Armenian and Jewish Experience between Expulsion and Destruction 9783110695403, 9783110695335

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Broadening Perspectives. Introduction
DIASPORA AND MINORITY ISSUES
Identity and Migration
Is Translation Diasporic? A Confrontation between Franz Rosenzweig and Yehuda Halevi
Saint Vardan’s Day in the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia: Similarities and Differences. The Use of Art, Literature, and Language in Celebrations
Yiddish Songs as an Identificatory Idiom in the Diaspora: Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, Arranged by Darius Milhaud, Stefan Wolpe, and Alvin Curran
“If you see me walking alone on the road”: Sephardic Songs of Exile, Expulsion, Memory – and Return
Experience of Alterity
Jewish and Armenian Students at German Universities from the End of the Nineteenth Century and until the Outbreak of World War I
“The Jews of Caucasus”: Perception of Armenians in the German and Polish Travel Literature
“Natural Born Actors” on the Screen: Das alte Gesetz (1923) and the Theatricality of the Modern Jewish Experience
AGHET AND SHOAH
Experience – Memory – Self-understanding
Between Armenian Praise and Zionist Critique: Henry Morgenthau and the Jews of the Ottoman Empire
The Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: Trauma and Its Influence on Identity Changes of Survivors and their Descendants
Memory in Motion: Armenian Youth and New Forms of Engagement with the Past
Cultural Representations: Identity Constructions and Negotiation Processes
Collective Memory in Israeli Popular Music: (Re)constructions across Generations
Historical Awareness in Zavèn Bibérian’s Autobiographical Longer Fragment: A Rare Perception of both Armenian and Jewish Sufferings
“Global Solidarity is Something to Warm the Cockles of Your Heart”: Holocaust and Genocide in Ephraim Kishon’s “Israeli Satire”
Persistent Parallels, Resistant Particularities: Holocaust Analogies and Avoidance in Armenian Genocide Centennial Cinema
Contributors
Authors
Editors
Index of Subjects
Index of Names

Citation preview

Armenian and Jewish Experience between Expulsion and Destruction

Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge European-Jewish Studies Contributions Edited by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam Editorial Manager: Werner Treß

Volume 51

Armenian and Jewish Experience between Expulsion and Destruction Edited by Sarah M. Ross and Regina Randhofer

ISBN 978-3-11-069533-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069540-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069553-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944275 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Nosyrevy / iStock / Getty Images Plus. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Sarah M. Ross/Regina Randhofer Broadening Perspectives. Introduction

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DIASPORA AND MINORITY ISSUES Identity and Migration Elad Lapidot Is Translation Diasporic? A Confrontation between Franz Rosenzweig and Yehuda Halevi 15 Anush Yeghiazaryan Saint Vardan’s Day in the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia: Similarities and Differences. The Use of Art, Literature, and Language in 29 Celebrations Heidy Zimmermann Yiddish Songs as an Identificatory Idiom in the Diaspora: Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, Arranged by Darius Milhaud, Stefan Wolpe, and Alvin Curran 51 Judith Cohen “If you see me walking alone on the road”: Sephardic Songs of Exile, Expulsion, Memory – and Return 75

Experience of Alterity Arpine Maniero Jewish and Armenian Students at German Universities from the End of the Nineteenth Century and until the Outbreak ofWorld War I 97 Maciej Wąs “The Jews of Caucasus”: Perception of Armenians in the German and Polish Travel Literature 115

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Stefan Hofmann/Theresa Eisele “Natural Born Actors” on the Screen: Das alte Gesetz (1923) and the 131 Theatricality of the Modern Jewish Experience

AGHET AND SHOAH Experience – Memory – Self-understanding Georg Wehse Between Armenian Praise and Zionist Critique: Henry Morgenthau and the Jews of the Ottoman Empire 159 Harutyun Marutyan The Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: Trauma and Its Influence on Identity Changes of Survivors and their Descendants 181 Öndercan Muti Memory in Motion: Armenian Youth and New Forms of Engagement with the Past 199

Cultural Representations: Identity Constructions and Negotiation Processes Miranda Crowdus Collective Memory in Israeli Popular Music: (Re)constructions across Generations 217 Hervé Georgelin Historical Awareness in Zavèn Bibérian’s Autobiographical Longer Fragment: A Rare Perception of both Armenian and Jewish Sufferings 227 Birgit M. Körner “Global Solidarity is Something to Warm the Cockles of Your Heart”: Holocaust and Genocide in Ephraim Kishon’s “Israeli Satire” 245

Table of Contents

Lawrence Baron Persistent Parallels, Resistant Particularities: Holocaust Analogies and 267 Avoidance in Armenian Genocide Centennial Cinema Contributors Authors Editors

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Index of Subjects Index of Names

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Broadening Perspectives. Introduction At the beginning of the twentieth century, two men, who never met, had the same idea. Hundreds of miles apart, they collected – over many years – thousands of traditional songs that they saw as the long forgotten, unadulterated, and pure music of their people. The Armenian priest and musician Komitas Vardapet (1869 – 1935) searched for genuine Armenian music. He found it in folk tunes that were practiced in villages in the Armenian Highlands, a region divided between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, that was of great historical and symbolic importance to the Armenian people. Komitasʼ collection of Armenian melodies became the foundation of modern Armenian national music.¹ The Jewish cantor Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882– 1938) went on a similar mission to locate authentic Jewish music. Idelsohn’s search took him to the “Land of the Fathers,” to Palestine then, a province of the Ottoman Empire. On the basis of the liturgical melodies that he collected among local Oriental Jews, Idelsohn formulated his idea of an essentially Jewish music rooted in the Orient. With his collection, Idelsohn became the founding father of Jewish music studies.² The common objectives of these two men were no coincidence: both music researchers belonged to collectives that, after centuries of statelessness and dispersion in the Diaspora, were searching for a new self-understanding as a nation. Both were born in the diaspora – Komitas in Kütahya, Anatolia, and Idelsohn in Filzberg, Latvia. Komitas and Idelsohn both reflected on the alienation of their people and the resulting loss of traditions. And both perceived and responded to debates on modernization, ethnicity, and nation that emerged under the influence of Western enlightened thought, which were accompanied by efforts to transform the traditional-religious self-image into a modern national affiliation. It was not a coincidence that both scholars discovered music as a resource for national identity: music has always been related to cultural ideas such as religion, politics, economics or literature in many different ways. Music not only serves as a symbolic representation of cultural ideas and existential experiences, but it is also a powerful medium for generating and directing emotions. Academic disciplines dealing with music are therefore required to take the nu See the complete edition of Komitas’ works: Erkeri Zhoghovatsou [collected works], ed. Robert Atayan et al., 18 Volumes (Yerevan: Academy of Sciences, 1969 et seqq.) (in Armenian).  Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, Thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental Melodies, 10 Volumes (Leipzig et al., 1914– 32); I. Adler et al., eds., The Abraham Zvi Idelsohn Memorial Volume (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1986). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-001

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merous contexts in which music is encountered into account, as well as its various functions and manifold relationships with other cultural concepts. This present volume “Armenian and Jewish Experience between Expulsion and Destruction” adopts a multidisciplinary approach reflecting a Jewish Music Studies perspective, an interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies oriented branch of musicology. Jewish Music Studies examine musical cultures of Jewish communities worldwide from different, overlapping contextual perspectives, and thus constitute a particularly useful lens for highlighting the impact of expulsion, dispersion, and annihilation in lived and remembered experiences of people, but also the meaning and social significance of such experiences expressed in cultural phenomena – such as in the music of the world’s Jewries. Such cultural phenomena are, however, not self-contained, culturally homogeneous incidents: they are characterized by overlaps and interactions with other cultures as well as by multiple perspectives and forms of media/mediations. Jewish musical forms reflect experiences of oppression, persecution, and exile, as well as social, political, and religious power differences, cultural proximity and distance, collective identity and memory, cultural adaptation and acculturation – and thus, the experience of diaspora. Similar to the Jewish diaspora, the Armenian diaspora is characterized by cultural, political, social, and religious processes of negotiation with surrounding societies and by the common effort to maintain a collective identity as well as a connection to the (real and/or imagined) homeland. Jewish Music Studies therefore provides a useful frame for comparing Jewish and Armenian experiences from different perspectives. Armenians and Jews are regarded as the “classical” models of a diaspora³ defined by a recurring experience of displacement, dispersion, and foreign rule: both groups are ethnic communities whose forced migration and collective memory of their old homeland became constitutive elements of their identity. For centuries, both were condemned to statelessness and a life outside their areas of origin. For a significant amount of time, and as a result of their ethnicity and minority status, they were forced to live on the periphery of the surrounding societies, and were exposed to forms of discrimination, stereotyping, and attribution that are strikingly similar. Yet, the diasporic condition of the Jewish and Armenian people cannot only by explained by the framework of the classical idea of diaspora, that is by a catastrophic dispersion of people. Rather, and since it is suggested by the Diaspora Studies from the 1980s onward, the notion of diaspora  This understanding of diaspora resembles – according to Robin Cohen – the first period of Diaspora Studies (from the 1960s to the 1970s), which arguably underwent four phases. See Robin Cohen, Global Diaspora: An Introduction. Second Edition (London, New York: Routledge, 2008), 1– 2.

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nowadays also needs to include people’s differing self-understanding and/or (de‐)construction as “ethnic/religious community”, their varying relationships to homelands and host lands, as well as the notion of the complexity of transnational identities resulting e. g. from trade, labor, and cultural diasporas (Cohen 2008, 1– 2). Such current and holistic approaches of Diaspora Studies are also applied in studies on Jewish and Armenian music making, such as in the one by ethnomusicologist Sylvia Alajaji. In her book, Music and the Armenian Diaspora (2015),⁴ Alajaji demonstrates how we can “understand the complex process of diasporic identity formation through music,” since music “inhabits a peculiar space that allows it to traverse the multiple identities people are often grappling with and maneuvering between. The music of diasporic or exilic communities not only reveals the shifts in “processes of becoming”, but illuminate the complexities of the processes themselves. Investigating the music of the Armenians [and the Jews; author’s note] can reveal how exilic and diasporic groups balance, prioritize, and maneuver between the simultaneous dimensions of their reality” (Alajaji 2015, 19). These “maneuvers”, as described by Alajaji, are not restricted to the medium of music alone, but can be applied to any other form of art and culture, as the authors in this volume will demonstrate. Next to their diasporic condition, Armenians and Jews share another fate that decisively determines who they are and how they situate themselves in world affairs: in the twentieth century, in the shadow of two world wars, they were threatened with collective annihilation – with the Aghet and the Shoah. While the historical experience of the Jews has increasingly entered especially German public consciousness, that of the Armenian community is comparatively unknown. This difference becomes also apparent in the current state of research: although studies on Armenian issues have increased over the past years – particularly in the United States and France one can find numerous institutions and chairs on Armenian Studies –, in terms of the scope of the content and level of critical reflection they cannot be compared to studies on Jewish history and culture.⁵ Focusing only on the ratio of Jewish and Armenian studies within the German academic landscape (in comparison to international research), and not on the question, if research on the Armenian genocide is done at all, one recognizes that German research shows considerable deficits with respect to Arme-

 Sylvia Alajaji, Music and the Armenian Diaspora: Searching for Home in Exile (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015).  One reason for this imbalance might be that the Shoah, the extermination of European Jews in World War II, was recognized as genocide almost beyond doubt, while the Aghet, the genocide of the Armenians in World War I, is still denied by the legal successors of the perpetrators to this day.

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nian Studies.⁶ With almost 30 academic institutions, Germany has the highest density of institutes for Jewish Studies in Europe, whereas Armenian studies have no institutional basis and depend on the research of few individuals: There are no chairs of Armenology, and wherever Armenian studies are conducted, they function as an auxiliary science to other disciplines such as theology, Oriental Studies, Cultural History of Violence, War Studies or Eastern European Studies. Furthermore, studies on Armenians and Jews from a comparative perspective are mostly located in the field of history and are mostly undertaken by scholars outside from Germany.⁷ Especially in cultural studies, comparative perspectives on the living environment and cultural expressions of Armenians and Jews are scarce. Comparative diaspora studies have likewise a narrow institutional base in Germany. Yet the conceptualization of diaspora has long since reacted to contemporary migration movements and has conquered numerous disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature, history, and political science. This obvious imbalance in research provided the impetus for the conference “We will live after Babylon. Armenian and Jewish Historical Experiences between Exile, Expulsion and Destruction.” This conference took place in Hanover in February 2019, and was organized by the European Center for Jewish Music at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and the German-Armenian Society. By focusing on Armenians and Jews alike, the organizers not only sought to draw attention to a lacuna in scholarship, particularly in the context of cultural studies, but to open up new and different perspectives from a multidisciplinary angle by drawing attention to times and spaces, perpetrators and victims, events and reception. The present conference volume is thus also committed to this goal. The present volume comprises 14 contributions by scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, history, literary studies, musicology, philosophy, sociology, and theatre studies, who, based on their respective cognitive interests, examine the Armenian and Jewish conditions and their reflection in the surrounding societies. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the con-

 It would be obvious to explain the different ratio of Jewish and Armenian studies in Germany by the actual demographic size of the Jewish and Armenian communities in the country. However, in Germany, Jewish studies do not make any reference to the vibrant Jewish communities, while Armenian studies were quite prominent in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the comparatively small Armenian community in the country. The imbalance is more likely due to the different anchoring of the two genocides in Germany’s culture of remembrance (Erinnerungskultur) and the resulting cultural-political implications.  See for example Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, eds., Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah – The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zurich, 2002).

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cept DIASPORA AND MINORITY PROBLEMS and starts with contributions that explicitly deal with questions of identity and migration, using language, ritual, and music as examples. The topic is introduced with a contribution by IsraeliGerman philosopher Elad Lapidot: “Is Translation Diasporic? A Confrontation between Franz Rosenzweig and Yehuda Halevi.” Starting with a reflection on the Tower of Babel as a mythological justification of linguistic diversity and diasporic dispersion, Lapidot presents two opposing concepts born out of the diasporic condition of language: the ideal of multilingualism, as described by the medieval Arab-Jewish poet Jehuda Halevi, and the idea of translation, as underlying the modern translation project of Halevi’s works by the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. In her contribution “Saint Vardan’s Day in the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia: Similarities and Differences. The Use of Art, Literature, and Language in Celebrations,” the Armenian sociologist Anush Yeghiazaryan contrasts the self-image of Armenian diaspora communities with that of the mother country. She uses the celebrations for the Armenian saint and hero, Vardan Mamikonyan (fifth century), a central collective symbol of the Armenians, as an example. Drawing on her current field research in the Republic of Armenia, Austria, and Iran, Yeghiazarian demonstrates that a different selfimage is expressed by the fact that decisive elements of rituals are functionalized differently in the diaspora and the motherland. In the Republic of Armenia, the emphasis is on state sovereignty and the freedom of the church, which was regained after the long Soviet phase (1922– 1991), while in the diaspora communities, the emphasis is on linguistic and artistic forms of expression as a sign of cultural autonomy and separation from the surrounding societies. In the age of emancipation, Jewish self-understanding in the diaspora was negotiated to a great extent through its relationship to tradition and modernity. The following contribution by Swiss musicologist Heidy Zimmermann demonstrates that this negotiation can take on very different forms. In her essay “Yiddish Songs as an Identificatory Idiom in the Diaspora: Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, Arranged by Darius Milhaud, Stefan Wolpe, and Alvin Curran,” Zimmermann presents a multi-layered analysis of three works by Jewish composers of different origins that reference Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann’s collection Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden (1920). Zimmermann shows how assimilated Jewish musicians of the twentieth century seek, discover, and confirm their Jewish identity by (re)arranging traditional songs. The contribution of the Canadian ethnomusicologist Judith Cohen leads us away from composition and into the world of oral musical tradition. In “”If you see me walking alone on the road”: Sephardic songs of Exile, Expulsion, Memory – and Return” Cohen reflects on the range of meanings that the situation of exile can have – physical, metaphorical, related to the individual or to the collective. Drawing on examples from her field re-

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search, Cohen presents a series of songs by Sephardic Jews originating from the Middle Ages to the present day, in which the memory of diverse situations of exile is expressed and which also reflect the individual biographies of their authors. The following three contributions deal with experiences of alterity, focusing on the perception of others and stereotyping, as well as the related experiences of exclusion. In her essay “Jewish and Armenian Students at German Universities from the End of Nineteenth Century and until the Outbreak of World War I,” Armenian historian Arpine Maniero focuses on the discrimination experienced by Armenian and Jewish students from the Russian Empire at German universities at the beginning of the twentieth century: suffering from the anti-Armenian and anti-Jewish sentiment of Russian society, they were perceived as “Russians” in German society and at the same time had to fight against prejudices and stereotypes, and, in the case of the Jewish students, also against anti-Semitism. In his contribution “”The Jews of Caucasus”: Perception of Armenians in the German and Polish Travel Literature” the German-Polish historian Maciej Wąs presents selected travelogues of Polish and German travelers of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the then still largely unknown region of the Caucasus. In his analyses of the descriptions of Armenians in the Caucasus, he points out the striking parallels between Armenians and Jews, especially with regard to characteristics such as education, trade activities, and tribal cohesion. The travelers try to explain the unknown with the known: Wąs points out that the stereotypes used to describe the Armenians of the Caucasus are similar to those employed in Europe to describe the Jewish population – including conspiracy theories. In their joint contribution on “ʻNatural Born Actors’ on the Screen: Das alte Gesetz (1923) and the Theatricality of the Modern Jewish Experience,” the German historian Stefan Hofmann and the German theatre scholar Theresa Eisele analyze the performative aspects of Jewish acculturation in modern times. The silent film “Das alte Gesetz” (1923), directed by the German-Jewish film director Ewald André Dupont, tells the story of a Jew from the Eastern European shtetl who leaves Jewish religious law behind to become an actor at the renowned Wiener Burgtheater. While the film is primarily about the successful acculturation of a Jew, the authors examine the theatricality associated with this acculturation. In the process of their transformation into members of the educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürger), Jews discovered the theater as a model for reflecting on society; at the same time, the Jewish appropriation of the bourgeois habitus led to the anti-Semitic trope of the Jew as a born actor. The second part of the volume is dedicated to Aghet and Shoah, the two genocides. The first three contributions deal with aspects of experience – memory – self-understanding. They examine motivations that were particularly pro-

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nounced as a result of the experience of genocide: the attempt to preserve identity, the establishment of a culture of commemoration and the reorientation of individual or collective self-understanding. German historian Georg Wehse sheds light on a largely unknown facet of Henry Morgenthau Sr.’s biography, namely, his time as United States Ambassador to Constantinople (1913 – 1916): the assimilated American-Jewish diplomat with German roots, better known as a contemporary witness to the Armenian genocide, also worked tirelessly for the rights and protection of Jews in Turkey. Reacting to the fate of Armenians, Morgenthau did everything to ensure the survival of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, even though he was politically opposed to Zionism and the founding of a Jewish nation state in Palestine. This is, according to Wehse, by no means a paradox, but can be explained by Morgenthaus’ complex Jewish experience as a member of a minority group, his experience of acculturation and American self-understanding. In his study “The Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: Trauma and its Influence on Identity Changes of Survivors and their Descendants,” the Armenian anthropologist Harutyan Marutyan critically examines the effects of the two genocides on the survivors and their descendants. Although the genocide in both cases is integral to the construction of group identity, it is remembered very differently. Marutyan argues that the manner of commemoration depends largely on the recognition or non-recognition of the genocides and the official policy towards them: in the case of the Armenians, the role of the victim was emphasized in Armenian collective memory for a long time, while in the case of the Jews, the resistance was included in Jewish collective memory from the very beginning. The different types of remembrance shape the habitus of the survivors and their descendants as well as the circumstances of their survival, which in the case of Armenians in Turkey was often based on forced conversion. The contribution of the Turkish sociologist Öndercan Muti, “Memory in Motion: Armenian Youth and New Forms of Engagement with the Past” analyzes the change in the culture of commemoration among young Armenians that is particularly shaped by the “Velvet Revolution” of 2018. In his fieldwork-based study, Muti shows how the young generation no longer wants to draw its identity from the genocide, but rather seeks alternative ways of dealing with the past based on the needs and demands of the present. Thus, the younger generation is moving away from established forms of victim nationalism and instead is embedding the memory of the genocide in a more comprehensive global political landscape of commemoration. The aspect of Cultural Representations: Identity Construction and Negotiation Processes finally complements the volume by four contributions examining the experience of the genocide and its effects as reflected in music, literature, and

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film. The final part of the volume starts with the study “Collective Memory in Israeli Popular Music: (Re)constructions across Generations” by Canadian-American ethnomusicologist Miranda Crowdus that deals with the representation of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust in contemporary popular music genres in Israel. Citing the importance of collective memory for the construction of group identity and cohesion, Crowdus presents selected works of Jewish popular music to illustrate the important role that popular music plays in this process. She shows how the collective memory of the Holocaust is conveyed and transformed by today’s generation of young adults to take on a new meaning beyond official state ideology and national identity. In the essay “Historical Awareness in Zavèn Bibérian’s Autobiographical Longer Fragment: A Rare Perception of both Armenian and Jewish Sufferings,” French sociologist Hervé Georgelin focuses on the Istanbul-based Armenian writer Zavèn Bibérian. During World War II, Bibérian served in the Turkish forced laborer battalions that were deployed in the formerly Armenian-populated central part of Turkey and in which Jewish conscripts also served. In his autobiographical writings, the Aghet and the Holocaust flow into one another. Bibérian’s experience of violence and Turkey’s denial of its Armenian history, coupled with his awareness of the annihilation of the Armenians in the past, caused him to adopt a universalistic perspective that opened his eyes to the suffering of the Jews in the present. Ephraim Kishon’s satires focusing on the typical Israeli and as well as the general human problems of everyday life had an unprecedented success in post-war Western Germany, as they were also seen as a contribution to reconciliation between Jews and Germans. In her essay ““Global Solidarity is Something to Warm the Cockles of Your Heart”: Holocaust and Genocide in Ephraim Kishon’s “Israeli Satire””, German literary scholar Birgit Körner demonstrates that Kishon’s experience as a Holocaust survivor lurks under the surface of his wide-reaching humor. Kishon’s “new Israeli humor” acts as a survival mechanism that seeks to preserve dignity. With his satirical descriptions of the inability to prevent further genocides, Kishon also compels the international community to reflect on their own (potential) complicity in genocides past and present. “Persistent Parallels, Resistant Particularities: Holocaust Analogies and Avoidance in Armenian Genocide Centennial Cinema” by the American cultural studies scholar Lawrence Baron demonstrates that the attitude of the perpetrators and the international community towards the mass murders not only shapes the habitus of the affected collectives, but also artistic forms of expression such as film-making. While the Holocaust was recognized early on as a historical fact and dramatized in numerous films, Turkish denialism delayed this development in the Armenian context. As a result, the comparatively few Armenian films about the genocide legitimized their content through a tradition of visual and verbal refer-

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ences to Holocaust films. The commemorative year 2015 was a turning point: 100 years after the genocide of the Armenians, a wealth of feature and documentary films were added, which at least partially emancipated themselves from the cinematic iconography of the Holocaust – the pressure for legitimation began to ease with the increasing recognition of the Armenian genocide. The present volume aims to supplement current historical and political perspectives on expulsion, diaspora, and genocide, which dominate research, with cultural studies approaches – that is, with a view from the margins, from fields of knowledge such as theatre and literature studies, musicology, philosophy, anthropology, highlighting specific perspectives on Armenians and Jews and their shared, but also very different, experiences and interactions. By presenting different and new perspectives on Armenian-Jewish topics, this volume aims to draw attention to a critical cultural scholarship (in the broadest sense) that is multifaceted, interdisciplinary, multi-methodological, and self-reflexive – not only with regard to its own social positioning, but above all with regard to the research topic under discussion here. We would like to acknowledge our indebtedness to Prof. Dr. Julius H. Schoeps of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies for his invitation to publish this conference volume in his series European-Jewish Studies. Hanover, September 2021 Sarah M. Ross Regina Randhofer

DIASPORA AND MINORITY ISSUES

Identity and Migration

Elad Lapidot

Is Translation Diasporic? A Confrontation between Franz Rosenzweig and Yehuda Halevi If diaspora has a proper place, a proper space, if the proper topos of diaspora is not a contradiction in terms, an impossible metaphor, then the diasporic space par excellence, where diaspora is at home, perhaps at its origin and source, is language. This is attested by at least one linguistic source of diaspora, one, perhaps the central textual source for the very notion of diaspora, where diaspora emerges, originally, in diasporic language, in translation. Diaspora emerges in Genesis 11 as a foundational fear of human society, as the foundations of civilization – city, tower, name – are laid down, so humans tell themselves, in one language, “lest we be dispersed [διασπαρῆναι, diasparenei] over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11,4). It is this project, an attempt to fend off diaspora, which got them the attention of God, who thwarted the project by confusing their tongue, and so “dispersed [διέσπειρεν, diespeiren] them from there over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11,8; 11,9). The Tower of Babel is a story of the attempt to avoid diaspora as the original political sin, which generated a basic human condition of diaspora – in language and on earth. Ironically, the biblical formula, which repeats itself twice in this mini-narrative, has diapora generate the unity of “the whole earth.”¹ The diasporic human condition, that is the diversity of societies, which is a pre-condition of politics, of history, is predicated in this text of Genesis, this genetic text, on the dispersion of tongue, on linguistic diversity. The fundamental performance of politics, the politics of politics, namely the foundational political act, which maintains the space of the political, and so enables all political action, would accordingly be the linguistic performance of diaspora, the maintenance of the diversity of tongues. This is the guiding notion that this chapter seeks to contemplate: politics of diaspora as a linguistic performance, an act of language. How is diaspora performed in language? Is diapora at all a performance, an act, or even politics? Doesn’t dispersion signify rather the deficiency or obstacle to politics? This would seem to be the

 For my close reading of this narrative and the question of translation, see Elad Lapidot, “What is the Reason for Translating Philosophy? I. Undoing Babel,” in Translation and Philosophy, ed. Lisa Foran (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 89 – 107. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-002

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presupposition of an age and discourse, where politics has come to be identified with the polis as a sovereign nation-state, whose paradigm and telos is the avoidance of dispersion, through city, tower, and name, through one nation, united by one language. My reading of Genesis has nonetheless showed diapora – at least by the logic of this myth – as the constitutive historical performance of politics. Daniel Boyarin has argued that at least one historical enactment of the discourse, of which Genesis is the beginning, namely the Jewish rabbinic tradition, has in fact been a collective diasporic performance, namely when he presented “The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora.”² To reflect on the linguistic performance of diaspora, I will therefore look here into the Jewish textual tradition, the tradition of performing Judaism in language. My reflection will take the form of confrontation. I confront a modern with a premodern, medieval Jewish project of diaspora in language. The modern project is Franz Rosenzweig’s project of translation. Rosenzweig is indeed one of the representatives of translation as a paradigmatic modern performance of linguistic diversity. He is at the same time one of the central voices of modern Jewish thought, and more specifically – in diaspora. Even more specifically, Rosenzweig is a representative of the Jewish diaspora that perhaps more than any other shaped Jewish modernity, at least intellectually, namely the Jewish-German. The basic question that I raise through Rosenzweig therefore concerns translation as a performance of diaspora in language, which is – so Genesis – the foundation of all diaspora. How does translation perform diaspora? How does the project of translation enact linguistic diversity? Does translation in fact perform diversity? Is translation a performance of linguistic diaspora, in general and specifically the Jewish one? I will briefly state the problem that I identify. At first sight, it seems obvious that translation in fact is a project of diversity. In contrast to projects of universal language – in the medium of mathematics, logics, formal language, English and so on – translation seems to clearly promote linguistic plurality. The project of translation actively generates diversity in language, and therewith, so it seems, diaspora – both in language and in politics. It is this initial evidence of translation as a diasporic practice that I wish to call into question. My basic argument is that translation, or a certain intervention on linguistic diversity that under that name has become dominant, even hegemonic in modernity, operates with the assumption that there is something, some meaning or

 Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). For my critical reflection, see Elad Lapidot, “Ger: deterritorialized immigrant in talmudic exile,” Jewish Culture and History 20 (2019): 23 – 42.

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sense, that may be neatly separated from language, from its own specific language, and transferred to another linguistic package. This notion, even as it may to some extent promote linguistic pluralism, at the same time, similarly to some notions of multiculturalism, empties linguistic difference from any essential significance for meaning, which becomes abstracted from all language, transferred into a pure meta-lingual level of universal thought. As I will show, Rosenzweig (together with others) represents a radical version of this conception, which insists on the linguistic specificity of meaning, namely recognizes the essential link between speech and its original language, at the same time, however, precisely by the operation of translation, transforms the tension between the original and the translation, which is initially an inter-lingual tension, between different tongues, into an intra-lingual tension, which generates an internal difference within one and the same language. In what follows I will indicate and articulate this conception and this operation in one of Rosenzweig’s famous translation projects, of the medieval Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141), first published in 1924 as Sixty Hymns and Poems of Yehuda Halevi, and then in a second edition in 1927, as Ninety Two Poems and Hymns by Yehuda Halevi. ³ My critique will suggest that, even though this practice of translation is carried out by Rosenzweig as a performance of diaspora in language, and seems at first sight to be just this, it in fact undermines linguistic diversity and therewith linguistic dispersion, to the effect of generating a space for the de-diasporization of politics – and accordingly, to think with Genesis, for the de-politization of thought. I will develop this critique through a confrontation of Rosenzweig’s conception and project of translation with another strategic intervention on or performance of linguistic diversity, a premodern, rabbinic one, namely the one formulated and carried out by Yehuda Halevi himself. In other words, I will confront the translator with the translated author on the issue of translation. My basic argument is that Yehuda Halevi stands for a fundamentally different performance of linguistic diversity, which, in contrast to translation, does not abolish, but in

 Franz Rosenzweig, Jehuda Halevi. Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte (Berlin: Verlag Lambert Schneider, [n.y.]). The book was reedited by Rafael N. Rosenzweig and published as Volume 1 in Section IV of Rosenzweig’s Gesammelte Schriften (The Hague et al.: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983). It was translated to English by Thomas Kovach, Eva Jospe, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt as Ninty-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). A second English translation was published by Barbara Ellen Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, And Translators (Montreal & Kingston et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 1– 287. The second part of Galli’s book contains various studies on Rosenzweig’s Halevi book.

