Transcription
Okay. Well, thank you very much indeed. Um, I will be shifting the geographical focus now, uh, a long way away, uh, to, uh, the Far East. Um, I want to look not just, in fact, at the Philippines, but also a bit at the, uh, communities in China and Japan because, interestingly, in our keynote, um, we, that was one area that was left out. Um, almost everywhere in the world was mentioned, but the, this, um, we did, of course, say the Lebanese were everywhere. These are not just Lebanese. These are, uh, people that I've called, uh, Syrian because they called themselves Syrian. Now, I know that this is a very, uh, problematic term, um, but it refers roughly to the Bilad al-Sham ash-Sham, um, with some, uh, possible, um, deviations.
Um, now, most authors who've looked at this generally Syrian migration, uh, have, in fact, uh, not referred to the Philippines or to, uh, China and Japan. Um, and yet, uh, the community there in historical times was roughly the same size as that in Australia. Uh, what's happened, of course, since then is that the community in Australia has grown, partly, interestingly, by migration from the Philippines. Um, whereas the community in the Philippines, uh, has, Uh, now, I have to be very careful here. It's not disappeared. It's still there, but it has ceased to represent itself politically as a constituted community. And this has a lot to do, uh, with the, uh, independence of the Philippines and the problems of how you cope with the independent Philippine government, uh, after, um, 1946.
Okay. Now, what brought them to the Philippines? Uh, we're looking here very much at an entrepreneurial diaspora. I much prefer entrepreneurial diaspora to trade diaspora. These people are not just traders. They are, in fact, amongst the, uh, pioneer, uh, industrialists of the Philippines. And this is often true, uh, of these people, uh, elsewhere. So, they're attracted initially by trade, uh, and this is, uh, showcased, uh, in various places, world exhibitions, and there's the whole transport thing. But, the thing I want to stress most of all is that the, uh, pioneers in this movement, uh, were Palestinian Christians, uh, who were selling essentially holy objects to, uh, deeply Catholic populations, and in some cases, deeply Orthodox populations. For instance, you get a number of these Bethlehemite in Kiev, in, in Russia, before 1917, almost today, Ukraine. Uh, and their specialty, their niche, if you like, their peddling niche, uh, is rosaries made of mother of pearl or made of olive wood from the Holy Land. Uh, and it's not just the objects themselves. There's an anecdote from the Philippines where, um, this is oral history, where, um, one of the, uh, migrants who's, in fact, from, uh, a Damascene family, a Greek Orthodox from Damascus, uh, goes out to start his peddling, and he's astonished that the local Filipinos fall on their knees and kiss his hand because he is of, of the Holy Land. He is of the people of Jesus. Uh, and he has, he had never himself been to Jerusalem. He had never been to Palestine. He was a Damascene Orthodox. He was not a, uh, a Catholic. And yet, there was this ability to, if you like, play the, the game. And I, I also discovered in the Spanish archives, very much to my surprise, that there was a Bethlehemite community in Spain, uh, from the 1860s already. Uh, what I can't work out is, is if there's a connection between the Bethlehemite selling rosaries in Spain and the Bethlehemite, uh, who are very often the pioneers selling rosaries, uh, in the Philippines. By wonderful piece of serendipity, the center of Little Syria in Manila was actually the Calle del Rosario, the, the street of the rosary. So, you get this sort of strange, um, I think that's by mistake.
Um, okay, this is just to remind you what the Philippines looks like. Of course, one of the things about this geographical thing is a lot of the pedaling in the Philippines is by boat rather than the traditional Syrian with his pack. The first arrival that I've been able to find is Mastura Sarkis, and I've checked with various of the Armenians here that Mastura is very much an Armenian first name, but he was probably resident somewhere in Syria, probably in Lebanon, in fact, and there's a large number of Sarkis, of course. Then we find Jerusalemite, but most importantly, I think, from 1881 is really quite a large number of Bethlehemite arriving, and so giving this a very Palestinian initial go. From 1885, these people are replaced, at least in numbers, by Lebanese Maronites mainly, and this leads to a major crisis with the Spanish government. In 1889, there's a tightening of regulations, expulsion of people who are begging, who are causing public order offenses. So, this is a relatively poor Maronite, contrast with the Bethlehemite, relatively wealthy. And then there is the Islamic phenomenon which comes in as a Christian Lebanese is arrested for spying for the Moro Muslims in the south of the archipelago. And this results in a ban on all Ottomans entering the southern island of Mindanao. Now, this is quite interesting because although this is a majority Christian community, it historically has played quite an important part in, if you like, mediating between Christian rulers and Muslim subjects in the south, but in this initial case, then this is something of a catastrophe.
