History
Under the Ottoman Empire, in 1596, Jubb Yusuf was officially a nahiya ("subdistrict") of Jira, part of Sanjak Safad, with a population of seventy-two. It paid taxes on crops such as wheat, barley, and fruit, and on goats and beehives.
In the early 18th century the scholar and Sufi Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi mentioned the khan, the domed well which still exists, and a nearby mosque. The Swiss traveller Johann Ludwig Burckhardt observed during his visit around 1816 that the khan was falling into ruin. The mosque was dismantled around the beginning of the 19th century and the stones used to build a sheep fence closed to the khan. The village by that time appears to have had few inhabitants, possibly because the well was no longer usable after the Galilee earthquake of 1837, leaving only one small, seasonal source of water nearby. An 1877 survey of the Galilee carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund stated:
“… Our next camp was at Khan Jubb Yusuf, where we arrived on the 4th of April. The Khan is a large building falling into ruins on the main road to Damascus. There was no village near, the country being occupied by Bedawin of the Semakiyeh and Zenghariyeh tribes.
At the time of the 1931 census, Jubb Yusuf had 17 occupied houses and a population of 93 Muslims.
In 1946, when Kibbutz Ami'ad was established a few hundred meters north of the khan, the village was still inhabited by Bedouin families. According to an original member of the kibbutz, the pond still provided water part of the year, "and the Bedouins, whose tents were spread across the valley of Jubb Yussef, used it to water their flocks."
However, other described the village of Jubb Yusuf as small, with closely packed houses made of mud, basalt stones, and limestone. There were a large number of springs in the vicinity, and that had attracted the Bedouin of the ‘Arab al-Suyyad tribe. They had settled the village, worked the land, and made up the majority of its (all Muslim) population. Their main crops were grain, vegetables, fruits, and olives. In 1944/45 they planted 2,477 dunums in cereals.
Due to the nomadic nature of the villagers the area under their jurisdiction was vast; 11,325 dunums.
Read more about this topic: Jubb Yusuf
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)