In 1909, George Shishim—a Lebanese immigrant serving as a police officer in Venice, California—won a landmark court case to secure his U.S. citizenship. His case set a legal precedent that classified Arab immigrants as white so they could naturalize, famously arguing that “If I am a Mongolian, then so was Jesus”.

The controversy began when Shishim arrested the son of a prominent Los Angeles attorney for disturbing the peace. To invalidate the arrest and secure his son’s release, the attorney used a racial prerequisite defense. Because Shishim was born in the Middle East, the attorney argued that he was legally “Chinese-Mongolian” and thus ineligible for U.S. citizenship—meaning he could not hold the authority of a police officer to make an arrest.

At the time, U.S. naturalization laws only permitted “free white persons” or persons of African descent to become citizens. Because the Middle East is geographically in Asia, immigration officials often blocked Arab immigrants from naturalizing by classifying them under restrictive Asian quotas.

Backed by the local Syrian and Lebanese community, Shishim hired a lawyer and brought the case before a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. The defense brought in ethnographic evidence to demonstrate that Arabs were of Caucasian descent. Shishim’s defense is famously noted for a theological argument: he pointed out that since he came from the same region as Jesus Christ, denying his whiteness would mean implicitly conceding that Jesus was not white.

The judge ruled in Shishim’s favor, allowing him to take the oath of allegiance and become a citizen. This ruling helped establish a precedent that allowed early 20th-century Christian Arab immigrants to be legally classified as white, which later contributed to how the U.S. government structured its demographic classifications on the modern Census.