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Stanford Jay Shaw, 1930-2006: An academic who denied the Armenian Genocide
by Aram Arkun (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
NEW YORK--At first sight, Stanford Jay Shaw appeared to be an
ordinary, innocuous, friendly, and garrulous grandfather. At UCLA, he
typically wore sneakers, and dressed informally.
He was, however, no ordinary man.
A prominent Ottoman historian, Shaw was perhaps the most prominent of
a scholarly school of American deniers of the Armenian Genocide. In
his best known work, a two-volume survey titled "History of the
Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" (Cambridge University Press,
1976-77), Shaw and his co-author (and wife) Ezel Kural Shaw attempted
to present the Ottomans and Turks in the most positive light possible,
at times from an anachronistic Turkish nationalist perspective. In the
process, alongside many other consequential errors, they minimized the
size and significance of the Hamidian and Cilician massacres, while
placing much of the responsibility for these events on Armenians.
They went on to argue that the Armenians revolted and consequently
suffered losses during World War I, contrary to the wishes of their
Young Turk rulers who worked to safeguard them during deportations
from war zones. Two hundred thousand Armenians were killed due to
famine, disease, and inadvertent violence during the turmoil of the
war, which, they emphasized, killed some 10 times as many Muslims.
This denial of the Armenian Genocide, similar to what many Turkish
government officials were contemporaneously stating, aroused Armenian
ire. In addition to a deplorable firebombing of Stanford Shaw's house
by unknown assailants, damage to Shaw's office, and threats made to
Shaw and the publishers of the book, many legitimate Armenian
demonstrations and protests took place at UCLA. As a consequence, Dr.
Shaw was able to present himself as a persecuted victim of Armenian
infringements on freedom of speech, and the academics who were going
to participate in a major public critique of his book changed their
minds for fear of the charged political atmosphere. Nonetheless, both
volumes were criticized by scholars in print for many flaws of
chronology, factuality, and bias on topics that went far beyond
Armenian matters, and even for issues of plagiarism.
Dr. Shaw produced a number of students who themselves became
university professors and published authors on topics of Ottoman
history. Some of them, such as Heath Lowry or Justin McCarthy, also
became prominent deniers of the Armenian Genocide. Many graduate
students in modern Armenian history at UCLA, incidentally, took
Ottoman history and language courses with Shaw.
Born in Minnesota on May 5, 1930 as Stanley Shapiro to Jewish immigrants from England and Russia, Shaw is said to have changed his name to its present version
early in his career, primarily due to anti-Semitism, and, apparently,
in honor of Stanford University, where he did his undergraduate work
and received a master's degree in British history. He completed the
work for another master's degree, this time in Turkish and Islamic
history, from Princeton University in 1955, and went on to study with
Bernard Lewis at the University of London, and Hamilton Gibb at
Oxford. He also studied in Egypt and Istanbul, preparing for his
Princeton doctoral dissertation titled "The Financial and
Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt,
1517-1798" (published in 1962 by Princeton University Press). Along
the way, he learned to read Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.
Shaw went to Harvard University, where he became an assistant and then
associate professor of Turkish language and history in the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and the Department of History from 1958 to
1968. Here, in addition to his dissertation mentioned above, he
published four more works on Ottoman Egypt, thus securing his position
as a specialist on this topic: "Between Old and New: The Ottoman
Empire under Sultan Selim III" (1971), and the edited translations
"Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century" (1962) and "Ottoman Egypt in
the Age of the French Revolution" (1964), all with Harvard University
Press; and "The Budget of Ottoman Egypt 1005-1006/1596-1597" (1968)
with Mouton (The Hague). He also co-edited a work of Sir Hamilton
Gibb's, "Studies on the Civilization of Islam" (1962).
Shaw became friends at Harvard with two other young professors, Avedis
Sanjian, a specialist in Armenian literature, and Speros Vryonis, Jr.,
a specialist in Byzantine, Seljuk, and early Ottoman histories. Often,
Shaw would come to dinner at Sanjian's house and play with his young
son Gregory. When Shaw fell sick, a Turkish graduate student nursed
him back to health, and he soon married that student, who became Ezel
Kural Shaw. Gradually, his positions on Armenians and Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire began to change in a negative fashion.
