The Damascus Nine

The unlikely saga of America’s first Syrian family

There are diverging stories about whether the Arbeely family of Syria actually attended the Exposition Universelle, the Paris World’s Fair of 1878, or whether they just pretended to.

It was one of history’s most memorable world’s fairs, featuring technological wonders like Thomas Edison’s phonograph and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Both American inventors were there in person to demonstrate. It was several years before the Eiffel Tower appeared as part of another exposition, but the ’78 fair offered the jaw-dropping preview of another major world landmark, the enormous spiked copper head of the Statue of Liberty. Sculptor Frederic Bartholdi’s masterpiece would not be assembled in New York Harbor until eight years later, but in 1878, millions of visitors gawked at what was already completed. In years to come, it would become most famous as a symbol for welcoming refugees from oppression.

If the Arbeelys, an Arabic family of nine, were indeed in Paris that summer, they were on their way to Maryville, Tenn. The family of professionals included an esteemed teacher and author of books about logic and astronomy, as well as a couple of medical doctors. Originally from Damascus, the large family had lived in Beirut in recent years. They had received an unusual exemption from the usually forbidding emigration rules of the Ottoman Empire to go to the World’s Fair.

We don’t know exactly how the Arbeelys escaped, or all the details of why they came to East Tennessee. By some accounts, a Tennessean was in touch with them when they were still in Beirut, and offered the prospect of employment hereabouts. Originally from the Knoxville area, Gideon S.W. Crawford was by 1878 one of the youngest professors at Maryville College. Still in his 20s, he was a charismatic fellow with short hair and a big beard. He taught mathematics, but had studied theology enough that he was sometimes called Rev. Crawford. By one account, a Presbyterian minister at the American mission in Damascus had contacted Crawford seeking a landing place for a family of Greek Orthodox Christians who had suffered persecution under the sultan. Back in 1860, Joseph Arbeely had barely survived the Druze militia’s Damascus Massacre of 1860, which left about 5,000 Christians dead.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II was trying to keep the centuries-old Ottoman Empire together, even as it was coming apart, and it suffered civil strife from minorities within the empire at the same time as a ruinous war with czarist Russia. The embattled sultan did not like the idea of his best and brightest citizens leaving the country, even if they were under suspicion for helping Christian missionaries. Joseph Arbeely had been known to teach Arabic to Presbyterians. These minority Syrians had been promised equal rights a few years earlier, but were often uncomfortable as a Christian minority in a Muslim nation where individual liberty was not often a priority.

Professor Crawford, back in Maryville, apparently promised a warm welcome and employment to the Arbeelys, but couldn’t do much to help the big family escape the exposition under the watchful eyes of the Ottomans. There are enough interesting coincidences to suggest that they may have gotten other behind-the-scenes help. One of the U.S. commissioners to the Paris Exposition was Peter Staub, the Swiss-born former mayor of Knoxville who had built Staub’s Opera House, which frequently hosted European visitors and sometimes made arrangement for transportation.

And at the same time, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire happened to be another Knoxville Presbyterian: former U.S. congressman Horace Maynard was based mainly in Constantinople, but we know he visited the Paris exposition at least once. He had some connections to Maryville College, and would later praise the Arbeelys; maybe there was a friendly connection there, likely one that Maynard, who was obliged to be friendly to the sultan, would have been reluctant to publicize.

Exactly how they effected their escape by way of the Paris World’s Fair isn’t obvious in the record, but using false names, they found passage in steerage to Liverpool, and made it from there across the ocean to New York.

Few immigrants to New York in the 1870s get their name in the papers, but the Arbeelys made headlines. They were believed to be the first Syrians ever to come to America with the intention of becoming U.S. citizens. At least four New York newspapers heralded their arrival with articles.

In late August, the New York Herald profiled them with the headline, “Free at Last.”

“All expressed abhorrence for Turkish tyranny and delight at the prospect of liberty in the United States.” Though a noted author of books about science and language back in Beirut, Joseph Arbeely had never had an occasion to write his own name in English, and was unable to do so in New York. His sons, savvier to changing times, were better at that part.

But safe arrival, and commencing the citizenship process, was just the first step.

About two weeks after their arrival, the New York Times outlined their plight, under the headline, “Tribulations of the Syrian Family.”

“Since their arrival here, they have been unsuccessful in obtaining employment, and implore the Commissioners of Immigration either to obtain situations for them or to send them to some part of the country where they may secure employment….”

