This highly original book brings into focus the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied source materialmedical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and traveloguesin a nuanced, wide-ranging, and powerfully analytic exploration of Ottoman sexual thought and practices from the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following on the work of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of the book is that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define boundaries of right and wrong, and imagine their sexual worlds through the set of discourses available to them. Dror Ze’evi finds that while some of these discourses were restrictive and others more permissive, all treated sex in its many manifestations as a natural human pursuit. And, he further argues that all these discourses were transformed and finally silenced in the last century, leaving very little to inform Middle Eastern societies in sexual matters. With its innovative approach toward the history of sexuality in the Middle East, Producing Desire sheds new light on the history of the Ottoman Empire, on the history of sexuality and gender, and on the Islamic Middle East today.

Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

History

Ze’evi, Dror

Middle East

University of California Press

Review “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events…A richly textured and highly sensitive study…The authors document, in painstaking detail and with constant reference to their key arguments, the centrally planned murder and deportation of Christians throughout Turkey.”―Times Literary Supplement“Offers a subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.”―New York Times Book Review“Again and again, I was brought up short by the sheer, terrible, shocking accounts of violence in Morris’s and Zeevi’s work… Is it possible for a people to be so inured to cruelty that they changed, that their acts of sadism could alter their humanity?”―The Independent“Gut-wrenching…Morris and Ze’evi convey well the horror of the killings.”―Foreign Affairs“In well over six hundred pages the authors detail, town by town and village by village, the atrocities that led to the elimination of Christians from Turkey…A monumental achievement.”―Commonweal“The mass killings of Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Christians in the late Ottoman era and early 1920s have been the subject of several excellent studies in recent years. The Israeli historians Morris and Ze’evi add value by knitting together the three main episodes of violent persecution in a comprehensive narrative.”―Financial Times“Brilliantly researched and written…Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi cast a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects. They emphasize that the three waves of violence against the Christians living in Anatolia were not spasmodic or distinct, but formed part of a larger and coherent plan to destroy them utterly. Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews from the face of the Earth.”―The Spectator“Important and ambitious…They break new ground in the attempt to tie various massacres and atrocities at different times and places into a seamless genocidal web extending on and off for thirty years…Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi have done a great service to the study of comparative genocide.”―David Gaunt, Bustan“The evidence cited in this well-researched book is overwhelming…By looking at previously isolated events in a broader view, Morris and Ze’evi open new horizons on these events. What they reveal has global implications.”―Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Middle East Quarterly“Remarkable…A warning from history, perhaps, that this incisive work transmits to us in these dark days of political turmoil.”―Jewish Chronicle“A must read for anyone interested in the tragic events and history which inevitably shaped the modern world.”―National Herald“An exhaustive account of Turkish policies towards Christians from the waning years of the Ottoman Caliphate through the first decade of Atatürk’s rule.”―National Interest“Forces me to re-examine my understanding of the Armenian Genocide…It will stand in both the historical records of nations and in the field of Genocide studies as a monumental marker of excellence.”―Massis Post“The book’s strength lies in the fact that it has a broader perspective than many other books on the subject… Morris and Ze’evi have given us an outstanding representation of the fate of the Christian minorities during this crucial thirty-year period.”―Svenska Dagbladet“The proof in this well-researched book is overwhelming…Hugely important.”―Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Neue Politische Literatur Product Description A Financial Times Book of the YearA Foreign Affairs Book of the YearA Spectator Book of the Year“A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.”―Times Literary Supplement“Brilliantly researched and written…casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Chri

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924

Morris, Benny

Europe

Harvard University Press

A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire, and then the Turkish Republic, against their Christian minorities.
Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.
The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.
Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.

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Books by Ze’evi, Dror

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ze’evi, Dror. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900 (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924

The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924