Strangers No More: Syrians in the United States, 1880-1900

By Linda K. Jacobs

Syrian/Lebanese immigration to the United States began only in 1878, but by 1900, Syrian men and women had settled in every state and territory, from Alabama to Wyoming. First traveling 5,000 miles to reach New York, these wanderers peddled their way to the furthest corners of the country, settling in hundreds of cities and towns. They braved th

• Language: English
• Publisher: KalimahPress
• Release date: Oct 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780983539278

Linda K. Jacobs

Linda K. Jacobs, PhD, is the grand-daughter of Lebanese immigrants who settled in New York City in the nineteenth century. A New York-based scholar and activist, Jacobs is the author of Digging In: An American Archaeologist Uncovers the Real Iran (KalimahPress 2012) and Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880-1900 (KalimahPress 2015).

Book preview

Strangers No More

© 2019 Linda K. Jacobs

ISBN-13: 978-0-9835392-6-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-9835392-7-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019908076

All rights reserved under the international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, utilized, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Inquiries should be sent to: [e-mail]

Book design: Gracia Echeverría

Cover photo: Wadea Kassab in Chattanooga, ca. 1891. Courtesy of the Kassab family.

Back cover photo: Rafael Salazar

Printed in the United States

This book is dedicated to the pioneers of Syrian/Lebanese immigrant studies.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Transcription and Spelling

Introduction

Joseph Arbeely family, Beirut, 1878

Routes of the Syrians across the United States

ALABAMA

Mike Moses, Montgomery, ca. 1900.

ALASKA TERRITORY

Michael and Zachariah Mafrige, Sitka, ca. 1885

Home of David Sleem, Seward, ca. 1906

Detail, David Sleem on his porch, Seward, ca. 1906

ARIZONA TERRITORY

ARKANSAS

Nazira Etoch, Helena, ca. 1897

CALIFORNIA

Two views of the Cairo Café, California Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, 1894

Isaac Ben Yakar, 1893

COLORADO

Denver Post report of the murder of Mrs. Kenhan, June 30, 1903

CONNECTICUT

Company housing, American Hat Co., Danbury, ca. 1900

Fur cutting, Mallory Hat Co., Danbury, ca. 1900

DELAWARE

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

FLORIDA

Two views of Fares Ferzan modeling a Syrian coat, ca. 1887

GEORGIA

Fadlallah Arbeely, Atlanta, ca. 1889

HAWAII TERRITORY

Sophie Daoud Shishim, New York, 1895

Sophie Cressaty in her Turkish goods shop, Honolulu, 1925

IDAHO

ILLINOIS

Damascus merchant’s house, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893

Abraham Samaha’s gem store and the Persian Palace, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893

Jameelee, Syrian dancer, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893

Turkish goods booths, Cairo Street, Chicago World’s Fair, 1893

INDIANA

IOWA

KANSAS

Thomas Solomon family, Sharon, ca. 1896

KENTUCKY

LOUISIANA

MAINE

MARYLAND

MASSACHUSETTS

Map of South Cove neighborhood, Boston, 1913

Syrian peddler, 1896

Syrian women and children at Denison House, Boston, ca. 1910

Map of mill section, Lawrence, 1910

Syrian housing, Lawrence, ca. 1910

Hajjar family members at Ayer Mill, Lawrence, ca. 1910

Orthodox women’s group, Lawrence, ca. 1910

B.K. Forzley peddling in Worcester, 1898

B.K. Forzley with horse and wagon, Worcester, ca. 1904

B.K. Forzley’s store, Worcester, 1925

MICHIGAN

MINNESOTA

MISSISSIPPI

MISSOURI

Bistany’s concession at St. Louis Fair, 1904

Belly dancer at St. Louis Fair, 1904

MONTANA

Article about the Assyrian colony, Butte, 1906

NEBRASKA

NEW HAMPSHIRE

NEW JERSEY

Jereissati Brothers’ Turkish rug store on the Boardwalk, Atlantic City, ca. 1900

NEW MEXICO TERRITORY

Nathan Salmon’s store, Santa Fe, ca. 1912

NEW YORK (excluding New York City)

Bistany & Bitar concession, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901

Advertising card for Egyptian King Cigarettes, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901

NORTH CAROLINA

NORTH DAKOTA

OHIO

OKLAHOMA TERRITORY / INDIAN TERRITORY

Massad brothers, Indian Territory, ca. 1900

OREGON

PENNSYLVANIA

Palestine bazaar, Centennial Fair, Philadelphia, 1876

Housing in the Syrian neighborhood, Pittsburgh, ca. 1900

Women washing clothes in the Syrian neighborhood, Pittsburgh, ca. 1900

RHODE ISLAND

Shehadi Abdallah Shehadi and Adib Faris in front of their store, Providence, ca. 1898

SOUTH CAROLINA

SOUTH DAKOTA

TENNESSEE

Mary Arbeely’s grave, Maryville, d. 1880

Arbeely family, Knoxville, 1884

Wadea Kassab, Chattanooga, ca. 1891

TEXAS

UTAH

VERMONT

VIRGINIA

WASHINGTON

WEST VIRGINIA

WISCONSIN

Syrian children in Milwaukee, 1913

WYOMING

Works Cited and Bibliography

Appendix: Birthplaces of Persons Mentioned in the Text

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to those named in the footnotes, captions, and bibliography, my thanks go to the many people at various archives, libraries, and historical societies throughout the country, as well as to the people I’ve met along the journey who were willing to give generously of their time and provide invaluable information and resources, including the following:

