In its population was . It has a religiously mixed population of Muslims and Christians from different denominations.

A Jewish village during antiquity, Kafr Kanna is mentioned in an extant 9th-century Islamic marble stele. Under Crusader rule, from the 12th to mid-13th centuries, it was a casale (country estate). Kafr Kanna had become a large village by 1300, during Mamluk