Dror Ze'evi – författare

A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish Republic against their Christian minorities from 1894 to 1924

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks 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 the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.

The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet 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, mass rape, and brutal abduction. 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.

Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.

This textbook explores the histories of royal women in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It argues that by dint of an unprecedented conjunction of historical shifts and powerful personalities, it was these women, and not men, who sat at the helm of global politics; moreover, it was they who in truth steered our world’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Organized into chapters devoted to each of the era’s great states, the book sets out to challenge several historical premises. First, it shows that women were the actual, if not always formally crowned, sovereigns of these states, or at least played a decisive role in shaping their policies. Second, the book dissolves the conventional dichotomy between East and West, showing that in both Christian Europe and Islamdom, women achieved their high status by means of similar strategies and at similar periods in history. Third, by demonstrating that there was a precedent for female authority long before the first harbingers of the women’s movement in the eighteenth century, the book calls into question received ideas about historical progress and the evolution of women’s liberation.