Naouras Almatar

Arab American National Museum and Matthew Stiffler

Dania Arbeely and Habib Arbeely

Genealogy friends Cheryl Assaid, Gail Edson, Mimi Geha, Bob Goodhouse, Julee Milham, Helen Samhan, and Matt Williams

The Kassab Family

Deeb Keamy

Colleen Kelly at the Resurrection Bay Historical Society

Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and Akram Khater, Margie Stevens, and Claire Kempa

Bishop Gregory Mansour, Randa Hakim, and Evelyn Small

Matthew Namee

New York University Library and Andrew Battista

Lee Poleske at the Seward Historical Society

Bishop Nicholas Samra

Kristin A. Shamas

Raymond and David Zambie, William Schultz

Note on Transcription and Spelling

Transcription of Syrian place names follows the convention in the Khayrallah Center’s transcription of Mokarzel and Otash when given;¹ otherwise I use Wikipedia’s list of Lebanese towns. Spelling of names follows the person’s own spelling when known, or if not, the most common spelling of his or her name in documents. This practice means that a name can be spelled differently depending on how the person chose to transcribe it: for example, Khalil, Kaleel, Khaleel, Kaliel, Kahlil, and Kalil. These variants do not include the mishearings and misspellings by Americans, like Callie or Kalit. Please do not assume that these varied spellings are typographical errors. Some individuals did not spell their own names consistently, making it difficult to figure out which to use. A forward slash between names indicates alternative spellings that were used interchangeably: Kalil/Charles. The original name is provided in parentheses if it is not obvious: Manu (Mansour).

Rather than spell out the names of states, which would add thousands of characters to this narrative, I have chosen to use their modern two-letter abbreviations, admittedly an anachronism.

---

¹ Mokarzel and Otash’s Syrian Business Directory (1908–9) is available online at the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies, North Carolina State University (hereafter the Khayrallah Center), https://lebanesestudies.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/collections/show/41.

Strangers No More

Syrian Emigration … is becoming an epidemic. Men are selling out or mortgaging their property & going off by the hundreds. About one-tenth of the population of Zahleh will have left before July, & there are vigorous pushing element[s] in the population—Some Lebanon villages are well nigh depopulated, & there is no telling where it will end.

—H. H. Jessup to Arthur Mitchell, Beirut, September 25, 1887, in Presbyterian Letters

The immigration fever shows no signs of abating in these parts. Hundreds go away every month. Zahleh has a population of about 18,000 and during the past 18 months at least 2000 men have emigrated to English-speaking countries. … These 2000 men were mostly young, representing the bone and sinew of the town and their absence depresses business and affects many interests. Many houses stand vacant, fruits have fallen, vineyards lack workers and the price of all fruits and grain has fallen. On many days in winter the once busy markets here have a half-deserted appearance.

—F. E. Hoskins to Arthur Mitchell, Zahle, July 8, 1889, in Presbyterian Letters

Sometimes I think we had better stop teaching English …

—H. H. Jessup to unknown recipient (probably Arthur Mitchell), undated [1892?], in Presbyterian Letters

INTRODUCTION

The first Syrian family to settle in the United States arrived in New York Harbor in August 1878.¹ Scattered individuals had come before that, drawn particularly by the 1876 Centennial Fair in Philadelphia, but it was the Arbeely family that opened the gates to a trickle—and then a flood—of Syrian immigration to the United States that only really ended with the draconian National Origins Act of 1924.²

The alarmist sentiments expressed by American missionaries in Syria in the epigraphs above were echoed by Syrians as well as by the Ottoman regime; some estimated that more than a third of the Syrian population had emigrated by 1910. Although the first family did not remain in New York City, that city became the mother colony of the Syrian diaspora in the United States—its economic, intellectual, and spiritual center.

It is four years since I published my study of the New York Syrian colony in the nineteenth century, Strangers in the West, which filled what had been a gap in both Arab-American diaspora studies and New York history.³ Because the Syrians were inveterate travelers, I followed many of them from New York City to colonies in other places. Many others went directly to these colonies without stopping in New York. I finally determined to follow these paths to their logical conclusion: to study all the nineteenth-century Syrian communities in the United States. This book is the result. The residents of those communities adapted to life in the United States in ways very different from those in New York, but individual members were just as intrepid, entrepreneurial, dastardly—in short, fascinating—as any I had encountered in the mother colony.

Joseph Arbeely family, Beirut, 1878. Photograph by Georges Saboungi. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Syrians began to arrive two years after the Arbeelys landed. Most of the earliest immigrants started out as peddlers, having either carried Holy Land goods (which American newspapers insisted on calling trinkets) with them from Syria or buying goods from American suppliers. Some brought enough money to set up their own businesses, and by 1885 and perhaps even earlier, Syrian-owned stores in New York were supplying an ever-increasing number of peddlers with notions, fancy goods, or Holy Land wares.⁴ The merchants encouraged new immigrants to move further and further afield, and soon armies of Syrian peddlers were spreading out across the country, following the railroads. Sometimes these men and women would head for a place that had not yet been exploited by fellow Syrians; at other times, they would be directed to a territory by the supplier himself (almost invariably a man) where other Syrians were already peddling. Family stories reveal that merchants sometimes traveled with the peddlers to their destination to make sure they went to the right place and then returned immediately to New York. The peddler started out for parts unknown with a stock of goods provided on credit and would receive new stock at the nearest train depot, sent from his or her supplier in New York. Newspaper articles about these early visitors—see-sawing between fascination and disdain—first appeared in the early 1880s, as Syrians began to be noticed in the remoter parts of the country. Sometimes the peddler would decide to settle down in a place rather than move on, and by about 1890, former peddlers had begun to set up stores and become suppliers themselves, using the railroads to transport goods from New York or elsewhere. By the mid-1890s, there were Syrian communities in every state and territory, often made up of many peddlers with one or two suppliers. This scenario was typical of many, but by no means all, of the Syrian colonies. They varied tremendously in size, social structure, occupations, and wealth, but all represented an admirable spirit of adventure and courage.

