1660 destruction of Safed

The 1660 destruction of Safed occurred during the Druze power struggle in Mount Lebanon, at the time of the rule of Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV. The towns of Safed and nearby Tiberias, with substantial Jewish communities, were destroyed in the turmoil. Only a few of the former residents of Safed had returned to the town after the destruction. Sholem considers the 1662 reports about the destruction of Safed as "exaggerated". The community however recovered within several years, whereas Tiberias lay in waste for decades.

Safed's central role in Jewish life in Galilee declined after the late 16th century, when it had been a major city with a population of 15,000 Jews. By the second half of the seventeenth century Safed still had a majority Jewish community with 200 "houses" and some 4,000 to 5,000 Jewish residents, while about 100 "houses" (multiple family units) in the town were Muslim. The district was under control of Druze emirs from the Maan family until 1660, when the Ottomans sought to regain local control by reorganizing the sanjaks of Safed and Sidon-Beirut into the new province of Sidon. From the 1658 death of Emir Mulhim Ma'n to 1667, a struggle for power between his sons and other Ottoman-backed Druze rulers took place in the region. Mulhim's son Ahmad Maʿn emerged victorious among the Druze, but the Maʿnīs lost control of the area and retreated to the Shuf mountains and Kisrawan. In the second half of the seventeenth century Safed became the capital of the Ottoman sanjak of the same name.

Adler, Franco and Mendelssohn claim that the destruction of Safed took place in 1660, Mendelssohn writing that the Jews of Safed "had suffered severely" when the city had been destroyed by the Arabs.

Gershom Scholem places the attack in 1662, and Rappel writes that by 1662 both Safed and Tiberias were destroyed, with only a few of former Safed's Jewish residents to return to the town. A publication by the General Council of the Jewish Community of Palestine states that the Druze of Lebanon raided and destroyed both Safed and Tiberias in 1662, "and the inhabitants fled to the adjacent villages, to Sidon or to Jerusalem".

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