 177; Elad, “The Coastal Cities,”155–57. 11  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 131–37; Whitcomb, “Jerusalem and the Beginnings of the Islamic City,” 401–15; Jodi Magness, “Early Islamic Urbanism and Building Activity in Jerusalem and at Hammat Gader,” in Money, Power, and Politics in Early Islamic Syria, ed. John Haldon (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 147–63; Myriam Rosen-Ayalon, The Early Islamic Monuments of al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1989), 8–10. 12  Luz, “The Construction of an Islamic City in Palestine,” 47–48; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Trans­ ition, 180–83.



Coastal Plain

45

whereas the communities of large Byzantine cities such as Caesarea, which had been an archbishop see, were decimated. It is unclear whether an archbishop continuously resided there during this period.13 Most of the emigrants during the Muslim conquest, and many of those who emigrated during the Abbasid civil war, were Christians. Their emigration depleted the coastal plain’s Christian communities and made them vulnerable and ill-organized. Thus, the Commemoratorium de casis Dei, compiled at the request of Charlemagne no later than 810, did not include a single church or monastery in the entire coastal plain.14 This omission does not suggest that there were no churches and monasteries in the coastal plain at the beginning of the ninth century, but it certainly indicates that the region’s Christian communities were in a highly precarious situation even before the Abbasid civil war. The coastal plain began to recover from this regression during the Tulunid period. Aḥmad Ibn Ṭūlūn rebuilt the port of Acre, built a tower in Jaffa, and was also recorded in an inscription found in Caesarea.15 According to Sharon, it is likely that Ibn Ṭūlūn was also involved in the rebuilding of other cities, especially Ascalon.16 Apparently, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s activities were gradual and did not extend to all the area’s cities, but they nevertheless laid the foundations for the prosperity of the coastal cities during the Fatimid period. There are no detailed descriptions of large-scale construction activity in the coastal plain during the Fatimid period. The coastal cities that were remote military outposts before the Fatimid period vigorously resisted the Crusaders. Unlike inland cities and towns, all of which were conquered in 1099 (except for Bāniyās), the conquest of the littoral cities was gradual and took more than two decades.17 The conquest of each coastal city (excluding Jaffa) included sieges that lasted weeks or even months.18 The resistance of the littoral cities indicates that they were of considerable size and population. During the Fatimid period, the remote and neglected Abbasid frontier outposts seem to have developed and became populated and fortified cities. Islamization was not limited to the urban sphere. For example, in the early ninth century, a Muslim woman wrote an elegy on the wall of a burial cave in Beth-Sheʿarim.19 Such an elaborate poem, written so early in the Islamic period, seems to indicate that around 150 years after the Muslim conquest, in a cave about twenty kilometres from the nearest city, the rural population had not only partially converted to Islam, but also included some highly educated people, such as this otherwise unknown poet. 13  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 179–80.

14  McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey, 180.

15  CIAP 1: 24; al-Balawī�, Sirat Aḥmad ibn Tūlūn, 351; Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 163. 16  CIAP 1: 133.

17  Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (London: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 123–27. 18  Asbridge, The Crusades, 121–62. 19  CIAP 3: xxxix–xlv.

46

Chapter 2

In 1047, the Persian traveller Nāsir-i Khusraw described the road from Acre to Tiberias. According to his diary, the villages of al-Birwa, al Dāmūn, and Iʿblī�n had Muslim pilgrimage shrines.20 This suggests that by the eleventh century the residents of these villages were Muslims. Nāsir-i Khusraw also described Tyre as a city whose population was mainly Shiʿite.21 According to Ibn al-ʿArabī� (1092–1095), the Palestinian littoral cities were home to sizable Shiʿite communities.22 This information indicates that the Fatimids not only rebuilt these cities, but also transferred or encouraged Shiʿites to settle in them. Al-Darazī�, the Ismaʿilī� propagandist who was later cursed and rejected by the Druze, had supporters in Acre.23 The presence of Druze residents in Acre’s vicinity is also reflected in the existence of Druze communities during the eleventh century in nearby villages, such as Yarka and Jat.24 The Fatimids also established in Ascalon the shrine of Ḥusayn’s head, which became an important pilgrimage site. The establishment of such an important shrine near Ascalon indicates that the city’s importance increased significantly during the Fatimid period.25 During the Fatimid period, Jews of North African origin immigrated to the Holy Land’s coastal cities. It is unclear if the coastal Jewish communities that appeared during the Fatimid period were new, or if the new immigrants integrated with pre-existing communities. In any event, Geniza sources reveal that Jews of Maghrebi origin resided in Palestinian coastal cities.26 Some of these Jews were part of mercantile networks, and probably settled in these cities in order to facilitate trade in their commercial network.27 Some of these cities, such as Ascalon and Tyre, became thriving Jewish centres from the Fatimid period until their destruction (Ascalon in 1192 and Tyre in 1291). Yet, although Jews lived in cities such as Caesarea and Acre, and in towns such as Haifa and Rafaḥ, there is almost no indication of a Jewish presence in the villages of the coastal plain. Christian communities apparently existed throughout the region. These communities were poorly documented, and their existence only became evident during the Crusader period. It is impossible to discard the option that Christians of oriental 20  Sefer Nameh, ed. Schefer, 51–52.

21  Sefer Nameh, ed. Schefer, 46–47.

22  Drory, “Some Observations,” 121–22. 23  Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 27.

24  al-Ashrafānī�, ʿUmdat al-ʿArāfīn, ed. ʿAzām, 380–82; Shimon Avivi, “The Druze Settlements in Israel: Their Origin and Development (11th–16th Centuries),” Horizons in Geo­graphy, 68/​69 (2007): 159–78 at 162 [in Hebrew]. 25  Daniella Talmon-Heller, Benjamin Z. Kedar, and Yitzhak Reiter, “Vicissitudes of a Holy Place: Construction, Destruction, and Commemoration of Mashhad Ḥusain in Ascalon,” Der Islam 93, no. 1 (2016): 182–215 at 186–92. CIAP 1: 141–42; 5: 28–30; Omar Abed Rabbo, “Was the Fāṭimī� Caliph al-Ā� mir bi-Aḥkām Allāh Buried in ʿAsqalān? Following the Recent Discovery of his Epitaph,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 47 (2019): 237–73; Talmon-Heller, Sacred Place and Sacred Time, 42–54. 26  Gil, A History of Palestine, 260–77.

27  Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medi­eval Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 39–45.



Coastal Plain

47

denominations immigrated to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem during the Crusader period and that these theoretical immigrants settled in the coastal plain, but sources do not support such an option. It seems that the southern coastal region had a heavier Christian population than the north. In addition, some inland localities, such as BethGuvrin (Bayt Gubrī�n, Bayt Jibrī�n, Bethgibelin), had a substantial Christian population. For example, early Arabic inscriptions found in the local stone quarries are clearly of a Christian character.28 Samaritans were recorded in some localities in the coastal plain before and during the Early Islamic period. The anonymous pilgrim of Piacenza wrote in 570 that there was a place called Castra Samaritanorum near Shiqmona (Haifa).29 Al-Yaʿqubī� wrote that Samaritans lived in Ramla and Yavne (Yubna).30 Hanan and Esther Eshel published two Samaritan inscriptions from Yavne, guessing that they were written between the Byzantine and the Crusader periods, probably closer to the beginning of this time span.31 Samaritan chronicles mentioned Samaritan communities in coastal cities such as Caesarea, Ascalon, and Gaza. These sources likewise indicate that there were some rural Samaritan communities in the region, which disappeared prior to the Crusader conquest.32 Crusader Period

The Crusaders conquered the coastal plain’s cities gradually. Jaffa and Ramla were abandoned in early June 1099, when the Crusaders were on their way to Jerusalem, and were the first cities to be occupied by the Crusaders. The conquest of the rest of the coastal cities—Arsūr, Caesarea, Haifa, Acre, and Tyre—was much slower, and continued to 1153, when Ascalon eventually surrendered to Baldwin III.33 The conquest of these cities, except for Tyre (1124) and Ascalon, was accompanied by fierce massacres.34 These events dramatically changed the region’s demo­graphic profile from being a Muslim (with a substantial Shiʿite segment) area with Oriental Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan minorities, to a mostly Western Christian region with Muslim, local Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan communities. It seems plausible that most of the casualties of these sieges and massacres were Muslims, although Jews, Samaritans, and even some local Christians probably perished as well. 28  CIAP 2: 127–31; Barbara Astafurova, “Stages of the Conversion to Christianity of the Rural Settlements in the Province of Palaestina Prima in the Fourth–Seventh Centuries ce: The Territory of Beth Guvrin/​Eleutheropolis as a Case Study” (master’s thesis, University of Tel-Aviv, 2018), 121. 29  Antoninus of Piacenza, Itinerarium, ed. Milani, 92.

30  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 328–30.

31  Esther Eshel and Hanan Eshel, “A Fragment of a Samaritan Inscription from Yavne,” Tarbiz 74 (2005): 313–16 [in Hebrew]. 32  Pummer, The Samaritans, 172; Crown, “The Byzantine and Muslim,” 77–81; The Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle, ed. Levy-Rubin, 183–86.

33  CIAP 1: 137–38.

34  Cities such as Beirut and Sidon were also conquered without massacres, yet they are outside the scope of this study.

48

Chapter 2

The Crusader occupation brought the Islamization process to a halt throughout the Holy Land, but especially in the coastal plain and Jerusalem. Although many Franks were of rural background, most of the Frankish population of the Crusader kingdom resided in urban settlements.35 This view does not contradict Ellenblum’s thesis that more Franks lived in the countryside than previously suggested, since he never suggested that those rural Franks constituted a majority. Many of the Franks lived in the coastal plain, which included relatively large urban settlements, but also villages, monasteries, and farms in the area.36 The Franks became the dominant population group in the region. They settled in cities that were emptied of their previous inhabitants. Those who survived the massacres and deportations and continued to live in the area were marginalized. Although there is no information available about the relative size of different religious communities, the fact that all pre-existing cities and towns in the coastal plain continued to exist in the Crusader period as urban settlements, indicates that Frankish immigration to these localities was significant enough to compensate for the population lost through massacres and deportations. Moreover, it seems that some coastal cities and towns expanded during the Crusader period, especially in the thirteenth century. Acre, and subsequently Tyre, reached their historical zenith during the Crusader period to become densely populated cities and thriving commercial centres. Following its conquest in 1153, Ascalon continued to be an important regional centre.37 Other settlements, such as Jaffa and Caesarea, remained secondary centres. Even though Jaffa was reportedly deserted at the time of the Crusaders’ arrival, and the population of Caesarea suffered a terrible massacre, it seems that during the Crusader period Caesarea retained its pre-conquest size, and Jaffa even expanded.38 This indicates either that the Frankish immigration to the coastal plain was substantial enough to replace the indigenous inhabitants who either perished during the conquest or emigrated shortly afterwards, or that the massacres were not as fierce as described in the contemporary sources. I demonstrate below that, at least in some cases, the second option seems plausible, although it is possible that the descriptions of the massacres faithfully described events that transpired elsewhere. The Franks were not the only residents of these cities. They were also inhabited by Muslims, local Christians, Jews, and Samaritans. Documentation of Muslims in the region’s cities is scarce, but it seems plausible to suggest that most if not all of the region’s cities and towns had Muslim communities. According to Ibn Jubayr (1184–1185), the 35  Joshua Prawer, Crusader Institutions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 102.

36  Joshua Prawer, Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem, 2 vols. (Paris: CNRS, 1969), 1: 568; Denys Pringle, The Red Tower (London: British School of Archaeo­logy, 1986), 12–13; Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 12–14; Michael Ehrlich, “L’organisation de l’espace et la hiérarchie des villes dans le royaume latin de Jérusalem,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 51 (2008): 213–22 at 219–22. 37  CIAP 1: 138.

38  Kenneth G. Holum, King Herod’s Dream: Caesarea on the Sea (New York; Norton, 1988), 231; Adrian J. Boas, “Frankish Jaffa,” in The History and Archaeo­logy of Jaffa, ed. Martin Peilstöcker and Aaron A. Burke, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: Costen Institute of Archaeo­logy, University of California at Los Angeles, 2011), 1: 121–24.



Coastal Plain

49

Franks allocated an area within Acre’s cathedral for Muslim prayer.39 There is reference to a Muslim merchant who resided in Tyre.40 Presumably, these two incidental references may point to a much broader phenomenon. Ibn Jubayr described the conversion of the central mosque into a cathedral by the Franks and mentions that they have also dedicated a certain area in the structure for Muslim prayers. This description is very important, in this respect: Ibn Jubayr disliked the Franks, expressing his hatred of them by frequently cursing them and describing them with pejoratives. Ibn Jubayr would not have invented a fictional story that seems to indicate a high level of Frankish tolerance toward Muslims. Namely, if he wrote that the Franks allocated an area within the cathedral for Muslim prayer, he was probably describing the situation accurately, and not engaging in wishful thinking. Moreover, the Franks who converted the former central mosque into a cathedral were aware of the sentiments of the Muslims. Not only did they enable them to practise their religion within the Frankish city, they did so within the Holy Cross cathedral itself. This also suggests that there was a significant Muslim presence in twelfth century Acre. Otherwise, the Franks would not have allocated a Muslim ritual place within their cathedral. If, after suffering massacre and deportation, Muslims still constituted a significant percentage of a central Frankish city’s population, they almost certainly remained an important segment of the rural population in many areas of the coastal plain. There is no indication that the Franks massacred or deported villagers during the region’s conquest or afterwards. Even though there are records of Frankish harassment and persecutions of Muslim villagers, such as a repeatedly studied group of Muslim villagers from Samaria who fled to Damascus, generally speaking, Ibn Jubayr’s description of the Muslim population of the rural area between Tibnī�n and Acre living in peace and serenity seems to indicate a rather common reality.41 Most Muslim villagers in the coastal plain probably continued living in their homes throughout this period. Many villages already existed in the early stage of the Mamluk period, such as those granted by Baybars to his amirs in 1265.42 These villagers were either Muslims in 1265 or converted to Islam during the Mamluk period, because their population was already Muslim by the end of the sixteenth century.43 However, although Muslims lived in the southern district of the coastal plain as well, it seems that the indigenous Christian share of this area’s population was more significant than it was around Tyre, Acre, and Caesarea. 39  Ibn Jubayr, Riḥlat, ed. ʿAbd al-Ghānī�, 247–48.

40  Hans E. Mayer, “Latins, Muslims, and Greeks in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” History 63 (1978): 175–92 at 184.

41  Ibn Jubayr, Riḥlat, ed. ʿAbd al-Ghānī�, 247–48; Sivan, “Réfugiés syro-palestiniens”; Drory, “Hanbalis of the Nablus Region”; Kedar and al-Hajjuj, “Muslim Villagers of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem”; Talmon-Heller, “The Shaykh and the Community”; Daniella Talmon Heller and Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Did Muslim Survivors from the 1099 Massacre of Jerusalem Settle in Damascus: The Truth Origins of the Ṣāliḥiyya Suburb,” Al–Masaq 17 (2005): 165–70 at 167. 42  Felix M. Abel, “La liste des donations de Baibars en Palestine d’après la charte de 663 H (1265),” Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society, 19 (1939): 38–44. 43  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 137–41.

50

Chapter 2

According to Fulcher of Chartres, even though most of Ramla’s people abandoned their city before the arrival of the Crusaders, the “Syrian” inhabitants remained in the otherwise empty city.44 In 1173, the Hospitaller order granted the monastery of Saint George to the Archbishop of Gaza and Beth Guvrin (Bethgibelin).45 This reference indicates that a substantial Greek Orthodox community still lived in the area of Beth Guvrin and Gaza shortly before the end of Frankish rule in the region. Gaza had an Oriental Christian community during the Crusader period, and apparently, that community continued to live in the city, even after its destruction and abandonment by other residents during the first half of the twelfth century.46 These sources indicate that local Christians resided in the coastal plain throughout the Early Islamic and Crusader periods, especially south of Jaffa. There is no evidence of Jewish or Samaritan communities in the coastal plain’s rural settlements during the Crusader period. Jews are mentioned in various Geniza sources, as well as in accounts of Jewish pilgrims, whereas Samaritans are mentioned in chronicles as well as by non-Samaritan pilgrims.47 The main difference between Jews and Samaritans is that some of the Jewish communities included immigrants, while the Samaritan communities seem to have been composed almost entirely of locals. Jewish communities are documented in Ascalon, Caesarea, Acre, and Tyre during the Crusader period.48 Caesarea’s and Ascalon’s Jewish communities ceased to exist after the Battle of Ḥaṭṭī�n and the Third Crusade. Tyre maintained its Jewish community throughout the thirteenth century,49 whereas Acre became one of the most important Jewish communities worldwide.50 Leading Jewish scholars, such as Rabbi Samson of Sens (1211) and Naḥmanides (1267) immigrated to the Holy Land and settled in Acre.51 Such prominent scholars were often followed by some of their disciples, which in turn fostered the immigration of additional Jews from different origins. However, the communities in Acre and Tyre ceased to exist in 1291, following the conquest of Acre and the surrender of Tyre. Some Jewish residents of Acre perished in the Mamluk conquest, whereas Jews from Tyre, which surrendered peacefully, and those Jews from Acre who managed to survive the violent Mamluk conquest, emigrated to various destinations. Some returned 44  Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. Hagenmayer, bk. 2 chap. 9: 443.

45  CH 1: no. 456, 306.

46  Reuven Amitai, “Gaza in the Frankish and Ayyubid Periods: The Run-up to 1260 ce,” in Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Co-existence, ed. Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 225–44 at 228–29. 47  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 20, 27–28.

48  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 20, 27–28; Die Rundreise des R. Petachja aus Regensburg, ed. Lazar Grünhut (Frankfurt am Main: Kaufman, 1904), 46 [in Hebrew]; UKJ 3: 1349; Oliver Berggötz, Der Bericht des Marsilio Zorzi (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991), 145.

49  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 253–58; Merav Mack, “The Italian Quarters of Frankish Tyre: Mapping a Medi­eval City,” Journal of Medi­eval History 33 (2007): 147–65 at 152n21.

50  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 258.

51  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 253–54.



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51

to Europe, but most of them probably moved to nearby destinations such as Safed, Jerusalem, or even Gaza.52 Samaritans are documented in Ascalon, Caesarea, and Acre during the Crusader period. Benjamin of Tudela mentioned three hundred Samaritans in Ascalon and two hundred in Caesarea: about a third of all Samaritans mentioned by Benjamin in the entire Frankish kingdom lived in Caesarea and in Ascalon.53 As Ascalon was conquered peacefully and the Samaritans felt secure there under the Frankish regime, it seems likely that the local Samaritan community continued to exist and prosper during this period.54 However, the relatively large Samaritan community in Caesarea seems to indicate that it was mainly composed of survivors of the 1101 massacre. If such a relatively large number of Samaritans survived the massacre, many Muslims and Jews may have also survived, making the conflict seem less fierce than usually described and believed.55 Samaritans living in Acre are cited in Frankish sources, and Naḥmanides, the renowned Jewish scholar, wrote that he asked one of the Samaritans in Acre to read an ancient Hebrew inscription on a coin he had found.56 Thus, shortly before 1270, Samaritans were living in Acre. The coastal Samaritan communities ceased to exist once Acre was conquered by the Mamluks in 1291, though it is possible that some Samaritan survivors emigrated to Gaza. Mamluk Period

A discussion about the coastal plain during the Mamluk period must be divided geo­ graphically between Gaza and its environs and the rest of the coastal plain. While the Mamluks systematically destroyed all of the cities and the towns between Jaffa and Tyre (aside from the old district of Haifa), they developed Gaza, which became a large and thriving city.57 As a result, the Oriental Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan urban communities that had resided in the coastal plain during the Crusader period disappeared, and the area became entirely Muslim. In Gaza, however, the situation was different; Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan communities were either newly established there or continued to exist from earlier periods. The Mamluk conquest virtually annihilated all of the religious communities in the area, except for the Muslims. The Franks, who ruled the area for almost two centuries, disappeared: many of them were killed in the battles, while others were captured and enslaved, and still others who were lucky enough to escape emigrated to Cyprus or to farther destinations. Oriental Christians, Jews, and Samaritans also left the region. Chris52  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem,” 713; Prawer, The History of the Jews, 258. 53  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 20, 28.

54  Kedar, “Samaritan History: The Frankish Period,” 83–94.

55  Asbridge, The Crusades, 123–24.

56  Prawer, Crusader Institutions, 389; Joseph Albo, Sefer HaʿIqarim (Warsaw: Goldman, 1870), 118–19. 57  Amitai, “Gaza in the Frankish and Ayyubid Periods,” 237–38.

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tians moved to neighbouring areas such as Cyprus, and Jews moved overseas as well as to inland cities, such as Jerusalem and Safed. Muslims living in the coastal cities moved to inland villages and townships, such as Jaljūliya and Qāqūn. These settlements were situated along the main road between Cairo and Damascus.58 Yet unlike the Fatimid period, when many Shiʿites lived in the coastal cities, during the Mamluk period the entire Muslim population was Sunni. Clearly, the population centres were transferred from the coastline to inland townships. However, despite the large-scale destruction wrought by the Mamluks, most cities were not entirely abandoned in the conquest, and many that were abandoned were subsequently rebuilt during the Mamluk period. For example, there are descriptions of some civic life in Acre in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; Tyre and its markets were rebuilt in 1420.59

58  Katia Cytryn-Silverman, The Road Inns (Khāns) in Bilād al-Shām (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010), 99–102, 135–36, 143–44. 59  Arbel, “Venetian Trade in Fifteenth-Century Acre”; Lewis, “An Arabic Account,” 482–83; Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings,” 20.



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Figure 1: The Great Mosque of Ramla, a former Crusader church (courtesy of Gad Rize)

The Mamluk conquest not only changed the population’s religious profile: it changed the landscape as well. Clearly, the disappearance of large cities such as Tyre, Acre, and Ascalon transformed the region. The once-thriving commercial region became a marginal, neglected area. Settlements along the Cairo to Damascus international highway enjoyed a certain resurgence, yet remained no more than townships. In places that were not destroyed, such as Gaza, Ramla, and Yubnā, Crusader churches were transformed into mosques.60 Moreover, the region to the north, as far as Arsūf, was dotted with Muslim pilgrimage shrines of various sizes. Some of these, such as the shrines of Abū Huraira in Yubnā and Salmān al-Fārisī� in Isdūd, were established along the international road, while others, such as Nabī� Rūbī�n and Sidnā Alī�, near Arsūf, 60  Andrew Petersen, A Gazetteer of Buildings in Muslim Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 204–5; Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 184–85.

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were established in remote, and reportedly abandoned, areas.61 Yet there is no evidence that churches in coastal cities and towns to the north of Arsūf were converted to mosques. According to Mamluk and Ottoman period sources, the mosques of the former Frankish settlements of Qalānsua and Qāqūn were former churches. However, unlike the mosques of the southern region, which to this day include discernible remains of churches, such remains did not survive in the area to the north of Arsūf.62 Gaza had a Christian community in the Early Islamic and Crusader periods.63 It continued to exist throughout the Mamluk period, and several hundred Christians still live in Gaza.64 The 1596–1597 census indicates that Christian communities only survived in Gaza and in Darūm (Dayr al-Balaḥ).65 The earliest reference to the existence of Jews and Samaritans in Gaza is from 1395.66 This description was written more than a century after the fall of the last Frankish strongholds in Syria. Such a long span indicates that Gaza’s Jewish community mostly included immigrants from Egypt and other locations, and only a handful of survivors, if any, from former coastal Jewish communities such as Tyre and Acre.67 A letter written in 1510 includes a reference to a Jew from Kafr Yāsī�f, about twelve kilometres from Acre.68 Small Jewish communities were documented in this location as well as in other adjacent villages during the Ottoman period, as well.69 The same considerations also apply to the Samaritan community. There are no references to the existence of a Samaritan community in Gaza during the Crusader, Ayyubid, and Mamluk periods prior to 1395. Although Samaritans had a limited diaspora, and as a result, the default assumption is that a Samaritan community is of local ancestry, in this case, the possibility that the members of Gaza’s Samaritan community arrived from Egypt is rather likely. It is possible that Gaza’s Samaritan community in the late fourteenth century was established during the Mamluk period by immigrants from neighbouring communities such as Ascalon or from abroad, perhaps from Alexandria, following its conquest and sack by the Franks in 1365.70 In the fourteenth century, reference 61  Petersen, A Gazetteer of Buildings in Muslim Palestine, 146–48, 156–58; Mahmoud Yazbak, “The Muslim Festival of Nabi Rubin in Palestine: From Religious Festival to Summer Resort,” Holy Land Studies 10 (2011): 169–98 at 171–77. 62  Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 61, 64.

63  CH 1: no. 443, 306–8; Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1: 216–19.

64  Pacini, “Socio-Political and Community Dynamics,” 278. 65  Cohen and Lewis, Population and Revenues, 117–34.

66  Le Saint voyage de Jherusalem du seigneur d’Anglure, ed. François Bonnardot and Auguste Longnon (Paris: Didot, 1878), 43. 67  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem.”

68  Abraham David, “The Involvement of the Last Nagids of Egypt in the Affairs of the Jewish Community of Eretz-Israel,” Teʿuda 15 (2005): 293–332 at 322 [in Hebrew].

69  Abraham David, To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in the Land of Israel in the Sixteenth Century (Jerusalem: Mass, 1993; trans. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Presss, 1999), 29 [in Hebrew].

70  Jo Van Steenbergen, “The Alexandrian Crusade (1365) and the Mamlūk Sources: Reassessment of the Kitab al-Ilmam of an-Nuwayri al-Iskandarani (d. 1372 AD),” in East and West in the Crusader



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is made to a Samaritan scribe, whose name was ‘al-Samarī� al-ʿAsqalānī�,’ which indicates that he was from a Samaritan family that originated in Ascalon. Ottoman Period

In the sixteenth century, Gaza was the largest and most important city in the entire coastal plain. The census of 1525–1526 enumerated 883 families, of whom 528 were Muslim, 235 Christian, ninety-five Jewish, and twenty-five Samaritan. The census of 1548–1549 counted 2258 families, of whom 1698 were Muslim, 325 Christian, 116 Jewish, and eighteen Samaritan.71 This clearly indicates that the city expanded considerably during the first decades following the Ottoman conquest, a phenomenon seen as well in Safed and Jerusalem. The Ottoman period witnessed a certain revival of Acre, and to a lesser extent of Haifa and Tyre. During the early seventeenth century, the Druze ruler of Sidon, Fakhr al-Dī�n (1586–1635), whose realm extended from Beirut to Lower Galilee, made a significant effort to renovate the port cities of Acre and Tyre.72 Renovation of the coastal cities was the result of Fakhr al-Dī�n’s ambition to develop trade with Europe. Acre and Tyre were still ruined cities, but the increased commercial activity in their ports constituted the first stage of their eventual recovery.73 Acre and Haifa also developed considerably during the eighteenth century, during the rule of Ẓāhir āl-ʿUmar (1730–1775).74 These beginnings also included the reappearance of small Christian and Jewish communities in coastal cities.75 In 1743 Rabbi Moshe Luzzatto settled in Acre and died there three years later.76 However, this brief episode did not provoke mass immigration. Acre’s Jewish community remained small and marginal. Despite the low profile of Jewish and Christian communities in the coastal plain during the Ottoman period, two important events whose impact extended beyond the region’s limits occurred there during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in 1665,

States. Context—Contacts—Confrontations, III. Acta of the Congress Held at Hernen Castle in September 2000, ed. Krijna N. Ciggaar and H Teule (Leuven: Peeters, 2003): 123–37; Niall Christie, “Cosmopolitan Trade Center or Bone of Contention? Alexandria and the Crusades 487–857/​ 1095–1453,” Al Masaq 26 (2014): 49–61 at 55–56.

71  Bernard Lewis, “Studies in the Ottoman Archives,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16, no. 3 (1954): 469–501 at 476.

72  William Harris, Lebanon: A History 600–2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011), 98; Alessandro Olsaretti, “Political Dynamics in the Rise of Fakhr al-Din, 1590–1633: Crusade, Trade, and State Formation Along the Levantine Coast,” The International History Review 30, no. 4 (2008): 709–40 at 733–38.

73  Elizabeth Sirriyeh, “The Mémoires of a French Gentleman in Syria: Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux (1635–1702),” Bulletin. British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 11, no. 2 (1984): 125–39 at 128–30. 74  Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 128–43; Philipp, Acre, 38–39. 75  Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 131; Philipp, Acre 57,

76  Jacob Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Tusca­ loosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 36; Yirmeyahu Bindman, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato: His Life and Works (Northvale: Aronson, 1995), 116–17.

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Shabtai Zevi visited Gaza and was declared by Nathan of Gaza to be the Messiah, which in turn caused unprecedented turmoil across the Jewish world.77 In 1708, Euthymus Saify, the Archbishop of Tyre and Sidon, formed a union with Rome with regard to doctrine and acceptance of the Pope as supreme head of the Church, a process that culminated in the 1724 schism and the establishment of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church.78 Summary

Islamization of the coastal plain was not a linear process, but one with many twists and turns. It began with the emigration of provincial elites, the decline of the region’s cities, and the establishment of alternative centres. The Abbasids focused their efforts on other areas, and subsequently, the coastal plain lost much of its previous economic and social importance. However, during the Fatimid period, Shiʿite immigrants settled in the region’s cities. As a result, these previously neglected coastal cities re-emerged, and some of them, such as Tyre and Ascalon, became important commercial centres. Ascalon even became an important pilgrimage destination. Some cities harbored Jews from North Africa, who established new Jewish communities or reinforced pre-existing ones. Samaritans continued to live in the central coastal cities. The Crusader conquest brought the region’s Islamization to a halt. An influx of Western Christians settled all over the region, especially in the cities and near the main road to Jerusalem. However, once the Mamluks occupied the area, the Western Christian population disappeared, and non-Muslim survivors left the region. Thus, by the beginning of the fourteenth century, only a handful of non-Muslims lived in the entire region, with the exception of Gaza, where a pre-existing Oriental Christian community continued to live throughout the period. Jewish and Samaritan communities in Gaza were either established or significantly expanded during the second half of the fourteenth century. Following the Ottoman conquest, the region’s cities were gradually rebuilt. It was a long and slow process, which also involved the reestablishment of non-Muslim communities.

77  Scholem, Sabbatai Ṣevi, 215.

78  Zwierlein, “Interaction and Boundary,” 162.

Chapter 3

GALILEE The area known as Galilee includes the southern part of Lebanon, from the Lī�ṭānī� River to the Israeli border (Jabal ʿĀ� mil), as well as the northern district of Israel, from the Lebanese border to the northern foothills of the Samaria mountains. The east to west dimensions of Galilee include the northern part of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. This book extends the borders of Galilee eastward, to include the Golan Heights and the Decapolis region, which are east of the Jordan River. It should be noted, however, that the northern coastal plain, from ʿAtlit to the Lī�tānī�, has been discussed in the previous chapter. This area is subdivided into the following regions: Western, Upper, and Lower Galilee, Jabal ʿĀ� mil, the Golan Heights and the Decapolis. These regions comprise an area that is almost identical to that of the Early Islamic district of Jund al-Urdunn.1

Western Galilee

Western Galilee is a modern Israeli name which did not exist in earlier periods. It includes the western half of the Galilee mountains, from the foothills to the midway point between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.2 In this book, the foothill settlements are discussed in the previous chapter. Western Galilee, which constituted the mountainous hinterland of Tyre and Acre, was exclusively rural. It was bypassed by the main regional roads, with the exception of a road that connected Damascus and Acre during the Crusader period until 1187. Western Galilee lacked important trade centres, as well as important shrines and pilgrimage destinations. As a result, it was not described, and consequently there is very limited written information about the region. Early Islamic Period

During the Roman and Byzantine periods, Western Galilee was divided between the provinces of Phoenicia and Judea, and later Palestina.3 This division reflected the spheres of influence of the coastal cities of Tyre and Acre, respectively. These cities dictated the cultural and religious profile of the region, whose population was mostly Christian.4 The Christianity of the area’s population is attested to by the existence of 1  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 27.