Shaw moved to Los Angeles, where he became professor of Turkish
history at the University of California from 1968 to 1992. Sanjian and
Vryonis moved to the same university, where Richard Hovannisian became
professor of Armenian history. It was at UCLA that his conflict with
the Armenian community at large, as well as with many of his faculty
friends at UCLA, became intense after the publication of his
above-mentioned second volume on Ottoman history. In the 1980s, Shaw
also lobbied the state of California's Department of Education, and
state legislators, against accepting the Armenian Genocide as a
planned attempt at annihilation, and was a signatory of various
petitions and paid political advertisements denying the Genocide.
Meanwhile, UCLA Armenians continued to protest against Shaw's position
on the Armenian Genocide. Shaw's presence at UCLA raised questions
about the limits of academic freedom. Towards the end of his stay at
UCLA, in 1988, Shaw claimed that the Armenians were persecuting him
because of their anti-Semitism, not because of his published writings
on Ottoman-Armenian relations--but this was refuted by statements from
the UCLA Jewish Student Union, the rabbi who was then director of
Hillel, and emeritus sociology professor Leo Kuper, a specialist in
the field of genocide studies. In two books Shaw published several
years later tendentiously praising Ottoman tolerance towards Jews, he
portrayed the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as
anti-Semites ("The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish
Republic," 1991; "Turkey and the Holocaust," 1992).
After retiring in 1992 from UCLA with various benefits, Shaw took
advantage of the "golden parachute" arrangement offered to many senior
faculty there to continue teaching courses for another five years. He
then moved with his wife to Turkey, and became professor of Ottoman
and Turkish history in Ankara's Bilkent University from 1999 until his
death. There, he published "Studies in Ottoman and Turkish History:
Life with the Ottomans" (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000); a five-volume
work titled "From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National
Liberation 1918-1923. A Documentary Study" (Ankara: Turkish
Historical Society, 2000); and "Bir Dusuncenin Gerçeklesmesi: Osmanli
Tarihi Çalismalarima" (Ankara: Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi Forumu,
2003), on his work on Ottoman history.
In his multivolume work on the Turkish war for independence, Shaw
highlighted the "misdeeds" of Armenians and others, while failing to
note or extremely minimizing massacres of Armenians committed by
Ottomans or Muslims in this period.
Shaw continued periodically to issue statements on the Armenian
Genocide while living in Turkey. For example, according to a Turkish
news agency, last year he called Switzerland "uncivilized" for
beginning a legal procedure against Turkish History Society president
Yusuf Halaçoglu for statements denying the Armenian Genocide.
Shaw's biases fit in well with those of his colleagues in Middle
Eastern studies. Turkey's generally anti-Soviet stand in the Cold War,
and American economic interests led to American promotion of positive
views of Turkey, while the Turkish historical establishment, dominated
by official state views, naturally also appreciated such
historiographical revisionism, thus allowing Shaw wide access to
Ottoman archives.
Stanford Shaw consequently was able to play an influential role in the
broader field of Middle Eastern studies. He helped found the
"International Journal of Middle East Studies" for the Middle Eastern
Studies Association, which is the major organization of scholars
specializing on this area in the United States. He edited this
journal, published by Cambridge University Press, from 1970 to 1980.
Shaw received medals from the president of Turkey, the
Turkish-American Association, and the Research Center for Islamic
History, Art, and Culture at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul, as well as
honorary degrees from Harvard University and Bogazici University in
Istanbul. He was made an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of
Science at the end of 2005. Major foundations provided him with
research awards and fellowships, including the United States National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research
Council, the Fulbright-Hayes Committee, and the Royal Institute of
International Affairs in London.
Shaw obviously possessed great energy and considerable ability. It is
a shame that in the latter half of his career he often pursued
tendentious goals at the expense of a reasoned historiographical
methodology. This, along with sloppy writing, damaged the value of his
own work, harmed the field of Ottoman studies, and caused
Armenians--and the descendants of the other former Ottoman subject
nationalities who received short shrift in his works--great upset.
