In 1596,
Yahudiya appeared in
Ottoman tax registers as being in the
Nahiya of Ramla of the
Liwa of Gaza. It had a population of 126 Muslim households and paid taxes on wheat, barley, summer crops or fruit trees, sesame, and goats or beehives. In 1838 it was noted as a
Muslim village called
el-Yehudiyeh in the
Lydda administrative region. The French explorer
Victor Guérin visited the village, which he called
Yehoudieh, in 1863, and found it to have a population of more than 1,000 people. The houses were made of
adobe bricks, several topped by palm leaves. Near a
noria he noticed an ancient
sarcophagus, placed there as a
trough. In 1882, the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described the place as "a large
mud village, supplied by a pond, and surrounded by palm-trees." They also noted a ruined tank, or
birkeh, to the south of the village.
British Mandate era In the
1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the
British Mandate authorities,
Yahudiyeh had a population of 2,437 residents, all Muslims, increasing in the
1931 census, when
Yahudiya had a population of 3,258 residents; 3,253 Muslims and 5 Christians, in a total of 772 houses. The previous name,
Al-Yahudiya, is thought to be taken from the name of the biblical town of Yahud, mentioned in (as part of a list of towns comprising the territory of the Israelite
tribe of Dan), and later called
Iudaea by the Romans. In 1932, the town was officially renamed Al-'Abbasiyya, because the inhabitants did not want the town to be associated with
Jews. The name chosen as a replacement, Al-'Abbasiyya, was mostly in honour of the memory of a
sheikh called al-'Abbas who was buried in the town, but also alluded to the Arab Muslim
Abbasid Caliphate. Of this, a total of 4,099 dunums was used for
citrus and
bananas, 1,019 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, 14,465 were for cereals, while 101 dunams were classified as built-up areas.
1948 and after On December 13, 1947, twenty-four armed men from the hard-right paramilitary organization
Irgun attacked the village, approaching from the Jewish town of
Petaḥ Tiqvah. The attackers wore khaki uniforms and drove through the village in four cars. One group fired on villagers at a cafe and another set bombs and grenades in houses. Seven Arabs were killed (two women and two children under the age of five) and seven others seriously wounded (two women and a four-year-old girl among them). An armored British police vehicle was fired upon by the attackers. On September 13, 1948,
David Ben-Gurion requested the destruction of Al-'Abbasiyya, among
other Palestinian villages whose inhabitants fled or were expelled. Between 1948 and 1954 the Israeli sites of
Yehud,
Magshimim,
Ganne Yehuda,
Ganne Tiqwa, and
Savyon were established on the land of Al-'Abbasiyya. In 1992 the village site was described: ==References==