2  Rafael Frankel, Nimrod Getzov, Mordechai Aviam, and Avi Degani, Settlement Dynamics and Regional Diversity in Ancient Upper Galilee (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2001), 141–42.

3  Michael Ehrlich, “The Borders in the ‘Baraita of the Boundaries’ according to Crusader and Mamluk Sources,” Proceedings of the 11th World Congress of Jewish Studies B/​1 (1994): 67–74 [in Hebrew].

4  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 230–31; Jacob Ashkenazi and Mordechai Aviam, “Monasteries, Monks, and Villages in Western Galilee in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Late Antiquity 12

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sixty-seven churches in this region, fifty of them in rural areas.5 Some archaeo­logical remains indicating Jewish presence in the area have also been found, but only sporadically.6 Western Galilee extends northwards from Acre, up to the modern-day Israeli–Lebanese border. According to the regional archaeo­logical survey, most of the Byzantineperiod churches were destroyed or abandoned in the seventh century, and out of the 194 settlements that existed during the Byzantine period in the entire Upper Galilee region (including its eastern district), only thirteen survived the Early Islamic period.7 This extremely low number suggests that Western Galilee underwent significant demo­ graphic change during this period, for unknown reasons. The surveyors said of the Western Galilee collapse: “the conquest of the region occupied by Christian and Jewish farmers by Bedouin who were the fervent adherents of a new militant faith clearly resulted in the destruction and abandonment of many sites and the depletion of the remainder.”8 This explanation is unsatisfactory, since this so-called “Bedouin fervour” did not provoke such a large-scale abandonment of Jewish and Christian rural settlements elsewhere. Moreover, there is no indication that Western Galilee, which was remote and therefore unattractive as an immigration destination, was driven out by Bedouins, who did not usually become farmers, certainly not immediately. This theory also contradicts Ellenblum’s opinion, namely that the Franks tended to settle in regions with a significant percentage of indigenous Christian residents, and therefore they settled or at least planned to settle a significant number of Franks in rural settlements across the region.9 Moreover, based on the regional archaeo­logical survey, many settlements were reestablished during the Crusader period.10 There is no indication that the newcomers were indigenous Christians. In 1184, the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr described the population between Tibnī�n and Acre as being exclusively Muslim.11 It is unclear to what extent an occasional traveller, who had only passed through a region for a day or two, could accurately describe the regional population’s religious profile. However, there is no reason to assume that the settlements he saw along the road were not inhabited by Muslims, and there is no indication that elsewhere in the region the population did include a significant percentage of Oriental Christians. The survey’s data seem to indicate that the increase in population in Western Galilee occurred during the Crusader period, and assuming that Ibn Jubayr’s description is reliable, most of the alleged newcomers should have been Muslims. This conclusion implies that Muslim villagers were (2012): 269–97; Mordechai Aviam, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Galilee (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2004), 9–21. 5  Patrich et al., Churches of the Holy Land.

6  Zvi Lederman and Mordechai Aviam, “A Tomb in the Teffen Region of Galilee and Its Incised Menorah,” Qadmoniot 79–80 (1987): 124–25 [in Hebrew].

7  Frankel et al., Settlement Dynamics, 114–17. 8  Frankel et al., Settlement Dynamics, 117.

9  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 36.

10  Frankel et al., Settlement Dynamics, 117–20.

11  Ibn Jubayr, Riḥlat, ed. ʿAbd al-Ghānī�, 245–46.



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encouraged to settle in the area, or even settled by Frankish landlords who wanted to generate as much income as possible from their property. However, despite the presence of clues that may support the existence of such an initiative, the most plausible explanation is that the Muslim population arrived in the region earlier. This option is based mainly on the lack of solid evidence of substantial Muslim immigration to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, and specifically to Acre’s hinterland. It is also based on the continued use of local toponyms from pre-Muslim periods to the modern era. Chaim Ben David, who has analyzed the preservation of toponyms, concluded that the main reason for name preservation is continuity of settlement.12 Yet even the few settlements whose modern names preserve pre-Muslim and Early Islamic toponyms outnumber the thirteen settlements that according to the survey existed during the Early Islamic period. These settlements must have existed throughout the Muslim period; otherwise, their names would not have been preserved. Some of these settlements’ inhabitants probably converted to Islam in the Early Islamic period, and were not immigrants who arrived during the Crusader period. The settlements might have become small and impoverished during the Early Islamic period, managed to survive the calamities of the period, but, according to Ibn Jubayr, recovered and prospered under Frankish rule. It seems that most of Western Galilee’s population converted to Islam during the Early Islamic period. Crusader Period

During the Crusader period, the coastal cities of Tyre and Acre became large cities, with Acre becoming particularly important. They were the two principal ports of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As such, the cities themselves, as well as their rural hinterlands, became attractive for Frankish settlement. Yet, aside from this temporary arrival of Frankish population, there are no indications that other settlements underwent significant religious and demo­graphic changes during this period. As stated above, Ronnie Ellenblum postulated that the Franks tended to settle in areas that were already inhabited by Oriental Christians.13 Ellenblum based his theory on two basic premises. The first was King Baldwin III’s desire to settle Franks and indigenous Christians in the region, as noted by an 1160 donation deed that includes the phrase: “Omnium pertinenciarum cuiusdam castelli mei, quod Mhalia nuncupatur tam earum vidilicet que nunc habitantur, quam earum, que per Dei graciam in futurum habitabunur.”14 Ellenblum concluded that since the king relied on “the help of the Lord” (per Dei graciam), it seems that he wished to settle the region with Franks or indigenous Christians. Ellenblum also suggested that the Byzantine period’s religious border between Christians and Jews in Galilee, and between Samaritans and Christians in Samaria, was still relevant in the twelfth century. According to his theory, Franks settled 12  Chaim Ben David, “The Preservation of Roman and Byzantine Place Names from the Golan Heights,” Semitica et Classica 3 (2010): 265–71 at 270. 13  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 36.

14  Tabulae ordinis theutonici, ed. Strehlke, no. 2, 2–3.

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Western Galilee and southern Samaria specifically.15 But while Ellenblum’s interpretation of the king’s words is feasible, it does not prove that the area was inhabited by Christians, or even that the king planned to settle it with Franks or indigenous Christians. The king may have simply used a colloquial expression or expressed his desire to increase the potential revenue from this region by encouraging settlement, regardless of the settlers’ religion. Moreover, the existence of about a dozen Jewish villages in Upper Galilee during the Crusader period might imply that the division between Christian West and Jewish East dating back to the Byzantine period still endured. Nevertheless, as stated above, the existing evidence suggests that during the Crusader period the Western Galilee population was Muslim. Shimon Avivi based his view that Druze people lived in the coastal plain between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries on the writings of the Druze historian al-Ashrāfānī�.16 He further posits that since the Druze were a persecuted minority during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, they were not able to eradicate the local Muslim population. Therefore, in Avivi’s opinion, the modern Druze settlements that were registered in the 1596–1597 census without specifying if their inhabitants were Muslims or Druze, would also have been inhabited by Druze at the time.17 However, there is no evidence that the inhabitants of thirteenth-century settlements such as Kisra,’ whose modern-day inhabitants are Druze, were also Druze at that time.18 Al-Ashrāfānī�, whose book constituted one of Avivi’s major sources, mentioned Druze settlements in the coastal plain as well as in the mountain regions, and therefore there is no reason to presume that a settlement was Druze based solely on a scholarly assumption, without additional support. Possible reasons for Druze settlement in Western Galilee villages could be numerous. For example, Druze people could have settled in deserted villages, or felt themselves strong enough to expel the Muslim inhabitants of a remote area, especially in periods when said area was ruled by Druze leaders such as Fakhr al-Dī�n. Mamluk and Ottoman Periods

The destruction of Tyre, and of Acre in 1291, led to the abandonment of most of the coastline. Although there are indications that some inhabitants remained in Acre and Tyre, and that the destruction was not absolute, these cities lost their status and became poor townships.19 As a result, the region lost its economic attractiveness. Its central markets ceased to exist, and the scope of trade in the surviving cities decreased considerably. This economic collapse would likely have been accompanied by a sharp decrease in demand for commodities provided to the cities by the rural settlements, which consequently led to the impoverishment of many settlements. Unlike the southern coastal plain, which was crossed by the main Mamluk road from Cairo to Damascus, no main 15  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 213–76.

16  Avivi, “The Druze Settlements,” 162–63. 17  Avivi, “The Druze Settlements,” 161.

18  Tabulae ordinis theutonici, ed. Strehlke, no. 73, 57–58.

19  Arbel, “Venetian Trade in Fifteenth-Century Acre,” 228; Lewis, “An Arabic Account,” 482–83.



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road passed through Western Galilee; it was therefore ignored by most traders. The region did not have any important religious shrines, either. While in other regions the Mamluks converted churches into mosques, there is no evidence that they did so in Western Galilee. The region had little arable land, and although it included some fertile enclaves, demand for their products was low, and it apparently included only poor settlements. During the Mamluk period, this region’s Frankish population disappeared, and the Oriental Christian and Jewish populations were limited in size. Subsequently, the region became marginal and unattractive, and was almost entirely populated by Muslims and Druze.20 No significant demo­graphic changes occurred in Western Galilee from the Mamluk conquest until the nineteenth century. It remained a mostly Muslim region, with a limited Druze presence. Summary

The main religious change in Western Galilee occurred during the Early Islamic period. During this period, the coastal cities of Tyre and Acre were in decline. The Western Galilean Christian communities either declined or entirely disappeared, and their members emigrated or converted to Islam. In the early tenth century, Tyre and Acre regained their importance and integrated Muslim and Jewish immigrants. As a result, the population of the hinterland of these cities probably increased, as well. This situation did not significantly change in the ensuing centuries. The region remained mainly Muslim, with a Druze minority that became more significant during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. Christians constituted a tiny minority of the area’s population, whereas no more than a handful of Jews lived in the region throughout the period.

Lower Galilee

Lower Galilee is a region that includes five low mountain ridges (up to 600 metres high) separated by relatively wide valleys. It borders Upper Galilee to the north, roughly along Israel’s Route 85, and the Jezreel Valley to the south. Early Islamic Period

During the Byzantine period, Lower Galilee had two urban centres, Sepphoris and Tiberias. These were cities of secondary importance with significant Christian and Jewish populations.21 They were surrounded by numerous villages, inhabited by adher-

20  Kate Raphael and Mustafa Abbasi, “The Galilee Villages during the Mamluk and Early Ottoman Period (1260–1746): A Smooth Transition or a Full-Scale Crisis?” Cathedra (forthcoming, in Hebrew). I would like to thank Dr. Raphael and Prof. Abbasi for kindly allowing me to read their important and innovative article prior to publication.

21  James F. Strange, “Sepphoris: The Jewel of Galilee,” in Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods. Volume 2: The Archaeo­logical Record from Galilean Cities, Towns, and Villages, ed. David A. Fiensy and James R. Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 22–38; Katia Cytryn-Silverman, “Tiberias from its Foundation to the End of the Early Islamic Period,” in The Archaeo­logical Record

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ents of both religions. The remains of nineteen churches and of thirty-three synagogues have been unearthed in Lower Galilee.22 Following the Bar-Kokhva revolt (132–135), the central Jewish institutions were restored in this area, at first in the three townships of Usha, Beth-Sheʿarim, and Shefarʿam (Shafāʿamr), later in Sepphoris and eventually Tiberias.23 In the early years following the Muslim conquest, the Christian and Jewish communities continued to flourish. A list from this period includes six synagogues in Tiberias and two in Sepphoris, as well as at least five synagogues in the rest of Lower Galilee.24 Saint Willibald, who visited the region around 720 ce, wrote that there were many churches and synagogues in Tiberias.25 Tiberias remained the Holy Land’s most important Jewish centre until the late ninth century. During this period, the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel, the most important Jewish institution outside of Iraq, was located in the city. Moreover, Tiberias became the most important centre of Hebrew-language scholarship in the world.26 Around the beginning of the tenth century, when the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel moved to Jerusalem, Tiberias lost its status as the centre of the Holy Land’s Jewish community, and its community became small and marginal.27 The rural Jewish settlement disappeared as well, and thus, by the end of the Early Islamic period, the region’s Jewish community was on the verge of extinction. The Christian community underwent a slightly different process. At the time the area was occupied by the Muslims in the 630s, Tiberias was a secondary city, subordinated to Scythopolis (Beth Shean/​Baysān).28 However, Saint Willibald, who visited Tiberias in 720, noted that the city included numerous churches.29 This description could mean that even though Tiberias had the largest and most important Jewish community in the Holy Land, it was not necessarily larger and more important than the local Christian community. The relative importance of these two communities in the city of Tiberias is displayed by the location of their houses of worship in the local urban area. While the cathedral has been found in the city centre, the sole synagogue hitherto exposed within the city’s walls was found near the northern wall, with two additional synagogues found in the adjacent town of Ḥamat Tiberias.30 While this urban plan does not provide information from Galilean Cities, Towns, and Villages, vol. 2 of Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods, ed. David A. Fiensy and James R. Strange (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 186–210. 22  Patrich et al., Churches of the Holy Land.

23  Hugo Mantel, Studies in the History of the Sanhedrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 142–45; Reuven Friedman, “Archaeo­logical Evidence of Jewish Settlement in a ‘Forbidden Town of Tyre’ in the Aftermath of the Bar-Kokhva Revolt,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen PalästinasVereins 136 (2020): 70. 24  Parma, Bibliotheca Palatina, MS 2457 (De Rossi 1087), fol. 23.

25  Tobler, Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae, 26.

26  Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 43–44, 47–57.

27  Kedar, “When Did the Palestinian Yeshiva Leave Tiberias?,” 117–20; Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 65–66. 28  Cytryn-Silverman, “The Umayyad Mosque of Tiberias,” 37.

29  Tobler, Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae, 26.

30  Cytryn–Silverman, “Tiberias’ Houses of Prayer,” 235–39.



Galilee

Figure 2: The centre of Early Islamic Tiberias (© The New Tiberias Excavation Project, photo­graph by David Silverman and Yuval Nadel)

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on either community’s relative size, it clearly indicates that the church was the central religious building in the urban tissue of Tiberias, whereas synagogues were located at the edge of the city. The region’s capital was later shifted to Tiberias, while Beth Shean itself declined, then destroyed by the 749 earthquake. Subsequently, the Bishop of Tiberias became the region’s most important ecclesiastic,31 and by the early ninth century was the region’s only remaining urban bishop, as recorded in the Commemoratorium de casis Dei. According to this source, Tiberias was home to thirty presbyters, monks, and canons, five churches, and a nunnery. The same survey also mentioned a bishop and four churches on Mount Tabor.32 This may mean that rural communities still existed on or around Mount Tabor in the early ninth century. Tiberias’ indigenous Christian community continued to exist until the Crusader period. However, it was in decline throughout the Early Islamic period, as reflected by the reduction of the local cathedral’s size.33 During the harsh eleventh century, the local Christian community was decimated, and when the city was conquered by the Crusaders, they only found a handful of local Christians.34 The rural Christian community in Lower Galilee declined throughout the Early Islamic period. We do not know when the Christian communities around Mount Tabor ceased to exist. There are some indications that Christian communities continued to exist in the area of Lajjūn until the Crusader period.35 They also existed in Nazareth, which was described by al-Masʿudī� as a village in the district of Lajjūn, and in Shafaʿamr.36 In both locations, Christian communities have survived to this day. The establishment of the region’s capital in Tiberias attracted Muslim immigrants.37 Some of them became the new administrative, religious, economic, and intellectual elites of the region. Tiberias did not only derive benefit from its upgraded status, but also from the simultaneous decline of other regional urban centres. As a matter of fact, by the early Abbasid period, Tiberias became the only important inland urban centre in the entirety of Jund al-Urdunn, while former cities such as Baysān and Jarash became towns.38 As such, Tiberias’ population, as well as its regional importance, increased during this period. The decline of the Christian and Jewish communities in the region, and eventually in Tiberias as well, led to the almost complete Islamization of the region before the Crusader era. In 1047, Nāsir-i Khusraw described the mosque of Ḥaṭṭī�n, and noted that the area to the south of Tiberias was inhabited by Shiʿites.39 This traveller’s 31  Milka Levy Rubin. “The Reorganization,” 206.

32  McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey, 212–24.

33  Cytryn-Silverman, “Tiberias’ Houses of Prayer in Context,” 239*.

34  Steven Biddlecombe, The Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 120. 35  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 54–55.

36  Masʿūdī�, Les Prairies d’or, ed. de Meynard and de Courteille, 1: 71; Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 301–2. 37  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 327.

38  Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria, 83–88; Michael Ehrlich, “Decay-Polis: The Decapolis Area during the Early Muslim Period 638–1099 ad,” Aram 28 (2016), 119–20. 39  Sefer Nameh, ed. Schefer, 59.



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description suggests that shortly before the end of the Early Islamic period, Muslims not only lived in cities, such as Tiberias, but also in villages, at least those situated near the main roads. Furthermore, the Shiʿite population near Tiberias indicates that the Fatimids fostered Shi’ite settlements in Jund al-Urdunn’s capital city and in its vicinity.40 The earthquakes that ravaged the region in 1033 and 1068, and the Seljūk invasions in the 1070s, culminating with the conquest of Tiberias and the massacre of its population in 1075, affected the entire region’s population.41 However, the non-Muslim communities, which were already in a precarious situation prior to the eleventh century, presumably suffered more than their Muslim neighbours, and their weakened status accelerated the region’s Islamization. Crusader Period

When the Crusaders occupied Lower Galilee, the region was devastated. Soon after the Crusader occupation, Tancred, the first prince of Galilee, granted ownership of seventeen villages to the Mount Tabor abbey, ten of which were described as having been devastated by warfare.42 Likewise, according to descriptions by pilgrims of the early Crusader period, such as Seawulf (1102–1103) and the Russian abbot Daniel (1106–1107), Nazareth was also at least partially destroyed.43 These descriptions indicate that the area was at least partially destroyed and abandoned when the Crusaders arrived. However, the situation improved rather quickly. The principality of Galilee was the most affluent Frankish lordship.44 This indicates that after the conquest, Lower Galilee managed to recover from the previous calamities. The area was resettled, and its population included Franks who lived in Tiberias and in Nazareth, as well as in towns, villages, monasteries, and fortresses. Most of the indigenous population probably remained in the area, despite the frequent disasters that afflicted it. Since the Christian communities had declined in the last century of the Early Islamic period, and the Jews had almost entirely disappeared from the region, most of the region’s villagers were probably Muslims. This conclusion is supported by the Muslim pilgrim ʿAlī� al-Harawī�, who visited the region around 1175 and described various local Muslim shrines, known only to the local population.45 He also mentioned some shrines dedicated to Jewish biblical figures, which may indicate the existence of a Jewish population. Nevertheless, 40  Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 15–16.

41  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 87–88.

42  CH 2: 897–98; Rabei G. Khamisi, “The Mount Tabor Territory under Frankish Control,” in Crusader Landscapes in the Medi­eval Levant: The Archaeo­logy and History of the Latin East, ed. Micaela Sinibaldi, Kevin J. Lewis, Balázs Major, and Jennifer A. Thompson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016), 40.

43  Peregrinationes tres, ed. Huygens, 74; for English trasnslation see Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pil­ grimage, 164.

44  Edbury, John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, 118; Martin Rheinheimer, Das Kreuz­fahrer­ fürstentum Galilӓa (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1989), 223; Steven Tibble, Monarchy and Lordships in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 155. 45  Al-Harawī�, Guide des lieux de pèlerinage, 19–21.

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since the same shrines were also visited by Jewish pilgrims, who did not mention nearby Jewish settlements, it seems as if the Jews no longer lived in these settlements. It is likely that the shrines that continued to exist and remained dedicated to the same biblical figures were venerated by the local Jewish population that converted to Islam shortly before the Crusader period. This hypothesis is also supported by the use of the Hebrew form Karnehatin in a Frankish description of the famous Battle of Ḥaṭṭī�n (1187).46 Rabei Khamisy analyzed the Frankish colonization activities in the area of Mount Tabor according to several documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He argued that Franks and indigenous Christians settled in the above-mentioned devastated villages before 1106. He further proposed that villages omitted from a 1255 Hospitaller document were abandoned by their previous Frankish and indigenous Christian inhabitants, ascribing their apparent devastation to the Muslim victory in 1187.47 However, the only clue to the alleged Christian population of these abandoned villages is that in 1182, some of the inhabitants of Buria, the area’s main settlement, were not all necessarily Franks. It should be borne in mind that during the first years of his regime, Baldwin I had far more urgent matters to address than the resettlement of remote devastated villages. He certainly preferred to use his limited available human resources to conquer the coastal cities and to settle main urban centres, such as Jerusalem and Acre. An inscription from 1213 is incorporated into the wall of the mosque of Dabūriyya (Frankish Buria), suggesting that the site was inhabited by Muslims at this stage.48 I propose that the most logical reason for the allegedly precarious conditions faced by local rural settlement is that the first half of the thirteenth century was a difficult period. The area of Mount Tabor became a no man’s land because Tiberias and Nazareth, both Frankish regional administrative centres, were in decline, especially so following the dismantling of the Ayyubid castle at Mount Tabor. Raids, such as in the early stages of the Fifth Crusade, increased the misery of the local population, and as a result, probably many of them left the area.49 People returned to the region after 1260, when the Mamluks had succeeded in pacifying it. After the great Muslim victory at the Horns of Ḥaṭṭī�n in 1187, Tiberias lost its regional status and became a remote and forgotten village. Nazareth, which during the Crusader period became a city for the first time in its history, returned to its original size and status, that of a remote village, albeit one with an important Christian shrine.50 As a result, the region was left without an urban centre. Consequently, the religious profile of the region’s population hardly changed between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. 46  La continuation de Guillaume de Tyr 1184–1197, ed. Margaret Ruth Morgan (Paris: Geuthner, 1982), 54. 47  Khamisi, “The Mount Tabor.” 40–49.

48  Petersen, A Gazetteer of Buildings in Muslim Palestine, 131; CIAP 4: 3.

49  Prawer, Histoire. 2: 137–42; Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 156–57; James M. Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 130–32. 50  Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 120–22.



Mamluk and Ottoman Periods

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As stated above, the religious profile of Lower Galilee’s population remained almost unchanged throughout the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. An overwhelming Muslim majority lived in many villages across the region. The rural character of the region did little to encourage governmental building efforts. The international road between Cairo and Damascus crossed through the region, and some khans were built along it, but these were isolated road stations, not settlements. Yet, these khans were the most remarkable building activities carried out by the Mamluk and Ottoman authorities in this region.51 Small Christian communities survived in Nazareth and in Shafāʿamr, whereas Jews lived in Kafr Kanā during the Mamluk period. Other Jews settled in Tiberias in the eighteenth century, but these minorities were almost insignificant within the large Muslim population.52 The region included important Christian pilgrimage destinations: Nazareth, Mount Tabor, Kana, and the important pilgrimage sites around the Sea of Galilee, but due to their relative remoteness and the poor infrastructure, the quantity of pilgrims was not significant enough to stimulate the local economy or to strengthen the local Christian community. Summary

Lower Galilee’s population converted to Islam during the Early Islamic period. This was a gradual process: at first, the Muslims established their new regional capital in Tiberias. The city flourished, attracting not only Muslim scholars, but Jews and Christians, as well. This change was attended by an almost complete conversion of its hinterland to Islam. The departure of the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel early in the tenth century accelerated the decline of Tiberias’ Jewish community, which culminated two centuries later, when the entire city was abandoned, including its tiny Jewish community. Christians lived in Tiberias until its abandonment, with Christian communities apparently surviving in Lajjūn and its vicinity until the end of the Crusader period. The Christian communities in Nazareth and Shafāʿamr still exist, and it is likely that they have been there continuously since the Byzantine period. Hence, from the time of the abandonment of Tiberias in the mid-thirteenth century until the modern period, Lower Galilee was a rural region with no urban centre, whose population was almost exclusively Muslim. Even the routing of the international road between Cairo and Damascus through the area did not cause significant change. Some khans were established along the road and probably fostered trade to a certain extent, but evidently, the area was still not attractive enough to provoke significant immigration. These khans were the main governmental building activity across the region until the eighteenth century, when the local chieftain Ẓāhir al-ʿUmar built several castles in Tiberias, Shafāʿamr, Arbel, and Dayr Ḥanna’.53 51  Cytryn-Silverman, The Road Inns (Khāns) in Bilād al-Shām, 132–35, 144–53.

52  Moses Basola, In Zion and Jerusalem: Itinerary, ed. David, 70; Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 148–53. 53  Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 15, 42.

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Lower Galilee was home to many local Muslim pilgrimage shrines, which did not attract Muslim pilgrims from outside the region. Even the important Christian pilgrimage sites, such as Nazareth, Mount Tabor, Kana, and the sites around the Sea of Galilee, were unable to attract a constant influx of pilgrims that could have expanded the region’s economy.

Upper Galilee

Upper Galilee is bounded by Lower Galilee (along Israel’s Route 85 highway), Western Galilee, the Jordan River, and the Dishon ravine, close to the Israeli–Lebanese border. Most of this area is a relatively high, mountainous region (up to 1200 m), except for the area near the Jordan River, which is a plateau. The region did not include any urban centre until the thirteenth century, when the Crusaders, and later the Mamluks, established a city in Safed. The region included a south to north road, which connected Tiberias to the Lebanon Valley (al-Biqāʿ), as well as a road that connected Jund al-Urdunn’s capital, Tiberias, with its main port, Tyre.54 Early Islamic Period

Upper Galilee includes the remains of about twenty synagogues from the Byzantine period. Mirroring Western Galilee, it includes almost no churches and other archaeo­ logical remains that are typically associated with Christian settlement.55 Nevertheless, in spite of the significant concentration of synagogues in this region, there is very little information about Upper Galilee’s Jewish population during the Byzantine period. While the contemporary Jewish sources focused on individuals from Tiberias, Sepphoris, and 54  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 190–91.

55  Patrich et al., Churches of the Holy Land.



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Figure 3: Jish (Gush Ḥalav) (Courtesy of Yinon Shivtiel)

their rural hinterland, they rarely referred to people from Upper Galilee. This disregard for the Jews of the Upper Galilee continued into the Early Islamic period. The tenthcentury Karaite scholar Sahl ben Matzliaḥ described a Rabbanite Jewish pilgrimage to Dalāta in Upper Galilee.56 Jews were also mentioned in Jish, Safed, Birʿī�m, and as well as in Kafr ʿInān on the border between Lower and Upper Galilee.57 However, Jish was apparently the only one of those settlements with any degree of importance. It was mentioned by al-Muqaddasī� as a station on the road between Tiberias and Tyre.58 Al-Muqaddasī� did not refer to the religion of Jish’s inhabitants, or to the region’s population. The only possible clues to the existence of a Muslim community in Jish during this period are an oil lamp with an inscription of Surāt al-Fātiḥa, and a local tradition stating that Sayyida Nafī�sa, Muḥammad’s great-granddaughter, visited the village on one of her pilgrimages. This visit is still commemorated today by a humble shrine in Jish.59 According to Schick, the inscribed oil lamp found in the archaeo­logical excavation of the synagogue outside the village suggests that Muslims lived in the area during the Early Islamic period. According to the excavation report, the inscription only included the word “Bismillāh” [sic], which is the sura’s first word.60 This lamp was found in the synagogue outside medi­eval Jish, a station on a main road between Tiberias and Tyre. Therefore, it was a 56  Josef W. Meri, The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medi­eval Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 220–21 57  Parma, Bibliotheca Palatina, MS 2457 (De Rossi 1087), fol. 23; Ehrlich, “From Gush Ḥalav,” 360.

58  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 190–91.

59  Schick, The Christian Communities, 147; Yoram Meron, Village Tales (Jerusalem: Minerva, 2005), 69.

60  Eric M. Meyers, Carol L. Meyers, and James F. Strange, Excavations at the Ancient Synagogue of Gush Ḥalav (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 129.

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crossroads for people from all the contemporary religions, any of whom could have left behind a small artifact such as an oil lamp. In his mono­graph about the village, Muṣṭafā ʿAbbasī� did not mention any Muslim presence in al-Jish prior to the Crusader period .61 However, even though there is no clear-cut evidence that Muslims lived in Jish, according to Friedman, Shiʿites lived in Safed and nearby villages.62 The existence of Muslim communities elsewhere in the region, the Shiʿite shrine, and Jish’s regional importance during the Early Islamic period all suggest that Jish was also home to a Muslim population.63 The indications of the existence of a Jewish community in Jish are more significant, and all of them are posterior to al-Muqaddasī�. These references include the residence in the village of a Jewish scribe, and an inscription dedicated to the head of the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel, both of which date to the eleventh century, as well as a description of the Jewish community in 1210, and later Geniza references.64 It therefore seems that during the Early Islamic period, Jish was a village of mixed Jewish and Muslim populations, and that its Muslims were probably Shiʿite. There is no evidence of a Druze presence in the Upper Galilee region during the Early Islamic period. Crusader Period

The Crusader presence in Upper Galilee extended from 1099 to 1187 and then from 1240 to 1266. The region has been substantially documented since the thirteenth century, and therefore, the Islamization of this region since the Ayyubid period is relatively well understood. During the first Crusader period (1099–1188) and then between 1240 and 1266, the only places in Upper Galilee in which we have evidence of a Frankish presence are Safed, and Vadum Jacob, a fortress that stood for less than a year (1179).65 Hervé Barbé believes that the discovery of domesticated pigs’ bones in Ḥorvat Shemaʿ might indicate that this settlement was resettled by Franks during the Crusader period.66 However, even if this settlement was occupied by Franks, it constitutes a singular case in the entire region. During these rather short periods of Crusader rule, the Franks established Safed as a regional urban centre. The transformation of Safed, hitherto a remote village, into 61  Muṣṭafā ʿAbbasī�, Al-Jish: Tārīkh Qarya Jalīlīya (Al-Jish: Al-Jish Local Council, 2010).

62  Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 20–21, 123.

63  ʿAbbasī�, Al-Jish, 88.

64  Gil, Palestine during the First Muslim Period, no. 474, 3: 151–52; Yosef Stepansky, “The ‘Yeshivat Geon Yaʿakov’ Inscription from Gush Halav: Archaeo­logical Find that Sheds Light on Medi­eval Galilean Jewry.” Cathedra 93 (1999): 67–80 [in Hebrew]; Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, T-S 13J21.21.

