Safed Old City and Artists' Quarter

The old city occupies the steep western and southern flanks below the citadel hill, and the gradient governs everything. Houses were built stacked down the slope so tightly that, in the account of the 1837 earthquake, the roofs of the houses below served as the streets for the ones above. That is a useful image for what a visitor is walking on: the lanes are not laid out on flat ground with buildings on either side, they are terraces threaded between rooflines, and the drop from the synagogue quarter to the galleries below is a matter of a few dozen steps rather than a few streets.

Orientation is simpler than it looks from a map. Ma'alot Olei HaGardom runs down the spine. East and above it is the synagogue quarter, a compact grid of alleys named for the men who taught in them, including Simtat Beit Yosef, named for Joseph Karo's legal work. West and below it is the artists' quarter, occupying what was the Mamluk-era neighbourhood of Harat al-Watta, the lower quarter. The citadel hill rises above both, a public park now, with the Crusader and Mamluk fortress remains under it.

Almost none of this is drivable. The alleys are stepped, narrow and largely closed to cars, and the practical approach is to park at the edge and walk in. At roughly 900 metres the weather is a real variable rather than a footnote: Safed is cold and wet in winter, occasionally snowed on, and pleasantly cooler than the Sea of Galilee an hour below it in summer.

Safed's importance is compressed into roughly seventy years. Jewish settlement had revived under Mamluk rule, with about 300 families recorded by 1481 on the Jewish Virtual Library's account, and the expulsion from Spain in 1492 sent scholars east who found in an obscure Galilee hill town a place with cheap houses, a textile trade and no established rabbinic hierarchy to argue with. By 1548 Ottoman tax registers counted about 1,900 taxpaying families in the town, 716 of them Jewish.

Joseph Karo arrived from Bulgaria in 1536 and taught roughly 200 students. His Shulchan Aruch became, and remains, the standard code of Jewish law. Moses Cordovero built the first systematic philosophical account of Kabbalah. Solomon Alkabetz wrote Lekha Dodi, the hymn to greet the Sabbath that is still sung weekly in synagogues that have never heard of Safed. Isaac Luria, known by the acronym the Ari, arrived in 1570 and died in 1572, and in those two years produced the cosmology that reshaped Jewish mysticism, most of it transmitted by his students rather than written down by him.

The town also acquired the machinery to export what it thought. Britannica and Wikipedia both date the Hebrew printing press here to 1577, set up by Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Prague and his son Isaac, and describe it as the first press in Asia to use movable type. The Jewish Virtual Library gives 1563 and credits the Ashkenazi brothers. The two accounts have not been reconciled and this page does not pretend otherwise; what is not in dispute is that the press existed here in the sixteenth century and that nothing comparable was operating further east.

Hebrew Wikipedia counts twenty-one synagogues in the town at the height of that period. The ones a visitor can enter today are the survivors of a much denser religious geography, and their names are the names of the teachers: Abuhav, Ari Ashkenazi, Ari Sephardi, Karo, Alsheich.

• Joseph Karo, arrived 1536, author of the Shulchan Aruch
• Moses Cordovero, the first systematic philosopher of Kabbalah
• Solomon Alkabetz, who wrote Lekha Dodi
• Isaac Luria, the Ari, in Safed from 1570 until his death in 1572
• The Hebrew press, dated 1577 by Britannica and 1563 by the Jewish Virtual Library

Two earthquakes decide what a visitor sees. The Near East earthquakes of 1759 left the town in ruins and killed 200 residents. Then on 1 January 1837, at about four in the afternoon, a shock followed five minutes later by a second one destroyed Safed outright. Estimates of its size run from 6.25 to 6.5 on one scale and 7.0 to 7.1 on another, and the regional death toll is put at 6,000 to 7,000. Survivors were still being pulled out of the rubble six and seven days later; a temporary hospital was not set up until 19 January.

The toll inside Safed itself is genuinely uncertain. English Wikipedia says the earthquake killed about half of the town's 4,000-strong Jewish community and destroyed all fourteen of its synagogues. The Jewish Virtual Library reports roughly 5,000 deaths, 4,000 of them Jews. Hebrew Wikipedia gives about 2,000. Anyone who tells a visitor a single confident number is choosing one account over two others.

