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=> Re: Where is Chapter One?

Re: Where is Chapter One?
Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Sunday, July 5 2009, 16:10:23 (CEST)
from 69.14.30.71 - d14-69-71-30.try.wideopenwest.com Commercial - Windows XP - Mozilla
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Boy, am I confused.

If you click on the original link and go to page 13, there you will find Chapter 1.

Since Chapter 1 goes from page 1-27 in the book (Pages 13-40 in the PDF), I am still quite confused as to how you could have possibly missed it. But then I remembered....... you aren't the computer type!

I have pasted PART 1 of Chapter 1 here, for your convenience. For the remainder, please refer to the original document. And enjoy!


1
Chapter One
Introduction

Chaldeans are the foundation of everything important and religious and
civil…Everything of importance was discovered by the forefathers of Chaldeans.

Sarhad Jammo, Chaldean Bishop in California 20011


The articulations of Chaldeanness in the United States—whether written or oral;
current or historical; popular or academic; public or private—exhibit a recurrent
association between the monumentality of history, the progress of modernity, and the
identity label “Chaldean”. The conception of this dissertation was chiefly prompted by
these ancient-modern inflections in contemporary Chaldean identity discourses. The
purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the mechanisms that augment these
processes of collective identity formation and re-formation. It seeks to achieve this
through discussions of the impact of the uses of history as a collective commodity for
sustaining a positive community image in the present, and the uses of language revival
and monumental symbolism to claim association with Christian and pre-Christian
traditions. Among the political agendas of such articulations is setting the Chaldeans
apart from the Islamic and Arab discourses associated with the contemporary Iraqi ethno-
religious majorities (Sunni and Shiite Arabs and Kurds) and bringing them closer to the
Christian West, particularly in the United States.

1
Jammo, Sarhad. 2001. Presentation at Orchard Lake Middle School. Orchard Lake: Michigan.
Cited in Henrich & Henrich, 2007:77.

In order to demonstrate how the dissertation fulfills the above, the first section
below offers an overview of the socio-historical scope of the study, followed by: a)
statement of the problems the dissertation aims to tackle, b) clarification of some key
terms, c) the contributions and limitations of this study, d) the current state of research on
Chaldeans, e) a statement of methodology and methodological limitations, and, finally, f)
an outline of the subsequent chapters.

I. Overview: Chaldeans between Iraq and America

Customarily, the modern Chaldeans are defined, by themselves and by others, as
an Aramaic-speaking Catholic minority from the ancient land of Mesopotamia (Bazzi,
1991, Chaldean Household Survey, 2007; Henrich & Henrich, 2007; Romaya, 2007;
Sengstock 1974, 1982, 1983, 2005; Sheikho, 1992). When it comes to Mesopotamian
antiquity, the earliest identifiable Chaldeans were Aramaeans (though nowadays some
question this assumption too) who settled in southern Iraq, forming the basis of the Neo-
Babylonian revival of the last Dynasty of Babylon. The Chaldean (Babylonian) Empire
fell in 539BC, leaving no evidence for tangible racial connections that are exclusive to
the ancient and modern Chaldeans. Moreover, when it comes to language, the modern
Chaldeans of the Nineveh Plains speak a few varieties of neo-Aramaic, and most cannot
read and write the script. For the greater part of today’s city-dwelling Chaldeans, Arabic
or English are the main languages, depending on their locations.
The recent prevalence of the term “Mesopotamia” in identity discourses that
employ it in reference to the originary land of the modern Chaldeans signals a revivalist
tendency. This location, literally, the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,

