Christianity Today
Feb 4 2005

Christian History Corner

Losing Jesus’ Language

The Assyrians, Iraq’s main Christian population, struggle to keep
their heritage and their ancient language.
posted 02/04/2005 9:00 a.m.

The Assyrians are the major Christian group in Iraq, where they
participated, with some hindrances, in last week’s election. A native
Assyrian herself, cultural historian Dr. Eden Naby has a great
concern for the survival of her community, which has suffered from
persecution throughout the 20th century. She has published
extensively on the Assyrians, as well as the Afghans, Turkmens,
Uighurs and Kurds, and has conducted NEH seminars for teachers at
Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on
religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East. She is currently
editing a book about the Assyrian diaspora worldwide and preparing a
monograph on Assyrians in the Middle East.

CT Online Assistant Editor Rob Moll spoke and e-mailed with Dr. Naby
about the Assyrians and their struggle to maintain their heritage.

ROB MOLL: Assyrians have been in Iraq for a long time. Could you tell
us about their history in the region?

EDEN NABY: Iraq is a recent term. Assyrians were in the region long
before the British, the Ottomans, the Arabs, and the Kurds. For
Assyrians, the term Mesopotamia makes better sense since that Greek
word – meaning “land between the rivers” – expresses where they have
lived historically, between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The
combination of an increasingly minority ethnicity and language plus
the problem of being Christian under Muslim rule has driven Assyrians
into the hinterlands of Iraq – the natural refuge areas of the
marginalized (either deserts or mountains). The Assyrians went into
the mountains, although significant numbers remained on the Nineveh
plains where churches date to the 4th and 5th centuries or earlier.

When Iraq was cobbled together through conquest and negotiations with
the successors to the Ottomans, many Assyrians ended up in Iraq.
Others lived in Turkey, Iran and Syria. After the Islamic Revolution
in 1979, Assyrians left Iran in such numbers that only about 15
percent of the post-World War II community remains.

What forces caused Assyrians to emigrate?

Persecution of Assyrians during the past several centuries has
centered around their Christianity, not their ethnicity. It is only
in the 19th and 20th centuries that ethnicity has come to play a role
in the Middle East as a source of friction.

Records from the 19th century are plentiful and clear: Islamic
governments treated all “people of the Book” as tolerated
second-class citizens. The Assyrians were subjected to poll taxes
levied against non-Muslims and the oppressive feudal system prevalent
in the Middle East, which combined to keep the Assyrians poor and
starving.

But more immediately, they were the victims of Kurdish tribes often
appointed as “tax farmers” for the Ottoman rulers in the areas where
Assyrians lived. Kurds therefore became accustomed to abusing
Assyrians both as a different, non-Kurdish speaking minority, and as
Christians with no recourse to authority. Most egregious was the
regular abduction of Assyrian girls and women.

The opportunity to emigrate came with the advance of Tsarist Russia
southward and the entry of Western diplomats and missionaries. The
first big emigration was to Russia, which is still a thriving and
educated community that has retained its Aramaic languages since
1828.

The second emigration was to America, the Christian-friendly land
that was able and willing to take a hardworking laborer or a good
student. In the late 19th century, men began coming to work in cities
with industrial jobs.

But persecution increased, as did opportunities to emigrate. The
years 1895-6 were particularly severe as were 1905, 1909, 1912, 1914
and finally 1915, the Year of the Sword. By 1918, nearly all
Assyrians were refugees somewhere. Until 1924, when the U.S.
immigration law became more restrictive, Assyrians poured into the
U.S.

During times of persecution, even with the backing of British and
American diplomats and missionaries, there was little the Assyrians
could do to defend themselves except make appeals, have the
missionaries buy back their sisters and daughters, and study hard to
improve themselves. Medicine and technical fields became their
strength. As doctors, they passed the well-developed art of healing
from ancient practice, plus Greek knowledge, to the rest of the
Middle East.

There is a strong emphasis on education in the Assyrian community in
America.

In minority communities, especially from the Middle East where under
Islam there is little economic opportunity, education is the key.
Medicine is a long-standing tradition among Assyrians.

Medicine is transportable across cultures. Most of the intellectuals
who came over and were trained in the ministry, education, or
something else ended up doing factory jobs.

Assyrians are concentrated in certain areas of the U.S. Why?

Mostly because of factory jobs. Also missionaries helped to send some
boys to school. Ohio Wesleyan, Springfield International College in
Springfield, Massachusetts, and Colombia University, were a few
schools Assyrians attended. At Colombia, Professor Abraham Yohannan
came to help translate the New Testament into Syriac – not the ancient
language, but they Assyrian vernacular in Iraq.

The pre-WWI immigrants came to work. Only after 1912 did permanent
residence in the U.S. dawn on the community as it saw waves of
persecution build against them. After WWI, our community was either
killed or scattered. Two-thirds of our people were killed or died of
disease.

How has the Assyrian community stayed connected, both within America,
and with Assyrians in the Middle East?

The basic connection is family. People in our community, as in most
Middle Eastern communities, remain closely connected to extended
family. When people immigrate from Iraq or Syria, part of the family
stays behind. This is a plus and minus because when you have your
great uncle still living in Baghdad you’re very careful about what
you say about Saddam Hussein or anyone who could turn around and harm
your people.

The second connection is through religious organizations or cultural
institutions. But it’s not easy holding on to a second and third
generation because of the language issue.

How important is keeping the language to maintaining the culture?

It is possible to be an Assyrian and not know the language. Certainly
there are people who are Jews, Armenians, Native Americans, who don’t
know the language of their community. We have people who feel
strongly that they are Assyrian, but the basis for their being
Assyrian has diminished considerably because of the loss of language.

The Passion of the Christ was in Aramaic. Could Assyrians watch
without the subtitles?

Many people could understand much of it. If I didn’t want to see the
subtitles and just listen, I had to close my eyes, which I didn’t
want to do. I understood about 50 percent, and I’m not as well
acquainted with our written language as some.

Is there a larger interest in Aramaic because of the movie, and has
it affected your community?

I’d like to say that Mel Gibson had an effect on the community, but I
don’t think it’s Mel Gibson at all. In terms of the visibility of
Aramaic, it certainly created a lot of visibility outside of our
community.

We simply do not have facilities to propagate our written language.
We had greater literacy in our community in 1920 than we do today.
The reason is that before 1920 the West had an enormous interest in
our language. There is a story about the 50th celebration of the
American presence in northwest Iran, which was in 1884. They had
invited some Persian dignitaries and a missionary was sitting next to
one of the Persian officials. The official noticed a lot of women
sitting together with books in their hands, and the official turned
the missionary and said, “what are those women doing with those
books. Women in your community can read?” and they asked for all the
women who could read to stand up. 600 women stood.

I don’t think we have 600 women in Iran today who could read our
language. We have a population of 15,000. There has been no
opportunity for our people to study our language.

Can you maintain it in America?

We have social institutions and church institutions that teach and
propagate the language. One of the problems we have is that some
churches insist that the vernacular should not be written [for
services], and that the only language should be Syriac, which died
out as a spoken language in the 14th century. Other churches, the
Chaldean and the Church of the East, pushed for the vernacular. Using
the vernacular means the church, when it teaches the language,
teaches the vernacular. That helps to preserve the language.

Rob Moll is online assistant editor for Christianity Today magazine.
More Christian history, including a list of events that occurred this
week in the church’s past, is available at ChristianHistory.net.
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