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fact maintains the diversity of tongues, and so enacts the human condition of diaspora. This strategy is multi-linguality, namely intellectual performance, or even an entire existence, individual and collective, which takes place in different languages simultaneously, in a state of dispersion. I will conclude this article by showing that it is inaccurate to call Halevi’s interlingual performance “premodern,” since it has inspired and been thematized and explicitly reenacted by decidedly modern, even late modern and contemporary rabbinic thinkers. In other words, I do not confront here a premodern with a modern Jewish performance of linguistic diaspora, but two modern performances, with respect to one of which, Rosenzweig’s, I challenge its diasporic effect.

1 Franz Rosenzweig and Translation I begin by pointing at the profound significance of translation as well as a profound paradox of translation, both arising from the profound insight of what has come to be known as Rosenzweig’s Sprachdenken, which can be translated as speech thinking, or, more appropriately I think, as language thinking.⁴ The concept of linguistic thinking conceives of language not just as a technical means of expressing and communicating language-free thoughts, namely as what Rosenzweig calls in his Postscript to his Halevi translation language as “means of understanding.”⁵ Rather, language thinking perceives language

 See Franz Rosenzweig, “Das Neue Denken. Eine nachträgliche Bemerkungen zum ‘Stern der Erlösung’,” in Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer (Dodrecht et al.: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 139 – 62: “der Unterschied zwischen altern und neuem, logischem und grammatischem Denken liegt nicht in laut und leise, sondern im Bedürfen des andern und, was dasselbe ist, im Ernstnehmen der Zeit: denken heißt hier für niemanden denken und zu niemandem sprechen (wobei man für niemanden, wenn einem das lieblicher klingt, auch alle, die berühmte ‘Allgemeinheit’, setzen kann), sprechen aber heißt zu jemandem sprechen und für jemanden denken; und dieser Jemand ist immer ein ganz bestimmter Jemand und hat nicht bloß Ohren wie die Allgemeinheit, sondern auch einen Mund” (152; emphases are mine). Rosenzweig characterizes language thinking as mindful of otherness and temporality, which also means politics and history, namely, the condition of diaspora after Babel. On Rosenzweig’s Sprachdenken see for instance Frank Hahn, Der Sprache vertrauen – der Totalität entsagen: Annäherungen an Franz Rosenzweigs Sprachdenken (Freiburg i. Br., Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013). For a recent work on Rosenzweig’s concept and work of translation, see Orr Scharf, Thinking in Translation. Scripture and Redemption in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2019); see also Mara Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s Bible: Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).  Rosenzweig, Nachwort, 155: “Mittel der Verständigung.” Note that the Nachwort of 1927 was published as a Vorwort, a Preface, in the 1983 edition, and accordingly also in the English trans-

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as an essential site, medium or element of thought. According to this conception, the work, as a unit of meaning, as a composition of significations or thoughts, is inseparable from its original language. It therefore seems that Sprachdenken is precisely the conceptual basis for a kind of project such as translation, which explicitly subjects itself to the exact language of another work, to the authority of the original. The paradox in the work of translation is that this apparent subjugation to the original work in the original language is carried out by the creation of a new text in another language, namely the translation, which in its own language appears and functions like a new original. I will now show how this paradoxical concept of translation, which I think captures the very essence of translation, or at least modern translation, takes shape in Rosenzweig’s Postscript to his translation of Yehuda Halevi. This text in no way exhausts what Rosenzweig had to say and actually wrote about translation. However, it has received less attention in comparison to his – and Buber’s – Bible translation project, even though some great translation scholars such as George Steiner listed this Postscript to be one of the important modern texts written on translation.⁶ I find Rosenzweig’s reflection on his translation of Yehuda Halevi especially fascinating, because this translation generates a very intimate and direct dialogue between Rosenzweig and the traditional Jewish, rabbinic language thinking. In his rabbinic reception, this medieval poet has come to be known as Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, RiHaL, whose work was canonized in the rabbinic corpus. It is this dialogue, which Rosenzweig never explicitly developed, that interests me, because it features an encounter between two different strategies of performing Jewish diaspora in language. In fact, very much like the translator Rosenzweig, the poet Rabbi Yehuda Halevi too was living and negotiating the inter-lingual space between the universal language of his time, the Arabic, and the other universality of the Holy Tongue.⁷ Rosenzweig’s personal identification with Halevi is well known. In a late letter to his mother, he even identified his own name with the poet’s name: Yehuda Ben Schmuel Halevi.⁸

lation of 2000. Galli’s 1995 translation rendered the Nachwort as an Afterword. In this article I will quote directly from the Nachwort, using my own translations.  George Steiner, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Open Road, 1997), 290.  The significance of the category of the “holy tongue” for the question of language diaspora, in contrast to the category “Hebrew”, will become visible below. For a more detailed reflection, see Elad Lapidot, “Fragwürdige Sprache. Zur Phänomenologie der Heiligen Zunge,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Institut 12 (2013): 271– 99.  Letter 1245, June 5, 1929, quoted in Benjamin, Rosenzweig’s Bible, 68.

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The Postscript begins with an epigraph by Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg, who in 1778 translated Homer’s Iliad to German: “Oh dear reader, learn Greek and throw my translation into the fire.”⁹ This statement encapsulates very well the specific idea and vision of translation. On one level, it swears to the absolute superiority of the original, and to the only subordinate status of the translation. At a closer look, however, the relation that it constitutes between original and translation is not subordination but substitution, “either or”: the original renders translation redundant. The existence of translation – unburned – thus presupposes and signifies, namely stands for the absence of the original. This means that translation does not enact linguistic diversity, does not perform the diaspora of tongues, but on the contrary suspends the difference between languages: it allows no contemporaneity of the text in various languages, that is, no proper temporality of inter-lingual existence as such, and accordingly, so the basic claim of my chapter, no properly diasporic existence. It is this vision that Rosenzweig’s Postscript unfolds. I want to insist on the paradox, whereby the supersession of language (i. e. of linguistic difference as essential for thought) arises from a basic commitment to language, from Sprachdenken. Indeed, Rosenzweig’s concept of translation, Übersetzung, emerges from a basic distinction over against Nachdichten, that Barbara Galli successfully and freely rendered by “free rendering.”¹⁰ Nachdichten, inspired by a text in another language, freely creates a new text in its own language, say German. Its operation is, as Rosenzweig calls it, “to Germanize the foreign.”¹¹ Übersetzung in contrast, that is translation, taking place in the realm of language thinking, commits itself to the original in its original language, namely as essentially foreign. Rendering the non-German in German means rendering German itself foreign. The Translator seeks, says Rosenzweig, “to foreignize the German.”¹² I think Hans-Christoph Askani¹³ was absolutely correct in recognizing here Rosenzweig’s strong affinity to Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose essay “On the Different Methods of Translating” has been seminal for the modern concept of translation. Rosenzweig himself explicitly relates to Schleiermacher in “Die

 Rosenzweig, Nachwort, 153: “O lieber Leser, lerne Griechisch und wirf meine Übersetzung ins Feuer.”  Galli, Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi, 169.  Rosenzweig, Nachwort, 154: “Eindeutschung des Fremden.”  Ibid., 154: “das Deutsche umzufremden.”  Hans-Christoph Askani, Das Problem der Übersetzung – dargestellt an Franz Rosenzweig: Die Methoden und Prinzipien der Rosenzweigschen und Buber-Rosenzweigschen Übersetzungen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 113 – 35.

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Schrift und Luther.”¹⁴ What Rosenzweig called “foreignizing the German,” Schleiermacher called “bringing the reader to the author.”¹⁵ Both designations express very clearly the paradoxical process in which an inter-lingual encounter, a tension between two different languages, is converted into an inner-lingual happening, an internal difference within one and the same language. This internal happening, which Rosenzweig’s Postscript describes as “creation” or “renewal” of the language,¹⁶ implies an active, creative operation on the existing state of the language. The typical site of this linguistic creation is the basic linguistic unit, the word. The translation, inspired by the foreign language of the original, intervenes creatively in the vocabulary of its own language: creating new expressions, lending new meanings to existing words, creating new words based on existing roots and so forth. Creative translation therefore aspires to be very literal, as Rosenzweig repeatedly emphasizes. His translation of Halevi’s poetry, however, features a much more central element. Its creative act goes beyond the semantic content of words and aims at the external form. Rosenzweig strove, as he wrote, to “introduce the foreign rhythmic into German.”¹⁷ This means that translators have to take upon themselves, as Rosenzweig repeatedly underlined, the “obligation” and “difficulties” of meter and rhyme. The translator is “compelled to subject himself to even stricter formal bonds than what the original form imposed upon the poet,” he wrote, in order “to achieve in translation an impression which would be as close as possible to the original.”¹⁸ Indeed, the absolute commitment to the original by way of recreating it anew in the translation, sans reste, generates a drama of martyrdom, of struggle for redemption, to which Rosenzweig referred in his Postscript, using the expression turned canonical by Walter Benjamin, as die Aufgabe des Übersetzers, “the mission (or task) of the translator.” It is precisely here, in the exact meaning of this “mission,” so I wish to claim, that lies a crucial difference between Schleiermacher, on the other hand, and Rosenzweig and Benjamin, on the other. For Schleiermacher, recognizing that the work is inseparable from its language means that it is forever and irrevocably foreign to other tongues. The translator’s task is to render, in his “mother tongue,” works in other tongues as foreign. In translation the for-

 Rosenzweig, Zweistromland, 749 – 72.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens,” in Das Problem des Übersetzens, ed. Hans Joachim Störig (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 38 – 70.  Rosenzweig, Nachwort, 155.  Ibid., 161: “Einführung der fremden Rhythmik ins Deutsche.”  Ibid., 159 – 60.

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eign – and so diversity – is encountered as such: as a foreign tongue, a foreign spirit, a foreign nation. The ensuing telos, the end vision, or eschatology of the translational mission is to assemble all works of all tongues of all nations in history, as foreign to one another, as a kind of “united nations”, in one specific, chosen tongue, “the tongue of translation.” For Schleiermacher, this was the historical calling of the German. For many, today, this is perhaps the role of English. Rosenzweig is motivated by a different, more radical vision, which does not seek to reaffirm and accommodate the difference of tongues as irreducibly foreign to one another, but, on the contrary, denies any irreducible linguistic foreignness. Every tongue contains the “kernel,” so he wrote in the Postscript to his Halevi translation, “of all human speech, of all foreign tongues,” which led him to his famous thesis that, basically, “there is only one language.”¹⁹ This “unity of all tongues” is the basis and vision not for a Schleiermacherstyle but for a Benjamin-style redemptive, messianic “mission” of the translator. “One has to translate,” Rosenzweig declares, “so that the day of this harmony [Eintracht] of tongues […] may come.”²⁰ If the Postscript has a key phrase, this is it. It features an explicit invocation of messianic redemption in the realm of language. This redemption is the undoing of Babel, the abolishment of linguistic diversity, by the restoration of “the unity of all tongues.” If we take Genesis by its word, this also means the end of diapora, linguistic and political. This would be the mission of the translator, the mission of translation. In the spirit of language thinking, I wish to look closely at Rosenzweig’s language in this messianic invocation. Rosenzweig uses a very specific word to designate the redemption of language, namely the German word Eintracht, harmony. It should be noted that this word is, as we call it today in digital texts, a hypertext, or as Rosenzweig calls it in the Postscript, in referring to Halevi’s poetry, “fluorescence.”²¹ A “fluorescent” word or expression is a reference that, without explicitly quoting, clearly links its text to another, more foundational, canonic text in the same archive, to a textual origin, a source, in a way that is obvious, visible – “fluorescent” – to the readers, who are presumably familiar with this archive and its sources. Rosenzweig’s invocation of the linguistic end of days clear refers to the biblical verse Zephaniah 3:9: ‫כי אז אהפוך אל עמים‬ ‫שפה ברורה לקרוא כולם בשם יהוה לעבדו שכם אחד‬, ki az ehefoch el amim safah berurah likro kulam be-shem YHWH le-ovdo shechem echad. The Jewish Publication Soci-

 Ibid., 155: “Es gibt nur Eine Sprache.”  Ibid., 155.  Ibid., 162: “das Fluoreszieren.”

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ety renders this verse in English: “For then will I turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve Him with one consent.” Luther translated or, as Luther himself called it, “Germanized” (verdeutscht) the same verse: “Dann aber will ich den Völkern reine Lippen geben, dass sie alle des Herrn Namen anrufen sollen und ihm einträchtig dienen.” “Einträchtig,” “Harmoniously”. In other words, Rosenzweig’s invocation of the biblical source, of the textual origin for the translation’s messianic end, conjures up Luther’s German Bible. What makes this messianic performance so significant is that this “fluorescence” of the text, its hyper-textuality or inter-textuality with the Bible, what Rosenzweig calls the “mosaic style” [Musivstil], is precisely the textual feature in which Rosenzweig himself, in his Postscript analysis of Yehuda Halevi’s poems, identifies the essential “being-in-exile” of “all Jewish poetry” in Hebrew.²² What Rosenzweig means here by “exile” is for our purpose the same as what I have so far designated as “diaspora.” The semantic difference between exile and dispoara is far from being inessential, especially in this context of language thinking, but I leave this question open here. The important point now is that the translator Rosenzweig takes it upon himself, as Aufgabe, as a mission, to reproduce this inter-textuality of diasporic Hebrew, to reproduce its exilic condition in German. In the Postscript he refers to Luther, while at the same time he is working together with Buber on writing their own biblical Urtext, on creating a new source in German.²³ This is the concrete meaning of Rosenzweig’s vision, whereby the unity of tongues “can grow only in each individual tongue, not in the empty space ‘between’ them.”²⁴ By generating diaspora within each single tongue, Rosenzweig’s messianic translation thus in fact works towards eliminating the space “between” the different tongues, towards abolishing inter-lingual dispersion.

2 Yehuda Halevi and Hybrid Language It is this inter-lingual diaspora that I would now like to make visible in the language thinking of Yehuda Halevi himself. This is how Rosenzweig presents him in the Postscript: “Yehuda Halevi was a great Jewish poet in the Hebrew lan-

 Ibid., 161.  On this Bible translation as a project of redemption, see Scharf, Thinking in Translation, 133 – 66.  Rosenzweig, Nachwort, 155.

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guage.”²⁵ Halevi is posited “in the Hebrew language,” at a pre-defined distance from the German reader. What is absent from this initial position is the fundamental multi-lingual dimension of Halevi’s work. Born and active in the eleventh and twelfth century Al-Andalus, the mother tongue of Abu al-Hasan Jahuda alLawi, Halevi’s Arabic name, was most probably Arabic. Hebrew was in this sense no more al-Lawi’s own language than it was Rosenzweig’s. In fact, just like for everyone else until the son of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, Itamar Ben Avi, the first child to be raised and educated in spoken Hebrew, for Yehuda Halevi too, writing, thinking, being in Hebrew meant being in diaspora. Let us take a look at what Halevi himself wrote about language in his famous philosophical book, ‫ﻛﺘﺎﺏ ﺍﻟﺤﺠﺔ ﻭ ﺍﻟﺪﻟﻴﻞ ﻓﻲ ﻧﺼﺮﺓ ﺍﻟﺪﻳﻦ ﺍﻟﺬﻟﻴﻞ‬, Kitab al-Ḥujjah wal-Dalil fi Nuṣr al-Din al-Dhalil, “The Book of Argument and Proof in Defense of the Despised Faith,” written in Judeo-Arabic in 1139, known in the Hebrew translation of Yehudah ibn Tibbon from 1170 by the title Sefer ha-Kuzari, “The Kuzari Book.”²⁶ This book constitutes one of the central texts to have formulated the main ideas of Judaism in relation to Aristotelian Philosophy, Christianity, and Islam since the Middle Ages. In the book, Halevi stages the confrontation between these four systems of thought (which to an important extent are configured as four comparable systems of thought precisely through Halevi’s staging) as a dramatic event in which the Kuzari King invites four scholars – a philosopher, a Muslim, a Christian, and a Rabbi – to convince him to adopt, together with his entire kingdom, their system of beliefs. Among others, Halevi, through the Jewish protagonist of the story, dedicates a few sections to discuss the question of language.²⁷ The central linguistic performance of the Kuzari’s discussion of language consists in developing in Judeo-Arabic an argument whereby the Hebrew is the most noble of tongues as the language of God and the language of Scripture. This is a paradigmatic performance of language diaspora. Interestingly, the Kuzari King’s major counter-argument to this assertion of Hebrew supremacy are “songs metrically constructed and arranged for tunes,”²⁸ which flourish in other tongues but are scarce in He-

 Ibid., 153.  See English edition, Judah Halevi, The Kuzari (Kitab al Khazari): An Argument for the Faith of Israel, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: Schocken Books, 1964). I will quote – with my own translation – from a modern Hebrew edition, The Kosari of Yehuda Halevi, trans., annot. and introd. Yehuda even Shmuel (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1994). For an introduction to Halevi and his work, see Yochanan Silman, Philosopher and Prophet: Judah Halevi, the Kuzari, and the Evolution of his Thought, trans. from Hebrew Lenn J. Schramm (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).  Kuzari, II, Paragraphs 66 – 78.  Halevi, Kuzari, Paragraph 69.

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brew. Halevi’s answer still perplexes his readers to this day. Not only does he not counter the argument by pointing at his own poetic achievements, but he denies the value of poetic meter all together. When the King observes, “I see, however, that you Jews in our time long for a prosody, in imitation of other peoples, in order to force the Hebrew language into their metres,” the Rabbi says: “This is due to our many errors and revolt. Not only we neglected the superiority that I mentioned, we undermine the structure of our tongue, which was designed to unite people, whereas we turned it into a tongue that separates.”²⁹ The meter, Halevi’s Rabbi explains to the King, interferes with the natural flow of language and prevents unison, congregational reading. It turns Hebrew into a tongue that separates between people, which signifies its corruption as the Holy Tongue, which “was designated to unite people.” This expression clearly refers to the same biblical passage that also “fluoresces” in Rosenzweig’s Postscript, the language eschatology from the Book of Zephaniah: “For then will I turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve Him with one consent.” For Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, as well as for the entire rabbinic tradition, this messianic language of political unity, this safah berurah, “pure tongue,” is the language in which this vision itself is spoken, namely the language of Zephaniah, the prophet and the book, the Holy Tongue, Hebrew. Why does Halevi then write in Arabic, be it Judeo-Arabic? Why not talk, write, and translate everything in Hebrew? Why live dispersed in two and more tongues, in language diaspora? Halevi himself does not answer this question explicitly. Instead, just as Rosenzweig refers to him as a model (which is an inaccurate reference, as I am trying to claim here), he himself refers to an earlier model, an ideal historical agent of language: the biblical patriarch Abraham. In the Kuzari, the Rabbi tells the King about Abraham’s life in Ur of the Chaldeans, his birthplace, namely before he was sent by God to Canaan. The Book of Genesis doesn’t say much about this time in Abraham’s life. We are told that he married Sarah (at that time still known as Sarai), who was barren, and that at a certain point, together with his wife, father, and nephew, he left Ur for Canaan (Genesis 11, 28 – 31). The Bible says nothing about language. And yet, Abraham appears in the biblical text just a few verses – and ten generations – after the story of the Tower of Babel, the origin of diaspora. Halevi’s Rabbi explains to the Kuzari King that the Holy Tongue, the language of unity, was not abolished by the dispersion of tongues, but survived to be transmitted from generation to

 Ibid., Paragraph 74.

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generation in Abraham’s family, all the way to him. Abraham knew Hebrew. Nonetheless, “in Ur of the Chaldeans Abraham was speaking Aramaic, because Aramaic was the tongue of the Chaldeans, however Hebrew was for him a special tongue, lashon ha-kodesh [“holy tongue,” Hebrew in the original], and the Aramaic lashon chol [“profane tongue,” Hebrew in the original].”³⁰ Even though Abraham knew Hebrew, already he, a first diaspora, lived in two tongues. The diasporic, namely inter-lingual performance of Halevi’s text should be noted. It is written in a diasporic language by definition, a language of many tongues, a hybrid, Judeo-Arabic. Within this multilanguage, the holy tongue, its naming as well as its defining distinction from profane language, appears as an intervention of the holy tongue. The expressions “holy tongue” and “profane tongue” are in Hebrew, non-translated. It should be well noted that this act of holy tongue, of non-translation, can only take place in a different language than the holy tongue itself, namely in all other languages except for Hebrew. It is an act of linguistic diaspora that gets lost in the linguistic unity and wholeness of the Hebrew, so to speak gets lost in the translation to the original. It is in fact invisible in the Hebrew translation of the Kuzari. We may say that it is precisely by the power of this act, namely the emergence of the holy tongue, without translation, in a different language, that this other language becomes a hybrid language of Jewish diaspora: Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Aramaic, and so forth. Diaspora is performed by non-translation. Halevi’s narrative of Abraham’s bi-linguality was received and discussed by later, modern rabbinic thinkers, who pondered its precise significance, such as Jacob Emden, the Ya’avetz, in the eighteenth century.³¹ It was Yoel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe from Satmar, who in 1961 explicated the language conception underlying this exegetic tale.³² He was writing against the messianic return of Zionism from the diaspora in all world tongues back to the one united Hebrew. If the unifying, end-of-time vision of the one, all-human, Holy Tongue, should have its meaning and time, namely the messianic time, Teitelbaum showed, so must the diaspora of tongues. According to Teitelbaum, the proper time of language diaspora is the time before the end-of-time and after Babel. Its meaning lies in strict language thinking: the distance from the universal, all-human language measures the distance from the universal, all-human thought. Tongues are many, because people say – and mean, namely think – different things. If and when one day all peoples will

 Ibid., Paragraph 68.  Jacob Emden, Migdal Oz (Berdichev, 1836), 312.  Yoel Teiltelbaum, Sefer Vayoel Moshe (Brooklyn: Yerushalayim, 1961).

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want to call God’s one name, they’ll find one language that belongs to no people, neither to Germans nor to Hebrews, but is God’s own lashon ha-kodesh, untranslatable holy tongue. Until that day, the rabbinic language thinker’s mission is to maintain the inter-lingual long-distance relationship with the original word, namely to maintain language in diaspora. The basic operation of this performance is not translation, but trans-lingual existence: that is not only existing in multiple languages, but performing language itself as multi-lingual.

Conclusion This chapter developed a reflection on the meaning of language diaspora, which, in the literal archive of the word diaspora, is the first diaspora. This reflection was articulated as an examination of the Jewish tradition of diaspora, a comparative examination of two conceptions and performances of language diaspora, one by the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, the other by the ArabJewish poet Yehuda Halevi. My analysis of Rosenzweig’s Postscript to his translation of Halevi’s poems both revealed translation as Rosenzweig’s basic operation of linguistic diaspora and as an operation that consists in transforming inter-lingual to intra-lingual difference, namely that consist in undoing diaspora, in redemption of linguistic dispersion into unity. In contrast, I showed how Halevi’s own conception and performance of language diaspora consisted rather in resisting translation, and instead in deploying the holy tongue – non-translated – to generate inter-linguistic difference within one and the same language, which thereby becomes multiple, hybrid, a Jewish language, which means a language of diaspora.

Bibliography Askani, Hans-Christoph. Das Problem der Übersetzung – dargestellt an Franz Rosenzweig: Die Methoden und Prinzipien der Rosenzweigschen und Buber-Rosenzweigschen Übersetzungen. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997. Benjamin, Mara. Rosenzweig’s Bible. Reinventing Scripture for Jewish Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Boyarin, Daniel. A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Emden, Jacob. Migdal Oz. Berdichev, 1836. Galli, Barbara Ellen. Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, And Translators. Montreal & Kingston et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.

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Hahn, Frank. Der Sprache vertrauen – der Totalität entsagen: Annäherungen an Franz Rosenzweigs Sprachdenken. Freiburg, Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2013. Halevi, Judah. The Kuzari (Kitab al Khazari): An Argument for the Faith of Israel. Translated by Hartwig Hirschfeld. New York: Schocken Books, 1964; translated in Hebrew by Yehuda even Shmuel. Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1994. Lapidot, Elad. “Ger: deterritorialized immigrant in talmudic exile.” Jewish Culture and History 20 (2019): 23 – 42. Lapidot, Elad. “Fragwürdige Sprache. Zur Phänomenologie der Heiligen Zunge.” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Institut 12 (2013): 271– 99. Lapidot, Elad. “What is the Reason for Translating Philosophy? I. Undoing Babel.” In Translation and Philosophy, edited by Lisa Foran, 89 – 107. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. Rosenzweig, Franz. Jehuda Halevi: Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte. Berlin: Verlag Lambert Schneider, [n.y.]. Re-edited by Rafael N. Rosenzweig. The Hague et al.: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983. Translated to English by Thomas Kovach, Eva Jospe, and Gilya Gerda Schmidt, Ninty-Two Poems and Hymns of Yehuda Halevi. Edited by Richard A. Cohen. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Rosenzweig, Franz. “Das Neue Denken. Eine nachträgliche Bemerkungen zum ‘Stern der Erlösung’.” In: Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, edited by Reinhold and Annemarie Mayer, 139 – 62. Dodrecht et al: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984. Scharf, Orr. Thinking in Translation. Scripture and Redemption in the Thought of Franz Rosenzweig. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2019. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens.” In Das Problem des Übersetzens, edited by Hans Joachim Störig, 38 – 70. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963. Silman, Yochanan. Philosopher and Prophet: Judah Halevi, the Kuzari, and the Evolution of his Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Lenn J. Schramm. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Open Road, 1997. Teiltelbaum, Yoel. Sefer Vayoel Moshe. Brooklyn: Yerushalayim, 1961.

Anush Yeghiazaryan

Saint Vardan’s Day in the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia: Similarities and Differences. The Use of Art, Literature, and Language in Celebrations Introduction

This article presents a sociological investigation of the Armenian saint and hero Vardan Mamikonyan. This paper will examine the celebrations on Vardan’s Day in three Armenian centers and the special focus will be on the use of art, literature, and language. Vardan Mamikonyan and the moral victory of the Armenian warriors and Armenian people against the Persian forces on the Plain of Avarayr are considered to be central Armenian cultural concepts. The central research question focuses on the self-perception of Armenians. The concepts of symbol and ritual are my main instruments. Also the mythical aspects of Vardan’s story are taken into consideration. In my chapter I discuss Vardan as a central collective symbol and interpret its importance for each community. The paper is based on data gathered by means of ethnographic observation and interviews (in the years 2007– 2009) as well as on the study of additional written materials. The main method of interpretation was ritual analyses based on social hermeneutics. Three case studies form the body of my research work: in Austria (Vienna), in Iran (Isfahan, Teheran) as well as in Armenia (Yerevan). It is structured as a contrastive comparison of two communities with regard to Vardan’s Day Celebrations, finally confronting the diaspora communities with the celebrations of Vardan’s Day in independent Armenia. In each of the three celebrations one can see a portrait of Vardan. i. e. a painting that is used, and prominent pieces of Armenian Literature are always present. Finally, the Armenian language is an important point of comparison of the three celebrations. In the first part, some theoretical assumptions are presented. After introducing the main theoretical standpoints, I intend to show the development of Vardan as an important collective symbol, and finally I describe and discuss the three celebrations and the power and function of the language, literature, and paintings in this context. How do they affect the concept of Vardan, and how do they work or function? https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-003

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1 Theoretical and Methodical Frame This investigation is based on the assumption that symbolical forms are important factors in social organization. Social phenomena of myth, symbol, especially collective symbols and ritual are the focus of the theoretical framework for this chapter. The myths similarly to the language and words are ways to arrange and process experiences in stories/tales. Social experiences are objectified in myths. Theoretically the concepts of ritual studies and symbol sociology are framing this study.¹ The social science hermeneutic and empirical study qualitative research methods are the core of the data collection and interpretation. Furthermore, the principals of Grounded Theory as a date orientated approach are an important part of the study. Collective symbols are – generally characterized – assembly, concentration, and organization of individual attitudes, feelings, and moods.² They represent and support historical myths in which the most important details of everyday life experiences are brought together to a higher meaning and make them “experienceable” as a whole. Symbols in general and collective symbols in particular are not fixed and immovable constructions. Their stability and permanence are established through a constant confirmation that corresponds to the conditions of living together in groups, communities, and society. Collective symbols constitute a sense of community and help to ensure its continued existence. For example, the community must constantly awaken its feeling of belonging through the use of collective symbols. Collective symbols have a central property: they combine the contradictory into a unity. They establish a simultaneous connection over time.³ The symbol postulates its own reality differently from causal argumentative constructions. These are ambivalent constructions of reality, which do not break with their contradictions, but live from them. Collective symbols express the contradiction and at the same time suggest the unity of the contradictions.⁴

 Ernst Cassirer, “Der Mythus des Staates,” in Texte zur modernen Mythentheorie, ed. Wilfried Barner, Anke Detken, and Jörg Welsche (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 39 – 55.  Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Der fliegende Maulwurf (Der taubenzüchtende Bergmann im Ruhrgebiet) – Totemistische Verzauberung der Realität und technologische Entzauberung der Sehnsucht,” in idem, Die Ordnung der Rituale. Die Auslegung des Alltags 2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), 150.  Hans-Georg Soeffner, Symbolische Formung: Eine Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2010), 36.  Soeffner, Symbolische Formung, 37.

