ABSTRACT
Assyrians are an ethnic and national group, a stateless people united to some extent by a Christian faith, an inheritance of pre-Christian rituals, and a vocabulary of Semitic words and concepts that dates to ancient times. During the 1890s and in 1914-1925, up to 750,000 Assyrians residing in the Ottoman Empire, but probably more like 250,000, perished in a genocide called “Seyfo” or “Sayfo” today. From the standpoint of Western historical memory, the Assyrian genocide very nearly fell into oblivion, despite copious documentation of the event at the time. Persistent efforts by the Assyrian Diaspora to write the Assyrians’ history had little popular impact. Historians of the Armenian genocide did not mention Assyrian victims of the genocide in a number of books published since 1990. When the United States and several European countries recognized the Armenian genocide, Assyrians were not mentioned, almost without exception until relatively recently. Like the Roma, Sinti, and Zegeuner, they were almost invisible.
This chapter will describe why Assyrians are a distinct people from the Armenians and the Kurds, analyze similarities between Raphael Lemkin's concept of genocide and their experiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explore reasons why remembrance of this genocide was long suppressed. It will then survey some of the ways in which the descendants of survivors, joined by scholars, have excavated memories of the event. It attempts to reflect on the wider question of the role that scholarship plays in the remembrance (or suppression) of episodes of genocide. Several findings emerge: (1) some genocides may be so destructive of ethnic or religious identify that the memory of the genocide itself is threatened by the virtual disappearance of the group; (2) the oblivion into which the Assyrian genocide existed prior to 2006 was not inevitable and was not apparent among contemporaries of the perpetrators; and (3) through persistent effort, some scholars have vigorously denied and distorted what happened during the Assyrian genocide through falsehoods and bad comparisons.
