John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian missions, archaeologists,and colonial powers (Studies in Christian Mission, 26; Leiden: Brill, 2000).
J.F.
Coakley
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2002
Vol. 5, No. 1
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv5n1prcoakley
J.F. Coakley
John Joseph, The Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western Christian missions, archaeologists,and colonial powers (Studies in Christian Mission, 26; Leiden: Brill, 2000).
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol5/HV5N1PRCoakley.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2002
vol 5
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Modern Assyrians
Nestorians
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[1] This
book is a revised edition of the author's The Nestorians and
their Muslim Neighbors, which was published in 1961. The
Nestorians was the first book devoted to the Modern
Assyrians since A.J. Maclean and W.H. Browne's The
Catholicos of the East and his People (1892); it was full
of information; and it had a sizable bibliography. All these
facts quickly made it a standard work of reference, although,
being published in a quiet scholarly series, it can only have
had modest sales. Copies were anyhow scarce: twenty years ago
the present reviewer had the experience of waiting in a queue
for what was, apparently, the only one available on
inter-library loan in Britain.
[2]
Curiously, while the book was in demand from us ecclesiastical
historians, it escaped the notice of other scholars. The
explanation for this fact seems to lie in the library world.
Cataloguers at the Library of Congress assign subject-headings
when they make a record for a new publication, choosing from a
fixed list. The list was (and still is) quite inadequate to
deal with the Syriac churches and the ethnic groups
historically represented by them. Even so, the list in force in
1961 did contain the heading 'Assyrians', glossed as follows:
'Here are entered works dealing with the modern adherents of
the Nestorian Church as an element in the populations of both
Asiatic Turkey and Iraq.'
Subject Headings Used in the Dictionary Catalogs
of the Library of Congress (6th edition, 1957). In earlier
editions the prescribed heading was 'Modern Assyrians'; that
would have been better left alone. The definition continues:
'The name "Assyrian" is based on an alleged racial affinity to
the Ancient Assyrians. The term "Assyrian" was used in the 18th
century by Assemani.' In subsequent editions these two
sentences have been dropped, along with the mention of Asiatic
Turkey.
While this is not a particularly
good or clear definition, the heading fitted the book and ought
to have been used. Perhaps the cataloguer took his cue from
Joseph's own rejection of the name 'Assyrians'. In any case, he
used instead only the heading 'Nestorians - history', which was
not only dislikable in itself, but also far from the vocabulary
of the modern Middle East. So in 1974-5 when the
International Journal of Middle East Studies published
an article entitled 'The Assyrian affair of 1933', it was clear
that neither the author (K. S. Husry) nor the journal's
referees were aware of Joseph's book where the episode was
fully treated, using some different sources. (Joseph published
a useful reply to Husry later in the same journal.) Clearly
The Nestorians and their Muslim Neighbors deserved a
re-issue with a new title. This we now have, and The Modern
Assyrians of the Middle East is in fact something better, a
significantly revised edition. It is only sad to notice on the
verso of the title page the new Library of Congress record with
only the same subject-heading 'Nestorians - history'.
Fortunately, one can now search library catalogues by keywords
in the title!
[3] The new
title deserves a moment's further notice. Besides catching the
attention of a wider scholarly audience, perhaps it will also
look more attractive to readers from the Assyrian community, by
many of whom Joseph has been considered a renegade all these
years because of the anti-'Assyrian' views found in the old
edition. In his new Preface, Joseph expresses the hope that
Assyrians will read the book - and may it be so. Enthusiasts
for ancient Assyria will, however, find nothing to conciliate
them. Once past the title page, the name 'Assyrians' is hardly
used again until near the end of the book. Not only that, but
the first chapter has been expanded into a full-scale
engagement with those writers, almost all of whom are members
of the community, who insist on the identification of the
modern Assyrians with the ancient people of that name. Joseph's
discussion is now the most comprehensive one on this subject,
subsuming the classic article of J.-M. Fiey ('"Assyriens" ou
"araméens"?', 1965; Fiey was among those who did not
know Joseph's work at the time).
[4] After
the discussion of terminology and ethnography, we come to a
sequence of chapters taking the history of the Modern Assyrians
from late antiquity (briefly and under the odd title 'Early
beginnings') to the present day. The chapters are slightly
reorganized from the earlier edition and there is new
documentation throughout, but the substance, except for what is
new at the end, will be familiar to readers of the first
edition. Here I shall not try to comb over this old ground, but
I offer the following three remarks as a quick orientation for
the new reader.
1. I said above that Joseph's book is better known by
ecclesiastical than by secular historians. Yet it is on
diplomatic and political matters that Joseph is at his best,
for example on the delicate legal status of the Assyrians under
the Ottoman regime (pp. 59-60), and the complex unfolding of
the Mosul question in 1921-5 (pp. 166-85). I wish we had the
benefit of his analysis of the supposed promise made by a
British officer to the Assyrians in 1918 that they would have
their own homeland after the war; but this incident, which is
still very important in the memory of the community, is only
indirectly mentioned (pp. 146, 155).
