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Syriac: a Life-Long Passion (And Madness)

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Syriac: a Life-Long Passion (And Madness) SYRIAC: A LIFE-LONG PASSION (AND MADNESS) BY GEORGE KIRAZ Martino Diez and George Kiraz Beth the in Mardutho office WWW.OASISCENTER.EU From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Dot-com crash, George Kiraz has consecrated his life to the promotion of the Syriac culture. With ecumenical repercussions Interview by Martino Diez In 1984 I took my first computer program- Beth Mardutho, Piscataway (NJ) ming course and I told my professor that I July 2, 2019 wanted to create a program to write Syriac. “It’s difficult,” he answered me, but two years In the introduction to your New Syriac Pri- later I eventually succeeded in developing a mer you write that “Syriac can be a passion (or font with Multi-lingual scholar, a DOS-based madness!), not just a language” (p. xx). Where program. We used to go to the Society of Bib- does this passion come from? lical Literature to show the software and sell it to scholars, because it worked with Syriac, When I was a little child in Bethlehem, my Arabic and Hebrew. And on one of these oc- father used to send my sisters and me to study casions I was invited to present the program Syriac with the local priest. And of course, to the Symposium Syriacum in Louvain, in kids don’t like to do extra-work in the sum- Belgium. It was 1988 and I gave a talk at the mer… My father used to give us conference. But more importantly, I met Se- 2,5 qurūsh (piasters) as a weekly allowance bastian Brock: I remember talking to him, ex- for studying Syriac, with that sum you could plaining that I had been working on Syriac for just buy an ice cream! Later, however, my the Church and the preservation of heritage, father told me that the priest had asked if I but I wanted to do it on an academic level. He could join the gudo, the liturgical choir. This invited me to apply to a program in Oxford implied to learn more Syriac and that’s where and I got accepted. There was actually a the passion began. Of course everybody in the misunderstanding about the timing, because I church was saying to me “good boy”, shātir, wanted to finish my bachelor first, but in the maybe this had also its weight at the begin- end I moved to Oxford in 1990 and I did the ning. Then the passion turned into madness. Master’s degree. My plan was to take just one year off, do my master’s degree, and then re- A madness which was to fully manifest itself in turn back to the US and get a job as an engi- the US… neer. But after a week I realized that I was going to stay, I liked it. And that was the I finished high school in Beit Jala in 1983. Im- point where everything flipped. mediately after, I moved to Los Angeles with my mom, reaching my sister who was already A deep interest in heritage preservation was living in the US. I attended college there: not new to your family. If I am not mistaken, electrical engineering, so typical of Middle the Dead Sea Scrolls were kept in your father’s Eastern boys! 1 house for some weeks shortly after their disco- rest of the story is in my father’s memoirs, ver… which I have edited. Yes, my father was a friend of Bishop Samuel It looks like you were predestinated to work [1] in Jerusalem and in 1947, when the scrolls on manuscripts … Was your family native of had just been discovered, Samuel bought Bethlehem? them. At some point the Bishop got in need of some funds and he called my father telling No, my family comes from Harput in him that there was a Jewish antiquarian who Southern Anatolia, a town between was ready to buy the scrolls. According to my Diyarbakır and Malatya. After the 1915 ge- father—but there is a dispute on this story, as nocide, many Syriac survivors fled to Adana, with whatever relates to the Dead Sea which was under French control, after the Scrolls— he advised the Bishop not to sell capitulation of the Ottoman Empire. The them and figure out how much they were French opened orphanages and schools for the worth. My father provided the funds to Sa- survivors, but they were defeated by the Ke- muel, they became partners in the scrolls and malist troops and in 1922 they were forced to he took them to our house. leave. Syriacs and Armenians, who had just endured the genocide, did not want to remain Sometime before, my father had got to know under Turkish rule and went South, to Le- Eleazar Suke- banon. And in our case, to Bethlehem. THE SCROLLS nik, the famous REMAINED IN OUR Israeli archaeo- Coming back to you: among your many achie- HOUSE FOR SOME logist, while vements, you have founded a publishing MONTHS, UNTIL building a house, Gorgias Press, which has made a name BISHOP SAMUEL house in Jeru- for itself for the quality of its publications. Was DECIDED TO SHOW THEM TO JOHN salem in the this project there from the start? TREVER days of the Bri- tish Mandate. No, it is a late development, and accidental. Having found a cave with some remains in it, After finishing my PhD, I started to work at he had called the Palestinian antiquity depart- Bell Labs: they used to belong to AT&T and ment for inquiries. They had sent Sukenik that’s where American research in technolo- and thus they had get to know each other. gies used to be carried out: at Bell Labs they Therefore my father decided to take the discovered the laser, they created the UNIX Scrolls to Sukenik. Troubles had already be- operating system, the C: programming langu- gan and they met in the no-man’s land at the age… They used to license about 1.5 patents YMCA. The scrolls remained in our house for every day! It was a scientific powerhouse, some months, until Bishop Samuel decided to controlling all telecommunications in the US, show them to John Trever, of the American before the government split the company be- Schools of Oriental Researches (ASOR). The cause it had grown too big. At any rate, I was 2 in the research department there, which was plummeted down from around 200 dollars really good because I was doing undirected each to 30 dollars, in one day. Among the five research. You were allowed to do whatever companies that had offered me a job, four you wanted, like at the Institute for Advanced went out of business in less than a week. Study. And you had a managerial level salary, Everything was lost, including my job. I de- which is really good too. Syriac was always on cided that I did not want to work for another the side, but in the late 1990s I realized that I company. wanted it to become the main thing. At that point there was the Dot-com bubble, I don’t It was at this point that Christine and I know if you have heard about it. I talked to thought of establishing Gorgias Press; and bit Christine, my wife, and told her that I wanted by bit it grew out. Later on, we took advan- to quit Bell Labs, join one of the new start- tage of the 2008 housing crash to buy the pro- ups, work hard for three, four years, collect perty we are in now. Initially it was planned the millions and endow Beth Mardutho (‘The as an office for Gorgias Press, but when I saw House of Knowledge’), the Institute for Syriac the room whe- Studies which my wife and I have founded. re we are sit- EVERYTHING WAS At the time Beth Mardutho was already exis- ting now I rea- LOST, INCLUDING ting, but it was only on paper: we wanted to lized that it MY JOB.IT WAS AT make it a real place. was perfect for THIS POINT THAT Beth CHRISTINE AND I Thus I quit Bell Labs and within a month I got Mardutho. We THOUGHT OF five job offers, all trying to outcompete each put poor Gor- ESTABLISHING other. Eventually I went to a speech techno- gias in the GORGIAS PRESS logy company from the Silicon Valley. They basement, re- wanted somebody to open a New York office. serving the best area for Beth Mardutho. We I got an office in Wall Street for them, which moved my private books here too, they make impressed them a lot. We hired staff and up the vast majority of what you see here. everything looked very promising. They were And that’s what we have now. paying in stock options and the stocks started to go up and up. On paper, at least, we could By the way, where does the name Gorgias co- see the six figures… I reckoned that in four me from? From Gorgias the sophist? And why years I would have a million aside to endow this choice? Beth Mardutho. Nine months into it, in March 2000, there was Well, we were convinced that if we open a the Dot-com crash. Most of the companies did press concentrating on Eastern Christianity not have any products, it was all about ideas alone, there will be no market for it. We and at some point the marked crashed. Stocks thought we had to work in classics too.
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