65  Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 206; Ronnie Ellenblum, “Frontier Activities: The Transformation of a Muslim Sacred Site into the Frankish Castle of Vadum Jacob,” Crusades 2 (2003): 91–96.

66  Hervé Barbé, “Safed Castle and its Territory: Frankish Settlement and Colonisation in Eastern Upper Galilee during the Crusader Period,” in Crusader Landscapes in the Medi­eval Levant: The Archaeo­logy and History of the Latin East, ed. Micaela Sinibaldi, Kevin J. Lewis, Balázs Major, and Jennifer A. Thompson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016), 67, 72–73.



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a town, altered the history of the entire region, and particularly that of Safed itself. This shift generated internal immigration from the surrounding villages to Safed, and perhaps attracted non-Frankish immigration from outside the region as well. A side effect of the establishment of the regional centre in Safed was the shifting of the regional Jewish centre from Jish to Safed.67 Thus, although there is no mention of a Jewish community in Safed in the twelfth century, by 1210 the Jewish community of the town was apparently the most important one in the region.68 Jewish pilgrims, such as Benjamin of Tudela, and especially Samuel b. Samson, described several rural Jewish communities in Upper Galilee.69 Latter-day Jewish pilgrims also referred to these more remote communities. Safed resisted the Muslims for more than a year after Saladin’s victory at the Horns of Ḥaṭṭī�n.70 During Ayyubid rule in the region (1188–1240), Safed became the centre of the Iqtaʿ of Safed and Tiberias. This was a form of governorship in which the governor also had the right to collect taxes.71 There is no clear information on the region’s population during this period, though the Muslim presence in the region was discernible. In 1210, Samuel b. Samson described on several occasions Muslim veneration of Jewish shrines.72 According to Jewish and Muslim sources from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Muslims participated in the central annual Jewish ceremony in Meron.73 Negligible information exists concerning the whereabouts of the indigenous communities of Upper Galilee during the second stage of Frankish rule. The only reference to a Jewish or Muslim presence in Safed after its fortress was destroyed in 1219 is a short sentence in Benoî�t d’Alignan’s treatise, stating that the bishop pitched his tents between the Jewish synagogue and the mosque of the Saracens.74 This short sentence implies that in 1240 there were both Jewish and Muslim communities in Safed. However, in 1285, four dignitaries from Safed’s Jewish community signed a letter of excommunication for those who opposed Maimonides’ philosophical writings.75 This reference indicates that less than twenty years after the Mamluk conquest, Safed already had an active Jewish community. It is uncertain, however, if this community predated the Mamluk conquest or was established following it. The Crusader period and the Ayyubid interval mark the beginning of Upper Galilee’s Islamization, or at least when it became an important enough phenomenon to be recorded in contemporary documentary sources. 67  Ehrlich, “From Gush Ḥalav,” 360–66.

68  Michael Ehrlich, “Les deux périples de Samuel b. Samson en Terre Sainte,” Journal Asiatique 307 (2019): 223–24. 69  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 29; Adler, Jewish Travellers, 106–10.

70  Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 206.

71  Dahan, Liban, Jordanie, Palestine, 147; Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 142. 72  Adler, Jewish Travellers, 107, 109; Ehrlich, “Les deux périples,” 223–24.

73  Adler, Jewish Travellers, 122; Lewis, “An Arabic Account,” 480–81.

74  De constructione castri Saphet, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1981), 38. 75  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 285–86n100.

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Mamluk Period

Following the Mamluk conquest in 1266, Safed became the capital of Mamlakat Safad, the Mamluk Holy Land’s northern district (which included modern-day southern Lebanon). Its impressive Crusader castle, partially destroyed during the siege, was renovated by the Mamluks, and the castle’s church was converted into a mosque.76 Significant governmental projects were carried out in Safed: Baybars built the “Red Mosque,” water supply systems were established and subsequently renovated, and dignitaries contributed to the establishment of various institutions pro bono publico.77 The Mamluk regional capital absorbed military and administrative personnel, as well as others, including scholars and Sufis.78 Safed’s transformation from remote village or township into provincial capital reversed the fortunes of the local Jewish community. The Muslim immigrants who settled in Safed and its environs presented a significant challenge to the region’s Jewish community, which was mainly composed of villagers, referred to in sixteenth century Ottoman censuses as al-Yahud al-mustaʿribun, who lived in a remote area and lacked high-level spiritual leadership and scholarship. This situation changed somewhat in the late thirteenth century, when Safed’s urban Jewish community expanded as a result of the city’s increasing regional importance, and the arrival of Jewish refugees who fled Acre and Tyre around the time these cities fell to the Mamluks.79 These immigrants were different: they included scholars, some of whom were of North African or European origin, who laid the foundations for an important urban community. Shortly afterwards, people began to immigrate to Safed from overseas communities.80 However, it is unclear if these immigrants were integrated into the local Jewish society or if they established independent communities. The indigenous Jewish community included a few hundred community members, some of whom lived in villages near the city, and others who had migrated to Safed itself. The new immigration further diminished the rural communities. The arrival of learned Muslims, as well as of Sufis, probably fostered a level of Islamization among Jews, from both the urban and rural communities. Yet the extent of this phenomenon is unclear. Even before the mid-fourteenth century, when the Plague ravaged the entire Middle East, the rural Jewish communities of Galilee were extremely vulnerable. The Plague 76  Luz, The Mamluk City, 159.

77  Hanna Taragan, “Doors that Open Meanings: Baybars’s Red Mosque at Safed,” in The Mamluks in Egyptian and Syrian Politics and Society, ed. Michael Winter and Amalia Levanoni (Leiden: Brill, 2004) 3–20; Drory, “Founding a New Mamlaka,” 166; Hervé Barbé, “Le château de Safed et son territoire à l’époque des croisades” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010), 180–86; Luz, The Mamluk City, 178–80; Yinon Shivtiel, Amos Frumkin, and Miryam Bar-Matthews, “Underground and Subaerial Water Systems of Zefat during the Intermediate Islamic Period,” Cathedra 175 (2020): 5, 8–21 [in Hebrew]. 78  Drory, “Founding a New Mamlaka,” 167–86; Or Amir, “Muslim Religious Life in the Safed Area during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries According to a ‘New-Old’ Source,” Cathedra 156 (2015): 50–65 [in Hebrew]. 79  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem,” 714–18.

80  Zvi Ilan, The Tombs of the Righteous in the Land of Israel (Jerusalem: Kana, 1997), 94.



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probably pushed some of them over the brink, and over the next few decades, many of them disappeared. There is no available contemporary information concerning the fate of rural communities during the Plague.81 Although rural settlements probably suffered less than urban nuclei, they did not emerge unscathed. Prior to the Plague, these communities comprised no more than a few dozen households: even a relatively low rate of extra mortality could have pushed them over the edge. Thus, Jewish pilgrims of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries explicitly wrote that there were no Jews in Meron and ʿAmuqa. Other communities, such as Birʿī�m and Jish, faded away and ceased to appear in literary and documentary sources after the fifteenth century.82 Nonetheless, the Jewish community in the Holy Land was restored, mainly due to a substantial influx of immigrants, especially to Safed and its surroundings. Many of these newcomers came from the Iberian Peninsula, and the rate of their immigration increased following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492). During this period, Druze people settled in the foothills of Mount Meron, as well as on its summit. Their presence was recorded by the fourteenth-century author al-ʿUttmānī�, who described some of the Druze villages, such as Bayt Jann and Zabūd.83 Both the Muslim and the Jewish communities of Upper Galilee expanded during the Mamluk period. The Jewish community underwent dramatic changes, most of which were of a positive nature. Safed attracted Jews from nearby villages, refugees from the Frankish coastal cities that ceased to exist after 1291, and immigrants from overseas. However, while these immigrants reinforced Safed’s Jewish community significantly, the rural communities further declined, and most of them disappeared by the end of the Mamluk period. Thus, the Ottoman census of 1596–1597 recorded only four rural Jewish communities in the region.84 During this period, the Muslims became the dominant community. They included an important urban elite and local converts, as well as immigrants from near and far, who were attracted by the opportunities offered by the emerging city and its environs. The Upper Galilee only included local Muslim pilgrimage shrines. Some of these shrines had been Jewish sites in earlier periods of time, but as the population converted, their shrines were adapted to the new religion. The monumental Mamluk building operations seem to have been focused on Safed, as well as the nearby Khan Jubb Yūsef.85 Most of the Mamluk building operations in the Upper Galilee seem to have been of modest nature. Thus, even in Safed, which was an important Mamluk city, there are few surviving remains of Mamluk buildings. The castle’s church, which was converted into a mosque, has not yet been found, and most of the surviving buildings in Safed’s old city date from the Ottoman period; the majority of them were built or rebuilt after the 1837 earthquake. 81  Raphael and Abbasi, “ The Galilee Villages.”

82  Abraham David, Jose Ramon Magdalena, and Maria Jose Cano, De Venecia a Tierra Santa: El viaje de rabi Moseh Basola 1521–1523 (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2015), 87–88; Yaari, Letters from the Land of Israel, 153. 83  Lewis, “An Arabic Account,” 479–81.

84  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 175–79.

85  Luz, The Mamluk City, 159; Cytryn-Silverman, The Road Inns (Khāns) in Bilād al-Shām, 112–21.

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Earthquakes might be a sound explanation for the disappearance of monumental Mamluk buildings, yet the scarcity of findings is so stark that it seems probable that, unlike in Gaza, the Mamluks simply did not build many monumental structures in the region. Ottoman Period

Safed continued to develop during the first century of Ottoman rule.86 In the sixteenth century, Safed was the largest and most important city in the entire northern district of the Holy Land. The census of 1525–1526 enumerated 925 families, of whom 633 were Muslim and 232 were Jewish. The census of 1153–1154 had enumerated 1837 families, of whom 1037 were Muslim and 716 were Jewish.87 These were apparently Safed’s best years. The city developed and became an important centre for manufacturing and trade, as well as an important intellectual centre. The prosperity was the result of two interrelated factors. The Ottoman Empire was at the peak of a highly successful period of expansion. These efforts stimulated the empire’s economy, and Safed benefitted from this affluence as well. The second factor was the immigration of Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Those who arrived in the Holy Land, both before and after the Ottoman conquest, evidently belonged to the higher echelons of Spanish-Jewish society and economy. The poor would have either converted and remained in Spain, or emigrated to nearby destinations, such as the Maghreb.88 Long-distance travel was expensive, and the integration into distant and alien communities required capital. Those who arrived in Safed included people who were involved in textile manufacturing and who brought new techniques and capital to the region.89 And yet the conditions in Mamluk Safed were not apparently promising for wealthy Jews. Mamluk Safed was a provincial capital, with very few prospects of economic success. When the Ottomans conquered the region, it was incorporated into an expanding empire, in which demand was constantly rising, and consequently, it provided a favorable destination for investors and entrepreneurs.90 These two factors encouraged the immigration of leading Jewish scholars to Safed, such as the renowned kabbalist Rabbi Itzhak Luria (HaAri), as well as Rabbi Joseph Karo, author of the widely accepted Jewish codex “Shulḥan ʿArukh.” Many of them arrived a few decades after the expulsion from Spain, after having resided for some years in important Ottoman localities, such as Salonica and Istanbul, until the situation in the Holy Land, and particularly in Safed, improved in the wake of the Ottoman conquest. The Jewish community of sixteenth-century Safed has been extensively studied, and therefore, this book only deals with this period from a demo­graphic perspective. 86  Cohen and Lewis, Population and Revenues, 19–25; Eyal Davidson, “Safed’s Sages between 1540–1615, Their Religious and Social Status” (PhD diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2009), 3–7. 87  Lewis, “Studies in the Ottoman,” 476.

88  Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 33–34. 89  Davidson, Safed’s Sages, 25–48. 90  Davidson, Safed’s Sages, 30–35.



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This includes Jewish immigration to Safed and to other localities in the Upper Galilee, conversion to Islam, and intra-Jewish relationships, namely the co-existence between indigenous Jews and immigrants. However, even after Safed began to decline in the late sixteenth century, Jews continued to immigrate to the city from across the Jewish diaspora, albeit in lower numbers. A limited number of Jews converted to Islam throughout the period, including a few rabbis, but there was no mass conversion.91 In later periods, Safed’s Jewish community lost its scholarly appeal. Yet, it remained a regional centre of some importance, and its Jewish community remained one of the Holy Land’s largest.92 Over the course of the Mamluk period, the number of rural Jewish settlements decreased. According to the 1596–1597 Ottoman census, Jews were only living in ʿAlma, ʿAyn al-Zaytūn, Bī�riya, and Kafr ʿInān.93 Jewish presence is also attested to in al-Buqayʿa.94 The indigenous rural Jewish communities apparently declined over the course of the Mamluk period, eventually disappearing during the Ottoman period, excluding al-Buqayʿa, where a Jewish community survived continuously from the early Ottoman period until the British Mandate period.95 There is very limited information concerning the Druze settlement in the area during the Ottoman period. Some of the Druze settlements already existed in the sixteenth century, yet it is unclear if their inhabitants were Druze at the time. The overwhelming majority of the region’s residents were Muslims. They originated both from local families, perhaps Jewish ones that gradually converted beginning in the Ayyubid period, as well as from immigrants. These included urban elites who settled in Safed, villagers who immigrated from outside the region for various reasons, and nomads, who mostly settled in the eastern plateau. Summary

Upper Galilee’s population converted to Islam in two stages. During the Early Islamic period, some Shiʿite communities were established around Safed. These communities ceased to exist in later periods. Beginning in the Ayyubid period, and especially during the Mamluk period, Sunni Muslims immigrated to Safed and its vicinity, including Sufi preachers who were instrumental in the conversion of residents of Safed’s rural area.96 Safed became less attractive to Muslim elites following the Ottoman conquest, when it became the regional centre of a remote district. However, Jewish immigrants arrived in

91  Davidson, Safed’s Sages, 111–12.

92  Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, “The Population of the Large Towns of Palestine during the First Eighty Years of the Nineteenth Century According to Western Sources,” in Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, ed. Moshe Maʿoz (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 66–69; Barnai, The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 109. 93  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 175–78.

94  David, Magdalena, and Cano, De Venecia a Tierra Santa, 113.

95  Monim Haddad, Pekiʿin (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987), 24–25 [in Hebrew]; Elad Ben-Dror, “The Last Guardian of the Ramparts of the First Hebrew Village: Izhak Ben‐Zvi and the Jews of Peqiin,” Cathedra 147 (2013): 115 [in Hebrew]. 96  Amir, “Muslim Religious,” 70.

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the region in a series of waves, around the time of the destruction of Tyre and Acre in 1291 and particularly after the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492. These immigrants included scholars as well as other urban elites, who transformed the Jewish community from a remote rural community into an urban centre with influence well beyond Upper Galilee’s regional borders.

Decapolis and Golan

The Decapolis was a regional group of cities, most of which (excluding Scythopolis) stood on the eastern bank of the Jordan River. These cities are found today in the northern districts of Jordan, southern Syria, and the Golan Heights. The Golan area included in this study refers to the area between the northern Jordan Valley to the west, the ceasefire line between Israel and Syria to the east, Mount Hermon to the north, and the region of Susita (Hippos) to the south. Scholars disagree on the meaning of the name Decapolis. While Yoram Tsafrir maintains that the Decapolis was a league of cities united by their pledge to preserve, develop, and remain faithful to Greek legacy, language, cults, arts and culture, S. Thomas Parker suggests the name simply indicates a geo­graphical region that included ten cities.97 The name Decapolis suggests that at some point, the area included ten cities, yet it seems that at other times it included more or fewer, and that those cities were not an exclusive group: Damascus was occasionally included in the Decapolis.98 The Golan region includes the area between the territory of Hippos–Sussita and the area of Paneas–Bāniyās near the sources of the Jordan River. The Decapolis and the Golan Heights were very different regions. While the Decapolis included many cities, the Golan Heights were inhabited by tribes and villagers throughout the periods discussed in this study, and the area’s only cities were located on its outskirts. Yet, the history of these two neighbouring regions was closely interrelated. During the Byzantine period, Scythopolis, the only city of the Decapolis to the west of the Jordan River, was the capital city of Palestina Secunda. It had a Christian majority and Jewish and Samaritan minorities, with many Christian and Jewish villages in the vicinity.99 Following the Muslim conquest, the regional administrative centre was transferred to Tiberias.100 This move probably led to economic and social decline in the city. However, the market built in the city during the reign of Hishām (724–743) indicates that Baysān was still considered important by the Umayyad government. The city was destroyed by a major earthquake in 749, and a year later the Abbasids toppled the 97  Yoram Tsafrir, “The Decapolis Again: Further Notes on the Meaning of the Name,” Aram 23 (2011): 1–10 at 3; S. Thomas Parker, “The Decapolis Reviewed,” Journal of Biblical Literature 94 (1975): 437–41; David F. Graf, “Koile Syria and the Decapolis,” Aram 28 (2016): 1–9. 98  Steven Moors, “The Decapolis: City Territories, Villages, and Bouleutai,” in After the Past: Essays in Ancient History in Honour of H.W. Pleket, ed. Willem Jongman and Mark Kleijwegt (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 157–207. 99  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 55–71.

100  CIAP 2: 199.



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Umayyad dynasty. Yet despite these major events, Baysān continued to be considered an important city by the Muslim authorities. Two inscriptions discovered in a mosque, one from 753 and the other from 794, mention members of the caliphal family, indicating that the first Abbasid rulers considered Baysān an important urban centre.101 Yet in spite of these investments, Baysān still declined, and by the time the Crusaders conquered it in the summer of 1099, it was a marginal and neglected town.102 Thus, when the abbot Daniel arrived in the region in 1106–1107, he described Baysān as “a dreadful and dangerous town inhabited by fierce pagan Saracens.”103 The fate of Baysān’s rural vicinity was apparently decided either before or shortly after the earthquake. The Christian and Jewish settlements seem to have been abandoned, and their populations had left the region. Avni noted that the main archaeo­logical sites in the region were excavated long ago, and that their dating is uncertain.104 Later occurrences, such as the establishment of Rabbi Eshtori HaFarḥi in Baysān during the fourteenth century, seem to be unrelated to the local Jewish community dating from the Byzantine period. There is no evidence that Jews lived in Baysān between the Abbasid and the Mamluk periods, and therefore the existence of a Jewish community in Baysān during the Mamluk period should probably be ascribed to Mamluk-period initiatives to foster trade in this area, discussed below.105 Prior to the Muslim conquest, the Decapolis (excluding Scythopolis) and the Golan Heights were part of the Ghassanid kingdom, whose capital was in al-Jābiya, in the south-west of modern Syria.106 According to Shahī�d, the Ghassanids were not nomads, and al-Jābiya was a city, which served the Umayyads as well.107 Interestingly, when the Ghassanids established their kingdom in the sixth century, they did not use any of the larger cities in their realm, but preferred to establish their capital in al-Jābiya.108 The choice was not an arbitrary one: Al-Jābiya was relatively far from the Decapolis cities, and the Ghassanid presence there did not bring it into significant conflict with the preexisting political entities of the region. In other words, either the Byzantine authorities or the Ghassanids, or both, preferred to establish the Ghassanid capital further away from the existing cities. Shahī�d asked why the Ghassanids settled in al-Jābiya and the Golan. He claimed it had to deal 101  CIAP 2: 207–22. 102  CIAP 2: 202.

103  Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 156.

104  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 70.

105  Joseph Braslavy, “Beth-Shean as the Focus of the Researches of R. Eshtori ha-Parḥi,” in The Beth Shean Valley (Jerusalem: The Israel Exploration Society, 1962), 81–83 [in Hebrew]; Amichay Schwartz, “Ashtori HaParḥi—The Man and His Literary Works Against the Background of the Cultural Landscape in which He was Active in Europe and in the Land of Israel” (PhD diss., Ariel University, 2019), 34, 83–84. 106  Shahī�d, Byzantium and the Arabs, 2/​1: 96–102; David Thomas, “Arab Christianity,” in The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, ed. Ken Parry (Chichester: Wiley–Blackwell, 2010), 2. 107  Shahī�d, Byzantium and the Arabs, 2/​1: 1.

108  Shahī�d, Byzantium and the Arabs, 2/​1: 96–106.

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with military considerations, since the location was well-positioned against potential threats. Moreover, the Ghassanids were zealous Monophysites and, considering their military force, Byzantine authorities might have wished to minimize any potential friction between well-armed Monophysites and Chalcedonian bishops.109 In any case, the rather massive Ghassanid immigration and settlement within the region created a new regional geo­graphy. Even if their centres were distant from pre-existing cities, they settled around them and income decreased from the vicinity of these cities. For example, according to Michael Eisenberg, the city of Hippos declined in the Late Byzantine period, and the earthquake of 749 was merely its coup de grâce. Moreover, Eisenberg indicates that some of the functions of Byzantine Hippos were shifted to nearby Fī�q.110 Yet, according to Shahī�d, Fī�q was probably a Ghassanid monastery.111 If so, the Ghassanids dominated most of Hippos’ territory, almost up to its gates, and thus brought about its impoverishment, and inevitably, its decline. The Ghassanids, who held military power in the region, could have used the situation to promote their own best interests, rather than those of the empire or of the local population. Therefore, beyond any macro-problems that afflicted the entire region, such as the Plague and the Sassanid invasion, the areas of the Golan Heights and the Decapolis had problems unique to them, which facilitated their subsequent decline and later near-abandonment. Alan Walmsley believes that despite the hardships of the sixth century, the decline of Syrian cities was less dramatic than suggested by Kennedy. Walmsley, and later Avni, based their studies on the results of many archaeo­logical excavations, the results of which were published after Kennedy published “From Polis to Madina,” in 1985. Walmsley noted that many sites flourished in the late sixth century, some of which he related to the Ghassanids.112 The establishment of a military centre in al-Jābiya, which was not a standard military camp, but much more of a town, shifted economic activity away from pre-existing cities to Ghassanid settlements. This shift in economic activity intensified the decline of the pre-existing cities that also suffered from global and regional problems. Early Islamic Period

The Decapolis region was conquered after the Battle of Yarmūkh (or the Battle of Jābiya) in August 636.113 Although the events of this battle are unclear, its results are perspicuous; namely, after this encounter, the Muslims managed to conquer the entirety of Syria and the Byzantines were eradicated from the region. In the years that followed, up to the major earthquake (749) and the successful end of the Abbasid revolt (750), the local

109  Shahī�d, Byzantium and the Arabs, 2/​1: 76–80.

110  Michael Eisenberg, “Hippos—Sussita from Roman Polis of the Decapolis to Declining Umayyad Town: Discoveries from the Most Recent Excavation Seasons (2012–2015),” Qadmoniot 151 (2016): 16–17 [in Hebrew]. 111  Shahī�d, Byzantium and the Arabs, 2/​1: 94–96.

112  Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria, 39–45.

113  John Haldon, The Empire that Would Not Die: The Paradox of the Eastern Roman Survival, 640–740 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 142–43.



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cities continued to exist. However, different cities reacted to the conquest in different ways. Some cities, such as Tiberias, benefited greatly; others, such as Hippos, declined, while still others, such as Jarash and Baysān, seem to have adapted to the new reality. However, this new reality abruptly changed in the mid-eighth century. The destruction by earthquake of the cities near the Jordan Rift Valley, and the Abbasid authorities’ lack of interest in rebuilding, led to a sharp decline of the urban network of the former Decapolis.114 The possibility that local phenomena, such as the drying up of a water source, resulted in short-distance migrations, as suggested by Bethany Walker in the case of Abila–Ḥubrāṣ, is plausible.115 However, since all the region’s cities either declined sharply or were completely abandoned, a confluence of such small-scale phenomena seems unlikely to be the cause of this significant regional settlement shift. In any event, when the Crusaders conquered the area in 1099, none of these settlements were considered cities. Moreover, Crusader period documentation indicates that Muslims lived in the area, whereas Christian communities ceased to appear in documents from the ninth century on, making it seem reasonable that the local population was mainly Muslim.116 Although scattered Christian and Jewish communities probably existed in the area, they are not mentioned in contemporary documents. The former Decapolis had become a marginal and rural region. No urban centre would exist there until the twentieth century, and the population consisted of peasants, who lived in towns and villages, and nomads who benefitted from this region’s relatively friendly climatic conditions. After the final collapse of Hippos in the mid-eighth century, Bāniyās became the only city of the Golan district.117 It was a humble centre, surrounded by tribes, as noted by its second name Madīnat al-Asbāṭ, and located on the main road from Damascus to Tyre.118 During the Fatimid period, Bāniyās absorbed immigrants from Ṭarsūs, which had been conquered by the Byzantines.119 It also included a Jewish community.120 Crusader Period

Very limited information is available about the Crusader presence in the former Decapolis region. It seems that the entire area of Jund al-Urdunn fell to the Crusaders without significant resistance following the capture of Tiberias in the summer of 1099. In 1100, Tancred, the prince of Galilee, granted the abbey of Mount Tabor a substantial amount of

114  Schick, The Christian Communities, 270–72, 315–22, 424–77; Ehrlich, “Decay-Polis,” 115–20; Achim Lichtenberger and Rubina Raja, “Ğ� eraš in the Middle Islamic Period,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 132, no. 1 (2016): 63–81 at 66. 115  Walker, “Mobility and Migration in Mamluk Syria,” 341–42.

116  Walker, “The Islamization of Central Jordan,” 144–49; Schick, The Christian Communities, 270–72, 315–22, 424–77. 117  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 326–27.

118  Shoshana Israeli, “The Baniyas Population in Light of Historical and Archaeo­logical Evidence,” in Paneas II: Small Findings and Other Studies, ed. Vassilios Tzaferis and Shoshana Israeli (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2008), 240. 119  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 160. 120  Gil, A History of Palestine, 214–15.

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property in the area of the former Decapolis.121 At this point, there was not a single city in the entire region, and the majority of the population was apparently Muslim. Once it was occupied, the region became one of the most lucrative Frankish assets. Thus, the eastern part of the Frankish principality of Galilee was obliged to send forty knights to the Frankish royal army, more than most other Frankish lordships. Only Galilee’s western district exceeded this quota.122 However, in spite of the region’s economic attraction, it was only barely settled by the Franks. The Franks usually settled in pre-existing towns and cities or established new outlying neighbourhoods outside historical city centres. In this case, however, they did not settle in or around the Transjordanian cities, except for Darʿā, where they established Civitas Bernardi de Stampi.123 There is no extant information concerning this city and its Frankish population. Cédric Davies argues that by 1120, the northern part of modern-day Jordan and southern Syria were inhabited by many Eastern Christians, and even by Druze.124 Moreover, he enumerates about thirty casuax (villages) in the area, suggesting that the region of ʿAjlūn was a Christian bastion. He supports this view by noting that the area included three mostly Christian settlements until the twentieth century.125 There are three problems with this argument: there is no evidence that the inhabitants of the casuax were Christian, and Druze did not live in the area prior to the eighteenth century. Additionally, the settlements that Davies attributed with a Christian majority in the twentieth century, either were home to a tiny minority of Christians in the sixteenth century or did not have any Christian inhabitants at all.126 In other words, the early twentieth century Christian majority in these villages was comprised of the descendants of immigrants to the region after the sixteenth century. I therefore believe that the area’s population was mostly Muslim, with scattered communities of Eastern Christians and Jews, and that the civilian Frankish population in this area was minimal. In 1129, the Ismaʿilis who ruled Bāniyās handed it over by agreement to the Frankish lord of Beirut.127 Considering the animosity between the the Ismaʿilis (the so-called Assassins), who ruled Bāniyās at the time, and the local population, and in view of the fact that the city’s size did not change during the Frankish rule (1129–1164, including eight years of Muslim rule between 1132 and 1140), it seems likely that Bāniyās was handed over to the Franks emptied of its indigenous population.128 However, since there 121  CH 2: 897–98.

122  Rheinheime, Kreuzfahrerfürstentum, 100–101.

123  WT bk. 15, chap. 10: 728; Rheinheimer, Kreuzfahrerfürstentum, 85, 97–98; Lichtenberger and Raja, “Ğ� eraš,” 68–70; Rune Rattenborg and Louise Blanke, “Jarash in the Islamic Ages (c. 700–1200 ce): A Critical Review,” Levant 49 (2017): 327–28; Cédric Devais, “A Seigneury on the Eastern Border of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: The Terre de Suète,” in Studies in the Archaeo­logy of the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. James G. Schryver (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 71–91 at 74–75. 124  Devais, “A Seigneury,” 75, 79–80. 125  Devais, “A Seigneury,” 85–88.

126  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 162–71.

127  Bernard Lewis, The Assassins (New York: Basic, 1968), 106–7.

128  Ibn al-Qalānisī�, History of Damascus, ed. Amedroz, 221; CIAP 2: 35–36.



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are no surviving descriptions of the indigenous population of Bāniyās during the Frankish rule, this option cannot be proven. However, even if the local population departed the city following its surrender to the Franks, many of them returned in 1164, when it was re-conquered by Nūr al-Dī�n, and other newcomers were settled in Bāniyās by the conquerors. In 1184, Ibn Jubayr described Bāniyās as a small city with a fortress, but did not mention its population.129 Around 1215, the Jewish traveller Menaḥem of Hebron spoke of a Jewish community there.130 The existence of a Jewish community around 1215 may mean that the indigenous Jewish community never left the city, or that it returned shortly after the Muslim reconquest. However, Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Bāniyās about five years after the Muslim reconquest and meticulously documented numbers of Jews during his travels, did not mention any Jews in Bāniyās.131 Moreover, despite being the first city to be reconquered from the Franks, Bāniyās never recovered its former status as an important station on the road connecting Damascus and Tyre. Mamluk and Ottoman Periods

During the early Mamluk period, some locations in the former Decapolis thrived. However, none of these towns were established on the sites of previous cities. The population of the region was mostly Muslim, though Jews and Christians lived in places such as ʿAjlūn and Ḥubrāṣ.132 It is not clear if the Christians who lived in this area in the fourteenth century were descendants of Christians who lived there in earlier periods or if they were newcomers. There is no mention of Jews living in the area between the Muslim conquest and the fourteenth century. It therefore seems likely that the Jews documented in the fourteenth century arrived shortly before being described. Ben-David suggests that this immigration was the result of an increase in economic activity alongside the Mamluk road through Baysān to Damascus, and that these communities disappeared following the later decrease in trade in the area. Consequently, the sixteenth century census does not refer to any Jews living in these settlements, or elsewhere in the region.133 Bāniyās lost its appeal and became a remote and neglected township. The shifting of commercial activity to the Cairo to Damascus road, which passed through Jacob’s Ford, reduced the economic attractiveness of Bāniyās, as well as its regional centrality.134 The town’s Jewish population faded after the 1210s, and it seems that in later periods, Bāniyās’ population was exclusively Muslim. This situation changed slightly in the eigh129  Ibn Jubayr, Riḥlat, ed. ʿAbd al-Ghānī�, 244–45. 130  Menahem of Hebron, “Letter,” 40–41. 131  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 29.