Methodology and Sources

The analysis of the communities in every state begins with the number of Syrians found in the 1900 census.⁵ I used the census data provided by the Moise A. Khayrallah Center of Lebanese Diaspora Studies as a starting point.⁶ At the beginning of my research (early 2017), which was also the very beginning of the Center's program of census transcription, these databases were incomplete: the transcribers had not, for example, included the birthplace Turkey in the search parameters and so missed sometimes up to 50% of the Syrians in the state.⁷ Syrians were also hidden because their birthplace might have been given as Assyria, Arabia, Palestine, Egypt, or Asia. I tried to remedy those omissions. Furthermore, the transcriptions did not include street addresses, naturalization status, or occupations, three pieces of information that are in my view crucial to any understanding of a community. These gaps were eventually filled in the Center's transcription. In addition, non-Syrian spouses (mostly wives) were missed because their birthplaces did not fall under any of the above categories. In order to fill these lacunae, I had to look at individual census sheets. Getting down to this micro level was useful, however, in finding names that the data gatherers had missed altogether, whether because the place of birth was incorrectly written, or simply because they had been overlooked. It helped that Syrians, like other immigrant groups, tended to live in clusters. This level of scrutiny also allowed me to see who the Syrians lived near or with.

After I was satisfied that I had as complete a census as possible for each state, I used the names on the census to search for further information about the residents—in city directories, vital records, newspaper articles, and the like—to flesh out what were really only the bare bones provided by the census. I also used search terms such as Syrian, Assyrian, Arabian, or Turk at newspaper archive sites to find articles about the communities. American newspaper reporters tended to focus on the internecine battles taking place in the communities as well as on the Syrians’ exoticism, story lines that became tiresome very quickly. Nevertheless, the articles often provided names not mentioned elsewhere (however mangled), business or home addresses, and context/content missing from other documents. The new names were then used as search terms. Occasionally, a multi-column feature article with sketches (or even a photograph) greatly enriched the record. The two Arabic newspapers that are extant for the nineteenth century (Kawkab America and al-Hoda), although focused primarily on New York, sometimes mentioned or printed letters from other places.

As was true of my first book, the amount of information available online increased markedly between the beginning and end of the research, but large gaps remained. Two of the most galling were the very uneven digitization of birth, death, and marriage certificates,⁸ and, until mid-2018, the difficulty of finding digitized copies of contemporaneous fire insurance maps, the only maps that can adequately impart the physical context of a neighborhood, building by building.⁹ I supplemented online resources with requests to historical societies, state libraries, and archives. The Syrians, while exotic and disputatious enough to excite the interest of some reporters, were not a large enough presence to merit many column inches in newspapers or other documents, and therefore the information available for the remoter colonies was often fragmentary or nonexistent.

Many disparate secondary sources have informed this work as well; one of my goals was to collect all of these sources in the bibliography. They can be divided into four types: general overviews of a topic, such as an account of the Maronite Church in the United States; state- or city-based monographs of immigrant communities; books and articles focused on individual Syrian communities; and immigrant memoirs. The first type was of limited usefulness for this book, as these works often lack references to specific cities, colonies, or individuals.¹⁰ The second type mainly ignores Syrians. This absence is due both to the small size of most of these communities in the nineteenth century and to the fact that they generally avoided drawing attention to themselves.¹¹

Local studies of Syrian colonies—the third type—are of uneven quality, ranging from the well-researched to the purely anecdotal. With one exception,¹² none of these local studies tries to assess or estimate numbers of residents, and none comprehensively describes the members of the community. Many avoid using names altogether, which, though understandable, severely hinders their usefulness for the purposes of this study.¹³ In addition, few go back to the nineteenth century, except in a mists of time way, because family stories usually take precedence over community analysis or description. Nevertheless, they must not be ignored. I’m sure I have missed many of these local histories, and I would appreciate being notified of them. This research is a work in progress that will be updated regularly online.

Immigrant memoirs and immigrant narratives in Arabic and English are another often-overlooked source.¹⁴ All were written in the twentieth century and look back at their origin stories through a nostalgic lens. Memoirs are invariably framed as a rags-to-riches story; why else would they have been written? It is often difficult to separate fact from embroidered memory. Nevertheless, they provide detail and color that are largely missing from the primary sources and ignored in the secondary sources, and of course the author was there. I have in the main avoided interviews with descendants because, like the memoirs, they muddy and mythologize the past and have the added disadvantage of being far removed in time from the people about whom I am writing, but some descendants have proved extraordinarily helpful. They are included in the acknowledgments and footnotes.

