Missions, Minorities, and the Motherland: Xenophobic Narratives of an Ottoman Christian “Stab in the Back”

Abstract

This roundtable focuses on the marginalization of ethnicities or religious denominations within Middle East studies, and in the larger realm of history writing. Without a nation–state of their own to preserve their language and history, the Assyrian people and the Church of the East denomination of Christianity fell subject to repression in Turkey, only recently finding a voice. Marginalization in history books and educational curricula is one symptom of broken treaty commitments and lack of equal access to state institutions and funds. In our century, marginalization has given way to something perhaps even worse: vilification and expulsion even from countries outside of Turkey where the Assyrians reside, during a neo-Ottoman period in which parts of Iraq and Syria came to more closely resemble Turkey, a resemblance that included the presence of Turkish arms.