Editing Safed (section)

====Pre-Crusader village and tower====
There is scarce information about Safed before the [[Crusaders|Crusader]] conquest.<ref name="Drory163">Drory 2004, p. 163.</ref><ref>Luz 2014, p. 33.</ref> A document from the [[Cairo Geniza]], composed in 1034, mentions a transaction made in Tiberias in 1023 by a certain Jew, Musa ben Hiba ben Salmun with the ''[[nisba (onomastics)|nisba]]'' (Arabic descriptive suffix) "al-Safati" (of Safed),<ref name="Drory163"/> indicating the presence of a Jewish community living alongside Muslims in Safed in the 11th century.<ref name="Barbé 2016, p. 63">Barbé 2016, p. 63.</ref> According to the Muslim historian [[Izz al-Din ibn Shaddad|Ibn Shaddad]] (d. 1285), at the beginning of the 12th century, a "flourishing village" beneath a tower called Burj Yatim had existed at the site of Safed on the eve of the Crusaders' capture of the area in 1101–1102 and that "nothing" about the village was mentioned in "the early Islamic history books".<ref name="Ellenblum179n15">Ellenblum 2007, p. 179, note 15.</ref> Although Ibn Shaddad mistakenly attributes the tower's construction to the [[Knights Templar]], the modern historian [[Ronnie Ellenblum]] asserts that the tower was likely built during the early Muslim period (mid-7th–11th centuries).<ref name="Ellenblum179n15"/>