Philip K. Hitti was the first scholar to study Arab-American immigration to the
United States. Highly influential during the twentieth century, his ideas have
lost much of their appeal to current interpreters of the early diaspora of
Arab-Americans called Syrians at the time. This article revisits Hitti's
thought, focusing on the issues of Palestine and Arab identity. Using primary
source material from Hitti's archived papers, plus multiple secondary sources, I
argue that Hitti maintained consistency, both in his advocacy of the general
Arab stance opposing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and in his construction of
Arab identity as different from Syrian identity. On Palestine, Hitti clashed
with Albert Einstein, in public discourse and in an acerbic private exchange of
correspondence. On Arab identity, Hitti held firm to a strict interpretation,
distinguishing Syrians, conceptualized as Christian, from Arabs, conceptualized
as Islamic.
Syrian immigrants populated New York's Lower Manhattan, creating a neighborhood known as Little Syria. Sources employ "mother colony" and other evocative terms to highlight the unique importance of New York's Arabic-speaking enclave to Syrian immigrant settlements throughout the United States. Yet no scholarly monograph on Little Syria, covering the entire period of its existence, from approximately 1880 to 1946, has been published. This article argues that early Syrian immigrants used their distinctive ethnicity to economic advantage within this urban enclave but exited its unhealthy environment as soon as they could. Like others, Syrians found unparalleled opportunities for mobility and financial success in New York. Manifesting an Arabic culture and an affinity for the middle class, they left Little Syria behind, and made no concerted attempt to preserve the old neighborhood. They embraced ethnicity as an economic virtue but distanced themselves from ethnicity as an environmental burden.
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