Somewhat over a century in the past, in his 1920 encyclical Principi Apostolorum Petro, Pope Benedict XV declared the 4th century poet, theologian, and author, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the Deacon of Edessa, to be a Physician of the Church, a excessive and uncommon honor of the common church. The twenty fourth individual so acknowledged because the Center Ages, Saint Ephrem, was the primary who didn’t come from the Western (Latin) Church or Jap (Greek) Church. He was a speaker of Syriac and wrote solely in that language. In his encyclical, the pope talked about the various clerics and bishops who inspired him to take this step, particularly the patriarchs of the Maronite, Chaldean, and Syriac Catholic church buildings, all non secular descendants of Saint Ephrem.
Ephrem and lots of others are the topic of a latest e-book, The Syriac World, by French researchers Francoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debie, each students of Syriac, as is Jeffrey Haines, who translated the e-book from French into English. It’s a necessary e-book, beautifully researched and illustrated, introducing Western audiences to the traditional riches of the Syriac Christian heritage—a heritage that one nice scholar has referred to as “the third lung” of Christendom, after Greek and Latin.
The ‘Syriac World’ (some favor the time period Assyrian or Aramean) is the ethnic and non secular group that grew out of the Syriac language and Christianity in Late Antiquity—Syriac being a department of Aramaic, the lingua franca of a lot of the Center East within the centuries earlier than the approaching of Christ. This standing was retained for hundreds of years, till Syriac was displaced by Arabic with the triumph of Islam. The roots of Syriac particularly look to Edessa (the trendy metropolis of Urfa in Turkey), town of Saint Ephrem. From there, as a lot as from close by Antioch and extra distant Jerusalem, and from the peregrinations of Saint Paul, “Christianity, an Asiatic faith,” unfold each east and west. The Syriac world grew to become a largely Christian one, finest understood in a gaggle of typically contending, fissiparous non secular our bodies, which had been typically in battle with their counterparts in Constantinople and Rome: the (Assyrian) Church of the East (disparagingly referred to as the Nestorian Church); the Syrian Orthodox Church (typically referred to as the Jacobite Church); varied Indian branches of those church buildings; and associated church our bodies utilizing Syriac and in communion with the pope in Rome, such because the Maronite Catholic, Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar, and Syro-Malankaran church buildings. At present, all of those church buildings have diaspora communities within the West, that are typically bigger and richer than the unique communities from the place they sprang within the East.
One in all The Syriac World’s many benefits is that it consists of blocks of translated texts from most of the nice Syriac writers, in order that they are often learn in their very own voices because it had been: Ephrem the Syrian, Patriarch Timothy I, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Jacob of Serugh, Theodore Abu Qurra, Bar Hebraeus, and lots of others. There are additionally the writings of others, from Marco Polo to Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, commenting on what they noticed among the many Syriac Christians. It’s a exceptional achievement to have been capable of intelligibly condense greater than two millennia of Syriac Christian civilization into 231 pages. A West that’s typically obsessed by Islam would do nicely to do not forget that “Syriac Christians performed a central function within the translation motion” in Baghdad as half of what’s referred to as the Abbasid Renaissance. It’s no shock that such famend students as Peter Brown, Philip Jenkins, and Sebastian Brock praised this e-book, for it’s a much-needed enchancment as a single-volume work, changing Professor William Wright’s 1894 Quick Historical past of Syriac Literature. The e-book’s one failing is that there’s solely a lot that may be squeezed into 231 pages, and the whole twentieth and twenty first centuries are coated within the final 5 pages of the e-book.
We are literally residing by way of a renaissance in Syriac Christian research. An incredible on-line reference portal (www.syriaca.org) supplies entry to all kinds of scholarly sources. Publishing homes like Gorgias Press have introduced again into print a wealth of obscure and arduous to seek out older works. And there have been many new works that deal with some facets of the story that the authors of The Syriac World search to inform. In 2006, Gorgias Press printed David Gaunt’s Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Jap Anatolia Throughout World Conflict I, an essential research of the Assyrian resistance to genocide within the Tur Abdin, Hakkari, and Urmia areas. Oxford College Press adopted up in 2016 with Joseph Yacoub’s Yr of the Sword, a brand new historical past of the Assyrian Christian genocide. In 2016, Adam H. Becker wrote on the fateful encounter between American missionaries and the Jap Syriac Christians in Revival and Awakening: American Evangelical Missionaries and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism. The lengthy and sophisticated historical past of the Assyrian Church of the East has been nicely served with two huge new volumes lately, David Wilmshurst’s The Martyred Church (2011) and Christoph Baumer’s lavish The Church of the East, an Illustrated Historical past of Assyrian Christianity (2016). The historical past of the Syrian Orthodox Church has been enriched by Philip Wooden’s The Imam of the Christians (2021), a superb research of the ninth century Patriarch Dionysius of Tel-Mahre. And we should point out a distinct e-book with the identical title as that beneath evaluation right here, The Syriac World from 2020, an excellent, huge work edited by Daniel King of Cardiff College, which is way more complete than the Briquel Chatonnet and Debie work beneath evaluation—however, at 896 pages, greater than 4 instances as lengthy.
