Kafr Lam

Did You Know?

• On 15 May 1948, Israeli naval forces provided the first support fire from warships, targeting Kafr Lam and Sarafand.
• By 1992, one house in Kafr Lam, that of Ahmad Bey Khalil, had been converted into a school, and another into an Israeli post office.

History

The Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 724 to 743, is credited by the geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi with founding Kafr Lam near Qisarya. Its fort, designed like a Roman castrum, was built in the late Umayyad or early Abbasid period as a ribat, a defensive outpost against seaborne raids and Byzantine reconquest. In the Crusader era, the settlement was called Cafarlet and belonged to the lord of Caesarea. In 1200, Lord Aymar de Lairon gave it to a vassal.

By October 1213, Aymar de Lairon had used Cafarlet and two other fiefs as collateral for a 1,000-besant loan from the Hospitallers. The casal was sold outright to the Hospitallers in 1232 for 16,000 Saracen besants, a price that had risen because it was fortified following a 1227 Damascene raid on Caesarea’s lordship. The Hospitallers passed Cafarlet to the Templars by 1255, and a final land swap in 1262 confirmed Templar control. Muslim forces captured the village in 1265, but the Crusaders soon retook it.

The Mamluks seized Kafr Lam in 1291 and governed it until the early 1500s, when the Ottoman Empire expanded into Palestine. A tax record from 1596 notes a farm there paying dues. Pierre Jacotin’s 1799 map labels it Kofour el An. European travelers later described it under Ottoman rule.

Mary Rogers, whose brother was the British vice-consul in Haifa, visited in 1856 and wrote of mud-and-stone houses and fields planted with Indian wheat, millet, sesame, tobacco, and orchards. In 1859, consul Rogers estimated 120 residents and 16 feddans under cultivation. Victor Guérin, a French explorer, came in 1870 and found about 300 villagers living on a small hill, within a large stone enclosure he dated to the Crusades. The 1883 Survey of Western Palestine by the Palestine Exploration Fund called it a tiny village of adobe huts packed inside ancient walls. A population list from around 1887 recorded 180 inhabitants, all Muslim.