The First Arabic-Speaking Community in the United States

Discover the journey

View of the Syrian neighborhood from the Battery, 1904.

Arriving

Beginning in 1880, the immigrants who would soon call themselves Syrians landed on the southern tip of Manhattan Island after a 5,000-mile journey from Mediterranean ports. From The Battery where they disembarked, they could see the foot of Washington Street, a north-south thoroughfare built on landfill in the Hudson River. This would become New York's "Syrian Quarter."
The immigrants were from "Greater Syria," the part of the Ottoman Empire comprising present-day Lebanon (from whence the largest percentage of "Syrians" came), Syria, and historic Palestine.
What started out as dozens turned into hundreds, and then thousands of immigrants, and by 1900, Washington Street had become a vibrant community of about 1,500 Syrians. Most were Christians: Maronites, Orthodox, Melkites, and Protestants, but Muslims and Druse settled as well. The street was awash with reminders of home: Arabic could be seen and heard everywhere; be-fezzed men strolled the streets; Syrian wholesalers, importers, and manufacturers supplied newly-arrived immigrants with goods to peddle. A half-dozen Arabic newspapers delivered news from the old country and advice to immigrants on how to adapt to their new home. Poets and writers were nurtured by literary societies.
Dubbed the "Syrian Colony," the "Syrian Quarter," or "Little Syria," the Washington Street community was the intellectual, literary, commercial, and religious center of Arabic-speaking communities in the United States. Several of these communities rivalled New York's in size and complexity, but New York City's community remained the lodestone.

Probably the first "Syrian" immigrant to the United States, Peter Zacharias was indeed from Syria. Born in Damascus in 1814, Zacharias went to California for the gold rush in 1852 and settled down in Sacramento, where he married and lived until his death in September 1878. Just a month before he died, the first Syrian family landed in New York. Although they did not settle in New York City (going instead to Tennessee), over the next decade, hundreds landed in New York and stayed, founding the first Arabic-speaking community in the United States. The majority of those who followed were from present-day Lebanon, but many came from Damascus and other parts of present-day Syria, as well as from Egypt and Palestine.

Peter Zacharias, 1868. Courtesy Sacramento Public Library.

The trip from Beirut to New York was brutal. Traveling in steerage for at least three weeks, during which the seas were often rough, the food inedible, and sickness rampant, the Syrians arrived bedraggled, dirty, frightened, and sometimes ill. Most had heard stories of compatriots who had been turned back at Ellis Island. They could be rejected for not having enough money or no job prospect or no friend or relative in the United States. If they had a "loathsome disease" like trachoma, they were turned back. If they were thought to have come as contract laborers to some employer, they were rejected and their suspected employers arrested. Since Syrians were thought of by many as "undesirables," these restrictions were sometimes applied arbitrarily. Syrian businessmen would come down to the dock and deposit money to guarantee the immigrant would not become a "public charge." These hurdles notwithstanding, the great majority were allowed to land, and the place they disembarked, The Battery, was just steps away from the foot of Washington Street, where their compatriots had settled.

What they saw and heard on lower Washington Street must have been a shock. A cacophony of languages, Irish, Italian, German, and Scandinavian, greeted them from immigrant-run saloons, stables, boarding houses, and foundries. Many of their neighbors worked on the rough-and-tumble Hudson River piers, one block west. The behemoth Babbitt's Soap Works took up nearly an entire square block on the west side of the street. On the east side, however, they were reminded of home: they heard Arabic spoken on the street, saw Arabic signs and menus in shop windows, and saw newspapers and books printed in the colony for sale. Syrian-owned shops carried Middle Eastern goods or offered groceries, fruit, or tobacco to their compatriots. There were even Arabic-speaking priests and chapels for each of the religious sects. Washington Street was a "Little Syria" in New York City.

We sold all our remaining possessions and found we had about $60 left over after we had paid for our passage on the steamer. The passage cost us $170 and we were three weeks making it, for we stopped at Egypt and Italy and some French and Spanish cities before we stretched out on that run across the Atlantic Ocean. I had never seen any city except Beirut before, and the voyage up the Mediterranean was to me a series of the most astonishing pictures. But all these seemed small after I came into New York bay and found myself almost surrounded by cities, any one of which was far larger and grander than any I had seen in Europe. We passed close by the grand Statue of Liberty and saw in the distance the beautiful white bridge away up in the blue sky and the big buildings towering up like our own mountain peaks. I was almost prepared to see snow on their tops, tho it was the summer time nine years ago.

Najib Diab, 1902.

Portrait of Najeeb Diab, ca. 1915. Courtesy Bob Goodhouse.

Dr. Akram Khater speaking at Villanova University.

Just-landed Middle Eastern immigrants at Ellis Island, ca. 1905.

Forty-eight Syrians of both sexes and all ages arrived here yesterday....It is doubtful if the Collector allows these people to land, as their poverty and nomadic intentions seem likely to reduce them to the condition of paupers.

New York Times, 23 August 1889.

Joseph Svehlak, former resident and tour guide, describes the makeup of the community. Excerpt from the documentary The Sacred by Ozge Dogan.

Lewis Hine, Syrian Woman at Ellis Island, 1923. New York Public Library Photography Collection.

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