What was Acre called through history?

Israel · Mixed city in the Galilee

Akko עַכּוֹ (Egyptian Execration Texts, c. 1800 BCE; Bible, Judges 1:31) → Ptolemais (Hellenistic/Roman, from Ptolemy II) → St-Jean d’Acre (Crusader capital) → Akka عكا (Arabic, restored)

Acre is one of the oldest continuously named places on earth: the city Egyptian scribes cursed as “Akko” nearly 3,800 years ago is the same city Arabic calls Akka today, because Arabic did not invent a new name, it recovered the old one after seven centuries of Greek and Roman rebranding. Between those two endpoints sits a full run of the region’s history: Phoenician port, biblical frontier town the tribe of Asher couldn’t hold, Roman colony, the Crusaders’ last and greatest stronghold, Napoleon’s one clean defeat, and Ottoman capital of the Galilee. Today it is a mixed Jewish-Arab city and a UNESCO World Heritage old city, the same cross-section this whole site keeps finding: conquerors change the label, the ground keeps the receipts.

Who named it, in order

The earliest surviving mention is Egyptian: 19th-century-BCE execration texts curse “Akko” as a hostile city, and Pharaoh Thutmose III lists it among his conquests around 1468 BCE; the El-Amarna letters, Egypt’s 14th-century-BCE diplomatic archive, name a local king of Akko in correspondence with Jerusalem. The Bible’s Book of Judges (1:31) records the same city as a Canaanite stronghold the tribe of Asher was assigned but failed to dislodge. It stayed an independent Phoenician port through the Assyrian and Persian periods, submitting to Sennacherib in 701 BCE and revolting against Ashurbanipal decades later. Alexander’s conquest in 332 BCE opened the Hellenistic era, and under Ptolemy II the city was renamed Ptolemais, a name Rome kept and expanded: under Nero it became “Colonia Claudia Ptolemais Germanica,” garrisoned by four legions. Byzantine Acre was a bishopric with a Samaritan community and, per Acts 21:7, a Christian one dating to the apostle Paul. When Arab armies took the city in 636 CE, Arabic dropped the Greek label and reverted to the old Semitic name, a fact preserved in the Talmud’s own references to Akko. The name has not changed since.

The Crusader capital and its fall

Crusader Baldwin I captured Acre in 1104; Saladin took it back in 1187, and the Third Crusade recaptured it in 1191, after which it served as the capital of what remained of the Kingdom of Jerusalem for a century, a walled, fortified port city of Hospitaller and Templar halls, some of which still stand beneath the modern old city. It was also the Crusader kingdom’s last stand: when the Mamluks besieged and stormed Acre in 1291, they destroyed it and massacred much of its population, ending Crusader rule in the Levant. The city sat largely in ruins for four centuries.

A continuous Jewish community

Acre’s Jewish record runs the length of this history. The traveler Benjamin of Tudela counted around 200 Jews there in 1170, with named scholars in residence; in 1211 some 300 rabbis from France and England settled in the city, and Nachmanides, having emigrated from Spain, lived and died there in 1270, part of a rabbinic center serious enough to draw Maimonides for a visit in 1165. The community survived the Mamluk sack in reduced form and rebuilt under Ottoman rule: by 1741 records show over a hundred Jewish households, and by 1816, under the local Jewish leader Chaim Farhi, Jews made up roughly a quarter of the city’s population. Ottoman censuses then tracked a shrinking count, 233 in 1839, 181 in 1849, 140 in 1886, and the last pre-state community of 350 Jews left Acre when the 1936 Arab Revolt reached the city. Jewish Acre as it exists today was rebuilt after 1948.

Ottoman power, Napoleon’s defeat, and the Mandate prison

Ottoman governor Ahmad al-Jazzar, “the Butcher,” rebuilt Acre from 1775 as capital of the Sidon province, fortifying it heavily and building the mosque that still bears his name over a Crusader crypt. Those fortifications mattered in 1799, when Napoleon besieged the city on his march north from Egypt; Jazzar Pasha, backed by a British fleet under Sir Sidney Smith, held out, and the failed siege broke Napoleon’s Middle East campaign entirely. Under the British Mandate, Jazzar’s old fortress became the Mandate’s central prison, holding Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1920 and a young Moshe Dayan from 1939 to 1941; in May 1947 the Irgun blew a hole in its wall and broke out dozens of Jewish underground prisoners in one of the boldest operations of the pre-state resistance.

1948 and the city today

On 13 May 1948, Haganah forces took Acre during the 1948 war; unlike Lydda, whose Arab population was largely expelled in that summer’s fighting (see what Lod was before it was Lydda), a substantial Arab population remained in Acre, which is why it is a mixed city today rather than an entirely Jewish one. Postwar records track the city’s growth: about 12,000 residents by the mid-1950s, 32,800 by 1967, 45,800 by 2002, running roughly three-quarters Jewish and a quarter Arab, mostly Muslim with a small Christian minority, concentrated in the old city. Acre also holds a place in a third faith: the Ottomans exiled Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, to Acre’s prison in August 1868 to silence his young religion by burying him in a forgotten corner of the empire; he spent his final years at Bahji just outside the walls, and his shrine there is the holiest site on earth for Baha’is, making Acre, alongside Haifa, the administrative and spiritual center of a fourth world religion born in the Holy Land.

What the propaganda gets backward

The claim that circulates about cities like Acre is that Jewish presence in Israel is a 20th-century colonial import layered onto an unbroken Arab city, a version of the wider colonizer charge. Acre’s own record runs the other way: a documented, if fluctuating, Jewish community from the 12th-century travelers’ accounts through Nachmanides, Farhi and the Ottoman censuses, interrupted by violence in 1291 and again in 1936, not by absence. The Arabic name itself concedes the point: it is not a colonial imposition but the original Canaanite name, restored by Arab conquerors who kept what they found. Acre’s present reality matters too: the old city remains predominantly Arab, Jewish neighborhoods expanded to the north and east after 1948, and the city has seen real communal tension, including riots between Jewish and Arab residents in May 2021. None of that erases the record above it. A mixed city with a three-thousand-year documented history is not a myth in either direction; it is just old, and it is just shared.

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Sources

From The cities on the main site.