has not officially existed under a single name for centuries. Historical Mesopotamia
comprises parts of present-day Syria, Iran, Armenia and Iraq, whereas the modern
Chaldeans which this dissertation profiles all trace their lineage to the Nineveh Plain, a
region in northern Iraq, and often, among US-based Chaldeans, specifically to a single
village in that region, Telkeif.
Although the term “Chaldeans” seems to have been used interchangeably with
other designations such as Syriacs, Nestorians, and Assyrians to refer to the Christians of
Mesopotamia before 1445 AD, officially speaking the followers of the present Chaldean
Church were called the Christians of the “Church of the East.” This was the name
ascribed to them after a split with the Catholic Church that began to take form possibly as
early as 325AD, with the first Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, a council that was
prompted by a dispute with the Catholic Church over the definition of Christ’s human
and divine natures (Baum and Winkler, 2003). It appears that the term “Chaldean” in the
Christian era was officially recognized for the first time in 1445 AD by Pope Eugenius
IV. This recognition took place as a group of Mesopotamian Christians joined the
Catholic Church following the separation that had lasted more than eleven centuries.
Those referred to as “Chaldeans” continued to populate the villages of the
Nineveh Plain region during the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Their status as dhimmis
under the millet system allowed them some protective privileges from the Ottoman
authorities as well as some autonomy under the direct leadership of their Patriarchs, who
were in charge of organizing the religious as well as the social life of their communities.
After World War I, the Chaldeans, along with the other Christian groups in the area, were

granted the status of religious minorities by the newly formed Iraqi monarchy, which they
continued to hold well into the twentieth century.
By 1988, the Iraqi Census revealed that approximately 5 per cent of the Iraqi
population was Christian, with the Chaldeans comprising the largest of the Christian
minorities in the country, and arguably the only Christian body that is native to the land
(Bazzi, 1991).
2
For doctrinal reasons Chaldeans and Assyrians separated and reunited
under the same ecclesiastical orders several times over the centuries. For political
reasons, the various Iraqi regimes indiscriminately lumped Chaldeans and Assyrians
together as a single “religious minority” during the bulk of the twentieth century. More
recently, and mainly from their diasporic settlements, both groups have been making
several attempts to reclaim their status as ethnic minorities in Iraq and elsewhere. In
specific contexts, the two communities have come together under the hyphenated title
Assyro-Chaldeans or Chaldo-Assyrians to assert that they form a homogenous and
unified community; in other contexts, they have sought to assert their autonomous status
as Chaldeans and Assyrians separately (Hanish, 2008). Chaldeans and Assyrians in the
American diaspora converge on many cultural and political issues, but also diverge on
other issues that involve identity questions and nationalist affiliations in the originary
land.
The largest and oldest settled concentration of Chaldeans outside of Iraq can be
found today in Southeast Michigan, where approximately 34,000-113,000 individuals are
estimated to live (Household Survey, 2007; Sarafa, n.d.; Sengstock, 2005; US Census,

2
After the First World War, the Assyrians entered the newly formed Iraqi monarchy as refugees from
Turkey and Iran. At that historical point they did not consider themselves natives of Iraq, but a diasporic
community that strove to return to its homeland at some point in the near future (John Joseph, 2000;
Aubrey Vine, 1937; Fuat Deniz,1999; Khaldun Husri, 1974).

2000). The first Chaldean immigrant to America had been identified as Zia Attalla, who
reportedly arrived to the United States in 1889 (Sengstock, 1983:137; 2005:3), but it was
not until World War I and the massacres of the Christian groups that had dwelled in the
southern region of modern day Turkey and northern Iraq during the first third of the
twentieth century3
(Hidirsah, 1997: 27-30; Matar, 2000:107-117) that the Chaldeans were
impelled to seek asylum outside of the Middle East. From the 1920s to the 1960s,
political and economic turmoil - the offshoot of alternately falling out of favor with Arab,
Turkish, Persian and Kurdish powers in the region – also prompted a number of male
members of this Iraqi Catholic minority to seek refuge in the Americas. Most of these
individuals and their descendants trace their origins to the northern Iraqi village of
Telkeif, (Gallagher, 1999; Sarafa, n.d., Sengstock, 1982, 2005; Survey, 2007). A majority
of Chaldeans, who first immigrated to multiple United States destinations, were soon to
congregate in Detroit by the 1920s, drawn to the stable wages and the low-skilled jobs
made available by Ford’s automobile assembly line. A deteriorating political and
economic scene in the homeland continued to prompt later waves of Chaldean migration
from Iraq to Detroit. Added to this “push” was the “pull” of favorable modifications to
the US immigration laws facilitating family-based chain immigrations, which began to
reunite male immigrants with their other family members in the mid 1960s - a classical
US migration model observed as early as 1885 by Ernest Ravenstein and embellished
later by E.S. Lee’s migration theory in 1966 (Sengstock 1982:41; 2005:6).
Since 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War, new waves of Chaldean immigrants
began to enter the US. A figure of 5,000 Chaldean immigrants was estimated to have
entered the US (Betzold, 1992; cited in Gallagher, 1999:5). Another 50,000 Chaldeans