* * *
Historian Aram Arkun was a graduate student at UCLA during the 1980s.
by Aram Arkun (special to the "Armenian Reporter")
NEW YORK--At first sight, Stanford Jay Shaw appeared to be an
ordinary, innocuous, friendly, and garrulous grandfather. At UCLA, he
typically wore sneakers, and dressed informally.
He was, however, no ordinary man.
A prominent Ottoman historian, Shaw was perhaps the most prominent of
a scholarly school of American deniers of the Armenian Genocide. In
his best known work, a two-volume survey titled "History of the
Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" (Cambridge University Press,
1976-77), Shaw and his co-author (and wife) Ezel Kural Shaw attempted
to present the Ottomans and Turks in the most positive light possible,
at times from an anachronistic Turkish nationalist perspective. In the
process, alongside many other consequential errors, they minimized the
size and significance of the Hamidian and Cilician massacres, while
placing much of the responsibility for these events on Armenians.
They went on to argue that the Armenians revolted and consequently
suffered losses during World War I, contrary to the wishes of their
Young Turk rulers who worked to safeguard them during deportations
from war zones. Two hundred thousand Armenians were killed due to
famine, disease, and inadvertent violence during the turmoil of the
war, which, they emphasized, killed some 10 times as many Muslims.
This denial of the Armenian Genocide, similar to what many Turkish
government officials were contemporaneously stating, aroused Armenian
ire. In addition to a deplorable firebombing of Stanford Shaw's house
by unknown assailants, damage to Shaw's office, and threats made to
Shaw and the publishers of the book, many legitimate Armenian
demonstrations and protests took place at UCLA. As a consequence, Dr.
Shaw was able to present himself as a persecuted victim of Armenian
infringements on freedom of speech, and the academics who were going
to participate in a major public critique of his book changed their
minds for fear of the charged political atmosphere. Nonetheless, both
volumes were criticized by scholars in print for many flaws of
chronology, factuality, and bias on topics that went far beyond
Armenian matters, and even for issues of plagiarism.
Dr. Shaw produced a number of students who themselves became
university professors and published authors on topics of Ottoman
history. Some of them, such as Heath Lowry or Justin McCarthy, also
became prominent deniers of the Armenian Genocide. Many graduate
students in modern Armenian history at UCLA, incidentally, took
Ottoman history and language courses with Shaw.
Born in Minnesota on May 5, 1930 as Stanley Shapiro to Jewish immigrants from England and Russia, Shaw is said to have changed his name to its present version
early in his career, primarily due to anti-Semitism, and, apparently,
in honor of Stanford University, where he did his undergraduate work
and received a master's degree in British history. He completed the
work for another master's degree, this time in Turkish and Islamic
history, from Princeton University in 1955, and went on to study with
Bernard Lewis at the University of London, and Hamilton Gibb at
Oxford. He also studied in Egypt and Istanbul, preparing for his
Princeton doctoral dissertation titled "The Financial and
Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt,
1517-1798" (published in 1962 by Princeton University Press). Along
the way, he learned to read Ottoman Turkish and Arabic.
Shaw went to Harvard University, where he became an assistant and then
associate professor of Turkish language and history in the Department
of Near Eastern Languages and the Department of History from 1958 to
1968. Here, in addition to his dissertation mentioned above, he
published four more works on Ottoman Egypt, thus securing his position
as a specialist on this topic: "Between Old and New: The Ottoman
Empire under Sultan Selim III" (1971), and the edited translations
"Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century" (1962) and "Ottoman Egypt in
the Age of the French Revolution" (1964), all with Harvard University
Press; and "The Budget of Ottoman Egypt 1005-1006/1596-1597" (1968)
with Mouton (The Hague). He also co-edited a work of Sir Hamilton
Gibb's, "Studies on the Civilization of Islam" (1962).
Shaw became friends at Harvard with two other young professors, Avedis
Sanjian, a specialist in Armenian literature, and Speros Vryonis, Jr.,
a specialist in Byzantine, Seljuk, and early Ottoman histories. Often,
Shaw would come to dinner at Sanjian's house and play with his young
son Gregory. When Shaw fell sick, a Turkish graduate student nursed
him back to health, and he soon married that student, who became Ezel
Kural Shaw. Gradually, his positions on Armenians and Greeks in the
Ottoman Empire began to change in a negative fashion.
