Dr. Khalil A. Bishara: a Presbyterian Minister Defended the Rights of Syrians and Others
Rev. Dr. Khalil A. Bishara
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| One of two found photos of Rev. Dr. Khalil A. Bishara, c. 1935. From the 10 May 1937, Sun & Bulletin, courtesy of Newspapers.com |
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 A. J. 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 then 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 he 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 official 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 question whether Jesus, A Semitic person from the Near East,
like Arabs, was Asian or white, the common person in the United States affirmed
that Jesus was white.
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| Title page of The Making of Modern Syria written by Dr. Kalil A.Bishara in 1914. Courtesy of The Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/originmodernsyria00bishrich/page/n6 |
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 required him 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.”
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| 1918 World War I Draft Card for Kalil A. Bishara. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
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 complicate 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 labelled 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 was 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.
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| Dr. Bishara and Leon Nahmee on a personalized Bishara label recorded by the Electric Recording Laboratories. |
In March 1925, Bishara spearheaded to purchase 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 America 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 surpervised efforts to raise
two million dollars for the American University of Beirut and had recently
completed his book, The Syrians in America.
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| A young Rev. Dr. Khalil A. Bishara. The Brooklyn Eagle 30 September 1929. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
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 person 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 American
education system placed far too much emphasis on learning to read and write the
English language and not enough on 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.
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| Article where Rev. Kalil Bishara condemns emphasis on language rather than character in the naturalization process, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 August 1929. Courtesy of Newspapers.com |
Groups like the Damascus Lodge #867 in Brooklyn invited Rev.
Bishara to its member memorial service to eulogize and honor its many member
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 pageant
planning committee to celebrate “The City of Churches” with a pageant sponsored
by 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 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.
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| Report of American death outside the US for Rev. Dr. Kalil A. Bishara. Courtesy of Ancestry.com |
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.
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