Peddlers who became builders.
How a small hill town sent its families across the world, and what they built when they arrived.
From 1901, merchants from Ramallah began crossing the Atlantic, and a pattern took hold that would define the family for a century: arrive with little, work relentlessly, and build.
From peddlers to founders
The earliest arrivals worked as traveling salesmen, carrying handmade rugs and wares from town to town. Living austerely and working long hours, the most successful moved from peddling to enterprise: becoming, in the words of one history, founders of banks, trading companies, and factories. Their success flowed back home, funding roads and institutions in Ramallah itself. Today a large community descended from Ramallah's founding families lives across the United States, connected through the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine.
The largest community of all
Christian families from Ramallah and the surrounding villages also turned south, with emigration to Latin America beginning as early as 1870. Chile today holds the largest Palestinian community anywhere outside the Middle East (as many as 350,000 people), most descended from the Christian towns of the Ramallah and Bethlehem hills.
More to be added
The Hishmeh diaspora reaches further still. As the record grows, chapters on Europe, the Nordics, the Gulf, and beyond will be added here. If your branch of the family settled somewhere not yet told, we would like to hear from you.
The sources for this page are listed on our Sources page.