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The ritual, on the other hand, is a form that the collective sensations need in order to enable permanence. As a form of action of the symbol, the ritual requires activities where other symbols draw their strength and effect from a fixed shape.⁵ The rituals become forms of action for the collective symbols. In every collective, in every community, the constituent contradictions of this community are organized in individual, supporting symbols which, through the support of the myths that store the most important ideas, are of significant importance for the community. These contradictions are experienced, emphasized, defused, and harmonized in the regular practice of ritual acts.⁶ The central structural feature of the ritual is that it corresponds to a collectively current contradiction, which is enclosed in a collective symbol. The functionality of the ritual is primarily based on this context: the irreconcilable contradiction, the paradox that encounters a social reaction that is anchored in a collective symbol and is given a form by the ritual. Symbols and rituals are imprinted or experience their changes depending on changes in society and historical circumstances. This perspective also determines the methodological approach of this work. A ritual is read after the contradiction to be resolved. In the theoretical framework of the investigation some central points of ritual studies are discussed, leading to the assumption that the internal contradictions of the community are crucial for rituals and collective symbols.⁷ These processes of marking and harmonizing the contradictions are recognizable even in individual interpretations. In my chapter I discuss three different ways, in which the hero Vardan as a symbolic figure “solves” the internal contradiction of each community. In doing so, I am very interested to see how the arts, literature, and language are influencing the whole process.

2 Vardan in the Context of Armenian History: Myth and Rituals In this part I would like to discuss Vardan Mamikonyan and the moral victory on the Avarayr field. Vardan, as a central collective symbol, has its mythical context

 Ibid., 42.  Ibid., 35.  Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Flying Moles (Pigeon-Breeding Miners in the Ruhr District): The Totemistic Enchantment of Reality and Technological Disenchantment of Longing,” in idem, The Order of Rituals: The Interpretation of Everyday Life (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 95 – 115; Soeffner, Symbolische Formung.

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and ritual expressions. The myth of Vardan goes back to the events of the fifth century, which are described in the works of the early Armenian historians Yeghishe and Parpeci.⁸ The content and the form of both of these historical works and their position in the Armenian culture define the centrality and mythical meaning of the story. The two historical accounts are in many aspects different, but not in the main point of the evaluation of Vardan and his action. The images of Vardan as a martyr and that of his adversary, Vasak, as a betrayer are shared by both authors.⁹ Yeghishe’s language and narration are literarily more valuable and have a great importance due to the metaphors and images created by the author. All famous popular expressions such as “Kanajq papkasun hajoc ashkharhi…” (The delicate women of Armenia…), “mah imacial anmahutjun e” (Death anticipated is immortality), and so on come from Yeghishe’s version. Lazar Parpeci’s version has more factual value, however it is also a very valuable text in its expression and vocabulary. These early Armenian textual constructions made a great contribution to the development of the written language and thought. The exact study of both sources shows many differences,¹⁰ that are more or less ignored in present popular conception. Two original versions are fused to one picture. These two texts together, in mutual addition, create the bases of the future myth, where the ambivalence of victory and defeat, the images of Haskert, the Persian king, Vardan and Vasak, the holy covenant and the struggle for Christianity and the Armenian tradition are provided. The question, though, remains how they are provided. The form of the sources and the context of formation are also important. The events are meant to take place in the fifth century and the authors lived and worked in the same century. And it was right in the fifth century when the Armenian alphabet was created, and the council of Chalcedon took place, as a result of which the Armenian Church got a new independent status. As the golden age of the early Armenian literature and the beginning of the Armenian historiography, the fifth century represents a crucial period for the self-perception of the Armenians. Vardan’s story carries in it all of these elements. But the real formation of the myth lasted

 Eghishe, History of Vardan and the Armenian War, trans. Robert W. Thomson (Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, 1982).  Azat Yeghiazaryan, “Vardananc paterazmy haj grakanutjan mej,” [The War of Vardananq in Armenian Literature] in Avarayri Khorhurdy (The Importance of Avarayr), ed. Artavazd Nazaryan (Yerevan: Mughni, 2003), 100 – 13 (in Armenian).  Robert W. Thomson, Introduction to History of Vardan and the Armenian War, by Eghishe, trans. idem (Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, 1982), 1– 56.

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some more centuries. The Armenian Church made its own contribution within this process. There is no myth without ritual. Every story needs to be told and performed. The ritual festivity dedicated to Vardan has a rather different history. Historical events about Vardan go back to the fifth century, whereas the celebration of Vardan’s Day as a church holiday is first mentioned in the eighth century.¹¹ While the texts of Yeghishe and Lazar formed the discussion of Armenian issues all over the history of Armenian thought, the position of the Vardan festivity is in some way not clear. For example the day of the celebration: why not the day of the Avarayr battle? According to the texts the battle took place in May, there is even the exact day of May 26. Yet this date has never been the date of the church celebration of Vardan’s Day. From the beginning the celebration of Vardan’s Day has been placed and related to the Easter Tradition. The idea of martyrdom and sacrifice is emphasized this way. The time component in the original texts has certainly many spiritual and religious aspects that can be associated with the Easter theme. Spring, to some extent, is the protagonist in Yeghishe’s description of the battle with colors and atmospherically pointed images as a rebirth and a new beginning.¹² There is one more assumption regarding the celebration date: the ethnographic study of Jenja Khachatrian¹³ shows that the choice of the celebration date has to do with a process of replacement of a pagan feast. To understand this point we should first speak about the time framework of the celebration. It is in dependence to Easter and at the same time it is actually in the carnival week. That week is one of the oldest Armenian festivities – Barekendan. The holyday of Vardan and his army has been placed in the Barekendan week from the beginning. First, it was the Tuesday in the Barekendan week (eighth to fourteenth centuries), and later, in the fourteenth century the holiday was divided into two parts: the church martyr and the secular hero each received separate celebration dates. Since then Tuesday is the day of Ghevond and Thursday the Vardan’s Day. The theme of Vardan and the battle were certainly a matter of discussion: Imastaser and Shnorhali and many other authors, as we know, mentioned it.

 Rafael Vardanyan and Hasmik Badalyan, “Vardananc toni kanonakanacumy,” [The Tabulation of Vardan’s Day] in Avarayri Khorhurdy [The Importance of Avarayr], ed. Artavazd Nazaryan (Yerevan: Mughni, 2003), 91– 96 (in Armenian).  Vardan Devrikyan, Vardananq ev haj eritasardutjuny [Vardananq and Armenian Youth] (Yerevan: Magaghat, 2008), 25 (in Armenian).  Jenja Khachatrian, Pary hajoc mej [On Armenian Dance] (Yerevan: Edit Print, 2013) (in Armenian).

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But the other important fact is that it was not the only perspective of dealing with the story in the Middle Ages. There are many important scripts that are concentrated on other episodes and facts.¹⁴ Mkhitar Gosh (1213) and Grigor of Narek (1010) used Yeghishe’s writing for their works, but made their own focus without mentioning the episode of the battle. The script is, on the one hand, a source of Armenian history in the Armenian language, on the other hand, it represents a source of regional importance. Some historians used it as a source for their special studies of the region and never referred to the battle. This detail shows two things: first, the difference to our present understanding of the narrative and the development that led to the present picture; second, at the same time, the great importance and potential of the work about Vardan and Armenian war for Armenian thought and Armenian culture. It has deep routs and reasons to be seen as a myth. It reflects the most important passages and stages of the formation of Armenian cultural identity. In the medieval sources one can find a reference to Yeghishe without mentioning Vardan and Vardan is mentioned without reference to Yeghishe (the Georgian historian Juansher, for example, speaks of Vardan as the father of Shushanik without mentioning Yeghishe and the battle of Avarayr). Also Armenian historians used the script for their own themes, without following the same scheme, putting their own accents. Armenian poets wrote about Vardan in the Middle Ages but a noteworthy detail is the very little appearance of Vardan’s theme in the Medieval Armenian arts. The sculptures of medieval Armenian churches mainly represent religious figures such as Christ, Maria, biblical figures, Armenian saints – but not Vardan. Until the fifteenth century there are no Vardan images in Armenian miniature. The secular themes appeared only in the fourteenth century in that context, but even then Vardan was not the central figure (more popular was the Alexander romance). The small number of Vardan images on Armenian miniatures is not necessarily a measure of his popularity.¹⁵ Anyway these aspects are rarely respected in Armenian discussion of Vardan’s importance in Armenian culture. The differences of Vardan’s symbolic representation in the historical perspective could be helpful for understanding the actual problems and difficulties of Armenian cultural issues. As in many other cases, the Armenian Mechitarist congregation also played a significant role in the “creation” of Vardan’s myth. Chamchean – a Venice Mechitarist – in his history of Armenians from its beginning to his own days presented also the history of Vardan and the revolt of 451. His history was translated into English and published in Calcutta and in this way opened a perspective to Armenian

 Thomson, Introduction to History of Vardan.  Thomson, Introduction to History of Vardan.

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history in Western Europe. Furthermore he developed a method of combining the sources, putting them together into one continuous narrative.¹⁶ This had a significant influence on the latest perception and conception of the history in general and the narrative of Vardan and Avarayr battle in particular. Chamchean gives a history of Vardan, that consists of quotations of Yeghishe’s and Lazar’s accounts. Since then we have one homogenous story. Of course there have been discussions in historical scholarship, doubts about the date of Yeghishe’s history, a new critical approach in the twentieth century, nevertheless in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the popularity of Vardan grew. He became a symbol of patriotism in literature and popular thought. The role of the Mechitarists was significant also in this regard. Many literary works were written by Mechitarists. Not to forget that only the writing of the literary works would not do, it was important that the books could be read. The level of education, the number of schools, and the reading population grew and the interest in this literature grew as well. Especially I would like to mention the plays about Vardan, because of their link to the celebration of Vardan’s Day. Henrik Hovhannisyan shows in his article about Vardan as a dramatic hero that the plays that were dealing with Vardan had in the first place a ritual meaning, as they were in their artistic and aesthetic value not really notable but had a great importance for the development of the national idea. On the other hand the ritual celebrations of Vardan’s Day borrowed some of these theatric elements for their program.¹⁷ Till now many of Vardan’s Day celebrations in Armenian centers all over the world have a theatric part or at least a part on the stage. It is also important to point out that in the mentioned period (eighteenth/nineteenth centuries) the Vardan celebrations differed according to the location and domination area: in Ottoman Empire the celebration was concentrated in the church and then around the church. In some regions of Persian and later Russian Armenia the celebrities were spread through the whole village, with processions and ritual dances. The dances are known as an element that is not accepted and supported by the Armenian Church. However in the case of Celebrations of Vardan’s Day the church fathers even lead the dance.¹⁸ Summarizing this part we can say: Vardan as a historical, literary, and religious figure has its own origin in works of Yeghishe and Lazar, which played an important role in the forming of Armenian thought and were read with different  Ibid.  Henrik Hovhannisyan, “Haj tatroni surby,” [The Saint of Armenian Theater] in Avarayri Khorhurdy, ed. Nazaryan, 177– 183.  Khachatrian, Pary hajoc mej.

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accents according to time period and historical conditions. The content of the text, the main figures, and the story are unique and at the same time very general. This made it possible to read it in different ways and to develop new interpretations according to the particular situation. The secular part of the story has always been seen, but the emphasis put on it represents a later phenomenon. The ritual celebration named after Vardan has however another consistency. It refers to the religious aspect of the script and the idea of martyrdom and was explicitly brought into being by the church. At the same time, the church policy of reinterpreting pagan rituals as Christian ones is to be noticed: many pagan elements, fun- and entertainment-orientated, survived and became a part of the celebration. Not at last the special position of the Armenian Church as to some extent a secular institution defined the meaning of the ritual celebration. The strong interrelation of the festivity and the historical and literary written sources appear in well known sermons of Vardan’s Day and the mentioned theater. Even this connection is very flexible, that is why in the Soviet era, as the explicit religious celebrations were not allowed, yet the myth of Vardan found a way to be celebrated.

3 Three Armenian Communities and Vardan’s Day Celebrations 3.1 Austria (Vienna): Struggle for Staying Armenian The present Armenian community in Vienna consists of Armenian families that immigrated in the 1960s and 1970s from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and later from Armenia and other post Soviet Republics. The community has its Saturday school and some other organizations parallel to the church. The Armenian life in Vienna is a kind of “week end matter” that you arrange as you are free from your other duties. The Armenian community is integrated into Austrian life, in the life of the ordinary Austrian citizen. At the same time cultural events, school performances, celebrations, public discussions, and lessons take place on weekends. The territory is also marked. The Armenian community is situated on Armenian square in Vienna.

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3.1.1 On Vardan’s Day The history of Vardan’s Day in Vienna reflects the development of the local community. The Mechitarists were known to keep a great tradition of Vardan’s Day celebration. Unfortunately when I was there no celebration took place. The Armenian Apostolic Church community also had its “golden times”. During the interviews I conducted the time of great celebrations in youth organizations was mentioned with enthusiasm. But the celebration has been obviously reduced and nowadays the Vardan’s Day celebration takes place only in the Armenian Saturday School. Within the above mentioned “weekend rhythm” it is not possible to keep the exact date of the celebration. Vardan’s Day officially should be celebrated on Thursday. In Vienna it must be moved to a Saturday and the date must be fixed in accordance with the school schedule and regular school holidays. Consequently, the celebration of different feasts is put together and the celebration of Vardan’s Day is usually combined with the celebration of Terendez, the traditional winter expulsion. In 2008 the celebration consisted of three parts: first a concert program presented by pupils of the Armenian Saturday school; second, a theater piece on a fairy tale by Hovhannes Tumanian; and last a Terendez celebration with a fire and traditional sweet dishes outdoors, within the school’s courtyard. The genuine part devoted to Vardan was not so long, about 20 minutes; it was neither so colorful and nor so worked out in details as the theatrical performance that came after it. But it was the framing part and carried a certain statement. A big picture of Vardan and another one of the battle were all the time on the wall. The transportable stage was covered with a carpet. It was completely occupied by the students; the moderation, the recitation, and the songs were performed by them. The whole performance was in Armenian. This was the most difficult and challenging part for the young people on the stage. Some of them had to read it from paper and you could see what an effort it was for them. In the critical moments one could hear the teachers or parents from the audience helping with the words. This sequence of overcoming their distance to Armenian culture, the effort of managing an Armenian space first of all by means of language, in the center of Europe, was the essential part of the event. In those few hours in that closed room the correlation “minority – majority” was shifted. Anyone not understanding Armenian and not understanding this effort becomes outsider. The presented texts provided the absolute basics about the historical events, some of them, especially songs, have completely other themes, not connected with Vardan’s history or its interpretation. In this setting somehow everything found its place, because it was still within frame of “work on maintaining the Armenian identity by the new generation.” The celebration of Terendez appeared

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as a light conclusion of the festivity, the easy and noisy part. All of that was seen as a part of Armenian tradition, which allows the children to get to know the Armenian world and to feel the distance to the Austrian everyday life. The way of celebrating Vardan’s Day is symptomatic of the way in which Armenian affairs in Vienna are carried out. They are integrated in the Austrian everyday life and, at the same time, the community longs for separation, for autonomy. This tension of integration and disintegration is solved through the distinction of areas in everyday life. The activities of the community are mainly on a cultural level, as mentioned in the “free time” and the other areas are dominated by the Austrian way of life. So we speak of cultural autonomy in many cases invisible for the others. This strategy, which I see in the organization of the Armenian life in Vienna, is crystallized in the Vardan’s Day celebrations. It is Vardan’s myth that provides the basic narrative. The metaphor of moral victory implies a differentiated perception of reality: the victory refers not to all aspects of it but to the important ones. At the same time, the victory that was achieved long after Vardan’s death implies also a massive proclamation of persistence and resistance.

Figure 1: Vienna.

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The use of arts in this case shows some typical features of the community life. The picture of Vardan on the stage is an enlarged copy of the famous portray of Vardan. It is a simple copy in black and white. In the same manner the poems and other texts are only silhouettes of themselves. And in this way they fulfill their function of maintaining the cultural autonomy but the main distinguishing element is still the language that makes the border “real”.

3.2 Iran (Isfahan, Tehran): Partial Victory The relations of Armenia and Persia have deep historical roots and the principals of construction of an Armenian community in Iran differ essentially from that in Austria and from the other Armenian communities in the world too. The appearance of Armenian communities in the center of Persia goes back to the relocation of the Djugha population in 1610, because of its social and economic capital as well as its connections to Christian Europe.¹⁹ Of course it was a forced relocation and brought suffering and pain, but it was based on appreciation. During the last 400 years numerous cultural monuments have been raised in Iran, especially in Isfahan. The architecture of the Armenian churches in Isfahan shows a very successful strategy. They are completely integrated into the cultural concept of the city. There is a big difference between the external and internal expression. Most Armenian elements are internal, whereas the external appearance of architectural forms correspondents to those of the majority culture. The Armenians in Iran deal much more with Armenian culture in their daily life than Armenians in Austria. They live in Armenian neighborhoods, the Armenian associations and clubs are active, children attend Armenian schools, people use the Armenian language in many situations, at home, at school, and on many other occasions. Financially Armenians and Armenian organizations are established well. People work for an Armenian newspaper or teach Armenian professionally and not only in their free time. There is a stable regular Armenian life in many Iranian cities: in Teheran, Isfahan, Tabris. There are places and situations that are not accessible for other ethnic groups. At their part Armenians are very successful in dealing with the Iranian culture and managing their own affairs in this environment. This situation, in which people successfully defend themselves  Armen Haghnazarian, “Neu-Djulfa. Die Gründung einer armenischen Stadt in Persien um 1600 und ihre Entwicklung,” in Armenien: Wiederentdeckung einer alten Kulturlandschaft, ed. Museum Bochum and Institut für Armenische Studien, Bochum (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1995), 293 – 296.

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and at the same time make use of the possibilities of their environment produces on the one hand interesting forms of justification: such expressions as “Iran-Armenia is a continuation of Armenia” or “We have everything that a state should have.” The success and stability in a non-Armenian state are perceived to be comparable to the independent state. On the other hand this shows, of course, the Armenian approach to the state or better to say the problems of an Armenian state concept. The Iran-Armenian community still has its resources and potential, but the ongoing immigration to west countries is threatening. So the struggle and work on maintaining an Armenian identity and the immigration to western countries take place at the same time. And for the sake of completeness it must be noticed that emigration never means for Iran-Armenians to give up their Armenian identity. It means to change the place of practicing it. A great number of Armenians in Vienna come from Iran. This contradiction of a safe and satisfied self-perception and at the same time an obvious lack of prospects and search for new perspectives is the basic contradiction of the Armenian community in Iran. In contrast to Vienna the question of maintaining Armenian identity is not the central one. It has been achieved and the intention to continue is unquestionable.

3.2.1 On Vardan’s Day At this point I would like to proceed to the Iran-Armenian Vardan’s Day celebration. The celebrations take place in different centers and organizations. Every school and every community has its own way to celebrate. Also such institutions as the Armenian Writers Union of Iran had its own celebration. I was present at one of the evening events in Isfahan. From the structural point of view the similarities to Vienna were apparent: indoors, in a big hall, a concert program on a stage. In both cases the representatives of the church were present. In both cases the language was Armenian. And in Isfahan as in Vienna the celebration raised clear boundaries from the non-Armenian environment. However, all of these points in Isfahan were much more complex and elaborated: no obvious difficulties with Armenian, more texts, longer speeches, even the picture of Vardan on the stage was more complex. Everything worked: the appearance of the participants on the stage, their dresses, and the program. The event succeeded in bringing together all of us as Armenians in an especially festive way. After the concert nobody wanted to go home, people stood as long as it was possible in the building and in the yard enjoying the company. The celebration was successful as a social event.

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Figure 2: Isfahan.

In the evening of Vardan’s Day in Isfahan one can visit some private parties on occasion of name-day celebrations. This is another old tradition of the celebration that was celebrated in Isfahan. One more occasion to draw the private boundaries and to sing and dance in Armenian. If you see these people you will never think that they live in an Islamic country and are a religious minority. This is a culture of integration and intelligent compromise, a modest but strong position in the powerful Iranian country. The ambivalent and in some respect the crucial point is the evaluation of that situation: even if Armenians have their position in Iran and are appreciated, they are only a minority. In this case Vardan and the myth indicate the moral victory as partial victory. In this case the songs and the texts are very clearly spoken and ambitiously presented. The picture behind the stage is very laborious and with artistic claim especially in comparison to the one in Vienna. The chosen songs are very difficult to sing. The singers are not successful performing them. The desired mark cannot be reached. Similarly, the autonomy is much more real and on different layers and areas complete in comparison to European Armenian centers as Vienna. At the same time, the complete autonomy is a goal that cannot be reached.

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3.3 Independent Republic of Armenia: Testing the Concept of Statehood The celebrations that I took as a third case have a rather short history unlike the previous two cases: since 2006 there is a public celebration of Vardan’s Day. While studying the history of Vardan’s Day celebration in Armenia one must take into consideration the three periods of the Armenian statehood, the first republic (1918 – 1920), Soviet Armenia (1922– 1991), and finally the third republic – the independent Armenia since 1991. The first Armenian republic arose from the collapse of the Russian Empire. Armenians found themselves in a new independent status and in a very difficult situation after a long period of economic and political dependence. The first but short Armenian republic made use of Vardan as a symbol several times. General Silikian, in his appeal to Armenians, before the Sardarapat Battle in 1918 that also took place in May, brought as inspiration the figure of brave Vardan and the virtue of Armenian ladies in Avarayr Battle.²⁰ Further on there are some references to a military parade in Yerevan on Vardan’s Day in 1919.²¹ In the Soviet period such festivities were prohibited. The church and all kinds of religious celebrations, as well as the Vardan’s Day, were repressed. The image of Vardan became more and more secular. In the context of that time the figure of Vardan became a topic of scientific and intellectual discussions. The main turn in the discussion and the perception of Vardan’s story comes during and after World War II. There are several ways in which we see how the hero and the symbolic dimension of the old theme arise again. First I want to mention a little booklet that was published in the years of war and sent directly to the front. That was a book series about Armenian heroes and the first book was dedicated to Vardan.²² It was called Vardan Mamikonian, not saint Vardan or something else, just a man as one of us with a name and a surname. The novel of Demirchian, Vardanank, is of course a milestone in this respect. And I would like to mention the illustrations of this novel. Eduard Isabekyan worked together with Demirchian and one can say they created a Vardan that inspired them and their generation.²³ For the perception of Vardan’s figure in Ar-

 Nazaryan, Avarayri Khorhurdy.  S. S. Mkrtchian, “The Festival System of the first Armenian Republic,” Herald of the Social Sciences 3 (1997): 160 – 64 (in Armenian).  Nazaryan, Avarayri Khorhurdy, 253.  Eduard Isabekyan, “Demirchiani ‘Vardananq’ vepi nkarazardumnery,” [The Illustrations of Demirchians Novel “Vardananq”] in ibid., 161– 63 (in Armenian).

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menia, Demirchian’s book was nearly so important, perhaps even more important than the scripts of Yeghishe and Parpeci. In 1975 the monument of Vardan Mamikonyan was raised. So through the arts, literature, and science the myth of Vardan got new actualization and became a secular figure. Since the celebration of Vardan’s Day within religious tradition according to the religious calendar never became a part of public life, the celebration of the narrative, through intellectual discussions and educational activities, was very successful and firmly established within society. The life in the Soviet republic was organized according to the secular calendar. As neither Easter nor Christmas played a role, Vardan’s Day was not celebrated either and had no influence on the organization of the social life. After the war, the church and the soviet state came to an “agreement” and sacrificing the religious identity they built a concept of Armenia on the Armenian language and literature. The idea of the secular form of martyrdom was created, apart from the church. This is one of the major differences in comparison to the diaspora: the church represented only an additional element. And one more task was fulfilled: Armenia was considered to be the homeland of all Armenians, the center of Armenians and Armenian culture, all other concepts and histories were understood in relation to the center: diaspora, lost territory, past, history, and so on. Armenia was a part of the USSR, was half independent again, which gave a possibility to finding a way of realizing the cultural goals. After achieving independence in 1991, the relations between the center and the periphery changed. Armenia had a new position as a state and in relation to diaspora. The role of the church changed as well.

3.3.1 On Vardan’s Day Vardan’s Day celebration was conceptualized in the following way: the day of the religious calendar was revived and a way of celebration was worked out. It includes elements that were disregarded in the Soviet period. The celebration has a form of procession through the capital city Yerevan beginning at the “Zoravor” church and ending at the monument of Vardan Mamikonyan. Leading politicians, representatives of the government and of the church, followed by soldiers and students, walk through the central streets of Yerevan. The “Zoravor” Church is located in the center of the city, but it is hidden behind the buildings, as it was not emphasized in the Yerevan architecture of the 1920s of Alexander Tamanyan. One must go through the residential houses to reach it. Including this church in the route gives to the concept of the procession an element of discovery and retrospect. First of all, this presents a challenge to former Soviet ideology

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that disregarded the church and religion. Revealing the hidden churches and discussing Tamanyan’s plan and thus putting it into question is a common debate in Armenia. At the same time, beginning at the church, the procession goes through the streets and buildings of Soviet Yerevan and finishes with the statue of Vardan (1975 Soviet as well). Religious and civic dimensions of the Vardan symbol are combined in this festivity but neither state nor political representations are included in the route. They do not pass by the ministries or government buildings or the like. Going back to times before the Soviet Union touches not only the religious aspect. Situating Yerevan in a bigger historical context, as in the last 100 years, is full of contradictions and does not reflect historical issues. The history of Yerevan during the Persian domination and later in The Russian Empire is not that fabulous. It has been many times captured and divided between Turks and Persians. Its actual architecture and organization as a capital are mainly a Soviet phenomenon. Yet the soviet period made of Yerevan a capital city and emphasized the idea of centralizing, through such measures as building an underground (only) in Yerevan etc. One more aspect of centrality is attributed to Yerevan: it is not only the center of the Armenian state, it is also considered to be a center of all Armenians, politically, as well as a territorial unit representing the piece of historical Armenian territory. Another dimension of space appears. The Armenian state does not coincide either with historical Armenia or with the world spread Armenians Diaspora networks. The organizers of the Vardan-procession also refer to this idea of centralization: the event is in the political center, in the center of the city and the central politicians are present.²⁴ The existence of the state and the freedom of the church are celebrated and Vardan helps to unite both ideas. The actual celebrations are about the state and the new form of Armenian identity. All of the possible forms and identity constructions are gathered together; all of the symbols of the state, of the Armenian history, church, and politics, as well as Vardan himself, are turned into elements of this procession. Armenian has a strong professionalization of the art forms. One can find many possible interpretations of musical and artistic forms. And the ways to use the language and the literary heritage have been elaborated and developed in the years of soviet power. This can be seen in the way the slogans on banners are composed. The textual expression in its form is sophisticated, even if not specific and very general in its content.

 Anush Yeghiazaryan, “Collective Symbols in Periods of Transition. The feast of Vardanans in independent Armenia,” Bulletin of Yerevan University 139, no. 5 (2013): 62– 71.

Saint Vardan’s Day in the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia

Figure 3: Yerevan.

