Palestine Gazette · British Mandate · 1921–1947
The Gazette's "Persons Changing Their Names" tables were, overwhelmingly, a record of Jewish name-Hebraization. Palestinian-Arabs are a sliver of it — and the few hundred Palestinian-Arab entries follow patterns of their own, quite unlike Hebraization. This page isolates them, distinguishes what kind of change each one is, and is candid about where the evidence runs out.
The first finding is the scarcity
Across the indexed Gazette issues we extracted 19,043 personal name changes. Only 382 (2.0%) carry a personal name that is Arabic in form — and, as the next section shows, even some of those are Arabic-named Jews from Muslim lands. Set the look-alikes aside and 292 are identifiably Palestinian-Arab (Muslim or Christian) people. The mechanism explains the imbalance: name-change notices were, by a large margin, the paperwork of Hebraization, a specifically Zionist cultural project of reviving Hebrew and shedding diaspora surnames.1,9 It had no Palestinian-Arab equivalent, and the largely indigenous Palestinian-Arab population had no comparable reason to swap a foreign surname for a national one.1,4
An Arabic-sounding name is not the same as a Palestinian-Arab person
Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Persia, Morocco and Syria carried Arabic given names (Salim, Saleh, Aziz, Yusuf, Sasson) and, on Hebraizing, produced changes like Mishreqi → Mizrachi.10 90 of those 382 Arabic-form records end in a Hebrew name — mostly Mizrahi / Arab-Jewish Hebraizations, a different phenomenon reported separately here and never folded into the Palestinian-Arab total. But a minority are instead converts to Judaism: 13 of the Hebrew-bound changes carry a distinctively-Muslim name a born Jew never bore — Muhammad, Hasan, Abd-al-… — or the traditional convert's name on the new side (Jamil Ali Sarsur → Abraham ben Abraham Avinu). Those are surfaced as their own small group, not asserted to be Arab Jews. Religion and community, not the "sound" of a name, are what separate these strands, and the bare record often cannot tell them apart.10,11
Don't collapse distinct things
Before counting "Palestinian-Arab name changes" it is worth splitting the Arabic-form records by where the new name lands. Doing so separates four analytically distinct movements that a single tally would blur together — and peels the Mizrahi / Arab-Jewish Hebraizations off the top.
Two stages. First: the destination register (Arabic, Hebrew, European, or unclear) — the Hebrew branch (split into Mizrahi / Arab Jews and likely converts to Judaism) is not Palestinian-Arab. Second: for names that stayed Arabic, the kind of change. Counts are distinct changes (370 total).
The single largest outflow is not a change of identity at all — it is a change of family name among people whose names stay entirely Arabic. That is the pattern worth dwelling on.
Four different things are happening
Among the 206 changes that stayed inside the Arabic register, three mechanisms account for nearly all of them. They are administratively and culturally distinct, and only the third touches "identity" at all.
This is 145 of the 206 Arabic-register changes, and most of them arrive in family clusters: several relatives registering the very same new surname in the same town, often across several years. The classical Arabic name is relational by design — a chain of ism (given), nasab (son-of patronymic), kunya and nisba — and fixed, inheritable surnames are a comparatively modern, administratively driven development.4,5 As Ottoman census and then Mandate registration (identity cards, land and tax rolls) demanded one stable family name, households pinned a single ancestor's name, place, or clan into a registered surname.2,6 What the Gazette captures here is the visible tail of that process — a standardization, not a renunciation.
The largest clusters: people in a single town who registered the same old → new family-name change. (Bar length = individuals; many are women and children, recorded alongside the men.)
A second group is not a name change at all but a change of spelling. There was no single standard for rendering Arabic in Latin letters, and British and French administrations used different conventions,7 so one Arabic name could surface as Khoury / Khouri / Houri or Akl / Aqel. When a person regularizes that spelling, the romanized record shows a "change" while the Arabic name is untouched. These are orthographic, and we label them as such rather than counting them as identity shifts.
The smallest group keeps the family name and alters the personal name — frequently by dropping or reordering one element of a long compound name (a nasab or kunya formalized away), occasionally adopting a new first name outright. Motive is rarely legible from the record alone.
