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Palestine inhabited by a mixed population

The "chauvinist Arab version of history," then--so important to the current claim of "Palestinian" rights to "Arab Palestine," which Arab Palestinians purportedly inhabited for "thousands of years" --omits several relevant, situation-altering facts

History did not begin with the Arab conquest in the seventh century. The people whose nation was destroyed by the Romans were the Jews. There were no Arab Palestinians then -- not until seven hundred years later would an Arab rule prevail, and then briefly. And not by people known as "Palestinians." The short Arab rule would be reigning over Christians and Jews, who had been there to languish under various other foreign conquerors, -- Roman, Byzantine, Persian, to name just three in the centuries between the Roman and Arab conquests. The peoples who conquered under the banner of the invading Arabians from the desert were often hired mercenaries who remained on the land as soldiers -- not Arabians, but others who were enticed by the promise of the booty of conquest.

From the time the Arabians, along with their non-Arabian recruits, entered Palestine and Syria, they found and themselves added to what was "ethnologically a chaos of all the possible human combinations to which, when Palestine became a land of pilgrimage, a new admixture was added."1  Among the peoples who have been counted as "indigenous Palestinian Arabs" are Balkans, Greeks, Syrians, Latins, Egyptians, Turks, Armenians, Italians, Persians, Kurds, Germans, Afghans, Circassians, Bosnians, Sudanese, Samaritans, Algerians, Motawila, and Tartars.

John of Wurzburg lists for the middle era of the kingdom, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Scots, Navarese, Bretons, English, Franks, Ruthenians, Bohemians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Georgians, Armenians, Syrians, Persian Nestorians, Indians,Egyptians, Copts, Maronites and natives from the Nile Delta. The list might be much extended, for it was the period of the great self-willed city-states in Europe, and Amalfi, Pisans, Genoese, Venetians, and Marseillais, who had quarters in all  the bigger cities, owned villages, and had trading rights, would, in all probability, have submitted to any of the above designations, only under pressure. Besides all these, Norsemen, Danes, Frisians, Tartars, Jews, Arabs, Russians, Nubians, and Samaritans, can be safely added to the greatest human agglomeration drawn together in one small area of the globe."2
Greeks fled the Muslim rule in Greece, and landed in Palestine. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Greeks lived everywhere in the Holy Land--constituting about twenty percent of the population-and their authority dominated the villages.3
 
Between 1750 and 1766 Jaffa had been rebuilt, and had some five hundred houses. Turks, Arabs, Greeks and Armenians and a solitary Latin monk lived there, to attend to the wants of the thousands of pilgrims who had to be temporarily housed in the port before proceeding to Jerusalem.4
"In some cases villages [in Palestine] are populated wholly by settlers from other portions of the Turkish Empire within the nineteenth century. There are villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians," one historian has reported. 5

Another source, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911 edition (before the "more chauvinist Arab history" began to prevail with the encouragement of the British), finds the "population" of Palestine composed of so "widely differing" a group of "inhabitants" -- whose "ethnological affinities" create "early in the 20th century a list of no less than fifty languages" (see below)  -- that "it is therefore no easy task to write concisely ... on the ethnology of Palestine." In addition to the "Assyrian, Persian and Roman" elements of ancient times, "the short-lived Egyptian government introduced into the population an element from that country which still persists in the villages."

. . . There are very large contingents from the Mediterranean countries, especially Armenia, Greece and Italy . . . Turkoman settlements ... a number of Persians and a fairly large Afghan colony . . . Motawila ... long settled immigrants from Persia ... tribes of Kurds ... German "Templar" colonies ... a Bosnian colony ... and the Circassian settlements placed in certain centres ... by the Turkish government in order to keep a restraint on the Bedouin ... a large Algerian element in the population ... still maintain(s) [while] the Sudanese have been reduced in numbers since the beginning of the 20th century.
In the late eighteenth century, 3,000 Albanians recruited by Russians were settled in Acre. The Encyclopaedia Britannica finds "most interesting all the non-Arab communities in the country . . . the Samaritan sect in Nablus (Shechem); a gradually disappearing body" once "settled by the Assyrians to occupy the land left waste by the captivity of the Kingdom of Israel."6