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Conclusion In this chapter, I tried on the one hand to present the Armenian hero and saint Vardan in his historical and cultural value for Armenians, and on the other hand to investigate the present performances and ritual concepts of the celebration of Vardan’s Day today. In this respect, the different forms of Armenia and two diaspora centers’ celebrations played an important role. Describing and discussing the similarities and differences in the celebrations, I paid attention to the forms and uses of art, literature, and Armenian language in the Vardan’s Day celebrations. In the two discussed Armenian diaspora communities – Vienna (Austria) and Iran – we see the direct reference to the use of artistic expressions and the crucial importance of the language that makes the cultural autonomy possible in a way that conforms to the social, political, economic etc. life of the country the communities are situated in. In the Republic of Armenia – contrary to the situation in the diaspora – we can see the dominant use of political forms and issues. The organized procession was mainly concentrated on communicating and celebrating the relationship between the state and its citizens, the church and the state, inventing and trying new characteristics of Vardan, whereas the use of artistic expression consumed a lot less space. At the same time, the traditions of arts and language were the most advanced forms in comparison to the demonstrated connections between the army and the state. Relying on the possibilities of the arts and using them for celebrating national heroes is a very influential method for diaspora communities. Every text and every literary expression that is performed in Armenian language marks a border to the world outside. The contradiction of staying Armenian in non-Armenian surroundings has been every time successfully solved in the celebration through the ritual use of the language. In Austria we have the challenge of mastering the Armenian language especially by the young generation. So the fact that the whole evening the main language was Armenian is the breaking point of the celebration and the possibility of winning the distance and feeling of strength. Some poems read in Iran would have a completely different influence if they were read in English, German or Farsi as in Armenian. They usually have some military contents that could be perceived as cruel and dangerous, threatening and ominous in other situations and contexts. The choice of Armenian makes a gesture that could be seen as an aggressive confirmation of independence. The emphasizing or overemphasizing of the fight metaphor should evoke emotions of self-improvement, security, and dignity. The contradiction in Armenia, however, is the challenge of the state: the structural problems, the danger on the borders of the state. In this situation the use and citation of the literature and other ar-

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tistic means is not the crucial one. In every one of these three cases we have an artistic visual presentation of Vardan. In both concert forms a painting is presented and in Armenia we have a person dressed up as Vardan and a sculpture of him. Similarly, as with the use of the language, the painting in Vienna represents only the main characteristics, the very existence is celebrated, and at the same time this simplicity makes the situation and challenges very clear. In Isfahan we have a much more complex picture: we have a large reproduction of the battle, with all its original colours and additional to the original two more fragments with separately standing Vardan and Ghevond. One can speak of great effort and of some redundancy, and similarly to the musical performance the complexity makes the message unclear. The performance of Vardan in Armenia is embodied and mobile, but in its means much more as an imitation than as an artistic personage. Anyway it is only a suggestion, it has a dynamic and possibility to be changed, adjusted, and developed. This layer of arts shows the different forms of performing Armenian self-understanding in its strength and endurance as well in diaspora and also in Armenia and at the same time shows its limits. In the diaspora we have in one case a struggle for identification and in the other case a concept of partial victory, which has always a part of defeat, even if it has been very successful. In Armenia we have a concept of state that theoretically could overcome all of these difficulties, but it is still searching for a position and ritual structures. The cultural forms can be also seen as the connecting aspects of all three cases and thus the possible level of communication, mutual strengthening, and exchange. My discussion in this paper is still in the framework of symbol and ritual studies and is not situated in the framework of a sociology of art, history or theories of art. With a stronger emphasis on these perspectives, we could possibly win some new insights in the way of communication of the basic ideas in organization of Armenian cultural life.

List of Figures Figure : Vienna. Photo: Anush Yeghiazaryan 2008 (© Anush Yeghiazaryan). Figure : Isfahan. Photo: Anush Yeghiazaryan 2009 (© Anush Yeghiazaryan). Figure : Yerevan. Photo: Anush Yeghiazaryan 2009 (© Anush Yeghiazaryan).

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Bibliography Cassirer, Ernst. “Der Mythus des Staates.” In Texte zur modernen Mythentheorie, edited by Wilfried Barner, Anke Detken, and Jörg Welsche, 39 – 55. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Devrikyan, Vardan. Vardananq ev haj eritasardutjuny [Vardananq and Armenian Youth]. Yerevan: Magaghat, 2008 (in Armenian). Eghishe. History of Vardan and the Armenian War. Translated by Robert W. Thomson. Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, 1982. Haghnazarian, Armen. “Neu-Djulfa. Die Gründung einer armenischen Stadt in Persien um 1600 und ihre Entwicklung.” In Armenien: Wiederentdeckung einer alten Kulturlandschaft, edited by Museum Bochum and Institut für Armenische Studien, Bochum, 293 – 296. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1995. Hovhannisyan, Henrik. “Haj tatroni surby” [The Saint of Armenian Theater.] In Avarayri Khorhurdy [The Importance of Avarayr], edited by Artavazd Nazaryan, 177 – 183. Yerevan: Mughni, 2003 (in Armenian). Isabekyan, Eduard. “Demirchiani ‘Vardananq’ vepi nkarazardumnery” [The Illustrations of Demirchians Novel “Vardananq”]. In Avarayri Khorhurdy [The Importance of Avarayr], edited by Artavazd Nazaryan, 161 – 63. Yerevan: Mughni, 2003 (in Armenian). Khachatrian, Jenja. Pary hajoc mej [On Armenian Dance]. Yerevan: Edit Print, 2013 (in Armenian). Mkrtchian, S. S. “The Festival System of the first Armenian Republic.” Herald of the Social Sciences 3 (1997): 160 – 64 (in Armenian). Nazaryan, Artavazd, ed. Avarayri Khorhurdy [The Importance of Avarayr]. Yerevan: Mughni, 2003 (in Armenian). Soeffner, Hans-Georg. “Der fliegende Maulwurf (Der taubenzüchtende Bergmann im Ruhrgebiet) – Totemistische Verzauberung der Realität und technologische Entzauberung der Sehnsucht.” In idem, Die Ordnung der Rituale. Die Auslegung des Alltags 2, 131 – 56. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. “Flying Moles (Pigeon-Breeding Miners in the Ruhr District): The Totemistic Enchantment of Reality and Technological Disenchantment of Longing.” In idem, The Order of Rituals: The Interpretation of Everyday Life, 95 – 115. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. “Zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals.” In idem, Gesellschaft ohne Baldachin: Über die Labilität von Ordnungskonstruktionen, 180 – 208. Göttingen: Velbrück, 2000. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. Symbolische Formung: Eine Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2010. Thomson, Robert W. Introduction to History of Vardan and the Armenian War, by Eghishe, translated by Robert W. Thomson, 1 – 56. Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, 1982. Vardanyan, Rafael, and Hasmik Badalyan. “Vardananc toni kanonakanacumy” [The Tabulation of Vardan’s Day]. In Avarayri Khorhurdy [The Importance of Avarayr], edited by Artavazd Nazaryan, 91 – 96. Yerevan: Mughni, 2003 (in Armenian). Yeghiazaryan, Anush. “Collective Symbols in Periods of Transition. The feast of Vardanans in independent Armenia.” Bulletin of Yerevan University 139, no. 5 (2013): 62 – 71.

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Yeghiazaryan, Azat. “Vardananc paterazmy haj grakanutjan mej” [The War of Vardananq in Armenian Literature]. In Avarayri Khorhurdy (The Importance of Avarayr), edited by Artavazd Nazaryan, 100 – 13. Yerevan: Mughni, 2003 (in Armenian).

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Yiddish Songs as an Identificatory Idiom in the Diaspora: Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, Arranged by Darius Milhaud, Stefan Wolpe, and Alvin Curran In memory of René Jechiel Guggenheim (1905 – 1991) who awakened my interest in Yiddish

Darius Milhaud and Stefan Wolpe, born only ten years apart, probably had no personal contact with each other.¹ Nevertheless, they did meet a couple of times so to speak on the musical level.² In early February 1927 works by both composers appeared on the program of a Berlin concert that brought forth the following brief review in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung: With religious fervor, Rahel Ermolnikoff sang – nay, celebrated – songs from Yemenite Jews and Eastern Jewish folksongs in excellent arrangements by Loewenson, Milhaud, Wolpe, Schalit, and Nadel. […] Stefan Wolpe at the piano, every inch a hypersensitive, twitching bundle of nerves, offered a veritable masterclass in the art of accompaniment, a chromatic gamut of gradations, subdivisions, and conglomerations of musical expression, a full in-

Note: The author would like to thank Austin Clarkson (1932 – 2021) and Barry Wiener for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article (see her “ʻOst und West’ – Darius Milhaud und Stefan Wolpe bearbeiten jiddische Volkslieder,” in RE-SET: Rückgriffe und Fortschreibungen in der Musik seit 1900, ed. Simon Obert et al. [Mainz: Schott, 2018], 190 – 97).  In a letter to Salli Levi, sent from New York on April 30, 1939, Wolpe said “I had many interesting discussions with Milhaud, Ernest Bloch, Lazar Weiner, Copland, and Yasser” (quoted from Philip V. Bohlman, The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936 – 1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992], 132– 33). However, Milhaud was still in France in 1939 and passed New York, on his way to California, only in summer 1940. No correspondence has come down to us either.  After the occasions mentioned here, they met again in 1938 – 39 in a project promoting arrangements of Israeli pioneer songs (Israeli Folk Music: Songs of the Early Pioneers, ed. Hans Nathan [Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1994]), in the ballet The Man from Midian, and in the folksong editions by Corinne Chochem (Palestine Dances: Folk Dances of Palestine [1941] [Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978]; Jewish Holiday Dances [New York: Vox, 1947?]). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-004

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ventory of every possible nuance of touch and pedaling. The assembled congregation, with rapturous applause, elicited several encores.³

It is safe to assume that Wolpe, on this evening, played some of his arrangements of Eastern Jewish folksongs (Bearbeitungen ostjüdischer Volkslieder, 1925), and that Milhaud’s Chants populaires hébraïques, op. 86, likewise written in 1925, was heard either as a whole or in part.⁴ Neither of these song cycles is wellknown today, nor do we know much about the circumstances that brought them into being.⁵ On closer inspection, however, it transpires that both are based on the same source: a songbook entitled Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden. In the case of Milhaud’s op. 86, this source has remained to date completely unknown. This chapter combines a search for clues with thoughts on the musical connotations of home in the Jewish Diaspora. More than any other musicians, Jewish musicians of the twentieth century were unavoidably confronted with the question of how they related to the traditional music of their ethnic group, and whether they should articulate themselves beneath the heading of “Jewish music.” Their conflicting responses to this question were governed entirely by factors rooted in biography, day-to-day

 Review beneath the heading “Musik und Musiker. Chronik der Konzerte,” in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (edn. for Greater Berlin), no. 69, February 11, 1927, morning edn. suppl., 3; online at http://zefys.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ (accessed February 10, 2020): “Mit religiöser Inbrunst sang, nein: zelebrierte Rahel Ermolnikoff Gesänge jemenischer [sic] Juden und ostjüdische Volkslieder in ausgezeichneten Bearbeitungen von Loewenson, Milhaud, Wolpe, Schalit und Nadel. […] Stefan Wolpe am Klavier, ganz hypersensitives, zuckendes Nervenbündel, bot ein wahres Kabinettstück von Begleitungskunst, eine chromatische Skala von Gestuft- und Gesteiltund Geballtheiten des musikalischen Ausdrucks, ein vollständiges Inhaltsverzeichnis aller möglichen Anschlagsnuancen und Pedalwirkungen. Die versammelte Gemeinde erzwang, begeistert klatschend, einige Zugaben.”  The other names in the concert are remembered exclusively as representatives of a national Jewish school: besides music for synagogue, Heinrich Schalit composed two cycles of Eastern Jewish folk songs (opp. 18 and 19, c. 1920); Arno Nadel published collections with arrangements of Jewish folk songs and love songs (Jüdische Volkslieder, Berlin, 1920; Jüdische Liebeslieder, Berlin, 1923); and Alice Jacob-Loewenson was equally active as journalist and composer (Jemenitische Lieder, unpubd.). See Jascha Nemtsov, “Eine Berliner Vorreiterin der Neuen Jüdischen Schule: Alice Jacob-Loewenson,” in Jüdische Kunstmusik im 20. Jahrhundert: Quellenlage, Entstehungsgeschichte, Stilanalysen, ed. Jascha Nemtsov (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006), 121– 35.  Darius Milhaud, Chants populaires hébraïques (Paris: Heugel, 1925). Wolpe’s Bearbeitungen ostjüdischer Volkslieder still awaits publication; they are recorded on the CD by Stefan Wolpe, Dr. Einstein’s Address about Peace in the Atomic Era; Ten Early Songs; Arrangements of Yiddish Folk Songs; Songs from the Hebrew; Der faule Bauer mit seinen Hunden; Epitaph (New Rochelle [N.Y.]: Bridge Records, 2007 [BCD 9209]).

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surroundings, geography, current history, politics, and not least music itself. The responses determined whether a composer avoided or borrowed traditional elements in his or her music, and whether he or she made such borrowings, if any, explicit or covert. The point of departure for my historical case-study is a slender volume of songs first published in 1920: Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden [The most beautiful songs of the Eastern Jews], edited by Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann.⁶ In the course of my research into folk music arrangements, I stumbled upon the discovery that this collection independently served several composers as a foundation for widely differing arrangements. Stefan Wolpe (1902– 1972), a secular member of the avant-garde, produced a number of arrangements of Eastern Jewish folksongs in Berlin during the 1920s. At the same time Darius Milhaud (1892– 1974), a composer who closely identified with his Jewish ancestry in the Provence, arranged his Chants populaires hébraïques, op. 86, in Paris.⁷ Sixty years later the Jewish-American composer Alvin Curran (b. 1938) discovered Kaufmann’s songbook and allowed it to inspire his Schtetl Settings. These examples serve to demonstrate how enlightened Jewish musicians sought, discovered, and confirmed their identity in traditional song. They illustrate the multi-faceted role that traditional music played in the situation of the Diaspora, in the exchange with the culture of the majority, and in their aesthetic self-definition. Not least of all, these instances of the historical impact of Kaufmann’s collection reveal how multilayered the perception of Jewish Diaspora, collective identity, and cultural homeland became in the course of the twentieth  Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann, Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden: 47 ausgewählte Volkslieder (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920).  Another early arrangement of songs from Kaufmann’s collection was written in 1937 by the Transylvanian composer Alexander Uriah Boskovich (1907– 1964) who had done ethnological fieldwork in the Carpathians and emigrated to Palestine in 1938 (see Jehoash Hirshberg, Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880 – 1948: A Social History [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995], 161, 165). The original suite for orchestra has the title Chansons populaires juives and was premiered in Tel Aviv in March 1938 by the Palestine Orchestra which was to become the Israel Philharmonic. A piano version was published as The Golden Chain (Tel Aviv: Israel Music Institute, 1962). Boskovich arranged six melodies from the Kaufmann collection (nos. 5, 15, 22, 32, 39, 46, all in the same key, except the last which was transposed a half tone higher) while the seventh piece is based on the Hasidic melody we-taher libbenu [and purify our hearts]. On the orchestral version he commented: “I have tried as far as possible to keep to the spirit of the original folksongs which are the expression of an entire people – and I might call this way of arrangement, in contrast to the individualistic conception, a collectivistic one, an attitude which has also been taken by such masters as Bartok and Kodaly”; quoted from the liner notes on the LP by Alexander Uriyah Boskovich, Semitic Suite. With Timbrels and Dance. The Golden Chain (Tel Aviv: Israel Music Institute, 1985). See also Soker, “The Mediterranean Style”.

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century. As James Clifford has noted with an eye to post-colonial Diaspora societies, the main concern was not a longing for one’s place of origin, but rather the ability to retain and recreate a culture at different locations.⁸ Ashkenazi culture in particular is marked by a pronounced Diaspora mentality in which Yiddish plays a central role as an extraterritorial argot.

1 The First Yiddish Songbook in Western Europe The title of Kaufmann’s collection refers explicitly to the concept of “Eastern Jews,” that vague collective appellation introduced to the journalistic debate by Nathan Birnbaum at the First Zionist Congress (1897). Here the focus falls less on the genre of Yiddish song than on a specifically “Eastern Jewish culture” embodied in such songs. To Birnbaum’s way of thinking, which Kaufmann largely adopted, “Eastern Jews” represent a large-scale unit with “its own ways of life,” a “cultural bloc” essentially different from the ways of life among deracinated Western Jews.⁹ From the fin de siècle on, this influential construct of “Eastern Jewry” was articulated in many journalistic organs, such as the widely read Berlin magazine Ost und West (1901– 23). In keeping with its programmatic title, this periodical was intended to convey to assimilated “Western Jews” the cultural achievements of their Easter counterparts. It also significantly helped Eastern European culture to become presentable in the urban centers of Western Europe, for example, with poetry readings and song recitals. In the wake of the “Jewish Renaissance” initiated by Martin Buber, so-called “Eastern Judaism” also became a positive counter-myth as well as a heavily idealized projection screen for modern sensibilities, even extending to a “cult of Eastern Jewry.”¹⁰ Kaufmann’s songbook falls into a history of publications such as Arnold Zweig’s Das ostjüdische Antlitz. ¹¹ This widely read work claimed to be an “authentic” de-

 See James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302– 38.  Nathan Birnbaum, “Was ist ein Ostjude?” (1916 in Süddeutsche Monatshefte); see Petra Ernst, “Das Verschwinden der Ghettogeschichte und die Erfindung des Ostjuden im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs, ed. Petra Ernst et al. (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2016), 319; see also Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).  See David A. Brenner, “Ost und West,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Dan Diner (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2015), 459.  Arnold Zweig, Das ostjüdische Antlitz zu 50 Zeichnungen von Hermann Struck (Berlin: WeltVerlag, 1920). Beginning with the second impression (1922), the volume contained 52 drawings.

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piction, but it also brought about a significant aestheticization of “Eastern Jewry” with Hermann Struck’s typecasting illustrations.¹² Kaufmann compiled his collection in September 1918, shortly before the end of the First World War. It is the first such collection in the German-speaking regions with a claim to scholarly stature, and one of the few of its era that reproduced the melodies of songs alongside their words. Its editor put great stock not only in “phonetically impeccable” transcriptions of Yiddish dialects,¹³ but also in illuminating the “cultural background” of each song and the specific manner in which the orally transmitted melodies were to be sung.¹⁴ Kaufmann, who committed suicide in 1921 at the age of 33, was the spokesman of the so-called “Pan-Jewish” movement in Germany,¹⁵ a primarily culturally committed faction of the “Jewish Renaissance” that turned against political Zionism and not only demanded of Yiddish that it free itself from the odium of being a linguistic “jargon,” but sought to mediate between Eastern and Western Jewry. His edition, while largely drawn from published collections,¹⁶ contains several songs that he himself had written down from Eastern Jews in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, a slum district with a high concentration of Jewish immigrants.¹⁷ He criticized commercial songbooks for usually “reproducing the same ten to twenty all-too familiar hit tunes, as if we had nothing more to offer than pripetschik, dem mil-

 See Alfred Bodenheimer, “Die Ästhetisierung der Ostjuden zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts: Kontext und Innovation von Chagalls Judenbildern,” in Chagall: Die Jahre des Durchbruchs 1911 – 1919, ed. Josef Helfenstein et al. (Cologne: Walther König, 2017), 40 – 49.  Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann, “Die Aufführung ostjüdischer Volksmusik vor Westjuden,” in idem, Vier Essais über ostjüdische Dichtung und Kultur (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1919), 52.  Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann, Das jüdische Volkslied: Ein Merkblatt (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919), 9.  Kaufmann had already published an initial series of Jewish folksongs, albeit without melodies, in his co-founded periodical Die Freistatt, which also contained statements from Arnold Schoenberg, Max Brod, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Arnold Zweig. See Die Freistatt 1 (1913): 123 – 35. See also Anatol Schenker, Der Jüdische Verlag 1902 – 1938: Zwischen Aufbruch, Blüte und Vernichtung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003), 258 – 59.  Saul M. Ginzburg and Pesach S. Marek, Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii (St. Petersburg: Voskhod, 1901), and Yehuda Leib Cahan, Yiddishe folkslider mit melodyes (1912), ed. Max Weinreich (New York: YIVO, 1957).  For example, Kaufmann mentioned an informant named Jankew Seidmann as a source for Amul is gewen a klaein jidele, set to music by Wolpe. See Kaufmann, Die schönsten Lieder, v and 44– 46.

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ners treren […], and similar songs that have little to do with indigenous creativity.”¹⁸ Kaufmann’s approach is noteworthy for the fact that he was less concerned with conserving a vanishing cultural heritage than with its continued cultivation. In an article on performing Eastern Jewish music to Western Jews, he argued against any and all forms of sentimental trivialization (as in the plays of Abraham Goldfaden) and on behalf of authentic renditions of folksongs that preserve their strangeness and bleakness. One must not, he said, “demean folksong into serving as a stopgap at national-Jewish festivities between club-swinging gymnasts and wheezing addresses from official speakers.”¹⁹ This plea would surely have been seconded by the composers in this chapter, all of whom were committed modernists, but not necessarily by the representatives of that “New Jewish School” which had arisen in 1908 with the founding of the Jewish Folk Music Society in St. Petersburg, and which continued to function after 1918 with offshoots in Vienna and Berlin. Thanks to ethnomusicological field work in Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, there now existed large collections of folk music, particularly Yiddish songs and Hasidic melodies, that constituted a treasure-trove for vocal and instrumental arrangements. Composers such as Joseph Achron and Joel Engel turned out romanticizing folksong arrangements published inter alia by Juwal in Berlin.²⁰ But by the early 1920s lively debates were already underway as to the nature of a new “Jewish music,” fashioned under such contradictory banners as a national-conservative school or international modernism. That the representatives of modernism were likewise interested in Jewish folksong is not a contradiction. Rather, it must be viewed in a larger music-historical context. After all, composers such as Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and Manuel de Falla programmatically espoused the expansion of their material resources to embrace folk music. It was probably from this vantage point that Milhaud and Wolpe looked at Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, guided by the thought of combining material from authentic (folk) music and a modernist musical idiom. Both, after all, were composers who refrained from defining them-

 Kaufmann, Das jüdische Volkslied, 15: “dieselben, zehn, zwanzig sattsam bekannten Schlager ab[drucken], als ob wir nichts anderes hätten, als den pripetschik, dem milners treren […] und ähnliche Lieder, die mit der Volksschöpfung wenig zu tun haben.”  Kaufmann, “Die Aufführung”, 51: “das Volkslied nicht dazu erniedrigen, auf nationaljüdischen Abenden Lückenbüßer zu sein zwischen keulenschwingenden Turnern und den kurzatmigen Ansprachen der Festredner.”  An overview of the sources can be found in Philip V. Bohlman, Jüdische Volksmusik: Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (Vienna: Böhlau, 2005). See also Jascha Nemtsov, Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004).

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selves primarily via a “folk” or a national school, but felt committed to European modernism. Nonetheless, the primary motivation for Milhaud and Wolpe alike was most likely their affiliation with a common tradition and an attachment, familiar in the Diaspora, between their own nature and the “other.”

2 A Jewish-Hebrew-Provençal Hybrid To the end of his days Milhaud, born in Aix-en-Provence in 1890, was sustained by an identity grounded in religion and rooted in his native region. In his autobiography, he formulated this self-image with the concise sentence, “Je suis un Français de Provence et de religion israélite.”²¹ In doing so he placed himself among the ranks of the “Diaspora nationalism” advocated by Simon Dubnow, which sought autonomous Jewish communities within larger political entities.²² Among his surviving œuvre are some one dozen works explicitly related to Jewish texts or themes. His liturgical compositions, such as Prières journalières, op. 96 (1927), Liturgie comtadine, op. 125 (1933), or Service sacré, op. 279 (1947), make use of musical elements from that southern French tradition that was considered especially authentic, and to which, with pride in its anciennité, he felt particularly attached.²³ The historical background of this attachment was that the Jewish communities of the Comtat Venaissin had already been established in the days of the Roman Empire, enjoyed papal protection in the Middle Ages, and cultivated for centuries a liturgy independent of both Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jewry. Milhaud, in his other works related to Jewish texts and motifs, expressed himself freely within his own musical idiom, which vacillated stylistically between modernist and classicizing trends. Poèmes juifs (op. 34), a set of eight songs with piano accompaniment composed as early as 1916, borrows its title from the far more familiar work of the same name by Ernest Bloch.²⁴ It consists of freely composed melodies and artis Darius Milhaud, Ma vie heureuse (Bourg-la-Reine: Zurfluh, 1998), 9.  See Robert M. Seltzer, Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism:” Diaspora, Nationalism and the World History of the Jews (Leiden: Brill, 2014).  See Darius Milhaud, “La Musique Juive au Comtat-Venaissin,” Musica Hebraica 1– 2 (Jerusalem, 1938), 18 – 20. See Andrea Brill, Jüdische Identität im 20. Jahrhundert: Die Komponisten Darius Milhaud und Alexandre Tansman in biographischen Zeugnissen und ausgewählten Werken (Neuried: ars et unitas, 2003); see also Erin K. Maher, “Darius Milhaud in the United States, 1940 – 1971: Transatlantic Constructions of Musical Identity” (PhD diss., University of Chapel Hill, 2016).  Milhaud recalled that Bloch played his Poèmes juifs to him when he visited Bloch in Lausanne in 1913. See Milhaud, Ma vie heureuse, 48.

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tically demanding accompaniments, characteristic settings of originally Hebrew texts translated into French.²⁵ Only one of the original poems has been identified to date; Milhaud himself merely intimated vaguely that he had found the “anonymous texts” in a “revue.”²⁶ However, a copy of the printed edition of Poèmes juifs in full score, located among the posthumous papers of Peter Gradenwitz,²⁷ contains an interesting lead: the Hebrew text of five of the songs has been entered by hand in Latin transliteration. This allows us to unequivocally identify the first song, “Chant de nourrice”: its text is based on the well-known Hebrew lullaby Numa perach (“Dors ma fleur”), first issued in print in 1895.²⁸ The six Chants populaires hébraïques, which stand at the center of this study, were likewise published in 1925 with a French text.²⁹ They were composed in February and March 1925 in close temporal proximity to Milhaud’s wedding and honeymoon. Originally the honeymoon trip was meant to lead from Italy via Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria to Palestine, but it had to end prematurely in Damascus owing to Darius’ illness.³⁰ Three of the songs are obviously based on Yiddish sources: “La Séparation” (no. 1) is identical in melody and text to the traditional Hamawdil, i. e. the Havdalah sung at the end of the Shabbat; “Berceuse” (no. 4), or “Schlof, schlof, schlof,” is one of the most familiar Yiddish lul-

 Darius Milhaud, Poèmes juifs (1916), traduits de l’hébreu (Paris: Eschig, 1920). The translator, though left unnamed, may well have been Milhaud’s boyhood friend Armand Lunel (1892– 1977), who translated the librettos of Esther de Carpentras and David and the text of Couronne de gloire (op. 211) from the Hebrew and advised Milhaud in matters related to Judaism. See Armand Lunel, Mon ami Darius Milhaud, ed. Georges Jessula (Aix-en-Provence: Edisu, 1992), 84– 86. Milhaud repeatedly expressed regret at not knowing more Hebrew than was necessary for the bar mitzvah (Ma vie heureuse, 21 and 263).  Milhaud, Ma vie heureuse, 61.  Milhaud, Poèmes juifs (Paris: Eschig, 1920), copy from the private library of Peter Gradenwitz, Library of the Paul Sacher Foundation (hereinafter PSS).  See Shire cam-zion (“Songs of the People of Zion”), ed. Menashe Ben-Zvi (Meirowitz) (n.p.: no publisher, 1895). The volume could not be located in any library. A copy exists in the private collection of Eliahu Hacohen, who comments on the edition online at “‘shire cam-zion’: ha-shiron ha-rishon shel ha-aliyah ha-rishona” [Heb.], in Oneg Shabbat, December 8, 2017 (http://oneg shabbat.blogspot.com/2017/12/blog-post_25.html, accessed January 16, 2020). The author of the words to Numa perach is Efraim Dov Lifshitz.  Darius Milhaud, Chants populaires hébraïques pour chant et piano [op. 86] (Paris: Heugel, 1925). Milhaud orchestrated the songs in January 1926; see the fair copy of the full score in the Darius Milhaud Collection, PSS.  See Milhaud, Ma vie heureuse, 149 – 52, and Micheline Ricavy and Robert Milhaud, Darius Milhaud: Un compositeur français humaniste: Sa traversée du XXe siècle (Paris: Van de Velde, 2013), 106.

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labies, already found in the basic collection of Ginzburg and Marek³¹; and finally “Chant Hassidique” (no. 6) is a counting rhyme known as Echad mi jodeac and meant to be sung at the Passover Seder. Milhaud discussed these three songs in a letter to Paul Collaer: “I’ve just harmonized three Jewish folksongs with admirable melodies. I found them in a collection from the East. The collection is in Yiddish. I’ll try to fake them and have them translated into Provençal!!”³² Although Milhaud did not cite his sources, he notated the melodies exactly as they appear in Kaufmann’s collection, i. e. with the same key, prosody, and placement of fermatas. It can thus be assumed with some certainty that he had precisely this recueil de l’Est at his disposal. This supposition is confirmed by a recently rediscovered autograph representing a separate first draft of the three aforementioned songs, headed “Trois mélodies populaires hébraïques” (see Figure 1).³³ In this document Milhaud first wrote out the Yiddish version of each song, after which he placed the adaptation française above the individual stanzas and the piano accompaniment beneath them. The transcription of the texts – “La Séparation” and “Chant hassidique” are bilingual with Yiddish and Hebrew verses mixed – exactly matches the Polish version in Kaufmann, a congruence which, given the great variety of transliterations of Yiddish square script, cannot be accidental. Whether Milhaud himself undertook the French adaptation is, on the other hand, impossible to say.³⁴ The Chants populaires hébraïques were premièred at a “Concert de musique hébraïque” given in the Maison Gaveau, Paris, in March 1925. The singer was Ma-

 Ginzburg and Marek, Evreiskie, no. 72.  “Je viens d’harmoniser trois chants populaires juifs dont les mélodies sont admirables. Je les ai trouvés dans un recueil de l’Est. C’est en yiddish. Je vais tâcher de les truquer et de les faire traduire en provençal.” Darius Milhaud, letter to Paul Collaer [February 2, 1925], in Paul Collaer, Correspondances avec des amis musiciens, ed. Robert Wangermée (Liège: Pierre Mardaga, 1996), 200. See also the letter of February 27, 1925, in which Milhaud offers Collaer the three songs for performance (ibid., 201).  Dossier Chants populaires hébraïques (Darius Milhaud Collection, PSS).  Barbara L. Kelly, in Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912 – 1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 132), mentions a copy of this manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, but ignored the connection to the original in Kaufmann. Marie-Noëlle Lavoie similarly fails to mention this connection in “Identité, emprunts et régionalisme: judaïcité dans les œuvres de Milhaud durant l’entre-deux-guerres,” in Musique, art et religion dans l’entre-deux-guerres, ed. Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau (Lyon: Symétrie, 2009). See also Neil Cardew-Fanning’s comments on the work, https://www.allmusic.com/composition/chants-populares-hebraïques6-song-cycle-for-voice-amp-piano-or-orchestra-op-86-mc0002390812, accessed February 10, 2020.