A small but distinct stratum keeps an Arab family name while the new name foregrounds a European or English given name. Most are Levantine-Christian families taking French names — a reflection of centuries of missionary and French presence among Palestinian Christians3 — and the largest family cluster shows it from inside: the Abu Judom → Rizk family of Jerusalem registers Violette and Georgette alongside Sliman and George. A handful are Muslims anglicizing outright (Muhammad → Jimmy William; Ismail Hasan → John Peter). The defining feature here is the European/English given name, not the family name — so the person remains Palestinian-Arab.
Where and when
The Palestinian-Arab changes cluster in the mixed and Palestinian-Arab urban centres — Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Gaza — exactly where the Mandate's registration machinery, courts and notable families were densest.
Distinct Palestinian-Arab-origin changes by year. Dates come from each issue's printed cover date and are approximate — treat the shape, not any single year, as the signal.
The larger story is elsewhere
It would be a serious error to read this small personal-name record as "Palestinian-Arab name change in Palestine." The large-scale, well-documented renaming of this land was not of people but of places — and it lies almost entirely outside this gazette.
From 1925 the Jewish National Fund's Naming Committee assigned Hebrew names to acquired lands and new settlements; after 1948 a governmental committee systematically Hebraized the map of the new state, and by the 1990s the naming committees had set Hebrew names for several thousand geographic features.12,13,14 Scholars document the mechanism in detail; its characterization — "erasure" versus "revival/restoration" — is genuinely contested, and we leave that judgment to the cited historians rather than asserting it here.12,15 Separately, there is no documented program of forced Hebraization of Palestinian-Arabs' personal names comparable to the toponymic one.13
In one line
This page is a narrow, voluntary, administrative slice — a few hundred Palestinian-Arab individuals who, between roughly 1923 and 1947, formalized a surname, regularized a spelling, or altered a given name. It is genuinely informative about that. It is not a measure of Palestinian-Arab naming, identity, or its transformation at large.
How this was made
Selection. A record enters the Arabic-origin pool when its old name shows Arab-name evidence — a distinctively Muslim given name (Muhammad, Ahmad, Mahmud, Mustafa, Hussein, Abdul-, Khalil, Ismail, Yusuf…) or an Arab family name (a curated Arabic-surname rule plus a small hand-verified extension) — and carries no Hebrew/Jewish marker. Shared Christian-European given names (Hanna, Michel, George, Emil, Victor, Julia) count only when paired with an Arab surname, which closes the largest false-positive trap: "Hanna" (Arab Christian, = John) collides with Ashkenazi "Hannah/Chana", so a row like Hanna Maislin → Hanna Kugel is correctly excluded. Records whose new name is Hebrew are then split off — mostly Mizrahi / Arab-Jewish Hebraizations, plus 13 likely converts to Judaism (a distinctively-Muslim name → a Hebrew one) — and never counted as Palestinian-Arab; the 292 Palestinian-Arab people are the Arabic-origin pool minus all of those. The classifier is lexicon-based and deterministic; it makes no network calls. A representative page was checked against the original scan.
Limits. Everything is a heuristic over romanized names — there is no Arabic script and no self-identified religion or ethnicity in the source. Romanization is unstable, so some "spelling changes" are artifacts of inconsistent transliteration rather than choices. Motive cannot be read from a name pair: a new surname may mean clan affiliation, the formalizing of a fluid patronymic, distancing from a name, or mere administrative tidying. Coverage is partial (the indexed Gazette issues) and the extraction is automated, so every count here is a lower bound, not a census. The Palestinian-Arab share is established by the records' composition and the absence of an equivalent Palestinian-Arab renaming movement — a reasoned inference, not a direct measurement.1,10
32 of the Arabic-origin records come from a separate vision-based recovery of the early (1921–1932) three-column tables; the rest are from the automated gold pipeline.
dest_register, change_mechanism, arab_confidence,
what_changed, family_group) so the selection stays fully
inspectable. Of the 382 Arabic-origin records identified, the
90 that are Arabic-named Mizrahi / Arab-Jewish Hebraizations are
excluded from this file (they remain in the full project dataset).Grounding
Historical context is drawn from the following. Tags mark peer-reviewed / academic primary encyclopedic sources. Empirical claims about the dataset are our own; interpretive characterizations are attributed to their authors.