Ein Karem
Ein Karem also Ein Kerem or Ain Karem, is a former Palestinian village southwest of Jerusalem, presently a neighborhood in the outskirts of the modern city, within the Jerusalem District in Israel. It is the site of the Hadassah Medical Center.
Ein Karem was an important Jewish village during the late Second Temple period, during which it became important to Christianity. Christian tradition holds that John the Baptist was born in Ein Karem, following the biblical verse in Luke saying John's family lived in a "town in the hill country of Judea". Probably because of its location between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, this location was a very comfortable one for a pilgrimage, and this led to the establishment of many churches and monasteries in the area.
During the years of Ottoman and later British Mandate, Ein Karem was a Palestinian Arab village. It was depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After the war it became once again a Jewish settlement. Today, Ein Karem is a vibrant bohemian neighborhood of Jerusalem, with a population of 2,000.
It has retained a very high-level of authenticity, its natural environment remains intact, and its old houses are still inhabited and preserved. It attracts three million visitors a year, one-third of them pilgrims from around the world. Alongside its religious landmarks, Ein Karem is also known for its fine art, culinary, and musical scenes.
Etymology
The name Ein Karem ''or Ein Kerem'' can be literally translated from both Hebrew and Arabic as "Spring of the Vineyard". It is derived from the springs and vineyards established on the village's terraced slopes.Another possible translation would be "Spring of Carem", if derived from an ancient Iron Age Israelite city called Carem, mentioned as a city in the dominion of the tribe of Judah in the Septuagint version of Book of Joshua. In Arabic, other than meaning "Spring of the Vineyard", it could be understood as well as "the Generous Spring".
History
A spring that provides water to the village of Ein Karem stimulated settlement there from an early time.Bronze Age
Pottery has been found near the spring dating to the Middle Bronze Age.Iron Age/Israelite period
During the Iron Age, or Israelite period, Ein Karem is usually identified as the location of the biblical village of Beth HaKerem.Second Temple period
A well-preserved ''mikveh indicates there was a Jewish settlement in the Second Temple period along with some other discoveries such as handful of graves, bits of a wall, and an olive press. A reservoir here was mentioned in the Copper Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.Roman and Byzantine periods
During excavations in the Church of Saint John the Baptist, a marble statue of Aphrodite was found, broken in two. It is believed to date from the Roman era and was probably toppled in Byzantine times. Today, the statue is at the Rockefeller Museum. Excavations in front of the same church, which has at its core the cave which Christian tradition identifies as the birthplace of John the Baptist, have unearthed remains of two Byzantine chapels, one containing an inscription mentioning Christian "martyrs", but without any mention of John. Ceramics from the Byzantine period have also been found in Ein Karem.In the Byzantine period, as part of the establishment of the "Liturgy of Jerusalem", Ein Karem was identified with the "Visitation", an event mentioned in the New Testament where Mary, expecting Jesus, encountered her cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John the Baptist. Byzantine sources link Ein Karem with the residence of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, a place not specified in the New Testament. In around 530 CE, the Christian pilgrim Theodosius places Elizabeth's town at a distance of from Jerusalem, which suits Ein Karem.
