An Aramaic speaker from the Galilee region of Israel holds a book of hymns. (Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters)

Ishtartv.com – timesofisrael.com

Alexander A. Winogradsky Frenkel

Nov 26, 2025

In an age of global mobility and dispersal, the phrase Christians of the East evokes both immediacy and distance. It gestures toward regions where the great monotheistic traditions emerged – Sumer, Assyria, ancient Israel – and toward communities that now live in Amsterdam, Södertälje, Stuttgart, Sydney, Jerusalem, Kerala, and the Caucasus. Yet the term often circulates as a slogan rather than as a recognition of the extraordinary linguistic, liturgical, and theological inheritance carried by Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Assyrian, Ethiopian, and other Semitic-rooted Churches.

Their history is not regional but planetary. Syriac and Aramaic Christianity reached India, Kerala, Assam, and even Tibet, where Lhasa once served as an episcopal seat of the Church of the East – an anecdote the Dalai Lama accepts with gentle amusement. Christianity travelled along the Silk Road long before the Latin Church appeared in Jerusalem. And in the Arabian Peninsula, Jewish and Christian communities flourished together before the rise of Islam. When the Jerusalem Patriarch Sophronius welcomed the Caliph ‘Umar to Jerusalem in 637, the Christian landscape comprised Greek-speaking Byzantines, Armenians, Copts, Ethiopians, Syriac Orthodox, and Assyrians/then-Nestorians. The categories “Catholic” and “Protestant” did not yet exist.

Why then do we speak of these Christians as if they were marginal, almost an endangered curiosity? Why ignore the immense spiritual, linguistic, and cultural patrimony they have preserved through centuries of persecution and exile – often without real support from their Western Christian brethren? The West excels at humanitarian aid or at storing manuscripts in libraries, but it has rarely grasped the theological depth of the Semitic Churches, whose languages and categories of thought differ fundamentally from the Greek and Latin frameworks that shaped Europe.

These days, for the first time in his pontificate, Pope Leo XIV is visiting Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomaios, Archbishop of Constantinople and primus inter pares among the Byzantine Orthodox Churches, at the Phanar in Istanbul.

The visit takes place in a region where the Ecumenical Patriarchate exercises spiritual leadership over much of the Eastern Orthodox world, even as present-day Turkey defines itself as secular and officially “non-confessional.” Paradoxically, in this same landscape, numerous Orthodox parishes have been opened or revived – particularly of Russian tradition, belonging either to the Moscow Patriarchate or to the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate – revealing both the vitality and the fragmentation of contemporary Orthodoxy.

The Bishop of Rome will then continue his journey to the Middle East, with a visit to Lebanon, a country whose social, political, and economic fabric has been profoundly shaken.

Lebanon remains home to the Roman Catholic Maronite Church – rooted in West-Syriac, originally Aramaic-speaking – together with a remarkable constellation of Eastern Catholic and Orthodox communities. The Pope’s encounter with these Churches highlights the fragile equilibrium of a land where Christianity is woven into the very identity of the nation, yet where insecurity and crisis place immense pressure on all religious minorities.

In this 1700th anniversary year of Nicaea, the Pope’s meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch – and his visit to Lebanon’s seventeen Christian communities, especially the Syriac-rooted Maronites – reveals anew the plurality of theological languages that formed the first Creed: the Greek Fathers’ conceptual rigor, the Latin West’s juridical coherence, and the Aramaic Churches’ Semitic sense of relational unity in the Messiah.

These encounters recall that the Nicene faith is multi-rooted, and that its deepest coherence is found not in uniformity, but in the harmony of these ancient voices.

The Council of Nicaea gathered an already overwhelmingly Gentile Christianity, debating the identity of a Jewish Messiah in Greek philosophical terms, at a moment when Arian and semi-Arian currents strongly influenced much of the then-episcopates.

At the heart of this patrimony lies Aramaic, the language of the Targum, the Talmud, and of Jesus. Aramaic is not an exotic relic. It is heard in the Kaddish in every Jewish community worldwide; it shapes Passover hymns, the Zohar, and the daily liturgy of Jews from Iraq and Syria. In Israel today, Aramaic is not perceived as foreign but as a part of Hebrew’s own breathing space. This proximity has encouraged a quiet but significant revival of interest: Bar-Ilan University, Hebrew University, Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University now study Jewish and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects together. Researchers map the speech patterns of former communities from the Hakkari mountains, the Nineveh plain, and northern Iran, rediscovering a shared Semitic past in which Jewish and Syriac Christian bilingualism was common and natural.

In Jerusalem, long before the pandemic, students from the Jewish Quarter yeshivot would stop at the nearby Syriac Orthodox parish to ask the mukhtar about Talmudic Aramaic terms preserved in the liturgy. These encounters – quiet, unadvertised – revealed that Aramaic is not simply a Christian heritage language but part of a living Semitic continuum that connects communities usually separated by theology or politics.

Meanwhile, in the historic heartland of Syriac Christianity, Tur Abdin, the depopulation continues silently. Villages that once sustained the Turoyo dialect naturally – through families, markets, fields, and monastic chant – now host only a few dozen households, often elderly. A symbolic “return movement” from Sweden or Germany exists, but it cannot recreate the ecological conditions necessary for a language to survive. A worldview, a rhythm of prayer, and the very grammar of an identity become fragile but fights for its redeployment.

