Majd al-Krum (; ) is an Arab town located in the Galilee in Israel's Northern District about 16 kilometers (10 miles) east of Acre. Its inhabitants are primarily Muslims. In it had a population of .
The town was a fief called Mergelcolon under the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries and was recorded as a sizable village under Ottoman rule in the 16th century. In the late 18th century, the inhabitants were allied with local sheikh Daher al-Umar and his family, under whom Majd al-Krum was a locally-garrisoned and fortified village with towers. Its walls were demolished by the Ottoman governor Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar after he captured the village in 1776.
By the late 19th century, the village consisted of three quarters, each with its own sheikh. Majd al-Krum surrendered to Israel during the 1948 war, not long after which several of its residents were executed. Many of its inhabitants became Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, while most remained and were joined by refugees from the nearby villages of Sha'ab and Birwa. It became a local council in 1964. Over two-thirds of its lands were expropriated by the state between 1949 and 1976. Its main economic activities are agriculture, quarrying, food processing and workshops.
Name The name Majd al-Krum translates from Arabic as 'watch-house of the vineyard', reflecting the town's fame for the quality of its grapevines. Rock-carved pits on the outskirts of the town were used to press the grapes to make wine since ancient times.
Majd al-Krum has been identified as Beit HaKerem, a Jewish Talmudic-period town mentioned in the Mishnah, whose name means the same in Hebrew and Arabic. Beit HaKerem was known for its arable land and abundant water sources.
Geography
Majd al-Krum is in the heart of the Galilee, about east of the subdistrict center of Acre and west of the city of Karmiel. It is situated in the northwestern end of the Beit HaKerem Valley, called 'al-Shaghur' in Arabic, and is the valley's largest Arab locality. Historically, Majd al-Krum's importance stemmed both from its copious spring and its position at the western entrance of the valley, which serves as the shortest and most accessible route connecting Acre with the central Galilee, Safed, and Damascus to the east. Its old core sits at the foot of Jabal Mahüz, and the town has an average elevation of above sea level.
Archaeology Ancient remains, including cisterns dug into the rock, have been found in Majd al-Krum. In the center of Majd al-Krum, there is an ancient well, a spring, a Roman-era tomb and ruins dating to the Crusader period.
History Crusaders During Crusader rule, Majd al-Krum was known as and was part of a fief with the Gedin (Jiddin) castle held by Henry of Milly (d. 1164). It became part of the inheritance of his daughter Stephanie of Milly (). The fief of Mergelcolon and Gedin passed to Stephanie's daughter Pavia whose husband, Garnier l'Aleman (d. ), became its lord. After his death, the fief passed to his son John Aleman, who transferred the part including Mergelcolon and the neighboring villages of Beit Jann, Sajur and Nahf to the Teutonic Knights in 1249. Crusader rule over Majd al-Krum and the Shaghur valley ended with their conquest by the Mamluks in 1271.
Ottoman Empire In 1516, the Ottoman Empire conquered the Levant from the Mamluks. An Ottoman tax register dated to 1548–1549 or 1596 lists Majd al-Krum as being in the (subdistrict) of Acre, part of the Safed Sanjak. It had a population of 85 households and five bachelors, all Muslims. The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on various agricultural products, including wheat, barley, olives or fruit trees, cotton, and goats and/or beehives; a total of 16,560 akçe. An Ottoman document from 1573 states that the men of Majd al-Krum and nearby villages joined forces with members of the Shihab clan and the Bedouin chief Mansur ibn Furaykh of the Beqaa Valley in carrying out raids against other nearby villages which resulted in the deaths of fifty or sixty people.
During Zaydani family rule of the Galilee under Daher al-Umar (1730s–1770s), Majd al-Krum was a fortified village, with an unspecified number of towers built along its walls. It was garrisoned by the local residents, who were allied to the Zaydani family. Oral traditions from Majd al-Krum maintain that the old mosque in the village and a cluster of homes around it date to this period. Daher was killed in his Acre headquarters by the Ottomans in 1775. When his Ottoman-appointed replacement, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, pursued Daher's sons, who were holding out against the governor in their Galilee strongholds, the inhabitants of Majd al-Krum supported Daher's son Ali. The latter used Majd al-Krum and nearby Abu Sinan as his main strongholds, and launched raids against Acre, prompting Jazzar to mobilize his troops in the village of Amqa. Ali gathered the fighting men of Majd al-Krum, along with Abu Sinan and Deir Hanna, and besieged Jazzar's camp. Reinforcements from Acre dispersed Ali and his men, and defeated them at Abu Sinan. Jazzar then took lead of his army and launched an assault on Majd al-Krum. According to the historian Adel Manna, the fighting took place on the plain outside of the village, and Jazzar was victorious. Once Majd al-Krum had fallen, Jazzar executed its defenders and sent their severed heads to the imperial capital at Constantinople as evidence of his success. He then proceeded against Ali, who had relocated his base to nearby Rameh.
