The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Nearing End of Chapter One

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, February 28 2007, 23:03:05 (CET)
from 189.162.12.50 - dsl-189-162-12-50.prod-infinitum.com.mx

Mexico -

Windows XP -

Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

I’ve hopped around in this first chapter as the spirit moved me..mostly I kept to the right order but I see I left out an important piece of the puzzle. It has to do with when the Nestorians started to call themselves Assyrians.

Dr Jacobs has shown that the term Chaldean had been in use well before the 17th Century schism. He cites BarHebraeus as one source who used the term to describe all the Nestorians as “children of the ancient Chaldeans” Dr Joseph also points out that as far back as 1445 A.D …”the Nestorians of the See of Cyprus were called Chaldeans upon their reconciliation with the Church of Rome”.

..a note appended here states:

One of the ruined churches of Famagusta in Cypress continued to be known as the Nestorian Church. See Camille Enlart, L’Art gothique et la renaissance en Chypre (Paris, 1899), pp. 356-365 .

And so it was…and they were called Chaldeans, by Rome, because their head patriarchate was in a “geographical” location known as “Chaldee”…or Chaldea…and not for their ethnicity. Also their mother tongue, a dialect of Aramaic was identified, …”with the so-called Chaldee language”. The Catholic Church naturally didn’t want to call the returned renegades by the heretical name of “Nestorius” so they named them Chaldean Catholics instead of Nestorian Catholics.

While all this calling of the Arameans, Nestorians and Catholics and Syrians was changing back and forth in the centuries leading up to the start of the 20th Century A.D., there is no evidence that Nestorians called themselves “Assyrians” till then..if I am understanding this correctly…and when there is mention made of that name, it is because Assyrians appeared in the bible, but those writing about them never identified themselves with the ancients. In other words, “proof” that Joe Blow “wrote” about the Assyrians, having learned of them from the Bible..even if he was sitting on the land of Assyria and even if he was born there and lived and died there from too much harrissa, is no proof at all that he WAS Assyrian…as Maggie, screaming on a Seminole reservation about the Seminole police and writing books about them, doesn’t make Maggie a Seminole..not even is she was born screaming.

There’s more along these lines, but I want to get to the point here, the question of when Nestorians first started calling THEMSELVES Assyrians…when did they change over from Syrians or Suraye to full blown Aturaye. And here I’ll just add the footnote to the paragraph where this is touched upon:

Daniel P. Wolk’s recent research shoes that even the Urmiyah Christians in America, in their own language, continued until after World War I to refer to themselves as Suraye. In his reading of some of their major publications from 1907 to 1920, Wolk found that the first ethno-nationalist organization established in Urmiyah, “Khuyada”…Unity…was a “Sureyta” organization. Chicago’s newspaper “Mashkiddana Suryaya” … Suryaye Herald…first published in 1915…changed to “Mashkiddana Aturaya” only in 1920, when the nationalist discourse had come of age;the title in English was “Assyrian American Herald, most probably because “Syrian” in the United States stood for the more numerous Arab Christians from geographical Syria.”

….there are more such references in the rest of it but I want to get to another one:

“Maclean and Browne, p. 6. See also Coakley, p 147, where he quotes Maclean saying “there is really as far as I know no proof that they (The Syrian Christians) had any connection with the Old Assyrians. One of the few Anglicans who did use the term Assyrian was the Archbishop of Canterburry Benson, ‘but that is a fad of His Grace, as no one else does.’

What these passages suggest is that contrary to what our nationalists say, there was no thought to call themselves Assyrians before the early 20th Century A.D.

.

---------------------

- BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic:
No replies.

Content-length: 4374
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: */*
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-language: es-mx
Cache-control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.35Hq.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)