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deleine Grey, presumably accompanied by Milhaud himself.³⁵ The fact that the term “hébraïque” is used several times in this context, rather than “musique juive,” points to the revealing distinction that we are dealing less with a religious attribution than with a reference to language and culture. In the Zionist context of the early twentieth century, “Jewish” (juif) carried the pejorative aftertaste of the Diaspora, whereas “Hebrew” (hébraïque) symbolized a self-confident Judaism referring back to Biblical autarchy. Paradoxically, the texts translated from the Hebrew in Milhaud’s work of 1916 (op. 34) appear with the attribute “juifs,” whereas the songs stemming from the Yiddish (op. 86) are now called “hebraïques.”³⁶ It was thoroughly in keeping with Milhaud’s religious inclinations that he included arrangements of two paraliturgical originals in his Chants populaires hébraïques, namely, songs for the domestic ceremonies of Shabbat and Passover. Let us take a brief look at one of the songs and at Milhaud’s approach to the arrangement of the piano part (see Figure 1). “Berceuse” (no. 4, “Dors, dors, dors”), a song of almost unsurpassable simplicity with a repetitive text, is given an accompaniment as skeletal as it is subtly expressive, albeit without regard for the “lute setting” provided by Kaufmann. Only four of the six stanzas of the original have been set, and the harmonizations, although written out, are identical. The song ends with a tiny coda (“pour finir”) that takes up the lullaby motto from the first bar and ends with an open fourth.

3 “Conglomerations” of Musical Expression Stefan Wolpe’s arrangements of Yiddish songs seem to have originated initially as pièces d’occasion. However, they gain special significance in view of his later musical interests, which were formatively influenced by his stay in Palestine in the 1930s. Unlike Milhaud, Wolpe had received only a meager religious upbringing,³⁷ and initially his secular socialist orientation predominated. But he was in a way an “offspring” of Eastern Jewry: the Wolpe family hailed from Lithuania; his

 Also included on the program, in which the Pro Arte Quartet participated, were Milhaud’s Poèmes juifs and works by Maurice Ravel (presumably his Deux mélodies hébraïques of 1915, whose orchestrated version had been premièred by Madeleine Grey in 1920) and Sergey Prokofiev (probably Ouverture sur des thèmes juifs of 1919). See Kelly, Tradition and Style, 133, and the illustration in Lavoie, “Identité,” 70.  On the difference between “juif” and “hébraïque” see Maher, “Darius Milhaud”, 136 – 38.  See Hilda Morley, “A Thousand Birds: A Memoir on Stefan Wolpe,” unpublished typescript, chap. 15, 169 – 70 (Stefan Wolpe Collection, PSS).

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Figure 1: Darius Milhaud, Chants populaires hébraïques op. 86, draft of “Berceuse” (© Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Darius Milhaud Collection).

father David was born in Kybarty and relocated to Berlin in the 1880s, and grandfather Leib Wolpe might have spoken Yiddish. Born in 1902, at the age of 20 Wolpe took an interest in the Hasidic stories of Martin Buber, an interest that

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would later leave its mark on the chamber opera Schöne Geschichten (1927– 29).³⁸ His engagement with the songs of Eastern Jews, beginning in 1923, probably gave him a feeling of attachment to Judaism under the banner of the “Jewish Renaissance.” This was certainly the case during his stay in Palestine, where he personally discovered traditional songs of Oriental Jews and new pioneer songs of the Yishuv while trying to learn Hebrew, and also for several years in New York, where his emigration continued from late 1938, and where he likewise established contacts with the local Jewish community.³⁹ Wolpe’s Yiddish songs are documented in the program leaflet of a recital given in 1925, in which he performed his Jewish folksong arrangements (op. 14) with the singer Rahel Ermolnikoff.⁴⁰ This leaflet is especially valuable in that it is the only place that lists all 13 of Wolpe’s arrangements. Six of them have come down to us in fair copy, accompanying him in his exile and later surviving a fire.⁴¹ One of them, no. 6 (“Es kimt gefloigen di gilderne Pawe”), already dates from October 1923; the other five originated in very short order in April 1925, and thus probably with an eye to the aforementioned recital.⁴² Wolpe had presumably become acquainted with Ermolnikoff a short while earlier at a recital in Berlin, where, in January 1925, she had sung “Hebrew  Stefan Wolpe, Schöne Geschichten, op. 5b (1927– 29) (New York and Hamburg: Peer Music, 1993). The texts of nos. 2 (Religion) and 6 (Philosophy) are in Yiddish. See Thomas Phleps, “Schöne Geschichten and Zeus und Elida: Wolpe’s Chamber Operas,” Contemporary Music Review 27 (2008): 246.  See Heidy Zimmermann, “Folk Song versus High Modernism: Stefan Wolpe’s Song of Songs Settings in the Context of the ‘New Palestine’,” Contemporary Music Review 27 (2008): 271– 88. Wolpe returned to the Yiddish language once again in Fünf Declamationen for speaker and piano (1939).  Program leaflet of April 27, 1925 (Meister-Saal, Köthener Strasse 38, Berlin), “Concert with Compositions by Stefan Wolpe.” Besides the Yiddish songs, the concert included the Sonata for Violin and Piano (op. 20) and the Sonata for Cello and Piano (op. 21), neither of which has survived. Besides Stefan Wolpe (piano) and Rahel Ermolnikoff (voice) the performers were Arved Kurtz (violin), Armin Liebermann (cello), and Antin Rudnyckyi (piano). Original in the Stefan Wolpe Collection, PSS.  The fair copy shows traces of heavy use and was damaged by the fire in Wolpe’s apartment (1970). It consists of 11 leaves; according to the pagination, pages 11 to 13 are missing, i. e. one or two songs between nos. 5 and 6 (Stefan Wolpe Collection, PSS). An edition prepared by David Bloch and Austin Clarkson is scheduled to be published by Peer Music, New York. The arrangements of nos. 1, 11, 15, 17, 22, 28, and 42 from Kaufmann’s Die schönsten Lieder no longer survive (see Appendix).  No. 1 is undated; nos. 2 to 5 are dated “IV. 1925” at the end of each piece. Thomas Phleps considered it possible that the concert was initiated by Wolpe himself; see Thomas Phleps, introduction to Lieder mit Klavierbegleitung 1929 – 1933, ed. Thomas Phleps (Hamburg: Peer Music, 1993), 10.

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songs of Yemenite Jews, mystical religious love songs from the Cabbalistic era (première performance), and new arrangements of Eastern Jewish folksongs,” accompanied at the piano by Alice Jacob Loewenson.⁴³ There can be little room for doubt that Ermolnikoff, born in Odessa in 1890, spoke Yiddish, if not as her native language, then as a dialect. The above-mentioned review at least tells us that “The Eastern Jewish songs in Yiddish jargon, with their strange moods, at once salty and lyrical, […] came off better in the readings by this amiable artist than the Yemenite songs with their conspicuous influences from Arab music.”⁴⁴ In short, Wolpe found in her an authoritative performer of Yiddish song. He himself had no command of the idiom, as we are told in the memoirs of his wife Hilda Morley-Auerbach. In her account, the arrangements were written for a tour of Poland that they undertook together: “In his early twenties Stefan had accompanied a celebrated singer of Yiddish songs called Rachel Ermolnikov [sic] on a tour through Poland which he always spoke of with pleasure – pleasure in having made contact with a genuine type of folk. For the tour he set several Yiddish texts which had to be translated for him.”⁴⁵ Some traces of Rahel Ermolnikoff can be found, after the recitals documented here, in newspaper advertisements and reviews until 1938⁴⁶; after that they vanish and we know only that she was deported from Berlin on March 28, 1942 and perished in the Trawniki concentration camp in Poland between 1942 and 1944.⁴⁷ That Wolpe turned to Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden for his arrangements is also verified by the program leaflet of 1925, which states that “The songs are arranged from the transcriptions by F. M. Kaufmann” and reproduces, on the pages that follow, all the lyrics of the songs, in a simplified transcription omit Jüdische Rundschau (Berlin, January 20, 1925), 55. The arrangements of Yemenite and Eastern Jewish songs stemmed from Alice Jacob Loewenson (see Nemtsov, “Eine Berliner Vorreiterin,” 122). Ermolnikoff was studying in Berlin since 1921; Wolpe mentions her in his diary in January 1925 (see Austin Clarkson, Introduction to Stefan Wolpe, Settings of Yiddish Songs (in print)).  N.N., “Musik und Musiker”: “Die im jiddischen Jargon gehaltenen ostjüdischen Lieder mit ihren seltsamen, salzig-lyrischen Stimmungen […] gelangen der sympathischen Künstlerin besser als die merklich von arabischer Musik beeinflußten jemenischen [sic] Gesänge.”  Morley, “A Thousand Birds”, chap. 15, 170. That the collaboration was accompanied by a brief love affair is suggested by the dedication on the fair copy of the first song (“This belongs to Raja Ermollnikoff [sic]”) and by several entries in Wolpe’s diary of 1925 (Stefan Wolpe Collection, PSS).  The Jüdische Rundschau and other newspapers mention concerts mainly in Berlin, but also in Munich (1927), Frankfurt/Main (1928), Amsterdam, and Hilversum (1929) (accessible online: http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/nav/index/title).  See the entry on “Rahel Ermolnikoff” in Lexikon verfolgter Musikerinnen und Musiker der NSZeit, www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de/object/lexm_lexmperson_00001822, accessed February 10, 2020; see also Barry Wiener, “Stefan Wolpe as Jew and Zionist” (unpublished paper).

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ting diacritica, adapting to standardized German and supplied with many terminological definitions.⁴⁸ It seems that Wolpe had taken to heart Kaufmann’s recommendation “to organize song recitals”: “In any case, the visitor to such an event has a right to be handed the song texts, but in a reliable transcription and with concise explanations of the cultural and artistic peculiarities of the group of songs presented.”⁴⁹ Yet for all his fidelity to the text, Wolpe by no means acceded to Kaufmann’s demand to keep the accompaniment “spare and restrained” and “devoid of any figuration in the polyphonic texture.”⁵⁰ His settings are frequently dense and sharp-edged, with rapid changes of texture, harmony, and figuration. They impart a distinctive character and counterfoil to each song, now jocular, now unruly. There are no piano introductions to set the pitch; indeed, in four of the songs the singer enters unaccompanied. Compared to the printed program, Wolpe’s handwritten copy of the lyrics in the fair manuscript reveals a great many alterations in favor of standard German (e. g. “Mandeln” instead of “mandlen”). This has, of course, no relevance to the piano part, assuming that Ermolnikoff sang the songs by heart.⁵¹ The example in Figure 2, Alle mentschn tanzendik, is one of the most prominent Yiddish wedding songs. The piano part – anything but a predictable “accompaniment” – is as spare as it is jocular. The unexpected staccatissimo offbeat accents grotesquely exaggerate the song’s dance-like character. Here, as in most of the other arrangements, Wolpe’s piano writing attains a harmonic and rhythmic complexity that gives the folksongs an unsettling and novel dimension. It is obvious that he did not consider the traditional melodies “museum items” so much as impulses to sharpen his own expressive musical language.⁵²

 Program leaflet of April 27, 1925, 1– 4 (Stefan Wolpe Collection, PSS): “Die Lieder sind nach den Aufzeichnungen von F. M. Kaufmann bearbeitet.”  Kaufmann, Das jüdische Volkslied, 27: “Auf jeden Fall hat der Besucher einer solchen Veranstaltung ein Anrecht darauf, dass man ihm die Liedertexte in die Hand gibt, aber mit zuverlässiger Transkription und mit knappen Erläuterungen zu den kulturellen und künstlerischen Besonderheiten der jeweils dargestellten Liedergruppe.”  Kaufmann, “Die Aufführung,” 55.  Whether there was a separate score for the singer cannot be determined. However, it is striking that, in no. 2, only the first of the four stanzas is underlaid beneath the melody in the vocal part. The manuscript of nos. 2 and 3 is presumably in Ermolnikoff’s hand.  See Stefan Wolpe, “ʻDie Lieder dieser Völker sind keine Museumsstücke’: Vier Vorträge zum Musikleben in Palästina 1938/39,” ed. Heidy Zimmermann, Musik-Konzepte: Neue Folge 150 (2010): 31.

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Figure 2: Stefan Wolpe, Bearbeitungen ostjüdischer Volkslieder, Fair copy of Nr. 4, “Alle Mentschn” (© Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Stefan Wolpe Collection).

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4 Sounds and Songs of Memory In conclusion, let us keep our geographical focus on Berlin and jump to the year 1987. It was then that Alvin Curran, born in New England in 1938 and living in Rome since 1965, arrived in West Berlin with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or DAAD) in order to work in that city. At the time he was experimenting with electronic music, but also wrote pieces for conventional forces. Then Melissa Gould (born 1958), a concept artist from New York whose work hinged on history and memory, showed him Kaufmann’s Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden in its Jerusalem reprint of 1971, which she had discovered in the library of the Jewish Congregation in Berlin’s Fasanenstrasse. “I was immediately struck by the beauty of these essential musical statements,” Curran explains. “And to these tunes and their words (which unfortunately I could only understand in part) I felt a strong personal connection.”⁵³ Before long he had chosen half a dozen melodies and set them for piano, “trying at all costs not to disturb the extreme simplicity of the melodies themselves.”⁵⁴ Other arrangements followed, and by the end he had compiled 11 Schtetl Settings (1987– 88). Unfortunately, the arrangements have to date appeared neither in print nor on recording. Yet one of Curran’s songs (he is also a very experienced improviser) was further elaborated into a piano piece with the title Schtetl Variations (1988). He dedicated it to the memory of Morton Feldman, who died in 1987. In this meditation, lasting almost 40 minutes, the song inter dem kinds wigele recurs over and over again. The plain five-note melody in the Misheberach mode emerges from the improvised overlays like a fragment buried beneath deep layers of memory (see Figure 3).⁵⁵ In a striking coincidence, Curran, who until then had not worked any discernible Jewish references into his music, began to reflect on his Jewish identity precisely with the Yiddish songs in the Kaufmann collection. For our discussion, it is significant that he sees the primary orientation of his Diaspora identity neither in the Biblical land of Israel nor in the current state, but in the Eastern European homeland of his forefathers. As he put it in an interview, he feels very close

 Alvin Curran, 11 Schtetl Settings for piano solo (1987– 88), Preface (May 12, 1988). I am most grateful to Alvin Curran for giving me a copy of the unpublished score.  Ibid.  The Schtetl Variations likewise remain unpublished. Alvin Curran was kind enough to place a copy of his manuscript at my disposal. Moreover, Ivar Mikhashoff has recorded the piece on CD (New York: Mode Records, 1995).

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Figure 3: Alvin Curran, Schtetl Variations (1988), pp. 1 and 19 (see mm. 1 and 16) (© Alvin Curran).

to the Jewish lifestyle and to European history, for it is also part of his history.⁵⁶ Asked about his Eastern Jewish ancestry, he stated: “I am culturally a Jew, […] I identify with the religion, the languages, myth, culture and tragic and brilliant history of Jews of the Diaspora, especially those like my grandparents […] who settled in the vast parts of eastern Europe.”⁵⁷ He also recalled the vivid presence of Yiddish in his young years in New York, when he not only heard many Yiddish songs sung at home by his father (a commercial musician), but accompanied them on the piano at weddings and bar mitzvahs. Curran views this as a “typical experience for American Jews of my generation,” who were in direct contact with popular and religious culture, but who (as an upshot of the ambivalence of assimilation) “did not learn the Yiddish language nor even want to learn it.”⁵⁸ In any event, his chance encounter with Yiddish songs gave rise to a lasting engagement with his past and the musical traditions of Judaism. They found expression in works with such revealing titles as Crystal Psalms (1988), Shofar (1990), A Call  Sabine Breitsameter, “Spontane Improvisation: Alvin Curran – ein Porträt,” MusikTexte 53 (1994): 31.  Alvin Curran, e-mail message to the author, March 21, 2019.  Alvin Curran, e-mail message to the author, March 24, 2019.

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to Prayer (1990), and Walls of Jericho (1993), which not infrequently assign a leading role to the shofar. Viewed as a whole, then, the preceding examples adumbrate the broad range of possibilities for achieving artistic self-definition in a modern awareness of the Diaspora. None of these three composers had lived in a society in which “diaspora” primarily meant exile and expulsion. On the contrary, all three are assimilated Diaspora Jews who found more points in common with than differences from the majority society. They nevertheless allowed themselves to be affected by a song tradition from an Eastern European environment that was basically alien to them in a cultural sense, and yet could be experienced as something personal and familiar, whether in the form of a deep-seated nostalgia or that “special warmth” that Hannah Arendt attributed to Jewish collective consciousness.⁵⁹ Another factor that has figured quite often in discussions of Jewish literature is Heinrich Heine’s vivid image of the “portable fatherland,” in which the Torah (and books in a larger sense) represents a homeland.⁶⁰ This idea can, with good reason, be transferred to music, and particularly to songs with their words and melodies. Basically captured in memory and handed down orally, they are an easily transported “portable” homeland and preserve a connection in the Diaspora to the soundtrack of childhood, to the living environment of the forefathers. For the secularist Wolpe, Yiddish songs may have embodied remnants of his own past, thereby facilitating the emotional rediscovery of his roots. In any event, his arrangements bear witness to a conscious act of acquisition. In Milhaud’s case, it seems surprising from today’s standpoint (if not even disconcerting) that he tried to mask Yiddish through translation (“truquer”), and that he saw no contradiction in converting so-called “Hebrew” folksongs into his local language, French. Although he insisted that the melodies were to be treated as original inventions, his reliance on French during the interwar years also served as confirmation of his dual identity. By restricting his Jewishness to his particular region, and embedding his modernist musical language in the French tradition, he protected himself not least against anti-Semitic attacks, to which he had been

 Hannah Arendt, “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964), in idem, Ich will verstehen. Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, ed. Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper, 1996), 64. See Natan Sznaider, “Diaspora-Nationalismus: Jüdische Erfahrungen und universale Lehren,” in Lebensmodell Diaspora, ed. Isolde Charim et al. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 190.  Heinrich Heine, “Geständnisse,” in idem, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr, vol. 15 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1982), 43. See also the transferral of the metaphor to the Talmud and its study in Daniel Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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subjected in the early 1920s.⁶¹ Finally, Alvin Curran’s Schtetl Settings represents a completely different scenario. A post-modern artist with a decentralized life history, he encountered Yiddish songs at the precise moment when public remembrance of the Holocaust began in Germany. In this light, his arrangements transcend their autobiographical background and become emblems of the commemoration of a vanished world, perhaps even betokening a revival of an essential cultural heritage in which the intention of remembrance is deeply engrained.

 See Marie-Noëlle Lavoie, “Polytonalität,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, ed. Dan Diner (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2015), 589.

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Appendix Table 1: The folk song arrangements by Milhaud, Wolpe, and Curran and their models. Milhaud, Chants populaires hébraïques op.  () [titles according to printed version]

Kaufmann, Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden () [other sources]

. La Séparation (“Celui qui distingue”)

Nr.  Hamawdil

. Le Chant du veilleur

– [Shirat ha-shomer]

. Chant de délivrance

– [?]

. Berceuse (“Dors, dors, dors”)

Nr.  Schlůf, schlůf, schlůf

. Gloire à Dieu

– [text from the Jewish liturgy]

. Chant hassidique (“Que te dirai-je”)

Nr.  Mů adabrů, mů aßaprů

Wolpe, Bearbeitungen ostjüdischer Volkslieder (/) [titles according to Autograph]

Kaufmann, Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden () [bold numbers correspond to Curran’s settings]

. Inter dem Kinds Wigele [Nr. ]

Nr.  Inter dem kinds wigele

. Bei main mameß haisele [Nr. ]

Nr.  Bá mán mameß hásele

. Amul is gewein a klein jidele [Nr. ]

Nr.  Amůl is gewen a klæin jidele

. Ale Menschen tanzendik [Nr. ]

Nr.  Ale mentschen tanzendik

. Wi asoi ken ech listik san [Nr. ]

Nr.  Wi asoͤ i ken ech lĭstik sán

. Es kimt gefloign di gilderne Pawe [Nr. ]

Nr.  Eß kĭmt gefloigen di gilderne Pawe

lost [titles according to program leaflet] [.] Schluf man Tochter (Wiegenlied)

Nr.  Schlůf mán tochter schæine fáne

[.] Amul is geven a Maasse

Nr.  Amůl is gewen a Máße

[.] Klip-Klap ef’u mir!

Nr.  Klip-klap ef’n mir

[.] Inser Rebenju (Chassidisches Lied)

Nr.  Ĭnser rebenju

[.] Ech bin a Balagule (Fuhrmannlied)

Nr.  Ech bin a balagůle

[.] Ale ljule ljule (Wiegenlied)

Nr.  Ale ljule ljule

[.] Tief im Weldele (Handwerkerlied)

Nr.  Tif in weldele

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Table : (continued) Curran,  Schtetl Settings ( – ) [titles according to Autograph]]

Kaufmann, Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden () [bold numbers correspond to Wolpe’s settings]

. inter dem kinds wigele => Schtetl Variations ()

Nr.  Inter dem kinds wigele

. Jacobs Lied aus Litauen . Schlůf mán tochter schæine fán

Nr.  Jakobs-Lied aus Litauen e

Nr.  Schlůf mán tochter schæine fáne

. is g’kimm der nussen

Nr.  Is gekĭmen der feter nůssen

. in Droússen is a triber tüg

Nr.  In droússen is a triber tůg

. as ech wolt gehat dem Kæissers öizress

Nr.  As ech wolt gehat dem kæißers oͤ izreß

. insrer reb’nju

Nr.  Ĭnser rebenju

. Ale mentsch’n Tanzendik

Nr.  Ale mentschen tanzendik

. hot haschem jissbůrech arůpgeschikt

Nr.  Hot haschem jissbůrech arůpgeschikt

. gæi man kind in chæider

Nr.  Gæi mán kind in chæider

. ale Ljule Ljule

Nr.  Ale ljule ljule

List of Figures Figure : Darius Milhaud, Chants populaires hébraïques op. 86, draft of “Berceuse” (© Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Darius Milhaud Collection). Figure : Stefan Wolpe, Bearbeitungen ostjüdischer Volkslieder, Fair copy of Nr. 4, “Alle Mentschn” (© Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, Stefan Wolpe Collection). Figure : Alvin Curran, Schtetl Variations (1988), pp. 1 and 19 (© Alvin Curran).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. “Fernsehgespräch mit Günter Gaus” (1964). In idem, Ich will verstehen: Selbstauskünfte zu Leben und Werk, edited by Ursula Ludz, 44 – 70. Munich: Piper, 1996. Bodenheimer, Alfred. “Die Ästhetisierung der Ostjuden zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts: Kontext und Innovation von Chagalls Judenbildern.” In Chagall: Die Jahre des Durchbruchs 1911 – 1919, edited by Josef Helfenstein and Olga Osadtschy, 40 – 49. Cologne: Walther König, 2017. Bohlman, Philip V. Jüdische Volksmusik: Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte. Vienna: Böhlau, 2005.

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Bohlman, Philip V. The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936 – 1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Boyarin, Daniel. A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Breitsameter, Sabine. “Spontane Improvisation: Alvin Curran – ein Porträt.” MusikTexte 53 (1994): 31 – 34. Brenner, David A. “Ost und West.” In Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, edited by Dan Diner, vol. 4, 455 – 59. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2015. Brill, Andrea. Jüdische Identität im 20. Jahrhundert: Die Komponisten Darius Milhaud und Alexandre Tansman in biographischen Zeugnissen und ausgewählten Werken. Neuried: ars et unitas, 2003. Cahan, Yehuda Leib. Yiddishe folkslider mit melodyes (1912), edited by Max Weinreich. New York: YIVO, 1957. Chochem, Corinne. Palestine Dances: Folk Dances of Palestine [1941]. Westport: Greenwood Pr., 1978. Clarkson, Austin. Introduction to Stefan Wolpe, Settings of Yiddish Songs, edited by Austin Clarkson and David Bloch. Hamburg: Peer Music (in print). Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (August 1994): 302 – 38. Collaer, Paul. Correspondances avec des amis musiciens, edited by Robert Wangermée. Liège: Pierre Mardaga, 1996. Curran, Alvin. 11 Schtetl Settings for piano solo (1987 – 88). Unpublished. Curran, Alvin. Schtetl Variations for piano solo (1988). Unpublished. Ernst, Petra. “Das Verschwinden der Ghettogeschichte und die Erfindung des Ostjuden im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs.” In Jüdische Publizistik und Literatur im Zeichen des Ersten Weltkriegs, edited by Petra Ernst and Eleonore Lappin-Eppel, 307 – 27. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2016. Ginzburg, Saul M., and Pesach S. Marek. Evreiskie narodnye pesni v Rossii. St. Petersburg: Voskhod, 1901. Heine, Heinrich. “Geständnisse.” In idem, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, edited by Manfred Windfuhr, vol. 15, 9 – 57. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1982. Hirshberg, Jehoash. Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880 – 1948: A Social History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Israeli Folk Music: Songs of the Early Pioneers. Edited by Hans Nathan. Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1994. Kaufmann, Fritz Mordechai. “Die Aufführung ostjüdischer Volksmusik vor Westjuden.” In idem, Vier Essais über ostjüdische Dichtung und Kultur, 48 – 64. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1919. Originally published in Der Jude 2 (1917 – 18): 759 – 68. Kaufmann, Fritz Mordechai. Das jüdische Volkslied: Ein Merkblatt (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919); reprinted in idem, Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden, 7 – 38. Kaufmann, Fritz Mordechai. Die schönsten Lieder der Ostjuden: 47 ausgewählte Volkslieder. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920 (Schriften des Ausschusses für jüdische Kulturarbeit); 2nd edition: Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1935; 3rd edition: Jerusalem: The Jewish Publishing House, 1971; new edition by Achim Freudenstein and Karsten Troyke. Edermünde: Achim, 2001. Kelly, Barbara L. Tradition and Style in the Works of Darius Milhaud 1912 – 1939. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

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Lavoie, Marie-Noëlle. “Identité, emprunts et régionalisme: judaïcité dans les œuvres de Milhaud durant l’entre-deux-guerres.” In Musique, art et religion dans l’entre-deux-guerres, edited by Sylvain Caron and Michel Duchesneau, 57 – 70. Lyon: Symétrie, 2009. Lavoie, Marie-Noëlle. “Polytonalität.” In Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, edited by Dan Diner, vol. 4, 585 – 90. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2015. Lunel, Armand. Mon ami Darius Milhaud, edited by Georges Jessula. Aix-en-Provence: Edisu, 1992. Maher, Erin K. “Darius Milhaud in the United States, 1940 – 1971: Transatlantic Constructions of Musical Identity.” PhD diss., University of Chapel Hill, 2016. Milhaud, Darius. Chants populaires hébraïques pour chant et piano [op. 86]. Paris: Heugel, 1925. Milhaud, Darius. Ma vie heureuse (1962). Reprint Bourg-la-Reine: Zurfluh, 1998. Milhaud, Darius. “La Musique Juive au Comtat-Venaissin.” In Musica Hebraica 1 – 2 (Jerusalem, 1938), 18 – 20. Milhaud, Darius. Poèmes juifs [op. 34], traduits de l’hébreu. Paris: Eschig, 1920. Morley, Hilda. “A Thousand Birds: A Memoir of Stefan Wolpe.” Unpublished typescript. Stefan Wolpe Collection, Paul Sacher Foundation. Nemtsov, Jascha. “Eine Berliner Vorreiterin der Neuen Jüdischen Schule: Alice Jacob-Loewenson.” In Jüdische Kunstmusik im 20. Jahrhundert: Quellenlage, Entstehungsgeschichte, Stilanalysen, edited by Jascha Nemtsov, 121 – 35. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006. Nemtsov, Jascha. Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004. N.N. “Musik und Musiker. Chronik der Konzerte.” In Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (edition for Greater Berlin), no. 69, February 11, 1927, morning edn. suppl., 3, http://zefys.staatsbi bliothek-berlin.de/. Olson, Jess. Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Phleps, Thomas. Introduction to Stefan Wolpe, Lieder mit Klavierbegleitung 1929 – 1933, edited by Thomas Phleps, 1 – 49. Hamburg: Peer Music, 1993. Phleps, Thomas. “Schöne Geschichten and Zeus und Elida: Wolpe’s Chamber Operas.” Contemporary Music Review 27 (2008): 239 – 49. Ricavy, Micheline, and Robert Milhaud. Darius Milhaud: Un compositeur français humaniste: Sa traversée du XXe siècle. Paris: Van de Velde, 2013. Schenker, Anatol. Der Jüdische Verlag 1902 – 1938: Zwischen Aufbruch, Blüte und Vernichtung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003. Seltzer, Robert M. Simon Dubnow’s “New Judaism”: Diaspora, Nationalism and the World History of the Jews. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Shire cam-zion [Songs of the People of Zion]. Edited by Menashe Ben-Zvi (Meirowitz). n.p.: no publisher, 1895 (in Hebrew). Soker, Tal. “The Mediterranean Style: From Pan-Semitism to Israeli Nationalism.” In Music, Longing and Belonging: Articulations of the Self and the Other in the Musical Realm, edited by Magdalena Waligórska, 82 – 93. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013.

