Journal Article

Faith, Language, and Identity: The Role of Education in the Americanization of “Syrians” in the United States, 1880–1928

Nicoll, Fergus

2025

Overview

This article seeks to address a significant lacuna in Arab American Studies in respect of the role played by primary, secondary, and adult education in the integration of hundreds of thousands of mainly Christian immigrants from the Ottoman Levant between the 1890s and the late 1920s. The article begins by discussing the context in which US federal authorities sought to assimilate and “Americanize” these new immigrants through the education of adults and minors in a rapidly evolving public education system, also addressing the developing role of charitable, parochial, and other private schools within the nascent Arab American community. At the heart of national policy was a concern, voiced particularly loudly during the second half of World War I, that the loyalty of immigrants to their new country had to be embedded through a deliberate inculcation of common American values. The education system, in its various forms, bore the brunt of this work. This ideological policy, however, often came into conflict with a countermovement of cultural pluralism, through which it was attempted to retain or reclaim intellectual, cultural, and social legacies from the migrants’ countries of origin. After tackling this wider context, the article focuses on the disparate communities of Arabic-speaking immigrants, from New York to states such as Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, and California. Within this heterogenous but, initially at least, mainly Christian diaspora, an intense debate took place throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century over these questions of Americanization, race, identity, the desirability, speed, and comprehensiveness of assimilation, and the extent to which the language and cultural legacy of the mother country would have to be sacrificed in becoming American. These debates, focused on education, shaped the self-view of the nascent diaspora community in ways that lasted until the more nationally diverse “second wave” of post-World War II Arab immigration.

• Publisher: Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies,North Carolina State University, Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies
• Subject: Arab American Syria / Cultural Pluralism / Education / Immigration / Ottoman / Sectarianism