It started with this video by And suddenly I found myself digging through Ottoman records, British government documents, old maps, census reports, parliamentary debates, immigration files, academic papers and more videos, trying to track down what she was talking about.
And boy, did I uncover a lot.
What began as one video turned into a much bigger history than I expected, with Egyptians, Hauranis, Bosnians, Algerians, Circassians, Sudanese, Syrian political refugees, foreign fighters, Ottoman resettlement programs and even Akko’s history as a penal colony all showing up in the documents.
So grab a bottle of water. Or a bottle of wine. Maybe the wine.
This is a long one. But there was no way to tell this story without following the people, the documents, and the history wherever they led.
In the years before Egypt invaded Ottoman Palestine in 1831, thousands of Egyptian peasants were already crossing the border.
They were fleeing Muhammad Ali’s government, where heavy taxation, compulsory labor and military conscription had made escape one way of avoiding the state. Correspondence preserved in the Royal Archives of Egypt places Egyptian fugitives in the districts of Jerusalem, Nablus and Gaza. An Ottoman document dated December 24, 1831 puts the number who had fled into Ottoman Syria at approximately 6,000. Muhammad Ali demanded their return, while Abdullah Pasha, the powerful governor based in Akko, resisted his attempts to retrieve them.
The dispute became one of the disputes surrounding Muhammad Ali’s confrontation with Abdullah Pasha and the Egyptian invasion that followed. Ibrahim Pasha’s army conquered Palestine and Syria, beginning nearly a decade of Egyptian rule and bringing another movement of soldiers, administrators, workers, merchants, military support personnel and families north. When Egyptian forces withdrew in 1840–41, the people who had established lives there didn’t all leave with them.
This is where the population history becomes much greater than one migration. Palestine was between Egypt, Syria, Arabia and the Mediterranean, inside an Ottoman Empire that constantly moved soldiers, refugees, prisoners, officials and displaced communities across enormous distances. People arrived through conquest, work, pilgrimage, slavery, political exile and government resettlement. Tribal groups crossed into new grazing lands. Refugees were given land. Political fugitives escaped across borders. Governments deliberately established communities where they wanted them.
By the time Britain began formally counting Palestine’s inhabitants after World War I, generations of these families had already been absorbed into the Arabic-speaking population. BUT…earlier documents still preserve their origins.
The Egyptian presence remained visible long after Ibrahim Pasha’s army withdrew. Egyptian communities developed around Gaza, Jaffa, the coastal plain and other areas, and nineteenth-century observers could still identify them as Egyptian. An 1863 British Admiralty map of Jaffa is particularly striking because it labels a settlement outside the city simply “Egyptian Village.” The map wasn’t reconstructing some ancient migration. British cartographers were labeling a community they could see.
Philip Baldensperger, born in Jerusalem in 1856 and later a contributor to the Palestine Exploration Fund, described communities including Zarnuqa and Qubeiba as Egyptian in origin. The surrounding fellahin, Arabic-speaking peasant farmers and agricultural villagers, still called their inhabitants Masriyyin, meaning Egyptians. Decades after Egyptian rule had ended, neighboring villagers remembered who had come from Egypt.
Jaffa preserved this history particularly well because newcomers established saknāt, residential settlements or quarters beyond the old city. Egyptian migration continued during the British Mandate as well. Immigration records include the case of an Egyptian laborer named Sayed who entered Haifa in 1931, found a series of jobs and remained for years. When authorities tried to deport him, he appealed and supplied letters from employers. His file captures the ordinary side of migration: a man crossed a border because there was work, built a life and tried to stay.
The Egyptian movement therefore stretched across very different periods. There were peasants fleeing Muhammad Ali before the conquest, people associated with the Egyptian administration and army after 1831, communities that remained after Egyptian withdrawal, and later workers drawn by Palestine’s expanding economy. Those streams eventually disappeared into a much broader Arab population, but the documents still separate them.
