The Thirty-Year Genocide
Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924
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ISBN 9780674251434
Publication date: 05/04/2021
A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year
“A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Brilliantly researched and written…casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects…Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.”
—Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator
Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.
“A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.”
—Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review
Praise
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A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events…A richly textured and highly sensitive study…The authors document, in painstaking detail and with constant reference to their key arguments, the centrally planned murder and deportation of Christians throughout Turkey.
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Offers a subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.
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Again and again, I was brought up short by the sheer, terrible, shocking accounts of violence in Morris’s and Zeevi’s work… Is it possible for a people to be so inured to cruelty that they changed, that their acts of sadism could alter their humanity?
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Gut-wrenching…Morris and Ze’evi convey well the horror of the killings.
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In well over six hundred pages the authors detail, town by town and village by village, the atrocities that led to the elimination of Christians from Turkey…A monumental achievement.
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The mass killings of Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians in the late Ottoman era and early 1920s have been the subject of several excellent studies in recent years. The Israeli historians Morris and Ze’evi add value by knitting together the three main episodes of violent persecution in a comprehensive narrative.
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Brilliantly researched and written…Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi cast a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects. They emphasize that the three waves of violence against the Christians living in Anatolia were not spasmodic or distinct, but formed part of a larger and coherent plan to destroy them utterly. Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews from the face of the Earth.
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Important and ambitious…They break new ground in the attempt to tie various massacres and atrocities at different times and places into a seamless genocidal web extending on and off for thirty years…Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi have done a great service to the study of comparative genocide.
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The evidence cited in this well-researched book is overwhelming…By looking at previously isolated events in a broader view, Morris and Ze’evi open new horizons on these events. What they reveal has global implications.
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Remarkable…A warning from history, perhaps, that this incisive work transmits to us in these dark days of political turmoil.
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A must read for anyone interested in the tragic events and history which inevitably shaped the modern world.
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An exhaustive account of Turkish policies towards Christians from the waning years of the Ottoman Caliphate through the first decade of Atatürk’s rule.
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Forces me to re-examine my understanding of the Armenian Genocide…It will stand in both the historical records of nations and in the field of Genocide studies as a monumental marker of excellence.
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The book’s strength lies in the fact that it has a broader perspective than many other books on the subject… Morris and Ze’evi have given us an outstanding representation of the fate of the Christian minorities during this crucial thirty-year period.
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The proof in this well-researched book is overwhelming…Hugely important.
Authors
- Benny Morris, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has published books about the history of the Zionist–Arab conflict. He has also written about the conflict in the New York Review of Books, New York Times, New Republic, and The Guardian.
- Dror Ze’evi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, has published several books on Ottoman and Middle Eastern history.
Book Details
- 672 pages
- 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
- Harvard University Press
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