As a scholar of the Christian East, I’ve adopted this topic for many years, and I’ve super respect for all the aforementioned students. I additionally had the nice fortune of doing analysis and documenting the Assyrian Christian communities alongside the Khabur River in northeast Syria once I served as an American diplomat in that sad nation through the Nineties. Having no Syriac, I communicated with my interlocutors in Arabic. Little did I do know that the bucolic farming communities that I visited would later be cruelly uprooted in a large terrorist assault by the so-called Islamic State in February 2015.
These Assyrian Christians had lived for hundreds of years within the Hakkari Mountains of what’s now southeast Turkey. In 1915, they had been massacred by the Turks and fought a preventing retreat to Urmia, in Iran, the place they discovered momentary security behind Tsarist Russian strains, solely to must flee as soon as once more after Russia’s exit from the struggle. They ultimately discovered sanctuary in British-ruled Iraq, however in 1933 they needed to flee once more, from the newly impartial, nationalist Iraq to the security of French Mandate Syria.
If I’ve any criticism of this new e-book and the opposite essential works I’ve talked about on Syriac Christians, it’s that they haven’t but mined the very actual drama and modern historical past that these communities have lived in latest many years. The 1915 genocide has been documented, however the story of the surviving communities that had been uprooted and pushed into exile within the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries continues to be to be printed. The story of Turkey’s Tur Abdin area, closely populated by Syriac Christians till the Seventies and caught between the dual fires of Kurdish rebels and Turkish counterinsurgency, is but to be absolutely informed. The identical is true of the historical past of Syriac Christian fighters (many from Tur Abdin) preventing within the ranks of the Lebanese Forces through the Lebanese Civil Conflict. A few of these males are nonetheless alive.
The previous decade has been a real Calvary for Syriac Christians of their historic homelands within the Center East. In 2010, the Islamic State perpetrated considered one of its worst massacres in a Syriac Catholic church in Baghdad, carried out throughout Holy Mass on All Saints’ Eve. The American invasion of Iraq, in 2003, unleashed hell on the nation’s Christian group, most of whom had been of Syriac (both Assyrian, Chaldean, Syrian Orthodox, or Syriac Catholic) origin. This focusing on of Christians continued after the Individuals left Iraq in 2011. In June 2014, the traditional Christian group in Mosul—most of whom belong to the Syriac church buildings—was expelled by the Islamic State. In August of that yr, it was the flip of the Syriac Christian villages on the Nineveh Plain, as total cities fled the onslaught of ISIS.
2015 started with an ISIS raid focusing on Assyrian villagers on the Khabur in Syria. The raiders blew up church buildings, tore down crosses, and took lots of of hostages who had been ultimately ransomed by the diaspora Assyrian group. In August of 2015, in southern Syria, ISIS succeeded in overrunning Al-Qaryatayn, a Sunni Muslim city with a major Syrian Orthodox Christian group. The close by Syriac Catholic shrine of Saint Elian of Emesa, a pilgrimage web site for each Christians and Muslims going again greater than a thousand years, was smashed to bits by ISIS, which, in fact, filmed and disseminated their non secular vandalism.
2016 noticed ISIS pushed again from Mosul and from the Nineveh Plains. Mosul’s Christian group doesn’t appear to have recovered from its expulsion and should by no means come again. About half the inhabitants of the Syriac Christian villages of the Nineveh Plain have returned and have since struggled to rebuild their lives within the face of poverty, unemployment, and insecurity—the latter now attributable to Iranian-backed Shia militias as a substitute of Salafi Jihadists.
Small, striving Syriac communities wrestle to outlive in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Intolerance and instability within the Muslim East imply that it’s typically very tempting to flee to the West. The way more highly effective and intensive (Syriac-adjacent) Maronite group in Lebanon—Lebanon’s president and armed forces commanders nonetheless must be Maronites—is beneath unprecedented financial, political, and navy strain. Many Christians are fleeing. Lebanon looks as if the final bastion of this historic ethnic and non secular polity, and it hangs by a thread. Bigger communities flourish in India, however these are ethnic Indians who had been traditionally merchandise of the evangelization of Syriac Christians, not Syriac audio system themselves.
Lebanon apart, if survival is feasible, it could be elsewhere. When two Syriac Christian fighters, allied to the Kurds, had been killed in a Turkish drone strike in March 2024, memorial companies for them had been held in Syriac church buildings throughout Europe—within the transplanted Syriac communities which have developed within the diaspora. There are actually extra folks in Europe who’re of Syriac Christian origin with roots in Turkey’s Tur Abdin than there are in Turkey itself. There are extra Individuals with roots within the Iraqi Chaldean village of Telkayf than there are inhabitants in that precise village. And in an unique repeat of the Syriac church buildings’ missionary previous, 1000’s—some say a number of hundred thousand—of previously Catholic Mayan Indian peasants in Guatemala are actually members of the Archdiocese of Central America of the Syrian Orthodox Church. However this was much less missionary work than the absorption of a charismatic group that had already break up and been excommunicated from the Roman Church in 2006. No matter these Europeans, Individuals, or Guatemalans are or shall be, they won’t be native audio system of Syriac. However they might be non secular youngsters of a wealthy—and all too typically forgotten—heritage of the common church.
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