I should note that I neither read nor write Arabic, except in the most limited way, so all of the Arabic sources have been translated by others. These people are also named in the acknowledgments.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized alphabetically by state and territory, following the divisions of the 1900 federal census. This is by no means the only way the data could have been divided. I could have presented a typology of communities, such as the following: (1) New York City, the largest colony, and a unique example of the diaspora experience in its mix of peddlers and self-made men; (2) the industrial communities of mainly the Northeast, where Syrian men and women worked in mills and factories; (3) the classic peddler-supplier communities described by Alixa Naff,¹⁵ where a single supplier served as the economic and social leader of a group of peddlers; (4) small urban outposts, which consisted of a few mom-and-pop shops (sometimes including a supplier) and peddlers; (5) communities consisting of a single extended family with a head and his (occasionally her) relatives doing whatever work they could to make ends meet; and (6) mixed communities, with some or all of the above characteristics. Alternatively, I could have followed the diaspora chronologically as the Syrians moved out from New York, as Adele Younis does.¹⁶ Or I could have looked, as Naff does, at the progression from immigrant peddler to big man across the country.¹⁷ I could have also constructed a book of itineraries of individual men and women, who would represent the different ways Syrians moved through time, space, economic strata, and assimilation. Instead, I’ve chosen to present the work state by state in hopes that this organization will make the book a useful reference. Each chapter stands alone; readers can turn directly to the state or states of interest.¹⁸ They are presented in alphabetical order for ease of use and to avoid privileging one state over another. Every state and territory (save one) had a Syrian presence in 1900.¹⁹ This organization also allows one to compare colonies, something that is lost in the thematic books cited above. For the first time, it is possible to know the size of each colony in the state, the total number of Syrians in each state, and thus, for the first time, to form an idea of the total Syrian population in the country in 1900 (but see below for strong caveats about putting too much faith in the numbers).

This organizational framework has its drawbacks. It is difficult to follow individuals as they moved from state to state, something that happened frequently. It is also artificial to divide communities based on state lines; for example, the Syrian communities in southern Colorado had more contact with those in New Mexico Territory than with those in Denver. The merchants in Atlantic City, NJ, were tied to their fellow countrymen in New York City much more closely than they were to those in, say, Patterson, NJ. The colonies in the industrial cities of Connecticut and Massachusetts had more in common with each other than they did with some of the other communities in their states. And the colonies in Wichita, KS, and northern Oklahoma Territory might just as well have been described as one; people moved back and forth across the state line as if it did not exist. But that is the price one pays for imposing order on a messy reality.

The number of Syrians in the state dictated the amount of information available and therefore the length of the chapter. An individual colony might warrant many paragraphs or just one, but I tried to include at a minimum the number of colony members, where and under what conditions they lived, and what they did for work; in the most populous states, I have not analyzed some of the smaller colonies, purely as a matter of practicality.²⁰ Sometimes I was forced to reach beyond my self-imposed date parameters and examine the early years of the twentieth century in order to help understand the Syrian presence in the nineteenth—or, alternatively, when low numbers of documented Syrians in a state had increased markedly shortly after 1900. My interest, as always, centers on individuals, and where possible, I have tried to describe at least one member of each colony in some depth.

Each of the chapters begins with the total number of Syrians living in the state as enumerated in the 1900 census. An introductory section describes the evidence for the earliest Syrian presence in the state and then presents descriptions of one or more individual communities, including their earliest documented peddlers or laborers, their earliest businesses, the neighborhoods in which they lived, and finally, the colonies as they looked in 1900. Sometimes I chose to highlight a colony not because it was the largest, but because there was an interesting story to tell. At the end of most chapters (or occasionally, major cities), a section called Beyond Subsistence describes the spiritual, literary, and social lives of the colonists insofar as I have been able to discover them.

I have posted two spreadsheets of supplementary data, by state, on the book publisher’s website: the first contains my transcribed 1900 census data, and the other, titled Sources, lists in matrix form additional information for each colonist.²¹ The stories that I’ve constructed about the individual communities, however, are the heart of this book. Data cannot substitute for the human lived experience, but neither can the stories alone enable us to understand a community. I hope I have been able to convey some part of their lived experience through the data.

Numbers

Combing, purging, and studying the 1900 census has revealed that the total number of Syrians in the United States and its territories was tiny, slightly fewer than fifteen thousand individuals. I am convinced, however, that the census in nearly every instance significantly understates their numbers. For example, the 1900 New York City census reported a Syrian population of about 1,230. Yet other documents have revealed more than 3,200 Syrians who lived in New York City sometime between 1880 and 1900 and at least 1,500 who were provably there in 1900 itself and therefore should have all been counted in the census but were not—a margin of error of nearly 25%.²² I think this discrepancy stems mainly from the fact that the census was conducted in June, when the vast majority of Syrians were out on the road peddling.²³ The census taker thus depended on whomever was at home to report on the missing members of the household, but in a community that spoke little English (particularly because those left at home were mostly women and children), many were missed. This fact also tilted the census data in favor of merchants over peddlers, since merchants were tethered to their shops and therefore accessible to the census taker, yet peddlers made up the majority of nearly every colony. The other obvious cause of undercounting is my error. I have occasionally found Syrians who should have come up in one of the searches but did not, either because their country of origin was mistakenly entered (such as Serbia for Syria) or simply because they were missed. How many of those are still hidden is impossible to guess.²⁴

