Iron Age In the ancient period, the area where the village stands was occupied by the
necropolis of the Biblical kingdom. According to the
Hebrew Bible, Siloam was built around the "
serpent-stone",
Zoheleth, where
Adonijah gave his feast in the time of
Solomon. , from the lintel of
Shebna-yahu's tomb The
Siloam inscription was discovered in the
water tunnel built during the reign of
Hezekiah, in the early 7th century BC. The Siloam inscription is now preserved in the
Archeological Museum of Istanbul, Turkey. Another important inscription found at Siloam is the lintel of
Shebna-yahu's tomb (known as the
Shebna Inscription), which is in the collections of the
British Museum. In 2004, archaeologists excavating the site for the
Israel Antiquities Authority found biblical-era coins marked with ancient Hebrew writing, pottery shards and a stone bottle cork that confirmed the identification of the site as the biblical Siloam Pool.
Roman Empire The King's Garden was used as a staging area for Jewish pilgrims who, during the
festivals of
Passover,
Shavuot and
Sukkot, used the spring-fed
Pool of Siloam to wash and ritually purify themselves before ascending the
monumental stepped street to the Temple Mount while singing hymns based on Psalms. On
Sukkot water was brought from the Pool of Siloam to the Temple and poured upon the altar and the priests also drank of this water. In the
New Testament, the collapse of the
Tower of Siloam is cited by Jesus as one of two examples where sudden, untimely death came to people who didn't necessarily deserve it more than most other sinful people. According to the
Gospel of John, Jesus healed a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man's eyes. He then told the man, "Go wash yourself in the
Pool of Siloam." So the man went and washed and came back seeing.
Josephus described the waters of Siloam as "sweet and abundant". During the general
outbreak of hostilities between the Jewish nation and the Roman Imperial army in ca. 66
CE,
Simon bar Giora controlled all of the "Upper City" where he made his place of residence in the
Phasael tower before abandoning it, and part of the "Lower City" (
Acra) as far as the great wall in the Kidron Valley and the
fountain of Siloam, now in Silwan.
Byzantine Empire A pool and church were built at Siloam by the
Byzantine empress
Eudocia (c. 400–460 CE) to commemorate Jesus' miraculous healing of the blind. In medieval Islamic tradition, the spring of Silwan (Ayn Silwan) was among the four most
sacred water sources in the world. The others were
Zamzam in
Mecca, Ayn Falus in
Beisan and Ayn al-Baqar in
Acre. Silwan is mentioned as "Sulwan" by the 10th-century
Arab writer and traveller
al-Muqaddasi. In his 985 book he noted that (as rendered in the edition by
Le Strange) "The village of Sulwan is a place on the outskirts of the city [Jerusalem]. Below the village of 'Ain Sulwan (Spring of Siloam), of fairly good water, which irrigates the large gardens which were given in bequest (
Waqf) by the Khalif
'Othman ibn 'Affan for the poor of the city. Lower down than this, again, is Job's Well (Bir Ayyub). It is said that on the Night of 'Arafat the water of the holy well
Zamzam, at
Makkah, comes underground to the water of the Spring (of Siloam). The people hold a festival here on that evening."
Moshe Gil interprets statements by Muqaddasi (writing in 985),
Nasir-i Khusraw (1047), and
Yaqut (1225), as meaning that what they called the Spring of Silwan, must be a water source located at quite a distance farther south, Khusraw actually indicated a distance of around 3 kilometers from Jerusalem's walls.
Ottoman Empire , ca. 1890 , by
Bonfils, ca. 1890 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 began in 1873–1874, when the
Meyuchas family moved out of the
Old City to a new home on the ridge. It was called
Wadi Hilweh in Arabic. In books published between 1888 and 1911, travellers describe the valley floor as verdant and cultivated, with the stony village perched along the top of the eastern ridge hillside. Explorer
Gustaf Dalman (1855–1941) describes the manner in which the villagers of Silwan irrigated their vegetable crop which they planted on terraces. 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. Between 1885 and 1891, 45 new stone houses were built for a Yemenite Jewish community in what is now the
Batn al-Hawa area of Silwan. The neighbourhood included a place of worship now known as the
Old Yemenite Synagogue. In 1896 the population of Silwan was estimated to be about 939 persons. In 1911, amateur archaeologist
Montagu Parker claimed the then Mount Ophel area was the location of the "ancient City of David." In 1913, Jewish-French professional archaeologist
Raymond Weill (1874–1950) investigated the site and agreed it was "the City of David."
