Jiddin (), also known as the Jiddin Fortress () or Khirbet Jiddin () is a partly ruined fortress in the western Upper Galilee northeast of the port city of Acre.
The fortress was originally built on the site of a Byzantine-era settlement by the Crusaders' Teutonic Order in the 13th century when it formed part of the Acre-based Kingdom of Jerusalem. The castle, then called Judin, was destroyed by the Mamluk sultan Baybars after he conquered the nearby fortress of Montfort from the Crusaders in 1271. In the 18th century, Jiddin was rebuilt and enlarged into a stately headquarters by the Husayn sheikhs and Daher al-Umar, local strongmen and tax farmers. At the time, Jiddin acted as the effective center of the cotton-rich Sahil Akka (plain of Acre) subdistrict. After Daher was killed by the Ottomans in 1775, the new governor of Acre, Jazzar Pasha, destroyed the fortress. Its ruins, Khirbat Jiddin, were afterward used as shelter by Bedouin shepherds and their flocks.
Jiddin's lands were largely uncultivable and no population was listed in British Mandate (1920–1948) records. Over a third of its lands were purchased by the Jewish National Fund in the late 1930s and a kibbutz, Yehi'am, was founded near the fortress in 1946. Most of the lands remained under Arab ownership. In the 1948 Palestine war, Jewish forces commandeered Jiddin and repulsed the first major assault by the Arab Liberation Army in the country in January 1948. The area was captured in Operation Hiram in October 1948, becoming part of the state of Israel. In 1967, the site was declared the Yehi'am Fortress National Park.
The fortress consists of two wards, each enclosed by a curtain wall. The upper (inner) ward is largely of Crusader construction, and closely resembles the other Teutonic castle of Montfort, both inspired by the military architecture of the Rhineland. Within the inner ward are two towers, rising along the ridgeline, which were heightened in the Ottoman period. The lower (outer) ward was largely constructed during the 18th century and its enclosure wall includes two rounded towers and a bastion, which serves as the castle's main entry. A paved extension of the fortress from this period added a mosque and bathhouse above and a groin-vaulted hall underneath, a clustering characteristic of Islamic architecture. A few houses were built within the fortress in the 19th century.
Geography
Jiddin is located northeast of Acre in the western Galilee. It sits above sea level, on a rocky spur of the northern ridge overlooking the Wadi Jiddin ravine. The wadi extends northeastward from Amqa, a village on the edge of Acre's coastal plain, passes below Jiddin and continues toward Tarshiha. Surrounding the fortress is a forest of Palestine oak, carob, sweet bay and storax.
History Byzantine period
The site was inhabited in the Byzantine period, as indicated by the remains of low walls, masonry, and a large colored mosaic found immedietely east of Jiddin during surveys in 1929 or 1948. Spolia characteristic of the late 5th to early 7th centuries are built into the fortress walls, including a stone block engraved with a cross encased in a circle.
Crusader period The earliest mention of Jiddin in the written record was in 1283, when Burchard of Mount Sion referred to "a castle called Iudin" located "four leagues from Acre". He noted that it was "destroyed" but formerly belonged to the Teutonic Order. Modern historians credit the Teutonic Order as the builder of the fortress, dating the construction to between 1220 and 1268 (or 1271). The Teutonic knights had acquired the lands where Jiddin was located in May 1220 when they purchased a large tract from Beatrice of Henneburg, the eldest daughter and an inheritor of Joscelin III of Edessa. The nearest village to the site of Jiddin that was mentioned in the acquisition was Sophie (or Supheye) ('Khirbet Shifaya' in Arabic), which was located to the north. The Teutonic knights built up a large estate in the area, founding there the castle of Montfort in 1226–1227, less than north of Jiddin. Jiddin itself had likely been a gastina or (ruined settlement) over which the Crusaders erected the fortress.
By 1268, most of the Teutonic holdings in the northwestern Galilee passed to the Mamluks under Sultan Baybars, who conquered Montfort in July 1271. Jiddin likely did not pass to Mamluk hands until the subsequent treaty of 21 April 1272 between Baybars and Hugh III of Cyprus and was afterward demolished by Baybars's order. Burchard's notice was largely repeated in the 1321 writings of Marino Sanudo.
Ottoman period
By the early 18th century, during Ottoman rule (1516–1917), Jiddin was administratively part of the nahiye (subdistrict) of Sahil Akka (plain of Acre), part of Sidon Eyalet (Sidon province). The fortress became the headquarters of a local family whose sheikhs farmed the tax revenues of the subdistrict. In the first decade of the 18th century, the (tax farmer) of Sahil Akka was Sheikh Najm. At that time, , Najm contracted with the Dutch merchant Paul Maashook to exclusively sell him all the cotton crop of his villages (Kafr Yasif, Abu Sinan, Julis, Makr, Amqa, and Tarshiha) in return for Maashook's payment of Najm's tax obligations to the governor of Sidon. Najm's cousin Husayn ibn Khaliq is later mentioned as the of Sahil Akka.