Even if I added 25–35% to account for the individuals presumed missing in the 1900 census, the resulting total Syrian population in the United States would be less than twenty thousand—which is much lower than many estimates proffered at the time. The Arabic-speaking priests who traveled around the country in the nineteenth century invariably reported the presence of many more Syrians in a town than were shown in the 1900 census. These discrepancies are pointed out in the appropriate chapters. Obviously, towns could be abandoned by Syrians or the colonies could experience population declines between the time of the priest’s visit and the census, but this was not the usual course; the size of the colonies tended to increase through time, at least until World War I. When asked to estimate the number in a town or in the country as a whole, lay Syrians also came up with figures that were far greater than those of the census. Although in both instances exaggerating their numbers may have been a conscious ploy to enhance their standing in the larger community (or boost the circulation figures of a newspaper), these men were, after all, on the ground and had access to information we lack.²⁵

Because of these uncertainties, the numbers given in this book should be taken as only relatively accurate. This is why I have not hesitated to round up or down to a workable number when describing a community. It not only smooths out the narrative flow, but it avoids giving the impression of numerical exactitude, which would be misleading. I have tried not to overuse the words about and approximately, but I expect readers to assume them to be present whenever numbers appear.

The attempt to correct the undercounting and to flesh out the bare bones of the census depends on supplementary data, gathered in the Sources spreadsheets mentioned above. Each sheet is a matrix of data I have compiled about the nineteenth-century communities from all sources apart from the 1900 census. It not only includes Syrians who may not have been listed in the census but who were in the state at some time during the period 1880–1900; it also provides further information about those in the census. Not all the cells of the Sources sheet could be filled in, but every entry does include a source and a source date so that they can be sorted chronologically to get a sense of the trajectory of the Syrian settlement of the state or community. The number and richness of sources diminished in direct correlation to the size of the community, so some of these sheets are un-satisfyingly incomplete. Despite being abbreviated and fragmentary, the sheet can provide details of an individual’s life history in the colony and an overall sense of the shape of the community. While the source documents are not cited in full in the spreadsheet, most have been included in footnotes.

Nationwide Connectors

Business is his lodestar, and in pursuit of it he penetrates if necessary the most remote parts of the Union. No nook escapes him.

—E. Dana Durand, General Statistics of Immigration and Foreign-Born Population, 1901

Syrians were intrepid. The Arbeely family set the pattern by traveling constantly around the United States during the 1880s, trying to find the ideal place to establish a Syrian colony. Although they failed, it took only a decade for Syrians to settle in every state and territory in the United States. This introduction would be incomplete without a look at some of the actors in the Syrian diaspora who transcended state boundaries and were its lifeblood, keeping it healthy. I have discussed some of these in my previous book, and some have also been covered in the overviews by Naff and Younis,²⁶ but researching this book has made their importance clearer.

Peddlers and Businesspeople

Peddlers, both men and women, who were the backbone of the early Syrian diaspora, traveled great distances. In a revealing description of his first years of peddling in the United States, Mohammed/Ed Aryain, a Druze from Damascus, went to the United States under the sponsorship of an American merchant in Rochester, PA, who, upon Aryain’s arrival, sent him to Beatrice, NE—a distance of a thousand miles—to peddle the merchant’s goods. Aryain carried with him what he could, and the rest was sent by express. In Beatrice, he was met by a number of other Syrians who peddled for the same merchant. Aryain used Beatrice as his base but traveled to wherever the selling was good and there was no competition from his countrymen; in his first year he peddled in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas by train and on foot. After seeing many different places on their travels, peddlers often chose one in which to settle; Aryain ended up in the west Texas town of Seminole.²⁷

Routes of the Syrians across the United States. Syrian-American Commercial Magazine, December 1923. Courtesy of Moise A. Khayrallah Center.

Individual Syrian businessmen (and some women) moved about constantly. Kawkab America, the first Arabic newspaper, which appeared in 1892 in New York City, had a section in every issue headed Comings and Goings, describing those arriving and departing New York. Where were they going? Everywhere. Many regularly made the two-week journey to Syria to see relatives. Others made frequent business trips (buying or selling) to Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. They were also constantly heading inland or to the states as they termed it, to check on their peddlers in faraway places, to transport fresh supplies, or simply to see friends or relatives. They traveled seasonally as well, to watering holes in upstate New York, Michigan, Florida, and elsewhere to set up pop-up shops catering to wealthy visitors; this was especially true of Syrian women who sold fancy goods in resort hotels around the country. The direction of travel was reciprocal: Syrian merchants throughout the country also went to New York to enjoy the cosmopolitan atmosphere and the company of their countrymen, as well as to replenish their stocks. Given the difficulties of transportation in the United States at this time (the railroad notwithstanding), this is a remarkable pattern.

