Season 5, Episode 4: Constructed Categories: Syriac Christians and the Immigration Act of 1924

One person, missionary EW McDowell, influenced the fate of Syriac Christians ahead of the US Immigration Act of 1924. In this episode, Hannah Roussel interviews James Wolfe about McDowell, whose writings and testimony before Congress opened up the dialectics about the nature of the category “Asiatic.”

In May 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, banning “Asians” from entering the country and setting a national origins quota to limit the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Yet the categories of national and ethnic groups were not so clear-cut. Syriac Christians were one of the groups that did not neatly fit into ideas about race held by many Americans at the time.

In this episode, Hannah Roussel interviews James Wolfe, a scholar of late antiquity. Wolfe’s research led him to EW McDowell, a missionary who worked with Syriac Christians and, as a result, became involved in immigration reform in 1924. According to Wolfe, McDowell opened up the dialectics about the nature of the category “Asiatic” through his writings and testimony in front of Congress.

View the full episode transcript.

Historian Biography

James Wolfe graduated in 2020 with a PhD in Greek and Latin from the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University. He is currently the 2023-2024 Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan and has held appointments as a lecturer in the Department of Classics at Ohio State and as a postdoctoral research fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. His research centers on the evolution of the late Roman state in the late antique and early medieval Middle East. In 2023, Wolfe’s article “Using the Syriac Documentary Parchments, Today and in Antiquity” was published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.

Production Credits

Episode Producers: Hannah Roussel, James Wolfe, Paige Newhouse

Host and Season Producer: Paige Newhouse

Executive Producer: Gregory Parker

Editorial Board: Enrieth Martinez Palacios, Talitha Pam, Cheyenne Pettit, Sophie Wunderlich

Voice Actors: Keanu Heydari, Lucas Koutsoukos-Chalhoub, David Mori, Shane Niesen, Leopoldo Solis Martinez, Sam Winikow

Interview: James Wolfe (Hannah Roussel, 2023)

Audio:

• newlocknew, “Vinyl noise old” (Freesound, CC By 4.0 Deed)
• craigsmith, “S09-12 Gavel tapping & hitting” (CC0 1.0 Deed)
• bewagne, “Paper_Shuffling_Crinkling.” (CC by 3.0 Deed)
• nebulousflynn, “Crowd of extras in a waiting room” (CC By 4.0 Deed)
• SpiceSound, “Wooden chair, push in, pull out” (CC0 1.0 Deed)

Music:

• TheoJT, “Minimalist Piano Strings Improvisation” (Freesound, CC by 4.0 Deed)
• Giogrio Di Campo @ Freesound Music, “Scott’s Job”

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