British Mandate At the time of the
1922 census of Palestine, "Selwan (Kfar Hashiloah)" had a population of 1,901 persons; 1,699 Muslims, 153 Jews and 49 Christians, where the Christians were 16 Roman Catholics and 33 Syrian Catholics. In the same year, Baron
Edmond de Rothschild bought several acres of land there and transferred it to the
Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. By the time of the
1931 census, Silwan had 630 occupied houses and a population of 2968; 2,553 Muslims, 124 Jews and 91 Christians (the last including the Latin, Greek and St. Stephens convents). In the
1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine, the Yemenite community was removed from Silwan by the Welfare Bureau of the
Va'ad Leumi into the Jewish Quarter as security conditions for Jews worsened, and in 1938, the remaining
Yemenite Jews in Silwan were evacuated by the Jewish Community Council on the advice of the police. According to documents in the custodian office and real estate and project advancement expert Edmund Levy, the homes of the Yemenite Jews were occupied by Arab families without registering ownership. , in 2005, looking towards the
Israeli West Bank barrier near the Old City In the twentieth century, Silwan grew northward towards Jerusalem, expanding from a small farming village into an urban neighborhood. Modern Arab Silwan encompasses Old Silwan (generally to the south), the Yemenite village (to the north), and the once-vacant land between. Today Silwan follows the ridge of the southern peak of the
Mount of Olives to the east of the Kidron Valley, from the
ridge west of the
Ophel up to the
southern wall of the
Temple Mount/
Haram al-Sharif. In the
1945 statistics the population of Silwan was 3,820; 3,680 Muslims and 140 Christians, with a total of 5,421
dunams of land according to an official land and population survey. Of this, Arabs used 58 dunams for plantations and irrigable land and 2,498 for cereals, while Jews used 51 for cereals. A total of 172 dunams were classified as built-up (urban) land. The United Nations 1947 partition plan for Palestine included Silwan together with Jerusalem and Bethlehem in an international
Corpus Separatum. Benny Morris wrote that the Israel's supporters rejoiced at the passage of the plan, while the Arab delegations walked out. However, both countries refused the full plan, but were initially willing to consider a smaller level of internationalization. After the 1948–1949 war, the area was divided between Israel and Jordan
along the 1949 armistice line. More limited offers of internationalization were discussed informally, but agreement was never reached.
Jordan After the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, Silwan came
under Jordanian administration along with the rest of the West Bank, and land there owned by Jews was managed by the Jordanian
Custodian of Enemy Property. Jordan
annexed the area in stages after capturing it. Most countries did not accept
annexation by Jordan. Silwan was annexed to the Jordanian municipality of Jerusalem in 1961. It remained under Jordanian rule until 1967, when Israel captured the Old City and surrounding region. Until then, the village had delegates in the Jerusalem City Council.
Israel Since the 1967
Six-Day War Silwan has been under
Israeli occupation, and Jewish organizations have sought to re-establish a Jewish presence there. The
Ir David Foundation and the
Ateret Cohanim organizations are promoting resettlement of Jews in the neighborhood in cooperation with the Committee for the Renewal of the Yemenite Village in Shiloah. In 1987, the Permanent Representative of Jordan to the United Nations wrote to the Secretary-General to inform him of Israeli settlement activity; his letter noted that an Israeli company had taken over two Palestinian houses in the neighborhood of
al-Bustan, after evicting their occupants, claiming the houses were its property.
Wadi Hilweh, an area of Silwan close to the southern wall of the Old City, and its neighborhood of al-Bustan, has been ever since a focus of Jewish settlement.
