The History of American-Syrians

Interesting article.  Worth a read.

Sharon Jacobs writing at NationalGeographic:
Before war broke out in Syria two years ago,  Moaz Sinan, a Syrian American from West Bloomfield, Michigan, spent every summer in Damascus with his family. He hasn't returned since 2010, but he's noticed changes in news reports he's seen.

"You're watching videos [taken] in the same streets that you spend your summer in, and seeing these streets destroyed," says Sinan. "The same streets I used to play soccer in, the same markets I used to buy stuff from—some of those are gone."

The Syrian-American community, at least 159,000 strong according to U.S. Census estimates, spans the political, religious, and cultural spectrum. It includes families whose ancestors peddled goods in New York City in the late 19th century, and medical students who came to the U.S. over the last few decades to complete residencies and find work.

Across this breadth of backgrounds, many Syrian Americans, like Sinan, retain strong ties to their homeland and feel the strain of the conflict threatening to tear it apart.

First Wave
Syrians started trickling into the U.S. during the mid-19th century, cresting into a major wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920.

By the 1930s, 130,000 to 350,000 Arab immigrants had entered the U.S. Most of the early immigrants came from "Ottoman Syria," which included the modern-day countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel, as well as the Palestinian territories.

Up to three-quarters of the early immigrants were Christian, according to Akram Khater, director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies at North Carolina State University. (Among Arab Americans, Christians still outnumber Muslims.) Some came to escape religious persecution, while others followed the well-trodden path toward a better life in America.

Most of the early immigrants settled in Lower Manhattan, along Washington Street, an area that came to be known as "Little Syria." The neighborhood boasted several Arabic-language newspapers, two churches, and numerous Arab restaurants and cafes. Little Syria's residents hailed from around the world—Marian Sahadi Ciaccia, who grew up in the neighborhood in the '20s, counted ethnic Greeks and Russians among her neighbors. But most of the neighborhood, especially in its early years, was Arab.

"You'd smell them making the baklava and Syrian ice cream," says Ciaccia, who now lives in Brooklyn. "Everybody knew each other; everybody shared each other's happiness, sadness, problems."

A Community on the Move
From their landing point in Little Syria, early immigrants spread, some settling in surrounding suburbs in New York and New Jersey, and others traveling as far as Detroit or Oklahoma City. Many were peddlers who traversed the country selling their wares. Some eventually became wealthy enough to settle down, forming communities along old peddling routes.

Father Anthony Sabbagh leads the congregation of St. George Orthodox Church in Allentown, in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley. The church was built in 1916 to serve 15 families. "The panorama of the mountains, of the greenery" in the Lehigh Valley reminded the early immigrants of home, says Sabbagh. Many of his congregants come from towns in Syria's Wadi al-Nasara—"the Christian valley" in Arabic.

The first Syrian Jewish immigrants also arrived in the U.S. around the turn of the century, many seeking economic opportunity in New York City like their Christian and Muslim counterparts. But Syrian Jews stayed largely separate from other Arab Americans there, and from other Jews.

"They all know each other," says Jennifer Abadi, who authored a cookbook of her family's Syrian Jewish recipes. And, she says, "they're very insular." Part of their insularity stems from "the Edict," a ban by the community's rabbis against marrying anyone unable to prove Jewish ancestry, including converts to Judaism.

Today the largest Syrian Jewish population, estimated at 20,000 or more, is centered in Brooklyn's Gravesend neighborhood. The most recent wave of immigrants came in 1992, when Syrian president Hafez al-Assad opened the doors for Syria's remaining 4,000 Jews to emigrate. Nearly all of them left for the U.S. or Israel.

Members of the Alawite sect, the Muslim ............