It wasn't just individuals who traveled; whole families moved their homes with relative frequency. If one looks at the birthplace of children in a family, one sometimes sees that every child was born in a different state.²⁸

Lecturers and Performers

Beginning in the early 1880s, Syrian lecturers and performers began to travel around the country; the Arbeely family initiated the practice in 1880,²⁹ and Elias and Layyah Barakat, Protestants from Abay, soon followed suit. The men and women who continued in their footsteps were as dauntless as the peddlers and gave Americans in every part of the country their first look at an actual native Syrian.³⁰ It was one of the few professions—peddling was another—where women were well-represented. Lecturing was a career choice like any other: Syrians dressed in native costume, performed Mohammedan rituals (while advertising their Christian faith), and either charged admission or sold Turkish goods. They might hire a vaudeville theater, rent a church hall, or be invited to perform in a private home. The announcements and reviews of these events were usually favorable (if often paid for by the performers themselves) and were the most frequent appearance of Syrians in the American press in the early years. People like the Arbeelys and Barakats, Hannah Korany, four different members of the Moghabghab family,³¹ Ezekiel Taminosian, and the Behannessey brothers were known nationwide.³² Others had more local renown: Labibi Arbeed, Najeebie Atta, Shehadi Abdallah Shehadi, Amin Rasi, Joseph Fatoosh, Asad and Effie Rustum, Ramza Macksoud and her niece and nephews, and Abraham Rihbany.³³ None took up residence in the towns where they performed, but while there, they must have been in contact with local Syrians and been a valuable source of information and gossip. All had settled down by the turn of the century to a relatively sedentary life.³⁴

The late nineteenth century was the heyday of world’s fairs. Beginning with Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition of 1876, they followed one another in almost unbroken succession.³⁵ Some had countrywide reach while others were more local, but Syrians attended dozens of them as vendors or entertainers. In a sense, every participant was perforce an entertainer, because all were required to wear native costume, whether performing in the Turkish theater or simply selling candy. Although the merchants usually came away disappointed (their profits never lived up to expectations), the fairs’ influence on American tastes and ultimately the market for Syrian goods was in the long term commercially rewarding.³⁶ The fairs attracted Syrians from distant parts of the country as well as from Syria; these visitors were introduced to a new locale, learned to deal with American customers, met fellow countrymen from other places, and sometimes put down roots.

Clergymen

Clergymen of the various Christian sects-Orthodox, Maronite, and Melkite–traveled extensively around the country serving Syrian communities. Orthodox Archmandrite Raphael Hawaweeny visited thirty cities in a straight line from New York to San Francisco in 1896, made a five-month journey in 1898, and another in 1899.³⁷ Men were plucked from local communities and ordained as Orthodox priests in the first decade of the twentieth century. They too traveled incessantly, taking some of the burden off Hawaweeny. Maronite missionaries Maroon Farah and Joseph Yazbek traveled widely in the 1890s, one under the aegis of Rome, the other under the Catholic archbishop of New York.³⁸ Melkites, who were fortunate to have some of the earliest resident priests, perforce shared their priests with people of other sects and other towns, and all resident priests of whatever sect became circuit riders. The Syrian faithful were hungry for the spiritual blessings offered by these itinerant Arabic-speaking priests and often delayed marriages and baptisms until their visit, about which they were usually notified in advance. The priests sought the approval—official or unofficial—of local American clergy and were then often granted faculties (allowing them officially to minister in the Americans’ parishes).³⁹ All of these missionary-priests carried news as well as spiritual guidance to their far-flung congregants in the early Syrian colonies.

Protestants took a different approach. Rather than sending Arabic-speaking clergy across the country from one Syrian community to another, they established missions in many of the larger colonies. Americans or lay Syrians were put in charge of delivering sermons, providing help to the needy, and proselytizing in the colony, hoping to bring others into the Protestant fold. Interestingly, their work was reported on to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, just as were their missionary activities in Beirut, Damascus, or Cairo, and money was allocated from the same budgets for these domestic missions.

Publications

A half-dozen Arabic newspapers were published in New York in the nineteenth century; they went by mail and train to Syrian outlets all over the United States. The bulk of the coverage was focused on New York, but there was still plenty of room for letters, articles, and advertisements from/about Syrians elsewhere. Not only did they disseminate news about their compatriots around the world; they also offered advice to the immigrant—whether in New York City or Tacoma, WA—on navigating the rocky shoals of a new country. Many oral histories recall a literate member of the community reading the newspaper to others. The newspapers were the Facebook of their day, knitting together widely separated groups of colonists in a shared cultural enterprise. It is not surprising that the only known extant copies of the first four years of Kawkab America were found in the Kansas Public Library. Each newspaper reflected the sectarian and political views of its publisher/editor, and each had its adherents, but they all carried news to the farthest reaches of the diaspora.

Two books—Dr. Abdou’s Travels in America and Commercial Directory, first published in 1907, and the Syrian Business Directory, published by Salloum Mokarzel and Harry Otash in 1909—were remarkable promotions of, and testimonies to, the national reach of the Syrian business community. Both bilingual and both paid for by subscriptions and advertising, the directories covered every state and town in which Syrians worked. Business owners submitted their names to be included in each state’s list, thereby communicating their success to their fellow Syrians.⁴⁰ Building on the foundation laid by the first businessmen and women in the nineteenth century, the confidence embodied in these directories was a symptom of the twentieth.

Nationwide Themes

The Underrepresentation of Women

Sadly, this book is mainly a story about men. Not only are women generally not well represented in newspapers, naturalization papers, or city directories, but in fact, outside of New York City, there is little evidence of women business owners or professionals. Of course, many women worked outside the home—as peddlers who were the primary breadwinners, traveling lecturers or entertainers, midwives, shop owners, boardinghouse keepers, or owners of real estate—but they are generally absent from the historical record. The exceptions stand out, not only because they were few, but because they were remarkable. The writer ‘Afifa Karam; businesswomen Sophie Shishim, Selma Abdelnour, Marie el-Khoury, and Ranga Marsha; midwives Malake Nafash, Mannie Shahdan, Barbara Sirgany, Anna Reem, and Latifie Ferris (as well as others whose names have not yet surfaced); and an unknown number of women real estate and shop owners—each deserves her own biography.⁴¹ This gender gap can only be filled by close and in-depth study of each community.

