A strip mall 15 minutes down the highway from Manhattan is the last place I expected to hear the language spoken by Jesus Christ. But northern New Jersey is one of the places where Syriac Christians, driven from the Middle East by violence and persecution, have come to call home over the past few decades. If Jacob Hanikhe has his way, it will also remain one of the few places where Aramaic, an ancient tongue found throughout the Talmud and Gospels, is a living language. Syriac, Assyrian and Chaldean Christians--their chosen name varies by denomination, but most recognize themselves as part of the same ethnic group--originally hail from the Middle East, where their Aramaic dialects were once the dominant language. Forced into diaspora by both ethnic and religious conflicts, the Syriac Christians in New Jersey, who number about 2,000 families and are mostly members of the Syriac Orthodox Church, have created Syriac establishments ranging from language schools to restaurants. They are now attempting to balance the American Dream with preserving their faith and reviving their ancient culture. I meet Mr. Hanikhe at a bustling jewelry market, where Aramaic is almost as common as English, in the city of Paramus. A jeweler by day, he is the founder and principal of the St. Gabriel Aramaic School in Haworth, a borough in Bergen County, N.J. At his desk, behind a jewelry display case, Mr. Hanikhe displays religious icons and photos of Syriac families in traditional dress. His desktop computer's wallpaper is a photo of Eavardo, his home village in the Tur Abdin region of Turkey. Tur Abdin, an eastern section of Mardin Province whose name means "the mountain of the servants," has been a center of Syriac life for centuries. Mr. Hanikhe wistfully points out the house he was born in and the church he was baptized in.

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As a visible religious minority in the Muslim-majority country, Syriac Christians in Turkey have long suffered from violence. "Our business was much better, but there we had no rights," Mr. Hanikhe laments. According to a paper published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Christian community of Turkey has declined from almost one fifth of the population at the beginning of World War I to about 0.1 percent today. Under a collapsing Turkish government in the late 1970s, communist militants and nationalist gangs committed escalating acts of violence on each other and bystanders, and the military coup in 1980 brought another wave of violence, with an ethnic Kurdish uprising followed by a brutal state crackdown. (Indeed, local Syriac leaders requested not to be photographed for this piece, citing fears of the political situation in Turkey.)

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But the worst attacks on the Syriac community had already come during the mechanized slaughter of World War I. Leading up to the war, the Ottoman Empire--which encompassed most of the present-day Middle East--had become increasingly hostile toward the Armenian and Syriac Christian communities under its control. During the dynasty's collapse at the war's end, Turkish troops and Kurdish militias massacred around two million Christian civilians, including hundreds of thousands of Syriacs. Although several Kurdish groups have apologized for the Kurds' role, Turkish law forbids calling the Year of the Sword, or Shato d Seyfo as it is known in Aramaic, a genocide. Family and place names were changed to erase their history; the village of Eavardo, for example, is G