Shall This Nation Die?

Newspaper clip from The Tablet, Brooklyn, NY, October 13, 1923.

Father Joseph Naayem and the 1915 Genocide

By Weam Namou

In 1915, before the word genocide existed, the people of the Ottoman borders already lived its meaning. Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans were driven from their homes, pushed into the desert, and slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands. Out of that darkness rose one Chaldean priest’s question, “Shall this nation die?”

Father Joseph Naayem was born in Urfa (ancient Edessa), a historic city in Mesopotamia that was home to generations of Christians. By 1915, when he was serving as a parish priest there, the Great War had already turned the Ottoman provinces into killing fields. The empire’s rulers had set into motion mass deportations that emptied towns and villages of their Christian populations. Armenians were the largest group targeted, but smaller eastern churches, including the AssyroChaldeans, suffered as severely.

What Naayem witnessed and later recorded was deeply personal. His own father, a merchant respected by Muslims and Christians alike, was imprisoned in Urfa on false charges of aiding rebels and secretly exporting grain to the enemy. After months in custody, he was executed without trial.

“I am patiently awaiting my fate,” he wrote in a final smuggled note. “My life is of little importance to me — but my children, what will become of them?”

Naayem’s book, Shall This Nation Die? (published in 1920), recounts not only his father’s death but the broader collapse of his community. Convoys of Armenian and Chaldean women and children — starved, beaten, often kidnapped — passed through Urfa every day. The police stole from them; soldiers carried away girls to abuse.

“These eyes of mine,” he wrote, “have seen little children thrown on manure heaps while life still lingered in their bodies.”

The entire Christian quarter fell under siege later that year, and Naayem himself narrowly escaped the city. Disguised in Bedouin robes and aided by an Arab friend, he made his way across the desert to Aleppo. Behind him, Urfa burned.

By the time the fighting ended, around 15,000 Christians — Armenians, Chaldeans, Syriacs —had been killed, their churches razed, and their homes emptied.

Lord Bryce, who prefaced the book, wrote, “The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish Government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915.”

Late that same year, Naayem was summoned by his Patriarch to serve as chaplain to Allied prisoners of war in Anatolia. He arrived at AfionKaraHissar, a camp where British, French, and Russian officers languished behind barbed fences. Fluent in multiple languages, Naayem acted as an interpreter. His compassionate interactions with the prisoners led to suspicions of treachery among the Turkish authorities. His situation worsened when three British officers successfully escaped, and he was subsequently accused of aiding them, leading to his arrest.

What followed he called simply “my prison experiences.” He was beaten with clubs, his beard torn out, left for days without food or water in a flooded cell. Torture alternated with interrogation: officials demanded his private notes, convinced he was reporting Ottoman crimes to the Allies.

At last, he was shipped to Constantinople to face a court martial. His “crime” proved to be a friendly letter to a French prisoner addressed “Mon bien cher Commandant.” He was acquitted after 130 days, broken but alive.

Naayem reflected, “The future is no light matter for the Christians. Unless they obtain liberty to live, and bread to eat, they will all die of hunger and cold in those regions through which the murderers have passed.”

The Ottoman Empire’s presence in Mesopotamia lasted until the aftermath of World War I. Following the Empire’s defeat, the region came under British control through the League of Nations’ mandate system. The British ended the Ottoman Empire’s rule when they established the Hashemite King Faisal I of Iraq on August 23, 1921. The official English name of the country changed from Mesopotamia to Iraq.

Fr. Joseph dedicated the rest of his life to serving his community and documenting the stories of other genocide survivors. He spread news about the genocide across the world. In the early 1920s, he came to the United States, where he established the Chaldean Rescue Mission, headquartered in New York City.

He made appeals at different colleges and congregations for aid for the thousands of destitute Christian widows and orphans of the old Christian nation. In his appeals, he explained that the Turks and Kurds had massacred more than half a million children and women, and thousands more had died through famine, which had been raging for years.

Fr. Joseph  spoke in front of large audiences about the tragic story of his people. He outlined the history of Chaldeans, from its abode in Nineveh and Babylon, and traced it to the present day. It is a history of undying faith in Christianity and the constant dwindling numbers of survivors from generation to generation.

Naayem spoke of the urgent necessity of immediate relief for Chaldean sufferers, who are members of a race that is the remnant of the oldest civilized nation in the world. At the outbreak of World War I, there were upwards of 700,000 Chaldeans living in Mesopotamia. Turkish and Kurdish depredations and religious persecution wiped out fifty percent of them and have driven the remainder from their homes.

In 1923, Naayem helped bring forty-two Chaldean girls and young women to the United States to train at American convents. There was no religious sisterhood in the Catholic Church of Chaldea, although it had eleven dioceses. For centuries, the attitude of the Turks had made community life for women impossible. These girls were to return to Mosul to establish a congregation. Twenty-four others would train as nurses in Catholic hospitals, and then they would return.

Father Joseph Raphael Naayem eventually became a United States citizen through naturalization. Some of Joseph’s family members died in Baghdad, Iraq, but most, including his mother, passed away in Beirut, Lebanon. He died on August 20, 1964, at the age of seventy-six, in Chur, the oldest town in Switzerland.

An Interesting Twist

Years later, a man named Joseph Naayem did a web search on his own name and was startled to find a book titled “Shall This Nation Die?” authored by someone with the same name.

Intrigued, he began to read and soon recognized familiar surnames woven throughout the pages.

“About three pages in, I thought, this is depressing,” he recalled. “So I skipped to the end—and the last line read, ‘Thanks to the efforts of our Chaldean Patriarch, we were able to reach Mosul, where we arrived on March 2.”

Naayem was shocked. That was his birthday!

“I felt like I was in the twilight zone,” he said with a laugh.

When he called his father, Fareed, he learned the truth: the author was his great-uncle, the Chaldean priest Father Joseph Naayem. That revelation sparked a family-wide search as Joseph II and his cousins began piecing together their ancestor’s remarkable story.

They discovered that Father Naayem had traveled frequently between the Middle East and the United States, tirelessly working with the Chaldean community. “He had shepherded the Chaldean community through the genocide,” said Naayem, a legacy he now carries with pride

“When Christians visited him, he would put them to work,” said the younger Joseph. “He’d have them handwrite Christmas cards and address envelopes.”

Joseph II was born in Lebanon, raised in London, and later worked in Switzerland before settling in the UK, where his mother—born in Baghdad—now lives. His father passed away in 2018.

Father Joseph Naayem’s story is one of unwavering faith and quiet heroism. Amid the horrors of genocide, he refused to let despair define his people, instead devoting his life to their survival, education, and hope. Through his tireless work—rescuing the vulnerable, chronicling atrocities, and building bridges between continents—he ensured that the voices of the Chaldean community would be heard and remembered.

Today, generations later, his legacy lives on in the families he saved, the communities he strengthened, and the stories that continue to inspire. The question he once asked, “Shall this nation die?” finds its answer in the resilience, courage, and enduring spirit of the Chaldean people.

Father Joseph Naayem’s story lives on through the modern adaptation “Joseph Naayem: A Chaldean Priest’s Story During the 1915 Genocide,” written by Weam Namou.