1940 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW considered nocturnal by nature. Magic and the occult, despite a wink at Carlo Ginzburg in the title of chapter 6, are practically non-existent; so are dreams, except for a few references in the context of poetry and Sufism; Ramadan, clearly an occasion for nightlife, is mentioned several times, but never really addressed as such. Expanding this list would be easy but unfair as this is not an encyclopedia but a study of the “social night” (7). And yet, one cannot help but notice that the book ends up being more about crime, drinking, rebellion, and power than about sleep, repose, and intimacy. This is a deep and somewhat inevitable contradic- tion. As if to justify the ominous tone in its title, As Night Falls is less about the night as a daily occurrence than about the exceptional, illicit, or simply marginal things that happen (also) at night. Any student of Ottoman history is likely to be familiar with this fun- damental problem: it is always easier to document the extraordinary than the ordinary. Clearly, Ottoman chroniclers found it more rewarding to report on noc- turnal orgies or sultanic illuminations than to describe the nightly routine of law abiding Istanbulites. Like- wise, the courts did not keep track of individuals’ sleep patterns but of the events that disrupted order, from contraband to rape and other crimes. But as the author tells us, such events represented less than 4 percent of the cases recorded (250). As a result, the argument that, contrary to Europe, the Ottomans did not practice “segmented” sleep rests on very thin evi- dence (36), along with everything left undocumented and unsaid about “everyday” nightlife. Does that take away the book’s undeniable merit? No, but the reader needs to be aware of this imbal- ance, just as they need to know that eight court regis- ters from Üsküdar can hardly be representative of the entire Ottoman capital; that adding four more from Jerusalem does not really help cover the “Ottoman cities” announced in the title; and that non-Muslims, apart from Jews in Jerusalem, are not really part of this nightly panorama. In all fairness, most of these short- comings cannot be held against the author, who has made the rational and reasonable choice of focusing on what offered the possibility of a richer narrative, which he has done with great talent, albeit at the cost of somewhat turning the night from an object of study into an occasion to move toward better documented subjects. We may still need more research into the prosaic aspects of the night in early modern Ottoman society and culture, but thanks to Avner Wishnitzer, we now have an excellent account of the most striking events that took place as night fell. Edhem Eldem Boğaziçi University, Turkey; Collège de France Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 656. Paper $20.00. The Thirty-Year Genocide is an ambitious undertak- ing that stands on the shoulders of—and helps propel forward—four decades of scholarship on the Arme- nian Genocide. Historians Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi place the genocides of the Ottoman Empire’s sizeable Christian communities—Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians—at the crossroads of “a declining, threatened Islamic polity and people and the rise of modern nationalisms and greed” (506). That the erasure of Armenian community life from the Ottoman landscape was the outcome of siege men- tality, modern nationalism(s), and a drive to Turkify the empire and its economy is hardly controversial. But Morris and Ze’evi go further than most scholars by centering Islam in their study. In fact, it is the first time since Vahakn N. Dadrian’s pioneering publica- tions on the Armenian Genocide in the 1990s that a major scholarly work places such emphasis on Islam in its investigation of late Ottoman violence. The authors do not, however, introduce major new evidence to sup- port their bold claim. While acknowledging that “the bouts of atrocity were committed under three very different ideological umbrellas,” Morris and Ze’evi embrace an argument for a “nexus between Islam and massacre” (505, 117). They stress that “[a]s an ethos and an ideology, Islam played a cardinal role throughout the process, in each of its stages” (5). The authors also hesitate to disentan- gle nationalism and Islam in general, positing that such is the reality of the twentieth-century Middle East, where “nationalist politics … have often been under- written by, and are inseparable from, Islamic beliefs” (494). Broadening the aperture to incorporate pre-World War One violence is also a mainstay in Armenian geno- cide scholarship. In Warrant for Genocide (2003), Dadrian argued that anti-Armenian massacres preced- ing the genocide “retrospectively may be characterized as a rehearsal for the subsequent 1915–18 cataclysm” (85), and that “the 1894–96 [Sultan] Abdul Hamit era massacres developed as a form of limited ethnocide, paving the ground for the World War I genocide” (93). Recent scholarship has also tackled the ethnic cleansing of Greeks and Assyrians in tandem with that of the Armenians. George N. Shirinian’s edited volume Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyr- ians, and Greeks, 1913–1923 (2017), Erik Sjoberg’s The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memo- ries of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (2016), Taner Akçam’s The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/128/4/1940/7458610 by Columbia University Libraries user on 18 September 2024