page_title: Silwan
section_title: Ottoman period
hierarchical_section_title: Silwan / History / Ottoman period
caption_attribution_description: English: 60 houses built by the Ezrat Niddachim charitable organisation in Silwan, Jerusalem, for poor Yemenite Jews in the 1880s.
context_page_description: Silwan is a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood on the outskirts of the Old City of Jerusalem. Forty Jewish families also live in the area. Silwan is located in East Jerusalem.
  Silwan began as a farming village, dating back to the 7th century according to local traditions, while the earliest mention of the village is from the year 985. From the 19th century onwards, the village was slowly being incorporated into Jerusalem until it became an urban neighborhood.
  After the 1948 war, the village came under Jordanian rule. Jordanian rule lasted until the 1967 Six-Day War, since which it has been occupied by Israel. Silwan is administered as part of the Jerusalem Municipality.
  In 1980, Israel incorporated East Jerusalem into its claimed capital city Jerusalem through the Jerusalem Law, a basic law in Israel. The move is considered by the international community as illegal under international law, but the Israeli government disputes this.
context_section_description: In 1596, Ayn Silwan appeared in Ottoman tax registers as being in the Nahiya of Quds of the Liwa of Quds, with  a population of 60 households, all Muslim. They paid a total of 35,500 akçe in taxes, and all of the revenues went to a Waqf.
  In 1834, during a large-scale peasants' rebellion against Ibrahim Pasha, thousands of rebels infiltrated Jerusalem through ancient underground sewage channels leading to the farm fields of the village of Silwan. A traveller to Palestine in 1883, T. Skinner, wrote that the olive groves near Silwan were a gathering place for Muslims on Fridays.
  In 1838 Silwan was noted as a Muslim village, part of el-Wadiyeh district, located east of Jerusalem.
  A photograph of the village taken between 1853 and 1857 by James Graham can be found on page 35 of Picturing Jerusalem by  photographers James Graham and Mendel Diness. It shows the western part of the modern village as empty of habitations, a few trees are scattered across the southern ridge with the small village confined to the ridgetop east of the valley.
  In the mid-1850s, the villagers of Silwan were paid £100 annually by the Jews in an effort to prevent the desecration of graves on the Mount of Olives. Nineteenth-century travellers described the village as a robbers' lair. Charles Wilson wrote that "the houses and the streets of Siloam, if such they may be called, are filthy in the extreme.” Charles Warren depicted the population as a lawless set, credited with being "the most unscrupulous ruffians in Palestine.”
  An official Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed that Silwan had a total of 92 houses and a population of 240, though the population count included only men.
  In 1883, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described Silwan as a "village perched on a precipice and badly built of stone. The waters is brought from Ain Umm ed Deraj. There are numerous caves among and behind the houses, which are used as stables by the inhabitants."
  Modern settlement of the western ridge of the modern urban neighborhood of Silwan, called Wadi Hilweh in Arabic and dubbed in 1920 "the City of David" by Jewish-French archaeologist de:Raymond Weill (1874-1950), began in 1873-1874, when the Meyuchas family moved out of the Old City to a new home on the ridge.
  In books published between 1888-1911, travellers describe the valley floor as verdant and cultivated, with the stony village perched along the top of the eastern ridge hillside. The village of Silwan was located on the eastern slope of the Kidron Valley, above the outlet of the Gihon Spring opposite Wadi Hilweh. The villagers cultivated the arable land in the Kidron Valley, which in biblical tradition formed the king's gardens during the Davidic dynasty, to grow vegetables for market in Jerusalem.
  Yemenite Jewish community. In 1881–82, a group of Jews arrived in Jerusalem coming from Yemen as a result of messianic fervor. The year had special meaning to them, for which some thirty Yemenite Jewish families set out from Sana'a for the Holy Land. It was an arduous journey that took them over half a year to reach Jerusalem, where they arrived destitute of all things. Upon reaching Jerusalem, they sought shelter in the caves and grottoes in the hills facing Jerusalem's walls and Wadi Hilweh (the City of David), while others moved to Jaffa. Initially shunned by the Jews of the Old Yishuv, who did not recognize them as Jews due to their dark complexions, unfamiliar customs, and strange pronunciation of Hebrew, they had to be given shelter by the Christians of the Swedish-American colony, who called them Gadites. Eventually, to end their reliance on Christian charity, Jewish philanthropists purchased land in the Silwan valley to establish a neighbourhood for them. Between 1885-91, 45 new stone houses were built for the Yemenites at the south end of the Arab village, built for them by a Jewish charity called Ezrat Niddahim. Up to 200 Yemenite Jews lived in the newly built neighbourhood, called Kfar Hashiloach (Hebrew: כפר השילוח‎, lit.: Siloam Village) or the "Yemenite Village." T
caption: Yemenite-Jewish village south of Silwan, housing project built by a charity in the 1880s (1891)
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