Early US naturalization law treated Christian Syrians as White.

Evidence

Invoking the same unfit for self-government tropes used against Jewish and Catholic immigrants, government lawyers emphasized the cultural inferiority and despotism of the Ottoman Empire from whence Ellis came. The court rejected this reasoning and found the “word ‘White,’ ethnologically speaking, was intended to be applied in its popular sense to denote at least the members of the White or Caucasian race of people.” The court reasoned, “If there be ambiguity and doubt, it is better to resolve that doubt in favor of the Caucasian possessed of the highest qualities which go to make an excellent citizen, as the applicant appears to be, and withal drawn to and well disposed toward the principles and policies of this government.” It was not immaterial that Ellis’s Maronite Christian identity distinguished him from the Mahometan Turks ruling his homeland. … A blow to Syrians’ naturalization efforts came in 1910 when the US Census classified people from the eastern Mediterranean as Asiatics. Christian Syrians were now at risk of being racially equated with non-White Mohammaden Turks, Buddhist Chinese, and Hindu Indians—all racial descriptors based in part on a religious identity. Although skin color, hair texture, and facial features allowed some Syrians to phenotypically pass as White, their legal status as subjects of the Muslim Ottoman Empire deemed them Asians. No longer did being classified as Caucasian suffice to qualify as legally White. Syrians now had to prove they were European. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 540

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s notes on the legal construction of Whiteness and to ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ themes of identity-as-signaling. — connects to: Syrian immigrants won citizenship by proving their whiteness through Christian faith; Lighter-skinned Syrian immigrants found easier acceptance in early 1900s America — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 227; Christianity was the factor that let Armenian immigrants pass as white. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 162