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.
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