The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Review of Dr. Jospeh's Book

Review of Dr. Jospeh's Book
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, April 11 2009, 19:49:23 (CEST)
from *** - *** Non-Profit Organizations - Windows XP - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

Note: What better answer to make to Bet-Jackass than to show the quality of people and scholars who show such regard and understanding for Dr. Joseph's work? Instead of this we should covet the good words of Ashur Bet-Jackass?


JOHN JOSEPH. The Nestorians and Their Muslim Neighbors: A Study of Western Influence on Their Relations. Princeton University Press, 1961.

Here is an excellent piece of scholarship which makes interesting but sobering reading. As its title indicates, it has to do with the ancient Christian body usually known, inaccurately, as the Nestorians. In his informative discussion of the name, the author rightly points out that various appellations have been given them. He notes that the “Nestorians” prefer the designation Syrians, but have also been called the Church of the East, the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans. Their origin as a church goes back to the early centuries of the Christian era. A religious minority in the Sassanian Persian Empire, they were subject to distrust and at times to persecution because of their dissent from the official Zoroastrianism and because their loyalty was suspect during the chronic wars of that regime with the Roman Empire at the time when the latter became officially Christian. Under the Moslem-Arab rule which followed, they remained a minority under civil disabilities. But they spread widely and at times their communities were found, usually still as minorities, from Mesopotamia to the China Sea. They suffered severely under Tamerlane and the later Moslem rulers, and by the nineteenth century were greatly reduced in numbers. Of many ethnic origins, they were held together by their ecclesiastical structure and their language, Syriac. They were then chiefly in central and southern Kurdistan and in Urmiyah—now Rezaieh—in Persia.

Dr. Joseph’s study has chiefly to do with the manner in which this religious body was affected by missionary and political currents from Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several Christian churches—Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox—sent missionaries in the hope of bringing it to conform with one or another of their patterns. Each had some success, with a resulting fragmentation of the Syrian communities. Syrians were caught in the power politics of western Europe, Russia, Turkey, and—after World War I—Iraq. From time to time they were attacked by their neighbors, the Kurds. As a consequence they suffered a severe loss in members and were scattered farther geographically.

Based upon a doctoral dissertation, this book is well documented, largely from printed sources, and is as nearly objective as is to be expected in so controversial a subject


Kenneth Scott Latourette
Sterling Professor of Missions and Oriental History, Emeritus
Yale University



Reviewed in THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL & SOCIAL SCIENCE, 340 (1962), 183.



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


The full topic:



***



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9