The Abuhav Synagogue is the exception that proves what happened. Tradition holds that the building was designed by the Castilian kabbalist Isaac Abuhav and put up by his disciples around the 1490s. In 1837 only its southern wall, the one carrying the three Torah arks, was left standing, and it is still there; everything around it is a rebuild. Locals attributed the wall's survival to the sanctity of the scroll inside, which is traditionally ascribed to Abuhav himself and is taken out only on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Shavuot.

The pattern repeats elsewhere. The Ari Ashkenazi Synagogue, completed in the late sixteenth century some years after Luria's death, was destroyed in 1837 and rebuilt about twenty years afterwards. Joseph Karo's building, which functioned as a study hall rather than a synagogue in his lifetime, was destroyed by the 1759 earthquake, rebuilt more modestly at ground level, wrecked again in 1837, and took ten years to restore with money from Isaac Guetta of Italy; a marble plaque over the entrance records that rebuilding. The street plan is old. Most of the stone is not.

The artists' quarter is younger than the state and its founding is inseparable from the war. Safed fell to Jewish forces in the second week of May 1948 during Operation Yiftach, and its Arab population, between 12,000 and 15,000 people by Wikipedia's account, left. Britannica dates the capture to 12 May and Wikipedia to 11 May or earlier, a one-day discrepancy that has never been fully settled. What followed is documented: seven artists moved into the restored ruins of Harat al-Watta and made a quarter of it.

The founders were Shimshon Holtzman, Arieh Lerner and his wife Hanna, Arieh Merzer, Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel, Moshe Castel and Menachem Shemi, encouraged by Moshe Fedatzur, the town's first mayor after the war. Several of them had trained in Paris, and the quarter's distinguishing character in Israeli art was its link to the School of Paris rather than to the harder-edged local modernism of the coast. A club called Mlo'ah met on Friday afternoons, and artists are recorded trading paintings for meals.

From the 1950s the General Exhibition, a selected show of work by resident artists, was housed in the old market mosque, which is the single most telling building in the quarter: a Muslim prayer hall turned into a Jewish artists' gallery within a few years of the town changing hands. Beit Castel stands at the entrance to the quarter.

The quarter is past its peak and says so. Hebrew Wikipedia dates the decline from the 1970s, as the founding generation died, artistic fashion moved on and the neighbourhood's population changed, with growing Haredi settlement in the same lanes. What a visitor finds today is a mix: a small number of serious working studios, a larger number of Judaica and souvenir shops, and several galleries that open when their owner feels like it. Going in the expectation of a curated museum quarter is the commonest way to be disappointed here.

The hill above the old city carries the remains of the fortress that made Safed worth fighting over. English Wikipedia dates a large Crusader fortress here to 1168 and puts the remains of King Fulk's earlier castle under the citadel excavations; Hebrew Wikipedia dates the first Crusader work to 1102 and 1103, rebuilt in the thirteenth century by the Templars, and describes a compound of roughly 40 dunams with walls 28 metres high and seven towers. The dates do not agree and neither source resolves the other. Saladin took the place in 1188, and the Mamluk sultan Baybars took it in 1266: Britannica says he destroyed the citadel, Wikipedia that the Mamluks rebuilt and reinforced it in 1268. The hill is now a public park with a view over the whole of Upper Galilee.

Two Muslim buildings survive in and near the old city and are easy to walk past. The Red Mosque was built by Baybars in 1275. The Saraya was put up as an Ottoman caravanserai in the mid-1700s. Neither is a working mosque now, and both are part of the same continuous settlement history as the synagogues below them.

Ma'alot Olei HaGardom repays a moment's attention rather than being treated as a set of steps to get up. The British Mandate authorities built the staircase deliberately wide, as a firebreak and boundary between the Jewish and Arab quarters, after a history that included the 1929 riots, in which 22 Jewish residents of Safed were killed and the Jewish quarter looted and burned. The old Jewish cemetery lies further down the slope below the artists' quarter, and holds the graves traditionally identified as those of Luria, Karo, Cordovero and Alkabetz.

The whole ensemble is small. A visitor who walks the synagogue lanes, crosses the staircase, works through the galleries and climbs to the citadel park has covered the entire old city and perhaps two kilometres of ground, most of it vertical.

• The citadel park, on the hill above both quarters
• The Red Mosque, built by Baybars in 1275
• The Saraya, an Ottoman caravanserai of the mid-1700s
• Ma'alot Olei HaGardom, the Mandate-built dividing staircase
• The old cemetery, below the artists' quarter