Shaw moved to Los Angeles, where he became professor of Turkish
history at the University of California from 1968 to 1992. Sanjian and
Vryonis moved to the same university, where Richard Hovannisian became
professor of Armenian history. It was at UCLA that his conflict with
the Armenian community at large, as well as with many of his faculty
friends at UCLA, became intense after the publication of his
above-mentioned second volume on Ottoman history. In the 1980s, Shaw
also lobbied the state of California's Department of Education, and
state legislators, against accepting the Armenian Genocide as a
planned attempt at annihilation, and was a signatory of various
petitions and paid political advertisements denying the Genocide.
Meanwhile, UCLA Armenians continued to protest against Shaw's position
on the Armenian Genocide. Shaw's presence at UCLA raised questions
about the limits of academic freedom. Towards the end of his stay at
UCLA, in 1988, Shaw claimed that the Armenians were persecuting him
because of their anti-Semitism, not because of his published writings
on Ottoman-Armenian relations--but this was refuted by statements from
the UCLA Jewish Student Union, the rabbi who was then director of
Hillel, and emeritus sociology professor Leo Kuper, a specialist in
the field of genocide studies. In two books Shaw published several
years later tendentiously praising Ottoman tolerance towards Jews, he
portrayed the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as
anti-Semites ("The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish
Republic," 1991; "Turkey and the Holocaust," 1992).
After retiring in 1992 from UCLA with various benefits, Shaw took
advantage of the "golden parachute" arrangement offered to many senior
faculty there to continue teaching courses for another five years. He
then moved with his wife to Turkey, and became professor of Ottoman
and Turkish history in Ankara's Bilkent University from 1999 until his
death. There, he published "Studies in Ottoman and Turkish History:
Life with the Ottomans" (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000); a five-volume
work titled "From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National
Liberation 1918-1923. A Documentary Study" (Ankara: Turkish
Historical Society, 2000); and "Bir Dusuncenin Gerçeklesmesi: Osmanli
Tarihi Çalismalarima" (Ankara: Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi Forumu,
2003), on his work on Ottoman history.
In his multivolume work on the Turkish war for independence, Shaw
highlighted the "misdeeds" of Armenians and others, while failing to
note or extremely minimizing massacres of Armenians committed by
Ottomans or Muslims in this period.
Shaw continued periodically to issue statements on the Armenian
Genocide while living in Turkey. For example, according to a Turkish
news agency, last year he called Switzerland "uncivilized" for
beginning a legal procedure against Turkish History Society president
Yusuf Halaçoglu for statements denying the Armenian Genocide.
Shaw's biases fit in well with those of his colleagues in Middle
Eastern studies. Turkey's generally anti-Soviet stand in the Cold War,
and American economic interests led to American promotion of positive
views of Turkey, while the Turkish historical establishment, dominated
by official state views, naturally also appreciated such
historiographical revisionism, thus allowing Shaw wide access to
Ottoman archives.
Stanford Shaw consequently was able to play an influential role in the
broader field of Middle Eastern studies. He helped found the
"International Journal of Middle East Studies" for the Middle Eastern
Studies Association, which is the major organization of scholars
specializing on this area in the United States. He edited this
journal, published by Cambridge University Press, from 1970 to 1980.
Shaw received medals from the president of Turkey, the
Turkish-American Association, and the Research Center for Islamic
History, Art, and Culture at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul, as well as
honorary degrees from Harvard University and Bogazici University in
Istanbul. He was made an honorary member of the Turkish Academy of
Science at the end of 2005. Major foundations provided him with
research awards and fellowships, including the United States National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research
Council, the Fulbright-Hayes Committee, and the Royal Institute of
International Affairs in London.
Shaw obviously possessed great energy and considerable ability. It is
a shame that in the latter half of his career he often pursued
tendentious goals at the expense of a reasoned historiographical
methodology. This, along with sloppy writing, damaged the value of his
own work, harmed the field of Ottoman studies, and caused
Armenians--and the descendants of the other former Ottoman subject
nationalities who received short shrift in his works--great upset.
* * *
Historian Aram Arkun was a graduate student at UCLA during the 1980s.
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