A Brief History
Some historians trace the rich history of Arabic-speaking communities in the Americas back to the sixteenth century. In 1528, Estebanico Azemmouri, a native of Azemmour in Morocco, landed on the continent as a member of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, likely becoming the first Arabic-speaking person to explore North America. Additionally, other Arabic speakers, identified as Moors and Moriscos, were brought to America’s first British colony of Roanoke on the coast of present-day North Carolina by the English explorer and privateer Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596).
Syrian Immigration to New York
Mo
re came as immigrants two centuries later, and found a home in New York City. Anṭūniyūs al-Bishʻalānī (1827-1856), commonly known as Antonio al-Bishallany, who immigrated from Lebanon, became the first member of a community today known as “Arab Americans.”
He preceded a wave of immigrants who arrived in the United States around 1880, forming the first Arabic-speaking community in New York City, emigrating from Ottoman-ruled Greater Syria, an area which at that time encompassed the historical lands of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. While the majority belonged to the Christian faith, a smaller number were Muslims (about 600 in 1897).
These refugees and exiles were escaping economic and political crises in Beirut, Mount Lebanon, and Damascus, for example the civil war between Maronite Christians and the Druze (1840 and 1860) or the economic boom pushing some to seek employment outside the region. They were drawn by the opportunities offered in the United States that they learned about in American missionary schools in Lebanon and Syria. For many of these emigrants the trip here entailed a three-week journey by ship that took them from the eastern Mediterranean, on to Marseille or Le Havre in France (where some settled), and finally to this country.
Little Syria
Upon their arrival in New York, Syrians made their new home near Battery Park, specifically around Washington Street on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. Many chose to continue their journey to other states, including Michigan and Massachusetts, while others ventured to Latin America— where vibrant Syrian communities flourished in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Mexico City.
New York City’s Syrian quarters, also called Little Syria or the Syrian Colony, thrived between the 1880s and 1940s. In order to support their families, men as well as women, rejecting traditional gender expectations, peddled goods (bī‘a al-kishsh), worked in factories, or in stores. Later, they opened their own restaurants and grocery stores, attended churches, and pressed Arab records. Newly founded publishing houses began printing the first Arabic-language newspapers, literary magazines, and books that circulated everywhere in the United States.
Poets of the Mahjar
Among this population there were also writers, poets, journalists, and artists, part of the broader Romanticism literary
movement of Arabic-speaking émigrés, called the Mahjar. In 1916 some of them formed a literary society, called The Pen League or al-Rabitah al-Qalamiyyah. Among their founding members were legendary writers: Nasib Aridah, Abd al-Masih Haddad, Nadrah Haddad, Amin Rihani, and Gibran Khalil Gibran. Syrian women also contributed Syrian women also contributed to the cultural and literary life of their community, such as the Lebanese feminist writer and journalist ´Afifah Karam (1883-1924), who condemned patriarchal norms of Arab society both in Lebanon and in America.
In their works, members of the Mahjar recorded their migration experiences and pondered their newly hybrid identities, wrestled with their integration efforts into American culture as well as the feeling of separation from their Arab homelands. Others recounted the daily lives of ordinary people in the bustling heart of Little Syria. Stimulated by their personal encounter with Western literature, they challenged the rigidity of Arab literary traditions, and radically changed the Arabic language, which ultimately magnified the Nadha movement, or the Arab literary and cultural Renaissance movement that flourished from the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. They wrote variously in Arabic and English in order to reach a broader audience, while also bringing European and Eastern European literature to Arabic-speaking readers and immigrant communities across the United States through their translations of those works into Arabic.
As a result, the brilliant productions of The Pen League were not only read in the United States but also across the Americas and the Arab world, establishing New York City as a prominent intellectual and cultural center of Arab life, with influence that traveled a fair bit beyond Washington Street.