A map from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 by Pierre Jacotin showed the place, named as El Megd El Kouroum. In 1838, Majd al-Krum was noted as a Muslim village in the Shaghur subdistrict, which was located between Safed, Acre and Tiberias. In the mid-19th century (pre-1859), William McClure Thomson, visited Majd al-Krum and noted that it had a "white-domed muzâr over the tomb" of a Muslim saint with a "striking appearance" but no ancient remains. In 1875, the French explorer Victor Guérin visited and described Majd al-Krum as being divided into three quarters, each with a different sheikh. The total population was 800 Muslims. In 1881, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described it as a village built of stone and surrounded by olive trees and arable land, inhabited by 600–800 Muslims. A population list from about 1887 showed that Majd al-Krum had 1,075 inhabitants, all Muslims.
British Mandate
In 1917 British-led Allied Forces captured Palestine from the Ottomans and in 1922 the British Mandate of Palestine was established. In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the Mandate authorities, Majd al-Krum had a population of 889, of which 885 were Sunni Muslims, three were Shia Muslims and one was Christian. According to the diaries of a resident of the village, Mohammed Haidar, Majd al-Krum experienced a series of hardships, beginning on 23 February 1928, when an earthquake caused damage to the foundations and roofs to numerous houses in the village. The damage became apparent during the harsh winter of January 1929, which was characterized by heavy rains and severe flooding, when the second floors of over fifty homes at least partly collapsed. On 18 April 1930, a swarm of locusts swept the village. In the 1931 census, Majd al-Krum had 226 occupied houses and a population of 1,006 Muslims. In the 1945 statistics, Majd al-Krum had 1,400 inhabitants, all Muslims. They owned a total of 17,828 dunams of land, while 2,214 dunams were public property.
Before and during the Mandate period, agriculture was the mainstay of Majd al-Krum's economy. Its output was largely for subsistence use, providing for the needs of extended families and, to a lesser extent, traded for other goods or to pay taxes and debts. Farming methods remained the same as they had generations prior, with cattle or donkey-pulled ploughs and manual tools. Nearly all households owned livestock, mostly cattle and goats, which provided for their domestic dairy needs, and chickens. At most, livestock was a source for supplementary income. Donkeys were raised in significant numbers for ploughing, while only few families owned horses. The lands lying west, south and southeast of the town were arable when tilled and terraced, while the hilly areas to the north were not cultivable. Of the 17,754 dunams the residents owned in 1945, 46.7% were cultivated, a high rate relative to the villages of the Shaghur valley, where cultivation was limited by the rocky hills and deep ravines surrounding the valley. About 72% of these lands were planted with grains, particularly wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas and sesame. The Mandate authorities provided tax relief for most of the grain fields due to their generally poor output. Closer to the village houses, the inhabitants maintained vegetable gardens for domestic use.
Orchards, mainly olives, comprised 28% of the farmlands and were significant to the village economy, but to a lesser extent than the neighboring villages, with olive groves occupying a relatively small share of Majd al-Krum's lands. Olives were harvested mainly for subsistence use and part of a cottage industry; the residents cracked the olives with stones, boiled them in water, and separated and collected the olive oil as it rose to the surface. Most households made their own olive oil soap and used the olive pits as fuel for their tabun ovens. Unlike other villages in the Shaghur valley, Majd al-Krum was well known for its dates, which were partly marketed in the Galilee's cities. According to historian Aziz Haidar, the dates "were among the finest in the country". Many of Majd al-Krum's residents, including entire families, found seasonal employment during the olive harvests in Rameh and Maghar and the grain harvests in Sha'ab, Damun and Shefa-Amr and, in some cases, Syria's southern Hauran region, where families would take up temporary residence.
Majd al-Krum had little commercial activity during the Mandate period, limited to three small general stores by the end of the Mandate in 1948. Several villagers owned camels and were employed to transport goods across Palestine and to and from Beirut and the Syrian cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. A number of the cameleers engaged in commerce of their own in the village. In the early 1930s, people in Majd al-Krum increasingly found work in the Port of Haifa and Haifa's tobacco factories (forty households from the village moved to Haifa when their heads gained employment in the tobacco factories). A few villagers became police officers there and in Acre. By the mid-1930s and especially during World War II, many young men from Majd al-Krum worked transport jobs in British military installations in and around Haifa and Acre, where incomes were twice as high as in the tobacco factories. Wage labor in the Haifa region had thus become a primary source of income for several families in Majd al-Krum.
1936–1939 revolt
During the 1936–1939 Arab revolt against British rule and increased Jewish settlement in Palestine, Majd al-Krum was one of the first villages in the Galilee to participate in the revolt. A resident, Abu Faris, claimed he was the first individual to take up arms in the Galilee during the revolt and the first to have his house demolished by the British as punishment for his participation. The British blew up a number of homes in Majd al-Krum during the revolt as a punitive measure, including the home of Hussein Abu Ramhin.