The Times remarked that Joseph Arbeely had “received a dispatch from a Mr. Crawford, of Knoxville, Tenn., promising him that if he would bring his family to that place, employment would be found for them.”

So at length they came to Knoxville, probably via the East Tennessee, Virginia & Georgia Railroad, and then made their way to Maryville. At the time, Maryville College was a small but uncommonly open place, in terms of enrollment. Even before the Civil War, MC had the unusual reputation of accepting both Black and Native American students. After the war, several immigrants from other cultures came to school there.

Perhaps through MC, they seem to have made connections through the network of Presbyterian churches in the area. They were Greek Orthodox, a denomination that wouldn’t be represented in the Knoxville area until the mid-20th century. But they also made more lasting connections through the smaller Quaker community that was based in Maryville’s Blount County.

The Arbeelys found a friendly home in Maryville, a small town of 1,000 on a busy day, and seemed to awe everyone they met.

The Republican Knoxville Weekly Chronicle introduced them: “The arrival of Joseph Aoad Arbeely and family, the Arabians, has been the topic of conversation ever since they came. Their Oriental costume and language, as well as the fact that they came from Bible lands, make them the center of attention. Prof. Crawford, as well as others of our citizens, met them at the depot and conducted them to a house already prepared for them gratuitously….” Maryville merchants Burger, Hood & Co. offered them kitchenware to set up a home.

There were nine of them. Joseph, or Jusif, and his wife, Mary, or Miriam, had six sons, a couple of them grown, and a young daughter who has died just before they left Syria. Perhaps because they’d already made arrangements for a young woman, a niece, called by various spellings, Jamaliah.

“Mr. Arbeely and family came from the highest circles of society, and have been wealthy,” continued the Chronicle. “They feel grieved when our people call them Turks. While they were subjects of the Turkish empire, they are not really Turks but Arabians. They say they are far from home and among strangers, but have their liberty; that they are freed from political and religious slavery of the old country.”

Dr. Fadlallah J. Arbeely became famous locally as a sort of miracle worker, taking on tough medical challenges, like a difficult amputation case. People seemed to trust him. Knoxville was partly a city of immigrants then, anyway.

Restless, elder son Abraham, or Ibrahim, went much farther west, in the company of an eccentric German immigrant, a sometime mining speculator known as L.L. Ferrary, and had a look at Austin, Texas. Dr. Abraham Arbeely stayed there for a while, developing a reputation as a medical magician there as his brother had in Maryville, visiting the Tennessee family only occasionally.

At some point, making the most of their status as curiosities, one of the more energetic sons, the teenager Nageeb, began making a sort of traveling show of his heritage.

It might be surprising at how quickly and warmly they were welcomed. It might have been different if they had not been affluent, of if they had been Muslim—though at the time, several local fraternal societies used Islamic imagery in their ceremonies. But they were undeniably Arabs, dark in complexion, and to various degrees proud of their native garb. During their early years in Tennessee, each of the men appear to have worn the native red fez.

***

They suffered a tragedy not long after their arrival. Ironically, that tragedy is the only reason we can point to certain tactile evidence that they were ever here.

Mary, or Miriam, Arbeely, was the matriarch, mother to the six children. She has suffered some health problems, and was said to have a weak heart.

In early June, 1880, not quite two years after their arrival in Tennessee, Mary “arose this morning in tolerably fair health, and was placing their matting and bedding out in the sun, when she stepped into the house and was afterwards discovered by Zbemelia [presumably the young woman otherwise known as Jamalie], her niece, to be suffering severely. The young girl endeavored to give assistance, but found the old lady speechless. … she soon passed away.” It was believed to be either heart disease or apoplexy, or stroke, “produced by the extreme heat of the sun.”

Mary Arbeely was only 42.

“They are here among strangers in a strange land,” noted the Chronicle. “Part of the family speaks English very imperfectly, while there are perhaps but three persons outside their family in East Tennessee who speak the Arabic. The family attachment is very strong with them, and this sudden bereavement is almost more than they can bear….

“The younger members of the family are in school, and are all far above the average of mankind in point of intelligence. They are quiet, good citizens and have many warm friends here. But for the mother and companion to be so suddenly stricken down in a far off land, among a strange people, is a sore trial. They have the united sympathy of all our people.”

***

Perhaps motivated by her memory, and pride in a culture they had left behind, Nageeb Arbeely, often accompanied by some of his brothers, produced a traveling show, demonstrating the rich culture of Syria, traveling as far as Nashville and Lexington to educate Americans who had never seen anyone like them.

