From George Tom in Cleveland, Ohio, to his father Tannous Gergis, Mt. Lebanon, Syria

Abstract

Contributing to the global turn of WWI studies, this chapter explores a unique relief effort that entwined Middle Eastern migrants in the United States and American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. Cut off from established banking channels to send money to their families, migrants from Ottoman Syria living in the Mahjar employed the Presbyterian Church’s American Mission Press in Beirut to facilitate “remittance relief” efforts during and after the Great War. Contextualized within the entangled history of migration between the Middle East and the Americas, this chapter employs records held at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon and the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, PA to illuminate the process through which the remittances were organized and transferred from New York to Beirut, and point further connected. The chapter includes a preliminary study of the remittances themselves, which reveals important trends in Syrian migration to the United States leading up to and during the Great War, and how these trends impacted the transnational relief whereby Middle Easterners abroad saved Middle Easterners back home.