Safed (Tzfat)

Safed occupies a mountain in the Upper Galilee, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of Acre and 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Tiberias. Its elevation of approximately 850 meters gives it a cooler climate than much of Israel.[1] The nineteenth-century traveler Laurence Oliphant described it as "perched on the summit of a mountain nearly three thousand feet high" and "one of the most picturesquely situated towns in the country."[9]

A 2017 State Comptroller report placed Safed's municipal jurisdiction at approximately 30,000 dunams, or 30 square kilometers, and recorded a 15-member city council.[12] The city lies almost ten miles inside the Lebanese border and hosts the IDF's Northern Command base, giving its location strategic as well as geographic importance.[22]

Safed's name appears in several transliterations, including Tzfat, Zefat, Sefad, Safad, and Tzefiya.[1][2] The Jerusalem Talmud mentions Safed as one of the mountaintop locations from which fire signals announced the new moon and festivals during the Second Temple period.[1]

Safed's early history is not known with certainty. The Jewish Encyclopedia dates its foundation to the second century CE and cites the Jerusalem Talmud as evidence of its antiquity.[14] The modern city has also sometimes been identified with Sepph, a place fortified by the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus in anticipation of a Roman attack in 66 CE, although the identification is not conclusive.[1][15]

A reference entry identifies Safed by tradition as the birthplace of Simon ben Yohai, traditionally associated with the Zohar, and notes that the city later became an administrative center under the Mamluks.[16] Jewish settlement is attested by documents from the first half of the eleventh century. Although Benjamin of Tudela reported no Jews there in 1170–1171, the community was revived in the thirteenth century and flourished under Mamluk protection by the late fifteenth century.[1]

The Ottoman Golden Age

The Ottoman conquest in 1517 opened the period most closely associated with Safed's religious and economic flourishing. At the beginning of Ottoman rule, an estimated 1,000 Jewish families lived in the Land of Israel, principally in Jerusalem, Nablus (Shechem), Hebron, Gaza, Safed, and Galilean villages.[5] Refugees from Spain had already strengthened Safed's community, and later immigrants included Jews from North Africa and Europe as well as descendants of Jews who had remained in the Land.[1][5]

By the mid-sixteenth century, Safed's Jewish population had risen to about 10,000. Orderly government under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent stimulated immigration, and most newcomers settled in Safed rather than Jerusalem. The city became a thriving textile center and a focus of intense intellectual activity, especially Kabbalah and Jewish law.[5]

Rabbi Joseph Caro lived in Safed and wrote the Shulḥan Arukh there, while Rabbi Isaac Luria made the city a center of Jewish mysticism.[18][1] Mosaic describes Caro's work as a seminal legal code and links Safed's later holy-city status to the presence of Caro, Luria, and other scholars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[17] The city's spiritual flowering was accompanied by material prosperity as Jewish residents established looms and traded in Galilean produce.[1]

The Late Ottoman and Mandate Periods

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Safed received Hasidim associated with the movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov and followers of the Vilna Gaon. Their arrival reinforced the city's role as a center of Jewish religious life even as its earlier economic prosperity declined.[16][1]

During the 1929 riots, Arabs attacked and destroyed Safed's Jewish quarter, and most Jewish residents were forced to leave.[16][18] A Jewish population nevertheless remained: in 1948, about 2,000 of the city's 12,000 inhabitants were Jewish. During the War of Independence, Palmach forces reinforced the besieged Jewish quarter and captured the city in May; Safed subsequently became a predominantly Jewish city within the State of Israel.[1][16]

Safed's population figures vary substantially by date. Encyclopedia.com records 21,600 residents in 1994, while a State Comptroller report counted approximately 33,000 residents in December 2015. The population had grown to more than 36,000 by 2019.[18][12][1]

Religion remains a defining feature of municipal life. A Times of Israel report estimated that about 30 percent of Safed's approximately 35,000 residents were Haredi and noted that many local businesses closed on Shabbat.[21] This observant character coexists with the city's artists' community and tourism economy.

