My paper will deal with the response of American missionaries to refugee children in and around the city Beirut during and shortly after WWI. In addition, I will discuss the problematic of children refugees as historical actors. The American missionaries under the umbrella of the Red Cross and later the Near East Relief took up the care of children refugees of Armenian, but also of Syrian backgrounds. The selection process and the education process of the orphans, I argue is geared toward making 'useful' citizens. The concept of usefulness is derived from a distinct Protestant perception of the world and is necessary to obtain salvation in front of the lord. In the case of missionary education of orphans this idea of usefulness and by extension the fostering of self-respect are concepts imported from abroad and aim at creating a culture that fosters productivity. However, the form and implementation is adapted to what the missionaries understand to be the need of local society. In the course of the paper, I will define the concept of usefulness as it varies according to gender and in this case is particular to the creating of a middle class. The missionaries argue that a 'lack' of a middle class and a literate peasantry was partially the cause for famine and starvation in the region. I will particular attention to the discourse employed by the missionaries that juxtaposes victim hood and salvation through productivity a discourse that mirrors contemporary neo-colonial rhetoric.

At the turn of the 1920s the Armenians of the Levant were mostly a population of refugees, largely outnumbering any previous Armenian presence in the region. Cutting across all layers and backgrounds of Armenian society, the tragedy of war and the Genocide had shattered the foundations of virtually all aspects of the life of the Armenian survivors as it was known before 1914. From the very start, the Armenians worked hard to reconstruct (or to construct, perhaps) an Armenian world in the post-Ottoman Levant. In the span of a few years this new Armenian world started to emerge in the life of the refugee camps and in the new Armenian residential quarters; a new set of Armenian institutions gradually appeared, catering for the material and spiritual needs of the community. The proposed paper will explore two crucial dimensions of the process of (re)construction: the re-establishment of the Armenian Churches (in the context of the French Authorities' religious policy), and the question of the participation of the Armenians in public, political affairs. The paper will argue that French colonial policy, and its approach to ethno-cultural diversity, are crucial to understand the Armenian community's comparative success in 'finding its place' in the post-Ottoman Levant.

The "Nansen Passport" named for Norwegian diplomat and explorer Fridtjof Nansen, was initially developed to allow refugees of the Russian civil war some freedom of movement across borders. Nansen also brought this critical humanitarian-bureaucratic innovation to the Eastern Mediterranean where it provided stateless people a modicum of civil status. This paper tells the story of the passport to understand how the modern concept of the refugee evolved, and more to the point, the internationalizing of the refu- gee "problem." Understanding its theoretical and ideological origins and the role it played - as well as that of the Nansen International Office for Refugees -- sits at the center of this work. Using the case of deported Armenians in Syria, I use this paper to also think about "refugee-ness" as a modern concept and how international organiza-tions had begun to analyze its impact upon the family, commerce and culture; and moreover, how creating the concept of refugee became a way to facilitate the eviction of groups from newly formed nation states as a humanitarian act.

In the decades following the 1948 War in Palestine, many members of the Syrian Jewish community arrived to Israel from their previous homeland. The aims of my presentation are twofold. First, I consider whether the term "refugee" applies to this community, by offering my analysis of the social realities facing Syrian Jews in Israel. Second, I look at the ways in which Syrian Jews, who had become Israeli citizens, reflected on their Syrian past[s]. Confronted with discrimination in Israeli society, Syrian Jews developed a sense of nostalgia for Syria, a county where they had held leading positions and enjoyed economic success. This nostalgia, sometimes bordering on a sense of exile, is commemorated in fictional texts written in Hebrew by Syrian Jews. I focus in particular on a novel by Amnon Shammosh, delineating the life of a Jewish Syrian family, "Michel Ezra Safra and Sons." Finally, I look at the writings of Alon Hilo, an Israeli writer who was born to Jewish Syrian parents, and his reflections on the connections between his Mizrahi-Syrian identity and the fate of the Palestinian refugees. I explore two historical novels of Hilo, one set in 19th century Damascus and another in Ottoman Palestinian, in order to unpack the complex meanings he ascribed to the experience of being a refugee.

This paper will examine the emergence and transformation of the notion of refugee in Syrian-Arab nationalist thought and Syrian collective memory between 1915 and 1939. There is almost no critical scholarly study about the early encounters between the Armenian, Syriac, Kurdish, Assyrian and several other refugees in Syria and the local Syrian during WW1 and the French mandate. Both in the official ideology and communal(ist) histories, the complex history of refugees in Syria is simplified by white-cleaning their history of improper conflictual aspect. As the early dissidence is excluded, so is the controversial process of integration of the newcomers in the host society has also become an unaddressed issue. One of the aims of this presentation is to demystify the state-sponsored discourse of communal harmony, tolerance and smoothness regarding the relations between the refugees and the Syrians, and display the actual situation on the ground with regards to the French mandatory politics of difference, socioeconomic situation in French-Syria and Arab nationalist thought. The image of refugee has greatly diversified and changed in the controversial Franco-Syrian treaty years in Syria (1936-39). The notion of refugee came to be contested by rivalling political groups in French-Syria. Different understandings of belonging and political loyalty to the nation came to be defined through this notion. This period witnessed the emergence of the good refugee vs. bad refugee discourse where the presence or the absence oppositionary political action forms the main line of distinction. The second part of this presentation will prove these arguments by giving examples from 1930s Syrian newspapers. It will also demonstrate how the image of refugee in the late 1930s has been transferred to the Syrian-Kurds in the Ba'th period.