Saffuriyya

The village stood on the southwestern slope of an outcrop of eocene sedimentary rock that rose about 110 m above the plain to the south. A secondary road linked it to the highway leading to Nazareth and the coastal highway to the northwest. The area around Saffuriyya constituted a gateway to Lower Galilee, a location that had accorded it strategic significance since ancient times. Its name may have been derived from the Syriac word 'Sefre' (bird), possibly a reference to the hill upon which it perched, like a bird. Soon after the Roman conquest of Palestine Saffuriyya became the administrative center for all of Galilee. After the suppression of the First Jewish Revolt in A.D. 70 the town gradually became a center of Jewish religious life. It was then called Sepphoris; later, under Hadrian, it was called Diocaesarea. It had both a Jewish community and a Christian community during the Byzantine period.

Saffuriyya was taken by the Muslims in A.D. 634, in the early days of the Muslim conquest. It figured prominently in subsequent history. The Crusaders, who called it Le Sephorie, built a castle there; Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin) wrested it from their hands after the battle of Hittin in A.D. 1187. A number of Arab and Muslim geographers and chroniclers, including al-Baladhiri (d. A.D. 892), Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. A.D. 1228), and Ibn al-Imad al-Hanbali (d. 1678) made references to Saffuriyya. Al-Hamawi, for example, reported in his Mu'jam that it was a village next to Tiberias. Saffuriyya was the hometown of a number of Arab and Islamic scholars, including Abu al-Baqa' al-Saffuri (d. 1625), who was very influential and became a judge in Safad and in several cities in what are today known as Syria and Lebanon. Another was Ahmad al-Sharif, also known as al-Saffuri al-Dimashqi (d. 1633), a judge and poet. In 1596, Saffuriyya was a village in the nahiya of Tiberias (liwa' of Safad) with a population of 2,200. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, and olives, as well as on other types of produce and property such as goats, beehives, and a press that was used for processing either olives or grapes.

In 1745, Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani (1695–1775), who became the effective ruler of northern Palestine for a short period during the second half of the eighteenth century, built a fortress on the hilltop above Saffuriyya. The church of Saint Hanna ('Anna') was built in the village atop the ruins of a large, late-sixth-century cathedral. In the early nineteenth century, the British traveler J. Buckingham noted that all of its inhabitants were Muslims and that the ruins of the house of St. Anna had been completely demolished. Later in the nineteenth century, Saffuriyya was a village built of stone and mud and situated along the slope of a hill. The village contained the remains of the Church of St. Anna and a square tower, said to have been built in the mid-eighteenth century. The residents, whose number was estimated at 2,500, cultivated 150 faddans (1 faddan = 100–250 dunums); they planted olive trees in some of this land (see photo). Modern Saffuriyya was the largest village in the Nazareth sub-disctrict in terms of population and land area. Its houses were made of cement and mud, and it was laid out in a rectangular grid, with its streets intersecting at the commercial center. In later years house construction expanded northwestward and southeastward. The population consisted of 4,320 Muslims and 10 Christians. Saffuriyya had two elementary schools, one for boys and another for girls; the boys' school was founded in 1900, during Ottoman rule. A local council was established in it in 1923. The council's expenditures, which were slightly less than its revenues, grew from 74 Palestinian pounds (P£) in 1929 to P£1,217 in 1944.

The area around Saffuriyya was well endowed with fertile soil and surface and underground water resources. Agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, with olives being the chief crop. In 1944/45 a total of 21,841 dunums was allocated to cereals; 5,310 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, of which 3,720 dunums were planted with olive trees.

Archaeological research has made it clear that Saffuriyya had been inhabited almost continuously from Hellenistic times, despite the fact that its buildings were destroyed more than once. Excavations in 1931 revealed a Roman amphitheater to the northwest that could seat from 4,000 to 5,000 people and that was probably built in the first century A.D. A recently discovered mosaic testifies to the wealth and culture of Roman Sepphoris. A later inscription refers to the restoration of a church in Saffuriyya in A.D. 516-517. The fortress constructed by Zahir al-Umar (mentioned above) was built on the foundations of a Byzantine structure , and its third storey was added later, during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Hamid II.