The show often included their own customs and practices, but also those of other Syrian cultures, including Islam: “Presentation of a Mohammedan prayer, in the costume of a Mohammedan priest.” Americans were curious about Muslims. “He also read a portion of the Koran, in the Arabic, the sacred language of the Mohammedans.”

They also presented the costumes of the Druse people and the Bedouins, the desert nomads. Descriptions of Nageeb’s Arabic shows emphasize the Islamic features; if there was any acknowledgment about their own Eastern Orthodox Christian culture in them, those aspects didn’t interest reporters enough to mention it.

“These all have the fascinating interest of novelty,” went one description. “Then he gives a short sketch of flirtation, courtship, and marriage which, as practiced in his country, is a novelty to us.” Some shows at least featured reenactments of Muslim weddings.

One Knoxville show was at Washington Presbyterian Church, on Washington Pike, in August, 1880. Nageeb kept an audience spellbound for 90 minutes “Everybody was delighted with his happy descriptions of his native country, and felt more than repaid for their attendance. Mr. Arbeely’s lecture was a rare intellectual treat to all, and we wish more could have heard it and seen the many different costumes and relics exhibited. His command of the English language is simply wonderful … We were astonished to find that the lecturer not only spoke English fluently but conversed with parties in French, German, Italian, and Arabic. His brother Kaleel, who assists him, speaks several languages also, and particularly the Greek. The Syrian gentlemen are quite affable in manner and make many warm friends wherever they go.”

Nageeb took his presentation farther, performing some version of it for years. The Washington Evening Star later noted that he “presented, with illustration by natives, the weird, romantic life of the people who dwell in and around the Holy Land.”

***

Patriarch Joseph—or Jusif, as sometimes spelled—had improved his English enough that he was offering lectures of his own, as he did in November, 1881, at Second Presbyterian Church, when it was located near Market Square. He spoke on the subject of “the Holy Land,” but it sounds as if it was mostly about the lifestyles and customs of modern Syrians. According to the Knoxville Tribune, “we must say that persons who have been to the East are loudest in their praise of Mr. Arbeely for his absolute truthfulness and the faithfulness of his descriptions.” Likely, former ambassador Horace Maynard, a member of that church, was among those.

East Tennessee was enthralled with the Arbeelys. One exception was the Loudon Journal, who in an odd moment denounced them as “Turks, tramps, and humbugs,” stirring a strong response from William Rule’s Chronicle, taking apart that assertion point by point.

“The Syrians out-do the Americans in politeness and are more formal and pleasing in their manner of receiving strangers,” noted the Chronicle, adding that “if they succeed here, others of their countrymen will come. They are quiet, peaceful, and industrious, and their emigration cannot but result in mutual good.”

***

For strangers in a strange land, they were surprisingly assertive. Repeatedly they talked about establishing a “colony” of Syrians in America. In May, 1881, not long after the inauguration of the new president, Republican John Garfield, Professor Joseph Arbeely—then still a new immigrant with little English and no citizenship papers—decided to visit the White House. With him was his ambitious son Nageeb, as well as Professor and Mrs. B.S. Coppock, of Maryville. Prof. Coppock had recently founded a Quaker teachers’ college in Maryville, and had befriended the Arbeelys, but at the time was seeking treatment for a serious illness on the east coast.

“They attracted considerable attention, being attired in their native costumes,” reported the National Republican. Whether they got to meet President Garfield on that visit, six weeks before his fatal shooting, is unclear.

Tennessee’s favorite Syrians also revisited New York, where they had been a center of attention three years earlier. The New York Tribune caught up with them again, describing their appearance. Joseph “still adheres to the dress of his native country…. A shirt made of purple silk striped with yellow, a fancy scarf about his waist, fancy trousers buttoned at the ankle, and a red-cloth conically shaped hat, called a tarboush [fez]. Nageeb and his brothers have retained only the red-cloth cap. Both father and sons have dark-olive complexions, black eyes, and black, crisp hair and beards. Nageeb, who is very handsome, appears to be about 30, although he said that he was only 19. The Arbeely family enjoys the distinction of being the only Syrian family who has come to this country to stay.”

Prof. Coppock seems to evaporate from the story soon afterward—he may be the same B.S. Coppock who later worked with Cherokee schools in Oklahoma—but he may have left a particular influence with the Arbeelys.

***

The family remained based in Maryville for several years into the mid-1880s, mostly in association with Maryville College. Most of the boys attended school there. Nageeb, who was a member of the intellectually elite Athenian Society, a literary and debating club, became its president. He taught French at MC for a time. His father Joseph seems to have been employed by the college for at least part of that time, teaching Arabic to missionaries in training. The two youngest sons, Habeeb and Nasseem, played baseball for MC.

