The Syriac Orthodox Community in Lebanon (1918–1982)

For the media and the general public, the Christians in the Middle East are usually associated with the most recent persecutions by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and with their difficulties in Egypt and Turkey. Syriac Orthodox Christiansalso called Arameans or Jacobitesappear especially at risk. This community has always had a special aura because of preserving the language of Jesus Christ, Aramean (Syriac). Syriac Orthodox with the Armenians and other Christian communities were victims of the genocide during First World War (WWI). It is not generally known that many of the survivors of those atrocities resettled in the newly established states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, often successfully. This research project focuses on the resettlement, rebuilding, and integration of the Syriac Orthodox community in Lebanon from the end of WWI to the Israeli invasion during the Lebanse Civil War (1918-1982). I am particularly interested in the question of their identity(ies) in connection with languagewhich is especially fascinating in their case because, depending on where they lived in Ottoman Anatolia prior to WWI, they spoke Turkish, Turoyo (a neo-Aramean dialect), Kurdish, Arabic, or Armenian. In Lebanon, where they were granted recognition as one of eighteen official communities, they gradually adopted Arabic and simultaneously tried to revive Syriac (Aramean), the use of which was by then mostly limited to church services. Arabic, usually associated with Islam, helped their integration into Lebanon as well as, paradoxically, their preservation of the Syriac Aramaic heritage. The question of language helps us determine the Syriac Orthodox position in the new Lebanese state and its political system, which was based on a distribution of power amongst the most important Christian and Muslim communities, as well as the Syriac Orthodox attitudes towards the various Christian and Muslim communities and the competing ideologies of that timeArab nationalism, militant (Maronite) Christianity, socialism. To that end, this research project will analyze, using methods drawn from history, philology, and the social sciences, sources in Arabic, Syriac, and French produced by the community itself in such media as newspapers and reported on it by the French mandate authorities, Lebanese media, or other outside observers. This research project aims to show that the rebuilding, identity and positioning of the Syriac Orthodox is symptomatic for the formation of modern national states in the Middle East, between ethno-religious pluralism and Arab nationalism as state ideology.

This research project was concerned with the reconstruction of a Christian minority in Lebanon (1918-1982) after it experienced widespread destruction in its former homeland in present-day south-eastern Turkey during the First World War. This Christian minority, the Syriac Orthodox, historically called "Jacobite" or "monophysite," holds a special status in the context of Middle Eastern Christianity, as a group that is particularly at risk in the Middle East. At the same time, the Syriac Orthodox present themselves as preserving a very ancient Christian tradition that goes back to the first apostles, not least because the Syriac Orthodox Church continues to use the Syriac Aramaic language in its liturgy and Jesus Christ spoke an Aramaic dialect. Up until the First World War, Syriac Orthodox Christians mostly lived in present-day south-eastern Turkey (then part of the Ottoman Empire), where they were targeted during the Armenian genocide. Those who survived migrated to Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine (also formerly part of the Ottoman Empire), where they managed to successfully rebuild their communities, an achievement that it is not widely known, establishing churches, associations, community schools, scouts, sports clubs and partly obtaining the citizenship of their new home-countries. This new environment was also prosperous for the revival of the Syriac Aramaic language. Yet a key finding of this research project is that the story of this Christian migrant group tells us a completely different story about the modern nation-states of the Middle East and the way they have accommodated religious and ethnic diversity. In this context, Lebanon figures as an exception to the general historical trend the Middle East experienced over the course of the twentieth century toward an increasingly exclusive Arab nationalism, dictatorship and Islamization. However, the unique and contradictory position of the Syriac Orthodox in Lebanon as a migrant yet Christian community, as a Christian yet non-Catholic and non-Greek Orthodox community, compels us to rethink Lebanon, which is often presented as a safe haven for Middle Eastern Christians. For its confessional system, which actually favored one specific Christian group - Maronite Catholic Christians -, prevented the Syriac Orthodox from full political participation, unlike in Iraq or Syria. Furthermore, the Syriac Orthodox succeeded in reviving its Syriac language in Lebanon, but it was Arabic - all too often exclusively associated with Islam - that helped them integrate into and thrive in the wider Lebanese society. Their socio-economic success on the one hand yet their political marginalization on the other generated mounting frustration among Syriac Orthodox in Lebanon, eventually leading a number of them to join the Christian militias during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1982).