This book is about the horrific violence that ended centuries of vibrant Christian life in Asia Minor in the early twentieth century. In 1894, Christians were 20% of the population of Anatolia, the Muslim-majority heartland of the shrinking, internally diverse Ottoman Empire. By 1924, after waves of attacks that targeted them, Christians were just 2% of the population.
Previous scholarship has treated anti-Christian violence in this politically tumultuous period as three distinct waves: the massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in 1894–96, during the reign of Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II; the Armenian Genocide of 1915–16, during WWI; and the ethnic cleansing of Greeks, Assyrians, and surviving Armenians in 1919–1924, during the war that led to the foundation of the Turkish Republic (1923).
Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi reject the three-distinct-waves view, and instead want to show that what happened was a “thirty-year genocide.” In making this argument—which they base on a decade of work in Ottoman, European, and American archives—Morris and Ze'evi seek both to reinforce the argument (embraced by most serious scholars of the subject) that the 1915–16 Armenian massacres were a genocide, and to expand the temporal scope of the “Turkish genocide” beyond the WWI-era killings of Armenians, to include the less-known earlier and later episodes of anti-Christian violence.
Based on the “documentation now available” (they do not say what this is) Morris and Ze'evi argue that “it is clear that separating the violence into three separate waves obfuscates the reality of what the Turks intended and what transpired” (4). By “the Turks,” they mean the ethnically diverse, polyglot group of state officials (several prominent members among them émigrés from the Russian Empire), who led the Ottoman imperial government and the Young Turk regime, followed by the Turkish republican government, between the 1890s and 1920s. The authors acknowledge that these three regimes operated in different contexts, under different “constraints,” and that each “imagined a different future.” And yet, they see continuity in a “Turkish project” that evolved over time, to destroy Christian life in Anatolia (4).
The biggest problem with this poorly argued book is that it does not tell us how and why people in these particular historical circumstances were motivated to attack and kill people who were, in many cases, their neighbors. Thinking comparatively, we know from recent work on the Holocaust how much ordinary people were involved in the persecution and killing of their Jewish neighbors, and how varied their motivations and justifications were across time and place. Though the authors make implicit comparisons with antisemitic violence in Europe (they often use the term “pogrom” to describe massacres of Christians), they do not cite any recent work on pogroms in Russia (which were happening at the same time as this anti-Christian violence, just across the Black Sea) or on the genocide of European Jewry, and there is no theoretical framework for their argument for a “Turkish genocide.”
It is hard to square what they say in the bulk of the book with their overall framing. In nine chronologically-organized chapters, the authors provide very detailed and often nuanced descriptions of how state actors in the Ottoman Empire and its successor state of Turkey tried to consolidate their political power and maintain control over land in the face of territorial losses and external and internal political threats (both real and imagined) by cultivating a majority-population mindset among ethnically and culturally diverse groups. They did this by deliberately inflaming ethnic tensions; privileging the religious faith of the majority (Islam); exaggerating the threat of religious minorities (Christians); and encouraging, ignoring, or rewarding popular violence against these minorities.
Yet, in their Introduction and Conclusion to the book, the authors cite “Islam” as the main reason for the violence, even as they deny making such a reductive claim: “‘Islam’ in itself is not a sufficient explanation,” they write on the final page of the book, noting that for centuries, “Muslim Ottomans ran an empire that respected religious minorities and protected and allowed them a measure of autonomy” (506). But this statement comes at the end of a book that repeatedly cites “Islam,” as the reason for violence against Christians. For instance, the authors write that “compelling evidence” shows Islam was the “overarching element” and “an important driver” in violence against Christians, and that even the secularist Ataturk and his fellow officials “frequently referred to Islam” as the “basis” for their actions (5). “Islam” was the “glue” that united Kurdish, Turkish, Circassian, Chechen, and Arab perpetrators of violence against Christians (5); and the “banner” under which perpetrators committed atrocities (506).
To make this argument, Morris and Ze'evi rely heavily on reports by European and American consular officials and missionaries who witnessed the violence, which are redolent with contemporary clichés about Muslim “fanaticism” and ancient hatreds, but tell us little about the motivations of the perpetrators (116, 494).
What do the authors mean by “Islam”? Over the last two decades, scholars have produced a sophisticated body of humanistic and social science work on Islam that reveals the variety of Muslim experiences and traditions in world history. The authors do not cite any of this work, nor do they discuss how and why “Islam” was effectively manipulated by political leaders in Anatolia in this thirty-year period, let alone why people could be made to kill others in its name. The authors seem to think that the term speaks for itself. At the same time, they want to reassure readers that they are not anti-Islam: “We are not arguing here that Islam is a single dogma, worse than other religious dogmas” (3). This, like their claim that they had “no political agenda” in writing this history (506), is strange to see in a scholarly work, and does not substitute for an honest, informed discussion of the politics that any scholar of this subject must reckon with. In any case, they tell us what their political agenda is: “We hope that this study illuminates what happened in Asia Minor in 1894–1924, that it will generate debate and, in Turkey, reconsideration of the past” (506).
Do these three waves of violence constitute a genocide? It is not clear how this book revises or corrects the work of previous historians, as the authors claim it does. Morris and Ze'evi do not provide a definition of genocide to support their revision of previous explanations of the massacres of the 1890s and 1920s as something else, nor do they connect the dots to persuasively show a state-sponsored plan across three regimes to exterminate Anatolia's Christian population. To say that they do not demonstrate that what happened was a thirty-year genocide does not make the violence they describe any less tragic.
The extermination of Christian life in Anatolia is a terrible chapter in the history of twentieth-century ethnic cleansing and genocide. If we are to face this history, we need serious historical work that can help us understand how and why it happened. This book is not that.
