Stanford J. Shaw

Infobox academic
name = Stanford Jay Shaw
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caption = Stanford J. Shaw
birth_date = birthdate|1930|5|5
birth_place = St. Paul, Minnesota
death_date = death date and age|2006|12|16|1930|5|5
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field = Ottoman history
work_institutions = UCLA, Bilkent University
alma_mater = Princeton University
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Stanford Jay Shaw was an American historian, best known for his works on the late Ottoman Empire, Turkish Jews, and the early Turkish Republic. He has been described as "one of the most prolific Ottoman historians in the United States". [http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/people/article.asp?parentid=73949 Wolf Leslau and Stanford J. Shaw: CNES mourns the passing of Professors Leslau and Shaw] , UCLA Center for Near East Studies.]

Biography

Stanford Jay Shaw was born to Belle and Albert Shaw, who had immigrated to St. Paul from England and Russia respectively in the early years of the twentieth century. Stanford Shaw and his parents moved to Los Angeles, California in 1933 because of his father's illness, and they lived there until 1939, first in Hollywood, where Stanford went to kindergarten, and then in Ocean Park, a community on the shore of the Pacific Ocean between Santa Monica and Venice, where his parents operated a photographic shop on the Ocean Park pier. The family returned to St. Paul in 1939, where Stanford went to the Webster Elementary School. After his parents divorced, Stanford went with his mother to Akron, Ohio during World War II, where he went to elementary school, though he hated the city since it was filled with red neck southerners who came to work in the rubber factories during the war. Stanford and his mother remained there until she married Irving Jaffey and moved back to St. Paul. Stanford then attended Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, where he graduated in 1947, one out of only five students from a student body of 500 who went to college.

Education and Early Research

He went on to Stanford University, where he majored in British history under the direction of Professor Carl Brand, with a minor in Near Eastern history, under the direction of Professor Wayne Vucinich. He received his B.A. at Stanford in 1951 and M.A. in 1952, with a thesis on the foreign policy of the British Labour Party from 1920–1938, based on research in the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

He then studied Middle Eastern history along with Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a graduate student at Princeton University starting in 1952, receiving his M.A. in 1955. Subsequently he went to England to study with Bernard Lewis and Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and with Professor H. A. R. Gibb at Oxford University.

Following this, he went to Egypt to study with Shafiq Ghorbal and Adolph Grohmann at the University of Cairo and Shaikh Sayyid at the Azhar University, also doing research in the Ottoman archives of Egypt at the Citadel in Cairo for his Princeton Ph.D. dissertation concerning Ottoman rule in Egypt. Before leaving Egypt, he had a personal interview with President Gamal Abd al-Nasser, who arranged for him to take his microfilms of Ottoman documents out of the country.

Main Research

In 1956-7 he studied at the University of Istanbul with Professors Omer Lutfi Barkan, Mukrimin Halil Yinanc, Halil Sahillioglu, and Zeki Velidi Togan, also completing research on his dissertation in the Ottoman archives of Istanbul, where he was helped by a number of staff members, including Ziya Esrefoglu, Turgut Isiksal, Rauf Tuncay, and Attila Cetin, and in the Topkapi Palace archives, where he was provided with valuable assistance and support by its director, Hayrullah Ors and studied with Professor Ismail Hakki Uzuncarsili.

He received his Ph.D. degree in 1958 from Princeton University with a dissertation entitled The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517-1798, prepared under the direction of Professor Lewis Thomas and Professor Hamilton A.R. Gibb, which was published by the Princeton University Press in 1962. Stanford Shaw served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Turkish Language and History, with tenure, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and in the Department of History at Harvard University from 1958 until 1968, and as Professor of Turkish history at the University of California Los Angeles from 1968 until his retirement in 1992.

Last Years

He was recalled to teach Turkish history at UCLA between 1992 and 1997. His final post was at Bilkent University, Ankara as professor of Ottoman and Turkish history from 1999 to 2006.