132  Chaim Ben-David, “Rabbi Estori Ha-Parchi’s Contribution to the Research of Transjordan,” in Rabbi Estori Ha-Parchi, Pioneering Researcher of the Land of Israel, ed. Israel Rozenson and Shlomo Glicksberg (Jerusalem: Efrata, 2015), 27–28 [in Hebrew]; Devais, “A Seigneury,” 85–88; Bethany J. Walker et al., “Village Life in Mamluk and Ottoman Hubras and Saham: Northern Jordan ProjectReport on the 2006 Season,” Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan 51 (2007): 438–48; Walker, “Mobility and Migration in Mamluk Syria,” 341–42. 133  Ben-David, “Rabbi Estori,” 342, n. 55. 134  Ehrlich, “From Gush Ḥalav,” 363–64.

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teenth century, when some Druze communities were established around Bāniyās, in the foothills of Mount Hermon.135 Although the Golan Heights were crossed by the main Mamluk route from Cairo to Damascus and included kḥans near the “Daughters of Jacob” bridge—Jūkhadār, and Khisfī�n—no significant settlements were established nearby.136 The lack of any urban centre in an area of this size indicates that Mamluk, and later Ottoman authorities, considered it unimportant. Likewise, there is no indication of the existence of any important Muslim pilgrimage sites in the area. During the Ottoman period, the religious profile of these two regions remained mostly unchanged. Most of their population remained Muslim, while some Christian communities survived in the former Decapolis region, and the Jewish presence faded completely, both in the Golan and in the former Decapolis regions. From the early seventeenth century on, nomadic tribes migrated to these regions, and in the late seventeenth century, Druze migrants began to settle around Bāniyās and in Jabal al-Durūz.137 Summary

Most of the population of the Decapolis and of the Golan Heights became Muslim during the Early Islamic period. This process was accelerated by the 749 earthquake that devastated many cities and villages, particularly in the Decapolis. However, since other cities also destroyed by the earthquake recovered, this cannot be the sole explanation for the region’s sharp decline. When the Crusaders arrived in 1099, the only city in either region was Bāniyās, which retained its municipal status through the thirteenth century. During the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, these areas remained almost entirely Muslim.

Jabal ʿĀmil

Jabal ʿĀ� mil is a mountainous region, bordering the northern extension of the Jordan Valley to the east, the Upper Galilee to the south, the Litanī� River to the north, and the Lebanese coastal plain to the west. Unlike mountainous regions further south, such as Galilee and Samaria, which included internal urban nuclei, the urban centre of Jabal ʿĀ� mil was the coastal city of Tyre. According to some scholars, the region includes areas to the north of the Litanī�, yet these areas are not included in this study.138 Early Islamic Period

The region of Jabal ʿĀ� mil was probably almost exclusively Christian prior to the Muslim conquest. However, this assumption is only loosely supported by contemporary liter135  Samy Swayd, The A to Z of the Druzes (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2009), 86.

136  Cytryn-Silverman, The Road Inns (Khāns) in Bilād al-Shām, 104–8, 121–27.

137  Swayd, The A to Z of the Druzes, 86; Astrid Meier, “The World the Bedouin Lived In: Climate, Migration and Politics in the Early Modem Arab East,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58 (2015): 21–55 at 24–25. 138  Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings,” 2.



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ary and archaeo­logical findings. Remains of about thirty churches from the Byzantine period were found across the region.139 Al-Yaʿqūbī� wrote that the population of Jabal al-Jalī�l originated in al-ʿĀ� mila. He describes Qadas as one of its most affluent districts.140 Al-Muqaddasī� wrote that Qadas was the central town of Jabal ʿĀ� mil. He notes that its population included many non-Muslim inhabitants but does not specify if they were Jews or Christians. Al-Muqaddasī� also wrote that the town’s mosque was in its marketplace, suggesting that Muslims also lived in Qadas.141 However, in Gil’s estimate, al-Muqaddasī�’s description indicates that there was a significant Jewish community in Qadas in the late tenth century.142 Al-Muqaddasī� also mentions Qadas and Majdal Salī�m as stations on the post road to Tyre.143 Based on al-Yaʿqūbī�’s description, migrants of the al-ʿĀ� mila tribe settled in Jabal al-Jalī�l, whereas nearby Tyre was inhabited by people of various origins. They seem to have become the dominant population group in the region, which was therefore named after them. Rula Abisaab and Yaron Friedman believe that the ʿĀ� mila were already a Shiʿite tribe when they settled the region in the seventh century.144 This option is plausible, although it is mostly based on local traditions rather than on solid evidence. Most of the Muslim inhabitants of modern-day Jabal ʿĀ� mil are Twelver Shiʿites. However, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the region was also home to Ismaʿilī� Shiʿites. Abisaab, who described the Shiʿite presence in Jabal ʿĀ� mil, mentioned several scholars who lived in the region. Yet, the scholars she mentioned lived in the coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon, or in their immediate vicinity.145 Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman Periods

There is very limited information on Jabal ʿĀ� mil related to the Crusader period. IbnJubayr’s famous description from 1184, stating that all the inhabitants of the area around Tibnī�n were Muslims, indicates that in his days the population was mainly Muslim.146 Nonetheless, Ibn Jubayr does not refer to the denominations of these Muslims. The local population’s religious profile probably did not change significantly during this period. Most of the local population was Shiʿite, and perhaps also included Druze communities. The overall impression of Jabal ʿĀ� mil’s inhabitants being mostly Shiʿites also characterizes the Mamluk period. Al-ʿUthmānī�, a judge and historian from Safed who probably 139  Tomasz Waliszewski, “From the Roman Temple to the Byzantine Basilica at Chhī�m,” Archaeo­ logy and History in Lebanon 23 (2006): 30–41. Achia Kohn-Tavor, “Kenishta: Regional Features in the Churches of Upper Galilee during the Byzantine Period” (PhD diss., Ariel University, 2021), 206–9. 140  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 327–28. 141  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 161–62.

142  Gil, A History of Palestine, 213.

143  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 190–91.

144  Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings,” 4; Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 7. 145  Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings,” 8–11.

146  Ibn Jubayr, Riḥlat, ed. ʿAbd al-Ghānī�, 245–46.

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composed his book between 1372 and 1376, wrote that the population of the district of Tibnī�n included a group of Shiʿite shaykhs.147 A significant number of ʿĀ� milī� scholars travelled to Ḥilla for instruction in various fields of Islamic religious studies. Subsequently, reference is made to the many scholars who settled and worked in Jabal ʿĀ� mil and in adjacent regions.148 This level of religious importance in a region as remote as Jabal ʿĀ� mil during the Mamluk period is unusual, perhaps signifying that unique circumstances were involved. This concentration of religious scholars probably came about as a result of Mamluk destruction of the nearby coastal cities, Tyre, Acre, and Sidon. A significant share of the Levantine coastal cities’ Muslim population prior to the arrival of the Crusaders was Shiʿite. Many of them survived the conquest, especially in Tyre, which surrendered peacefully. The situation changed in 1291, when the coastal cities were destroyed by the Mamluks. While Jews emigrated to Safed and Jerusalem, as well as overseas, and Christians moved to adjacent regions such as Cyprus, Shiʿites from Tyre were comfortable emigrating to the nearby Jabal ʿĀ� mil. This possible influx of well-educated people and wealthy families provides a possible explanation for the emergence of this important Shiʿite religious centre. Al-ʿUthmānī�’s remark, that rich merchants lived in the village of Kūnī�n, close to Tibnī�n, seems to be another manifestation of a possible short-distance immigration of merchants from Tyre to the nearby rural, mostly Shiʿite area, rather than to the Mamluk centres, such as Damascus.149 Rural regions usually lack the infrastructure to support a high level of trade or scholarship. Therefore, during the region’s heyday in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the harbors of Tyre and Acre partially resumed operation, and a certain extent of commercial activity was restored.150 Both scholarship and trade continued into the first century of Ottoman rule.151 Subsequently, the region declined economically, and many local ʿulamā emigrated to other destinations. This led to the region’s marginalization, which endures to this day. Summary

Jabal ʿĀ� mil became a Shiʿite enclave in the Early Islamic period. Despite some fluctuations, this situation did not change significantly throughout the entire period covered in this study. One phenomenon unique to Jabal ʿĀ� mil is its emergence as an important centre of Shiʿite scholarship during the Mamluk and early Ottoman periods. This was probably the result of short-distance immigration from the former Frankish coastal cities, which were destroyed by the Mamluks.

147  Lewis, “An Arabic Account,” 482.

148  Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings,” 12–13. 149  Lewis, “An Arabic Account,” 482.

150  Eliyahu Ashtor, “The Crusader Kingdom and the Levant Trade,” in The Crusaders in their Kingdom (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1987), 34 [in Hebrew]; Arbel, “Venetian Trade in FifteenthCentury Acre”; Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings.”20. 151  Abisaab, “Shiʿite Beginnings,” 14–21.

Chapter 4

SAMARIA Samaria is a

mountainous region located between the mountains of Judea to the south, the Jezreel Valley to the north, the Jordan Valley to the east, and the coastal plain to the west. This study distinguishes between the southern part of Samaria, whose principal city is Nablus, and the northern region, whose centre was first in Sebaste, and later in Jinī�n.

Early Islamic Period

Until the Roman period, most of Samaria’s inhabitants were either pagans or Samaritans.1 In the second century bce, Samaria, the capital of the former Kingdom of Israel, became the base for a Greek military force.2 In the late first century bce, Herod established a new city in Samaria, and named it Sebaste in honour of his benefactor, the Roman emperor Augustus.3 In 72 ce, the Romans established a colony in Neapolis, outside the site of Biblical Shechem.4 Magen posits that the population of the colony was not originally Samaritan but was composed of Roman veterans of various origins. However, during later periods, the Samaritan segment of the city, built near Mount Gerizim, the mountain venerated by the Samaritans, grew increasingly larger.5 By the beginning of the Byzantine period, Neapolis became the city with the largest Samaritan population and the main Samaritan religious centre, where many Samarian dignitaries and their religious leadership lived. Ever since its establishment as a Roman colony, Neapolis has overshadowed Sebaste as the regional centre. Subsequently, Sebaste’s Samaritan community became less important, after which it disappears in sources from the Early Islamic period. For about a century and a half before the Muslim conquest, the Samaritans, who constituted a major segment of the region’s population, repeatedly rebelled against the Byzantine empire.6 These revolts apparently led to a significant decrease in the Samaritan 1  Jonathan Kirkpatrick, “How to Be a Bad Samaritan: The Local Cult in Mount Gerizim,” in The Variety of Local Religious Life in the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, ed. Ted Kaizer (Leiden: Brill. 2008), 155–78 at 157–58.

2  Jan Dušek, “Administration of Samaria in the Hellenistic Period,” in Samaria, Samarians, Samaritans: Studies on Bible, History and Linguistics, ed. Jósef Zsengellér (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 71–88 at 77–78. 3  John W. Crowfoot, Kathleen M. Kenyon, and Eleazar L. Sukenik, The Buildings at Samaria (London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1942), 31–33.

4  Pummer, The Samaritans, 171–74; Yitzhak Magen, Flavia Neapolis: Shechem in the Roman Period (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquity Authority, 2005), 329–31 [in Hebrew]. 5  Magen, Flavia Neapolis, 329–35.

6  Pummer, The Samaritans, 139–41.

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population.7 However, two sources seem to indicate that the results of these revolts were less dramatic than usually believed. The anonymous pilgrim from Piacenza, who visited the area around 570, describes the Samaritan communities in the area around Sebaste: From there (Scythopolis) we went up past a number of places belonging to Samaria and Judea to the city of Sebaste, the resting place of Prophet Elisha. There were several Samaritan cities and villages on our way down through the plains, and wherever we passed along the streets they burned away our footprints with straw, whether we were Christians or Jews, they have such a horror of both. This is what they tell Christians: “Don’t touch what you want to buy till you have paid the money….”8

This volume does not deal with issues such as ritual purity in the Samaritan religion, although many sources describe a similar practice, namely that Samaritans did not allow non-Samaritans to touch them or their belongings.9 It seems the pilgrim was describing a common Samaritan practice but interpreted it as an insult. Regardless, the pilgrim reports on Samaritan communities shortly after the revolts were crushed, never mentioning that said revolts ever occurred, or that the Samaritan population was particularly hostile toward Christians: the Christian empire had recently decimated their population and confiscated their holy sites. Nor does this speaker relate that this population was recovering from hardships experienced shortly before his pilgrimage. Another reference to the Samaritan community is an inscription from the late Byzantine period found in the archaeo­logical excavation of the synagogue at Reḥov, near Beth Shean, which includes a long list of towns, all of which to the north of Nablus, namely, the region of Sebaste whose population was Samaritan.10 These two sources, entirely independent of one another, indicate that the revolts might have had a milder effect on the Samaritan population of the northern district of Samaria than has been described. On the contrary, they suggest that even shortly after the revolts, the Samaritan population was still a major component of the regional populace. Interestingly, both sources describe the Samaritan community around Sebaste and ignored Nablus and its surroundings, where the traditional Samaritan centre lay. This may indicate that the Byzantines focused their efforts on the Nablus area, and that this region consequently suffered more than the Sebaste region. Yet, in later periods, to be discussed below, the situation reversed. While Samaritans survived in the region of Nablus, they disappeared from other regions, including Sebaste. Ronnie Elenblum suggests that the region known as Samaria was divided into two religious zones during the Byzantine period. Christians lived in the area with a rela7  Levy-Rubin, “New Evidence,” 258–59; Pummer, The Samaritans; Levy-Rubin, “Islamization of Space and People,” 361–62.

8  Antoninus of Piacenza, Itinerarium, ed. Milani, 112–15; for an English version see Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrimage, 81. 9  Pummer, The Samaritans, 145–46.

10  Joseph Naveh, On Stone and Mosaic (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1978), 84 [in Hebrew]; Aaron Demsky, “The Permitted Towns in the Boundaries of Sebaste According to the Rehov Mosaic Inscription,” Qadmoniot 42–43 (1978): 75–77 [in Hebrew].



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Figure 4: Archaeo­logical remains from the Byzantine period in Zababdeh (courtesy of Meir Roter)

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tively large number of Byzantine churches and settlements whose toponym includes the word “Dayr,” usually translated as “monastery.” The northern border of this area was around Biblical Shilo, roughly midway between Jerusalem and Nablus. North of Shilo, churches were almost absent, and the word “Dayr” rarely appears in local toponyms. Consequently, Ellenblum believes the area to the north of Shilo was inhabited by Samaritans, whereas Christians lived from the area of Shilo southward. Ellenblum states that as a consequence of the Samaritan rebellions, the Samaritan populations of many settlements around Nablus decreased during this period, either because many perished in the rebellions, converted to Christianity, or emigrated from the area. These abandoned settlements were inhabited by Muslim immigrants, who arrived in the area following the Muslim conquest. He further offers that the unique concentration of monasteries in the border area between the southern Christian and northern Samaritan regions was the result of the Byzantine policy of establishing monasteries in border areas between Christianity and other religions.11 However, Yoel Elitzur and Chaim Ben David demonstrate that in many cases, “Dayr” does not indicate that the site was a monastery or church; their work shows that in other areas, the Byzantines did not establish monasteries along interreligious borders, and they therefore reject Ellenblum’s theo11  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 225–29.

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ry.12 Moreover, the number of Samaritan synagogues found in this area is also extremely low. Yitzhak Magen found eight synagogues throughout the entire region.13 In a later corpus about Christian sites in Judea and Samaria, Magen and Evgeni Kagan refer to twenty sites in which a Christian presence during the Byzantine period could have been indicated in the area described by Ellenblum as mostly Samaritan. These sites did not necessarily include the remains of Byzantine churches, but did include typical Christian objects such as inscriptions and small objects decorated with crosses. Magen and Kagan hesitate to describe some of these sites as Christian, but it seems that the Christian presence in the region during the Byzantine period, although still very minor, was larger than previously thought.14 In fact, despite the paucity of local churches, Samaritan synagogues do not significantly outnumber churches in this region. So if the absence of churches indicates that Christians did not live in the area, the same criterion should be applied to Samaritan synagogues. I offer that the lack of both Samaritan synagogues and Christian churches has a common explanation: the continuous existence of the region’s main settlements. For instance, it seems reasonable to think that an important Samaritan settlement, such as ʿAwartā, had a synagogue. Yet, the remains of this synagogue have never been found. Furthermore, there is no indication of massive conversion of Samaritans to Christianity following the revolts. Such conversion should have been manifested in the construction of new churches, not only in important sites such as Mount Gerizim, but in rural areas as well. However, aside from the octagonal church built on top of the destroyed Samaritan temple and churches in Nablus, no churches were found in the area. In other words, although many Samaritans probably perished or emigrated, most of the survivors maintained their former religion. Considering the history of the final 150 years of Byzantine rule in the area, it seems likely that the Samaritans welcomed the Muslim conquerors, whereas the Christians did not.15 However, it seems that no dramatic changes occurred in the area until the end of the Umayyad period. From 750 onward, after the Abbasids toppled the Umayyads, the Samaritans’ situation deteriorated. Milka Levy-Rubin believes, based on the Continuatio of the chronicle of Abū al-Fatḥ from the fourteenth century, that the Samaritans suffered persecutions that climaxed during the period of Abbasid rule in the area.16 Levy-Rubin concurs with Ellenblum’s opinion, that Muslims settled in the areas previously inhabited by Samaritans and that suffered the consequences of the fifth and sixth century revolts, though in a limited manner.17 She suggests that although the Samaritan inhabitants suf12  Yoel Elitzur and Chaim Ben-David, “Deir in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic and Toponyms of the ‘Deir-X’ Type,” Cathedra 123 (2007): 13–38 [in Hebrew].

13  Yitzhak Magen, “Samaritan Synagogues,” in The Samaritans, ed. Ephraim Stern and Hanan Eshel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2006), 382 [in Hebrew].

14  Yitzhak Magen and Evgeni D. Kagan, “Corpus of Christian Sites,” in Corpus of Christian Sites in Samaria and Northern Judea, ed. Malka, CC 1: 103–27. 15  Pummer, The Samaritans, 142–44.

16  Levy-Rubin, “New Evidence”; Levy-Rubin, “Islamization of Space and People.”

17  Levy-Rubin, “New Evidence,” 259–60; Levy-Rubin, “Islamization of Space and People,” 362–63.



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fered Byzantine persecutions following the revolts, the previously Samaritan area was not abandoned by its population, meaning the Muslims could not fully occupy it as an empty region. Moreover, her observations, based on the Continuatio, provide additional information on the reasons that led to an apparent mass conversion of the Samaritan community in the Early Islamic period. (The credibility of this source was discussed in the preface.) Yet one point is evident: many Samaritans living in Samaria during the Abbasid and Tulunid periods converted to Islam. Perhaps the situation was not as chaotic as described by the Continuatio, but it was dire nonetheless. Another important process that emerged in the Early Islamic period is the transformation of the Samaritans into an urban community centred in Nablus, with some rural satellite communities. There is very little information about the Christian community in the region during the Early Islamic period. However, according to the Commemoratorium de Casis Dei, the church in Sebaste dedicated to Saint John collapsed, and the local clergy, including a bishop, were serving in a church where Saint John was imprisoned and beheaded. According to this source, there was a large church in Nablus that housed the tomb of the Samaritan woman, as well as other churches, a bishop and clergymen.18 This information suggests that in the ninth century, significant Christian communities still existed in both of Samaria’s urban centres. However, the extent of the rural Christian communities in the area is unknown. Denys Pringle dates the second stage of the church on the mound of Sebaste to the second half of the eleventh century.19 This indicates that in spite of the alleged hardships that Christians underwent throughout the Early Islamic period, some were living in Sebaste shortly before the Crusaders’ arrival. Muslims had lived in Samaria since the early years after the conquest. Al-Yaʿqūbī� wrote that Nablus’ population included Arabs, non-Arabs (ʿAjam),20 and Samaritans, and that Sebaste depended on Nablus. Nonetheless, he does not explain in what sense Sebaste depended on Nablus, nor does he detail the demo­graphics of either city’s hinterland.21 According to al-Muqaddasī�, Nablus’ central mosque stood in the city centre.22 Although this description implies that Nablus was among the cities whose central area was modified by the Muslims, it gives no indication of the ratio between the different religious and ethnical communities in the city. Milka Levy-Rubin notes that when Saladin conquered Nablus, most of the region’s population was already Muslim. She demonstrates that,according to the Continuatio, there were already Muslim villages in Samaria in the ninth century.23 Levy-Rubin’s 18  McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey, 214–15; Levy-Rubin, “The Reorganisation of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” 206–7. 19  Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 2: 299.

20  He might have been referring to Persians.

21  Al-Yakūbī�, Kitāb al-Buldān, ed. De Goeje, 329–30. 22  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 174. 23  Levy-Rubin, “New Evidence,” 257–58.

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opinion, that the existence of a large Muslim community in the region in the Early Islamic period also implies the existence of a Muslim majority in that period, seems most plausible. In short, Muslims became the largest religious community in the region in the Early Islamic period. They lived in urban as well as rural areas and were the descendants of immigrants and of indigenous converts. The ratio between the descendants of immigrants and those descended from converts is unknown. The fate of the Samaritans and Christians in the region is unknown. The best evidence we have of their whereabouts in the Early Islamic period comes from the Crusader period, discussed below.

Crusader Period

During the Crusader period, the situation in the region did not undergo dramatic change. The pressure exerted on the local Christian and Samaritan communities to convert to Islam supposedly ceased. Moreover, the Samaritans seem to have experienced a sort of a renaissance during this period. They apparently maintained good relations with the Franks, and produced significant religious literature.24 However, the Crusader period also provides clear-cut evidence of the severe crisis this community went through during the Early Islamic period. Benjamin of Tudela claims there were 1000 Samaritans living in Nablus.25 Pummer has correctly noted that it is unclear if Benjamin meant individuals or households.26 However, since ʿAlī� al-Harawī� wrote that there was a significant Samaritan community in Nablus, and since Nablus was a large and relatively populous city during the Frankish kingdom, I cautiously suggest that Benjamin of Tudela might have been referring to households rather than individuals.27 However, outside of Nablus, the rural Samaritan communities disappeared almost entirely. There is only a single reference to a Samaritan rural community in Frankish documentation, a village called Saphe.28 There is evidence of the existence of Samaritans in other villages as well, though unclear if these villages were entirely Samaritan or if their Samaritan inhabitants coexisted with other communities, probably Muslims.29 Yet, this single reference to Samaritans, in a region where they previously constituted a significant part of the population, is significant. I offer that the Samaritans in the hinterland of Nablus had mostly converted to Islam, for various reasons, including those mentioned in the Continuatio. Namely, some Samaritans might have converted after being convinced that Islam was the true religion. Yet most of them either emigrated to nearby Nablus or to diaspora communities such as Damascus or remained in their homes and gradually converted. Some converted for economic reasons, others for social ones.This process took place 24  Pummer, The Samaritans, 151; Kedar, “Samaritan History: The Frankish Period,” 89–90.

25  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 20–21. 26  Pummer, The Samaritans, 150.

27  Al-Harawī�, Guide des lieux de pèlerinage, 23–24; Ehrlich, “L’organisation de l’espace et la hiérarchie des villes,” 216–21. 28  UKJ 1: no. 92, 239–41.

29  Kedar, “Samaritan History: The Frankish Period,” 85–86.



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throughout the entire Early Islamic period, similar to other religious minority communities that converted to Islam during the same period, apparently without attributing their members’ conversions to severe external pressure. No matter the reason, the result was the same. Between the final century of Byzantine rule and the Frankish conquest, the Samaritans became an urban community, with a few dependent rural communities.30 While the Samaritan presence in Nablus remained significant into the Crusader period and beyond, the situation around Sebaste was completely different. There is no mention of Samaritans in this area, from the start of the Early Islamic period to this day. These communities, which seem to have survived the post-revolt Byzantine persecutions quite successfully, are not referred to in later sources, Samaritan or otherwise. I believe the fact that the sources are silent on these communities means they ceased to exist rather early, since long-standing communities have a better chance of being recorded in contemporary documents. As stated above, there is no textual evidence of the survival of Samaritan communities in northern Samaria. However, a Crusader church was built on the site of a Samaritan synagogue in Faḥma. According to Magen, this synagogue existed until the Crusader period.31 This is the latest evidence of a Samaritan presence in the northern district of Samaria. Indigenous Christians remained in Sebaste during the Crusader period. However, there is no solid evidence of the existence of rural Christian communities in the northern region of Samaria during the Crusader period. One rural Muslim community that is relatively well-described is a group of villagers whose leader was a charismatic shaykh from the village of Jamāʿī�l, southwest of Nablus. This group, which emigrated to Damascus, has been studied repeatedly by important scholars, who have also emphasized its uniqueness.32 I would like to emphasize that these people, and many others described in a unique book that profiles the miracleworking local shaykhs, were Muslim villagers.33 Namely, as noted by Levy-Rubin, the rural population to the south of Nablus was already predominantly Muslim during the Crusader period. However, the situation around Sebaste was seemingly rather different. There has been no information about Samaritan communities in this region since the end of the Byzantine period. According to a Frankish document from 1178, King Baldwin IV confirmed the Hospitaller Order’s possession of the village of Sileta, about five kilometres to 30  Nathan Schur, “Persecutions of the Samaritans by the Abbasids and the Disappearance of the Samaritan Rural Population,” in The Samaritans, ed. Ephraim Stern and Hanan Eshel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2006), 587–90 [in Hebrew]. 31  Magen, “Samaritan Synagogues,” 430–31.

32  Sivan, “Refugiés syro-palestiniens”; Drory, “Hanbalis of the Nablus Region”; Kedar and al-Hajjuj, “Muslim Villagers of the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem”; Talmon-Heller, “The Shaykh and the Community.” 33  Daniella Talmon-Heller, “The Cited Tales of the Wondrous Doings of the Shaykhs of the Holy Land by Ḍiyā’ al-Dī�n al-Maqdisī� (569/​1173–643/​1245): Text, Translation and Commentary,” Crusades 1 (2002): 111–54.

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the north of Sebaste, and of its inhabitants. He further confirmed the possession of 103 Bedouin “tents,” probably extended families, belonging to seven tribes that immigrated to the area from Muslim territories.34 Sileta was listed among the Samaritan towns in the aforementioned inscription found in the synagogue of Reḥov. The Frankish document does not provide information about these villagers’ religious identity, which could have been Samaritan, Muslim, or Christian. However, the arrival of Bedouins in this area during the Crusader period seems to indicate that it was sparsely inhabited, since Bedouins were usually not welcomed by peasants. Moreover, it was in the Frankish landlords’ best interests to increase their income by protecting the local peasantry, and not allowing Bedouins to let their herds graze in the fields of their peasants. The high number of Bedouin tribes that immigrated to the area, and the Frankish approval of such an immigration, indicate that the region included large empty properties that would have provided favourable conditions to the Bedouins. Since this area was described as inhabited shortly before the Muslim conquest, the region’s abandonment must have occurred before or during the Frankish occupation. One of the Bedouins mentioned in the Frankish document is Geber filius Jerar. This name seems very similar to the name Jarār, one of the area’s most important families to this day. According to Beshara Doumani, this family immigrated from Transjordan during the seventeenth century, and began to play an important role in Jinī�n and its surroundings during the nineteenth century.35 However, one of the Jarār family members told me that, according to his family tradition, they arrived in the area during the days of Saladin.36 The striking similarity between the twelfth-century name and the modern one seems to indicate that this family, or perhaps one of its branches, might have arrived in the area even earlier, before the days of Saladin. There are other possible identifications, such as Sahatlahabil, perhaps a mispronunciation of the famous ʿAbd al-Hādī� family’s name, which has two parallel traditions of its own: one claiming that they arrived in the region in the seventeenth century, and one that they were brought there by Saladin.37 In this case, despite the existence of a corresponding local tradition, the similarity between the documented name and the contemporary one is less clear. If the documented name is a mispronunciation of the modern family name, the documentation predates the family tradition. The document refers to Bedouins who arrived in the region of Frankish Nablus, not Sebaste. However, the borders between these Frankish lordships were blurred and Sebaste was surrounded by the lordship of Nablus.38 The only settlement mentioned 34  UKJ 2: no. 405, 668–91. I would like to clarify that I do not deal here with the territories of the Frankish lordship of Sebaste, nor the district of Neapolis that was part of the Frankish royal domain.

35  Beshara Doumani, Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 31. 36  Personal communication from Muḥammad Jarār.

37  Jacob Shimoni, The Arabs of Palestine (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1947), 228–29 [in Hebrew].

38  Gustav Beyer, “Neapolis (nāblus) und sein Gebiet in der Kreuzfahrerzeit. Eine topo­graphische und historisch-geo­graphische Studie,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 63 (1940): 155–209 at 156–59, 168.



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in this document is Sileta, which should have belonged to Sebaste, for two reasons: it was very close to Sebaste and it appears in the Reḥov inscription as one of the settlements in the territory of Sebaste.39 Additionally, the Jarār family was concentrated around the village of Sānūr, also near Sebaste, and the ʿAbd al-Hādī� family was in the village of ʿArrabā, near Jinī�n. Moreover, the importance of pasturage in the economic life of northern Samaria has been well-known since Biblical times. Jacob sent his sons to let their herds graze in Shechem (Nablus), but they preferred to go to Dothan, in the northern region.40 There certainly were peasants living in the northern district of Samaria, and shepherds in Samaria’s southern region. Although the document does not explicitly mention the place in which these Bedouins were settled, it seems likely that at least some of them arrived in northern Samaria. Either way, it seems that the cumulative data, including the lack of any evidence of Samaritan presence since the Early Islamic period, the Frankish church built on the site of a Samaritan synagogue, and the large number of Bedouins invited by the Franks to settle the area, indicate that the Samaritan community in this region disappeared during the late stages of the Early Islamic period. It is, of course, impossible to determine if these communities thrived until the tenth through the eleventh centuries and were then suddenly wiped out, or if they faded away through a more gradual process. In any case, the Samaritan population withdrew and was replaced by Muslim newcomers, at least some of whom were Bedouins. These Bedouins underwent a process of sedentarization, and today most of the local population lives in towns and villages. This may explain the tribal nature of at least part of the rural society in the area, the so-called ʿushrān. As for the Samaritans, some of them probably converted, while others may have emigrated to other Samaritan communities, especially to nearby Nablus. To the best of my knowledge, aside from sporadic references to Greek Orthodox monks in the monastery in Sebaste, there is no mention of local Christian communities that existed in the region during the Crusader period.41 A small Crusader-period church was found in Faḥma, and Frankish structures were found in Zababdeh and in Khirbat Babriya, near Sebaste.42 In conclusion: Muslims became the largest community in the region of Nablus prior to the Crusader period. During the Crusader period, Bedouins migrated to the region around Sebaste, making this area predominantly Muslim as well. Samaritans became a primarily urban community in Nablus, with some satellite rural communities, but without any foothold in the region of Sebaste. Indigenous Christians lived both in Nablus and Sebaste, and probably in some villages in northern Samaria, as well. 39  Demsky, “The Permitted Towns,” 75–77.

40  Genesis 37:12–17.

41  Joannis Phocas, Ioannou tou Kinnamou Historion biblia z’ /​Joannis Cinnami Historiarum libri VII, ed. Du Cange and Jacques-Paul Migne, Patro­logia Graeca 133 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1983): cols. 939–40.

42  Meron Benvenisti, “Bovaria—Babriyya: A Frankish Residue in the Map of Palestine,” in Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom of Jerusalem, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans E. Mayer, and Raymond C. Smail (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1982), 130–52 at 137–44.