The disparate peoples recently assumed and purported to be "settled Arab indigenes, for a thousand years" were in fact a "heterogeneous" community 7 With no "Palestinian" identity, and according to an official British historical analysis in 1920, no Arab identity either: "The people west of the Jordan are not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking. The bulk of the population are fellahin.... In the Gaza district they are mostly of Egyptian origin; elsewhere they are of the most mixed race." 8
 

Birthplaces of Inhabitants of Jerusalem. District circa 1931

Moslems Chnstians Others
Palestine
Syria
Transiordan
Cyprus
Egypt

Hejaz-Nejd

Iraq
Yemen
Other Arabian
  Territories

Persia

Turkey

Central Asiatic
  Territories

Indian Continent

Far Eastern Asia

Algeria
Morocco
Tripoli
Tunis
Other African
  Territories

Albania
France

Greece
Spain
United Kingdom

U.S.S.R.
U.S.A.
Central & South
  America

Australia

Palestine
Syria
Transiordan
Cyprus
Malta

Other Mediterranean
  Islands

Abyssinia
Egypt

Hejaz-Neid
Iraq

Other Arabian
  Territories

Persia
Turkey

Central Asiatic
Territories

Indian Continent

Far Eastern Asia

Algeria
Morocco

Tripoli

Tunis
Other African
  Territories

Albania
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Czechoslovakia
Denmark

France
Germany
Gibraltar
Greece
Holland
Italy
Latvia
Lithuania
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Rumania
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom

U.S.S.R.
Yugoslavia

Canada
U.S.A.
Central & South
  America

Australia

Palestine
Syria
Egypt
Persia
Czechoslovakia

Poland

Rumania
Switzeriand
United Kingdom

U.S.S.R.

Languages In Habitual Use In Palestine circa 1931

Moslems Chnstians Others
Afghan
Albanian
Arabic
Bosnian
Chinese
Circassian
English
French
German
Greek
Gypsy
Hebrew
Hindustani
Indian dialects
Javanese
Kurdish
Persian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Sudanese
Takrurian
Turkish
Abyssinian
Arabic
Armenian
Basque
Brazilian [sic]
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chaldean
Chinese
Circassian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Finnish
Flemish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindustani
Indian dialects
Irish
Italian
Kurdish
Latin
Magyar
Malayalam
Maltese
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Rumanian
Russian
Serbian
Slavic
Spanish
Sudanese
Swedish
Swiss
Syrian
Turkish
Welsh
Arabic
Czech
English
French
German
Hebrew
Persian
Polish
Russian
Spanish
Yiddish

Source: Census of Palestine --1931, volume 1, Palesfine; Part 1, Report by E. Mills, B.A., O.B.E., Assistant Chief Secretary Superintendent of Census (Alexandria, 1933), p. 147.

1. Richard Hartmann, Palestina unter den Araben, 632-1516 (Leipzig, 1915), cited by de Haas, History, p. 147.

2. De Haas, History, p. 258. John of Wurzburg list from Reinhold Rohricht edition, pp. 41, 69.

3. F. Eugene Roger, La Terre Sainte (Paris, 1637), p. 331, cited by de Haas, History, p. 342.

4. Frederich Hasselquist, Reise nach Palastina, etc., 1749-52 (Rostock, 1762), p. 598, cited by de Haas, History, p. 355.

5. Parkes, Whose Land?, p. 212. See Chapters 13 and 14. 

6. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. XX, p. 604.

7. Ibid.

8 .In a handbook, prepared under the direction of the historical section of the Foreign Office, no. 60, entitled "Syria and Palestine" (London, 1920), p. 56.
 

This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst 
Brooklyn, New York 
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