Historians have debated whether Levantines, that is, locally integrated groups with hereditary ties to Western/Central Europe and/or the Catholic Church around the Eastern Mediterranean constituted a proto-ethnic group identity or were merely lumped together by pejorative exonyms. A close reading of Levantine writers' statements or lack thereof reveals that nineteenth-century "Levantine" intellectuals did not lay claim to a group identity, but rather to a space that allowed for ambivalent identities and spaces. Only twentieth-century authors cast Levantine identity as a quasi-ethnicity. The more recent generation has combined the latter assumption with the nostalgia produced by the former.