The mass killing of Ottoman Armenians is today widely recognized, both within and outside scholarly circles, as an act of genocide. What is less well known, however, is that it took place within a broader context of Ottoman violence against minority groups during and after the First World War. Among those populations decimated were the indigenous Christian Assyrians (also known as Syriacs or Chaldeans) who lived in the borderlands of present-day Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. This volume is the first scholarly edited collection focused on the Assyrian genocide, or “Sayfo” (literally, “sword” in Aramaic), presenting historical, psychological, anthropological, and political perspectives that shed much-needed light on a neglected historical atrocity.
Tabela de Conteúdo
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Contextualizing the Sayfo in the First World War
David Gaunt, Naures Atto and Soner O. Barthoma
Chapter 1. How Armenian was the 1915 Genocide?
Ugur Ümit Üngör
Chapter 2. Sayfo Genocide: The Culmination of an Anatolian Culture of Violence
David Gaunt
Chapter 3. The Resistance of Urmia Assyrians to Violence at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Florence Hellot-Bellier
Chapter 4. Mor Dionysios ‘Abd an-Nur Aslan: Church Leader during a Genocide
Jan J. van Ginkel
Chapter 5. Syriac Orthodox Leadership in the Post-Genocide Period (1918–26) and the Removal of the Patriarchate from Turkey
Naures Atto and Soner O. Barthoma
Chapter 6. Sayfo, Firman, Qafle: The First World War from the Perspective of Syriac Christians
Shabo Talay
Chapter 7. A Historical Note of October 1915 Written in Dayro D-Zafaran (Deyrulzafaran)
Sebastian Brock
Chapter 8. Interpretation of the ‘Sayfo’ in Gallo Shabo’s Poem
Simon Birol
Chapter 9. The Psychological Legacy of the Sayfo: An Inter-generational Transmission of Fear and Distrust
Önver A. Cetrez
Chapter 10. Sayfo and Denialism: A New Field of Activity for Agents of the Turkish Republic
Racho Donef
Chapter 11. Turkey’s Key Arguments in Denying the Assyrian Genocide
Abdulmesih Bar Abraham
Chapter 12. Who Killed Whom? A Comparison of Political Discussions in France and Sweden about the Genocide of 1915
Christophe Premat
Index
Sobre o autor
Soner O. Barthoma is an independent researcher in the field of Political Science and co-coordinator of the Erasmus+ Aramaic Online Project at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of several articles about the modern history of Assyrians in Turkey.