Various Arbeelys were frequently in Knoxville, too, shopping here, assembling here for several family photographs, sometimes staying in Knoxville hotels, especially when they were catching an early train, putting on Arabic shows, making friends, providing unusual newspaper stories—more than 100 Knoxville newspaper articles were about the amazing Arbeelys—during that rapidly changing era that included deadly gunfights in the streets, dramatic baseball games, and opera productions starring famous sopranos.

Nageeb was a speaker at a YMCA convention in Knoxville, recalling comparable organizations in Syria, offering a perspective other attendees might now have expected. YMCA sponsored some of their lectures.

At least one Arbeely purchased some land here. Fadlallah Arbeely, the physician, let it be known in March, 1885, that he was looking to move to Knoxville. Two months later, he married Jamalia, his cousin, in what the papers described as “quite a wedding” at his father’s Maryville home in the Syrian tradition but conducted by a local Presbyterian. He apparently bought some property in Knoxville, perhaps with the prospect of living here with his new wife. If he did live here, it was not for more than a few months. By November, he and his new wife were on their way to Atlanta.

His departure elicited some grief in Knoxville. “It is a source of regret that we have to lose him,” mourned the Knoxville Chronicle. “Dr. Arbeely is a gentleman by nature and education, a man of true worth, and of such sterling personal, social and professional qualities as to make him an ornament to any community in which he may choose to dwell…. The doctor leaves us because the climate has not been favorable to him.”

His father, always seeking the perfect climate, apparently joined him for a time. Atlanta is much closer to the latitude of Beirut than Knoxville is.

The last Arbeely to live in the Knoxville area was probably young Nasseem. He started at Maryville College, but apparently transferred to UT in 1885. It was a turbulent era up on the Hill, when the university, during a period when it lacked a president and was run by a squabbling Board of Trustees, couldn’t agree on a future course. It still retained the military discipline that had characterized it since the Civil War. Its students, all male, were called “cadets,” and there were only about 150 of them.

Perhaps “Cadet Arbeely,” as Nasseem was sometimes known, was looking for a change from distinctly non-miliary Maryville College, and even a place to display his own culture’s martial arts. Within weeks of enrolling, he was offering his own class in “fencing and sword exercise”—noncredit, perhaps—on Saturdays.

He also joined the sometimes-controversial intellectual club known as the Chi-Delta Literary Society. At the end of that academic year, in May, 1886, he won Chi-Delta’s competitive oratorical contest. A newspaper article commended Cadet Arbeely “who, for about 15 minutes, engaged strict attention, and with good delivery, added much to his masterpiece.” Further descriptions of his presentation are elusive.

***

The same month, his ambitious older brother, Nageeb Arbeely, impressed newly inaugurated President Grover Cleveland, who appointed him U.S. consul to Jerusalem, then still part of the Ottoman Empire. “He is an excellent young man, and will doubtless make a faithful, conscientious officer,” commended the Republican Journal, acknowledging that conservative Democrats and even the New York World were denouncing the appointment and questioning his citizenship—though some reported that he had become a U.S. citizen in Knoxville two years earlier, and voted in Blount County. “We are ignorant as to his politics, though we have met him frequently,” noted the Journal, “and we could not say for certain that he has any politics.”

Some Tennesseans, sensing that the appointment was a gesture of inclusion to Tennesseans, questioned whether Arbeely was the kind of Tennessean they were expecting, but in the end the state’s congressional delegation approved the appointment.

One who didn’t approve it, though, was the sultan. Abdul Hamid II, the last absolute ruler of the Empire, whose reign the Arbeelys had fled barely a decade before, refused to meet with him because he did not recognize his status as a U.S. consul.

Arbeely spent some time in and around Jerusalem, taking it all in, and describing the city in detail in a long letter that was published in the Los Angeles Times in June, 1886.

But about that time, President Cleveland, sensing it was useless to change the sultan’s mind, withdrew the nomination. Nageeb returned to America, disappointed with his foray into diplomacy, but found a respected post as an interpreter and administrator in the busy immigrant offices of New York.

He and his brother, Abraham (or Ibrahim), who had done most of his own wandering in America, settled in New York and founded something remarkable, the first Arabic-language newspaper in the Western Hemisphere. Kawkab America, first printed in 1892, was a weekly newspaper that became a daily six years later. For reasons that might seem puzzling, it has been described as a pro-Ottoman newspaper, especially surprising considering that the publishers’ father regarded the sultan as an enemy, and the same sultan had refused to receive Nageeb in Jerusalem. But the paper seems to have been marginally successful, lasting for 15 years.

