Introduction : Communities in the Middle East Coming from the same Middle Eastern milieu where identity was based on religion , the immigration experience of the Syrian Jewish and Catholic communities in Brooklyn represent different approaches to the Americanization process . This paper will examine the reasons for the gradual transformation of the Syrian Catholics into Arab - Americans , a Middle Eastern ethnic group and the contrasting intensification of identity and cohesiveness of the Jews in New York who identify as Syrian Jews . Syrian Catholics were only one group that made up the Christian population of Ottoman Syria . Until the eighteenth century , the largest group of Syrian Catholics , the Melkites , were Greek Orthodox Christians who came under the ecclesiastical authority of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch . When , as a result of Roman Catholic proselytizing , many accepted the authority of the Pope in Rome and became a Uniate congregation , the Syrian church was allowed to k...
אל הספר