Egyptian rule and regional trade also brought Africans into Palestine. The British Government’s 1922 * Handbook of Palestine* described an African population around the lower Jordan Valley and Dead Sea and specifically mentioned
Jaffa contained a community known as Saknat al-Abid (Harat al-Abeed) commonly translated as the “quarter of the slaves.” Historical accounts associate its inhabitants with black Africans, including Sudanese whose presence was connected to the Egyptian period. Baldensperger later encountered black Africans living among Jaffa’s Egyptian communities and described different paths by which they had arrived. Some had been enslaved, some had been freed or escaped bondage, and others had traveled through pilgrimage routes and remained.
Jerusalem also maintained Muslim pilgrim lodgings serving travelers from Sudan, North Africa, India, Afghanistan, Bukhara and elsewhere. Pilgrimage was another route through which temporary movement could become permanent settlement. A traveler found work, married, remained, raised children, and within generations the family’s distant origin could become little more than a memory.
The nineteenth century brought enormous forced population movements across Ottoman territory. Russian expansion through the Caucasus expelled Muslim communities, while European advances through the Balkans displaced others. French conquest in North Africa sent Algerian Muslims eastward. The Ottoman government faced huge refugee populations at the same time it was trying to strengthen vulnerable territories, increase agricultural production and reinforce political control.
Palestine became one of the places where these populations were settled.
Circassians driven from the Caucasus were established across the Levant, including communities at Kafr Kama and Rehaniya in Galilee. The 1922 British handbook describes Sultan Abdul Hamid II using Circassian refugee settlement as part of imperial policy. Circassians were useful to the state as agricultural settlers, and some later served in the Gendarmerie. Their communities were connected to the wider Ottoman strategy of placing Muslim refugees in areas where the government wanted dependable settlements and stronger administrative control.
Algerian Muslims provide another substantial example. Following the French conquest of Algeria beginning in 1830, Algerian refugees migrated into Ottoman lands, and Ottoman authorities facilitated settlement in Palestine. Algerian communities became established around Safed and Tiberias and in villages including Marus, Tulayl, al-Husayniyya, Dayshum, Ma’dhar, Kafr Sabt, Samakh, Awlam and Hawsha. Research on these communities has estimated roughly 4,000 Muslim Algerians in Palestine by 1928 and more than 6,000 by 1948.
Their arrival also belonged to an older North African presence. The British handbook traced Maghrebi, or North African, migration into Syria and Palestine to the eighteenth century, when North Africans could be found serving among the mercenary infantry of Ottoman pashas. Others came as pilgrims, religious settlers and later refugees. By the beginning of the Mandate, British officials estimated roughly 1,900 Magharbeh in Galilee.
The Algerian villages are especially important because they show how quickly the language of migration changes. A refugee community established in the nineteenth century could become a village whose children and grandchildren were born in Palestine. By the twentieth century those descendants could be counted as part of the local Arab population even though the circumstances of their ancestors’ arrival remained well documented.
The Bosnian story deserves more attention because it provides one of the clearest examples of government-assisted Muslim resettlement in Palestine.
After Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, Muslim families began leaving for territory that remained under Ottoman rule. Political uncertainty, military conscription and fear about life under Christian imperial administration contributed to a much larger Bosnian Muslim exodus. Ottoman authorities received these refugees and helped determine where some of them would settle.
Approximately 50 Bosnian Muslim families were settled at Qisarya, ancient Caesarea, in the early 1880s. They mostly came from Herzegovina, including areas around Mostar, Trebinje, Stolac and Čapljina. They weren’t simply joining an established Arab town. Ancient Caesarea had largely become ruins, and the newcomers built a new community among and around them.
By the late 1880s, travelers were describing substantial stone houses with tiled roofs. The Bosnian settlers built a mosque, storage buildings and a boys’ elementary school. Caesarea developed into an administrative center for the surrounding area, while the settlers employed neighboring Arab fellahin, traded with surrounding villages and increasingly became part of the social world around them.
Bosnian settlement wasn’t confined entirely to Caesarea. Research into Ottoman refugee settlement also identifies Bosnian families associated with Yanun in the Nablus district and Rummana in the Jenin district, while Circassian, Turkish and other Balkan families entered some of the same broader settlement networks.
The Bosnian identity can still be seen preserved in family names. Bushnaq, a Levantine family name derived from Bosniak or Bosnian, continued to identify Bosnian origin even as the families became Arabic-speaking and integrated into surrounding society. The Institute for Palestine Studies describes the Caesarea Bosnians as eventually becoming an integral part of the Palestinian people.
