1834 looting of Safed

The 1834 looting of Safed, also known as the 1834 Safed pogrom, was a month-long attack on the Jewish community of Safed, then part of the Sidon Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire under the governorship of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt. It began on Sunday, June 15 (7 Sivan), the day after the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, and continued for 33 days, ending by mid-July, during the Peasants' revolt in Palestine against Ibrahim Pasha's rule. The violence coincided with a power vacuum as his forces were occupied suppressing the wider revolt around Jerusalem. Accounts describe large-scale looting, killing, and rape of Jewish residents and the destruction of homes and synagogues, carried out by Druze and Muslim rioters. Some sources describe the attack as spontaneous, while a separate, uncorroborated anecdote attributes premeditation to the incitement of a local religious figure, based on accounts given to a foreign traveler who visited the following year.

Safed's Jewish community, a center of Kabbalistic study since the 1540s, numbered an estimated 4,000 by the 1830s, comprising at least half the town's population. It had previously been plundered by Druze forces in 1628 and again in 1833, as Ibrahim Pasha's army approached the region. In 1834, newly announced Egyptian taxation laws and the conscription of fellahin into the army — who were also disarmed by local notables — provoked widespread anger; the Druze of the Galilee rose in revolt that spring, joined by a mass fellahin uprising that drew in part on resentment of local Jewish cooperation with the Egyptian administration. Safed was also severely damaged by the 1834 Jerusalem earthquake that May, after which attacks broke out on the weaker members of Ottoman towns generally, including Jewish and Christian residents alike — the setting in which the looting began.

During the 33-day attack, looters stripped homes of their contents; men, women, and children were robbed of their clothing and beaten, and some fled into the fields until the danger passed. An estimated 500 Torah scrolls were destroyed, along with antique books belonging to the 14th-century rabbi Isaac Aboab I, and Safed's sole Hebrew printing press — the only one in Palestine — was wrecked, halting Hebrew-language printing in the country for about three years; its founder, Yisrael Bak, suffered a foot wound that left him with a permanent limp. Community head Yisroel ben Shmuel of Shklov was threatened with his life, went into hiding, and wrote to foreign consular officials in Beirut seeking intervention. Another rabbi who had taken refuge in a hillside cave was set upon and had his eye gouged out, and elderly rabbis hiding in a synagogue were beaten. Twelve-year-old Jacob Saphir sheltered in the nearby village of Ein al-Zeitun with the help of a sympathetic Arab sheikh, going without food for three days and remaining in hiding for forty days before finding his family's home completely emptied. Contemporary accounts give no precise death toll, though they describe many Jews as badly wounded and hundreds left injured.

Following appeals relayed through foreign consuls, Ibrahim Pasha dispatched Bashir Shihab II, Emir of Mount Lebanon, with troops that ended the rioting by mid-July 1834. According to Rabbi Joseph Schwartz's 1850 account, individuals accused by Jewish residents of looting were arrested and compelled, including through beatings, to return stolen property — a process Schwartz described as proceeding without formal investigation. Separately, thirteen ringleaders and Safed's governor were captured, tried, and publicly hanged in Acre. Consuls compiled lists of victims' losses, recorded at 135,250 piasters by one investigation, but residents ultimately recovered only about seven percent of the value of what was destroyed or stolen.