[........]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." 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."
Greeks fled the Muslim rule in Greece, and landed in Palestine. By the mid-17 century, the Greeks lived everywhere in the Holy Land--constituting about 20% of the population-and their authority dominated the villages.
Between 1750 & 1766 Jaffa had been rebuilt, and had some 500 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.
"In some cases villages [in Palestine] are populated Wholly by settlers from other portions of the Turkish Empire within the 19th century. There are villages of Bosnians, Druzes, Circassians and Egyptians," one historian has reported.
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 50 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 18th 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 Disparate peoples recently assumed and purported to be "settled Arab indigenes, for a thousand years" were in fact a "Heterogeneous" community 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."
