Armenians and Jews: A look in the mirror

Skulls of Armenians massacred in Urfa, surrounded by Armenian dignitaries and women from the women’s shelter in Urfa’s Monastery of St. Sarkis, in June 1919. Photo courtesy ABGU/Creative Commons

 

By Jeffrey Salkin

Armenians and Jews have a lot in common.

(RNS) — For me, there is no trip to Jerusalem without a stroll through the Armenian Quarter. A few weeks ago, I did that walk again, and, as I walked past the Armenian Museum, I remembered touring it several years ago.

I was the only visitor in the ancient building that day. A guide walked me through its corridors, showing me its exhibits, pointing out the photos of the atrocities during World War I. Each of us was barricaded within the walls of our own languages. We could not understand each other. But he used one word that we both understood. Ginoceed, he said. I recall that tears came to my eyes as I nodded.

On Tuesday of this week, Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared on a podcast with Patrick Bet-David where he discussed those atrocities.

To quote the Jerusalem Post:

Bet-David asked Netanyahu why Israel is so reluctant to recognize the massacre committed by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917 as a genocide, given the context of worldwide recognition of the Holocaust.

Netanyahu informed the host that the Knesset recently passed a bill recognizing the massacre as genocide, but the host pushed him for personal recognition.

Netanyahu responded: “I just did.”

I am glad that Prime Minister Netanyahu did this. It was way overdue, and it points to something deeper.

The Armenian Quarter (with maps of the genocide on its walls) and the Jewish Quarter are adjacent to each other in the Old City of Jerusalem, and it is not always readily apparent where one ends and the other begins.

When Jews and Armenians look at each other, it is as if we are looking in the mirror.

Years ago, the poet Joel Rosenberg wrote:

I count the ways we are alike

I cite the kingdoms of our former glory — which, for both of us, perhaps, had been a bit too much to handle,

As it has been ever since.

I cite our landless outposts

of diaspora, strewn close along the rivers

and the shores of human habitation

that branch outward from the founts

of Paradise. I cite our neighboring

quarters in the walled Jerusalem,

our holy men in black, our past

in Scripture, and our overlapping

sacred sites. I cite our reverence for family ties, the polar worlds of grandfathers and grandmothers…

our ironic manner, our eccentric uncles. Our clustering in cities

Our cherishing of books

Our vexed and aching homelands.

Let us go back, to more than a century ago, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, when the Armenians were seen as a foreign element in Turkish society, just like the Jews.

Like the Jews, the Armenian Christians challenged the traditional hierarchy of Ottoman society.

Like the Jews, they became better-educated, wealthier and more urban.

Like Germany’s “Jewish problem,” the Turks talked about “the Armenian question.”

The Turkish army killed a million and a half Armenians. Sometimes, Turkish soldiers would forcibly convert Armenian children and young women to Islam.

In his memoirs, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau wrote that the Turks worked, day and night, to perfect new methods of inflicting agony, even delving into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and reviving its torture methods.

So many Armenian bodies wound up in the Euphrates that the mighty river changed its course for a hundred yards.

In America, the newspaper headlines screamed of systematic race extermination. Parents cajoled their children to be frugal with their food, “for there are starving children in Armenia.”

In 1915 alone, The New York Times published 145 articles about the Armenian genocide. Americans raised $100 million in aid for the Armenians. Activists, politicians, religious leaders, diplomats, intellectuals and ordinary citizens called for intervention, but nothing happened.

The Armenians call their genocide Meds Yeghern (”the Great Catastrophe”). It was to become the model of all genocides and ethnic cleansing. It served the Nazis as a model — not only the act of genocide, but also the passive amnesia. “Who talks about the Armenians anymore?” Hitler quipped.

That is the mirror.

And now, the echo.

Jewish theologians responded to the Holocaust in very specific ways. I know the work of the late Richard Rubenstein, who believed the idea of God had perished in Auschwitz.

That was the way it was with some Armenian theologians, as well.

A story: In 1915, in the small town of Kourd Belen, the Turks ordered 800 Armenian families to abandon their homes. The priest was Khoren Hampartsoomian, age 85.

As he led his people from the village, neighboring Turks taunted the priest: “Good luck, old man. Whom are you going to bury today?”

The old priest replied: “God. God is dead and we are rushing to his funeral.”

In fact, one of the founders of the “death of God” movement was Gabriel Vahanian (1927-2012), a French theologian whose family were refugees of the Armenian Genocide.

The echoes:

• After the Shoah, Jews cried aloud to God: “God, how could You do this to us, the children of Your covenant?”
• After the genocide, Armenian theologians cried: “God, how could this have happened to us, the first people to adopt Christianity as a state religion?”
• After the Shoah, Jews cried: “We must have sinned. God has used the Nazis as a club against us.”
• After the genocide, Armenians cried: “We must have sinned. God used the Turks as a club against us.”

But, in these events, there is not just horror — there is also promise and responsibility.

In the words of Vigen Guroian, in “How Shall We Remember?”:

We have a responsibility to the martyrs. Before all else we must perpetuate the faith for which they died. If our faith should expire then the martyrs’ example and the hope which Armenians rightly discern in the deaths is lost to those living and all those who follow in the future.

In this, we hear a distant echo of the words of the Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim: that Jews are forbidden to hand Hitler any posthumous victories.

I hope this new declaration from Netanyahu might lead to more dialogue between Jews and Armenians.