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Mamluk and Ottoman Periods In 1170, Benjamin of Tudela cited the figure of one thousand Samaritans (probably households) in Nablus. However, according to the Ottoman censuses of the sixteenth century, there were only twenty-nine Samaritan families in Nablus in 1538–1539, thirtyfour families in 1548–1549, and at the end of the century, only twenty families.43 This means that if Benjamin was counting families and not individuals, then the number of Samaritans decreased by ninety-eight percent, and if he was counting the entire community, that number was reduced by ninety-two percent. In either case, it seems that during the Mamluk period and the early Ottoman period, the Samaritans in Nablus became a miniscule community, on the verge of extinction. There is no indication that the Samaritans suffered during the Mamluk period more than other non-Muslim communities, such as the Jews or the Christians. However, their initial situation was more difficult. While the Jewish community survived the Mamluk period thanks to a constant, though limited, number of immigrants from overseas, the Samaritan diaspora communities were fewer and smaller. Moreover, the main Samaritan diaspora communities were situated in major Mamluk cities, such as Damascus, Cairo, and Alexandria, and emigration to these destinations would not have improved the conditions of potential immigrants to Nablus and its surroundings. Therefore, unlike Jews, who could have arrived from overseas, and Christians, who were numerous across the region, the Samaritans had to decide between converting and remaining in their unfortunate situation. It seems most of them decided to convert. The figures did not change dramatically in ensuing centuries. After the Samaritan community collapsed during the Mamluk period, its situation seems to have stabilized. The survival of the Samaritan community in Nablus became possible because of the decline and eventual disappearance of the diaspora Samaritan communities. Samaritans who survived the Mamluk conquest of Frankish Acre in 1291 probably found their way to nearby communities such as Nablus, Gaza, or Damascus. In later generations, the other diaspora communities, such as Cairo, Alexandria, Ḥalab, and Damascus, disappeared as well. Some of their members probably converted to Islam, while some prominent Samaritan families migrated to Nablus.44 These migrations may have resulted in the elimination of the diaspora communities by the eighteenth century, but they also enabled the survival of the Samaritan community in Nablus. Practically no Christians lived in Samaria during the Mamluk period. As a matter of fact, there was only an urban community in Nablus and a monastic presence in Sebaste. There is no clear evidence that Zababdeh, where a Christian community exists today, had a Christian population prior to the Ottoman period. According to Benvenisti and Hammoudeh, this village’s Christian population migrated from the area of Karak during 43  Pummer, The Samaritans, 155–56; Nathan Schur, “The Samaritans in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods and in the Twentieth Century,” in The Samaritans, ed. Ephraim Stern and Hanan Eshel (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2006), 607–17 [in Hebrew]. 44  Pummer, The Samaritans, 159–60; Schur, “The Samaritans,” 607.



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the sixteenth century.45 However, the fact that the presumed immigrants settled in this remote and neglected village, which was not included in the Ottoman census at the end of the sixteenth century, may indicate that Christians also lived there before the immigration mentioned by Benvenisti. Muslims became the dominant population group in the area prior to the Crusader period. During the Mamluk period, the other communities almost entirely vanished, and the entire region became almost exclusively Muslim.

Summary

Most of the population of the region known as Samaria converted to Islam in the Early Islamic period. However, the Samaritan community in Nablus survived until the Mamluk period, when it became a tiny community on the verge of annihilation. Christians also survived, mainly in Nablus, as well as in scattered communities across the area. Both communities enjoyed an influx of immigrants, who, despite being limited in number, sustained the depleted local communities.

45  Ayelet Hashahar Malka, ed., Corpus of Christian Sites in Samaria and Northern Judea, CC 1: 108; Benvenisti, “Bovaria – Babriyya,” 142; Samee Hammoudeh, “New Light on Ramallah’s Origins in the Ottoman Period,” Jerusalem Quarterly 59 (2014): 44.

Chapter 5

JUDEA AND JERUSALEM The area discussed in this chapter includes the city of Jerusalem and its vicinity, bordered on the west by the foothills of the Judean Mountains, the regions of Bethlehem and Ramallah to the south and the north, respectively, and the Judean Desert to the east. However, since the desert was mostly uninhabited throughout history, the conversion of its population is not discussed here. The discussion also includes the area of Hebron and its vicinity, as well as the region of Karak, to the south-east of the Dead Sea. Jerusalem

Jerusalem is one of the most studied cities in the world. It has a documented history lasting nearly four thousand years, and Jerusalem’s Old City and its environs have been thoroughly excavated over the past century and a half.1 Therefore, I do not claim to encompass the entire history of Jerusalem between the years 638 and 1800, nor the entire body of studies relating to the city’s history during this long period. However, I believe that the data and studies presented here fairly portray the events that led to Jerusalem’s Islamization. Early Islamic Period

Byzantine Jerusalem was an exclusively Christian city. Jews were explicitly forbidden from entering, and its transformation from a Roman city into an important pilgrimage destination, and subsequently to a Patriarchal see, converted it into a Christian space.2 The city expanded, with many churches and monasteries inside and outside its walls.3 But when the Muslims conquered the city, this reality changed. The well-known (but likely later fabrication) amān agreement between the Muslim conquerors and Jerusalem’s residents included several important stipulations: the Muslims pledged to respect the residents’ property, enshrine their freedom of religion, not destroy or confiscate churches, and ensure that Jews did not reside in Jerusalem alongside the Christians.4 The authenticity of this text is disputed by scholars. Shelomo D. Goitein contends it is a false document, primarily since Jews lived in Jerusalem throughout the Early Islamic period, whereas Moshe Gil and others argue that despite some inaccuracies, it is mostly 1  Gideon Avni and Katharina Galor, “Unearthing Jerusalem: 150 Years of Archaeo­logical Research,” in Unearthing Jerusalem: 150 Years of Archaeo­logical Research in the Holy City, ed. Gideon Avni and Katharina Galor (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011), ix–xii. 2  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 109–13.

3  Oren Gutfeld, “The Urban Layout of Byzantine-Period Jerusalem,” in Unearthing Jerusalem: 150 Years of Archaeo­logical Research in the Holy City, ed. Gideon Avni and Katharina Galor (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 327–50. 4  Gil, A History of Palestine, 54.

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a genuine document.5 Both opinions have clear disadvantages. Goitein’s opinion contradicts a document that was, even if fabricated post-factum, accepted as genuine by the contemporary population of Jerusalem. Thus, an eleventh-century Jewish document demanding the Jews negotiate their return to Jerusalem with the Christians seems to echo this. Those who argue that such a document was issued cannot ignore the inaccuracies found in it, namely, that Jews lived in the city even though the document explicitly forbids them from doing so. I suggest a third option: the agreement is authentic, and the Muslims did not breach it by allowing seventy Jewish families from Tiberias to settle in Jerusalem. This clause must be understood stricto sensu; Jews were excluded from Christian districts yet could live in other parts of the city. The specific stipulation in the agreement was: “No Jew will live among them (the Christians) in Ilya.”6 This clause was strictly imposed. From the Muslim conquest up to the nineteenth century, Jews did not live in Jerusalem’s Christian Quarter. On the other hand, the Jews asked the Muslims for permission to live close to their ruined Temple, not far from the Pool of Siloam.7 Thus, the Jews and the Muslims occupied the area close to the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f, whereas the Christians remained in their homes near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with no Jews in the quarter. This idea is based, first and foremost, on Jerusalem’s topo­ graphy. The Old City is divided into two main districts, built along the two cardines. The western district’s centre is close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while the eastern is near the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f. This division of Jerusalem’s landscape continued until the Mamluk period.8 Christians

Arculf, the first Christian pilgrim after the Muslim conquest (ca. 670) whose account of his visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land survives, describes Jerusalem as a city with two focal points. He describes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as a roughly built mosque in the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f precinct, that, according to his estimations, could accommodate about three thousand worshippers.9 Arculf describes the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f. He does not mention people, Muslims or Christians. Yet it seems likely that this city was divided into districts: a western area around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, inhabited by Christians, and an eastern district near the Temple Mount, populated by Muslims and perhaps a few Jews. 5  Goitein, Palestinian Jewry, 36–41; Gil, A History of Palestine, 56; Milka Levy-Rubin, “Were the Jews Prohibited from Settling in Jerusalem following the Arab Conquest?—The Authenticity of alTabarī�’s Jerusalem Surrender Agreement,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 36 (2009): 63–82. 6  Gil, A History of Palestine, 54.

7  Gil, Palestine during the First Muslim Period, no. 1, 2: 1–3.

8  Michael Ehrlich and Doron Bar, “Jerusalem According to the Description of the Bordeaux Pilgrim: Geo­graphic and Theo­logical Aspects” Cathedra 113 (2004): 39–41 [in Hebrew]. 9  “Adamnani de Locis Sanctis,” in Itineraria et alia geo­graphica, ed. Geyer and Cuntz, 186.



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The Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik (684–705) and his son and successor al-Walī�d (705–715) initiated a major building project on the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f itself, and near its western and southern walls. The project included the building of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqṣā Mosque, as well as a secular complex outside the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f ’s temenos, which included six large buildings.10 The secular complex seems to indicate that the caliphate was not merely interested in Jerusalem’s spiritual qualities, but also considering converting Jerusalem into a thriving Muslim administrative centre.11 The establishment of the Muslim area near the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f, rather than in the city’s centre, suggests that despite the fact that the Muslims upheld their promises and did not confiscate Christian property or religious buildings in the centre of Jerusalem, they wanted to become leading actors in the city. Therefore, they preferred to establish a new city centre, rather than breach their agreement with the local population. Donald Whitcomb describes the Muslims’ actions in Jerusalem as the establishment of a “Twin City.”12 These buildings were practically the only large-scale investments made by Muslim authorities in Jerusalem before the Crusader period. ʿAbd al-Malik and al-Walī�d’s project would likely have led to the relocation of the city’s central commercial district from the western cardo to the vicinity of the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f. The existence of a brand-new area, inhabited by a higher-class population, would have motivated newcomers to establish their businesses in the area and incentivized local residents to transfer their commercial activities there. Nevertheless, although these administrative buildings point to the lofty ambitions of the Umayyad project, it lost momentum shortly after al-Walī�d’s death. Sulaymān, al-Walī�d’s brother and heir, established the new capital of Jund Filasṭī�n in Ramla, and probably transferred many administrative functions from Jerusalem. I suggest that the establishment of Ramla had a substantial impact on the history of Jerusalem in the Early Islamic period. Instead of becoming one of the caliphate’s crown jewels, it developed as an ordinary secondary city. Without governmental support, Jerusalem became an unattractive city, far from the centre of the caliphate and from its main trade routes. Consequently, fewer people immigrated to Jerusalem. Others, who arrived in Jerusalem because they believed it was about to become a thriving religious and commercial centre, emigrated once they saw these ideas were unlikely to be realized. Hence, even though part of Jerusalem’s population converted to Islam during the Early Islamic period, an important Christian community remained in the city. Jerusalem still has a Christian community, mainly in the present-day Christian Quarter. However, the survival of a Christian community was not only dependent upon Muslim presence or actions, but on the actions of Christian institutions as well. Despite being cut off from the Byzantine empire, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem remained a leading actor in the life of the Christian community of the city and its vicinity. Since there were probably few Muslim newcomers, who apparently lived in a separate urban district, and the Christian establishments were protected by the surrender agreement, 10  Whitcomb, “Jerusalem and the Beginnings of the Islamic City,” 405.

11  Elad, Medi­eval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship, 28.

12  Whitcomb, “Jerusalem and the Beginnings of the Islamic City,” 413–15.

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the Patriarchate functioned without major obstacles throughout the period. Moreover, Jerusalem’s sanctity fostered interest abroad in its Christian community. For example, Charlemagne initiated a detailed survey of the Christian communities in the Holy Land, which included many churches and monasteries in Jerusalem, and also made contributions to a hospice in the city.13 However, the life of the non-Muslim communities in Jerusalem was not always easy. In about 870, the pilgrim Bernard the Monk described the miracle of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.14 Presumably, fire descending from heaven is a miracle deserving of mention. Since no earlier pilgrim referred to it, it was evidently a new development, which began in the second half of the ninth century. The miracle was described for the first time shortly after the reign of al-Mutawakkil (847–61), who fervently persecuted non-Muslims. Presumably, Christians used this miracle to demonstrate the superiority of their religion, despite the gloomy reality they faced.15 The repair of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre after its demolition in 1009 was financed by the Byzantine emperor, and although Jerusalem was not an important trade centre, the Amalfitans, engaged in trade with the Fatimid caliphate, managed to establish a hospice in Jerusalem during the eleventh century.16 The combination of strong local religious institutions, Muslim indifference, and the support of foreign powers, facilitated the survival of Jerusalem’s Christian community throughout the Early Islamic period. Al-Muqaddasī�, a Muslim from Jerusalem, describes the reality of his time in unfavourable terms: Few are the learned there, many are the Christians, and these make themselves distasteful in public places…. The Jurisprudence is in solitude, and the man of letters disregarded; schools are unattended, and there is no instruction. The Christians and the Jews are predominant here, and the mosque is devoid of congregations and assemblies.17

Ibn al-ʿArabī�, who visited Jerusalem more than a century later, depicted a different reality. Yet, although he praises the Muslim scholarship he saw in Jerusalem, he also clearly describes the Christian prominence in the city.18 These two pictures indicate that Christians constituted the most prominent religious community in Jerusalem until the Crusader period. 13  McCormick, Charlemagne’s Survey, 155–83, 200–206; F. E. Peters, Jerusalem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 218–22. 14  Tobler, Descriptiones Terrae Sanctae, 92.

15  Andrew Jotischky, “Holy Fire and Holy Sepulchre: Ritual and Space in Jerusalem from the Ninth to the Fourteenth Centuries,” in Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages, ed. Frances Andrews (Donington: Shaun Tyas /​ Paul Watkins Publishing, 2011), 44–60 at 48–49; Benedicta Ward, “Miracles in the Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge Companion of Miracles, ed. Graham H. Twelftree (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 149–62. 16  Adrian J. Boas, Jerusalem in the Time of the Crusades (London: Routledge, 2001), 103; Peters, Jerusalem, 267–76.

17  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 167; English version: Al-Muqaddasi, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, trans. Basil A. Collins (Reading: Garnet, 1994), 152. 18  Drory, “Some Observations,” 104–6, 120–22.



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As stated above, according to an eleventh century document, some seventy Jewish families moved to Jerusalem from Tiberias shortly after the Muslim conquest. This humble community, whose members are hitherto anonymous, brought significant change in the city, since it was the first time in about 500 years that Jews were permitted to settle in Jerusalem and establish a community. Nonetheless, the impact of this community outside the city’s walls was negligible. The only information we have is derived from archaeo­logical excavations. For example, what was apparently the community’s synagogue was discovered underneath one of the Umayyad administrative buildings:this synagogue ceased to function by the first half of the eighth century, when the Umayyad administrative complex was built.19 As a matter of fact, there is no known Jewish presence in Jerusalem between the second half of the eighth century and the end of the ninth century. Even though Jews could live in Jerusalem, the main Jewish institution in the Holy Land, the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel, was not relocated to Jerusalem; it remained in Tiberias. However, in the late ninth century, the immigration of the Mourners of Sion began. The immigration of this elite group provoked a chain reaction, probably playing an important role in the relocation of the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel to Jerusalem.20 The transfer of the Yeshiva was followed by the relocation of its members from Tiberias to Jerusalem, and later on by the immigration to the city of other Jews, many of them of Maghrebi origin. As with the Christian Amalfitans, many of the Maghrebis were traders, and their establishment in Jerusalem probably did not serve their mundane goals. Yet in both cases, newcomers from overseas expanded and reinforced the local non-Muslim communities. Another important aspect of the Jewish settlement in Jerusalem in the tenth and eleventh centuries is that the Jerusalem community was confined to the city itself. It seems that very few Jews, if any, settled in Jerusalem’s satellite towns or in its rural hinterland. From the tenth century onward, Rabbanite and Karaite Jews lived in two adjacent neighbourhoods in the city’s southern district. When the city walls were rebuilt in the tenth century, both of these neighbourhoods were left outside the wall. I suggest that both communities moved into the walled city during the eleventh century. During this period, the population of the city suffered various calamities. The city was hit by two major earthquakes, in 1033 and 1068, and was often attacked and plundered. Therefore, when its perimeter shifted during the eleventh century, the residents of the Jewish neighbourhoods, which constituted a vulnerable community, probably established new intra muros neighbourhoods. Furthermore, unlike Prawer, who suggested that the Jewish neighbourhood in pre-Crusader Jerusalem was between the northern wall of the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f and the city’s northern wall, and Gil, Daniella TalmonHeller, and Miriam Frenkel, who proposed that the neighbourhood was on the site of the

19  Eilat Mazar, “Architecture and Strati­graphy of the ‘House of Menorot’,” in The Temple Mount Excavations in Jerusalem 1968–1978 Directed by Benjamin Mazar, Final Reports, Vol. 2, ed. Eilat Mazar (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003): 163.

20  Erder, “The Negation of the Exile,” 110–11, 119–26; Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 65.

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present-day Western Wall plaza, I propose that Jewish neighbourhoods existed in both areas: the northern was inhabited by Karaites, whereas the southern was a Rabbanite neighbourhood.21 Since the Yeshiva had left the city and relocated to Tyre during the 1070s, by 1099 the Rabbanite neighbourhood was already depopulated, and most of the Jews massacred by the Crusaders in Jerusalem were in fact Karaites.22 Muslims

The Muslim conquest caused the emigration of local Byzantine elites, and the immigration of Muslims. Yet it seems that Jerusalem was not an especially attractive destination for immigrants. Muslims may have immigrated to Jerusalem during the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik and al-Walī�d’, but once the ambitious project of these caliphs was abandoned, Jerusalem lost its appeal as an immigration destination, and Muslim immigration to the city slowed down. Jerusalem, it seems, remained a marginal Muslim city until the eleventh century. It had two magnificent Muslim structures, the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqṣā Mosque, but Christians were still dominant in the urban scene. As stated above, al-Muqaddasī� sadly admitted that in his time, about 350 years after the Muslim conquest, Muslims had a very marginal impact on the city’s everyday life. This was primarily because Muslim rulers had little interest in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was distant from the important trade routes, and its religious importance was overshadowed by Mecca and Medina. Moreover, it is obvious that without massive government support, the Muslim district along the eastern edge of the city had very limited prospects. Since the establishment of Aelia Capitolina in the first half of the second century, the main urban activity was located near the city centre, namely around what would eventually be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The region around the Temple Mount/​Ḥaram al-Sharī�f was across a ravine, in an inconvenient area, and therefore, from the second century on, the city centre was in the vicinity of the Holy Sepulchre. The Umayyad project was soon abandoned, and a similar effort by the first Crusader rulers during the first twenty years of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem also failed. During the eleventh century, Jerusalem became a more important Muslim scholarship centre. Although Ibn al-ʿArabī� referred to the Christian prominence in Jerusalem, he was likewise impressed by the extensive world of Muslim scholarship he found in the city, and deplored its destruction in the Crusader conquest. Interestingly, despite being under Fatimid Shiʿite rule until the 1070s, the Muslim religious renaissance in Jerusalem was mostly within the Sunni community. The eleventh century genre of Faḍā’il Bayt alMaqdis adopted an anti-Shi’ite stance, and depicts Sunni efforts to preserve their hege21  Prawer, The History of the Jews, 18; Gil, A History of Palestine, 635–39; Daniella TalmonHeller and Miriam Frenkel, “Religious Innovation under Fatimid Rule: Jewish and Muslim Rites in Eleventh Century Jerusalem,” Medi­eval Encounters 25 (2019): 203–26 at 206; Michael Ehrlich, “The Location of the Jewish Neighborhoods of Jerusalem during the Early-Muslim Period,” New Studies on Jerusalem 19 (2013): 359–68 [in Hebrew]. 22  Goitein, Palestinian Jewry, 229.



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mony in the city.23 Omar Abed Rabo listed sixty-seven Muslim scholars of Jerusalemite origin, sixty-nine who immigrated to the city, and eighty-five scholars who visited Jerusalem but did not live there.24 Most of these scholars belonged to Sunni schools.25 In other words, despite Fatimid rule, Jerusalem became an important centre of Sunni scholarship in the eleventh century. Crusader Period

Notwithstanding its brevity, the Crusader period is an extremely important chapter in the history of Jerusalem’s Islamization. The brutal Crusader conquest and subsequent elimination of the Muslim and Jewish communities in the city created a new reality, in which only Christians lived in the city. Given these circumstances, the gradual Islamization process that had been underway in the city prior to the Crusader period ceased all at once. The city became purely Christian. Frankish rule in Jerusalem lasted a mere eightyeight years. But that was long enough to sever the ties between the descendants of deportees from Jerusalem in 1099 and the traditions that existed in the city prior to the Crusader conquest. When Saladin conquered Jerusalem, these descendants, Muslims and Jews, were living in the cities that had absorbed their ancestors. These people may have considered the possibility of a return to the city from which their forefathers had been expelled. Yet there is no evidence of people of Jerusalemite origin returning to the city. Even if some did, they then left the city in 1229, following the Jaffa-Tall al-ʿAjjūl agreement, when most of the Muslim residents left the city, probably never to return.26 In these circumstances, the local Christian community, particularly the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities, were the only segment of Jerusalem’s population that had a continuous presence and traditions in the city going back to the fourth century.27 Most of the Jews and Muslims who settled in Jerusalem after the 1250s were probably not descended from former Jerusalemite families, but rather arrived from elsewhere. Ayyubid Period

The Crusader period had a significant effect on Jerusalem’s urban landscape. However, when Saladin retook the city, the situation returned to the status quo ante bellum. The Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqṣā Mosque resumed their original function, and several Latin churches, such as the Church of Saint Anne, were converted into Muslim religious buildings, as well.28 Oriental Christian communities retained control of their churches, and 23  Friedman, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, 12–13.

24  Omar Abed Rabo, “Jerusalem during the Fāṭimid and Seljūq Periods: Archaeo­logical and Historical Aspects” (PhD diss. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2012), 20–147. 25  Abed Rabo, “Jerusalem during the Fāṭimid and Seljūq Periods,” 148–91.

26  Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 203.

27  Carole Hillenbrand, “Ayyubid Jerusalem—A Historical Introduction,” in Ayyubid Jerusalem: The Holy City in Context 1187–1250, ed. Robert Hillenbrand and Sylvia Alud (London: al-Tajir Trust, 2012), 1–2 at 20–21. 28  Mahmoud K. Hawari, Ayyubid Jerusalem (1187–1250): An Architectural and Archaeo­logical Study

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some churches, such as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which became Latin during the Crusader period, were returned to their pre-Crusades possessors.29 However, although Saladin returned such churches, he only returned the church proper. Properties that had belonged to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were confiscated and endowed to various Muslim beneficiaries. The Ṣalāḥiyya khānaqāh was established in the former palace of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, located within the precinct of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and many of the church’s properties, both urban and rural, were endowed to the khānaqāh, (the Persian word for a place for Sufi gatherings).30 This policy had a substantial impact on the viability of the local Christian community. An impoverished church had fewer resources to support its parishioners during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. Notwithstanding, despite the economic and religious challenges, the local Christian community has existed continuously from the Byzantine period to this day. During the Ayyubid period, both Muslims and Jews returned to Jerusalem. However, since the Ayyubid period essentially ended in 1229, the Ayyubid-era Muslim and Jewish resettlement of Jerusalem was largely anecdotal and left a very small imprint on the history of the city. The only clear exception was the Muslim Maghrebi community, which settled in Jerusalem in response to Saladin’s call to settle the city.31 However, this quarter was geo­graphically marginalized, and its inhabitants usually did not belong to the city’s elite groups. Mamluk Period

The Mamluks consolidated their rule in Jerusalem during the 1260s. During their long and stable rule, Jerusalem became a city with a clear Muslim majority and character. The Mamluks encouraged Muslim immigration to Jerusalem, fostered pilgrimage, and invested substantial funds in large building projects, most of them inside and around Ḥaram al-Sharī�f.32 During the Mamluk period, Jerusalem became a Muslim city in two ways. The Muslims became the largest religious community in the city, and many religious Muslim buildings were built within the city and in its rural vicinity.33 In addition, some (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007), 19; Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 3: 407–8, 423, 143.

29  Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 3: 31; Hawari, Ayyubid Jerusalem, 17.

30  Hawari, Ayyubid Jerusalem, 35–38; Yehoshuʿa Frenkel, “Political and Social Aspects of Islamic Rel­igious Endowments (awqāf): Saladin in Cairo (1169–1173) and Jerusalem (1187–1193),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 62 (1999): 1–20 at 6–8; Johannes Pahlitzsch, “The Transformation of Latin Religious Institutions into Islamic Endowments by Saladin in Jeru­ salem,” in Governing the City: The Interaction of Social Groups in Jerusalem between the Fatimid and the Ottoman Period, ed. Johannes Pahlitzsch and Lorenz Korn (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004), 49–69. 31  Hawari, Ayyubid Jerusalem, 17.

32  Zaide Antrim, “Jerusalem in the Ayyubid and Mamluk Periods,” in Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, ed. Suleiman Mourad, Bedross Der Matossian, and Naomi Koltun-Fromm (New York: Routledge, 2018), 102–9. 33  Luz, “Aspects of Islamization,” 146–50; Luz, The Mamluk City, 117–21.



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churches, especially those in the modern-day Muslim Quarter, were converted into mosques throughout the Mamluk period. The city gradually became more Muslim in character. Naḥmanides (Rabbi Moshe b. Naḥman, also known by the acronym Ramban, 1194–1270), who arrived in Jerusalem in 1267, described the city and counted about two thousand Muslim inhabitants, three hundred Christians, and two Jewish dyers.34 These figures seem to indicate that at this stage Jerusalem was sparsely populated. Yet even at this early stage of the Mamluk period, most of Jerusalem’s population was Muslim. Since Muslims had been massacred and deported by the Crusaders, and most of those who re-established the Muslim community after 1187 then left the city in 1229, I propose that most of the Muslims living in the city in 1267 were newcomers, with no familial roots in Jerusalem. Most of the Muslim immigrants who settled in Jerusalem were probably from the surrounding regions. In many places, such as in Ramla and Tiberias, Muslims occupied former Frankish districts. It seems likely that Muslims who lived near Jerusalem seized the opportunity, and moved into better quality dwellings inside the city.35 The much smaller Christian community was composed of various Oriental Christian denominations, which had survived in the city since the Arab conquest in the 630s, through the Crusader conquest and subsequent Muslim reoccupation. The Christians were the only community to survive through the centuries, and therefore, despite being oppressed, it still preserved local traditions. Moreover, the Mamluks do not seem to have made substantial efforts to transfer Muslim populations to Jerusalem, or to rebuild the city. An example of the Mamluks’ lack of interest in Jerusalem is the establishment of the Via Dolorosa during the second half of the thirteenth century. The institution of this processional route during the early stages of the Mamluk period required special attention. At this stage, relations between the Franks and the Mamluks were anything but friendly. The Mamluks were engaged in an ongoing campaign to uproot the Franks from their bastions all over the country. Therefore, they did not have any plausible reason to make such a generous gesture in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, not only did the Mamluks allow Western Christians to hold a procession that crossed the city—from the eastern gate, through the Muslim Quarter, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—they also established the annual pilgrimage mawsim to Nabī� Mūsā, which coincides with Easter. Namely, the Mamluks, who otherwise fiercely fought the Christians and tirelessly persecuted them all over the Middle East, displayed surprising tolerance toward a public Western Christian procession and ceremony in Jerusalem.36 This reality changed in the fourteenth century, both within Jerusalem as well as in its rural vicinity. Jerusalem’s urban landscape became increasingly Muslim. The Mamluks built Madrasas (Islamic institutions for religious studies), new buildings in the Ḥaram, mosques, and Muslim pilgrim lodges all over the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, espe34  Kobler, ed., Letters of Jews, 1: 226.

35  Ehrlich, “The Frankish Impact on the Urban Landscape,” 194–96.

36  Michael Ehrlich, “Ascension Traditions in Jerusalem,” in Religious Stories in Transformation: Conflict, Reception and Revision, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Tamar Kadary, Marcel Poorthius, and Vered Tohar (Leiden: Brill 2016), 300–13 at 310–11.

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cially near the Ḥaram.37 These actions converted Jerusalem into a Muslim city, yet Christians and some Jews continued to reside in specific areas within it. In the late fourteenth century and the fifteenth century, Muslim authorities became more aggressive toward the non-Muslim communities. The physical manifestation of this harsh attitude is the construction of a mosque near the synagogue, constant efforts by local religious leaders to close the synagogue, conversion of the church of Saint James the Persian into a zāwiya (a word used interchangeably with khānaqāh, mainly in Arabic-speaking areas),38 and construction of two imposing minarets to the south and north of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.39 This architectural language suggests that the landscape of Jerusalem gradually became Muslim. Despite the fact that Muslims had already become the city’s largest religious group in the thirteenth century, they still showed restraint towards non-Muslim communities, especially the Christians. Later, they began building extensively within the Ḥaram and outside of it, in an area whose population was mainly, or perhaps exclusively, Muslim. During the fifteenth century, Muslim authorities built religious institutions near, or even on top of important houses of prayer used by minorities. They were strong enough to harass the Jewish and Armenian communities with impunity, and to that end they built a mosque near a synagogue. This led to a long conflict that culminated in the permanent closure of the latter. The history of the church of Saint James the Persian is less well known, but it was clearly converted into a zāwiya no later than the fourteenth century. The construction of the imposing minarets near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was meant to manifest Islam’s supremacy over Christianity. These minarets, which still tower over the church and its campanile, were built near pre-existing mosques, whose original minarets were probably more modest. These minarets were built simultaneously with the escalating conflict between Mamluk authorities and the Franciscan friars in nearby Mount Sion. However, the building activity clearly delineated the Mamluk range of action. They were content to harass resident Christians, as well as pilgrims, but did not want to infuriate the European powers. Muslims

There is no information on the beginning of the Muslim presence in the early stages of the Mamluk period. As noted above, with the exception of the Maghrebi community, the Muslims left Jerusalem following the Jaffa–Tall ʿAjjūl agreement.40 Yet in 1267, Naḥmanides reported nearly two thousand Muslims in Jerusalem, the largest religious community in the city. We do not know of any substantial immigration to Jerusalem 37  Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 77–78; Luz, The Mamluk City, 161.

38  Alexandre Papas, “Khānaqāh,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Three, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Consulted online on February 28, 2022, http:/​/​dx.doi.org/​10.1163/​1573–3912_ei3_COM_35476.

39  Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 513, 517–18, 568–69; Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 3: 189–91. 40  Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols, 203.