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Sznaider, Natan. “Diaspora-Nationalismus: Jüdische Erfahrungen und universale Lehren.” In Lebensmodell Diaspora, edited by Isolde Charim and Gertrud Auer Borea, 185 – 93. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Wiener, Barry. “Stefan Wolpe as Jew and Zionist.” (unpublished paper). Wolpe, Stefan. “ʻDie Lieder dieser Völker sind keine Museumsstücke’: Vier Vorträge zum Musikleben in Palästina 1938/39.” Edited by Heidy Zimmermann. Musik-Konzepte: Neue Folge 150 (2010): 19 – 52. Wolpe, Stefan. Schöne Geschichten, op. 5b (1927 – 29). Edited by Thomas Phleps. New York and Hamburg: Peer Music, 1993. Zimmermann, Heidy. “Folk Song versus High Modernism: Stefan Wolpe’s Song of Songs Settings in the Context of the ‘New Palestine’.” Contemporary Music Review 27 (2008): 271 – 88. Zimmermann, Heidy. “‘Ost und West’ – Darius Milhaud und Stefan Wolpe bearbeiten jiddische Volkslieder.” In: RE-SET: Rückgriffe und Fortschreibungen in der Musik seit 1900, edited by Simon Obert and Heidy Zimmermann, 190 – 97. Mainz: Schott, 2018. Zweig, Arnold. Das ostjüdische Antlitz zu 50 Zeichnungen von Hermann Struck. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1920.

Judith Cohen

“If you see me walking alone on the road”: Sephardic Songs of Exile, Expulsion, Memory – and Return Exile takes many forms. An entire community, both physical and metaphorical, may be exiled, over a short time, or over broad swathes of time and space. Within any community, individuals may undergo a process of short-lived, long-term or permanent exile, from their families, their marriages, even their own children. Exile may or may not be associated with expulsion, but it always is associated with memory, and sometimes with return. This presentation offers a brief overview of Sephardic songs in Judeo-Spanish/Ladino of exile, expulsion, memory, and, in some cases, return. Memory and return, like exile and expulsion, may be physical and/or metaphorical, and even imagined and constructed from the outside. Exile and expulsion may even occur without leaving one’s home, as was the case with Portuguese Conversos, many returning only now to what they consider home – thousands of kilometers away in Israel, learning a language both new and old to them. People being people, there are more songs about specific circumstances than collective movements, and the romantic is often mixed with the practical. But perhaps behind every song of personal exile there is an awareness of collective exile, expulsion, subsequent wanderings and new homes, memory, and, sometimes, on various levels, return.

1 “Si ves ke me vo sola…” – “If you see me walking alone…” This is the title song, which was sung for me by Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle in 1981 (Figure 1). She explained it as “the bride’s farewell to her family.” The lyrics

Note: This paper has been adapted from its original form: a lecture-recital, with both live and recorded examples of the songs discussed, and images of both people and places. Where possible, the original material has been kept, but inevitably, the flavor given by sound and images cannot be reproduced. Translations not otherwise attributed are my own; “fieldwork” refers to my own fieldwork, carried out between 1980 and the present. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-005

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are short, and begin, “if you see me walking alone along a road, pray that no enemy fall upon me.” The refrain, “stay well, I’m leaving now”, has appeared in incipits which served as melodic references for setting lyrics of Hebrew piyyutim, sung metrical hymns.¹

Figure 1: Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle Montreal. Photo J. Cohen 1982.

Bouena’s own life was bound up with departures and exiles. Born in Salonica in 1916, she was a partisan there during WWII, saved many Jewish children from the Nazis, and saw her own fiançé shot and killed by a German soldier as

 Edwin Seroussi, Incipitario sefardí: el cancionero judeo-español en fuentes hebreas: siglos XVXIX (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2009), 342, #489.

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she approached the synagogue on what was to have been her wedding day. She eventually married a Canadian Ashkenazi Jewish soldier, and, after a brief stay in Israel, they moved to Montreal, Canada, where she enjoyed her family, and was active in many pursuits, but, she told me, never really felt at home either in the city’s predominantly Ashkenazi community, or in its mostly Moroccan Sephardic one². Bouena was very decisive in our encounters. She pre-selected the songs she wanted me to record, and in the order in which she wanted them recorded. This was one of the first songs she prepared. Though she interpreted it as a bride’s leave-taking of her family, with both excitement and trepidation, the text has other associations of personal exile as well.

2 “Hayizkor ya’alat hakhen yedida” – “Will her love remember the graceful doe?” Poem attributed to the wife of the tenth-century poet Dunash ibn Labrat. The longing for Zion is a classic theme of medieval Iberian Jewish poetry. A human longing, the timeless longing of a young wife for her husband, who is about to embark on a long journey, is expressed in this one-of-a-kind poem, attributed to the wife of the tenth-century poet Dunash ibn Labrat. Dunash was born in Fès, Morocco and studied in Baghdad and spent time in Córdoba, Andalusia. The poem was discovered among the countless manuscripts of the legendary Cairo Genizah, with a follow-up poetic response from Dunash. It is doubly unusual: as the first known poem composed in Hebrew by a woman, if the attribution is correct, and for its mention of a child. In order to rescue the poem from its own exile, by singing it, I prepared a contrafactum. Although the melody I chose is from later on in the medieval period, it seemed appropriate to me because it is the only melody attributed in a manuscript to a medieval woman troubadour. The woman, known to us as Beatriz, Countess of Dia, also wrote atypically for her time. In this poem, “A chanter m’er” (I must sing), she appears to reject conventional expressions of debilitating lovesickness, and berates her lover for leaving her, informing him that she is the most beautiful, learned, and skilled in courtly love, and that he will learn that pride comes before a

 Judith Cohen, “Selanikli Humour in Montreal: the Repertoire of Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle,” in Judeo-Espaniol: Satirical Texts in Judeo-Spanish by and about the Jews in Thessaloniki, ed. Rena Molho et al. (Thessaloniki: Ets Ahaim Foundation, 2011), 220 – 42.

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fall. The structure and metrics of Beatriz’ poem fit quite easily with the poem by the wife of Dunash³: Will her love remember his graceful doe, her only son in her arms as he parted? On her left hand he placed a ring from his right, on his wrist she placed her bracelet. As a keepsake she took his mantle from him, and he in turn took hers from her. Would he settle, now, in the land of Spain, if its prince gave him half his kingdom.⁴

3 Singing Expulsion: “Ea Judios” – “Hey, Jews!” The sixteenth-century music theorist, organist, composer, and humanist Francisco de Salinas, of Salamanca, Spain, included fragments of popular songs to illustrate points in his otherwise sternly sober 1577 “De musica libri septem” [On Music: Volume Seven]. These are both tantalizing and frustrating because they are incomplete; Salinas seems to have assumed that anyone perusing his books would be familiar with the songs. Nevertheless, the fact that they exist is a welcome one. They include several subjects, including close-to-racy excerpts about a young girl and a priest. The one of singular interest here seems to be the beginning of a longer song, or perhaps a refrain – or perhaps it did stand alone, as a musical taunt to the Jews who were expelled from Castile and Aragon. Although the expulsion occurred in 1492 (and from Navarre in 1497), several decades before “De Musica” appears, if Salinas includes it as an example, it was likely persistent in people’s memories. Ea, judíos, a enfardelar que mandan los reyes que passeis la mar. “Hey, Jews, pack up! for the monarchs have decreed that you head out to sea.”⁵

 Judith Cohen, “New Life for Old Songs: the Ethnomusicologist as Applied Contrafactotum,” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 2 (1999): 39 – 40.  Peter Cole, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950 – 1492 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 27; Hebrew in Ezra Fleischer, “On Dunash ibn Labrat, his Wife and his Son: New Light on the Beginnings of the Hebrew-Spanish School,” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 5 (1984): 196 (in Hebrew).  Fernándo Rubio de la Iglesia, “Las melodías populares en De Musica libri septem, de Francisco Salinas: estudio comparado de algunos ejemplos,” in De música libri septem de Francisco de

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4 Exile from Exile: Babylon and Spain. One might think that the Sephardic song corpus would include songs about the 1492 Expulsion from Spain, but only a couple of romances [narrative ballads] reference it. However, many elderly Sephardic people I interviewed, during the last two decades of the twentieth century – especially women – referred to “when we lived in Spain” in a matter-of-fact way, almost as if they had left not long before. Elderly Crypto-Jewish women whom I interviewed in Portugal in the 1990s sometimes referred to the Inquisition in the same way. The only romance which specifically refers to the expulsion from Portugal tells a rather peculiar story: the Portuguese princess marries the King of Castile; Christians, Muslims, and Jews come out to greet her; she expresses a wish to kill or banish Jews; her headdress falls off and she is changed into a goat, or she falls to pieces, or she dies.⁶ Another ballad referring to the expulsion from Portugal exists only as a fragment.⁷ Many other romances deal with themes related to exile, with or without return, though not specifically to the expulsion of the Jews, and later the Muslims, from Catholic Spain. One of the best-known, among both Sephardim and nonJewish Spaniards and Portuguese, with several different melodies and varying details, is “Don Bueso y su hermana” ([Sir Bueso and his sister].⁸ In this classic tale, a man on horseback returns from a battle and sees a pretty young girl washing clothes by the river. He greets her as a “pretty Moorish girl” and she responds that she is Christian, born in Spain. In the Moroccan Sephardic version, he asks her whether she’d like to return to Spain with him; she asks what to do about the clothes she is washing and he replies that she should bring those of good quality and abandon the rest. Approaching his house, he calls to his mother, “instead of bringing a bride, I’ve brought my sister,” as she has indeed turned out to be. Her exile from her community, her religion, and her immediate family has ended. The place name in the song varies, depending on where it is being sung. Sometimes it begins with no place name, just “una tarde de verano” [one summer day] but sometimes a name is supplied. “Al pasar por Zaragoza” [passing through Zaragoza] is one, but a common Moroccan Sephardic version begins “Al pasar por Salinas: Música, teoría y matamática en el Renacimiento, ed. Amaya García Pérez and Paloma Otaola González (Salamanca: University of Salamanca, 2014), 229 – 23 (my translation).  Samuel G. Armistead et al., El Romancero Judeo-Español en el Catálogo Menéndez-Pidal (Catálogo-índice de romances y canciones) (Madrid: Cátedra-Seminário Menéndez-Pidal: Vol. I-III, 1978), Vol. I, 172– 174.  Armistead et al., El Romancero, Vol. I, 378 – 79.  Armistead et al., El Romancero, Vol. II, 269 – 78.

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Casablanca”. This makes little sense, as the next line is “pasé por la morería” [I passed through the Moorish quarter]: as Casablanca is predominantly Muslim, it cannot have a “Moorish quarter.” The important element is the journey itself, and the resolved exiles. Another well-known ballad is a pan-European narrative known in Spanish as “La Vuelta del marido” [The return of the husband], or sometimes of the fiancé or the beloved.⁹ Typically, he (un-named in most versions) returns from a battle, and she does not recognize him. When she asks for news of her beloved, he asks her for a description, then replies that the latter has died and told him to marry her in his stead. In most versions, she refuses, insisting that she will wait for her beloved, and that if he has died she’ll enter a convent, or otherwise demonstrate her faithfulness. He then reveals himself. In some versions, known in English as the “broken token” variant, she then asks him to prove his identity, upon which he pulls out a broken ring and asks to see her matching half. Very occasionally – not in any Sephardic versions I am familiar with – she tells him that it’s too late; she’s married another. The most common ending is the conventionally happy one. Again, exile has been resolved, one way or another. The endings are not always happy. In “La mala suegra” [(The Wicked Motherin-Law],¹⁰ the young queen wishes she could give birth at her parents’ house and her mother-in-law gives her permission to do so. The young wife returns from her exile from her family, but exiles herself from her new household. When her husband returns, his mother lies spitefully, telling him that his wife has insulted her and him both and then gone off. The newborn baby speaks up and tells of its mother’s innocence, and the king returns home and kills his mother, though in some versions he first kills his innocent wife. “Hermanas reina y cautiva” [Sisters Queen and Captive] is a complex story of exile and return, which can be traced back to the 1001 Nights and, closer to 1492, to medieval Spanish and French epic poems; it exists in several other European languages as well. The ballad has been popular among Sephardic women, from both Morocco and the former Ottoman regions. The basic story is that the “Moorish” queen sends her knights to capture a Christian woman to be her slave; they do her bidding and return with a young woman who, like the queen herself, is pregnant. In the ballad, the two women give birth on the same day and the midwives switch the babies so that the queen has boy and the slave has a girl. Upon hearing the slave singing to her baby about possible names, the queen realizes (or in some versions has known all along) that this is her lost sister, as she her-

 Armistead et al., El Romancero, Vol. I, 319 – 30.  Armistead et al., El Romancero, Vol. II, 18 – 19.

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self had originally been a Christian captured by the “Moors.” In the medieval tale, a mercenary soldier dies in northwest Spain, Galicia, and entrusts his young daughter to the (Moorish) King. The king gives the (Christian) girl to his (Moorish) wife, as a servant; both women give birth on the same day. The babies, not switched around, grow up to fall in love with each other; many complex adventures and misadventures take place. In the medieval tale, Flor must set off to Babylon to rescue Blanchefleur. The story needs its own paper, and indeed has been discussed at length. It was chosen here for its multiple themes of exile and return, as it appears in Sephardic and Iberian oral tradition, where the story is truncated, and is one of loss, kidnapping, despair, bravery, perseverance, recognition, and reunification.¹¹

5 Expulsion, Exile, and Memory of Various Kinds A glance through the motif-index of the Sephardic ballad catalogue (Armistead et al. III: 298 – 329) for “expulsion” and “exile” shows ballads of captivity, abduction, abandoned children, someone sold into slavery, a bride giving birth far from home and her mother-in-law killing her and/or the baby; and double exiles in which children or young girls are sold to “the Moor”: exiled from their families and also from their entire culture. Another kind of exile is conversion: a young girl abandons Judaism to marry “a Moor” or a “Turko”. The exception is Sol Hachuel, of Morocco, whose ballad recounts the nineteenth-century true story of how this Jewish teenager resisted conversion to Islam and became part of the harem of the local governor, knowing the alternative was to be beheaded (Figure 2).¹² Not all songs of abandonment, exile, and bereavement are from the romancero. The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Sephardic lyric song repertoire also has its share of roads and travels. Perhaps the single most famous example is “Adio Kerida” [Farewell, my love], whose melody is thought to be based on an aria from Verdi’s La Traviata. The wedding song repertoire is in some ways a repertoire of exile, as is, of course, the repertoire of endechas or oínas [la-

 General information from my fieldwork; ballad classification in Armistead et al., El Romancero, Vol. I, 265 – 269; baby-switching information in Patricia Grieve, ‘Floire and Blancheflor’ and the European Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 197– 98.  There are many accounts, historical and fictional, as well as a sung ballad, of this episode, which occurred in 1834. I learned of it through fieldwork and participant observation, through a version of the ballad. For the most complete scholarly account so far, see Sharon Vance, The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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Figure 2: Sol Hachuel tomb in Fès. Photo J. Cohen 2014.

ments]. Wedding songs often refer to the bride leaving her parents’ home; at a time of arranged marriages, this was often with more trepidation than anticipation. A song popular among older Moroccan Sephardic women includes the phrase “a ver la muestra novia si era galana”: to check that the bride is a virgin. In one from the Turkish-Bulgarian border area, the bride’s family and friends call to her to hurry up and come down, and she keeps putting them off, saying she has to finish arranging her dress, or her hair. Laments, marking the final journey, do not generally specify a loved one’s name; rather, they are general laments used for specific occasions. The occasion might be a family or community one, but I was told several times during fieldwork over the years that laments are also used for worldwide Jewish days of mourning, such as Tisha be’Av, the Ninth of the month of Av. Nina Şalom Vučković’s life included several episodes of exile and displacement. She had to leave her native Bosnia to escape the Holocaust, worked in Displaced Persons camps, including one in Egypt, with her husband, a doctor, and eventually emigrated to Canada with him. He became the only resident doctor, at the time, of the Canadian Mohawk Indigenous reservation Kahnawá:ke, near Montreal, and after his death Nina decided to stay on. When I met her, she

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Figure 3: J. Cohen with Nina Şalom Vučković, Kahnewa:ke, Quebec. ca. 1985.

was in her eighties. I asked her what song she remembered most from her youth in Bosnia, and immediately she went to her piano, and sang the emblematic Bosnian sevdalinka “Kad ja podjoh na Bembashu” [When I Went to Bembasha]. In this song, the narrator walks to Bembasha, the old Turkish quarter of Sarajevo, and sees all the young girls at the fountain except his beloved. She calls to him from her latticed window and invites him to dinner. “I didn’t go that evening,” he sings, “but went the next evening – too late; she’d married another.” This is not a Jewish song, though Bosnian Jews know it well and use the tune as a contrafactum melody for the Havdalah (end of the Sabbath) prayer, in both Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. More than any Judeo-Spanish song, this old Bosnian sevdalinka

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of love, loss, and betrayal was what Nina recalled immediately, decades after leaving her home. (Figure 3).

6 Exile Without Leaving Physically Still another form of exile is being exiled from one’s people, without physically going anywhere. As I suggested, wedding songs can be seen in this context, as can laments and songs about losing a child or a community member to another religion. When the Jews were expelled from Portugal five years after the expulsion from Spain, the circumstances were vastly different. Most were forced to remain, as the promise of boats awaiting them was not fulfilled, and had no time to learn the rudiments of practicing Catholicism. They were forcibly baptized, but given a period of time during which they would not be persecuted for “Judaizing”; after that, the Inquisition was as cruel to them as it was to those who had remained as Conversos in Spain. They were exiled, on the one hand, from their own religion, and, at the same time, from their non-Jewish neighbours, who distrusted them as possible “judaizers” and often denounced them to the Inquisition. The romances most frequently collected from Crypto-Jews of the Belmonte and Tras-os-Montes regions of Portugal in the twentieth century were recited as prayers, rather than sung, and feature themes of mortal peril and redemption: the binding of Isaac, Jonah and the whale, or Daniel in the lions’ den. In my research and during my fieldwork in both areas, I learned that, at least from the early twentieth century, Crypto-Jews also sang well-known jogos de roda [play-party dance songs], especially during the period around Passover. These are the same jogos de roda that non-Jewish local people knew, though in a few cases altered a little, and/or identified as “ours”. Their song “Judah and Tamar”, probably from the early twentieth century, tells of a young girl who defies her wealthy father by eloping with an impoverished troubadour. A Portuguese translation of “Hatikva” which they learned in the 1920s became a symbol of return from exile, without leaving physically, just as they had entered exile, and long before most of them had the opportunity to physically return to Israel. Another song, “Caminhemos e andemos” [“let’s travel and walk”], sung during Passover, refers to the Exodus from Egypt. “Maria, sister of Aaron, play your tambourine so we can dance” is one line. It was sung until recently by the Belmonte Crypto-Jews as a play-party dance, and they also performed a ceremony of “beating the water,” to symbolize the parting of the Red Sea. The ballad of the crossing of the Red Sea exists both among the Portuguese Judeus and the Sephardim, though not in non-Jewish sources. Both versions describe

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Figure 4: The Belmonte family: Mercedes Diogo and Julio Henriques, 2004.

the “people of Israel” as singing; the Portuguese ballad adding that they were praising the Lord: “cantigas iam cantando, ao Senhor iam louvando.” The people in the ballad ask Moses where he is taking them, with no bread or wine, not even a shepherd with his flock: “onde não há pão nem vinho, nem pastor com ganado.” In both versions, Moses beats the sea to part it, and in the Portuguese version, he later beats the rock to obtain water: “bateu numa pedra mara”¹³. In a Sephardic version, the details are so immediate they almost resemble a movie script: they carried wood, dough, and gold; the men carried the heavier children and the women carried the lighter gold: Unos llevavan la leña, otros llevavan el amasado; los hombres a las criaturas de los brazos y de las manos. Las mujeres llevavan el oro, que es la cosa más liviana. ¹⁴

 Manuel Da Costa Fontes, “Two Portuguese Crypto-Jewish Ballads: A Passagem do Mar Vermelho and A Pedra Mara,” e-Humanista 8 (2007): 245.  Benmayor, Romances Judeo-Españoles de Oriente: Nueva recolección (Madrid: Cátedra-Seminário Menéndez Pidal, 1999), 83 – 87.

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Figure 5: Belmonte tourist signpost to synagogue and other attractions. Photo J. Cohen 2011.

The Crypto-Jews of rural Portugal exemplify not only exile without leaving the land, and memory, but, today, also return. In the now almost Disney-like town of Belmonte, not many Jewish families remain: most of those I knew in

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the 1990s have passed away or have moved to Israel. Their exile has been their return. Some do return to Judaism and remain in Belmonte: they turn their internal exile into a return. It is a return both emotional and practical: the remaining Judeus, often together with Jews recently arrived from Brazil, have opened souvenir shops and other small businesses¹⁵ (Figure 4, Figure 5).

7 The Ultimate Exile, “We Remember”: the Holocaust Dona Carolina, the matriarch of the Ciganos [Portuguese Roma] clan in Belmonte, who lived next door to the Crypto-Jews, asked me one cold March day in the late 1990s to explain why around late March or early April the women of the “Judeus” [Jews] never bought bread for a week or so. I asked whether she wanted the long or the short answer (Figure 4). “Long!” she replied unhesitatingly. In my then imperfect, Spanish-infused Portuguese, I recounted the story of the exodus from Egypt. Dona Carolina sent for her children and grandchildren, had them gather on the floor and the few chairs around the fireplace, and commanded me to tell the story again. At the end, she said, “well, your people and our people both suffered in the Holocaust and we should always be good to each other” (Figure 6). Nina Şalom Vučković, speaking about the Holocaust when I interviewed her in 1983, reflected, “We lost the country, we lost everything, but you have to be very elastic so to say, flexible, otherwise you cannot survive, if you are not flexible you cannot survive.” Flory Jagoda, also from Sarajevo, was some years younger than Nina; in fact, I met Nina through her. In her nineties at the time of writing, Flory is often referred to as the “Nona” [grandmother] of Ladino songs.¹⁶ Most of the songs she sang and composed are about love, daily life, and aspects of the Jewish calendar year. After returning, 43 years later, to her native Sarajevo, she wrote some of her last compositions, far from the light-hearted style of much of her repertoire, about the Holocaust (Figure 7).

 All remarks about the Crypto-Jews of Portugal not otherwise attributed are from my own fieldwork; see Judith Cohen, “‘Maria, sister of Aaron, play your tambourine’: Music in the Lives of Crypto-Jewish Women in Portugal,” El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture 3 (2009): 293 – 314.  Flory Jagoda passed away on January 31, 2021, after the first draft of this paper had been submitted.

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Figure 6: Belmonte. Ciganos Dona Carolina and Senhor João: fiftieth anniversary. Photo J. Cohen 2006.

Until quite recently, many people were not aware, or barely aware, of the Sephardic component of Jews affected by the Holocaust. Isaac Jack Levy, who passed away as I was writing this in January 2020, was a pioneer of Sephardic Holocaust studies, with his anthology “And the World Stood Silent”. Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle sang songs and recited poetic toasts referring to the Holocaust during our interviews. A chilling song by David Haïm, also of Salonica, describes the infamous train to Auschwitz, set to a Greek folk tune.¹⁷

 Isaac Jack Levy, And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 97– 99.

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Figure 7: J. Cohen with Flory Jagoda. Virginia, USA. 2004.

8 Returning: There is Indeed Life After Babylon. The online discussion group “LadinoKomunita” meets every year or two to return to one or another of their diasporas. In 2008, I accompanied them as an ethnomusicologist on their trip to Turkey, a return to a secondary exile for many of them, and an interesting excursion for others (Figure 8). For the twentieth anniversary of the group, members discussed whether to return, as they did on their very first trip together, to the land they were originally exiled from, Israel.¹⁸ Berta or Bienvenida Aguado (1929 – 2016), one of the last great traditional singers of Turkish Sephardic songs, often sang her intricately ornamented version of “Ir me kero, madre, a Yerushalayim” (“I want to go, Mother, to Jerusalem”). Many Sephardim did, in fact, go to Jerusalem. In mid-twentieth century Tetuan, Morocco, Jewish women sang a rueful song about all the eligible young men having dis-

 Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, LadinoKomunita trips are currently on hold.

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appeared – they’d emigrated to Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil or Israel.¹⁹ Life in Israel wasn’t always easy; the Sephardim often found themselves discriminated against by the Central and Eastern European Ashkenazim. One song does not speak of that, however, but rather of how unprepared most of them were for hard agricultural labour. Rachel Bereshit (Figure 9), originally from Izmir, Turkey, whom I interviewed in Montreal, remembered singing in her youth in Israel: Con muncha dificuldad a Palestina entrimos, imaginandomos Mashiakh que topimos Fist’ a las shesh la ora, mozotros laburimos, maldichos los qaplanes veinto groshen ya ganimos. Ajde mani mani, dize Kaplan Yanni, no puedemos, ‘stamos en tanit … “We entered Palestine with great difficulty, imagining that we’d find the Messiah; we worked till six in the evening; cursed be those foremen… we were paid (only) twenty groschen… Come on! Let’s go! says Kaplan Yanni – we can’t, we’re hungry!”²⁰

9 Returning to the Homeland which was itself Part of Exile: Spain In the second decade of the twenty-first century, both Spain and Portugal established a law of return, for people who could prove that they were descended from Jews expelled from either country. Decades before that, around the time of the 1992 commemorations of 500 years since the Expulsion, Spain and, to a lesser extent at the time, Portugal, began to hold events, often musical, relevant to the centuries of Iberian Jewish life before 1492 and 1497 (1498 in Navarre). Musicians began to perform Sephardic songs as soloists or in ensembles – there had already been some musical activity, but it was now considerably stepped up. The Red de Juderías [Network of Jewish Quarters] was established in Spain, and, later, in Portugal the Rede de Judiarias. Conferences, festivals, and imagined re-enactments became common, as did archeological findings or imagined findings. The laws of return were thus preceded by imaginary returns: some Sephardim did, indeed, return to Spain beginning quite early in the twentieth century, but they were not involved in the largely invented “memories” of many festivals and musical performances. In some cases, of course, there was a serious attempt to try to give a reasonable historical approximation of what Sephardic music

 Susana Weich-Shahak, “Migration in the Twentieth-Century Sephardic Song Repertoire,” European Judaism 44, no. 1 (2011): 142– 43.  Fieldwork; Weich-Shahak, “Migration,” 138 – 39.

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Figure 8: Ethnomusicology on the LadinoKomunita Bus, Turkey, 2008.

might have been before the expulsions. However, there is no surviving Jewish music from those centuries, and, to complicate these projects, the majority of popular songs in Judeo-Spanish, those which most people have heard on commercially available recordings and in concerts, are relatively recent, from the mid-to-late nineteenth century on. These songs are often given “the medieval treatment”: “returning” them to a time in which they never existed.²¹ Roads are endless, and, people being people, there are more songs about specific circumstances than collective movements, and the romantic is often mixed with the practical. But perhaps behind every song of personal exile there is an awareness of collective exile, expulsion, subsequent wanderings and new homes, memory and, sometimes, on various levels, return.

 Judith Cohen, “Redeeming Self and Portraying Other: Music and the ‘Three Cultures’ Festivals in Spain,” in Antropologia delle musica nelle culture mediterranee: Interpretazione, performance, identità / Musical Anthropology in Mediterranean Cultures: Interpretation, Performance, Identity, ed. Philip V. Bohlman et al. (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 2008).

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Figure 9: Rachel Bereshit, Montreal, Quebec. ca. 1990.

In 2018, during a brief stay in Israel, my daughter Tamar and I went to Tiberias to visit “Tio Julio” [Uncle Julio] from Belmonte, whom we knew well, having often stayed with him and his wife Mercedes, before she passed away (Figure 4). Now in his eighties, he had never lived anywhere else before moving to Israel with his son and his family, and, with limited mobility, spends most of his time in their fourth-floor walk-up. He doesn’t speak Hebrew, and sees mostly family and close friends from Belmonte who also moved there. Tamar, for whom he had been a grandfatherly figure when she was small, asked him whether he felt lonely. “No,” Tio Julio replied unhesitatingly, “I’m home now.” Thousands of kilometres from what had been home for centuries, his exile is over.²²

 I learned only just before the final proofs were sent out that “Tio Julio” passed away in Israel, in December 2020.

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List of Figures Figure : Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle Montreal. Photo: Judith Cohen 1982 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : Sol Hachuel tomb in Fès. Photo: Judith Cohen 2014 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : J. Cohen with Nina Şalom Vučković, Kahnewa:ke, Quebec. Photo: anonymous ca. 1984 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : The Belmonte family: Mercedes Diogo and Julio Henriques. Photo: Judith Cohen 2005 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : Belmonte tourist signpost to synagogue and other attractions. Photo: Judith Cohen 2011 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : Belmonte. Ciganos Dona Carolina and Senhor João: fiftieth anniversary. Photo: Judith Cohen 2006 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : J. Cohen with Flory Jagoda. Virginia, USA. Photo: anonymous 2004 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : Ethnomusicology on the LadinoKomunita Bus, Turkey. Photo: Judith Cohen 2008 (© Judith Cohen). Figure : Rachel Bereshit, Montreal, Quebec. Photo: Judith Cohen 1982 (© Judith Cohen).