Like other local chiefs, Husayn and Ahmad al-Husayn (assumably his son) drew military support from the populace and entrenched their rule by constructing a fortress, which invariably became the effective center of their nahiye. The Husayns' fortress headquarters was Jiddin. At least part of Jiddin's Ottoman-era building phases can be attributed to the Husayn family. Another local family of the Galilee, the Zayadina, began to expand their holdings across the region in the 1730s under the leadership of Sheikh Daher al-Umar. In 1738, Daher mobilized his peasant fighters and Bedouin allies from the Banu Saqr, some 1,500 men, and defeated Ahmad at Jiddin and conquered the fortress and its dependencies, including Abu Sinan and Tarshiha. Daher did not dislodge the Husayns, keeping them as vassals over Sahil Akka. Like with other local kept in place by Daher through the 1740s–1760s, he underwrote the tax farms of the Husayns. A from June 1738 named Husayn ibn Khaliq as the controller of the Jiddin fortress and an ally of Daher; the directed the governor of Damascus to move against the local and raze their fortresses, though the order was not executed.
The Italian traveler Giovanni Mariti visited Jiddin in July 1761 and was received by the sheikh of the fortress. Mariti did not identify the sheikh, but noted that he "commanded this castle under Daher". Mariti describes a generous reception by the sheikh and his hosting of a bayram (feast) of roasted stuffed sheep and pilaf, boiled vegetables and pulses with seasoned meats, thin cakes (as bread), and small bowls of leben. The meal was preceded by the sheikh's invocation for heavenly blessings and followed by cups of coffee and pipe smoking around a circle. On the following morning Mariti toured the fortress with a dozen of the sheikh's men, noting that it "enjoys an advantageous exposure, as it commands a view of various hills; of the plains of Acre, equally fertile and agreeable; and of a large extent of sea". Around the fortress, he mentioned dwellings inhabited by Muslim Arab subjects of the sheikh. Roughly from the fortress, on a steep decline, were the sheikh's gardens, also called Jiddin, which spanned many miles in a "spacious valley abounding with excellent fruits", including olives, almonds, peaches, apricots and figs. Streams flowing from the hills above watered the garden's thriving cotton crop. Upon his departure from Jiddin, Mariti left for its nearby dependency, Tarshiha, where he was hosted by a deputy of the sheikh.
The Ottomans killed Daher and took control of his Acre headquarters in 1775. Soon afterward, the Ottomans appointed Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar as the governor of Sidon and Jazzar made Acre his headquarters. His first serious challenge was subduing the Zayadina, who continued to control much of Acre's Galilee countryside. The chief rebel was Daher's son, Ali al-Daher of Safed. Jiddin was listed among the roughly fifteen fortress villages under Ali's control. After a series of battles, Ali was defeated by Jazzar and later killed in late 1776. A of Sahil Akka from the Husayn family, Muhammad al-Husayn, launched a rebellion in late 1778, coinciding with other local risings against Jazzar by remnants of the Zayadina, as well as the Metawalis (Twelver Shia Muslims) of southern Lebanon. Jazzar dismantled Jiddin and the village of al-Bassa thereafter replaced it as the administrative center of Sahil Akka. The dwellings around the castle were afterward abandoned and part of the inhabitants may have settled in the nearby dependency of Khirbet Ja'thun to the west.
A map by Pierre Jacotin from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 showed the place, named as . In 1838, Eli Smith listed Jiddin as a ruin or deserted place. French explorer Victor Guérin visited in 1875, and provided the first written details about the fortress and its surroundings:
By its gigantic remains still creates an imposing effect … It has been constructed with rectangular stones of medium size; only the lower courses are of larger blocks. Two large square towers, each lacking its upper storey, are still three-quarters standing and contain within them several rooms, at present very dilapidated; the staircases which lead to them have been purposely deprived of some of their steps to make access more difficult. Below extend store-rooms and stables, whose vaults rest on several rows of arcades. Cisterns cut into the rock extend under a paved courtyard. … Below and adjoining the castle, a second enceinte, flanked by semi-circular towers, encloses within it the remains of numerous demolished houses, cisterns and scrub, which grows everywhere amid the debris. To the north and east, gardens long since abandoned are in the same way invaded by thorns and wild shrubs, which entwine and stifle the figs, pomegranates and olives.
At some point in the 19th century, three or four dwellings were built inside the ruins of the fortress. Both Guérin and an earlier 19th century traveler to the area, William McClure Thomson (), noted that the fortress remains were inhabited by Bedouin shepherds and their flocks. When Herbert Kitchener of the Palestine Exploration Fund inspected the place in 1877, he found it "quite unoccupied, though there are several chambers and vaults that could serve as habitations." He noted that the surrounding area was dominated by Bedouins, save for a few cultivated hamlets. In the same year, Kitchener observed quality Arab masonry and that "Some parts of the castle are in a fair state of repair, though now it is entirely deserted and is rapidly falling to ruin"
British Mandate period
One of the houses within the fortress was occupied up to the 1930s, during British Mandate rule in Palestine (1920–1948). According to historian Walid Khalidi, the Bedouins of the Suwaytat (Suweitat) tribe, lived in the fortress and encamped around it until 1948, when it was captured by Jewish forces during the 1948 Palestine war. The 1945 village statistics counted the Suwaytat as a tribe living within the boundaries of nearby Tarshiha; no population was given.Government of Palestine, Department of Statistics, 1945, p. 5