The village was situated at the northern foot of Mount Carmel, about 2 km east of the Arab town of 'Isfiya. AI-Jalama was classified as a hamlet by the Mandate Palestine Index Gazetteer. The Haifa-Nazareth highway passed about 100 m to the north of it. Just below al-Jalama was Khirbat Asafna, where the village had been located in earlier times. It was excavated by the University of Missouri with the support of the Corning Glass Company from 1964 to 1971. These excavations revealed that the site had been occupied intermittently from the first to the fourth century A.D. The chief interest of the site for the investigators was the glass factory there, the production of glass at which reached its peak in the fourth century A.D. 
Most villages in the vicinity of al-Jalama were captured immediately before or shortly after the fall of Haifa. In the instructions to the Haganah brigades contained in Plan Dalet, the Carmeli Brigade was assigned the task of controlling the road between Haifa and al-Jalama, according to the History of the Haganah. This probably occurred in the last week of April and early in May 1948, when Zionist forces occupied a cluster of villages in Haifa's hinterland, such as Balad al-Shaykh. The inhabitants may have been driven out at this time.