From the, um, uh, after this crisis, then we get fewer, on the whole, wealthier, more skilled, more literate, uh, immigrants coming in, including, uh, Chaldeans from Iraq, so Uniates, uh, Christians from, uh, Iraq, um, and more from, um, Syria proper. Also, uh, Jews, uh, coming in from a, uh, large variety of areas. Some from Syria, from Aleppo in particular, uh, but mainly from Anatolia, the Balkans, and Egypt. And, uh, there is an enormous problem, tension within the community as to whether you should count Jews, even if they're from Syria, as being Syrians. Um, usually they're not counted, and this is something which I've encountered elsewhere. There's a census of Syrians done in Mexico in the 1940s, and again, the Jews are deliberately excluded. And the whole question of this tension between Christians and Muslims on the one hand, and Jews on the other, within the diaspora has been very much covered over, and I think because it's, uh, there's a tremendous political incorrectness about this, and therefore there's been a tendency not to, to do it. But if you look at someone like Philip Hitti, who we'll be coming back to later, he specifically stated in 1924, "Jews are not part of the Syrian community, uh, in the United States. They belong to the Jewish community." Uh, and we find the same sort of, uh, uh, problems, uh, occurring.
Um, just a reminder of where, where these people came from. Um, uh, I've got my pointer, but, but largely they come from that Eastern Mediterranean, um, area. Uh, crisis then with the end of Spanish rule in 1896 to 98, and a kind of, uh, a lot of these people go home, but a lot of new ones arrive. So, there's a kind of change of generation. Uh, more of the Syrians now come through the United States, um, sometimes as American citizens. Uh, and so there's more of a colonial, uh, uh, contact link, uh, with the mother colony in New York, the mother colony of the colonies in, in the United States, that is, but it's often forgotten that this mother colony in New York is also the mother colony to some extent of, uh, these people, not just in the Philippines, but also, uh, in Puerto Rico, in Cuba. Uh, these kinds of links, uh, are recreated through US, uh, imperialism.
Uh, a new crisis, however, in 1917, when the United States enters the First World War. Now, although the United States never actually declares war on the Ottoman Empire, uh, because President Wilson was opposed to it, he was pushed very hard by the French and British, uh, the Ottoman subjects became technically allies of enemy. And they were quite strongly persecuted. They generally move out of the, uh, public employment sector at this stage. Um, and as a kind of a rift is then created between the US administration, uh, and the Syrians, uh, in, in place. At this time, then, a census is drawn up, of which there's, uh, a copy here in the College Park archives, which was discovered for me by one of my research students. Um, and this is a census prior to internment. The idea is that if the United States was to declare war on the Ottoman Empire, these people would be interned, as the Germans and the Austrians already had been, uh, as enemy aliens. It's a partial count. Uh, I think 145 male households, uh, is, uh, very much an underestimate. I think we're looking at a larger community. It's probably more accurate for Manila, but not much outside. Now, the interesting thing is in sense who's excluded. There are no Armenians, although many of the Armenians were Ottoman subjects, uh, and there are no Jews. And in fact, it goes to the point that a number of families who claim to be Greek Orthodox, uh, from northern Syria, but who are locally thought to be Jewish and to be passing as Christians, are also excluded from, uh, this census. I've put the Breimo family as one example. I have no idea what they really were, but they certainly declared themselves to the authorities as being Greek Orthodox, but they were locally considered to be Jews.
Um, this is, I'm afraid, a map that doesn't come out terribly clearly of where these people were in 1918 in the Philippines. A big concentration in Manila. Not many in the southern Islamic areas, which represents the mainly Christian nature of this group. The main concentration is in Manila and ours this, uh, How does this work? How do you turn this on? Wonderful. Oh, except I can't do it. How did you, how do you press that? Press that. Right, okay. So, Manila, you've got 33 households there, and then down here, Cebu, this area here is a sort of secondary area. You must get one of these. Yeah.
Um, this is a community which becomes very prosperous in the post First World War period because the Germans who'd been very important in the Philippines are eliminated, at least temporarily, by their not just their being interned, but by their property being confiscated and sold by the Americans. And this is when you get big growth in the embroidery and lace exports of the Philippines to New York. And this is where you get the big connection then with Shanghai and with Kobe, with the Chinese and Japanese groups. All of these are run by about 20 families in New York who are the big Syrian families in the rag trade, competing with the Jews, and more as between them, Syrians and Jews monopolizing the rag trade in the New York area. So, the Philippines is very much part of this economic network. Some of them move into professions, lots of doctors. This is very parallel to what happens in the United States, of course, and relatively few, uh, uh, in plantations or mines or in production, that kind of thing.