3
These groups were also known as Tiaris and Christian Kurds in reference to their regional affiliations.

were estimated to have fled to Jordan as refugees during the United Nations’ economic
embargo on Iraq (1991-2003). The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused the escalation of
Chaldean internal displacement and their search for asylum and refuge outside of Iraq.
Many Chaldean city dwellers returned to their ancestral villages in northern Iraq, while
alarmed community reports estimated that 200,000 Christians (most of whom are
Chaldean) left Iraq between 2003 and 2007 (Warikoo, 2007). While at least half of this
number is estimated to be in transit countries such as Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey,
others have relocated to refugee camps in European cities (Harris, 2007). Another
segment of these refugees is making its entry to the US to join with family and kinship
networks. 12,000 more Chaldean immigrants are estimated to be settled in the US by the
end of 2008 (Metzler, 2008).
Chaldeans have been continuously entering the US in waves since the first
pioneers began to form a visible cluster in Detroit in the 1920s (Sengstock, 1982). With
these multiple waves of migration, Chaldean migrants who leave Iraq today to reside in
the US encounter multiple options for reconfiguring, consolidating, and negotiating their
ethnicity in a host country where their family and kin are already established. While new
Chaldean migrants engage in negotiating their new identities and reconfiguring their
economic status, the socio-cultural structures in the US spark the ambition of the
established diaspora Chaldeans to gain recognition from the national and international
communities and to maintain reinvented and imagined links with the originary land. In
this manner, the various generations of Chaldean immigrants have exhibited assimilative
tendencies, refurbished traditions they or their families brought from the native homeland
of Iraq, and forged new identities that combine processes of innovation and renovation in

a fashion that reveals multiple inflections of the hyphenated identity “Chaldean-
American”. Some of these inflections—whether or not they could be subsumed under the
categories of “reactive” ethnicity, “symbolic” ethnicity, or “linear” ethnicity (Gans, 1979,
1992; Waters 1990; Alba et al., 2003)—reveal a continuous disparity between the
conceptual mechanisms of identification employed by US-based Chaldeans and the
Chaldeans who still constitute the ethno-religious enclaves of the originary land.
As members of this Catholic Iraqi minority initiated their immigration to the US
around the turn of the twentieth century, some began to strongly assert their Chaldean
identity, promote their Aramaic language, and disfavor affiliations with Arabs and Arab
culture. Another tendency that was making itself felt among a large number of Chaldean
immigrants was their growing eagerness to assimilate into the narrative of the “melting
pot” of American society. Yet, although they wanted to be considered “American” and
although the second generation’s capacity to speak the language of heritage—be it Arabic
or Aramaic—generally diminished and their physical ties to the homeland weakened,
active affiliation as Chaldean continued across the successive generations of immigrants.
This assertion of identity became a mode of denouncing Arabic-Islamic heritage as well
as an exercise in linking the Chaldean community to a reconstructed past of a homeland
whose civilization and glory outshine those of contemporary Iraq. After looking at
Chaldean history in the originary land more closely, this dissertation will analyze the
stakes and efficacy of taking on such identity positions in the particular location of the
United States.


pancho wrote:
>No need to give me her email...do you mean it didn't bother you that the first chapter is missing???? Doesn't that harm her entire work and how people should or could respond to all her hard work?
>
>Why don't you email and ask her...I'm sure she would want to know. I would.



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