The history of White settlement in South Africa started in 1652 with the settlement of the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) under Jan van Riebeeck. Despite the preponderance of officials and colonists from the Netherlands, there were also a number of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution at home and German soldiers or sailors returning from service in Asia. The Cape Colony remained under Dutch rule for two more centuries, after which it was annexed by the United Kingdom around 1806. At that time, South Africa was home to about 26,000 people of white ancestry, a relative majority of whom were still of Dutch origin. However, beginning in 1818 thousands of British immigrants arrived in the growing Cape Colony, intending to join the local workforce or settle directly on the frontier. About a fifth of the Cape's original Dutch-speaking white population migrated eastwards during the Great Trek in the 1830s and established their own autonomous Boer republics further inland. Nevertheless, the population of white ancestry (mostly European origin) continued increasing in the Cape as a result of immigration, and by 1865 had reached 181,592 people. Between 1880 and 1910, there was an influx of Jews (mainly via Lithuania) and West Asian immigrants from Lebanon and Syria arriving in South Africa. Immigrants from the Levant region of Western Asia were originally classified as Asian, and thus "non-white", but, in order to have the right to purchase land, they successfully argued that they were "white". The main reason being that they were from the lands where Christianity and Judaism originated from, and that the race laws didn't target Jews, who were also a Semitic people. Therefore arguing that if the laws targeted other people from the Levant, it should also affect the Jews.