Their Palestinian identity developed in Palestine. Their Bosnian migration remained part of their history.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire didn’t end population movement. Britain’s first census of Palestine explicitly records tribal migration into the Beersheba region from the Hejaz and southern Transjordan after 1914. The Hejaz is the western region of the Arabian Peninsula containing Mecca and Medina, while southern Transjordan lay immediately east of Palestine.
British officials attributed the movement partly to favorable rainfall around Beersheba and partly to pressure from competing tribes east of the Jordan. Ottoman authorities had estimated the tribal population around Beersheba at approximately 55,000 in 1914. The British later estimated the southern tribal population at 72,898, although many Bedouin tribes refused normal census enumeration, forcing officials to rely on tithe records, administrative estimates and information supplied by tribal sheikhs.
The useful evidence isn’t obtained by subtracting those two imperfect numbers. The census superintendent directly recorded migration from the Hejaz and southern Transjordan into Palestine during the years immediately preceding Britain’s first census. Arab tribal movement across the new political boundaries was still occurring while British officials were trying to establish who lived inside them.
The economic expansion of the 1930s created another powerful attraction. Workers came south from the Hauran, an agricultural region covering southern Syria and extending toward today’s northern Jordan. Palestine offered wages, and Haurani labor became common enough to generate concern inside the Mandate administration.
By 1935, the issue had reached the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. Lord Lugard raised a report attributed to the governor of Hauran claiming that ** 30,000 to 36,000 Hauranis had entered Palestine during the preceding months and settled there**. British officials rejected the estimate as far too high, while their internal paperwork shows how seriously they were treating the migration.
The surviving files include “Police: Deportation of Hauranis,” “Deportation of Hauranis” and a Criminal Investigation Department “Report on Hauranis in Palestine.” In January 1937, Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore received another paper titled “Note on illegal Arab immigration into Palestine with particular reference to Hauranis.” Britain’s representative before the League explained that frontier controls had been strengthened to prevent the entry of people the administration called “undesirable.”
Then the Arab Revolt began in 1936, and the Hauranis appeared in another set of British records. During a House of Commons debate on June 19, Parliament was told that “a great deal of the most murderous rioting” was being carried out by “wild Hauranis who have come in during the last few years.” The wording is important because it connects recent migration directly to contemporary British discussion of the violence. Haurani laborers had crossed into Palestine during the economic boom, British authorities had opened immigration and deportation files concerning them, and some recent arrivals were subsequently identified among participants in the revolt.
This is also where labor migration and political movement begin overlapping. The same routes connecting southern Syria with Palestine carried seasonal workers, permanent migrants, political refugees, weapons and eventually organized fighters. British officials were trying to police all of those movements at once.
Akko, called Acre in many English-language documents, introduces another form of population movement that deserves far more attention than it usually receives. The Ottoman government used the fortified city as a destination for imprisonment and exile, including people transported there from elsewhere in the empire.
Akko’s geography made it useful for that purpose. It was a heavily fortified Mediterranean city far from Istanbul, surrounded by walls and notorious during the nineteenth century for disease, poor sanitation and difficult living conditions. Historical scholarship describes Akko as functioning as an Ottoman penal colony, holding ordinary criminals, political prisoners and other people the government wanted isolated. Ottoman exile registers show that this wasn’t merely a reputation attached to the city later.
One surviving case dates to 1859. Circassian Hüseyin Daim Pasha was accused of involvement in a secret organization acting against the Ottoman government and sentenced to death. Sultan Abdülmecid commuted the sentence and ordered him transported to Akko for lifelong imprisonment. The order required that he remain confined within the fortress under guard and not be permitted to leave. The underlying entry survives in the Ottoman Nefy ve Itlak Defterleri, the government’s exile and release registers.
Akko’s penal role continued. British parliamentary discussions in the 1890s referred to Ottoman political prisoners held at St. Jean d’Acre. Historical descriptions associated the prison population with murderers, highway robbers and political agitators sent there from different parts of Ottoman territory. A person could become a political or criminal problem hundreds of miles away and end up confined in Palestine.
The best-known exile arrived in August 1868, when Ottoman authorities banished Bahá’u’lláh,…
