Historians of American religion have paid scant attention to Orthodox Christianity, especially to the Non-Chalcedonian (“Oriental”) Orthodox Churches. These include the Armenian, Coptic, Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Indian (Malankara) churches, as well as the Syriac Orthodox (Jacobite) Church, the subject of this timely and important study. George Anton Kiraz, a Syriac Orthodox deacon, first embarked on this project in the 1980s as a teenager preparing to immigrate to the United States. Kiraz has returned to this early research to produce an admirable book that outlines his church's history in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America. Through short, richly detailed subchapters, Kiraz explains that on this continent, the Syriac Orthodox Church did not so much assimilate as it did continuously reinvent. With careful attention to issues of language and ethnicity, this is a fascinating account of a religious tradition whose history in North America offers much for scholarly exploration.

This book might be read as three studies. The first is a meticulous survey of early twentieth-century Syriac immigrant institutions. Drawing on the impressive breadth of publications produced within Syriac immigrant communities, Kiraz shows how a variety of non-church institutions—ethnic clubs, reading rooms, businesses, presses, women's organizations, schools, and fraternal societies, among others—laid the groundwork for the arrival of Syriac clergy and the establishment of parishes. The second study takes the form of an ecclesiastical, top-down history of the Syriac Archdiocese of North America after 1940. With the arrival of clergy and the establishment of ecclesiastical oversight, their communities would clash not over doctrine or practice, but rather how they referred to themselves in English. Various self-identifications—Syriac, Aramaic, or Assyrian; Apostolic or Orthodox—indicated differences in language, places of origin, or stages of migration. The third study, covering more recent decades, is drawn largely from Kiraz's own observations of more recent trends within his church. Kiraz cites complex dynamics of identity formation and migration patterns to explain that despite more than a century of history in North America, multigenerational families with connections to the Syriac Church's earliest history on this continent are surprisingly rare.

Within these three narrative sections, several themes emerge. First, the through-line connecting all three are the instruments of violence and persecution that drove Syriac migration to North America, namely genocides (sayfo) in the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s and 1910s, midcentury wars in Palestine, and later, political upheaval in the Middle East. In this way, we see a helpful reminder for the ways that migration, settlement, and safety are all important for the preservation of cultures and traditions endangered by conflict and genocide. Kiraz also invites further attention for how language and ethnicity function within such refugee immigrant communities, especially in how these values change over time. Nuanced identity formations centered in language and place of origin, which Kiraz observes as a defining characteristic of the Syriac Orthodox experience in the Ottoman Empire, continued to mold community life in North America. Their immigrant church remained united in belief and practice, yet diverse in both language use and ethnic identity. Finally, Kiraz offers an interesting case study in comparative migration, showing how three distinct stages of migration made for distinct manifestations of the Syriac Church. He seems to indicate that the community more or less repeatedly replaced itself in each stage. If indeed true, this seems a tantalizing enticement for scholars of American religion interested in the effects of shifting ethnic identities, pressures of assimilation, and dynamics of intergenerational change in the development and sustenance of immigrant religious traditions.

Though Kiraz's work has many strengths, there are aspects which merit minor critique. Kiraz is clear in establishing his work as an insider history, inviting valid questions of critical distance and objective bias. And he is honest in assessing the limitations of his own language skills, which left some Ottoman Turkish sources lamentably underutilized. This is not intended as a dismissal of the excellent research Kiraz presents here, but rather to highlight that such limitations might actually serve an important purpose. From the perspective of Orthodox studies, such a well-researched and deeply-informed narrative baseline is critical to the development of a diverse and representative historiography of Orthodox traditions in North America. We need the stories these kinds of books tell, and more importantly, their footnotes, to move toward producing the kinds of comparative, analytical, and theoretical studies so many other subfields in American religions have long taken for granted.

With a keen eye for narrative, Kiraz also shows us the utility in looking beyond merely the ecclesial to instead cast a wide perspective across Syriac communities. As he demonstrates in the book's opening sections, fraternal societies, ethnic clubs, newspapers, and other institutions were critical to how immigrant believers—clergy and lay, men and women—constructed their religious worlds in North America. These ideas, expressed through the methodology of lived religion, has been central to the study of American religions for decades. It has not reached widespread acceptance, however, in a historiography of Orthodoxy in the Americas that has almost exclusively erred toward the ecclesiastical and clerical. This is where the second and third portions of Kiraz's narrative seem to fall short, as shifts in available source material caused him to revert to traditional, top-down perspectives that somewhat pale before the comparative richness of his initial chapters.

Taken in full, this book reminds us that Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox traditions merit far more exploration than has been afforded in the scholarly literature, especially smaller and lesser-known communities like the Syriac church. Splendidly illustrated and carefully researched, even if somewhat uneven in its narrative arc and methodological analysis, Kiraz has done a great service for the study of Orthodox Christianity in North America, and American religions as a whole. Scholars of religion, ethnicity, migration, transnational studies, and geopolitics will find in this foundational survey many tantalizing avenues for further research.