[3] Together with the adjacent village of Bi'ina it formed the site of the Crusader monastery town of St. George de la Beyne, an administrative center of the eponymous fief which spanned part of the central Galilee.

Control of the fief changed several times from the noble Milly family to Joscelyn III of Courtenay and ultimately to the Teutonic Order before the area passed to Mamluk rule in the late 13th century.

Settlement continued under the Mamluks and the village's St. George monastery was mentioned as treating the mentally ill in the late 14th century.

[12] A Mamluk source active as the Islamic head judge of Safad in the 1370s, Shams al-Din al-Uthmani, noted that the monastery treated the mentally ill.[12] According to Ottoman waqf (religious endowment) documents from 1838 and likely as early as the 16th century, historical accounts, and local folklore, Deir al-Asad was granted to the 16th-century Sufi sage Shaykh Muhammad al-Asad, who was also known as Ibn Abd Allah al-Asadi, and bore the alternative epithets al-Safadi (of Safed) or al-Biqa'i (of the Beqaa Valley).

[17] Although local folklore attributes the name Asad (Arabic for lion) to his taming of a lion, Layish surmises that the name was already established; by his summation, Shaykh al-Asad was possibly a kinsman of Asad al-Sham Abd Allah al-Yunini (d. 1220) from Younin in the Beqaa Valley, who was a Sufi mystic and warrior in the army of Saladin in the wars against the Crusaders, or a descendant of Saladin through the latter's son al-Aziz Uthman.

[19] Al-Burini's account holds that Shaykh al-Asad was granted the village to settle in with his children and Sufi devotees and that its original Christian inhabitants were expelled by the sultan's order; Layish theorizes that the sultan intended for the village to become a Muslim nucleus in order to strengthen Islamic control of the "security sensitive" area whose proximity to the coast left it vulnerable to European Christian penetration.

[20] Shaykh al-Asad was concurrently appointed the imam of the mosque established in the monastery of St. George and as the administrator of the waqf property.

[22] The attraction to Deir al-Asad during the early Ottoman era may have stemmed from its inhabitants' exemption from army service and the village's reputation as a refuge, including for criminals evading government pursuit.

[23] According to local tradition, two brothers whose descendants formed Deir al-Asad's Dabbah clan settled in the village's upper neighborhood in the 18th century.

[26] Deir al-Asad and nearby Bi'ina were both inhabited by members of the Druze community when Victor Guérin visited in the 1875,[27] but by the late 1870s, they had emigrated to the Hauran to avoid conscription by the Ottoman army.

[28] In the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) in 1881, Deir al-Asad was described as a village of 600 Muslims, containing a few ruins of the original Christian settlement.

[37] Village notables officially surrendered to Israeli forces the next day and Israel's Golani Brigade entered on 31 October.

[40] A number of Deir al-Asad's inhabitants became refugees in Lebanon and some 2,500 members of the village's Asadi clan resided in the Ain al-Hilweh camp in 1982.

The village produced enough meat, fruit, wheat and vegetables for its inhabitants and sold the surplus in Acre or Nazareth.

In 1962 its land in the Majd al-Kurum valley was expropriated for the Karmiel town project, stripping the village of its most fertile acres and irreparably harming the local economy in the process.

[46] The mosque and tomb of Shaykh al-Asad al-Safadi is a two-domed structure, situated about 50 meters (160 ft) south of the Crusader abbey and church remains.