***

Meanwhile, the once-tight Maryville family was scattering to the winds, after eight years in East Tennessee. They seem never to have stopped moving; perhaps inheriting their mother’s physical vulnerabilities, several of them died prematurely.

The scholar-patriarch, Joseph—or Jusef—wandered as much as his sons did, living in Atlanta, and briefly in Indiana before making a home in Southern California, near Los Angeles. He died there in 1894, at age 67.

Nageeb, who seemed to Victorian America the most impressive of the lot, the handsome, charismatic lecturer and stage manager of the Arabic-culture shows presented in dozens of cities from Erin to New York, the briefly anointed consul to Jerusalem, the New York immigration interpreter, and the co-founder of America’s first Arabic-language newspaper, suffered an apparent stroke in his late 30s. He died at age 42, about the same age as his mother had been when she’d died back in Maryville.

Abraham, the Beirut-educated doctor who was the first to leave when he was scouting the perfect American location for a “colony” of Syrians, lived in Austin; Galveston; Hot Springs, Ark.; Washington, D.C.; and Los Angeles, where he opened a medical practice. He had apparently given up on the quest by the time he moved to New York, where he worked with long-separated brother Nageeb on Kawkab America. He died at 67 in Washington, a few years after Kawkab had ceased publication.

Fadlallah, the talented doctor who awed patients in Maryville for years and had floated the idea of settling in Knoxville permanently—just before he moved to Atlanta—moved again to Los Angeles in early 1890—but died later that year, at age 36, of tuberculosis, a scourge of the era.

Nasseem left UT to join his brother Habeeb at Earlham College, the Quaker school in Indiana recommended to them by a Maryville friend. Their father eventually joined them there, for a while at least.

Those two youngest brothers who had once played baseball for Maryville College—including Nasseem, who was also a promising UT alum—were the only ones who returned to the Middle East. They both settled in Cairo in the 1890s, establishing a store there. Habeeb was only 32 when he died there.

Nasseem lived in Cairo for many years until his death in 1919, long enough to see the end of the absolute era of the Ottomans, though he was only in his 50s at the time.

Kaleel, whom historian Linda Jacobs described as “a cipher,” is the most mysterious of them. He had been part of the Oriental educational shows organized by his other brothers in Knoxville and elsewhere. As an adult, he tried living in Austin with his brother, later Los Angeles, where he opened a pharmacy. Never married, he was the only son who didn’t earn a college degree, the only one who didn’t obtain U.S. citizenship, and although he was at one time described as a talented tailor and shoemaker, he seems to have lapsed into urban poverty, dying alone of tuberculosis in a Brooklyn tenement at age 37.

Kawkab America, the first Arabic-language newspaper in the Western hemisphere, outlasted its key founder, Nageeb, and closed in 1907.

***

We had completed most of the research for this story, based on contemporary newspaper articles, when our intern, Seth Whitaker, found a remarkable document called “An Arbeely Family Album,” put together by Syrian scholar and author Linda K. Jacobs in New York, about four years ago. The unusual American adventure of the once-famous Arbeelys has interested her, but she acknowledges there’s hardly any trace of this energetic and creative family in the nation where they chose, at some risk, to live. The one exception is tangible here, in downtown Maryville.

Back in 1880, the grief of the Arbeelys’ mother’s sudden death had elicited a gesture from her eldest son, Abraham. Living in Texas at the time she died, jr may have suffered an even more profound grief than the rest of his family. He appears to be the one who hired Knoxville marble sculptor T.J. Waters, “the popular and efficient marble workman,” whose studio was on Gay Street near the courthouse, for an unusual and perhaps unique monument. The tombstone for Miriam, as described in the newspaper, “is constructed of our Tennessee marble, of plain yet neat design, with an excellent finish, reflecting much credit on the workmanship of Mr. Waters … On the reverse side of the stone is an inscription in the Syrian language, with interpretation.”

The grave is easy to find, one of the larger ones at New Providence Presbyterian Cemetery on Broadway, in downtown Maryville. It’s a heavy shaft with an urnlike structure on top. What appears there in English, below the Arabic, is an odd poem, imperfect but poignant:

We came from Damascus nine

Seeking rest this side the wave

Death baffled this hope of mine

Now I rest within my grave.

 

 

by Jack Neely.