"[4] The city is identified with Shefar'am, an ancient Jewish town of great significance during Talmudic times.

Some have proposed that its original meaning may be linked to the Hebrew words "Shefer" (שֶׁפֶר), signifying something nice, beautiful or good, and "'Am", (עַם) which translates to people.

[12] A salvage dig was conducted in the southern quarter of the old city exposing remains from five phases in the Late Byzantine and early Umayyad periods.

Finds include a tabun oven, a pavement of small fieldstones, a mosaic pavement that was probably part of a wine press treading floor, a small square wine press, handmade kraters, an imported Cypriot bowl and an open cooking pot.

[15] The village, then called "Shafar 'Am", was used by Muslim leader Saladin between 1190–91 and 1193-94 as a military base for attacks on Acre.

[17] Italian monk Riccoldo da Monte di Croce visited the village in 1287–88, and noted that it had Christian inhabitants.

[18] It apparently was under Mamluk control by 1291,[19][20] as it was mentioned in that year when sultan al-Ashraf Khalil allocated the town's income to a charitable organization in Cairo.

[22] A 1573 firman (decree) mentioned that Shefa-Amr was among a group of villages in the nahiya (sub district) of Acre in rebellion against the state.

[25] The taxable produce also comprised occasional revenues, goats and beehives, and the inhabitants paid for the use or ownership of an olive oil press.

Uthman and his brothers Ahmad and Sa'id besieged the village in 1765 but were repulsed by its local defenders with Zahir's support.

[37] After Zahir's death in 1775, the Ottoman-appointed governor Jazzar Pasha allowed Uthman to continue as subgovernor of Shefa-Amr in return for a promise of loyalty and advance payment of taxes.

[39] Several years later Uthman was removed and replaced by Ibrahim Abu Qalush, an appointee of Jazzar Pasha,[29] who rebelled against him in 1789.

[40] A map by Pierre Jacotin from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 showed the place, named as Chafa Amr.

[43] Their condition worsened with the departure of the autonomous leader of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, during which time Shefa-Amr was nearly emptied of its Jewish residents, who had opted to move to Haifa and Tiberias.

"[45] Conder and Kitchener, who visited in 1875, was told that the community consisted of "2,500 souls—1,200 being Moslems, the rest Druses, Greeks, and Latins.

"[46] The town's Druze community dwindled considerably in the 1880s as its members migrated east to the Hauran plain to avoid conscription by the Ottoman authorities.

[58] On 16 May 2004, Whehebe Moheen, a man in his sixties, murdered Manal Najeeb Abu Raed, his widowed daughter-in-law, wife of his son, and mother of his two granddaughters.

[59] Manal had lost her husband to cancer two years earlier, and was living in the couple's home, in the Druze village of Daliat El Carmel, near Haifa.

[59] Following the speeches, the dignitaries signed the sulha (reconciliation) agreement, and after the document was declared officially endorsed, the killer's family handed the leader of the sulha committee, Sheikh Muafak Tarif, a bag containing the blood money (diya) compensation, and Tarif handed the bag to cousins of the murdered woman.

[59] The bag contained 200,000 NIS (about US$50,000), about half what a "normal" conciliation payment would be, but the killer's family refused to bring more money, claiming that they had no resources, and were not prepared to make themselves bankrupt because of a "crazy" uncle.

[59] On 4 August 2005, an Israeli soldier who was absent without leave, Eden Natan-Zada, opened fire while aboard a bus in the city, killing four Arab residents and wounding twenty-two others.

The four fatalities were two sisters in their early twenties, Hazar and Dina Turki, and two men, bus driver Michel Bahouth and Nader Hayek.

[citation needed] The elevation of the city and its strategic location as the connection between the valleys and mountains of Galilee made it more than once the center of its district, especially in the period of Uthman, the son of Zahir al-Umar, who built a castle in it, and towers around it.

[63] During the early 1950s, about 25,000 dunams of the land of Shefa-Amr were expropriated by the following method: the land was declared a closed military area, then after enough time had passed for it to have become legally "uncultivated", the Minister of Agriculture used his powers to "ensure that it was cultivated" by giving it to neighboring Jewish majority communities.

In collaboration with Waldorf educators at Harduf the school developed a language curriculum accommodating the differences between written and spoken Arabic.

Oud player and violinist Tayseer Elias, on the Beit Almusica staff, is a composer, conductor and musicologist who also lectures at Bar-Ilan University.

Sa'eed Salame, an actor, comedian and pantomimist, established a 3-day international pantomime festival that is held annually.

The Awt Cafe started holding musical nights where local singers and instruments players including oud and others perform for the audience.