A 2017 State Comptroller report recorded a 15-member council and identified Ilan Shochat as the mayor serving at that time, avoiding the implication that the report establishes the identity of the current mayor.[12] Safed also hosts the IDF Northern Command base, which adds a major strategic institution to the city's municipal and regional functions.[22]

Tourism, recreation, commerce, and the arts are prominent parts of Safed's modern economy. The city's artists' quarter contains galleries and communal exhibition space and has long served as a tourist attraction.[1] Safed's Old City also includes active synagogues, artisan studios, shops, and historic stone buildings.[15]

Safed's sixteenth-century textile industry was an important source of its Ottoman prosperity. Newcomers established looms whose products competed with Venetian textiles, while local Jews traded in oil, honey, silk, spices, and other Galilean produce.[1] Although that economic prominence later declined, tourism and religious institutions helped sustain the city as a destination.

Modern cultural life includes an annual klezmer festival, museums devoted to the Bible and Kabbalah, and pilgrimages to the graves of Jewish sages near the city.[1] The International Center for Tzfat Kabbalah also offers courses, workshops, and activities for visitors interested in Jewish mystical tradition.[19]

Safed's Old City preserves many of the places most closely associated with its religious history. Synagogues named for Isaac Luria, Joseph Caro, Yose ha-Bannai, and Yitzhak Abuhav remain among its best-known landmarks.[1] The Ari and Abuhav synagogues continue to function as houses of prayer, while the surrounding lanes contain galleries, artisan workshops, and other visitor attractions.[15]

The artists' quarter occupies part of the Old City's historic fabric and contains galleries used by painters and sculptors.[1] Its proximity to active synagogues gives Safed a distinctive combination of religious community, historic architecture, and contemporary visual art.

Safed stands atop Mount Canaan amid the forests and hills of the Upper Galilee, with views toward Mount Meron.[15] Nearby parks provide short walking trails, while the city's elevated setting has attracted admiring descriptions for centuries. Oliphant's nineteenth-century account called Safed one of the country's most picturesquely situated towns.[9]

Safed is one of Judaism's traditional Four Holy Cities, together with Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. The American Jewish Committee associates this status with longstanding Jewish communities in those cities and notes that Safed became the center of Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth century.[4] Mosaic more specifically links its modern holy-city status to its role as a center of mystical scholarship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[17]

Joseph Caro wrote the Shulḥan Arukh in Safed, and Isaac Luria lived and taught there during the city's Kabbalistic flowering.[18][1] Luria's presence helped establish Safed as the leading center of Jewish mysticism, while Caro's legal scholarship gave the city a similarly important place in the development of Jewish law.

Safed's association with Kabbalah remains active rather than purely historical. The World Jewish Congress describes the city as "the center of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism," and institutions in the city offer organized study and activities for visitors.[20][19]

The city's contemporary religious character is also visible in its Haredi population, widespread Shabbat observance, and active synagogues.[21][15] These institutions connect modern Safed with the religious traditions that developed there during its Ottoman golden age.

Safed lies almost ten miles inside the Lebanese border and hosts the IDF Northern Command base.[22] Its location and military role exposed the city to repeated attacks during the cross-border conflict with Hezbollah that followed October 7, 2023.

On November 23, 2023, Hezbollah claimed responsibility for launching 48 rockets toward an IDF base near Safed, and an explosives-laden drone detonated at the Northern Command headquarters.[7] On February 14, 2024, rockets fired from Lebanon landed in Safed and near the base, killing one soldier and wounding eight other people.[22]

Safed was not included among the border communities evacuated in October 2023 because it lies almost ten miles inside Israel, even though it remained within rocket range.[22] This distinction left residents in place while communities closer to the frontier were evacuated.

Attacks continued in September 2024. A Counter Extremism Project chronology records approximately 60 rockets fired toward Safed on September 25–26, including one that struck a home and wounded civilians, followed by at least 30 additional rockets later that evening.[7] Mayor Yossi Kakon called for civilians to be evacuated, and the IDF subsequently struck Hezbollah launchers and weapons depots in southern Lebanon.[7]

Safed's experience illustrates the vulnerability of northern Israeli cities that lie beyond the immediate border zone but remain within the range of rockets fired from Lebanon.[22][7]

Palestinian Authority television and PA-associated cultural programming have presented Safed as part of "Palestine." One children's song listed Safed with Tiberias, Acre, Haifa, Nazareth, Beit Shean, Jaffa, Ramle, and Be'er Sheva while describing "my country Palestine."[25] A later PA-associated festival featured the same song, and Palestinian Media Watch documented other broadcasts since 2011 that characterized Israeli cities, including Safed, as Palestinian.[26]

Palestinian Media Watch interprets this programming as denying Israel's legitimacy and sovereignty. That political narrative conflicts with Safed's documented Jewish history and its present status as an Israeli municipality.[1][12]