2. With matters religious, ecclesiastical and missionary,
Joseph is less comfortable. The reader who is told that 'after
the Council of Ephesus, those who adhered to the teachings of
Nestorius organized their own church' which was subsequently
'forced to move in the direction of Mesopotamia and Persia' (p.
41, a statement admittedly at variance with most of the rest of
the chapter) will naturally be somewhat wary of the treatment
of ecclesiastical matters later on in the book. It is also an
ominous sign that having banished the name 'Nestorian' from the
title, the author retains it elsewhere in the book, even in the
chapters covering the period after 1918 when it clearly
includes people other than members of the Church of the East.
For all that it may be a handy term, no theologically sensitive
writer could do this.
3. The treatment of missions in particular, which makes up a
substantial part of the book, is a classic. The Assyrians were
'previously untroubled by the kind of religious prejudices and
conflicts that were set into motion' by the missions (p. 88);
these missions were the agents of 'the political and cultural
imperialism of the "Christian" powers' (p. 69); the
missionaries did harm by 'refusing to recognize any truth or
values in Nestorian beliefs and practices' (p. 95); and the
'unseemly struggle' among the different missions was a scandal
(p. 133). Praise for the missionaries is limited, more or less,
to their role in the relief of suffering during World War I
(p.140). This whole position, in my opinion, needs some
correction. Briefly: most of the de-racinating and
de-stabilizing attributable to the missions would have come
anyway in the twentieth century, and they would have been worse
if the missions had not prepared the Assyrians to meet the
modern world. But it is not so much at that point where I would
fault Joseph (and others). It is rather that he is hardly
interested in the primary, religious work of the
missions (there are no tabulations of parishes, schools, books
printed, etc. - they would be dull, to be sure), but only in
the secondary, social and political, effects of this work.
Those scholars, on the other hand, who put in long hours in
missionary archives reading reports of the day-to-day
activities of missionaries, do not usually emerge with the
censorious judgment given by Joseph. Is that just because we
become comfortable and sympathetic with the people whose
correspondence we are reading? Or is it that something is being
neglected by the others? In my opinion, the reader should keep
in brackets the more general statements that Joseph makes about
missions to the Assyrians until we have, for example, a more
comprehensive history of the American ABCFM/Presbyterian
mission than anything presently available.
[5] The last
two chapters (9 'Between mutually hostile neighbors' and 10
'From missions to ecumenism') are substantially new in this
edition. These chapters do not very easily come under the
subtitle 'encounters with Western Christian missions,
archaeologists, and colonial powers', but they are certainly
valuable, having a good deal of material that is not readily
available elsewhere. Ch. 9 includes an account of the recent
history of the Kurds, with whose affairs the Assyrians are now
so closely connected. (The Assyrian party in Kurdistan is
Zo
c
a
(zaw
c
a 'movement'), not Zo'a.)
But these chapters are selective too, and if the idea is to
bring the history of the Assyrians down to date there should be
something more than the occasional sentence about Assyrians in
the diaspora, and something about modern Assyrian literature
and culture. Ch. 10 has a discussion of the exercise of
'rethinking missions' that has gone on in postcolonial times,
and a section entitled 'The Roman Catholic Church and Islam',
neither of which is particularly relevant to the Assyrians. The
second half of the chapter takes the history of the Church of
the East from its low point in the 1930s to the important
doctrinal agreement of 1998 with the Roman Catholic Church,
which serves as a sort of happy ending to the whole study.
[6] The
bibliography has been greatly expanded, although some of the
new entries are not very helpful, e.g. books on the remote
biblical background and on religious pluralism, and many
encyclopedia articles. Macuch's Geschichte der spät-
und neusyrischen Literatur (1976) appears, but nothing in
modern Syriac has been added to the few titles in the first
edition, not even Jacob bar Malek Ismael, The Assyrians and
the Two World Wars (Tehran 1964); nor anything significant
in Arabic since 1961. German readers will be surprised not to
see P. Kawerau, Amerika und die orientalishen Kirchen
(1957) or any of the books of Gabriele Yonan, especially
Assyrer heute (1978), or the articles of Martin Tamcke.
The useful book of John Guest on the Yezidis, Survival among
the Kurds (2nd ed. 1993) is also an omission.
[7] John
Joseph's last book Muslim-Christian relations and
inter-Christian rivalries in the Middle East: the case of the
Jacobites in an age of transition (State University of New
York Press, 1983) was unpleasantly marred by the absence of
copy-editing, and I hoped that the obvious remedies would have
been applied to this one. Alas, they have not been, and the
number of errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc., is
well above what should ever be associated with the names of
John Joseph and E. J. Brill.
[8] To sum
up: Joseph's Modern Assyrians is not a book that
displaces others, but it is welcome and valuable alike to those
who have, and those who have not, used the earlier edition. It
is still the best discussion of the political history of the
Modern Assyrians and still the richest bibliographical guide to
the subject, its discussion of the international politics after
World War I is particularly thorough, and it is absolutely
required reading for anyone wishing to understand the debate
over the identity of the 'Assyrians'._______
Notes