Around 100,000 Ashkenazi Jews migrated from Central and Eastern Europe to the Middle East and North Africa from the early 19th century to 1914. The large majority of these migrants settled in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, with smaller numbers in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and elsewhere. This migration is typically understood as ideologically driven by Zionist or proto-Zionist sentiments. Zionist scholarship presents this migration as a Jewish “return” to an ancestral land, motivated by religious connection and a quest for national self- determination, while critical historiography analyses it as a form of European settler colonialism. In both approaches, the relationship between the migrants and their environment is understood as essentially antagonistic, framed through dichotomies of Europe and the Orient, settlers and natives. However, as demonstrated by Gur Alroey, most Ashkenazi migrants to Palestine before 1914 were not motivated by Zionist ideology but by material considerations much like Jewish migrants elsewhere. However, even Alroey portrays East European Jews as essentially incompatible with the Arab environment. Ashkenazim, claims Alroey, “had no interest in becoming part of the majority Arab society and made no attempt to adopt the Middle Eastern lifestyle.” In this paper I will challenge this assumption. I will argue that, although the level of Ashkenazi integration was not as deep as that of long-standing Middle Eastern Jewish communities, acculturation was nonetheless taking place. Ashkenazim adopted Arab clothes and diet, participated in local Muslim festivals, formed business, neighbourly and romantic relations, studied Arabic and Islam, and forged local political alliances. This cultural integration was insufficient to withstand the political forces of the 20th century. The advent of Zionism and Arab resistance to it inevitably positioned Ashkenazi Jews – even those who were already living in Palestine before Zionism - as European settlers against local Arabs. Ashkenazi “Arabisation” was undone and was erased from cultural memory and the historiography. In the case of Ashkenazi Jewish migration to the Middle East, the categories of the migrant, refugee and colonial settler have been collapsed into one, due to the triumph of Zionism. Challenging this reductive reading, I aim to place Ashkenazi migration to the Middle East within the larger story of migration into the Middle East, involving Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucus, Greek and Italian merchants and others. I will explore the different paths Ashkenazi migration followed, and the divergent political horizons it facilitated beyond separatism and settler-colonialism.