Safed

Safed, Israel

Stepped stone alleyway in Safed's Artists' Quarter with blue window frames in late afternoon golden light.

Safed is a Galilee hill town of stone lanes, old synagogues and an artists' quarter.

The place

Safed, also known as Tzfat and Safad, is a city in northern Israel, perched at 900 metres on a ridge in the Upper Galilee. The population is 35,700. The built-up area mixes a tight stone old town with later neighbourhoods that spill downhill. Officially the municipality spells the name Zefat; in Hebrew it is Tzfat (צְפַת) and in Arabic Ṣafad (صَفَد). The pronunciation visitors usually hear is SAH-fed.

The historic core climbs toward the remains of a fortress. Lanes are stepped, narrow and paved, with houses of pale masonry and workshops tucked into former homes. The Artists' Quarter occupies what was the Arab quarter, and a cluster of synagogues sits on the same hillside, many of them linked to the Kabbalah scholars who gathered here after the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Safed belongs to the group known as Judaism's Four Holy Cities, which is why the lanes still fill with students, worshippers and people visiting family graves as well as with painters and weekenders.

It is a small place to move through. The railway reaches only as far as Karmiel, and the last stretch is by bus, including services from Tiberias and Rosh Pina. In summer the local note is simply to keep drinking water; winter at 900 metres can be sharp. Between those seasons the town is easy to walk, and many travellers use it as a quiet base for the northern Galilee rather than as a city of large monuments. Practical updates sit on the municipal website.

Its story

Safed enters the written record as a high, fortified place rather than as a dated founding. Scholars identify it with Sepph, the Upper Galilee stronghold that Josephus described. The Jerusalem Talmud names it among five ridges where fires were kindled so that communities farther off would know a new month or a festival had been declared, in the days of the Second Temple.

A long gap follows. Paper from the Cairo Geniza, written in 1034, recalls a business deal in Tiberias in 1023 involving Musa ben Hiba ben Salmun, whose byname al-Safati means "of Safed". That is the earliest clear trace of Jews living here beside Muslims, already in the eleventh century. Ibn Shaddad, who died in 1285, pictured a well-settled village and a tower, Burj Yatim, just before Crusader forces took the district in 1101–1102, and he observed that earlier Islamic histories barely noticed the site.

In 1168 the Crusader garrison gained a substantial castle on the ridge. Saladin captured it twenty years on. In 1219 al-Mu'azzam Isa, Saladin's grand-nephew, had the stronghold demolished. The 1240 treaty reopened the height to fortification. Baybars, the Mamluk sultan, took that castle further in 1268, raised Safed's rank to a provincial capital and gave the Galilee a new administrative centre on this hill. The town then shrank for generations. Ottoman rule from 1517 steadied it: Jewish migrants from Europe expanded wool working and the teaching of Kabbalah, and Safed came to be counted among Judaism's Four Holy Cities.

What to see

Culture

Safed's public culture has a religious side and an artistic side, and they share the same stone lanes. Kabbalah study, synagogue life and cemetery visits bring people up the hill through the year. The artists' colony is the other current. In the 1950s and 1960s painters gathered in the former Arab quarter, and the town was talked about across Israel as an art capital. The circle included Yitzhak Frenkel, Yosl Bergner, Moshe Castel, Menachem Shemi, Shimshon Holzman and Rolly Schaffer.

When the Glitzenstein Art Museum opened in 1953, Mane Katz gave Safed eight of his canvases. Galleries and solo workshops still line the quarter. The Frenkel Frenel Museum and Beit Castel, set in Moshe Castel's former home, keep individual studios in the story of the street rather than behind a single civic façade.

For a while the night hours matched the galleries for attention. Through the 1960s Safed's clubs drew singers near the start of their careers, Naomi Shemer and Aris San among them. That nightlife has since faded; the lanes now feel closer to a gallery walk and a religious neighbourhood than to a club district.

In Safed, dress modestly at synagogues and the cemetery, and ask before you photograph anyone who is praying.

What to wear

Safed does not keep a single ceremonial costume for the street. What reads as traditional dress is the clothing of religious life: men in dark suits, white shirts and hats or kippot, married women with hair covered by a scarf, a snood or a wig, and skirts below the knee. Wool workshops that flourished here in the sixteenth century left no folk costume behind, but cloth still marks observance, especially the white worn on Shabbat.

On a weekday the Artists' Quarter shows another Safed. Painters, students and visitors wear ordinary cotton and linen, jeans, trainers and sun hats. Both wardrobes share an alley without either being a costume put on for outsiders.

A visitor should plan for 900 metres and for doors where modesty matters. Covered shoulders and knees are the standard at synagogues and at the cemetery. A light scarf helps at the citadel and at holy places. Summer wants breathable cloth and a water bottle; evenings and the cold months want another layer. Stone steps and broken paving call for closed shoes with a grip rather than thin sandals.

What to eat

Plan it

Best time. April, May, September and October are the easiest months to walk Safed. The town stands at 900 metres, summer is when visitors are told to drink extra water, and winter on the ridge can be cold. Those months sit between the heat and the cold.

How long. 2–3

Getting there. Safed has no railway station. From Ben Gurion Airport the practical route is an Israel Railways train to Karmiel, the closest station, and a bus for the last leg into town. Buses also run from Tiberias and from Rosh Pina, which has connections toward Haifa and Tel Aviv. Services from Jerusalem and Bnei Brak are fewer and cater mainly to Orthodox travellers. Check current times with the operator and with the municipality at http://www.zefat.muni.il/Pages/default.aspx.

Budget. mid

Tips

Etiquette

Nearby

Sources