Jewish settlements In 1991, a movement was formed to promote Jewish settlement in Silwan. Some Silwan properties had already been declared
absentee property in the 1980s, and suspicions arose that a number of claims filed by Jewish organizations had been accepted by the Custodian without any site visits or follow-up. Property in Silwan has been purchased by Jews through indirect sales, some by invoking the
Absentee Property Law. In other cases, the
Jewish National Fund signed protected tenant agreements that enabled construction to proceed without a tender process. As of 2004, more than 50 Jewish families live in the area, some in homes acquired from Arabs who claim they did not know they were selling their homes to Jews, some in
Beit Yonatan. In 2003, Ateret Cohanim built a seven-storey apartment building known as Beit Yonatan (named for
Jonathan Pollard) without a permit. In 2007, the courts ordered the eviction of the residents, but the building was approved retroactively. In 2008 a plan was submitted for a building complex including a synagogue, 10 apartments, a kindergarten, a library and underground parking for 100 cars in a location 200 meters from the Old City walls. Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, which changed its name to
T'ruah in 2012, accused Elad of creating a "method of expelling citizens from their properties, appropriating public areas, enclosing these lands with fences and guards, and banning the entrance of the local residents...under the protection of a private security force." Approximately 1,500 supporters of RHR-NA/T'ruah wrote to Russell Robinson, CEO of JNF-US, to demand an end to the eviction of a Silwan family. Overnight on September 30, 2014, at 1:30 am, settlers, supported by police officers and reportedly connected to the
Ir David Foundation, commonly known as Elad, entered 25 houses in 7 buildings which previously belonged to several Palestinian families in the neighborhood, in what was the largest Israeli purchase of homes in Silwan since 1986. Most were vacant, but in one house where a family was evicted a confrontation broke out. Details concerning the process whereby the properties were purchased are lacking, but Palestinian middle men appear to be involved, buying the six houses, and then selling them to a private American company, Kendall Finance. Elad stated that the houses had been bought properly and legally. Advertisements were posted on Facebook offering Jewish ex-army veterans $140 a day to sit in the properties until families move in. Some of the Palestinian families claiming ownership intended to get the settlers out by taking legal steps. White House spokesman
Josh Earnest, in a condemnation of the takeover, described the new occupants as "individuals who are associated with an organization whose agenda, by definition, stokes tensions between Israelis and Palestinians." Israeli prime minister
Benjamin Netanyahu was "baffled" by US criticism, deeming it "un-American" to criticize the legal purchase of homes in East Jerusalem to either Jews or Arabs. On June 15, 2016, Jerusalem's City Hall approved the construction of a three-storey residential house for Jews wishing to make Silwan their home. A ruling handed down by the Jerusalem Magistrats Court in January 2020 gave a substantial boost to efforts by the settler organization
Ateret Cohanim to evict large numbers of Palestinians in Silwan from their homes. The organization managed to take over control of an Ottoman era (19th century) Jewish trust, called the Benvenisti Trust after Rabbi Moshe Benvenisti, and claims that land in areas of Silwan, such as the Batan al-Hawa neighborhood, was 'sacred religious land' and that Palestinians residing on this trust land were illegal squatters. The decisions are thought to effectively threaten with displacement some 700 Palestinians in Silwan.
The Sumreen (or Sumarin) family The house where the family lives is in the middle of an area designated by Israel as "the City of David National Park." where a right-wing, pro-settler organization,
Elad, runs an archaeological and biblical theme park known as
City of David. In December 2011, a board member of the Jewish National Fund's US fundraising arm resigned in protest after a 20-year legal process came to a head with an order for the eviction of a Palestinian family from a JNF-owned home. The home had been acquired via the Absentee Property Law. Several days before the order was carried out, JNF announced it would be delayed. In 2011 the verdict was overturned. In 2017, the claim was successfully renewed. In September 2019, the Sumreen family lost an appeal and appealed to the District Court. In June 2020, the appeal was rejected. On 9 January 2022, following receipt of an opinion stating "there is no objection to the expulsion" from Israeli Attorney General
Avichai Mandelblit, a decision by the Supreme Court is awaited. On 3 April 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against eviction and that the JNF's subsidiary Heimanuta must pay compensation of 20,000 shekels ($5,560).
Housing demolition and construction permits In 2005, the Israeli government planned to demolish 88 Arab homes in al-Bustan neighborhood built without permits but they were not found illegal in a municipal court. According to the State Comptroller's report, there were 130 illegal structures in Silwan in 2009, a tenfold increase since 1967. When enforcement of the building code began in al-Bustan in 1995, thirty illegal structures were found, mostly old residential buildings. By 2004, the number of illegal structures rose to 80. The municipality launched legal proceedings against 43 and demolished 10, but these were soon replaced by new buildings. They also say that as of 2009, the vast majority of buildings in the neighborhood were built without permits, in particular in al-Bustan. In 2010, Ir Amim's petition to halt a municipal zoning plan for the City of David area was rejected. The plan does not call for demolition of illegal construction, but rather regulates where construction may continue. The group said that the plan favored the interests of Elad and the neighborhood's Jewish residents, while Elad said that the plan allotted only 15 percent of construction to Jews versus 85 percent to Arab residents. The
mukhtar of Silwan objected to Ir Amim's petition against the plan. "We have said that there are good aspects of the plan and there are bad aspects of the plan, we're still working it all out. But to come and say that the whole plan is bad, and to ask that it be done away with, then what have you accomplished? Nothing."
Torching of olive trees In May 2010, a group of Israeli settlers torched "an 11-Dunam olive orchard in al-Rababa valley, in Silwan, south of the Old City of Jerusalem" which included the destruction of three olive trees that were over 300 years old. In a 2011
New York Times article, these attacks were called
"price tag" attacks. ==Demography==