Socioeconomic Factors

Virtually all oral histories of the Syrian diaspora begin with the story that the Syrians—mainly Christian—left their homeland to escape the persecution of their Ottoman Muslim overlords. But as many have pointed out, the facts embedded in the immigrants’ own narratives contradict this, instead ascribing the exodus to both a search for economic opportunity that was sorely lacking in late-nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon (H. H. Jessup, a Presbyterian missionary in Beirut, called it gold fever) and a simple quest for adventure. Amy Rowe points out as well that the myth’s other emphasis on the poverty and backwardness of these early immigrants—in stories told not only by Americans but also by the Syrians’ descendants (because it made their successes seem even more remarkable)—does not fit the evidence.⁴² In fact, it seems that the average Syrian immigrant was better educated, of a slightly higher economic status, and was more skilled than many other immigrants. This is reflected in the extraordinary number of doctors in the first generation of immigrants (whether educated in Syria or in the United States),⁴³ in the number of men who were able to start businesses without beginning as peddlers, the celerity with which they acquired English (or came knowing the language), and the speed at which many prospered.

Nevertheless, every family history is founded on the penniless-peddler–to–merchant-prince story, whether the family lived in New York City or Kearney, NE. I hope that this book will give readers an idea of the wider variety of life histories actually lived by Syrians in the United States. Just as in any population, there were those who didn’t make it, those who were able to feed their families but never got rich, those who went back to Syria with or without a nest egg, and those who did indeed fulfill the Syrian (or American) dream and become wealthy.⁴⁴

As early as 1890, there were significant (and visible) status differences between Syrian immigrants, often determined by economic success, which was in turn usually correlated with how long they had been in the United States. Big men were recognized in many colonies; they served not only as models to emulate in business, but also as judges, counselors, bankers, and sometimes spiritual leaders. Economic success was not the only differentiator, however: literacy in Arabic or English; fluency in spoken English (conferring on the speaker the ability and opportunity to interact with the host culture); one’s position in the religious congregation (often but not always correlated with wealth); literary ability; and, not unimportant, how a person was perceived by American society, all determined one’s standing in a given colony. Just as this is a book mainly about men, it is also by necessity mainly about the successful and accomplished members of the communities. It was those men who appeared in city directories, naturalization applications, court documents, and newspaper articles (whether in Arabic or English). In short, they were the ones who left their mark on the historical record, while the majority of colony members—Syrian immigrant myth-making notwithstanding—were part of the unrecognized middle and are more difficult to trace. I hope that this book will stimulate the effort to find and document these hidden members of the diaspora.⁴⁵

Despite the almost universally positive stories that the first wave of immigrants told about their early lives, life was extremely difficult for these early settlers. They lived in terrible conditions in some of the worst parts of town—whether in Denver, Boston, or Chicago—and lost many children to disease, especially respiratory illnesses and cholera. Even those who enjoyed early success continued to live with their countrymen in crowded tenements, practically on top of one another, with other equally miserable immigrants and African Americans.⁴⁶ Their neighborhoods were dotted with noxious industries as well as the rail depots and tracks close to which they settled in order to receive goods from their distant suppliers. They always lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Almost without exception, these neighborhoods are gone, wiped out by urban renewal; in the few cases where buildings remain, one can still picture the misery in which they lived. Those who lived in rural areas or homesteaded had the difficult life of every nineteenth-century farmer, scratching out a living in a sometimes unforgiving environment. Their work in the mills of the Northeast was murderous, with sixty-hour weeks, low pay, dangerous conditions, and the necessity of leaving their children unsupervised. Even peddling, which many remember with nostalgia, was brutal work; men and women walked miles each day with heavy loads, slept in the rough, and were sometimes abused by the local populace.

It turns out that the New York City colony was an anomaly in almost every way. In no other urban setting did the nineteenth-century Syrians turn to manufacturing, importing, and large-scale wholesaling as they did in New York.⁴⁷ However valorized, being in business for oneself was largely limited to the peddlers’ suppliers and the mom-and-pop shops selling groceries, confectionery, or fruit. Only in New York do records document Syrian-owned factories with tens or hundreds of employees making laces, kimonos, mirrors, or cigarettes. Elsewhere, there were no large-scale importers with factories overseas and five-story warehouses supplying not only Syrian retailers but Americans as well. There were no titans of industry. This is not to say that Syrian immigrants outside of New York could not become wealthy; they could and did. They expanded their mercantile businesses into holding companies selling a wide variety of products, or they diversified by buying land or real estate. Much of this expansion took place in the twentieth century but was begun in the nineteenth. It was mainly left to the second generation, however, to enter the professional classes and scale the peaks of success in America.⁴⁸

