Greater Syrian Diaspora at 78RPM: Dr. Khalil A. Bishara

posted on: Dec 9, 2020

By: Richard Breaux/Arab America Contributing Writer

What do you do when you find several dozen 78 rpm records all in Arabic and you can neither read, nor speak the language? You research the musicians and record labels and write about them.…at least that’s what Arab America contributing writer, Richard Breaux did. The result is bound to teach you something about Arab American history and heritage in the first half of the 20th Century. Arab America highlights some of the well-known and lesser-known Arab American musicians profiled on this series. This week’s article features Arab American minister, Dr. Khalil A. Bishara.

As readers of this blog know, several Arab American priests or ministers recorded on 78 RPM record.  Most ministers who recorded like Germanos Chehade, Agapios Golam, Samuel David, and Ilyas Kurban held positions in the Syrian or Antiochian Orthodox Church. Melkite and Maronite priests seemed less likely to record, yet Maronite priest Rev. George Aziz recorded on Columbia in 1914 and on Maloof in 1925 and Melkite priest Anton Aneed recorded on Macksoud in the 1920s. Recordings by Arab American imams or Protestant ministers were less common and recordings by any Syrian/Lebanese immigrants on so-called vanity labels are even more rare and tended to fly beneath the radar that is Richard K. Spottswood’s Ethnic Music on Record. Reverend Doctor Khalil Asaph Bishara’s recording of “My God’s Love” on the Electric Recording Laboratories’ personalized Bishara label in the 1920s was one such record.

Khalil Assaph Bishara was born either 1 May 1877 or 1878 or 20 March 1879 in Greater Syria, now Lebanon. School records at Hobart College, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Naturalization records use the 1 May birthdate, while 20 March was used on his Social Security application filed by his wife. According to some sources, Bishara took his early studies at the Boys’ Training Home established by the Quakers or Society of Friends in Brummana, Lebanon. The Boys’ Training Home, founded in 1873, later became Brummana Boys’ High School than just Brummana High School as it became coed. Bishara also enrolled at College National in Baabdat. He arrived in the United States after traveling via Beirut to La Harve to New York City in October 1898. By 1907, he enrolls at Hobart College and Columbia University but finally settled on the Princeton Theological Seminary from 1907 to 1910. He graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity in 1910 and later received his Ph.D. in Semitics from the New Windsor College 5 June 1912.

Khalil A. Bishara became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908. One of the character witnesses who signed his naturalization document was Al-Hoda newspaper founder and publisher Naoum Mokarzel. Beginning in 1909 with Costa Najour, Syrian immigrants began to have their racial status questioned in the United States, thus restricting their ability to become naturalized citizens. According to the 1790 Naturalization Act, only “free white persons” had a rightful path to naturalized citizenship. Were Syrians, from Asia Minor, Asian or white? Initially, “scientific evidence” and legal precedent backed the idea that Syrians were racially white. However, by 1910 in the Ellis case, “common knowledge” became the basis for classifying Syrian immigrants as white. Common knowledge meant whiteness was essentially whatever the common white person said it was. Within three years, the common person’s attitude towards Syrians had changed. In ex parte Shahid, the courts ruled that Syrians were not white. In some places, city and county officials revoked Syrian Americans’ voting rights. Similarly, in 1914, the courts used the common knowledge rationale to argue Syrians were not white and therefore not eligible for citizenship. Naoum Mokarzel and other editors of Arab American newspaper viewed this case as instrumental to the future of Syrian America and Mokarzel called in a favor to Kalil Bishara to advocate for Dow and Syrian Whiteness. Bishara leveraged his education and access to resources to produce a 128-page book, The Origin of Modern Syria, which helped make the case for Syrian’s whiteness along with what we call “the Jesus thesis”. Faced with the question of whether Jesus, s Semitic person from the Near East, like Arabs, was Asian or white, the common person in the United States affirmed that Jesus was white.

Mount Paran Church in Randallstown, Maryland became the first church Bishara served as pastor after passing his exam, preaching his first sermon, and entering the presbytery in 1910. He preached on the subject “What Conditions That Must Be Complied With in Order to Have Our Prayers Answered?” at the three hundred fourteenth stated meeting of the Presbytery in Baltimore in 1913. Although newspaper reports claimed Bishara left Mount Paran Church to care for his ailing mother back home, Bishara next accepted an assignment at Bedford, Pennsylvania. Weddings, funerals, special events filled Rev. Bishara’s regular schedule. Some engagements he required to explain cultural developments back home such as his lecture on “The Women of Syria” at the Suffrage Party meeting. As Bishara settled into his new congregation, he proved not to be adverse to technological use as each of his July and August 1915 lectures that were a part of the “A Trip to the Holy Land and Back” series featured “between seventy and eighty stereopticon views, illustrating the daily life of the people of different countries, their religions, places of worship, the physical features of the countries, historic buildings, etc.” Lectures in the series included “Africa,” “David Livingston,” “Persia,” “Syria,” “India,” and “China.”