Uh, this is just a sign of how wealthy some of these people became. This is the, what's called the Ishmael Hashim, uh, mausoleum in the Cementerio del Norte in, uh, Manila. Uh, Ishmael is an interesting name because it's actually Gemayel, Jemaiel, from Bikfaya. So, this is the famous or infamous Maronite political, uh, dynasty of Lebanon, which, of course, is a very large clan and has many, um, representatives. The Hashim side of it is also interesting because Wadia Hashim became the richest, uh, Syrian in the Philippines. She was a millionaire, a great entrepreneur. She married twice. She outlived both her husbands. She was an extraordinary, uh, character, and I think probably this mausoleum was, uh, built by her, although I've not been able to, to discover this. So, this is, uh, this is a, a mixed Maronite, Greek Orthodox, and her second husband, interestingly, was a Druze. And the Philippines is a bit unusual in the sense that there's quite a large and prominent Druze community, uh, not Jews, but Druze, uh, in the, in the Philippines. So, this family is of great, uh, interest to me. And here, in stone, their wealth and their success is, is represented.
However, all this success comes to a grinding and juddering halt in 1941 because of the rather peculiar circumstances of the Japanese occupation, which of course affects these communities also in Shanghai, uh, in Guangzhou, and various other places, uh, in the Far East. Um, many are arrested, tortured, killed. Um, Saïd Takieddine has, at the end of his book, has a list of those who were killed by the Japanese. Um, and the Battle of Manila was a complete disaster because many of these people took refuge in Manila, thinking they were going to be safe, instead of which the town was flattened, and very many of them were killed. And then, as a final injury, the United States came back and accused those who'd survived of collaborating with the Japanese. So, the Japanese accused them of collaborating with the Americans, the Americans accused them of collaborating with the Japanese. This is a typical problem with these intermediate communities who get caught in between.
And then independence is granted in 1946, and these people are seen as foreigners, and there's all sorts of problems about their naturalization. So, what happens really is that the community either emigrates at this point, uh, or, uh, those who remain behind Philippinize. They take Filipino nationality. In fact, one of the drafters of the Philippine constitution was Fermin Caram, uh, who, in fact, from the, he's from the Carus Caram family from, from Chadi. Um, but he was an intimate of President Quezon, and he, um, was one of those who really pushed the Philippinization, the fact that they became Roman Catholic, they became completely integrated into the, uh, local, uh, community. And it's at this stage that actually these people begin to really contribute to the first wave of industrialization in the Philippines. Um, I'll give you a couple of examples here. The United Textile Mills is the Assad family from, uh, what's today, in fact, part of Turkey, from the Antioch, uh, area. So, they do remain, they are important, they remain very, uh, economically important, but they cease to represent themselves, uh, as a community. And I'm not sure if this happens, uh, in other parts of the world, but it'd be an interesting thing to, to, to look at.
Now, in conclusion, then, um, what's happened is that these people have been very much overshadowed in Filipino, uh, history, uh, by the Chinese, perhaps most obviously, but also by the Japanese, and even by, uh, South Asian communities, the Sindhi from what is now Pakistan, who've been studied by Claude, uh, Markovits. Um, and they've kind of almost disappeared from the historical record. And yet, if you go back into the documents, the Syrians are everywhere. And what you have, you typically, you have people being denounced just as the Chinese and the Syrians. Uh, these are the sort of, you know, the Jews of the Philippines. These are the people who are sucking us dry. So, that kind of polemic anti-immigrant, uh, discourse, to use that dreadful word, um, is often brackets that the Chinese and the Syrians. But, today, people don't remember this. And that, that, that, the amongst young Filipinos, the memory has gone. But, what is beginning to happen is that people from this community, uh, in the Philippines are now beginning to go into the roots type phenomenon. They're rediscovering their ancestry. They're rediscovering the members of their family who are in, uh, Australia, South Africa, and neighboring, uh, parts of the diaspora. And they're going back to, uh, Lebanon, to, uh, Palestine, uh, and, uh, trying to find their relations. And so, there's a whole kind of recreation or rediscovery of this kind of ethnic Arab background.
And it may be that this is linked to something which any of you have been to Lebanon recently have noticed the huge numbers of Filipinos, uh, in, uh, Lebanon, and indeed more widely, uh, uh, in the, uh, Middle East. Uh, what I've been trying to find out is if there is actually a connection. If you get, uh, successful, uh, people coming back to the homeland with, they certainly come back with Filipino wives in a number of cases. But, I think also probably with domestics. Certainly, I found Filipino domestics going to the United States with some of these people. And I think it's very likely that they brought them back, uh, to the Middle East. And then, what would be really fascinating to see would be if you get a kind of chain migration of Filipinos who then go back. Um, and there's a little nugget here, too, which is that the last ambassador from the Philippines but one to Lebanon was himself a Lebanese, uh, Filipino from the Bichara family, uh, in Bicol. So, the, in a sense, the wheel has come full circle. Uh, and these two, uh, diasporas have become connected. Thank you very much.