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between 1244, when the Franks were expelled from the city following the Khwarezmian conquest, and Naḥmanides’s visit in 1267. There are two possible explanations for the apparent surge in the number of Muslims between 1244 and 1267. The first is that the sources that describe the Muslim exile from Jerusalem in 1229 were inaccurate. The other possibility is that nearly two thousand Muslim immigrants settled in the city during this period. Between these two possibilities, the first seems more plausible. As stated above, the Maghrebi community probably did not leave the city, which could perhaps mean that other Muslims decided to stay in the city as well, despite its division between the Franks and the Muslims. Nevertheless, although this possibility cannot be dismissed, these possible communities were composed of people who did not leave any mark on the city’s history. Muslim residents could also have been converted Christians from Jerusalem and its vicinity. Yet there is very scarce evidence to indicate the existence of significant conversion or converted populations in Jerusalem, and the city’s conversion process did not occur solely during the Mamluk period’s earlier stages, but rather throughout the entire period. Immigrants constituted another segment of Jerusalem’s Muslim society in the Mamluk period. They consisted of ordinary people from nearby localities who found the city attractive, Sufis and scholars, as well as retired or exiled Mamluks who were relocated to Jerusalem. Burgoyne’s and Luz’s surveys clearly indicate that Mamluk buildings, religious as well as secular, are to be found mainly near Ḥaram al-Sharī�f.41 However, Luz notes that the Mamluks built many zawiyas and Hanaqahs in Christian areas, where they became effective tools for Islamization.42 Burgoyne analyzed Jerusalem’s Muslim society according to data he extracted from the Ḥaram documents from the final decade of the fourteenth century. According to Burgoyne’s study, the ratio between males and females in Jerusalem was 1:2, and about half of the individuals recorded in the documents appear without a nisba. These people had probably lived in the city for a relatively long time and were therefore considered locals, and thus were not listed according to their place of origin. Among the rest of those recorded, almost one half were from al-Shām (six from Jerusalem), about fifteen percent from Egypt and the Ḥijāz, approximately seven percent from the Maghreb, and almost a third from Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the East.43 Since locals were usually not named after their place of origin, the Jerusalemites who were listed as such were probably people whose ancestors left Jerusalem in earlier generations and who then returned to the city of their forefathers. However, these figures represent Jerusalemite society after more than a century of Mamluk rule. They do not provide information on the social organization of the Muslim city during this period. All four of the Sunni Maḍāhib had courts in Jerusalem; however, the Shāfiʿī� court was the main court of the city.44 Such a phenomenon indicates that there was a significant 41  Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 63, 78–87; Luz, The Mamluk City, 161. 42  Luz, The Mamluk City, 164–65.

43  Burgoyne, Mamluk Jerusalem, 61.

44  Huda Lutfi, Al-Quds al-Mamlūkiyya (Berlin: Schwarz, 1985), 194–203.

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number of scholars in Jerusalem, which was a small city. The combination of the women, some of whom were extremely wealthy, and who constituted a significant majority of the population, with the large number of Muslim scholars created a society with a very unique matrix. Mamluk Jerusalem had many institutions of Islamic studies and mystical thought that attracted newcomers. Non-Muslim communities were often harassed and occasionally persecuted. Nevertheless, Christian villagers who occasionally visited Jerusalem would see a Muslim city with ornate buildings, where they met Muslim scholars and mystics. Moreover, the significant presence of Sufis in the city and its environs facilitated conversion of the urban and rural communities. According to Luz, charismatic Sufis who settled in Jerusalem’s countryside and Christian villages were instrumental in the conversion of local inhabitants.45 On the other hand, most of these settlements were marginal enough, and the local church did not have the means to support them. In the more central settlements, such as Bethlehem and the nearby towns, Christian communities have survived to this day because of their size and because their importance for Christianity worldwide was too great to be ignored by the Patriarchate and by foreign Christian powers. Therefore, the pace of conversion to Islam in these localities was slower than elsewhere. Christians

The Greek Orthodox community was probably the largest Christian community in Mamluk Jerusalem. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate was located near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was dominated by Greek Orthodox clergy. Other Christian communities were the Georgians, Armenians, Serbs, Ethiopians, and Roman Catholics. The Greek Orthodox community of Jerusalem was headed by one of the three Greek Orthodox Patriarchates under Mamluk rule. The Jerusalem Patriarchate was, however, the weakest of the three. Although there are no reliable sources describing the size of these communities, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem seems to have been poorer and less populated than the Patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria.46 The Mamluk authorities considered Jerusalem’s Christian community a valuable bargaining chip. Thus, when their interests were undermined in Christian countries, they did not hesitate to retaliate in Jerusalem.47 Consequently, Christians in Jerusalem could be persecuted by Mamluk authorities to a greater degree than other Christians in the Mamluk sultanate, as a way for the Mamluks to exert pressure on Christian powers overseas. Taking Naḥmanides’ figures at face value suggests that in 1267, the Christian community was of a very limited size all through the Mamluk period. However, according to the first Ottoman census (1525–1526), there were 715 Christians living in Jerusalem.48 45  Luz, “Aspects of Islamization,” 136–46.

46  Johannes Pahlitzsch, “Mediators between East and West: Christians under Mamluk Rule,” Mamluk Studies Review 9, no. 2 (2005): 31–47 at 36–37. 47  Pahlitzsch, “Mediators between East and West ,” 34–35.

48  Cohen and Lewis, Population and Revenues, 92–94.



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These figures indicate that the Christian community roughly doubled in size during the Mamluk period, probably as a result of immigration throughout the period. Christians lived mostly in the western half of the Old City of Jerusalem, namely the area of the modern-day Christian and Armenian quarters. Churches in the Muslim Quarter were abandoned as a result of internal Christian migration, instigated by one or more of the following factors: first, these churches were considered abandoned property; second, pressure was possibly exerted on their congregants to convert to Islam; third, the churches were confiscated by Mamluk authorities; or fourth, their congregants wanted to live among Christians rather than being surrounded by Muslims. Jews

In 1267, Naḥmanides found a total of two Jewish brothers living in Jerusalem. He noted that on Saturdays there was a Minyan (a group of ten adult Jewish men) who would pray together in the city.49 In other words, the late medi­eval Jewish community in Jerusalem was established ex nihilo during the Mamluk period. Naḥmanides also describes the establishment of a synagogue, probably that known today as the Ramban synagogue.50 As Jews did not live in Jerusalem before 1267, those who lived in the city by the early fourteenth century would have been newcomers. Some of them were probably survivors from the Frankish cities of Tyre and Acre, which were destroyed and evacuated in 1291. Some of these cities’ Jewish residents would have probably left their homes ahead of the Mamluk conquest, after seeing that the Crusader kingdom was not a viable entity, while others survived the conquest, and probably preferred to relocate to the relatively close Safed and Jerusalem rather than make the expensive and dangerous journey to Europe. This possibility provides an explanation to the rather high profile of Jews of Western European origin in Jerusalem in the fourteenth century.51 Jews of European origin continued to arrive in Jerusalem throughout the Mamluk period, though in more modest numbers. Rabbi Obadiyah of Bertinoro notes that when he arrived in Jerusalem in 1488, there were about seventy Jewish households in the city, and that many of the city’s Jewish residents were older widows. He reports that people left the city because they were starving and because the local authorities were extorting them. He tells of a Jew who converted because of an internal quarrel within the Jewish community, and that his mother then endowed her home, adjacent to the synagogue, to the Muslims to be converted into a mosque. Consequently, the Muslims destroyed the synagogue, but the supreme court in Cairo later forced them to rebuild it.52 49  Kobler, ed., Letters of Jews, 1: 226.

50  Michael Ehrlich, “More on the Location of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and its Synagogue during the Early Mamluk Period,” Cathedra 136 (2010), 37–51 [in Hebrew]; contra: Elchanan Reiner, “The Location of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem after the Crusader Period,” Cathedra 132 (2009): 101–30 [in Hebrew]. 51  Ehrlich, “The Jewish Communities of Safed and Jerusalem,” 718–20.

52  Obadiyah of Bertinoro, From Italy to Jerusalem: Letters, ed. Hartom and David, 64–83.

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Ottoman Period

The Ottomans conquered Jerusalem peacefully. Therefore, many of the trends that had characterized the later stages of the Mamluk period continued to prevail in Ottoman Jerusalem,. The initial Ottoman rulers understood the religious and prestigious value of Jerusalem and therefore, during the sixteenth century, invested large sums toward its development. For example, Suleiman “the Magnificent” rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls, as well as the city’s citadel, known as the Tower of David. During this period the city thrived, and its population grew. Thus, the sixteenth century censuses reflect an increase in the number of Muslim families from 619 in 1525–6 to 1,959 in 1553–4. The Christian community grew from 119 to 303, and the number of Jews increased as well, from 199 to 324. The overall number of families in the city grew from 934 to 2614.53 However, after the late sixteenth century, the Ottoman military and economic achievements on the frontiers became increasingly unimpressive. Consequently, state expenses increased, whereas the sources of income declined, and the potential financial resources for investment in Jerusalem were exhausted. In these circumstances, the distance between Jerusalem and Istanbul played a decisive role. As a result, Jerusalem became a remote, small city, far from commercial routes and external frontiers, becoming marginal and neglected. Governmental investments decreased sharply and the city was ruled by governors chosen from among the local elite families.54 Later, in the eighteenth century, the central administration steadily became weaker, and did not provide enough support to the Jerusalem governors, who then became powerless to impose their authority on the city and its environs.55 As a result of the worsening conditions, Jerusalem’s population contracted during this period, and its Muslim share decreased. Thus, in 1810, the German traveler Ulrich J. Seetzen estimated the city’s population at around 8,750, of whom less than half were Muslims.56 Muslims

At the time the Ottomans conquered Jerusalem, Muslims constituted the largest religious community in the city. This reality intensified during the first decades following the conquest. However, there is a clear difference between the first years of Ottoman 53  Lewis, “Studies in the Ottoman,” 476; Cohen and Lewis, Population and Revenues, 92–94; Robert Schick, “Who Came on Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods: An Inter­ religious Comparison,” in Für Seelenheil und Lebensglück: das byzantinische Pilgerwesen und seine Wurzeln, ed. Despoina Ariantzi and Ina Eichner (Mainz: Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, 2018), 243–59.

54  Dror Ze’evi, An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 35–39; Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow, “Ottoman Jerusalem 1517–1918,” in Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, ed. Suleiman Mourad, Bedross Der Matossian, and Naomi Koltun-Fromm (New York: Routledge, 2018), 113–21 at 115–16. 55  Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 169–72; Ben-Bassat and Buessow, “Ottoman Jerusalem,” 115–16.

56  Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1984), 127.



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rule, when the city’s population, and particularly the Muslim community, increased, and later periods, when the population gradually decreased. Apparently, the Ottoman elites found Jerusalem to be an unattractive destination for immigration, because it was too far away from the Balkans, Anatolia, and Istanbul. Therefore, most of the Muslim immigrants settling in Jerusalem in the sixteenth century probably arrived from nearby regions. It seems unnecessary to address the issue of conversion to Islam during this period. If the number of Muslims in Jerusalem decreased slightly, and the number of Jews and Christians remained practically steady or even increased, conversion to Islam in Ottoman Jerusalem would probably have been a marginal and anecdotal occurrence. Muslims lived all over the Old City of Jerusalem, but mostly near the Temple Mount/​ Ḥaram al-Sharī�f and in the area of the present-day Muslim Quarter.57 Christians and Jews

During the Ottoman period, these two communities grew in absolute numbers, as well as in their relative percentage of the entire population. In other words, although there were Christian and Jews who converted during this period, mass conversions to Islam did not occur under Ottoman rule. Jews and Christians immigrated to the city both from overseas and from neighbouring regions. During the sixteenth century, the Jewish community absorbed immigrants, a significant percentage of which were expelled from Spain, or were descendants of these refugees. The Christian community received new immigrants from foreign countries, but also migrants from nearby Bethlehem and Bayt Jālā, whose Christian population decreased in the seventeenth century.58 In the Vicinity of Jerusalem

The region just to the south of Jerusalem still has a substantial Christian community, which has been the case since the Muslim period. However, this region is unlike the area just north of Jerusalem, which also has a substantial Christian community. While Bethlehem, Bayt Jālā, Bayt Sāḥūr, and their vicinity seem to have been an ever-shrinking Christian enclave ever since the end of the Byzantine period, the area north of Jerusalem has undergone significant changes throughout history. Ellenblum proposes that the southern half of the area between Jerusalem and Nablus included a large Christian population, and that the Franks tended to settle there.59 Yet, by the late sixteenth century, most of the region’s inhabitants were Muslims, some of whom lived in settlements that at present have significant Christian populations. For example, according to the 1596–1597 Ottoman census, Bī�r Zayt and Jifna were entirely Muslim settlements, whereas Tayba’s population consisted of sixty-three Muslim families and twenty-three 57  Adar Arnon, “The Quarters of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Period,” Middle Eastern Studies 28 (1992): 1–65 at 12.

58  Oded Peri, Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem: The Question of the Holy Sites during the Early Ottoman Period (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 14. 59  Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement, 225–29.

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Christian families.60 Ramallah had nine Muslim and seventy-one Christian families, but the Christians of Ramallah were newcomers, who had immigrated from the region of Karak only a few years earlier.61 As suggested above, the decrease in the size of the Christian community, its impoverishment, and the increasing pressure exerted by the Muslim authorities and population, including oppression, discrimination, marginalization, and persecution, had a cumulative negative effect on the community both within and without the city. Furthermore, the learned and prosperous Muslim community, which included scholars and aristocrats whose impressive homes dotted the city, could have become an attractive option for Christians who lived in Jerusalem and its vicinity. Sufi activity in the city and its environs probably facilitated the conversion of Christian villagers, as well.62 Summary

The city and district of Jerusalem are the region where Christianity managed to survive better than anywhere else in the Holy Land. Muslim sources indicate that until the Crusader period, Christians were the dominant segment of the local population. The Muslim and Jewish populations of Jerusalem were destroyed during the Crusader conquest of the city, and both communities were banned from living in the city until Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem. During the Mamluk period, the city’s population, as well as that of its vicinity, became increasingly Muslim. Jerusalem’s inhabitants were mostly newcomers from various regions. A significant percentage of rural inhabitants converted to Islam for several reasons, such as the declining Christian community, the growing Muslim one, the Sufi presence in Christian villages, and Muslim settlement in Jerusalem’s surroundings. Nevertheless, the existence of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, as well as other Christian institutions, enabled a substantial number of Christians to remain in the region while maintaining their religion, despite the efforts of the Mamluk authorities and non-state actors to foster conversion to Islam. During the Ottoman period, the percentage of Muslims in the city decreased, which indicates that the Ottomans did not make major and continuous efforts to convert Jews and Christians. On the other hand, the Christian community was organized enough to survive the pressure exerted on it, and the Jewish community managed to rejuvenate itself several times throughout the period, through the arrival of immigrants from overseas.

60  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 114–16. 61  Hammoudeh, “New Light,” 43–49.

62  Luz, “Aspects of Islamization,” 137–39.



Hebron

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According to the Bible, Hebron is the city where the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Jewish People are buried. Hebron was also the first capital of the kingdom of David.63 Yet, although the Double Cave, the sepulchre of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs, is universally identified with a huge temenos within the city, Hebron was not an urban settlement between the abolition of the Kingdom of Judea in 586 bce and the second half of the twelfth century ce. As a result, until the Crusader period, Jerusalem was the most southern city in the Judean Mountains, whereas the region of Hebron, in the hinterland between the arable land and the desert, was inhabited by villagers and nomads. Early Islamic Period

The fifth century ecclesiastical historian Sozomen described an annual event near the “Oak of Mamre,” near Hebron: I consider it necessary to detail the proceedings of Constantine in relation to what is called the Oak of Mamre. This place is now called Terebinthus, and is about fifteen stadia distant from Hebron, which lies to the south, but is two hundred and fifty stadia distant from Jerusalem. It is recorded that here the Son of God appeared to Abraham, with two angels, who had been sent against Sodom, and foretold the birth of his son. Here the inhabit�ants of the country and of the regions round Palestine, the Phœnicians, and the Arabians, assemble annually during the summer season to keep a brilliant feast; and many others, both buyers and sellers, resort there on account of the fair. Indeed, this feast is diligently frequented by all nations: by the Jews, because they boast of their descent from the patri�arch Abraham; by the Pagans, because angels there appeared to men; and by Christians, because He who for the salvation of mankind was born of a virgin, afterwards manifested Himself there to a godly man. This place was moreover honoured fittingly with religious exercises. Here some prayed to the God of all; some called upon the angels, poured out wine, burnt incense, or offered an ox, or he-goat, a sheep, or a cock. Each one made some beautiful product of his labour, and after carefully husbanding it through the entire year, he offered it according to promise as provision for that feast, both for himself and his dependents. And either from honour to the place, or from fear of Divine wrath, they all abstained from coming near their wives, although during the feast these were more than ordinarily studious of their beauty and adornment. Nor, if they chanced to appear and to take part in the public processions, did they act at all licentiously. Nor did they behave imprudently in any other respect, although the tents were contiguous to each other, and they all lay promiscuously together. The place is open country, and arable, and without houses, with the exception of the buildings around Abraham’s old oak and the well he prepared. No one during the time of the feast drew water from that well; for according to Pagan usage, some placed burning lamps near it; some poured out wine, or cast in cakes; and others, coins, myrrh, or incense. Hence, as I suppose, the water was rendered useless by commixture with the things cast into it. Once while these customs were being celebrated by the Pagans, after the aforesaid manner, and as was the established usage with hilarity, the mother-in-law of Constantine was present for prayer, and apprised the emperor of what was being done. On receiving this information, he rebuked the bish�ops of Palestine in no measured terms, because they had neglected their duty, and had permitted a holy place to be defiled by impure libations and sacrifices; and he expressed

63  CIAP 5: 1–2, 8.

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his godly censure in an epistle which he wrote on the subject to Macarius, bishop of Jeru� salem, to Eusebius Pamphilus, and to the bishops of Palestine….64

Sozomen’s description suggests that the fair was a multi-national and inter-religious event. It also indicates that it included a popular feast, which was probably disliked by mainstream religious authorities, such as Jewish religious sources, which forbade participation in this event.65 Likewise, around the year 570, the pilgrim of Piacenza described Jews and Christians celebrating side by side at the Double Cave.66 These two rare descriptions of inter-religious festivals celebrated in the area of Hebron during the Roman and Byzantine periods indicate that the population of Hebron and its vicinity engaged in regional cults, which usually characterized popular beliefs irrespective of ethnic and religious boundaries, rather than an organized religious community. Remains of forty-five churches from the Byzantine period have been found in the area, as well as four synagogues, to be discussed below in detail.67 However, despite this impressive Christian presence, according to Byzantine lists of bishops, Hebron did not have a bishopric, indicating its modest size and lack of importance. According to an early Muslim tradition, Muḥammad himself granted Tamī�m al-Dārī� seven villages, all of which are within the boundaries of modern-day Hebron.68 At the same time, the sanctuary of the Double Cave attracted pilgrims of the three Abrahamic religions. Al-Muqaddasī� describes a kitchen that supplied meals to pilgrims near the Double Cave.69 During the Early Islamic period, there was a modest Jewish community in Hebron, and perhaps also a tiny Christian community.70 Benjamin of Tudela reported that there was a synagogue within the Double Cave prior to the Crusader period.71 This description implies that the use of the temenos by worshipers of more than one religion, which characterized the site in the Byzantine period, continued into the Early Islamic period. Scant information is available about rural communities, and most of it comes from archaeo­logical findings. We have no knowledge of whether the occupation of villages was violent or not, nor do we know of any agreements signed with villages. Simply put, villages were probably occupied peacefully, as a consequence of the fall of nearby urban centres. 64  Sozomen, The Ecclesiastical History, bk. 2, chap. 1, translation taken from https:/​/​www. newadvent.org/​fathers/​26022.htm. 65  Jerusalemite Talmud, Avoda Zara, 4a.

66  Antoninus of Piacenza, Itinerarium, ed. Milani,184–85.

67  Patrich et al., Churches of the Holy Land.

68  David Cook, “Tamī�m al-Dārī�,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 61, no. 1 (1998): 20–28 at 21–22. Yehoshua Frenkel, “Tamī�m al-Dārī� and Hebron during the Mamluk Period,” in Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras, 7: Proceedings of the 16th, 17th and 18th International Colloquium Organized at Ghent University in May 2007, 2008 and 2009, ed. Urbain Vermeulen, Keith D’hulster, and Jo Van Steenbergen (Leuven: Peeters, 2013): 435–46 at 440–41. 69  Al-Muqaddasī�, Aḥsan, ed. De Goeje, 172–73. 70  Gil, A History of Palestine, 745.

71  Sefer Hamasaʿot, ed. Adler, 25.



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Figure 5: The mosque in the narthex of the synagogue of Susiya (Doron Sar-Avi)

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Several excavations were carried out in rural settlements in the hills south of Hebron. In Maʿon, a synagogue existed until the eighth century, when the site was abandoned.72 Nearby Susiya had a beautiful synagogue, in whose narthex a humble mosque was subsequently built. According to Magness, the mosque was built in the eighth century, whereas Werlin, following the excavators, suggests that the synagogue was abandoned in the eighth century, before the mosque’s establishment.73 In Samuʿa, a mosque was built within the synagogue itself. Magness and Werlin dated the establishment of this mosque to the same date as in Susiya.74 In ʿAnim, there is no clear-cut evidence that the synagogue, which apparently fell out of use in the seventh century, was converted into a mosque. However, the building remained in use until the ninth to thetenth centuries.75 The church of Yatir also continued to exist throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. However, it seems to have been domestically occupied, and there is no evidence of the site’s continued use as a church, nor of its transformation into a mosque.76 Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman Periods

There is no information on Islamization of the region during the Crusader period. Likewise, since it was a peripheral region, contemporary sources mostly consist of pilgrims’ accounts, which mainly dealt with the Double Cave, as well as with minor pilgrimage destinations in its vicinity. These sources did not address the religious identity of the indigenous population, and therefore, as far as this study is concerned, are irrelevant. However, the Crusader period is important because in the mid-twelfth century Hebron was separated from the royal domain, and became an urban settlement near the sepulchre of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs.77 As stated above, this brief episode did not have an immediate impact on the religious profile of the local population. However, from this point onward, Hebron gained greater importance as both a regional centre and a religious centre. Although there is no evidence that Jews and Christians lived in Hebron during the Crusader period, it is likely to have been the case, since there is a reference to Jews living in Hebron since the early Ayyubid period. The same conclusion probably applies to the Christian community, although in this case the solid evidence is posterior.78 The 72  Jodi Magness, The Archaeo­logy of the Early Islamic Settlement in Palestine (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 96–97; Steven H. Werlin, Ancient Synagogues of Southern Palestine 300–800 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 210–11. 73  Magness, The Archaeo­logy, 100–102; Werlin, Ancient Synagogues, 180.

74  Magness, The Archaeo­logy, 103; Werlin, Ancient Synagogues,198.

75  Magness, The Archaeo­logy, 104–5; Werlin, Ancient Synagogues, 221. 76  Magness, The Archaeo­logy, 106–7.

77  Hans E. Mayer, “Die Herrschaftsbildung in Hebron,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 101, no. 1 (1985): 64–81 at 70.

78  Menahem of Hebron, “Letter,” 36, 45–46; Schick, “Who Came on Pilgrimage,” 243; Cohen and Lewis, Population and Revenues, 98–99; Al-ʿUlaymī�, Al Uns al-Jalīl, 2: 77–78.



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Christian and Jewish communities in Hebron during the Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman periods were extremely small, and did not have a serious impact on the demo­graphic breakdown: the overwhelming majority of Hebron’s population was Muslim. The same applies to the countryside. There is a vague reference according to which part of the population of the town of Yaṭṭa, near Hebron, is of Jewish origin.79 Since there is no clearcut evidence supporting this view, I consider it an unproven theory. Yet, even if it is correct, it only indicates that some individuals, out of many, were Jewish during the medi­ eval period. and that they eventually converted to Islam. Muslims were not merely the overwhelming majority in Hebron and in its surroundings. The entire region’s landscape had become Muslim. Hebron and Jerusalem became known as “the noble twin sanctuaries,” al-Ḥaramayn al-Sharīfayn, and the Double Cave became an exclusively Muslim shrine.80 Summary

Before the Crusader period, Hebron was a cluster of villages with a major pilgrimage shrine; it became a town during the Crusader period. During the Mamluk period, Hebron further developed and became a small city with both religious as well as regional significance. Despite the existence of Jews and Christians in Hebron and environs, most of the region’s population converted to Islam rather early. The conversion of the population in Hebron and in its surroundings was the result of an accumulation of factors: the Hebron area was the most fertile region nearest Arabia on the western side of the Jordan Rift Valley. The Double Cave was an important pilgrimage destination since the earliest years of Islam, and Hebron is located alongside the main road leading to Jerusalem from the south. Additionally, the syncretistic rituals that took place in Hebron, as reflected in Byzantine period descriptions, and the lack of ecclesiastical institutions in the region, enabled a rapid conversion of the local population. Excavations to the south of Hebron revealed that the conversion of the local population was a multifaceted process. It seems that Maʿon was abandoned around the time of the Muslim conquest, and although ʿAnim and Yatir continued to exist for centuries after the Muslim occupation, the apparent desacralization of the church in Yatir and the synagogue in ʿAnim seems to indicate that these settlements were dominated by people who did not practise these religions. In Susiya and Samuʿa, mosques were built inside the old synagogues. The mosque of Samuʿa is located in the synagogue’s main prayer hall; in Susiya it was built in the synagogue’s narthex. I referred earlier to Mattia Guidetti’s book, In the Shadow of the Church: The Building of Mosques in Early Medi­eval Syria, in respect of the contiguity between churches and mosques in the region during the Early Islamic period. The case of Susiya is particularly interesting, since it seems to indicate that the contiguity was not limited 79  Izhak Ben-Zvi, Sh’ar Yashuv (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1966), 407–23 [in Hebrew]; Ehrlich, “Is the Book The Paths of Jerusalem (Shviley DeYerushalem)?” 68.

80  Françoise Micheau, “Eastern Christianities (Eleventh to Fourteenth Century): Copts, Melkites, Nestorians and Jacobites,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5, Eastern Christianity, ed. Michael Angold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 402.

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to urban churches but also existed in rural synagogues. The difference between Susiya and Samuʿa may be the result of local factors, such as the size of the local community, or the percentage of converts in the entire population. It is also possible that Samuʿa’s Jewish population left the settlement, but unlike nearby Maʿon, which was altogether abandoned, Samuʿa was resettled by Muslim newcomers. One way or another, aside from the small Christian and Jewish communities, nearly the entire population of the region became Muslim, perhaps even before the Crusader period.

The Region of Karak

The region of Karak includes an arid plateau between the south-eastern Dead Sea seashore and the main road between Damascus and Arabia. Early Islamic Period

The Karak area was a Christian enclave until the Mamluk period. The area’s arid climate was apparently not sufficiently attractive for immigrants from Arabia. There is only very limited information about Karak in the Early Islamic period; it was seemingly a dormant town in a remote and marginal area, with a significant percentage of Christians.81 Crusader Period

The fortunes of Karak shifted during the Crusader period. In 1115, King Baldwin I transferred Christians from an unspecified area in southern Transjordan to Jerusalem.82 In 1142, King Fulk of Anjou decided to transfer the capital city of the lordship of Transjordan from Montreal (Shawbak) to Karak.83 This transformed Karak from a remote and marginal town into an important city in the Frankish kingdom. Despite being a Frankish centre, Karak also included a significant percentage of local Christians. Thus, in 1301, the Christian residents of Karak were exempted from a Mamluk law that forced Christians to wear blue hats, since the governor claimed that the majority of the city’s residents were Christian.84 If this was the situation in the early stages of Mamluk rule, more than a century after the Franks had left the area, the vast majority of the area’s population should have been Christian before the Mamluk period.

81  Levy-Rubin, “The Reorganisation of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” 203–13. 82  WT bk. 11, chap. 27: 535–36.

83  WT bk. 15, chap. 21: 703–4; Hans E. Mayer, Die Kreuzfahrerherrschaft Montréal (Sobak): Jor­ danien im 12. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990); Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, 1: 286; Milwright, The Fortress, 29; Kate Raphael, Muslim Fortresses in the Levant (London: Routledge, 2011), 161. 84  al-Maqrī�zī�, Kitāb al-Sulūk, ed. Ziāda, 1: 912; Walker, Jordan in the Middle Ages, 47–53, 86.



The Mamluk and Ottoman Periods

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According to the Ottoman census of 1596–1597, 111 of the 191 families that lived in the town of Karak at the end of the sixteenth century were Christian, and three Christian families lived in its hinterland.85 That made it the third largest Christian community in the Holy Land, after the Jerusalem-Bethlehem area and Gaza communities. But this datum does not indicate the strength of Karak’s Christian community as much as it attests to the sharp decline of Christianity in the Holy Land when the Crusader period ended. Just over one hundred families living in an isolated town in a distant region could not constitute a solid foundation for survival of the local Christian community. Indeed, the community continued to decline throughout the Ottoman period. It suffered both from emigration and from conversion, and eventually Karak ceased to exist as a Christian centre. Despite its close proximity to the Arabian Peninsula, the plateau of Karak remained a Christian enclave until the Mamluk period. During this period, the Christian urban community in Karak remained the largest religious group in the town, whereas the entire population of the town’s hinterland became Muslim. Although the percentage of Christians in Karak’s population remained relatively high until the late sixteenth century, in absolute terms it was a tiny community in a little town. Such a community, which also happened to be isolated from other Christian centres, was likely to decline further, either by emigration or by conversion of its members.

85  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 171–72; Walker, Jordan in the Middle Ages, 140.

Chapter 6

NEGEV The Negev desert constitutes the entire area between the Shiqma stream (Wādī�

al-Ḥasī�) to the north and the Red Sea to the south, the borders between Israel, the Gaza Strip, and Egypt to the west, and the Arava streambed between the Dead Sea and the Red Sea along the Israeli–Jordanian border to the east. The Negev is divided into three main regions: the area of Beer Sheba, with nearly 200 mm of rain per annum in average; the Negev Highlands, with 100 mm p.a.; and the area of Eilat, with 20 mm p.a. These variances dictate significant variances in the settlement pattern. The northern area, around Beer Sheba, allows for agriculture and for the existence of large settlements. The Negev Highlands enable agriculture in specific eco­logical niches, and settlements of limited size, whereas the climate of Eilat only sustains agriculture around oases, and the settlements in this region are few and rather small. Nomads lived across the entire region, though in small numbers.

The Early Islamic Period

The Negev prospered during the Byzantine period. In the north, Beer Sheba was an urban centre surrounded by villages, farms, and monasteries.1 The population of the Negev Highlands was concentrated in the city of Elusa and various semi-urban settlements, known today as the Desert Cities of the Negev, as well as various rural settlements.2 There was also a city in Ayla, on the Red Sea coast, more than 200 kilometres to the south of the desert cities. These were separate areas; the great distance between the Highlands and the Red Sea, combined with the difficulties and dangers along the road, caused the two areas to develop independently.3 In the Roman Empire, a city was a settlement whose urban status was confirmed as such by the authorities. Cities were built according to a specific plan featuring several typical institutions and buildings. In later periods, a city would have an episcopal see. Therefore, although the urban centre in Beer Sheba had several urban characteristics, it was not considered a city. No coins minted in Beer Sheba have ever been found, it was not described by contemporaries as a civitas, and it did not have an episcopal see. However, it was a large settlement with a military camp and several churches, indicators of Beer Sheba’s urban character.4 The same applies to the so-called “Desert Cities.” Appar1  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 257–58.