Bibliography Armistead, Samuel G., with Selma Margaretten, Paloma Montero, and Ana Valenciano. El Romancero Judeo-Español en el Catálogo Menéndez-Pidal (Catálogo-índice de romances y canciones). Madrid: Cátedra-Seminário Menéndez-Pidal: Vol. I-III, 1978. Benmayor, Rina. Romances Judeo-Españoles de Oriente: Nueva recolección. Madrid: Cátedra-Seminário Menéndez Pidal, 1999. Cohen, Judith. “New Life for Old Songs: the Ethnomusicologist as Applied Contrafactotum.” Hispania Judaica Bulletin 2 (1999): 35 – 42. Cohen, Judith. “Redeeming Self and Portraying Other: Music and the ‘Three Cultures’ Festivals in Spain.” In Antropologia delle musica nelle culture mediterranee: Interpretazione, performance, identità / Musical Anthropology in Mediterranean Cultures: Interpretation, Performance, Identity, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Marcello Sorce Keller, with Loris Azzaroni, 101 – 12. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 2008. Cohen, Judith. “‘Maria, sister of Aaron, play your tambourine’: Music in the Lives of Crypto-Jewish Women in Portugal.” El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture 3 (2009): 293 – 314. Cohen, Judith. “Selanikli Humour in Montreal: the Repertoire of Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle.” In Judeo-Espaniol: Satirical Texts in Judeo-Spanish by and about the Jews in Thessaloniki, edited by Rena Molho, Hilary Pomeroy, and Elena Romero, 220 – 42. Thessaloniki: Ets Ahaim Foundation, 2011. Cole, Peter. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950 – 1492. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007. Da Costa Fontes, Manuel. “Two Portuguese Crypto-Jewish Ballads: A Passagem do Mar Vermelho and A Pedra Mara.” e-Humanista 8 (2007): 242 – 63.

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Fleischer, Ezra. “On Dunash ibn Labrat, his Wife and his Son: New Light on the Beginnings of the Hebrew-Spanish School.” Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 5 (1984): 189 – 201 (in Hebrew). Grieve, Patricia. ‘Floire and Blancheflor’ and the European Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Levy, Isaac Jack. And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust: Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Rubio de la Iglesia, Fernándo. “Las melodías populares en De Musica libri septem, de Francisco Salinas: estudio comparado de algunos ejemplos.” In De música libri septem de Francisco de Salinas. Música, teoría y matamática en el Renacimiento, edited by Amaya García Pérez and Paloma Otaola González, 219 – 53. Salamanca: University of Salamanca, 2014. Seroussi, Edwin, et al. Incipitario sefardí: el cancionero judeo-español en fuentes hebreas: siglos XV-XIX. Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas: 342, #489, 2009. Vance, Sharon. The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Weich-Shahak, Susana. “Migration in the Twentieth-Century Sephardic Song Repertoire.” European Judaism 44, no. 1 (2011): 136 – 49.

Experience of Alterity

Arpine Maniero

Jewish and Armenian Students at German Universities from the End of the Nineteenth Century and until the Outbreak of World War I 1 Introduction The academic migration from the Russian Empire to German and other Western European universities that began in the eighteenth century took a permanent and regular character in the nineteenth century. German universities, in particular, attracted foreign students because of Germany’s remarkable science and education developments. The so-called academic freedom that shaped the German university landscape also made it more appealing to foreign students than, for example, the rather utilitarian French education system. The influx of the students from Russia to German universities was also a consequence of academic and political restrictions on the Russian Empire’s national minorities. There were administrative hurdles, language barriers and, in the case of Jewish students, even the numerus clausus that made access to Russian universities very difficult. Russia’s national elites discussed the importance of better education throughout the nineteenth century; however, any effort to improve the insufficient educational situation could come into conflict with Imperial politics. Hence, academic migration to European universities offered students the opportunity to obtain a university degree beyond the political turmoil in their homeland. At the same time, tsarist authorities perceived the enrollment at foreign universities as highly suspicious. The prospective national educational elite went from the periphery of the Empire to Western European universities where they studied outside of state control. This could hardly correspond to the interests of the state, especially since it could not be guaranteed that the experiences acquired abroad would benefit the Empire. At the end of the nineteenth century, a considerable number of Russian subjects attended German universities and soon begun to organize themselves. Their growing number and the emergence of their student organizations was viewed ambivalently in German academic and political circles, and was even exploited

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in certain contexts.¹ This chapter examines the socialization of Jewish and Armenian students who, because of numerous restrictions at Russian universities, became migrants and mobilized socially and politically at the German universities. Although their initial situations before educational migration, their activities in the host country, and their study conditions were very different, there were also certain similarities. A closer look at these aspects underlines the peculiar situation of Russian subjects in an academic, political, and social environment that was not always friendly to academic foreigners from the Russian Empire.

2 The Students from the Russian Empire at German Universities: A Social Portrait Academic migration to European universities has been studied in pre-Soviet historical research, and especially since the 1990s, but the research remains sporadic and incomplete. Until recently, there was no comprehensive study on Armenian students at German universities,² but the situation of Russian, Jewish, and Polish students received significant attention.³ Even so, academic migration from the Russian Empire to Western European universities has not been systematically researched as a social phenomenon. Above all, the historiography lacks compa-

 The conflict-ridden situation, which was essentially directed against the students from the Russian Empire, is known in the academic environment under the slogan “the issue of academic foreigners” or simply the Ausländerfrage. Hartmut Rüdiger Peter, “Politik und akademisches Ausländerstudium 1905 – 1913. Preußisches Beispiel und sächsisch–badische Variationen,” in Universitäten als Brücken in Europa – Les universités: des ponts à travers l’Europe. Studien zur Geschichte der studentischen Migration – Études sur l’histoire des migrations étudiantes, ed. Hartmut Rüdiger Peter and Natalia Tikhonov (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 175 – 94.  Arpine A. Maniero, Umkämpfter Weg zur Bildung: Armenische Studierende in Deutschland und der Schweiz von der Mitte des 19. bis Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020).  Claudie Weill, “Russisch-jüdische Studentenvereine in Deutschland 1900 – 1914,” in Universitäten als Brücken in Europa, 229 – 39; Florian Kemmelmeier, “Polnische Studentenvereine in Halle (1880 – 1914),” in Universitäten als Brücken in Europa, 279 – 98; Witold Molik, “Richtungen und Methoden der Forschung zu polnischen Studenten an deutschen Hochschulen im 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Schnorrer, Verschwörer, Bombenwerfer? Studenten aus dem Russischen Reich vor dem 1. Weltkrieg, ed. Hartmut Rüdiger Peter (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 51– 69.

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rative studies that would examine the academic migration of different national groups and their specific social experiences.⁴ This lack of research applies equally to the initial situation of these national groups in the Tsarist Empire and to the national, cultural, and social backgrounds that were major factors in their decision to seek higher education abroad. For example, the Russification of the universities in Dorpat, Warsaw, and a few other institutions forced members of minorities such as German, Jewish, and Polish students to foreign universities.⁵ The academic and political restrictions at Russian universities and the lack of educational opportunities, in particular in the technical disciplines, were additional factors that caused the influx of Russian subjects to German institutions of higher learning. With regard to individual groups of national minorities, there also were specific reasons that forced members of these groups to become academic migrants. Armenian students, for example, had difficulties enrolling at Russian universities not only because they lacked Russian language skills but also because Imperial universities did not accept diplomas even from the Nersesian Seminary ⁶ and the Gevorgian Academy. ⁷ A decree issued in 1906 did allow graduates of denominational academies in the Russian Empire access to university studies. However, Piotr Mikhailovich fon Kaufman (1857– 1926), the Minister of Public Education, indicated that graduates from the Gevorgian Academy and the Nersesian Seminary should not be included in this arrangement.⁸ By contrast, the same diplomas were accepted in most German universities, which allowed Armenian students to enroll and study in Germany and in Switzerland. Jewish students faced even more complications. Their access to Russian secondary schools, universities, and most other institutions of higher learning was limited in 1887 by a quota system to 3 % in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 5 % in the

 Claire Mouradian, Charles Urjewicz, and Claudie Weill, “Les étudiants du Caucase en Allemagne 1900 – 1914,” Russes, Slaves et Soviétiques: Pages d’histoire offertes à Roger Portal (Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1992), 369 – 92.  Hartmut Rüdiger Peter, “Russian Students at German Colleges and Universities in the Late 19th and Early 20th centuries,” in The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe, ed. Klaus J. Bade et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 656.  Nersesian Seminary was founded in 1824 by Bishop Nerses V Ashtaraketsi (Nerses V., 1770 – 1857), Armenian primate of the diocese of Georgia, later Catholicos of All Armenians. The Seminary was an Armenian higher education institution in Tiflis and existed until 1924.  Gevorgian Academy is a theological higher institution of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which was founded by Catholicos of All Armenians George IV (1813 – 1882) in 1874 in Vagharshapat (Etchmiadzin).  Centralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [Central State Historical Archive], f. 139, op. 1, d. 10511, 21.

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educational districts outside, and 10 % in schools within the Pale of Settlement.⁹ At first, the quota system was not implemented consistently, but the government under Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin (1862– 1911) enforced strict compliance to the regulations. This led to large numbers of Jewish students heading to foreign institutions to circumvent the restrictions.¹⁰ While Stolypin enforced Jewish quotas, he advocated that Russian universities accept all Armenian students with a diploma from the Gevorgian Academy or the Nersesian seminary, even as he claimed the education at Armenian seminaries was not sufficient to enroll at Russian universities. Stolypin’s attitude seemed surprising, but it was aimed at curbing the exodus of Armenian students to foreign universities, where they were outside of state control and subject to the influence of Armenian revolutionary parties. According to Stolypin, the German universities especially had opened their doors wide to these Armenians, who received their first education in their own denominational schools, then went from the Caucasus straight to Germany, and after completing their studies, brought back both “foreign knowledge” and a hostile attitude toward their homeland.¹¹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, a considerable contingent of students from the Russian Empire was already attending German universities, and their number continued to grow until the beginning of World War I. The student body from the Russian Empire was extremely heterogeneous. It differed not only in national and religious composition, but also in political commitment. Although Russian citizens accounted for no more than 3.6 % of all students in Germany, they made up 45 % of all foreign students, with Jewish students comprising the significant majority.¹² According to Jack Wertheimer, the number of Jewish students at German universities and technical schools “rose at an extraordinarily rapid pace,” reaching over 2.500 by 1912/13.¹³ Unlike Armenians, who were present at almost every large German university, the Jewish students tended to concentrate at a few universities located near sizable Jewish communities

 Jack Wertheimer, “The ‘Ausländerfrage’ at Institutions of Higher Learning: A Controversy Over Russian-Jewish Students in Imperial Germany,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27 (1982): 187– 215, 187; Guido Hausmann, “Der Numerus clausus für jüdische Studenten im Zarenreich,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 41 (1993): 508 – 31.  Peter, “Russian Students at German Colleges and Universities,” 656.  Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [Russian State Historical Archive], f. 733 (1909), op. 201, d. 102, 2 f.  Peter, “Russian Students at German Colleges and Universities,” 656.  Wertheimer, “The ‘Ausländerfrage’ at Institutions of Higher Learning,” 189.

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such as Konigsberg, Berlin, or Leipzig.¹⁴ For Leipzig, for example, a significant presence not only of Jewish, but also of Polish and Armenian students was recorded between 1889 and 1913.¹⁵ The number of Armenian students at German and Swiss universities began to increase in the 1860s and peaked in the 1906/07 winter semester before steadily decreasing beginning in the 1910s. During this period, over 850 Armenians studied at institutions of higher learning in Germany and Switzerland. Immediately before the outbreak of World War I, however, only a handful of Armenian students were enrolled at German universities; most of them, especially the scholarship holders, moved to Switzerland after the start of the war.¹⁶ Over time, almost all national groups of students from the Russian Empire developed their own social life and followed their own national, political, and cultural agenda. However, they also faced common problems, above all financial, with the Armenians and the Jews in particular being in a unique situation. While Jewish students could hope for help from Jewish communities in Germany, the Armenians had established a relatively modern scholarship system in the Caucasus based on donations and bequests from members of the Armenian business elite. Starting in the 1870s and even during World War I, selected Armenian candidates received regular payments to continue their studies abroad. The growing Russian academic migration also led to student self-help efforts. Initially arising spontaneously, they quickly became organized. For Jewish students, numerous associations such as academic clubs and reading halls, shared dining facilities, and aid funds emerged. Generally, the Jews were retreated into their so-called “colonies,” which despite their political fragmentation showed remarkable social cohesion. This was particularly evident in the immediate admission of the newcomers to these colonies, where they not only could expect help in adjusting to the new and occasionally unfriendly environment, but they also received the necessary support in order to pursue their academic path. The Russian-Jewish Student Fund in Munich, for example, declared that its aim was to provide financial support to students who were unable to finance their studies themselves. The funds consisted of monthly contributions, the income from cultural evenings, and donations. Likewise, the Association of Arme-

 Trude Maurer, “‘Der historische Zug der Deutsch-Russen nach Göttingen’ oder: Auslese und Abschreckung. Die Zulassung zarischer Untertanen an einer preußischen Universität,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 53 (2004): 219 – 56, 220 f.  Yvonne Kleinmann, “‘Ausländer’ – ‘Russen’ – ‘Sozialisten’. Jüdische Studenten aus dem östlichen Europa in Leipzig, 1880 – 1914,” in Bausteine einer judischen Geschichte der Universitat Leipzig, ed. Stephan Wendehorst (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, 2006), 517– 40, 525.  Maniero, Umkämpfter Weg zur Bildung, 90 – 110.

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nian Students in Geneva supported fellow students in need in the city with small loans. Similar Armenian associations also existed in Berlin and Leipzig. Apart from that, Armenian students, unlike their Russian, Jewish, or Polish student counterparts, had limited opportunities for self-help, since there were no large Armenian communities in Germany to support them. The scholarships and other financial support to students covered only their minimum living and study costs, so the social condition of most students from the Russian Empire at German universities remained extremely precarious. According to the reports of the Berlin committee for the Help of Needy Students from Russia, most of them lacked sufficient resources to pay for life and study, they had no opportunities for financial support from organizations, and even their options to earn money for themselves were extremely limited. Against this background, the Berlin Committee emphasized that many students, especially members of the national minorities, did not voluntarily go abroad but were forced to become academic migrants because of restricted access to Russian universities and political repression.¹⁷ The aim of the Berliner Committee and many similar organizations was to organize financial support for these indigent students from Russia. This support was even more urgent as even their contemporaries saw the precarious financial situation of most Russian students as one of the reasons for their poor standing in German academic circles and their conflicts with fellow German students. Russian students’ financial hardships undoubtedly shaped how they were perceived not only in German academic circles but also in German society. Even so, the social image of students from the Russian Empire at German universities included not just their studies but also their club life, cultural activities, and political commitments. It is not possible to cover all these topics in detail in the context of an essay, so one of these aspects, Jewish and Armenian student mobilization in clubs and associations in Germany, will be examined in more detail below.

3 Jewish and Armenian Student Mobilization in Associations Part of national self-determination for both Jewish and Armenian students in Germany was their mobilization in student associations. Several clubs emerged  Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of the Russian Federation, GARF], f. 102 (1898), op. 226, d. 3, ch. 226.

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at the universities with large Jewish and Armenian student populations whose objectives included uniting their fellow students, raising their members’ political and social awareness, and spreading the ideas of revolutionary social democracy. At the turn of the twentieth century, also nationalistic tendencies were increasing at a remarkable rate among the Jewish and Armenian students. Relations between these student organizations were not always free from conflict, especially when the emergence of nationalist currents led to disputes with representatives of social democratic movements. Even though authorities kept a close watch on the student clubs’ activities, representatives of Russian national minorities considered a stay in Europe as a unique opportunity for the development of political consciousness. For Jewish students, the growing anti-Semitism both in the Russian Empire and in Germany contributed to their mobilization. To a certain extent, their cohesion was also a countermeasure to contemporary political and journalistic discussion in Germany about the immigration of Eastern Jews,¹⁸ which led among other things to hateful anti-Semitism within the German fraternities and to an escalation of the Ausländerfrage. From the beginning of the 1890s, students in Germany established groups espousing both Jewish nationalism and socialist ideology. The representatives of these associations had not only different visions about the future of post-revolutionary Russia, but also different attitudes towards Jewish national issues. While many socialist groups defined themselves as internationalists and did not attach particular importance to Jewish nationalism, the Jewish Labour Bund in Poland and Russia, founded in 1897, advocated the national and cultural autonomy of all national minorities of the Russian Empire, including the Jews. The Bund generally enjoyed a special position among Russian-Jewish students in Germany and had members and activities in Berlin, Darmstadt, Fridberg, Jena, Koethen, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Mittweida, and Munich. The Bund aimed to solve the “Jewish problem” in Eastern Europe by creating a socialist order that would allow Jews to enjoy national and cultural autonomy. Within ten years of its foundation, the Bund had built a network of various organizations abroad. In Germany, however, the membership was mainly students.¹⁹ The Bund’s handling with Jewish nationalist groups were among the reasons it had such a strong position within the student milieu until World War I. In 1888, the Russian-Jewish Scientific Association was founded in Berlin. It was considered one of the first Zionist associations in Germany and was dedicat Jochen Oltmer, “‘Verbotswidrige Einwanderung nach Deutschland’: Osteuropäische Juden im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 17 (2007): 97– 121.  Weill, “Russisch-jüdische Studentenvereine in Deutschland,” 235.

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ed “to offer the Jewish youth from Russia in Berlin the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the interests and needs of the Jewish people.”²⁰ However, this association had more cultural than political goals, trying to instill a sense of Jewish identity, promote a national perspective, and spread the idea of Zionism among the Berlin students. To achieve this, the association organized lectures on Jewish history and literature, along with a focus on the geography of Palestine. The organization’s success inspired students in other cities to form similar groups, which in 1913 led to the founding of an umbrella organization called the “Cartel of Zionist Students from Russia in Germany.”²¹ In January 1911, the Association of Jewish Students from Russia was founded in Berlin and claimed to be the largest Russian student organization in Germany. With a library, a reading hall, and an information point about the study opportunities, this organization had a structure typical of Russian clubs. The association aimed to maintain sociability among its members and to promote their material and academic interests. It organized student self-help and supported fellow students in need by arranging various festivities and lectures.²² Other important Jewish student organizations were the Association of Jewish Students in Leipzig, the Jewish Student Association, founded in Munich at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Jewish Academic Cultural Association, also founded in Munich in 1910.²³ The ideological dividing line for these organizations ran between the nationalist Jews and those who belonged to the wing of the social democratic movement, which did not accept any demarcation from the Russian Social Democratic Labor movement and propagated a common organization of all Russians. In contrast, the nationalist Jews saw the social democratic movement as a denial of Judaism, which further exacerbated the conflict. In parallel to the increasing anti-Semitic mood and the administrative restrictions in the academic environment, both factions adopted a more radical position and established their own strategies to fight for their academic rights. Similarly, at the end of the nineteenth century many Armenian students focused primarily on national issues but also had to deal with a sizeable Armenian student contingent that had embarked on the path of the international class struggle and dissociated itself from any expression of nationalism. By the turn of the century, Armenian student mobilization was very important and led to the foundation of several student associations. Their main aim was to keep  Jack Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 111.  Ibid.  Weill, “Russisch-jüdische Studentenvereine in Deutschland,” 230.  Ibid., 234.

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the “national spirit” alive among the Armenian students, to unite their compatriots at the respective universities, and to contribute to their further education through cultural evenings and lectures. Several Armenian academic associations such as the Materialist Association of Armenian Students and the Literary Association of Armenian Students were founded within a short time in Berlin, but these organizations only had a few members and did not exist for long. One of the most important Armenian student organizations was the Armenian Academic Association founded in 1892 in Leipzig. Unlike many other clubs, this association existed until 1913 and played a significant role in shaping Armenian students’ academic life. One of its aspirations was to bring Armenian history and literature closer to the European people. The association had a chair, a secretary, a cashier, and also maintained a library. In 1894, the members of the Armenian Academic Association took the initiative to form a common association for all Armenians studying in Europe. The founding conference of the Association of Armenian Students in Europe took place in Heidelberg from April 12 to April 15, 1897. By 1908, there were groups of this association in Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg, Halle, Leipzig, Bern, Zurich, and Geneva and individual association members in almost all German cities where Armenians studied. Initially, the association focused only on student issues. However, at a conference in Zurich from October 12 to October 15, 1900, the members decided by a large majority that the association should deal primarily with the current political situation of Armenians both in the Ottoman and Russian Empires. In the following years, the association organized several events in different European cities and issued brochures aimed at educating the European public about the “Armenian question” to win support for the Armenian people oppressed in both Empires.²⁴ Controversy between the students with socialist and nationalist views ultimately led this association to divide into two opposing groups. A large number of Armenian social democratic students opposed the widespread nationalist trends among Armenian students and in no way separated themselves from the Russian Social Democratic movement. They left the association and declared it dissolved. A coalition of former members founded a student wing of the political party Armenian Revolutionary Confederation called Association of Armenian

 See, for example, Ilse Frapan, Die Armenische Frage und das europäische Gewissen. Öffentlicher Vortrag. Veranstaltet zu Hamburg, den 22. Mai 1903 (Geneva: Union des Étudiants Arméniens de l’Europe, 1903); Für Armenien und Macedonien: Eine Manifestation, übersetzt und mit einem Vorwort für deutsche Leser versehen von Ilse Frapan (Geneva: Union des Étudiants Arméniens de l’Europe, 1903); Georg Brandes, L’Arménie et l’Europe: Conférence faite à Berlin le 2 février 1903 (Geneva: Union des Étudiants Arméniens de l’Europe, 1903).

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Dashnaktsakan Students in Europe. This organization, in accordance with the party, saw itself as socialistic, but was primarily devoted to Armenian national issues. In Germany and Switzerland, the Armenian social democratic student groups failed to organize themselves within an association. Some groups in Germany tried to unite the Armenian students under the umbrella of the Russian labor movement, and others called for the independence of the Armenian social democrats, which was similar to the Jewish Bund. Before and during the First Russian Revolution, politically suspicious associations of Russian students in Germany were already under close police surveillance. The suppression of the Revolution sparked a new wave of academic migration to German universities, and by then the political attitudes and social composition of the student body had changed visibly. There were many more revolutionary-minded students committed to political agitation, which now took into account national peculiarities and interests. From this point on, the debate about the presence of Russian students at German universities became even more hostile, both on the political and academic level.

4 Jewish and Armenian Students between Tsarist Discrimination and German Prejudices Until the turn of the twentieth century, the students from the Russian Empire were rarely considered disruptive in the German academic milieu. This changed when growing numbers of Russian subjects at German universities made their social differentiation more visible. Attitudes toward the supposed revolutionary students became increasingly virulent in German political and academic circles, especially at universities with large Jewish student populations. This growing antagonism sparked heated debate among the authorities, academic organizations, and in the press about the presence of foreign students at German universities. The emphasis was on students from the Russian Empire in particular, and usually not positive. An image of “good” and “bad” foreigners existed in the German student milieu, so that the majority of Swiss, Austrian, and students from the “Germanic” countries such as Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians were seen as no immediate danger. Instead, the attitude was that “the danger that we face comes from the East.”²⁵ Both the steadily growing number of the students from Russia and the intensifying debates on the “issue of academic foreigners” led to various administra Universitätsarchiv Freiburg, B1/2766.

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tive restrictions at German technical schools and universities. Even though most of the regulations enacted in individual German states aimed in theory to control the number of all foreign students, in practice these measures particularly affected the Russian subjects. In 1899 and 1900, Prussia introduced the two so-called “‘Russians’ decrees” at its technical universities, which, among other things, required a successful competition test for Prussian technical schools. Further restrictions were added later, such as special fees for foreign students, later space assignments, and stricter police surveillance. According to the academic regulations of March 12, 1908, foreigners at Prussian universities also had to provide evidence that their academic training was adequate to qualify them for study in their home countries.²⁶ In 1911, Bavaria also imposed admission restrictions on Russian subjects. These students could be enrolled only in the number in which they had been exmatriculated in the previous semester. Further measures involved examining foreign certificates more closely, in light of various reports that the students from the Russian Empire were entering German universities insufficiently prepared. At Baden universities like Freiburg i. Br. or Heidelberg, the hurdles were less intense; however, the internship and auditorium fees were increased in 1912 and 1913 respectively, and a faculty examination equivalent to that of physics was introduced. There were numerous reasons for these kinds of restrictive measures. The growing numbers of Russian subjects in German universities caused increasing unease in German student political circles and in German society, which occasionally was expressed more openly in hatred and discrimination. The prejudices were associated with the “revolutionary drives” of the students from Russia, who were portrayed as a dangerous and subversive element that threatened Germany’s political stability. The situation deteriorated even more after the German ambassador to Russia warned of a “huge rush” of Russian students to German universities, triggered by “Russian university turmoil.”²⁷ However, according to their own statements, the overwhelming majority of Russian students came to Germany to escape from political turbulence. They emphasized this not only in their student press but also in their personal correspondence. Many Armenian scholarship holders reported that, despite their limited financial means, they preferred to study in Germany rather than in Russia. Unlike the Jewish student associations, the Armenian associations did not discuss the Ausländerfrage and the associated administrative restrictions at German universities. However, as stu-

 Universitätsarchiv Freiburg. Zulassung von Ausländern, B1/2766.  Maurer, “Der historische Zug der Deutsch-Russen nach Göttingen,” 225.

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dents from the Russian Empire, they were equally affected by these measures. As the Armenian geologist Hovhannes Karapetian reported, there were great difficulties in Germany both for graduates from Russian middle schools and from Armenian secondary schools: First of all, you need proof of a 1 or to 2-year internship, the fees are too high and exams in the mathematical subjects are required. Regardless, I went to Aachen in order to achieve an overview of it myself. I have been informed that there are great difficulties in enrolling Russian subjects in Germany. I lost hope in Germany and went to Belgium, Liège and Mons.²⁸

The “issue of academic foreigners” reached a new critical phase in 1912/13 with the so-called Klinikerstreik in Halle. German student dissatisfaction was directed against the assumed preference of the students from the Russian Empire who, despite their supposed inadequate previous knowledge, were still allowed to attend the clinical semesters. The congresses of Russian students in Karlsruhe in 1913 and in Bern in 1914 were a prompt reaction to the rapid escalation regarding the “issue of academic foreigners.” These congresses aimed not only at maintaining the academic rights of their compatriots but also at improving the reputation of all students from Russia among the German public. The national question was treated secondarily, as the concerns were initially for those students who had been excluded from Russian universities and were forced to continue studying abroad. Studencheskii Listok, which was published as the press organ of the congress in Karlsruhe, announced that all Russian students, regardless of their nationality and belief, should stick together, as the situation of Russian students at German universities was about to deteriorate.²⁹ And yet, there was little talk of a common strategy for all students from the Russian Empire. A large part of russian student body, namely the Jewish students, interpreted the targeted work of German student organizations and fraternities, which used both the press and the public space for their propaganda, and the xenophobia in the German academic milieu as purely anti-Semitic. The protests against the Russian students, which reached “threatening proportions” in Munich, were also described as “undoubtedly anti-Semitic.”³⁰ Hence, the associations of Jewish students from Russia boycotted the congresses and even called the appeal for forming a general association of all students from the Russian Empire simply an attempt at Russification.

 National Archive of Armenia, f. 312, list 1, file 55, part 1, 45.  Studencheskii Listok [Student Leaflet], November 10, 1913, nr. 3 – 4 (in Russian).  Studencheskii Informacionnyi Listok [Student Information Leaflet], January 28, 1913, nr. 1 (in Russian).

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The Russian students’ situation was even more complicated because they faced additional persecution and discrimination from their own government, which had asked for German support in the fight against the alleged “anarchists” from the Russian Empire. The Jews, Poles, and, to a limited extent, the Armenians were particularly affected by this policy of the Tsarist authorities, as the members of these minority groups were repeatedly accused of being involved in revolutionary activities. Russian diplomatic missions were instructed to collect information on politically conspicuous students at German universities and forward it to the Russian police. Russian authorities saw the social, national, and denominational backgrounds of these students as especially important, so it was no coincidence that the police and other official reports on revolutionary students from the Russian Empire consistently emphasized the representatives of national minorities: The University of Munich refused to accept those students who had been excluded from Russian universities. There are about 80 Russians in the polytechnic, but 90 % of them are Jews from the southwestern regions. These students can be divided into two groups: those who are just lazing around, and the revolutionaries who are dissatisfied with the current system in Russia and dream of destroying it with the help of the working masses.³¹

In connection with the planned closure of the Russian Academic Club in Leipzig, which was suspected of revolutionary activities, the Imperial Russian Consul in Leipzig explicitly pointed out that Russian students would stay in Germany only to study. At the same time, the consul made clear that representatives of extreme orientations among the Russian subjects studying in Leipzig were by no means the majority, but only a small group of mainly Jewish and Armenian students, and “they discredited the whole Russian student body by their behavior.”³² The reference to Jewish and Armenian students in this report was not without reason. The official Russian press distanced itself from the “revolutionary elements” at the foreign universities with a significant anti-Semitic attitude. Regarding Armenian students, the police reports repeatedly referred to their supposed political radicalization at German and Swiss universities. Russian authorities described the universities in Switzerland, where the Armenian Social Democratic Hunchakian Party ³³ was founded by a group of Armenian students, as the

 GARF. f. 102 (1898), op. 226, ch. 3, 5 f.  Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, I. HA, Rep. 77, St 18, Nr. 264, 4.  Hratch Dasnabedian, “The Hunchakian Party,” The Armenian Review 41 (1988): 17– 39; Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).