Early Islamic period
Ein Karem was recorded after the Islamic conquest. Al-Tamimi, the physician, refers to a church in Ein Karem that was venerated by Christians, and notes a particular plant he collected there.Crusader period
It is mentioned under the name St. Jehan de Bois, "Saint John in the Mountains", during the Crusades. The Crusaders were the first to build here a church dedicated to St John, rebuilt in the 17th century by the Franciscans and still active today, and Moshe Sharon considers it as "almost sure" that the Crusaders are the ones who started the tradition of identifying that particular site as St John's birthplace.Ayyubid and Mamluk periods
After conquering Jerusalem in 1187, Saladin granted the village of Ein Karem to Abu Maydan, a renowned Sufi teacher from Seville, Andalusia. Abu Madyan had fought in the 1187 Battle of Hattin against the Crusaders before returning to the Maghreb, where he eventually died in Tlemcen, in what is today Algeria. A document, drafted in Jerusalem in 1320 by Abu Maydan's great-grandson, outlines the waqf's holdings, beginning with Ein Karem:"A village known by the name of Ein Karem, one of the villages adjacent to Jerusalem. This village includes farmed and fallow lands, both cultivated and abandoned, slopes and plains, unproductive bare rock, buildings in ruins, farmhouses, buildings in good repair with their surrounding fields, a little garden, pomegranate trees and other kinds irrigated with water from springs on the property, olive trees of a "rumi" or western variety, carob trees, fig trees, sessile oaks, qiqebs. This village is bounded on all sides: to the south by the great Maliha ; to the north by properties belonging to Ein-Kaout, Qalunya, Harash, Sataf, and Zawiya el-Bakhtyari; to the west by Ein Esheshqqaq, and to the east by properties belonging to the Maliha and to Beit Mazmil. This village is established as a waqf, with all attendant rights, appurtenances, fields, cultivated lands, threshing floors, loamy earth, with freshwater springs on location, prairies, planted trees, disused wells, vineyards, in a word, with all rights relating thereto, both within and without. However, the mosque, house of God, the path and the cemetery intended for use by Muslims, are not included in the present waqf."The Waqf Abu Maydan endowment, which included the Mughrabi Quarter in Jerusalem, has been supported by agricultural and property revenues from the village of Ein Karem until the 1948 war.
A coin from the reign of As-Salih Hajji was found here, together with pottery, glassware and other coins from the Mamluk era.
Ottoman period
Most of the village – some 15,000 dunams – was waqf land set aside charitably to benefit the Moroccan Muslim community in Jerusalem, belonging to the endowment established by Abu Madyan in the 14th century.In 1517, the village was included in the Ottoman Empire with the rest of Palestine and in the 1596 tax-records it appeared as Ain Karim, located in the Nahiya of Jabal Quds of the Liwa of Al-Quds. The village had at this time 29 households, all Muslim. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 33.3% on agricultural products, which included wheat, barley, summer crops, vineyards, grape syrup/molasse, goats and beehives in addition to "occasional revenues"; a total of 5,300 akçe. All of the revenue went to a waqf.
In the course 17th century, the Franciscans manage to recover the ruins of the church raised by the Crusaders over the traditional birth cave of St. John and, in spite of local Muslim opposition, to rebuild and fortify it as the Monastery of St. John in the Mountains.
Israeli geographer Yehoshua Ben-Arieh described Ein Karem as "the most important village west of Jerusalem" in the 19th century.
James Silk Buckingham visited in the early 1800s, and found he was "more pleased with this village than with any other place I had yet visited in Palestine."
In 1838, Ain Karim was noted as a Muslim and Latin Christian village in the Beni Hasan district.
In 1863 Victor Guérin noted a thousand inhabitants "of whom there are barely two hundred and fifty who are Catholics; the others are Muslim." The ancestors of the latter were held to descend from Maghrabins, that is to say, originating from the Maghreb. Guérin describes them as rowdy and fanatical, until a few years before his visit having very often attacked the Catholic monks at the Monastery of St John in order to extort from them food and money, a habit that had subsided only lately.
An official Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed that Ain Karim had 178 houses and a population of 533, though the population count included only men. The population consisted of 412 Muslims in 138 houses, 66 Latin Christians in 18 houses, and 55 Greek Christians in 12 houses.
In 1883, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described Ain Karim as: "A flourishing village of about 600 inhabitants, 100 being Latin Christians. It stands on a sort of natural terrace projecting from the higher hills on the east of it, with a broad flat valley below on the west. On the south below the village is a fine spring, with a vaulted place for prayer over it. The water issues from a spout into a trough."
In 1896 the population of Ain Karim was estimated to be about 1,290 persons.
British Mandate period
In the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, the population of 'Ain Karim was 1,735; consisting of 1,282 Muslims and 453 Christians, increasing in the 1931 census to 2,637, in 555 houses.During the 1929 riots in Palestine, Arab residents of 'Ain Karim launched raids against the nearby Jewish neighborhood of Bayit VeGan.
In the 1945 statistics, Ein Karim had a population of 3,180; 2,510 Muslims and 670 Christians, The total land area was 15,029 dunams, of this, a total of 7,960 dunums of land were irrigated or used for plantations, 1,199 were used for cereals; while a total of 1,704 dunams were classified as built-up areas.
The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine placed 'Ayn Karim in the Jerusalem enclave intended for international control.