FROM THE MOUNTAINS OF ARARAT
By James R Russell
Haaretz
21/12/2007
I am an American Jewish scholar, a Zionist, and though I have devoted
a lifetime to studying the culture of Armenia, it is not my own.
Nonetheless, it is fascinating, perplexing and relevant to, and
intertwined with, important Jewish issues today. Armenia’s uniqueness
among the countries of the Near East is striking: Unlike surrounding
Georgia, Kurdistan and Iran, it has no indigenous Jewish community;
yet its history is more closely analogous to our own than that of any
other nation. The Armenians formed the first Christian state, one that
has endured in embattled isolation and proud independence: In their
literature, written in a unique script unchanged over 15 centuries,
the Armenians accordingly identify themselves with the Maccabees.
Their stubborn determination to be themselves, and to be free, made
Armenians the object of fear and hatred in the disintegrating Ottoman
Empire. During World War I, they endured the 20th century’s first
genocide, a term coined some years later by a Jewish jurist, with
the avowed purpose of giving legal definition to this unprecedented
crime. At the time the Turkish rulers called their campaign a
"jihad." The people of a handful of Armenian villages on Musa Dagh, a
mountain on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, just north of the present-day
Syrian border, fought off several Turkish armies until the French
navy rescued the survivors.
The year before Hitler came to power an Austrian Jew, Franz Werfel,
published his novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh." The Nazis banned
it, its best-selling author fled to the United States, and in 1939 the
German dictator assured his generals that just as nobody remembered the
Armenians, whatever the Germans might do in Poland, they would never
be punished for it. As the Wehrmacht advanced in 1942 through North
Africa, some leaders of the pre-state Jewish community in Israel even
talked about preparing for a last stand on Mt. Carmel on the model,
not of Masada, but of Musa Dagh.
Not all the Armenians were murdered: Many fled into the northeastern
part of their ancient homeland, still ruled then by the Russian
Empire; and in 1918, the first independent Armenian state in half
a millennium was proclaimed at the capital, Erevan. But a bitter
civil war ensued among the Armenians: The Communists took control,
the centrist government of the Dashnak (Armenian Revolutionary
Federation) party fled into exile, and Armenia disappeared behind
the Iron Curtain. America, fearful of the Red Menace and anxious
to maintain good relations with strategically important Turkey, did
indeed forget the Armenians. In 1935, the State Department, acceding
to Turkish pressure, even forced MGM in Hollywood to cancel production
of a film version of Werfel’s book.
The embittered Dashnaks had in the meantime embraced racist and
fascist ideology. On Christmas Day of 1933, at an Armenian church in
Manhattan, two of their leaders disemboweled a political opponent,
Archbishop Leon Tourian, during mass, in full view of thousands of
parishioners. In Boston, their newspaper Hayrenik ("Fatherland")
praised the German Fuehrer and youths of the Tseghagron ("Race
Worship") group marched. Hitler intended to finish off the Armenians,
though, and the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets over Erevan inviting the
local Azerbaijani Turks to sharpen their knives. In fact, Soviet
Armenia lost a quarter of its population in the fight against fascism.
Meanwhile, in New York, Avedis Derounian, a young man from a
family of genocide survivors who himself had witnessed the murder
of Archbishop Tourian, vowed to waken the U.S. to the dangers of
homegrown fascism. After the war he traveled to the Middle East, and
in his 1950 report on that trip, "From Cairo to Damascus," described
how Nazism had been transplanted into the Arab world and offered the
prescient declaration that radical Islam would prove to be a greater
and more enduring danger to mankind than Communism.
Derounian saw Israel as the model for a free and democratic Armenia,
and felt instinctively that Jews were his brethren. Many Armenians,
however, were and are on the other side of the Arab-Israel divide;
some Armenians had even supported the Nazis; and Israel, for its part,
was to find it politic to court Turkey’s friendship.
In Jerusalem four years ago, a young Armenian nurse who was to
be honored on Israel Independence Day for her work rehabilitating
victims of suicide bombings had to watch as Turkish pressure on the
Israeli government led the ceremony’s organizers to remove from the
program all reference to her family having been survivors of the
genocide. Armenians have reacted to this kind of holocaust denial
with justifiable rage.
As Harvard’s only professor of Armenian studies, I have found myself
attempting to negotiate a viable, middle way, and have suggested that
the Jewish community in America support genocide recognition by the
U.S., which Israel might then follow, in the face of Turkish threats,
which have included an attempt to blackmail the small Sephardic
community in Turkey. Turkish intellectuals and defenders of human
rights, like the historian Taner Akcam and the Nobel Prize-winning
writer Orhan Pamuk, have insisted at great personal risk that Turkey
reexamine its past. We should support them.
At the same time, I have pointed out, one needs to recognize that there
is real anti-Semitism in the Armenian community, and scapegoating
of Israel and Zionism often goes well beyond the issues and becomes
a cover for deeper hatreds. The Dashnaks, Hitler’s wartime buddies,
who are still a presence both within Armenia and in the diaspora, have
jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon, championing the Palestinian cause
on American campuses. Their central committee sponsors a traveling
circus called "Armenians and the Left," featuring Israel-bashers like
Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk.
Hannah Arendt was right: Anti- Semitism is the only survivor of
the totalitarian ideologies of the last century. Not only that, but
the "socialism of fools" is truly international again, and gaining
strength. So if it comes to it, I’ll leave my books and shoulder
a rifle on Musa Dagh or Mt. Carmel. But until then I’ll carry on
studying the mystical meditations, poems and myths of the ancient
and indestructible people from the mountains of Ararat, the Armenians.
James R. Russell is Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard
University.