Recent persecution of Yezidis in Iraq by ISIS has again shown their precarious situation, caused largely by misunderstandings of their unique religious practices and social organization. Over a century ago, as the various communities of the Ottoman Southeast Anatolia were negotiating their own identities within a changing Ottoman society, the Yezidis began attracting a renewed interest from neighboring Kurds and Syriac Christians. In this paper, I will analyze descriptions of the Yezidis presented in the writings of the neighboring Syriac Orthodox and Muslim Kurdish communities. Through this textual analysis I will demonstrate the ways in which these groups’ notables gave meaning to the interplay of religious and political authority within their own changing societies. By projecting these notions of competing modes of leadership upon the neighboring Yezidis, they helped formulate the contours of their own nascent political identities. While traditional historiography on the turn of the century has paid particular attention to the Empire’s ethnic groups’ increasing demands of autonomy and political power, the intricate relationship of religious and political elites’ competing definitions on the identity of the group still warrant further attention. In this paper, I argue that ethnicity was produced and reproduced through contributions of both religious and political leadership developed on the Ottoman periphery. To this end, this paper will explicate Syriac and Kurdish religious-political discourse in the Late Ottoman Empire by examining their portrayal of the Yezidis. Specifically, it will engage a close reading of archival sources of the Syriac Orthodox Church from the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside Syriac community periodicals. The emerging narrative will then be compared with its Kurdish counterpart. Through this, I will show that regional dynamics mattered; that they formed a localized language of authority distinct from the center and shared across religious and ethnic boundaries. By analyzing these texts, I will discuss ways in which different communities projected their own understanding of the proper relationship between religious and political authority onto one other. At a moment when the Ottoman state was to change its own political structure through constitutional reform, these claims and formulations of authority at the periphery of the Empire gives us insights about the negotiated nature of the authority at the margins of the political power. Furthermore, it will illuminate details of the history of interfaith and intercommunal relations in the Ottoman Empire by exploring how these shared experiences shaped discourse of ethnicity and identity.