The announcement of his death by his department at UCLA noted that his life was commemorated at Etz Ahayim Synagogue in Ortaköy, Istanbul, where his family accepted condolences from friends and colleagues and from Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül and numerous other dignitaries and that he was buried at the Ashkenazi Cemetery in Ulus.CNES]

Awards

He was an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society (Ankara), recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard University and the Bogazici University (Istanbul), and a member of the Middle East Studies Association, the American Historical Society, and the Tarih Vakfi (Istanbul). He also has received a Medal of Honor from the President of Turkey and medals for lifetime achievement from the Turkish-American Association and from the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul. He has received two major research awards from the United States National Endowment from the Humanities as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hayes Committee.

Reception and criticism

In the second volume of "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" published in 1977, Shaw and his Turkish wife Ezel Kural Shaw put forward the argument that the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire had revolted in 1915 against the government and were thus justifiably removed from the war zone along the Russian border. Unlike historians who hold that the deportations constituted an act of systematic genocide, the Shaws claim that Ottoman authorities did their utmost to protect the deportees and call the Armenians "the victimizers rather than the victims, the privileged rather than the oppressed, and the fabricators of unfounded tales of massacre." [Balakian, Peter. " [http://books.google.com/books?id=Ry8AMhNuwyIC&pg=PA382&vq=the+victimizers+rather+than+the+victims,+the+privileged+rather+than+the+oppressed,+and+the+fabricators+of+unfounded+tales+of+massacre&dq=The+Burning+Tigris:+The+Armenian+Genocide+and+America%27s+Response&lr=&source=gbs_search_s&sig=ACfU3U1hFiNMdQSVd3nnUmZbEB2ES9sxkw The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response] ". New York: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 382 ISBN 0-0605-5870-9.] The book also downplays the severity of the conditions of the deportation marches and instead presents them in a much more benign and pleasant light. [Shaw, Stanford J.; Shaw, Ezel Kural. " [http://books.google.com/books?id=M1DQooVS_oYC&pg=PA200&vq=armenian+revolt&dq=editions:LCCN76009179&source=gbs_search_s&sig=ACfU3U3U25NgDDknaLfu0k4IDOm017vScA History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Volume 2. Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey 1808-1975] ". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 200-205, pp. 311-317, pp. 322-324 ISBN 0-5212-9166-6.]

Many Armenians, particularly those attending UCLA, were offended and outraged with the assertions made by the Shaws. In a probable retaliation to the publication of this work, on the night of October 3, 1977, a bomb, placed by unknown assailants, exploded at the doorstep of Shaw's home at 3:50 AM although no one was hurt. [cite news
url=http://www.armenews.com/IMG/pdf/Shaw_bomb.pdf
date=1977-10-04
accessdate=2008-07-10
work=Los Angeles Times
pages=D1 (Part II)
title=Crude Bomb Explodes at UCLA Professor's Home
author=Manoukian, Socrates Peter
coauthors=Kurugian, John O.] [cite news
url=http://www.armenews.com/IMG/pdf/shaw_bomb_letter_to_editor.pdf
date=1977-10-18
accessdate=2008-07-10
work=Los Angeles Times
pages=C6 (Part II)
title=Shaw Bomb
author=Manoukian, Socrates Peter
coauthors=Kurugian, John O.] He later made light of the situation and attributed the bombing to the fact that he had assigned too many "F"s, and cancelled the rest of his classes for the remainder of the quarter. [UCLA "Daily Bruin". October 4, 1977, p. 1.]

Bibliography

*"The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517-1798" (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1962)
*"Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution" (Harvard University Press, 1964)
*"The Budget of Ottoman Egypt, 1005/06-1596/97" (Mouton and Co. The Hague, 1968)
*"Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III. 1789-1807" (Harvard University Press, 1971)
*"Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century" (Harvard University Press)
*"History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" (2 volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1976-1977) (with Ezel Kural Shaw)
*"The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic" (Macmillan, London, and New York University Press, 1991)
*"Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's role in rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi persecution, 1933-1945" (Macmillan, London and New York University Press, 1992)
*"From Empire to Republic: The Turkish War of National Liberation 1918-1923: a documentary Study" (I - V vols. in 6 books, TTK/Turkish Historical Society, Ankara, 2000)

In addition to the above, Shaw was founder and first editor of the "International Journal of Middle East Studies", published by the Cambridge University Press for the Middle East Studies Association, from 1970 until 1980.

References

External links

* [http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~shaw/profile.html Profile] , Bilkent University, Turkey