Yet paradoxically, other regions show unexpected vitality. Across the Gulf – UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman – Syriac, Assyrian, and Malankara Christians gather in large numbers. Their liturgies are full, their choirs impressive, their parishes active. But the conditions of migrant life – short-term contracts, limited religious education, no inter-generational stability – mean that while faith thrives, language transmission collapses. Children grow up with English, Malayalam, Tagalog, or Arabic. Aramaic becomes a liturgical sound rather than a domestic language.

One of the most dynamic centres of Aramaic Christianity today lies not in Mesopotamia but in India, where the Malankara and Mor Toma traditions preserve and renew Aramaic chant, West-Syriac hymnody, and a rich theological heritage. Here, Aramaic is not nostalgia but cultural creativity. It is taught in seminaries, sung in new compositions, woven into Malayalam sermons, and carried forward by communities that understand themselves as heirs of both Semitic and South Asian worlds. India proves that Aramaic can live when it adapts rather than retreats.

Meanwhile, the Assyrian Church of the East, under Patriarch Awa III, has embarked on a redeployment across the Russian Federation and the Caucasus. New parishes appear in Krasnodar, Rostov, and North Ossetia; older communities in Georgia and Armenia reconnect with their liturgical roots.

Still, these communities remain divided among multiple jurisdictions: Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic, Maronite, Ancient Church of the East. This fragmentation often appears as a weakness. Yet it also reveals a paradoxical truth: the pre-Chalcedonian traditions are more resilient it can face violence, exile, and statelessness. These Churches have a long experience with marginality. They never expected earthly protection and thus learned to survive with little. Their resilience is not only demographic but theological, rooted in a spiritual worldview shaped by Semitic categories of identity, exile, and fidelity.

This leads to a deeper contemporary insight: Christianity cannot be understood without its Semitic matrix. The early Church prayed, argued, and confessed largely in Aramaic idioms. Concepts that later became abstract in Greek – ousia, physis, hypostasis – were originally expressed through Semitic verbal roots emphasising relationship, presence, and action, not metaphysics.

In Syriac thought, hymnuta/ܗܝܡܢܘܬܐ (faith) means fidelity and steadiness; parsopa/ܦܪܨܘܦܐ is a face, a personal presence; qnoma/ܩܢܘܡܐ is a concrete mode of existence. These categories reveal a Christianity that is dynamic, embodied, relational, far closer to the prophets and to Jewish liturgical consciousness than to later philosophical structures.

The year 2025, marking the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, has prompted renewed discussions on how Greek and Semitic theological languages intersect – and where they diverge. Much will be said about Greek terms like ὁμοούσιος (“of one essence”), indispensable in the formulation of the Creed. Yet these debates only make full sense when illuminated by the Aramaic categories that shaped early Christian experience. A term like ὁμοούσιος finds no precise equivalent in Aramaic. Instead, Syriac expresses the same mystery through the Messiah’s revealed presence, the one who makes the Father known in his own “face” and action. Theology, in this view, is less about substance and more about encounter.

Far from relativising doctrine, this deepens it. It shows that Christianity possesses several theological grammars, each legitimate, each expressing a different facet of the same revelation. In a world fragmented by identity and ideology, the Semitic traditions remind us that unity does not require uniformity, but harmonised diversity rooted in shared revelation.

Another contemporary development deserves attention: the surprising rise of Syriac and Assyrian visibility in the public life of Northern Europe. In the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden, members of these diasporas now serve in municipal councils, regional assemblies, and national parliaments. They campaign on issues of minority rights, integration, and cultural protection.

Their political involvement is often marked by internal rivalries – Assyrian vs. Aramean, Church-of-the-East vs. West-Syriac – but it represents a remarkable transformation: one of the oldest Christian peoples, long persecuted in their ancestral lands, now helps shape European democracies. Their presence in public life gives renewed legitimacy to their historical narrative and strengthens their ability to advocate for endangered Aramaic-speaking populations in the Middle East.

The modern world increasingly reduces religious identity to numbers, geopolitics, or survival statistics. But the Christians of the East carry something deeper: a living memory of how the first centuries of Christianity thought, prayed, argued, and hoped. Their survival is not merely demographic: it is conceptual. They preserve the ancient “immune system” of the Christian body, much like the thymus, the gland that shapes biological immunity in early life and then diminishes but never disappears.

In this sense, their presence in Israel is striking. The State recognizes the Syriacs as Assyrians (אשורים\Ashurim) and the “non-Arab” Aramaics (ארמעעם\Aramaim) as a distinct national identity. Associations such as “Aramit – Second Jewish Language” explore shared Jewish–Christian linguistic heritage. Israeli Christians and Jews study Targumic and Talmudic Aramaic together.

The future of the Christians of the East remains uncertain. Tur Abdin seems to empty but resist. Syria and Iraq struggle to retain their remaining faithful; Lebanon trembles under economic collapse. Armenia faces geopolitical instability. Yet at the same time, digital tools connect choirs from Kerala, monks from Tur Abdin, Aramaic teachers in America’s, Sweden, and liturgical scholars in Jerusalem. Aramaic is widely broadcasted on YouTube… Exile, paradoxically, has made the tradition more global, more visible, and perhaps more capable of renewal.

Perhaps, a century from now, the Aramaic-speaking Churches – scattered yet faithful, wounded yet creative – will have regained their breath. And perhaps they will once again offer to the entire Christian world the depth, fidelity, and luminous simplicity of the faith first confessed in the languages of Abraham, the Prophets, and the Messiah.

About the Author

Alexander is a psycho-linguist specializing in bi-multi-linguistics and Yiddish. He is a Talmudist, comparative theologian, and logotherapist. He is a professor of Compared Judaism and Christian heritages, Archpriest of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem, and International Counselor.