Tithi Bhattacharya: As the imperial war escalates in Syria, I mourn not just as a human being and a mother for all the lives lost, that will be lost, but also as a historian. For a region that gave us a wondrous history and human achievement that now lies beneath the rubble of war and devastation. Please read this beautiful description of Aleppo from a leading scholar of the region to get a sense of the butchering that is being done to both people and histories:
“The civic identity of Aleppo, a city whose very nature made it similar to other cities in the eastern Mediterranean, like Trieste, Salonica, Smyrna and Alexandria, did not fit comfortably into those novel concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘ethnicity’. A tremendous ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity marked these cities… Aleppo sat astride global trade routes and enjoyed relative fame in the early modern period as a centre of commerce in luxury goods, attracting merchants from all around the Mediterranean, from northern Europe, and south and central Asia. Jewish traders came to the city from India, the Sasson family in particular, augmenting an already large indigenous community. Armenian silk-merchants and weavers arrived from Anatolia or Shah Abbas’s imperial capital, Isfahan. Europeans despatched merchant adventurers to the city. Once there, they established trading houses in any one of the grand urban caravanserais located in and around Aleppo’s massive central business district. The Venetians called theirs fondacos, the French, ichelles and the English, factories. Shakespeare’s Othello even makes reference to Aleppo, where he began his career in service to Venice, as he kills himself at the end of the play. Aleppo’s international economic importance waned in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it remained a vibrant and cosmopolitan crossroads of the Old World into the first years of the twentieth century.”
Keith David Watenpaugh, “Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City”