January 1919 brought Bishara into the spotlight as the press reprinted his sermon on whether the United States Senate should accept and sign the Treaty of Versailles. Congress voted 39 to 55 to reject the treaty. Interestingly, in his sermon about the need to contribute to the Near East Relief Campaign for Syrian and Armenian Relief, Bishara reduced the war within the recently fallen Ottoman Empire, not to the complicated maneuverings and politics of the empire and its millets, but solely to Christian vs Muslim war.

While Bishara supported President Woodrow Wilson, he also condemned racial prejudice in the United States against African Americans. As things stood in 1919, following what James Weldon Johnson labeled The Red Summer of 1919, Bishara argued that African Americans had no future prospects for hope or “social or political rights’ whatsoever when it came to equality despite “Living under the flag; Dying under the flag as brave and patriotic as any.”

A letter of resignation in March 1919, marked the end of Bishara’s tenure in Bedford, Pennsylvania. He participated in and offered the invocation at the memorial for the late Dr. Howard Bliss, former president of the Syrian Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut). Later that year, Rev. Bishara became pastor of the Syrian Protestant Church in Brooklyn, New York. He also married his wife, Nabeeha, in 1920.

The Electric Recording Laboratories operated from 1921-1922. Their headquarters were in New York City at 210 Fifth Avenue and their pressing plants were in New Jersey. For $35 “musical artists” could reserve the studio for one take session and receive a dozen personal phonograph discs. Emerson Records took over The Electric Recording Labs in 1924 and the Consolidated Recording Corporation bought Emerson and produced records from 1926-1928. The Consolidated Recording Corporation’s Electric Recording Laboratories recorded at least one song, “My God’s Love,” with Elian Neameh, on a double-sided disc on the customized Bishara label in 1921 or 1922. The Electric Recording Labs pressed customized records regularly for individuals or institutions that wished to produce limited-run recordings.

In March 1925, Bishara spearheaded to purchase of the former Second Unitarian Church building on Clinton Street in Brooklyn for the Syrian Protestant Church. On 27 May 1925, Rev. Bishara joined a group of prominent Syrian speakers at a testimonial banquet for Dr. and Mrs. Philip Hitti from the American University of Beirut. Hitti emerged as one of the foremost scholars and intellectuals of Arab and Arab American history from the 1920s through the 1950s. Hitti’s work remains heralded as some of the most groundbreaking and pioneering work in the field. At the time, Hitti supervised efforts to raise two million dollars for the American University of Beirut and had recently completed his book, The Syrians in America.

Changes to the US immigration laws troubled Rev. Bishara deeply. The Immigration Act of 1924 also known as the Johnson-Reed Act limited immigration from mandate Greater Syria to 100 people per year, however, it was the Naturalization Act of 1906 that required immigrants seeking naturalization to learn English. Bishara openly argued against such requirements as he came to believe that the American education system placed far too much emphasis on learning to read and write the English language and not enough time on building informed citizens with integrity and “personal character.” Bishara maintained that Syrian immigrants were “110 percent American in loyalty to American institutions and Constitution.” He told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that although most of his sermons were in Arabic, one service per month and all Sunday school were conducted in English.

Groups like the Damascus Lodge #867 in Brooklyn invited Rev. Bishara to its member memorial service to eulogize and honor its many members who had died since the lodge’s founding. By 1930, this constituted some seventeen members, some of whom stood among the 15,000 Arab Americans to serve for the United States in World War I. In February 1933, WCCU broadcasted one of Rev. Bishara’s sermons for its 8:30 PM slot as a part of its Brooklyn Church and Mission Federation programs.

The spring and early summer of 1934 found Rev. Bishara on the pageant planning committee to celebrate “The City of Churches” with a pageant sponsored by the Interracial Commission of the Brooklyn Church and Mission Federation. By this point in his personal and spiritual development, Bishara began to reject denominationalism among Christians and worked across ethnic and racial groups to this end. Among those who sat on the planning committee with Bishara was a young twenty-three-year-old Dorothy Height, who had just graduated from New York University and in just over twenty-years would become President of the National Council of Negro Women.

Naheeba’s poor health took the couple to Lebanon in 1933, and Rev. Bishara returned and presented a series of lectures related to his travels over the next few years. Lebanon gained its independence from the French mandate in 1943. Rev. Bishara received his most updated US Passport in 1945 and in 1950, Rev. Bishara traveled alone to Beirut. Whether he knew he had encephalitis remains unclear, but he grew increasingly weak and ill and died at the American University in Beirut Hospital on 1 September 1950. His remains were not shipped home and he’s buried in the Arabic Protestant Cemetery at Ras el Nabih in Beirut.

According to historian and genealogist Mary Ann Haick DiNapoli, the Syrian Protestant Church sold its buildings at “201-203 Clinton Street” in 1954 and Fourth Avenue Presbyterian Church absorbed the Syrian Protestant Church’s congregation.

Special thanks to Justin Goins and Wael Al-Hakim.

Richard M. Breaux is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse from Oakland, California. His courses and research explore the social and cultural histories of African Americans and Arab Americans in the 20th Century.

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