2  On the unesco world heritage list under the name of The Incense Route (http:/​/​whc.unesco.org/​ en/​list/​1107rev). 3  Magness, The Archaeo­logy, 133.

4  Eugenio Alliata, “The Legends of the Madaba Map,” in The Madaba Map Centenary, 1897–1997, ed. Michele Piccirillo and Eugenio Alliata (Jerusalem: Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, 1999), 86–87; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 257.

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ently, among these settlements, Elusa, which has not yet been thoroughly excavated, was the only full-fledged city. It was described by contemporaries as a city and was an episcopal see. What’s more, ongoing excavations on the site seem to indicate the existence of a Roman city in the area.5 Other settlements, such as ʿAvdat and Shivta, were towns with some urban characteristics. Such settlements were similar in many ways to those described by Kennedy: communities which could reasonably be described as urban in character… Kaprobarada was clearly an artisanal and agricultural centre of some importance, probably performing the same economic functions as many classical cities, yet there is a total absence of formal town planning or public urban buildings other than churches. The “streets” were narrow winding paths, there was no agora, no colonnades, no theatre and the one bath was a small structure dating from an earlier period of development and quite inadequate for a community of that size.6

However, there is no indication that these settlements were defined as cities by contemporaries. The Roman administration decided whether or not a settlement was a city on the basis of crystal-clear criteria, and there is no sign that the Romans ever defined these settlements as cities. Consequently, they did not have an episcopal see; the sole episcopal see in the entire area between Gaza and Ayla was in Elusa. The population living in the area was at least partially of Nabatean origin. An inscription from the late first or early second century found near ʿAvdat includes two lines in Arabic, written in Aramaic letters.7 The inscription indicates that Arabic was spoken in the region long before the Muslim conquest. The settlements of the Negev Highlands developed a sophisticated system of desert agriculture. It seems that agriculture superseded trade as the main local occupation during the late Roman and the Byzantine periods.8 Trade was probably not entirely brought to a halt during the Byzantine period, but the main road between Ayla and Gaza, Darb al-Ghazza, bypassed the Desert Cities, meaning travellers and traders on this route could only indirectly contribute to the regional economy. 5  Antoninus of Piacenza, Itinerarium, ed. Milani, 194–95; Scott Bucking and Haim Goldfus, “O. Elusa 2: Another Enigmatic Ostarcon from the Pottery Workshop at Elusa in Byzantine Palestine,” Palestine Exploration Journal 144, no. 1 (2012): 47–66; Yaron Dan, “Palestina Salutaris (Tertia) and its Capital,” Israel Exploration Journal 32 (1982): 134–37; Philip Mayerson, “The City of Elusa in the Literary Sources of the Fourth–Sixth Centuries,” Israel Exploration Journal 33 (1983): 247–53; Haim Goldfus, Benny Arubas, and Kim Bowes, “New Excavations in the East Church at Halutza (Elusa): Preliminary Report,” Journal of Roman Archaeo­logy 13 (2000): 331–42; Don H. Butler et al., “Byzantine–Early Islamic Resource Management Detected through Micro-Geoarchaeo­logical Investigations of Trash Mounds (Negev, Israel),” PLoS One 15, no. 10 (2020): e0239227 at https:/​/​ doi.org/​10.1371/​journal.pone.0239227.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ 6  Kennedy, “From Polis to Madina,” 13–14.

7  Avraham Negev, “Obodas the God,” Israel Exploration Journal 36 (1986): 56–60; Kees Versteegh, The Arabic Language, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 36. 8  Israel Finkelstein and Avi Perevolotsky, “Processes of Sedentarization and Nomadization in the History of Sinai and the Negev,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 279 (1990): 67–88 at 79–80; Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 285–86.



Negev

Map 2: The Desert Cities (courtesy of Arie Bar)

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Figure 6: The mosque near the southern church of Shivta (Bracha Ehrlich)

The results of excavations and surveys carried out across the region show that while there were urban churches as well as rural churches around Beer Sheba, there were none outside the urban nuclei in the Negev Highlands or in the Eilat area.9 This reality is unparalleled in other regions of the Holy Land, where numerous churches and synagogues existed outside the cities. This might indicate that the religions of the cities’ inhabitants were not identical to the rural populations around them, or that the clergy of the urban settlements provided for the parochial needs of the nomads and farmers who lived nearby. The history of the Negev in the Early Islamic period has not been widely described by contemporaries. However, some epi­graphic sources from the area do provide information about the era. The famous papyri of Nessana, found during excavations in the 1930s, are a unique, first-hand account of life in the Negev during the transition period between Byzantine and Muslim rule. A large corpus of inscriptions was found in a settlement near Sede Boqer that includes an open-air mosque.10 Additional Arabic-language inscriptions were found in the church at Rehovot in the Negev, and in a mosque near the southern and northern churches of Shivta.11 These findings provide information on the 9  Patrich et al., Churches of the Holy Land.

10  Moshe Sharon, “Arabic Inscriptions from Sede Boqer,” appendix to Rudolf Cohen, Archaeo­logical Survey of Israel: Map of Sede Boqer–East (168) 13–03 (Jerusalem: Archaeo­logical Survey of Israel, 1981), xxxi–xxxii [in Hebrew]; Magness, The Archaeo­logy, 137–38.

11  Yehuda D. Nevo, “The Arabic Inscriptions,” in Excavations at Rehovot in the Negev, ed. Yoram Tsafrir et al. (Jerusalem: Institute of Archaeo­logy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), 187–92; Bilha Moor, “Mosque and Church: Arabic Inscriptions at Shivta in the Early Islamic Period,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 40 (2013): 73–141.



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everyday life of the local inhabitants and on their religious world. They hardly deal with regional, not to mention global, issues. The most important sites of the region, including all of the desert cities, have been excavated in the past fifty years, and many archaeo­logical surveys and field studies have been carried out in the region. This study, however, tries to ascertain the period in which the region’s population became Muslim. The questions of when and why the desert cities were abandoned only provide a terminus ad quem for the region’s Islamization. The Muslim conquest altered the reality of the area, though there is no indication it was violent. The population of the Negev Highlands was already at least partially of Arab origin, arabophone, and had ongoing contact with the Arabian Peninsula. This segment of the population probably welcomed the conquerors. There is a clear distinction between the Negev settlements of Shivta, Nessana, and Elusa, all of which survived well into the Abbasid, and even the Fatimid periods, and the other cities, which were abandoned earlier. It is beyond the scope of this research to speculate on the reasons for these settlements’ survival while the others were abandoned. However, it is important to note that the only mosque found to date within a desert city is the modest mosque built just outside the southern church in Shivta. There are also significant differences between the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods outside of the urban settlements of the area. In the Byzantine period, all the churches in the region were built inside the perimeters of the urban settlements. No churches were found in the villages and farms around the larger settlements, and no monasteries were found anywhere in the region. However, during the Early Islamic period, about twenty mosques were found outside the urban settlements.12 These findings suggest that the population living outside the urban settlements during the Byzantine period was either not Christian, or that its religious needs were entirely provided for by the urban clergy. The Muslims abolished the province of Palestina Tertia and divided its distinct regions between the neighbouring provinces. The papyri of Nessana, a unique corpus of documents found in the excavation of the site, include several references to these changes. Papyrus 21, dated to 674–677, includes a reference to Elusa as an Iqlīm in the Khūra of Gaza.13 This text indicates that in 677, Elusa was no longer the capital city of any province, but was by then subordinated to Gaza, which was a part of Palestina Prima in the Byzantine period.14 There is not enough information about Elusa to reconstruct events from the Muslim conquest to its final abandonment. Yet, the abolition of Palestina Tertia must have led to a sharp decline in the city’s status. The former capital became a marginal, remote city. Yet despite being downgraded during this period, archaeo­logical findings suggest that the city continued to exist at least until the eighth century. Interestingly, the Arabic translation of the Hebrew Bible by the famous tenth-century scholar 12  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 267–85.

13  C. J. Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana, vol. 3: Non-Literary Papyri (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), no. 21, 68.

14  Nitzan Amitai-Preiss and Oren Tal, “A Lead Bulla from Apollonia-Arsūf with the Place Name Arsūf,” Israel Numismatic Journal 10 (2015): 191–206 at 196–97.

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Rav Saʿadia Gaon (882–942) refer to Elusa, which he identifies with the Biblical kingdom of Gerar.15 This reference suggests that Elusa was still an existing settlement in the early tenth century. It was not only Rav Saʿadia, who probably never visited the area, who knew about the town. His readership, which lived hundreds of kilometres from Elusa, would have heard about it as well. In other words, Elusa was still a familar settlement to the residents of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq in the early tenth century, and most certainly not a ruin covered by the dunes of the desert. The Bishop of Elusa does not appear in ecclesiastical lists following the Muslim conquest.16 In fact, there was no bishop in the entire area to the south of Gaza. Moreover, the mosques found across the region were not built before the eighth century.17 The location of the mosque in Shivta, near the church, shows that the church was probably still in use when the mosque was built nearby, for otherwise the Muslims would have used the church itself rather than its narthex. The Muslim villages are from the same period, as well. These settlements were probably established during the Early Islamic period, by newcomers, not indigenous converts. Ayla, at the northern edge of the Gulf of Eilat, (or the Gulf ofʿAqaba) was another city in the Negev region.18 During the Roman period, Ayla became an important port through which lucrative imported goods from India were transferred to Europe. The city had an episcopal see, and its bishop participated in the Council of Nicea in 325. Supposedly, the transfer of Legion X Fretensis from mainland Palestine to this remote location was related to the importance attributed to the Indian trade by Roman authorities.19 According to very early traditions, Ayla surrendered to the Muslims, who were still led by the Prophet himself, in 630.20 Later, the Muslims built a new residential district, a few hundred metres away from the Roman city. According to Whitcomb, Ayla was not just a city with a garrison, but a misr, part of a system of settlements created by the Muslim policy.21 The policy of construction of new residential areas was adopted elsewhere in the caliphate. Beyond the military motive suggested by Whitcomb, it indicates that the Muslims wanted to develop a new city, one aligned with their own priorities, independent of the local population’s preferences. The special conditions in Ayla, which was 15  St. Petersburg, The National Library of Russia, MS EBP II C, fol. 41v. I would like to thank Prof. Nahem Ilan for directing my attention to this manu­script. 16  Levy-Rubin, “The Reorganisation of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” 203–14. 17  Avni, Byzantine–Islamic Transition, 283–85.

18  Donald Whitcomb, Ayla: Art and Industry in the Islamic Port of Aqaba (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1994), 6.

19  S. Thomas Parker, “Preliminary Report on the 1994 Season of the Roman Aqaba Project,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 305 (1997): 19–44 at 20–22; Piotr L. Grotowsy, Arms and Armour of the Warrior Saints: Tradition and Innovation in Byzantine Icono­graphy (843–1261) (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 88; Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), 57–58. 20  Parker, “ Preliminary Report,” 21; Paul M. Cobb, “Scholars and Society in Early Islamic Ayla,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 38 (1995): 418–28. 21  Whitcomb, Ayla, 9.



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so far away from any other Christian or Jewish community, made the option of emigration impractical for most of its residents. Therefore, the Muslims decided to reshuffle the local social hierarchy by creating a new focal point for the settlement.22 This Muslim action made the previous agreement between the Muslims and the local population meaningless. The Muslims would not have to expel non-Muslims nor would they have to confiscate their houses of prayer or property. The construction of the newly built residential and commercial district caused a sharp decline in the value of their property and left them outside the city’s protected area. The new district was built to allow new elites to evolve in the local society. There was probably an open door for those who wished to adhere to Islam, and given the special conditions in Ayla, many of the citizens of Byzantine Ayla probably moved to the new residential area. Subsequently they or their descendantsconverted to Islam. Unlike Elusa, Ayla appears in ecclesiastical lists in the late ninth century.23 However, there is no information about Christians who lived in Ayla during this period. What’s more, Islamic Ayla has been excavated, and so far, no remains of a local cathedral or even a church have been found. It is possible that the Byzantine cathedral continued to exist in Ayla’s old district all through the Early Islamic period, but this seems unlikely, since this area was destroyed no later than 749, when the region was impacted by the great earthquake. Paul Cobb studied the bio­graphies of Muslim scholars who lived in Ayla and notes that the city’s population included members of the Umayyad family. The arrival of members of the royal family suggests that Ayla was an important city. Cobb also finds that many of the local Umayyad clients (mawālī) were descended from local Christian and Jewish families who lived in the city prior to the Muslim conquest.24 This seems a plausible explanation: the Umayyads were the major stakeholders in the city. However, just as emigration from Ayla was unattractive, immigration was also not an enticing option for potential newcomers. Therefore, the possibility that the local population moved from the old district to the new one, where they became more likely to convert, seems likely. Moving out of the old district meant adaptation to a new structural organization. Newcomers did not necessarily live with their co-congregants, and there is no evidence of a church or a synagogue being built in the Muslim city, indicating that the non-Muslim communities’ houses of prayer probably remained in the old district. It seems, then, that Ayla became entirely Muslim during the Early Islamic period. There is no indication that non-Muslims lived in the area until the twentieth century. The same conclusion applies to the entirety of the Holy Land’s southern district. At some point in the Early Islamic era, the area’s entire population converted to Islam. The abolition of the ecclesiastical administration in the area may have been a result of the emigration of some of the Christians and the conversion of those who remained behind, or perhaps the local Christians converted after being abandoned by the clergy, and left without any religious leadership. The abandonment of some central settlements following the Muslim conquest, and the decline of those who survived, imply that the second 22  Whitcomb, Ayla, 6.

23  Levy-Rubin, “The Reorganisation of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem,” 203.

24  Cobb, “Scholars and Society,” 424–26.

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option is more plausible. The Christian communities were too small and vulnerable, and the ecclesiastical administration decided to concentrate its efforts in regions with a better prospect for survival. Over the next few centuries, the situation did not change. The next time an urban settlement was established in the region was 1906, when the Ottomans, a mere decade before their expulsion from the area, founded the town of Bī�r al-Sabaʿ. During the entire period between the abandonment of Elusa, and later Ayla, and the early twentieth century, the region was solely inhabited by Muslim Bedouin nomads.

Chapter 7

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS In his seminal

work, Conversion to Islam in the Medi­eval Period, Richard Bulliet emphasizes that the “timetables of conversion differed from one region of the Islamic world to another and that these regional differences were reflected in political and institutional developments that depended to some degree upon the conversion process.”1 Basically, that statement voices the same fundamental attitude as I have presented in this study. However, Bulliet mostly deals with larger geo­graphical units, such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria, whereas this study focuses on much smaller regions. The historical review presented in the previous chapters clearly indicates that there were major variations in the character and the timetable of the Islamization process in different areas of the Holy Land, and that the conversion process varied among different religious groups. Those differences may even be discerned in neighbouring regions. For example, the Jewish communities of Lower Galilee converted to Islam much earlier than those in Upper Galilee. Throughout this book, I have defined Islamization according to three criteria: religious conversion to Islam, Arabization, namely, transition from the use of local languages to Arabic, and the Islamization of the landscape, i.e., addition of Islamic elements such as mosques and shaykh tombs to the regional landscape. There were significant variations between the conversion in the different regions and Islamization of the landscape in those regions. In the next few pages, we will examine the spread of these phenomena in the Holy Land from the Muslim conquest to the end of the eighteenth century. One phenomenon that apparently occurred continuously throughout the period was a contraction of the population of the Holy Land. According to leading scholars, the premodern period when the Holy Land’s population was at its highest was the Byzantine period, before the outbreak of the bubonic plague. Yoram Tsafrir estimates that western Palestine’s population at the time was around one million people; other scholars have suggested even higher figures.2 The destruction that presumably accompanied the Muslim conquest led, according to many scholars, to a sharp decline in the Holy Land’s population. Based on the Ottoman census of 1596–7, the total population of the areas reviewed in this study was approximately 260,000 people.3 This study intentionally steers away from the quantitative debate to focus on the population’s religious profile, without regard for its size. 1  Bulliet. Conversion to Islam in the Medi­eval Period, 7.

2  Tabula Imperii Romani: Iudaea-Palaestina, ed. Tsafrir, Di Segni, and Green, 19; Yoram Tsafrir, “Some Notes on the Settlement and Demo­graphy of Palestine in the Byzantine Period: The Archaeo­ logical Evidence,” in Retrieving the Past: Essays on Archaeo­logical Research and Methodo­logy in Honor of Gus W. Van Beek, ed. Joe D. Seger (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 269–83. 3  Hütteroth and Abdulfattah, Historical Geo­graphy, 43.

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Arabization

Arabization is the process of the transition from the use of vernacular languages to the use of Arabic. Generally speaking, acquisition of the absorbing country’s language is crucial to the integration of immigrants into their new society.4 However, during the Early Islamic period in the Holy Land, the opposite occurred: not only did the immigrants not acquire the local language, but the local population acquired the language of the conquerors and immigrants. Language change is typically a clandestine process: historians cannot usually record the moment when two ordinary people begin to converse with one another in a language other than their mother tongue. Therefore, the only conclusive data can be derived from a comparison between the situation before the Muslim conquest and after it. This juxtaposition clearly indicates that Arabic became the main language of the Holy Land during the Early Islamic period. It was a gradual process, but apparently a relatively swift one. It did not occur at the same rate throughout the country. Thus, the earlier papyri of Nessana were composed in Greek, and some of the later ones were bi-lingual.5 These papyri demonstrate that even before the reign of ʿAbd al-Malik, Muslims issued documents in Arabic that included Muslim formulas and dates. These documents offer proof that the local administration used Arabic from a very early period, and that official documents included typical Muslim features. Furthermore, it suggests that even at this early stage, the Muslim administration included arabophones. However, these are unique documents whose singularity suggests that such phenomena were probably rare at this stage. The impressive inscriptions from the Early Islamic period included in the Corpus inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae are almost exclusively in Arabic. The massive volume of these inscriptions indicates that as time went by, the Holy Land’s population became increasingly arabophone, beyond the elites and authorities. Sidney Griffith demonstrates that from the ninth century, Christians have translated their religious writings into Arabic or even written them in Arabic.6 This phenomenon shows that an increasing number of Christian worshippers requested Arabic versions of Christian religious literature in the ninth century. In fact, the Christian population in some regions of the Holy Land and its vicinity was already arabophone at this early stage. However, there is no indication of this phenomenon’s scope. Beginning in the tenth century, Jews wrote in Judeo-Arabic. Scholars such as Rav Saadia Gaon, as well as traders, wrote in this language, indicating that Arabic was widespread among the Jews who lived in Arabic-speaking lands in this period. Some of the more isolated communities may have preserved the use of the old vernacular languages, as in Maʿlūlā (Syria), where Syriac survived as a spoken language at 4  Barry R. Chiswick, Uzi Rebhun, and Nadia Beider, “Language Acquisition, Employment Status, and the Earnings of Jewish and Non-Jewish Immigrants in Israel,” International Migration 58, no. 2 (2020): 205–32 at 206–7. 5  Kraemer, Excavations at Nessana, vol. 3: nos. 56, 60–67, 156–97. 6  Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque, 48–57.



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least until 2011 when the Syrian civil war erupted, but the overall picture is clear.7 Arabic replaced all other languages, all over the Holy Land, as well as in adjacent countries during the early centuries of Muslim rule. This phenomenon should not be taken for granted. For example, although the Roman and Byzantine Empires ruled the Holy Land for nearly seven hundred years, neither Latin nor Greek became an everyday language in the region.8 It is therefore quite astonishing that Arabic became the primary language not only in the Holy Land but in the entire area between Spain and Iraq. However, the Holy Land probably had some unique features that made this relatively swift Arabization possible. The first datum is that, by the time of the Arab conquest, a certain percentage of the Holy Land’s population was already Arabic speaking. As shown above, at least part of the Negev’s local population was speaking Arabic in the second century. Additional Arab tribes migrated to the Holy Land during the Byzantine period as well, and settled in the region of the Decapolis, the Golan Heights, and the area of Beth Guvrin. In other words, by the late Byzantine period, Arabic could no longer be considered a foreign language in the Holy Land. In a classic article about Romanization, Ramsay MacMullen notes: “The east needed no Romanizing, nor accepted it, yet its cities could tap the imperial treasure almost at will.”9. Local Eastern elites became Romanized either because they found it beneficial or because they admired Rome and its culture.10 In other words, Romans did not foster a broad acculturation directed at the masses of their empire.’ Rather, they ruled their vast empire through local elites, who were happy to collaborate and to imitate the Roman way of life. Consequently, they had no interest in the acculturation of the lower classes of urban and rural populations. On the other hand, the Umayyads promoted the immigration of Muslims, and especially Arabs, to the cities of the Holy Land. These immigrants, whose spoken language was Arabic, became the main stakeholders in many of the Holy Land’s cities. They replaced the Byzantine period elites, who opted to emigrate. The new immigrants played an essential role in the civic life of cities established by the Muslims, such as Ramla, as well as in pre-existing cities such as Tiberias, the new capital city of Jund al-Urdunn. Here, as well, the new local elites who replaced those emigrating following the Muslim conquest found it attractive to adopt some of the new rulers’ practices. Presumably, acquiring the Arabic language became a valuable and benign tool for advancement in the social sphere. People who gained proficiency in Arabic could work in the administration and communicate with the immigrating elites.11 Arab and Muslim immigrants 7  For example: Andreas Bandak, “Problems of Belief: Tonalities of Immediacy among Christians of Damascus,” Ethnos 77, no. 4 (2012): 535–55 at 537–39. 8  Versteegh, The Arabic Language, 128.

9  Ramsay MacMullen, “Notes on Romanization,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyro­logists 21 (1984): 161–77 at 163. 10  Christopher Kelly, The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 43–50. 11  Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphate (London: Longman, 1986), 98–99;

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used Arabic as their spoken language, and, consequently, those who wished to circulate among the elite had to acquire it as well. Apparently, Arabic became widespread through the “wave model.”12 It emanated from a central point, as ripples on a pond when a stone is thrown into it. After the Arabization of the elites, the masses, urban and rural alike, followed them in a relatively swift manner, culminating in the Arabization of nearly the entire population of the region in the Early Islamic period.

Regional Conversion

Various regions and religious communities undergo different processes of conversion. I suggest a distinction between the Holy Land’s periphery, marginal zones of little interest to governments and unattractive to immigrants, and the Holy Land’s core regions, which held much more interest for these important actors. This is an imperfect distinction, since there is a certain degree of overlap between these definitions, and since the centrality or marginality of regions tends to shift over time. For example, the coastal plain and Lower Galilee were initially core regions, but eventually became marginal areas, whereas Upper Galilee underwent the opposite process. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that these definitions reflect the situation during the transition period between the Byzantine and Early Islamic periods. Peripheral Areas

The population of the Negev, the Decapolis, and of Jabal ʿĀ� mil already included Arab tribes that settled in these regions before or shortly after the Muslim conquest. These areas are quite different from one another, but also have significant common characteristics. In the Byzantine period, the Decapolis and the Golan Heights were Christian areas, with limited Jewish and Samaritan presence. The Negev’s population was Christian, concentrated around the region’s urban settlements. Evidence of the religious profile of the populations of the Decapolis and of the Golan Heights beyond the regional urban centres indicates that the Arab tribes living in these areas were Christians as well. In the Negev, there is only scarce evidence of the religious profile of the rural and nomadic populations, and therefore we cannot determine if those people were Christians or not. Information about Jabal ʿĀ� mil ‘s population prior to the Muslim conquest is insufficient as well. After the Muslim conquest, the entire urban system of the Negev and of the Decapolis was in a state of collapse until the Crusader conquest, whereas there were no urban settlements in Jabal ʿĀ� mī�l prior to the Muslim conquest. The population of these areas, which included a substantial tribal segment prior to the Muslim conquest, became Muslim during the Early Islamic period. Jabal ʿĀ� mī�l’s population became predominantly Versteegh, The Arabic Language, 128–29.

12  Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 128.



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Shiʿite, and the survival of the Shiʿite community there was probably enabled by Shiʿites living in nearby Tyre until 1291 and then immigrated to the neighbouring Shiʿite region. It seems that these three peripheral regions were completely Islamized prior to the Crusader period. Underdeveloped Areas

Western Galilee, Upper Galilee, and the region of Karak were underdeveloped regions in Byzantine Palestine. While the regions of Karak and Western Galilee were mainly inhabited by Christians, the population of Upper Galilee was mostly Jewish. There was no urban centre in Western or Upper Galilee, whereas Karak was the urban centre of its region. While the population of Western Galilee converted to Islam during the Early Islamic period, the population of the region of Karak did not begin to convert prior to the Mamluk period, when Karak became the capital of a Mamluk mamlaka, prompting Muslim immigration. Despite this Muslim immigration, the majority of Karak’s population was still Christian in the late sixteenth century, though the population of the city’s hinterlands became Muslim. Still, it must be borne in mind that although local hegemony in Karak may have been maintained into this late period, it was nevertheless a small, remote, and isolated community. Throughout the Ottoman period, increasingly more people either converted to Islam or emigrated, and the community declined further. Upper Galilee remained a home to several rural Jewish communities that survived, despite the absence of any regional urban centre until the thirteenth century. Shiʿites settled in the region during the Early Islamic period, but since the Crusader period, only Sunni Muslims have settled in the area. Since the 1260s, when the Mamluks established a mamlaka in Safed, the Muslim population of the region of Upper Galilee has been almost exclusively Sunni. Shiites probably emigrated to the adjacent area of Jabal ʿĀ� mil or converted to Sunni Islam. The Druze appeared in the region during the Mamluk period, though it is unclear if they were immigrants or the descendants of former residents. The Jewish community declined, as well, in the wake of the establishment of the Mamluk city of Safed. However, numerous waves of Jewish immigration to the area succeeded in expanding the Jewish community during the Mamluk and especially the early Ottoman periods. The combination of Acre’s revival in the last 200 years of the Early Islamic period and the lack of an alternative centre in Western Galilee may have accelerated the conversion of the region’s population in the Early Islamic period. Upper Galilee and the region of Karak were too isolated and remote, and therefore, their Jewish and Christian populations were less exposed to foreign influences: they managed to survive until the Mamluk period. While the Christian community of Karak was in continuous decline over the centuries, the Jewish community of Safed persevered, due to the arrival of immigrants throughout the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, from nearby communities as well as from overseas, which reinforced the waning local community.

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Core Regions

The core regions of the Holy Land during the Roman–Byzantine periods were Jerusalem and the coastal plain, and to a lesser degree Lower Galilee and Samaria. Until the Muslim conquest, Jerusalem was an exclusively Christian city. The situation changed after the conquest, when Muslims settled in the city, and Jews were permitted to live in Jerusalem. However, the city’s population remained mainly Jewish and Christian throughout the Early Islamic period. The Crusaders massacred the Muslim and Jewish populations, deporting those who survived the massacre, although some fled the city. Yet Jerusalem was resettled after the Crusader period, and in particular after the Mamluks rose to power. At that point the Muslims constituted the largest segment of the population, a situation that continued until the nineteenth century. Despite being deposed from the local hegemony, Christians managed to continue living in the city and its vicinity continuously from the fourth century to the present day. The Jerusalem Patriarchate, which has existed uninterruptedly since the fifth century, has provided a solid base for the local community’s survival, as well as for several rural communities around the city. The Muslims who arrived in Jerusalem following the Crusader period were not necessarily the descendants of those expelled by the Crusaders, and many of the Jews were newcomers, as well. In the more distant regions of Judea, most of the population converted to Islam during the Early Islamic period. The coastal plain underwent dramatic changes following the Muslim conquest. Many of the coastal cities declined, while other cities, such as those around Gaza and Ascalon, such as Anthedon and Diocletianopolis, vanished. However, some cities further away from the coastline survived. The Muslims also established Ramla, which became the region’s most important city. The situation of the declining seashore cities was exacerbated during the Abbasid period. However, the seashore cities revived in the Tulunid and Fatimid periods, and were settled by immigrants from near and far. The population of the coastal plain’s cities during the Fatimid period included Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, but the most substantial religious group in the region were Shiʿite Muslims. The Crusaders massacred and deported many Muslim and Jewish residents of the area, although it seems the massacre was not as bloody as often described and believed. Nevertheless, while some Muslim, Jewish, or Samaritan communities may have survived the massacres or recovered from them, it is true that Ascalon was destroyed by Saladin and the other coastal cities were destroyed by the Mamluks in the second half of the thirteenth century, scattering those communities. At this juncture, the remaining population of the region became almost exclusively rural and Sunni Muslim. The only city in the region was Gaza, which was also home to small minority communities. Other urban settlements, such as Ramla and Lydda, were small, Muslim townships. Over the course of the Ottoman period, some of the coastal cities began to recover. These cities’ populations were Muslim, although some of them had small Christian and Jewish communities, as well. There is scant information about rural settlements inhabited by non-Muslim communities following the Crusader period, except for some villages around Acre where Christians and Jews lived.



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Samaria was the homeland of the Samaritans. In their heyday, the Samaritan communities expanded into adjacent regions, and even further destinations. However, after a series of unsuccessful revolts in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Samaritan community in Samaria entered a decline prior to the Muslim conquest. In fact, the Muslim conquest seems to have halted persecutions against the Samaritans. Nevertheless, the community in Samaria continued to decline, accelerating particularly after the Abbasid revolt. Following the last Samaritan revolt in the late sixth century, Samaria was home to many rural Samaritan settlements, but only one is described as a Samaritan village in the Crusader period. Some Samaritans probably continued to live in villages mostly inhabited by Muslims. In later periods, an ever-decreasing number of Samaritans continued to live in Nablus, while the rural communities disappeared. The presence of Christian communities in Samaria outside the urban nuclei of Sebaste and Nablus is poorly documented, both before and after the Samaritan revolts. However, the paucity of archaeo­logical indications of a Christian presence in the area does not necessarily indicate that Christians were not living there. It is important to note that the number of Samaritan findings, particularly Samaritan synagogues, barely exceeds the number of churches in the area. Moreover, there is limited evidence of previously Samaritan settlements that were destroyed, abandoned, or became Christian following the revolts. Muslims settled in the area from the time of the Early Islamic period. They seem to have become the dominant rural population across the region by the time of the Crusaders’ arrival. There is evidence of Bedouins in the region during the Crusader period, a phenomenon that may have intensified its Islamization. In later generations, the region’s population became increasingly Muslim, except for the Christian and Samaritan communities in Nablus and some rural Christian communities. Following the suppression of the Bar Kokhva revolt, the main Jewish institutions moved to Lower Galilee. Over the next few centuries, Tiberias developed as the centre of the Holy Land’s Jewish community. Lower Galilee also had extensive Jewish rural settlement, as evidenced in both literary sources and archaeo­logical findings. Tiberias’ Jewish community thrived until the tenth century, when the primary Jewish institution outside Iraq, the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel, was transferred to Jerusalem. Tiberias’ Jewish community survived until the thirteenth century, when it gradually faded away. The rural Jewish population in Lower Galilee disappeared even earlier. The Christian community underwent a similar process, although some rural enclaves in the region continued to exist in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, as well.

