Al-Safiriyya may have been known to the
Byzantines and
Crusaders as
Sapharea or
Saphyria. However, later comparative linguistic analysis excluded this possibility.
Hani Al-Kindi, an early
Muslim scholar and acetic, was buried in Al-Safiriyya. The
Umayyad caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (717–720) had offered him the Governorship of Palestine, but Al-Kindi had declined it. In 1596 it appeared in the
tax registers under the name of
Safiriyya, as being in the
nahiya ("subdistrict") of
Ramla, which was under the administration of the
liwa ("district") of
Gaza. It had a population of 53 household; an estimated 292 persons, who were all Muslims. They paid a fixed tax-rate of 33,3 % on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, summer crops, sesame, vineyards, fruit trees, goats and beehives, in addition to occasional revenues; a total of 18,800
akçe. All of the revenue went to a
waqf. In 1838
Safiriyeh was among the villages
Edward Robinson noted from the top of the
White Mosque, Ramla. It was further noted as a Muslim village, in the Lydda District. In 1863
Victor Guérin found the village to have 450 inhabitants. He noted that the
mosque was shaded by an old
mulberry tree, and around the village were plantations of tobacco and watermelons. An Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed that es-Safirije had 29 houses and a population of 134, though the population count included men only. In 1882, the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine described it as an
adobe village, with olives to the south.
British Mandate era In the
1922 census of Palestine conducted by the
British Mandate authorities,
Safriyeh had a population of 1,306, all Muslims, increasing in the
1931 census to 2,040 inhabitants, still all Muslims, in 489 houses. In the
1945 statistics it had a population of 3,070 Muslims, while 95 dunams were classified as built-up areas. Al-Safiriyya had two elementary schools, one for boys founded in 1920 which had an enrollment of 348 boys in 1945, and another school was for girls, founded in 1945 with 45 girls. On September 13, 1948, Al-Safiriyya was one of 14 Palestinian villages that
Ben-Gurion asked to be destroyed, in order to block the return of the villagers.
Tzafria,
Kfar Chabad,
Tochelet,
Ahi'ezer and the suburbs of
Rishon LeZion today occupy Al-Safiriyya land. ==References==