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Articles tagged with: Circassians

Circassians in Israel

By Asya Pereltsvaig | January 26, 2012 | 14 Comments

While Israel serves as a gathering place for the world-wide Jewish diaspora, it too hosts smaller diasporic communities of its own. One such community is that of the Circassians. Members of this community live in two villages: Kfar-Kama in the lower Galilee (population 2,900) and Reyhaniye further north, on the border with Syria (population 1,000). The roots of this community …

The linguistic and genetic mosaic of the Northwest Caucasus

By Asya Pereltsvaig | January 25, 2012 | 13 Comments

The Northwest Caucasus – including Russia’s internal republics of Adygea, Karachai-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as parts of Krasnodar Krai in Russia proper – presents a veritably kaleidoscopic ethno-linguistic picture. As can be seen from this ethno-linguistic map of Karachai-Cherkessia, based on 2002 census data, Indo-European-speaking groups such as the Russians (shown in blue) and the Ossetians (in brown) coexist …

The Politics of Genocide Claims and the Circassian Diaspora

By Martin W. Lewis | January 24, 2012 | 47 Comments
Map of the Caucasian Language Families

Allegations of genocide are often politically charged. On January 23, 2012, the French parliament voted to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In Turkey, by contrast, it is illegal to assert that the same acts were genocidal. The Turkish government remains adamant, threatening to impose unspecified sanctions on …

Circassia and the 2014 Winter Olympics

By Martin W. Lewis | February 4, 2010 | One Comment

Yesterday’s post referred to the Ossetians as a people of “profound world-historical significance,” a phrase that fits their neighbors, the Circassians, even better. That members of the so-called White race are called “Caucasians” stems largely from the widespread nineteenth-century European notion that the Circassians, natives of the northwestern Caucasus, somehow represented the ideal human form

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