The Conversion of Communities

All the non-Muslim communities that existed in the Holy Land prior to the Muslim conquest suffered from the conversion of a significant percentage of their adherents throughout the Early Islamic period. The conversion of different communities seems to have been the result of similar processes occurring at different periods of time. The shift from rural to urban existence of these communities was characteristic not only of the Jews, but also of the Samaritans and Christians. Thus, by the time of the Crusaders’

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arrival, a significant percentage of the rural Christian communities had disappeared, except for the region around Jerusalem, where the Christian villages survive to this day. Urban Christian communities also existed in the coastal cities. But when those cities were demolished by the Mamluks, most of their inhabitants emigrated to nearby destinations, such as Jerusalem and Gaza, or to neighbouring regions, such as Cyprus. Almost no Christian communities remained in the area, with the exception of Gaza. Likewise, most of the rural Jewish population either converted or abandoned its settlements in the Early Islamic period, with the exception of a dozen or so villages in the mountains of Upper Galilee, each of which had a few dozen families. The Jewish settlement differed from the Christian in its ability to relocate its principal urban centre in the course of the period. When the Muslims conquered the area, the Jewish community was centred in Tiberias. That centre later moved to Jerusalem, but during the Crusader period the main Jewish community was in Tyre, and later still in Acre. Safed emerged as an important Jewish centre during the Mamluk period and remained the largest and most important Jewish settlement in the Holy Land in the early Ottoman period. In the Ottoman period, Jerusalem once again became an important Jewish centre. These shifts manifested in the arrival of immigrant populations in a certain urban centre, and were not followed by the formation of rural Jewish communities around these cities, except in the region around Safed, where such communities already existed before Safed became a central city. Most of the Jewish immigrants arrived from distant locations, such as North Africa and Western Europe. Although Jewish immigrants were usually few in number, with the exception of major events such as the exile from Spain in 1492, their constant influx bolstered the continued existence of a Jewish community in the Holy Land. The Samaritan community was already of urban character by the time the Crusaders conquered the Holy Land. They were concentrated in Nablus, as well as smaller communities in Ascalon, Acre, and Caesarea. By the early Ottoman period, almost all the Holy Land’s Samaritan population was concentrated in Nablus. The entire community consisted of about one hundred people: the Samaritan religion was on the brink of annihilation. The community in Nablus survived thanks to the arrival of Samaritans from communities such as Cairo and Damascus, who helped revive the waning local community. The urban communities of the non-Muslim religions differ from one another. Jerusalem’s Christian community has existed from the fourth century to the present day. Although some Christians have probably emigrated from Jerusalem, and others have immigrated to it, the local institutions have persevered, providing a social network and spiritual guidance for the local Christian community. Though Christians in Jerusalem have converted to Islam over the years, the community has remained attractive enough that the religion’s adherents have endured the hardships and show impressive resistance to conversion efforts. Jews established urban communities in different cities, yet only in Tiberias and Safed did these urban communities have a rural hinterland that relied upon them. The two cities became Jewish centres due to their regional importance. The existence of a Byzantine- and Early Islamic-era Jewish community in Tiberias that was home to an important institution did not promote an expansion of rural Jewish settlement around Tiberias. Still, although many rural Jewish communities ceased to exist during the Mam-



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luk period, some new communities were established in the vicinity of Safed during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods. The disappearance of the rural Jewish settlement around Tiberias resulted from the decline of the urban community, which lacked the resources to support the rural communities. The Islamization of Lower Galilee further intensified once the Yeshiva of the Land of Israel left Tiberias for Jerusalem, also the first stage toward the abolition of Tiberias’ Jewish community. Safed was a village in Upper Galilee that was probably home to a Jewish community. But when the Franks and then the Mamluks established a regional centre there, Safed’s Jewish community expanded, and absorbed many immigrants, including renowned scholars and religious leaders. As a result, Safed became an important community that attracted immigrants to the city and its vicinity. However, the rural Jewish communities around Safed were few and humble in size, and once Safed’s community began to decline, most of them either disappeared or became miniscule communities. The Samaritans became city-dwellers in the Early Islamic period. Most of the rural Samaritan communities seem to have disappeared prior to the Crusader period. During the Crusader period, most Samaritans in the Holy Land were concentrated in Nablus and in several coastal cities. Once the latter were destroyed by the Mamluks, Nablus became the sole Samaritan community. Still, even though the Samaritans who had lived in cities such as Caesarea and Acre probably migrated to Nablus, the number of Samaritans living there in the sixteenth century was less than ten percent of their number during the Crusader period. This datum indicates a collapse of the Samaritan institutions, social network, and spiritual leadership in the Mamluk period. During the Ottoman period, the Samaritan community was stabilized by the arrival of immigrants from communities outside the Holy Land. The difference between the Christian, Jewish, and Samaritan communities is that the Christians were supported by foreign powers that protected their interests, while the Jews could rely on influential and wealthy diaspora communities that also sent immigrants to the Holy Land. The Samaritans did not benefit from either of these advantages and were therefore much more vulnerable than other religious communities. The concentration of the minority communities within the cities implies that almost the entirety of the Holy Land’s rural settlement had become Muslim. During the early Mamluk period, conversion in settlements that were still mainly Jewish or Christian was the result of the intensive Islamization of Jerusalem, Karak, Safed, and Gaza, as well as the enfeeblement of Christian institutions; it was further promoted by Sufis, who settled in the villages and rural areas around the cities and encouraged conversion to Islam. Jews lived in villages around Safed until the Mamluk period, whereas Christians resided in the hinterland around Jerusalem and Karak, and probably in the area of Gaza as well. There are Christian communities in modern-day Israel’s coastal plain and in Galilee. However, most of these communities are descended from immigrants who settled in these areas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, their existence does not imply the existence of Christian communities in the same settlements during the Mamluk period. There was no urban centre in Jabal ʿĀ� mil; therefore, external influences in the region were limited. Consequently, Shiʿite communities managed to survive, and even occasion-

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ally prosper, in this region. Likewise, Druze have remained in this region as well as in remote areas neighbouring Upper and Western Galilee. The Druze religion was founded in the eleventh century and crystallized during the Crusader period. The survival of the Druze was in fact facilitated by the remote nature of most of their settlements, as well as the hostile conditions prevailing in some of them. According to numerous studies, the number of rural settlements declined sharply during the Early Islamic period in comparison to the Byzantine period. Yet this is a simplistic representation of the data. Many of the major Byzantine-period settlements survived into the Mamluk period. Moreover, the number of registered settlements from the Crusader period is about double that of the Byzantine period. Raphael and Abbasi observe a similar phenomenon in Galilee during the Mamluk period, when many rural areas in the region flourished.13 Most recorded Crusader-period settlements also appear in the Ottoman census from the late sixteenth century. As stated above, toponym preservation is a clear indicator of settlement continuity.14 In other words, names of most of the major rural settlements have been preserved, in one form or another, from the Byzantine period to this day. In some cases, archaeo­logical findings suggest that sites were inhabited in the Byzantine period, without being mentioned in external sources. For example, the village of Birʿim in Upper Galilee, which features the extant remains of an impressive synagogue from the Byzantine period, was not mentioned in literary sources prior to the Early Islamic period.15 A century ago, Jacob Mann included in his book on the Jews of Egypt and Palestine under Fatimid rule the names of settlements that were only recorded in later sources. He proposes that these settlements probably existed well before the earliest known reference to them.16 This argument is also valid for the Jewish congregations of Upper Galilee, meaning that a settlement with a vernacular name that appears in Crusader records is likely to have existed continuously since the Byzantine period. This assumption is based on the fact that only a limited number of settlements were established in the Early Islamic period, and therefore, in most cases, a Byzantine-period settlement with no previously known name is simply a matter of lack of proper documentation. I therefore propose that wherever a toponym survives from antiquity to the modern period, we can assume with some confidence that the local population remained on site and converted to Islam. This conclusion does not negate the possibility that immigrants settled in such places alongside the indigenous population. In some cases, these immigrants may have become the largest group in the local popula13  Ehrlich, “The Frankish Impact on the Urban Landscape,” 50–52; Raphael and Abbasi, “ The Galilee Villages”; see the maps in the Archaeo­logical Survey of Israel at https:/​/​survey.antiquities. org.il/​index_Eng.html#/​; Yehoshua Frenkel, “Rural Society in Mameluke Palestine,” Cathedra 77 (1995): 19–21 [in Hebrew]; Bethany J. Walker, “Mamluk Investment in Southern Bilād al-Shām in the Eighth/​Fourteenth Century: The Case of Ḥisbān,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 62, no. 4 (2003): 241–62 at 243–48. 14  Ben-David, “The Preservation,” 270.

15  Mordechai Aviam, “The Ancient Synagogues of Baram,” Qadmoniot 124 (2002): 118 [in Hebrew]. 16  Jacob Mann, The Jews in Egypt and Palestine under the Fāṭimid Caliphs, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1920–1922) 1: 171.



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tion. In most cases, those immigrants were Muslims, though there are some documented cases of minority immigration to rural settlements.

The Islamization of the Landscape

The first major Muslim additions to the Holy Land’s landscape were mosques, built in urban and rural settlements alike. Some of the mosques in cities were built on governmental initiative, whereas in the villages, the construction of a mosque was probably usually carried out by locals. In accordance with the surrender agreements of the region’s cities (as recorded in later sources) churches were not usually demolished or confiscated, and therefore, mosques were often built on unoccupied plots of land in the city centres. However, the construction of a magnificent mosque in a city does not necessarily imply that a majority of the local population converted. For example, though the Umayyads built the al-Aqṣā Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, tenth and eleventh century sources indicate that Christians were still the largest religious community in the city at this time. However, in rural settlements, mosques were usually functional, modest buildings created at the grassroots initiative of local converts to Islam or Muslim immigrants. A parallel process was the diminished presence of non-Muslim houses of prayer. While a few dozen churches and synagogues may have survived the Early Islamic period, very few were built or rebuilt during this period. This clearly indicates that demand for these buildings had declined in comparison with earlier periods. The Mamluks and the Ottomans were involved in the construction of many Muslim religious facilities all over the land, particularly in urban settlements. These included mosques, madrasas, and zawiyas. One subgroup of these initiatives was the conversion of churches and synagogues into mosques or other Muslim religious facilities. Some mosques had been Frankish churches that were then converted by the Mamluks to manifest Islam’s supremacy and glorify their victory over the Franks. This happened in cities such as Gaza, Nablus, and Ramla, among others. Interestingly, there is no material evidence to indicate that the Mamluks converted churches into mosques to the north of Sebaste. Several references have been made to such conversions, for example in the castle of Safed, but there are no surviving physical remains. This cannot be easily explained merely by the castle’s destruction due to natural causes, such as by earthquake. The presumed converted church was not described in contemporary accounts. It should be noted that the nearby Mamluk-built “Red Mosque” still stands to this day. What this means is that the most important mosque of Mamluk Safed was probably built ex novo by the Mamluks. Presumably, some churches and synagogues were replaced by mosques simply because those buildings’ earlier occupants abandoned them or themselves converted to Islam. Under the Mamluk regime, several key sites, including the Double Cave in Hebron and the Tomb of David in Jerusalem, became exclusively Muslim, despite veneration by other religions. Mamluk authorities were also involved, either directly or indirectly, in the founding of pilgrimage shrines such as Nabī� Rūbī�n and Nabī� Mūsā. These sites were built outside urban areas, attracting pilgrims from near and far. In this case, as

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well, Mamluk activities seem to have been limited to the southern regions of the Holy Land. Shaykh tombs and similar venerated places, such as holy trees, appeared in almost every village. It is likely that in some cases local shrines were Islamized in the wake of the conversion of the local population. However, limited information is available about popular pilgrimage shrines prior to the Mamluk period. Local saints, who were venerated exclusively by the population of a village and its close vicinity, were rarely described by pilgrims and other voyagers. As time went on, most rural sacred sites became venerated by Muslims, often exclusively.

Summary

The Islamization of the Holy Land in the wake of the Muslim conquest in the 630s was a multifaceted and gradual process. It varies from region to region and from one religious community to another. Arabization is the only characteristic that occurred all over the region. Yet, though it facilitated conversion, not all Arabic speakers were Muslims, and not all Muslims were Arabic speakers. The Holy Land’s non-Muslim communities generally become increasingly more urban. The Christians seem to have benefitted from a more advantageous starting point: at the time the Muslims conquered the land, the Christians constituted the largest religious community in the Holy Land. with a well-organized administration in Jerusalem and vicinity that survives to this day. The Jewish communities repeatedly shifted their temporal and spiritual centre, which was composed of Jews from various origins. This practice fostered the continuation of the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. The Samaritans, however, barely escaped obliteration. They survived in Nablus, where their communal institutions endured, and absorbed Samaritan immigrants from the waning diaspora communities. The residents of most of the Holy Land’s rural settlements converted to Islam during the Early Islamic period. Although there were emigrations and immigrations, the continued existence of most of the Holy Land’s major settlements and the preservation of most toponyms indicate these settlements were not entirely abandoned by their indigenous populations. The data from the late sixteenth century show that the Islamization processes peaked during the Mamluk period, when administrative centres were established in regions where the population still included a relatively high percentage of non-Muslim communities. The ratio between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Holy Land did not change significantly during the Ottoman period.

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INDEX

Abbasi, Mustafa, 61, 70, 73, 138 ʿAbd al-Hādī, 92–93 ʿAbd al-Malik, 27, 99, 102, 130 Abed Rabo, Omar, 103 Abila see Ḥubrāṣ Abisaab, Rula, 52, 82–84, 142 Abū al-Fatḥ, 88 Abū ʿUbayda b. al-Jarrāḥ, 27 Acre, 3, 21–23, 27, 30, 32, 36, 45–55, 57–61, 66, 72, 76, 84, 94, 109, 133–34, 136–37, 143 Aelia Capitolina (or Īlyā), 102 Ahl al-ḍimma, 5 Ahl al-Kitāb, 5 ʿAjlūn, 80–81 ʿAkkā see Acre Al-ʿAjjūl Tall, 103, 106 Aleppo, 18, 94 Alexandria, 34–35, 54–55, 94, 108 Algeciras, 28 ʿAlī al-Harawī, 65, 90, 141 ʿAlma, 75 Amalfitans, 100–101 Amān, 24, 97 ʿĀmila, 27 Al-Amīn, 29 Amitai, Reuven, 14, 39, 41, 50–51, 125, 142 ʿAmuqa, 73 Amwās, 27, 43 Anatolia, 107, 111 Andalus-al, 1, 15, 28, 37, 44, 143 ʿAnim, 116–17 ʿAnjār, 22 Antioch, 15, 35, 108 Al-Aqṣā, Mosque, 17, 44, 99, 102–3, 139 Arbel, 67 Arculf, 98 Armenian, 103, 106, 108–9 ʿArrabā, 93 Arsūf, 20, 53–54, 125 Ascalon, 22, 27, 29–31, 43, 45–48, 50–51, 53–56, 134, 136 Ashʿar, 27 Ashrafānī, 10, 46, 141

ʿAsqalān see Ascalon ʿAtlit, 57 Augustus, 85 ʿAvdat, 122 Avivi, Shimon, 46, 60 Avni, Gideon, 2–3, 13–20, 23, 27, 37, 43–45, 57, 65, 76–78, 97, 121–22, 125–26, 143, 145 ʿAwartā, 88 ʿAyn al-Zaytūn, 75 Ayla see Eilat

Babriya, Khirbat, 93 Balādhurī, 16, 26, 141 Baldwin I, 118 Baldwin III; 47 Balkans, 111 Bāniyās, 36, 45, 76, 79–82 Bar-Kokhva, 3, 62, 135 Barbé, Hervé, 70, 72 Baysān, 17, 19, 27, 36–38, 62, 64, 76–77, 79, 81 Bayt Jālā, 111 Bayt Jann, 73 Bayt Jibrīn, 19 Bayt Nūba; 21 Bayt Sāḥūr, 111 Beer Sheba, 121, 124, 128 Beirut, 5, 6, 41, 47, 55, 80 Ben-David, Chaim, 59, 81, 87, 138 Benjamin of Tudela, 31–33, 40, 51, 71, 81, 90, 94, 114 Benoît d’Alignan, 71 Benvenisti, Meron, 93–95 Bernard the Monk, 100 Beth-Guvrin, 38, 47, 50, 131 Beth-Shean see Baysān Beth-Sheʿarim, 45, 62 Bethlehem, 9, 25–26, 97, 108, 111, 119 Bīr al-Sabaʿ see Beer Sheba Bīr Zayt, 111 Bīriya, 75 Birʿīm, 69, 138 Al-Birwa, 46

148

Index

Black Death, 33 Bulliet, Richard, 2, 9, 11, 129, 143 Al-Buqayʿa, 75 Burgoyne, Michael H. , 107, 143 Buria see Dabūriyya

Caesarea, 3, 15, 16, 20, 23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 43–51, 136–37 Cairo, 11–12, 32, 38, 52, 60, 67, 81–82, 94, 104, 109, 136 Carlson, Thomas, 14–15 Chalcedonians, 2, 25, 78 Charlemagne, 45, 64, 89, 100, 142 China, 11, 19 Civitas de Bernardi de Stampi see Darʿā Clovis, 2 Coastal Plain, 2–3, 7, 15, 20, 23, 26, 33, 43–56, 60, 82, 85, 132, 134, 137 Cobb, Paul, 126–27 Commemoratorium de casis Dei, 45, 64, 89 Constantine, 113 Constantinople, 25 Cordoba, 15, 28, 35, 37 Cyprus, 14, 29, 51–52, 84, 136

Dabūriyya, 66 Dalāta, 69 Damascus, 15, 18–19, 27–28, 32, 34–35, 49, 52–53, 57, 60, 67, 76, 79–82, 84, 90–91, 94, 118, 131, 136, 142 Al-Dāmūn, 46 Daniel, Russian abbot, 65, 77 Darʿā, 80 Al-Darazī, 46 Darūm (Dayr al-Balaḥ), 54 Daughters of Jacob, bridge, 82 Davies, Cédric, 80 Dayr Ḥanna, 67 Decapolis, 2, 7, 37, 57, 64, 76–82, 131–32 Dome of the Rock, 17, 44, 99, 102–3, 139 Dothan, 93 Double Cave, 113–14, 116–17, 139 Doumani, Beshara, 92 Druze, 10, 30, 40, 46, 55, 60–61, 70, 73, 75, 80, 82–83, 133, 138 Eilat, 121, 124, 126 Eisenberg, Michael, 78 Elitzur, Yoel, 36, 87, 143

Ellenblum, Ronnie, 13, 15, 35, 48, 57–60, 70, 87–88, 111, 143 Elusa, 121–22, 125–28 Eshtori HaFarḥi, Rabbi, 77 Ethiopians, 108 Eusebius Pamphilus, 113 Euthymus Saifi, Bishop of Tyre and Sidon, 41 Faḥl, 27 Faḥma, 91, 93 Fakhr al-Dīn, 55, 60 Filasṭīn, Jund, 5, 15 Fīq, 27, 78 Franciscans, 106 Frenkel, Miriam, 101–2 Frenkel, Yehoshuʿa, 8, 104, 114, 138 Friedman, Yaron, 22, 30, 54, 65, 70, 83, 103, 143 Fulcher of Chartres, 50, 141 Fulk of Anjou, 118 Fustāt, 35

Gaza, 2–3, 6, 23, 27, 30, 32, 34, 39, 41, 43, 47, 50, 51, 53–56, 74, 94, 119, 121–22, 125–26, 134, 136–37, 139 Geber filius Jerar see Jarār Geniza, 11–12, 29, 46, 50, 70 George, Saint, 50 Georgians, 108 Gerizim, Mount, 85, 88 Ghassanids, 77–78 Gil, Moshe, 2, 12, 15, 29, 31, 35, 46, 70, 79, 83, 97, 98, 101–2, 114, 143 Goitein, Shelomo, 11–12, 31, 97–98, 102, 143 Golan, 7, 33, 57, 59, 76–82, 131–32 Greek–Catholic Melkite Church, 41 Greek Orthodox, 3, 50, 93, 103, 108, 112 Griffith, Sidney, 12, 130, 144 Guidetti, Mattia, 17–18, 117 Gush Ḥalav see Jish

Haifa, 46–47, 51, 55 Ḥalab see Aleppo Ḥamat, 37, 62 Hammoudeh, Samee, 94–95, 112 Ḥaṭṭīn, 30, 50, 64, 66, 71 Hebron, 32, 81, 97, 113–14, 116–17, 139, 142 Hermon, Mount, 76, 82



Herod, 11, 48, 85 Ḥijāz, 4, 107 Ḥilla, 84 Hippos, 19, 37–38, 76, 78–79 Hishām, Caliph, 19 Holy Cross, cathedral of Acre, 49 Holy Sepulchre, Church of the, 18, 98, 100, 102, 104–6, 108 Hospitaller Order, 50, 66, 91 Ḥubrāṣ, 79, 81 Iberian Peninsula, 28, 32, 73 Iʿblīn, 46 Ibn al-ʿArabī, 30, 46, 100, 102, 143 Ibn Jubayr, 48–49, 58–59, 81, 83, 142 Ibn Tūlūn, 12, 21–22, 45, 53, 141 India, 19, 126 Irbid, 5 Isdūd, 53 Ismaʿilis, 40, 46, 80, 83 Istanbul, 74, 110–11 Itzhak Luria, Rabbi, 74

Jabal ʿĀmil, 7, 57, 82–84, 132–33, 137, 142 Jabal al-Durūz, 82 Al-Jābiya, 77–78 Jacob’s Ford, 81 Jaffa, 6, 21–22, 27, 43, 45, 47–48, 50–51, 103, 106 Jaljūliya, 52 Jamāʿīl, 91 Jarār, 92–93 Jarash, 17, 19, 27, 64, 79–80 Jāsim, 27 Jat, 46 Jerusalem, 2–11, 14–18, 21–25, 27, 29, 24, 36–37, 39–41, 43–44, 46–49, 51–57, 59, 62, 64–67, 84, 87, 97–114, 117–19, 126–27, 134–37, 139–45 Jezreel Valley, 61, 85 Jifna, 111 Jinīn, 85, 92–93 Jish, 69–71, 73 John, Saint, 18, 89 Jonathan of Lunel, Rabbi, 32 Jordan River, 6, 57, 58, 76, 79 Jordan Valley, 19, 37, 76, 79, 82, 85, 117 Joseph Karo, Rabbi, 74 Judea, 7, 33, 43, 57, 85–86. 88. 95, 97, 113,

134 Jūdhām, 27 Jūkhadār, 82

Index

149

Kafr ʿInān, 69, 75 Kagan, Evgeni, 88 Kana, 67–68 Karaites, 39–40, 69, 101–2 Karak, 5, 7, 23, 39, 94, 97, 112, 118–19, 133, 137 Kedar, Benjamin Z., 14, 31, 33, 46, 49, 51, 62, 90–91, 93, 144 Kennedy, Hugh, 4, 8–9, 12, 20, 28–29, 78, 122, 131, 144 Khamisy, Rabei, 66 Khans, 60, 67, 73, 82 Khazars, 2 Khisfīn, 27, 82 Kināna, 27 Kinda, 27 Kisra’, 60 Kūnīn, 84

Lajjūn, 64, 67 Lakhm, 27–28 Legion X Fretensis, 126 Levtzion, Nehemia, 4, 11, 144 Levy-Rubin, Milka, 5, 10, 12–13, 16, 21, 25, 33–34, 36, 47, 86, 88–89, 91, 98, 118, 126–27, 141, 144 Litanī River, 5, 6, 57, 82 Lower Galilee, 7, 33, 55, 57, 61–68, 129, 132, 134–35, 137 Ludd see Lydda Luz, Nimrod, 8, 14, 17, 23–24, 29–30, 43–44, 45, 72–73, 104, 106–8, 112, 144 Lydda, 21, 23–24, 27, 43–44, 134 Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, 113 MacMullen, Ramsay, 130 Magen, Yitzhak, 85, 88, 91 Maghrebis, 29, 31, 46, 101, 104, 106–7 Maimonides, 71 Majdal Salīm, 83 Maʿlūlā, 130 Al- Maʾmūn, 29 Manila, 38 Maʿon, 116–18 Maximus the Confessor, 4

150

Index

Mazar, Amihai, 19, 38, 144 Menaḥem of Hebron, 81 Meron, 71, 73 Mesopotamia, 107 Mexico City, 38 Mishna, 36, 39 Misr, 126 Monophysites, 78 Montreal, 118 Moshe Luzzatto, Rabbi, 55 Mourners of Zion, 39, 143 Muʿāwiya, 16, 26 Al-Muqaddasī, 17, 21, 44–45, 68–70, 79, 83, 89, 100, 102, 114, 141 Mūsā b. Nuṣayr, 28 Al-Mutawakkil, 100 Nabateans, 122 Nabī Mūsā, 105, 139 Nabī Rūbīn, 53–54 Nablus, 2–3, 27, 29, 49, 85–95, 111, 135–37, 139–40, 143, 145 Nafīsa, Sayyida, 69 Naḥmanides, 32, 50–51, 105–9 Napoleon, 3, 6 Nāsir-i Khusraw, 22, 46, 64 Nathan of Gaza, 41, 56 Nazareth, 9, 64–68 Neapolis see Nablus Negev, 2, 6–7, 121–28, 131–32 Nessana, 122, 125, 130 Nicea, council of, 19 Niebla, 28 Non-Chalcedonian, 2, 5, 25

Oak of Mamre, 113 Obadiyah of Bertinoro, Rabbi, 109, 142

Palestina Prima, 15–16, 35, 43, 125 Palestina Secunda, 16, 19, 35, 76 Palestina Tertia, 16, 133 Paneas see Bāniyās Parker, S. Thomas, 76 Philippopolis, 18 Phoenicia, 5, 43, 57, 113 Piacenza, pilgrim of, 47, 86, 114, 122, 141 Prawer, Joshua, 15, 31–32, 48, 50–51, 68, 71, 101–2, 145

Pringle, Denys, 48, 53–54, 64, 66, 70–71, 89, 104, 106, 118, 145 Ptolemais see Acre Pummer, Richard, 2–3, 5, 33, 34, 47, 85–88, 90, 94, 145 Qadas, 27, 83 Qadiz, 36 Qalānsua, 54 Qāqūn, 52, 54 Qays, 27 Qaywarān, 36

Rabbanites, 39, 69, 101–2 Rafaḥ, 43, 46 Ramallah, 95, 97, 112 Ramla, 15–16, 21, 23–24, 27, 29, 31, 35–36, 43–44, 47, 50, 53, 99, 105, 131, 134, 139, 144 Raphael, Kate, 61, 73, 118, 138 Reḥov, 86, 92–93 Rehovot in the Negev, 124 Remi, Saint, 2 Reyyo, 28 Ribāṭ, 20, 44 Roman Catholics, 108 Saʿadia Gaon, Rav, 126, 130 Sabbateans, 41 Safed, 3, 23, 30, 32–33, 38–39, 41, 51–52, 54–55, 68–75, 83–84, 109, 133, 136–37, 139, 142–43 Sahl ben Matzliaḥ, 69 Saint James the Persian, church of, 106 Saladin, 66, 71, 89, 92, 103–4, 106, 112, 134, 144 Salonica, 74 Samaria, 7, 12–13, 33, 49, 57, 59–60, 82, 85–95, 134–35, 144 Samaritans, 2–3, 5, 9, 12–14, 27, 33–34, 47–48, 50–51, 54, 56, 59, 85–91. 93–94, 134–37, 140, 144–45 Samson of Sens, Rabbi, 32 Sānūr, 93 Saphe, 90 Safed, 3, 23, 30, 32–33, 38–39, 41, 51–52, 54–55, 68–75, 83–84, 109, 133, 136–37, 139, 142–43



Samaria, 7, 12–13, 33. 49, 57, 59–60, 82, 85–95, 134–35, 144 Samuʿa, 116–18 Schick, Robert, 1, 9, 12, 34, 36, 69, 79, 110, 116, 145 Scythopolis see Baysān Seawulf, 21, 65 Sebaste, 27, 85–86, 89, 91–94, 135, 139 Sebastia see Sebaste Sede Boqer, 124 Seetzen, Ulrich J., 110 Seljuks, 29, 65 Sepphoris, 3, 19, 31, 38, 61–62, 68 Serbs, 108 Seville, 28 Shabtai Zevi, 41, 56 Shafāʿamr, 62, 64, 67 Shahīd Irfan, 6, 77–78 Shām, 6, 8, 15, 40, 52, 67, 73, 82, 107, 138, 142 Sharon, Moshe, 10, 45, 124, 141, 145 Shechem see Nablus Shefarʿam see Shafāʿamr Shefela, 7, 43 Shemaʿ, Ḥorvat, 70 Shiʿites, 30, 46–47, 52, 56, 64–65, 70, 75, 82–84, 102, 133–34, 137, 142 Shilo, 87 Shiqma stream, 121 Shiqmona see Haifa Shivta, 122, 124–26 Sidnā Alī, 53 Sidon, 40–41, 47, 55–56, 83–84 Sidonia, 28 Sileta, 91–93 Siloam, 98 Sion, Mount, 106 Sivan, Hagit, 2 Sophronius, 4 Sozomen, 113–14 Sufis, 14, 30, 72, 107–8, 137 Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, 27, 99 Suleiman “the Magnificent”, 110 Susiya, 17, 115–18 Sussita see Hippos Tabor, Mount, 64–68, 79 Talmon- Heller, Daniella, 46, 49, 91, 101–2, 145

Index

151

Talmud, 36, 39, 114 Tamīm al-Dārī, 114 Ṭarsūs, 79 Tayba, 111 Temple Mount/ Ḥaram al-Sharīf, 98–99, 101–2, 111 Theophanes, 29, 44, 142 Tiberias, 3, 15–17, 19, 21–22, 24, 27–32, 35–37, 39, 43, 46, 61–69, 71, 76, 79, 98, 101, 105, 131, 135–137, 143 Tibnīn, 49, 57 Toledo, 15, 35, 37 Tripoli, 29 Tsafrir, Yoram, 37, 76, 124, 129, 142 Tudmīr, 28 Tyre, 22–23, 27, 29–32. 41, 43, 46–57, 59–62, 68–69, 72, 76, 79, 81–84, 102, 109, 133, 136, 141 ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, 25, 27 Upper Galilee, 7, 33, 38, 57–58, 60, 61, 68–76, 82, 129, 132–33, 136–38 Urdunn, Jund, 5, 24, 43, 57, 64–65, 68, 79, 131 Usha, 62 Al-ʿUthmānī, 83–84 Vadum Jacob, 70 Via Dolorosa, 105

Al-Walīd, 99, 102 Walker, Bethany, 79, 81, 118–19, 138, 142, 145 Walmsley, Alan, 13, 64, 78, 145 Western Galilee, 7, 13, 57–61, 68, 133, 138 Whitcomb, Donald, 16, 44, 99, 126–27, 145 Willibald, Saint, 17, 62 Willibrand of Oldenburg, 21 Al-Yaʿqūbī, 27–28, 47, 83, 89 Yarka, 46 Yarmūkh, Battle of, 78 Yatir, 116–17 Yaṭṭa, 117 Yavne see Yubnā: Yeshiva (of Eretz Israel), 31–32, 39–40, 62, 67, 70, 101–2, 135, 137 Yubnā, 27, 47, 53,

152

Index

Zababdeh, 87, 93–94 Zabūd, 73 Ẓāhir āl-ʿUmar, 55, 67 Zaragoza, 17, 37 Zuqnīn, 9, 141