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New York’s Little Syria and the long history of race and citizenship in America

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent upholding of portions of Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, Minnesota representative Keith Ellison released a statement on June 26. Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to congress, did not suggest that the court’s decision ran counter to American history. Instead, he pointed to its uncomfortable resonance with a number of court rulings that enabled the country’s most shameful episodes, from Japanese internment to segregation to slavery. Ellison’s words ably gestured toward the tangled, painful relationship between race and citizenship in American history, and the intersecting struggles of various minority groups. Yet as Khaled Beydoun and Stacy Fahrenthold have noted, the Muslim ban does not simply resonate with past rulings, but is in fact a repetition of a long history of policies that excluded Muslims from American citizenship. What has received less attention, perhaps, is how natives of greater Syria in the United States — Muslims and Christians alike — have faced the question of race and citizenship since long before it has been brought to light by the Muslim ban, the USA PATRIOT Act, NYPD surveillance of Muslims, and decades of stereotypical treatment in films.

One place to start this story is on Manhattan’s Washington Street, home to Little Syria or the Syrian Colony, which boasted some 8,000 migrants from the late 19th into the early 20th century. It emerged as a bustling quarter of merchants, newspapers, restaurants and places of worship to a largely though not entirely Christian community hailing from greater Syria, an expansive geography encompassing parts of lands now divided between Israel-Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. Part of a global scale of migration that witnessed Syrian communities appear in Buenos Aires, Dakar and Sao Paolo as well, many of the residents of Little Syria viewed their stays temporary. Indeed, one member of the community, Yusuf Jirjis Zakhim, even insisted on calling the community “travelers” (misafirun) rather than “migrants” (muhajirun) in a 1910 article in the Damascus-periodical al-Muqtabas. And while many did return to Syria (as did the money of still others in the form of remittances), many also stayed in their new homes.

Pastry counter at a Syrian restaurant, ca. 1910-1915

Whether its members considered themselves migrants or travelers, Little Syria caught the eye of reporters from The New York Times like Cromwell Childe, who seized the opportunity to introduce Syrian delicacies to its readership in an 1899 article. Okra was explained on a restaurant menu as “a vegetable resembling beans.” Baklawa, meanwhile, appeared as the Syrian answer to “the great American pie.” Though familiar to “every Syrian Dick and Tom” — as Childe termed the neighborhood’s male residents — the syrupy sweet’s novelty was so great to other New Yorkers that the reporter added that his spelling of it was “as nearly as English letters can render the phonetic equivalent.” While introducing dishes unfamiliar to readers and, apparently, the English language, newspaper coverage of the community also related Syrians to the city’s other immigrant communities, noting, for example, that Little Syria’s plethora of Arabic-language newspapers (some of have been digitized here by NC State’s Khayrallah Center) were “more remarkable even to the eye…than are the strange Yiddish news sheets of the Ghetto,” referring to the booming presses of the Lower East Side’s Jewish communities.

At the same time, the details of American visions of Little Syria appear frustratingly familiar. Indeed, the content of some articles might well help us form a bingo card for clichéd treatments of Arab communities that could still be used for stories today. Strong coffee and water pipes? Yes. Men having meandering conversations while consuming both? Yup. Intimation of ancient sectarian enmity? Uh-huh. Women’s fashion as a register of degree of assimilation? Bingo!

These stories also touched on themes that would perhaps be less likely to appear in newspapers today. Cromwell Childe’s article bemoaned the seclusion of the quarter’s attractive women, noting that passerby could only catch a “glimpse of one of these transplanted beauties of Syria” by glancing “through the chinks of a shutter by day,” invoking the exotic sense of mystery and desire that suffused the American imagination of the Arab world. Nor could few treatments of Little Syria manage to avoid referring to the color of the skin of the neighborhood’s residents. Childe met Michael Kaydouh at Sahadi’s, the New York institution now located on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue. Of Kaydouh, Childe wrote that he, “save for his olive skin and his cast of features, scarcely seems a Syrian at all.”

Syrian children playing in street, unknown year

It is in the repeated reference to olive skin (both in Childe’s article and in a 1903 piece) that we might begin to consider the longer history of race and citizenship among Syrian migrants in America. After all, in the early 20th century, skin color determined citizenship. It still does, of course, but often while cloaked in language that conceals this fact. Even Trump’s brazen references to the Muslim ban have been subsequently massaged into justifications having to do with national security.

No such fig leaves covered the racist logic in 1909, when Costa George Najour’s citizenship case came up before the Atlanta circuit court. As Sarah Gualtieri details in her book “Between Arab and White,” the law at the time dictated that U.S. citizens had to be “free white persons” or of “African nativity or descent.” The U.S. government’s position, simply, was that Syrians were “Asiatic,” and therefore ineligible for American citizenship. In another case, an assistant U.S. attorney spelled out the argument quite clearly, noting that even though “the common man” might not be able to define “a white person,” they would well know what a white person was not, suggesting that “the average man in the street…would find no difficulty in assigning to the yellow race a Turk or a Syrian,” thus disqualifying them from citizenship. Despite these arguments, Najour ultimately won his case. As Gualtieri argues in her book, Najour, and others, were able to claim whiteness in no small part by being Christian, and therefore less threatening to American sensibilities. These court rulings, however, did not protect Muslim Syrians from the United States’ first Muslim ban in 1918, nor did it protect all Syrians from the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, not to mention the terrorism of the KKK.

Cases like Najour’s had echoes on Washington Street, where members of Little Syria struggled to place themselves on the right side of the color line. In September 1909, The New York Times published an editorial on whether natives of the Ottoman Empire ought to be eligible for citizenship. Its title — “Is the Turk a White Man?” — similarly demonstrated the explicit link between race and citizenship. The Times editorial board ruled yes (though not without considerable qualification: “they are a cruel and massacring people…but they are…as much ‘white’ people as the Huns, Finns, and Cossacks”). In response, Little Syria’s Salloum Mokarzel wrote a letter to the paper in which he introduced another complication, suggesting that the real issue was “not the practicability of considering the Turk a white man, but the possibility of considering every Turkish subject a Turk.” After all, while classified in the U.S. as Syrian, Mokarzel and many of his comrades on Washington Street hailed from the Ottoman Empire, a polyglot, diverse empire for which the bifurcated racial logic of U.S. citizenship law did not fit.

Few traces remain today of Little Syria, despite the best efforts of the Washington Street Historical Society. The façade of St. George’s Syrian Catholic Church is preserved, complete with an image of St. George slaying a dragon, though it now houses St. George’s Bar. At certain times of day, it is quite literally in the shadow of One World Trade Center, an apt if overwrought metaphor, it seems, for how the imperatives of responding to the xenophobia of the post-9/11 era have obscured how questions of race, religion and citizenship have been intertwined for so long for migrants from greater Syria of all faiths in America.

Sam Dolbee recently completed his PhD in Middle East history at New York University. He is a contributor to the Ottoman History Podcast, where his most recent episode explores Little Syria as part of a broader examination of Ottoman history in New York City.

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