History
The Crusaders called the village Judyn or Iudin. A Crusader castle was built there some time after May 1220, when the Teutonic Order acquired the nearby village of Shifaya. The village fell to Sultan Baybars between 1268 and 1271. In 1283, Burchard of Mount Sion described a destroyed castle on the site that had belonged to the Teutonic Order.The castle was built around two towers with an outer enclosure wall.It was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by Dhaher al-Omar, the Bedouin leader who became Ottoman governor of the Galilee.The outer enclosure walls and moat were reconstructed, together with an angled entrance gatehouse. A vaulted hall was built over the Crusader walls. This hall was the basement of a palatial residence which included a mosque and a bathhouse. The vaulted roof rested on a series of square pillars on the hillside. The walls featured well shafts and gun-slits. The mosque was a small square building originally roofed with four cross-vaults resting on a central pillar. The bath house was a small building supplied with water from the wells below.
An Italian monk, Mariti, who traveled to "Geddin" in the 1760s, says he was given a generous reception by the local sheik who commanded the place for Daher.
Jezzar Pasha razed the fortress around 1775.
Before 1948, the ruined fortress was occupied by Bedouin of the al-Suwaytat tribe whose primary occupation was animal husbandry. In 1944/45, they also cultivated a little barley and tobacco on a total of 22 dunums of land.
Read more about this topic: Khirbat Jiddin
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