Religion

Adherence to Christian religious practice—whether Maronite, Melkite, Orthodox, or Protestant—was of primary importance to every Syrian and every group of Syrians in the United States. While loyalty to one’s natal village or family was certainly in evidence and has been described in many studies, it was subsumed by adherence to one’s faith, which was not negotiable and never neglected or taken for granted. There were of course marriages between people of different religions, most of which were between Syrian men and American women.⁴⁹ Some interfaith marriages between Syrians did take place in the first generation—my paternal grandparents were one example—but these were extremely rare. It was expected that the wife would convert/conform to her husband’s faith. Until they were able to afford a church (whether rented or purchased) and to support an Arabic-speaking priest, Syrians attended the American church that most closely resembled their own. If they could not wait for a Syrian priest to arrive, they were married or had their children baptized by American priests and sometimes re-baptized by their own priest. No one was happy with this situation: many communities clamored to have an Arabic-speaking priest, but only a few were granted their wish. Thus, even as early as the nineteenth century, Syrian priests were lamenting the loss of their parishioners to American churches. Ironically, the problem of drift became epidemic in the twentieth century, just as Arabic-speaking priests were becoming more available, not only because the second generation were more assimilated, but because they had difficulty understanding the liturgy in Arabic.⁵⁰

In some communities, the sects were riven by internal factionalism, leading in the most extreme cases to the founding of two churches of a single sect or the defection of congregants to American churches, even when a Syrian church was present. An epic battle between two factions of American Maronites at the turn of the century played out in several cities. Aired in the Arabic and American press and in letters to church fathers, it was vitriolic in the extreme. Conflict was not confined to the Maronites. Fights erupted around the same time within Melkite communities in various towns, the Orthodox in New York City, and even among the Presbyterians (small as their numbers were). They engaged entire communities.⁵¹ Although they corresponded roughly in time to the disputes that occurred in many communities around the turn of the century described below, they seem to have been separate from them. Why this should have been the case is something that needs to be explored further.

If it is true (as has been estimated) that only about 1–2% of the nineteenth-century Syrian immigrants to the United States were Muslim and Druze, there would have been no more than about four hundred in the entire country. Muslims were more common in the Midwest than the East,⁵² but still few. Although Naff, whose work concentrated on the Midwest, identifies some Druze and Muslim immigrants, only a few of those she discusses arrived before the turn of the century.⁵³ William Sherman identified early Muslim homesteaders in North Dakota,⁵⁴ some of whom came before 1900, and identifiable Muslims appear in the 1900 census in Sioux Falls, SD, and Des Moines, IA, all of whom were peddlers.⁵⁵ Syrian (and Egyptian) Muslims participated in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, but how many of them remained in the country afterward is unknown. A few pre-1900 newspaper articles discuss the coming of Muslims to Texas and the Midwest, but it is hard to tell whether they were confusing Syrians with Muslims or whether there really were Muslims in their midst. The stories told by descendants of the earliest Druze immigrants likewise date their coming to the late nineteenth century, but there is almost no independent confirmation of these early arrivals.⁵⁶ The possibility that more were here, hidden by changed names, conversion, or passing as Christians, remains tantalizing and worthy of further research. It can be said with some certainty, however, that the first real influx of Syrian Muslims did not occur until the first decade of the twentieth century.

Early Syrian (and Middle Eastern) Jewish immigration to the United States is a story waiting to be told. I have described three of the Arabic-speaking Jews who had close ties to the Syrian colony in New York in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁵⁷ Several other such stories have emerged in researching this book—their presence is documented at several world’s fairs—and I would expect more to be found as scholars look more carefully at early arrivals who shared a language and culture with the early Syrian Christian immigrants.

In-Fighting

American newspaper reporters often asserted that Syrian colonies were divided into factions, sometimes ascribed to feuds originating in Syria between villages and/or religions. These stories also permeate the oral histories of descendants. Before researching this book, I was reluctant to accept the idea, because it seemed to fit so well into the orientalist stereotype of the primitive and violent Arab. But the idea of factions within the community now looks more plausible. Although it is certainly true that in many cases people from different villages and/or different religions lived in close proximity, with their shops side by side, there were many other instances in which colonies were physically divided into two enclaves, sometimes just a few blocks apart. Unfortunately, I do not have enough information about village of origin or religion to overlay on individual residents/residences to make a definitive case one way or another, but the physical pattern is clear and needs to be investigated further. Each case is elucidated as far as is possible in the individual colony’s chapter.

There was a depressing similarity in the fights that occurred in many of the communities around the turn of the twentieth century. One can (as I did in my earlier book) ascribe these fights in part to the horrible conditions in which the immigrants lived: crowded together in filthy tenements; scrambling to make a living in competition with one another, never mind the Americans; and the stresses of being strangers in the West. The disputes did occur mainly in large urban colonies like New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago, where the tensions of urban existence were severe, but they also broke out in places like Denver, Baton Rouge, and Fort Wayne—wherever Syrians gathered. American newspapers covered these battles (especially the violent ones) with glee; the language barrier added a note of farce to every story. If one reads (the admittedly garbled) accounts of the fights from one state to the next, they were couched either in the language of money or honor: someone owed or stole money from someone else, or a person (man or woman) had been allegedly insulted, slandered, or defamed by another member of the community (including several accusations of adultery). These battles often ended up before a judge (and hence in the newspaper) because the Syrians were quick to sue or swear out a warrant against their countrymen, even if they were only recently arrived and spoke little or no English. The supposed guilty party or parties were usually fined a nominal sum and set free. Sometimes the hostilities also played out in the Arabic newspapers, with individuals writing florid letters accusing one