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“focus of the Armenian revolutionary adventure.” According to the Russian Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions, closing these “pedagogical markets” or at least paralyzing the demand for them should be Russian state policy.³⁴ The Russian student press constantly complained about their government’s pejorative attitude toward its subjects studying abroad, even emphasizing that German public opinion was more favorable than the official Russian attitude.³⁵ Representatives of national minorities who were defending their own academic interests felt abandoned in Russian politics. Moreover, the Russian government’s derogatory attitude toward its own subjects, its open “denunciation” of them as “revolutionary elements,” and the close cooperation between the Russian and German police was not just a cause for sharp criticism but also for the deterioration in the Russian students’ academic situation in Germany.

Conclusion Both the German academic environment and German society reflected the presence of students from the Russian Empire in various contexts and in different ways. Russian subjects’ rapidly growing numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century and their strong presence in the already overcrowded technical schools prompted more and more discussion about the “issue of academic foreigners.” Increasing German public hostility towards the students from Russia led to a strong national solidarity especially among the representatives of national minorities. This solidarity was particularly evident among the Jewish students, who complained of discrimination and anti-Semitism both at home and in Germany. Almost all students from the Russian Empire were affected to some degree by discrimination and prejudice in Germany, but Jews and Armenians considered themselves to be singled out. There was a pressure from anti-Semitic circles in German academic and social environments on the state governments to solve the Ausländerfrage, which Jack Wertheimer called a “euphemism for the noticeable presence of Jewish students from Russia”.³⁶ There certainly also existed an open or latent anti-Armenian mood in German society as well as a contorted por-

 Zapiska ob armianskikh školakh [Note on Armenian Schools] (St. Petersburg: Tip. Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1911), 25 f.  Studencheskii informacionnyi listok [Student Information Leaflet], February 13, 1913.  Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers, 34.

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trayal of Armenians in the German press, which was related to German foreign policy interests in the Ottoman Empire. The press particularly disseminated a picture of the “rebellious” Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, whose support would have caused substantial damage to German foreign policy. Even the Armenian press worried that Germans living in Turkey would hate the Armenians not any less as the Turks did.³⁷ However, it seems that the Armenian students were by far not as much affected by discrimination and prejudice as the Jewish students, or at least their experience of it did not have a negative impact on their academic activities.

Archival Materials Centralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [Central State Historical Archive], f. 139, op. 1, d. 10511, 21. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, I. HA, Rep. 77, St 18, nr. 264. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii [State Archive of Russian Federation, GARF], f. 102 (1898), op. 226, ch. 3. National Archive of Armenia, f. 312, list 1, file 55, part I, 45. Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv [Russian State Historical Archive], f. 733 (1909), op. 201, d. 102, 2 – 3. Universitätsarchiv Freiburg, B1/2766; B1/2766.

Bibliography Brandes, Georg. L’Arménie et l’Europe. Conférence faite à Berlin le 2 février 1903. Geneva: Union des Étudiants Arméniens de l’Europe, 1903. Dasnabedian, Hratch. “The Hunchakian Party.” The Armenian Review 41 (1988): 17 – 39. Frapan, Ilse. Die Armenische Frage und das europäische Gewissen. Öffentlicher Vortrag. Veranstaltet zu Hamburg, den 22. Mai 1903. Geneva: Union des Étudiants Arméniens de l’Europe, 1903. Für Armenien und Macedonien. Eine Manifestation, übersetzt und mit einem Vorwort für deutsche Leser versehen von Ilse Frapan. Geneva: Union des Étudiants Arméniens de l’Europe, 1903. Hausmann, Guido. “Der Numerus clausus für jüdische Studenten im Zarenreich.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 41 (1993): 508 – 31. Horizon 2, no. 197 (1910). Kemmelmeier, Florian. “Polnische Studentenvereine in Halle (1880 – 1914).” In Universitäten als Brücken in Europa. Les universités: des ponts à travers l’Europe. Studien zur

 Horizon 2, no. 197 (1910): 1.

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Geschichte der studentischen Migration. Études sur l’histoire des migrations étudiantes, edited by Hartmut Rüdiger Peter and Natalia Tikhonov, 279 – 98. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Kleinmann, Yvonne. “‘Ausländer’ – ‘Russen’ – ‘Sozialisten.’ Jüdische Studenten aus dem östlichen Europa in Leipzig, 1880 – 1914.” In Bausteine einer judischen Geschichte der Universität Leipzig, edited by Stephan Wendehorst, 517 – 40. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2006. Maniero, Arpine A. Umkämpfter Weg zur Bildung. Armenische Studierende in Deutschland und der Schweiz von der Mitte des 19. bis Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020. Maurer, Trude. “‘Der historische Zug der Deutsch-Russen nach Göttingen’ oder: Auslese und Abschreckung. Die Zulassung zarischer Untertanen an einer preußischen Universität.” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 53 (2004): 219 – 56. Molik, Witold. “Richtungen und Methoden der Forschung zu polnischen Studenten an deutschen Hochschulen im 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Schnorrer, Verschwörer, Bombenwerfer? Studenten aus dem Russischen Reich vor dem 1. Weltkrieg, edited by Hartmut Rüdiger Peter, 51 – 69. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001. Mouradian, Claire, Charles Urjewicz, and Claudie Weill. “Les étudiants du Caucase en Allemagne 1900 – 1914.” In Russes, Slaves et Soviétiques. Pages d’histoire offertes à Roger Portal, 369 – 92. Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1992. Nalbandian, Louise. The Armenian Revolutionary Movement. The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Oltmer, Jochen. “‘Verbotswidrige Einwanderung nach Deutschland’: Osteuropäische Juden im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik.” Aschkenas. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 17 (2007): 97 – 121. Peter, Hartmut Rüdiger. “Russian Students at German Colleges and Universities in the Late 19th and Early 20th centuries.” In The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe, edited by Klaus J. Bade et al., 655 – 58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Peter, Hartmut Rüdiger. “Politik und akademisches Ausländerstudium 1905 – 1913. Preußisches Beispiel und sächsisch–badische Variationen.” In Universitäten als Brücken in Europa. Les universités: des ponts à travers l’Europe. Studien zur Geschichte der studentischen Migration. Études sur l’histoire des migrations étudiantes, edited by Hartmut Rüdiger Peter and Natalia Tikhonov, 175 – 94. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Studencheskii Listok [Student Leaflet], November 10, 1913, nr. 3 – 4 (in Russian). Studencheskii Informacionnyi Listok [Student Information Leaflet], January 28, 1913, nr. 1 (in Russian). Weill, Claudie. “Russisch-jüdische Studentenvereine in Deutschland 1900 – 1914.” In Universitäten als Brücken in Europa. Les universités: des ponts à travers l’Europe. Studien zur Geschichte der studentischen Migration. Études sur l’histoire des migrations étudiantes, edited by Hartmut Rüdiger Peter and Natalia Tikhonov, 229 – 39. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Wertheimer, Jack. Unwelcome Strangers. East European Jews in Imperial Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

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Wertheimer, Jack. “The ‘Ausländerfrage’ at Institutions of Higher Learning: A Controversy Over Russian-Jewish Students in Imperial Germany.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 27, no. 1 (1982): 187 – 215. Zapiska ob armianskikh školakh [Note on Armenian Schools]. St. Petersburg: Tip. Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1911 (in Russian).

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“The Jews of Caucasus”: Perception of Armenians in the German and Polish Travel Literature The historian Gershon Hundert showed the advantages of looking at the history of Jews in a broader context not limited to them alone. The approach of comparison of the experiences of Jews with other ethnic groups in old Poland allowed him to question several concepts (“middleman minority,” “penalized minority,” “trading diaspora,” and, generally, the concept of “minority”). Urban ethnic heterogeneity of the Polish Commonwealth included Germans, Italians, Bohemians, Dutch, Armenians, Scots, Muscovites, Greeks, French, Hungarians, Tatars, and others, many of them involved in commerce. Scots, Italians or Armenians developed institutional and occupational patterns similar to those of the Jews. Moreover, not only Jews met with legal disabilities: Gdańsk excluded Italians, Scots, Nurenbergers, and Englishmen. Lublin was against the practices of Armenian, Scottish, Jewish, and Lithuanian merchants. There was also an opinion about Italians – “they are worse, even, than Jews.”¹ Indeed, there were historians who, writing about Jews, did not forget to mention Jewish competition or cooperation with merchants from other ethnic groups, among others with Italians, Greeks or Armenians.² However, the Jews may have found themselves in another company. In another phenomenon Jews were compared to other groups in order to discredit them. Sebastian Miczyński, professor at the Jagellonian University in Krakow, published the anti-Jewish pamphlet “The Mirror of the Polish Crown” in 1618. Miczyński claimed that the Turks would never have taken different areas in southern Europe without the help of the Jews. In the Polish context, the author presented Jews as traitors who convey strategic information to the enemies of the Polish

 Gershon Hundert, “An Advantage to Peculiarity? The Case of the Polish Commonwealth,” AJS Review 6 (1981): 21– 38.  Ignacy Schiper, Dzieje handlu żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich (Warsaw: Nakładem Centrali Związku Kupców w Warszawie, 1937), 18 – 20, 31– 32, 90 – 91, 180, 340; Majer Bałaban, Żydzi lwowscy na przełomie XVI i XVII wieku (Lwów: Nakładem Księgarni H. Altenberga, 1909), 430; Leon Streit, Ormianie a Żydzi w Stanisławowie w XVII i XVIII wieku (szkic historyczny) (Stanisławów: Nakładem Koła Naukowego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Uniwersytetu Hebrajskiego w Jerozolimie Oddział w Stanisławowie, 1936). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-007

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Crown (Turks, Tatars, and Muscovites). In particular, Miczyński emphasized the treacherous cooperation between Jews and Turks (“Enemies of the Holy Cross”), which, according to him, resulted from many similarities between them: Jews and Turks descend from the sons of Abraham. They do not eat pork, perform circumcision, “blaspheme shamefully” the Holy Trinity. In addition, Polish Jews pay tribute to sultans. They both shared a common hatred of Christians and a desire to destroy their rule. The source of hatred among Jews for Christians lay in the Talmud.³ Therefore, there could be no question of loyalty of the Jews to the Polish Crown. Such a comparison of Jews with Turks took on a particularly sinister connotation during the times of Polish-Turkish conflicts. This was not the only way to associate Jews with a threat and show them as collaborators of Poland′s enemies. Szymon Starowolski also put together Jews with Mohammedans (Turks). But he added to his list Arians as well.⁴ The basis for linking Jews with Arians was that these so-called Polish Brethren were against the doctrine of Trinity. On the one hand, Jews were accused of urging Christians to give up their faith which, in the case of Arians, meant to become “judaisantes.”⁵ On the other hand, Arians (as Protestants) were accused of cooperation with Protestant Swedes during their invasion of Poland. Together with Jews, they became scapegoats for the Swedish “deluge” of Poland.⁶ While the existence of the first phenomenon was blurred (and Hundert had to appeal that the Jews cannot be studied in isolation) discrediting of Jews continued to develop further. In this chapter I would like to show another perspective of this second phenomenon – comparing not the Jews to others, but another group to the Jews. It will not be about presenting historical facts, but about existing stereotypes (I agree that stereotypes are also historical facts). The purpose of this text is to present reproduction of stereotypes appearing in analogies based on comparisons of Armenians with Jews. The authors of the comparisons were people who had come to the Caucasus from outside. As sources I have used the descriptions of

 Sebastian Miczyński, Zwierciadło Korony Polskiey. Vrazy ćięzkie, y vtrapienia wielkié, ktore ponośi od Zydow (Krakow: W Drukarney Macieia Jedrzeiowicza, 1618), 22– 25.  Szymon Starowolski, Prawdziwe obiáśnienie braterskiego napomnienia ad disidentes in religione (Krakow, 1648), 74, 91.  Majer Bałaban, Historia i literatura żydowska ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem historji Żydów w Polsce: dla klas wyższych, vol. 3: Od wygnania Żydów z Hiszpanji do Rewolucji Francuskie (Od Zygmunta Starego do trzeciego rozbioru Polski) (Lwów, Warsaw, Krakow: Wydawnictwo Zakładu Narodowego Imienia Ossolińskich, 1925), 159.  Bałaban, Historia i literatura żydowska, 271, 315.

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Polish and German travelers from the nineteenth and twentieth century. But as I show in some places, such comparisons were not limited only to Poles and Germans.

1 Education Michał Andrzeykowicz describing Dusheti wrote that it had more than 3,000 inhabitants, of which one-third of the population were: “Armenians who have occupied the small Georgian towns just like our Jews.”⁷ Not only this author referred to his experiences from Poland. Also Mieczysław Lepecki, creating a description of Georgia, reached for knowledge he had from his land: “The language of the street is Georgian. However, on request in Russian you will receive the answer in Russian. In general, Russian is very badly spoken in Tiflis. The Russian language of Georgians and Armenians is famous throughout the Soviet Union and it is an inexhaustible source of laughter, just as for the Poles it is the Polish language of the Jews.”⁸ As for the language, staying in Georgia in the same year as Lepecki, Jan Berson commented on it a bit differently: “Georgians do not want to speak Russian, even if they speak the language.”⁹ The German Artur Leist stressed the importance of education among the Armenians who knew that it increased the strength of every nation. He also wrote that the Armenians took care of raising it quite seriously, showing it at the same time worth following solidarity. They had good schools everywhere. And a significant part of their youth was educated in Russia and abroad. One could meet among them many people with higher education and fluent in several languages. In general, the level of education among the Armenians was not as low as it might be supposed. Frequent travels and business relations with foreigners also contributed to this.¹⁰ So, it was possible to describe the Armenians as badly speaking Russian, or as polyglots. The Polish tourist Adam Sierakowski believed in 1902 that there were few Jews in Tiflis. He associated this with a small number of Armenians in Poland.

 Michał Butowd-Andrzeykowicz, Szkice Kaukazu. Vol I. (Warsaw: W Drukarni Jana Psurskiego, 1859), 52.  Mieczysław Lepecki, Sowiecki Kaukaz. Podróż do Gruzji, Armenii i Azerbejdżanu (Warsaw: Bibljoteka Polska, 1935), 75 – 76.  Jan Otmar Berson, Minus Moskwa: Wołga, Kaukaz, Krym (Warsaw: Rój, 1935), 82– 83.  Artur Leist, Szkice z Gruzyi (Warsaw: Nakładem księgarni A. Gruszeckiego, 1885), 53 – 54.

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And, the other way around, he associated a large number of Jews in Poland with a large number of Armenians in Georgia. Additionally, he assessed which nation in the Caucasus was shiftier: “Just as Lwów is a Jewish-Armenian city, so is Tiflis an Armenian-Jewish city. Armenians, much craftier than the Jews, oust them systematically from the Caucasus (…).” Sierakowski also characterized the dominant role of Armenians in the trade of books in Tiflis, besides their level of education: “The whole nation reads and counts.” And at the same time, traveling only very briefly in Georgia as a tourist, he issued a negative judgment about the Armenians: “Somehow, this Armenian race is unlikable for me (…).”¹¹ He did not explain why he did not like the Armenians. Perhaps one should look for the origins of this attitude not in the Caucasus but in Poland? This way, based on a description, we can learn a lot about the author himself, his attitude towards a given topic, his knowledge, prejudices, the country of his origin, or even the current situation in the neighbor land. In the latter case, we find it in the description of the Polish traveler Mieczysław Lepecki in 1934. On a trip by railway he saw the ethnic diversity of the Caucasus: “Georgian language mixed with Armenian and Russian, disappearing at some stations in the Ossetian or Abkhazian dialect. The huge Georgian noses mingled with the short noses of the Turks, the eagle noses of the mountain Jews, the fleshy noses of the Armenians and the vague noses of the Slavs. On every step, a different race, a different nation, a different language. Hitler might go mad here.”¹² By the way, even before World War II, “inhuman persecutions of Armenians during the World War by Turkish authorities” were compared with “inhuman persecution of Jews in today’s Germany.”¹³

2 Trade In a Russian government publication from 1836 an attempt was made to characterize Armenians: “Armenians, like the people of Moses, have been dispersed about the face of the earth, gathering wealth under the weight of their rulers, unable to enjoy their own land. This is the cause of the Armenian’s lack of character: he has become a cosmopolitan. His fatherland becomes that land where he can with the greatest advantage and security and through the resourcefulness of  Adam Sierakowski, Listy z podróży. Podróż na Krym, Kaukaz i do Tunisu (Warsaw: Drukarnia L. Bogusławskiego, 1914), 82– 83.  Lepecki, Sowiecki Kaukaz, 60.  Streit, Ormianie a Żydzi, 6.

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his mind make for himself profit. (…) Any sort of deception is considered by them acceptable (…).”¹⁴ Armenians were compared with “the people of Moses”. Such comparisons appear in many descriptions. Apart from this, efforts were also made to compare the Armenians with Georgians. However, the result of such comparison was different. Artur Leist believed that the nature of Armenians was very different from that of the Georgians. He claimed that the latter ones had many “knightly features”. Armenians, on the other hand, had “more inclination to quiet, hardworking life, and they do not like the warfare like Jews.” Leist pointed out that such character traits and the Armenians’ perception of their own role posed an economic threat to the Georgians. It was difficult for “good-natured, gullible and willing to be spendthrift Georgians” to compete with the Armenians. The Georgians’ “material resources were decreasing each year, moving to the strong hands of the Armenians, among whom many already had large areas of land.” Comparing the Armenians with the Georgians, the author further wrote: Armenians were “more cleverly able to take care of their own than these ex-knights, who liked comfortable life and poetry, and who were guided more by their honor and conscience.”¹⁵ In 1873 a Russian traveler S. Maksimov offered a very similar explanation: Trade in the Caucasus is entirely in the hands of clever and calculating Armenians. Armenians are higher than Georgians in intelligence and in love for work, and for that reason there is nothing surprising in the fact that Georgians properties are rapidly falling into Armenian hands. Georgians are dependent on them just as the Poles are on the Jews and similarly feel towards them the same contempt and hatred (if not more than the Poles feel towards the Jews). The commercial Armenians reveal much cleverness, wiliness, are always ready with flattery; their thirst for profit leads them to cheating and swindling.¹⁶

According to Leist these differences between Georgians and Armenians could partly be explained by climatic conditions. There were no such paradisiacal landscapes like in Georgia. Instead of this, Armenia, the proper homeland of the Armenians, stretched out on a high, not very fertile, dry plateau. There was equally hard and burdensome heat during the summer and frost during quite a long winter. This caused a modest yield. Such bad conditions for agriculture meant that the Armenians were forced to earn their bread in a different way,  Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 39.  Leist, Szkice, 51– 53.  Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 41.

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namely by trade. And, the uncertainty of tomorrow due to lack of fertile land was connected with the desire to accumulate more and more money. This, in turn, evolved to greed. Leist explained that a dose of greed was usually characteristic for people who, disinherited from the land in their homeland, had to look for livelihood in foreign countries. To the different characters contributed, according to Leist, also persecutions and oppression from the Turks and Persians from which Armenians had suffered for ages. Such experiences led to their cunning. “They killed in them the sense of sincerity and they taught them duplicity and sham humility.”¹⁷ However, Leist’s explanation, why Armenians turned to trade, was not shared by Friedrich Hempel and Christian Geissler in 1803: according to these authors, the Armenians were by nature lazy and sluggish, so they all committed themselves to trade. The authors also claimed that although Armenians had abilities for all kinds of arts and crafts, they avoided any (physical) effort like Jews and Gypsies. And: “Because of the trade profit, they put up with oppression and abuses like Jews.” Hempel and Geissler also wrote: “Trade becomes a passion for them” and as a consequence they were profit-seeking. For the authors they were cheating and that was not really trade but usury.¹⁸ There was another author who wrote about cheating. In 1825 a German scientist, Eduard Eichwald, who was a professor of zoology at the Kazan University at that time, passed through Astrakhan. He wrote that there lived Russians, Tatars, Armenians, and Persians. To Atrakhan came also traders from Central Asia. There were people from Western Europe as well. Eichwald also mentioned Jews. At the same time, despite the rich diversity of nations residing and trading in the city, he compared them with the Armenians. According to Eichwald, the character of Armenians and Jews was very similar. Jews, however, could not compete with them. It was the Armenians who had the priority in trade and “cheating”.¹⁹ Visitors from Europe could, of course, feel being tricked after buying something at the bazaar, or anywhere else, on other occasions – especially, if they could not haggle the price down and did not know the rules of behavior. In this respect, Sierakowski’s assessment was more balanced than Eichwald’s. He was pleased with the things he acquired at an “Armenian bazaar”. And he sim-

 Leist, Szkice z Gruzyi, 50 – 52.  Friedrich Ferdinand Hempel and Christian Gottfried Heinrich Geissler, Abbildung und Beschreibung der Völkerstämme und Völker unter des russischen Kaisers Alexander menschenfreundlichen Regierung (Leipzig: Industrie Comptoir, 1803), 127.  Eduard von Eichwald, Reise auf dem Caspischen Meere und in den Caucasus 1 Band, 1 Abtheilung (Stuttgart, Tübingen: Verlag der J.G. Cottaʼschen Buchhandlung, 1834), 16 – 17.

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ply stated that “you have to bargain uncommonly.”²⁰ And Maria Ratuld-Rakowska was impressed how others could bargain ardently.²¹ Bargaining was a phenomenon worth mentioning as something special and exotic. However, the travelers did not have to go to Asia or to the Caucasus to gain such experience. They were also common, for example, in Eastern European Shtetls.²² Furthermore, Ratuld-Rakowska complained that during her travel to Persia she was “ripped off” by Tatars, Armenians and Kurds, having paid too much for food and accommodation.²³ Such complains could be expressed wherever there was among other things a lack of adequate infrastructure and competition. In case of Eastern Europe, we also find descriptions of travelers being “ripped off” by Jews.²⁴ As we could see above, the comparisons between Armenians and Jews were connected with a certain “skill”. In this context, Leist mentioned a proverb (he published his descriptions in German and Polish. In the Polish version there is no such proverb, therefore I use the German source here): “A Greek will cheat three Jews, an Armenian three Greeks, and a Persian three Armenians.”²⁵ So, the Jew occupied the lowest place in this specific hierarchy. The Armenian was almost at the top, higher than the Jew and the Greek. Only the Persian was above all. Leist stressed that the Persian (it is already in the German and Polish version) is a “cunning deceiver”.²⁶ It is also striking that a Georgian was not even taken into consideration here. Even in another version of this proverb circulating at that time Jews were on the lowest position in the ranking: “A Greek will cheat three Jews, but an Armenian will cheat three Greeks” wrote the British diplomat Oliver Wardrop, and added his perception of the relations between Armenians and Georgians: “and the Georgian, straightforward, honest fellow, is too often cruelly swindled by the artful children of Haik. When the fraud is very apparent the Armenian often pays for his greed with all the blood that can be extracted from his jugular vein.”²⁷ Tadeusz Wyganowski did not share such a vision contained in the proverb. In his description he put Armenians and Jews on one level: “Armenians as well  Sierakowski, Listy z podróży, 84.  Maria Ratuld-Rakowska, Podróż Polki do Persyi. Z przedmową T. Jaroszyńskiego. Część I. (Warsaw: Drukarnia Aleksandra T. Jezierskiego, 1904), 69.  Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Wspomnienia Polesia, Wołynia i Litwy, vol. 1 (Wilno: Nakład Druk. T. Glüksberga, 1840), 10.  Ratuld-Rakowska, Podróż Polki, 60.  Kraszewski, Wspomnienia, 153 – 54.  Arthur Leist, Georgien. Natur, Sitten und Bewohner (Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Friedrich, 1885), 16.  Leist, Szkice z Gruzyi, 27.  Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 42.

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as Jews, who usually pretend to be Russians or Caucasians there, are very unpleasant and generally disliked because of their greed and impudence.”²⁸ At first glance, it is not clear who Wyganowski thought about. Armenians were Caucasians. Georgian Jews or mountain Jews were Caucasians as well. If it was about Jews who came from outside the Caucasus, somehow they had to communicate and one of the possible languages of communication was Russian. An interesting hint is the information that Wyganowski worked in the Caucasus in the oil industry for the Moscow Prokofyev Company and for the Company of Brothers Nobel. So, perhaps, it was the expression between the lines of a negative attitude of one company’s employee towards (not named in the text) competitive company of Rothschild by means of an anti-Semitic argument? At this point, we have to mention that the Caucasus was beyond the Pale of Jewish Settlement. Thereby, Jews had a restricted access to this region, unless they, for example, graduated from a university, served in the army or were baptized. Perhaps Wyganowski meant Jews who were baptized (and assimilated). In this way, they could avoid tsarist restrictions and conduct business more freely in the Caucasus. In the eyes of the author, they could therefore “pretend to be Russians.” In this way, he might have expressed that he did not recognize the fact of somebody’s assimilation. While reading Wyganowski’s words we should also not forget two other important points which allow us to see them in a broader context. The first one is that his book was published in Warsaw in 1907 in Polish. Therefore it was addressing the Polish speaking reader in Congress Poland where the negative attitude towards the Russian speaking Jews was quite present at that time.²⁹ The second one is that he, mentioning in one sentence Jews and Armenians, captured the period of the growing Armenophobia (backed and promoted also by Russian nationalists and chauvinists) in the Caucasus of that time.³⁰ Such negative opinions about the Armenians were not only present in Polish and German books. Maria Ratuld-Rakowska – a Polish woman, who lived in France, traveled through the Ottoman Empire to Persia in 1894.³¹ The opinions, which she had heard, were summarized in her memories from the travel.

 Tadeusz Wyganowski, Wspomnienia z Kaukazu (Warsaw: Druk E. Skowrońskiego, 1907), 7.  See Roman Dmowski, Separatyzm Żydów i jego źródła (Warsaw: Nakładem Gazety Warszawskiej, 1909).  See Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 43 – 49.  Ratuld-Rakowska traveled through the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of “bloody pogroms of 1894– 1896” against Armenians. Naimark sees here many similarities to pogroms of Jews in Imperial Russia. See Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 22– 23.

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The opinions about the Armenian people were connected with the yoke that they were subjected to over the centuries. This was to make the Armenian people “too accustomed to grovel and bend the neck. And, having got rid of all courage in the surrounding of the powerful and predatory tribes, they were permeated with falsity, hypocrisy, craftiness. (…) Armenians settled in cities and living calmly under the protection of the authorities, make vengeance for the poor and oppressive village brothers, exploiting everything and everyone: people, circumstances and things. They also gain a great material advantage. They come out of the mother’s womb with a check under the armpit and are born bankers and industrialists.”³² In such words she summed up what she had heard about Armenians during her travel through the Ottoman Empire from Europeans. We can see that before coming to the Caucasus, the authors had specific experiences, ideas, and images. They were modified in new circumstances. They were subjected to new impressions, new experiences. The word “merchant” was a synonym for the word “Jew”. In the Caucasus they experienced another reality. Here, the stereotype of the Armenian matched the image of the Jew beyond that region. Armenians were therefore perceived as “Jews of the Caucasus”. Jews were to some extent a kind of substitute for Armenians by attempts to describe the reality in the Caucasus. Many other components might have contributed to this perception as well. The structure of the Georgian society (peasants and nobles) was almost entirely based on agrarian economy. On the other hand, urban culture and economy was largely influenced by Armenians – the emerging bourgeoisie. Keeping in mind the socio-economic structure of Kingdom of Poland, comparisons with the reality in Poland were for many understandable. One more similarity could be seen in the fact that both the Congress Poland and the Caucasus were absorbed by the Russian Empire. In this context, not only Armenians were compared with Jews, but also Georgians with Poles.³³ For a better understanding of the perception of the Jews as traders, we turn briefly to an analysis of the sociologist Aleksander Hertz. Hertz points out that the estate system of old Poland had many features of a cast system. Therefore, he proposes to look at the Jews in old Poland as a closed caste group. Participation in the caste required the adoption of specified norms (religious, legal, linguistic, moral, and professional) which defined and determined the behavior and attitudes of the cast members inside and outside of their group. So, both the caste and the environment expected each caste member to behave

 Ratuld-Rakowska, Podróż Polki, 49.  Wyganowski, Wspomnienia, 7.

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as required by the norms (clothing, language, diet, housing, medical regulations, etc.). According to Hertz, a non-Jew, when dealing with a Jew, classified the encountered individual as a member and representative of the caste. The process of defining included emotional attitude towards the encountered person. It placed the person in a specific professional and cultural group, in a specific system of values, and attributed certain physical features. As a rule, it included also a judgment. The author indicates that such a mechanism works constantly in all cases of human contacts, in which it is necessary to define and categorize: “We use abstractions here and reduce human beings to these abstractions. We look at people through the template of our definitions. We see these people in masks that collective experiences and traditions impose on them.”³⁴ Although in the reality, the economic functions of the Jewish caste were more diverse than embraced in the stereotype, a Jew was, by definition of his cast, a “merchant” or a “trader”. Such activities were to be expected from a Jew, for it fit into the pattern and norms of the Jewish caste (in Polish folklore before WWII, a “Jew in khalat” was called “trader” [kupiec]). Moreover, the determination that somebody was a Jew resulted in attributing to him – no matter what his profession really was – the “commercial features” which were considered typical in Poland for traders. And there was a constant aversion to do commercial activities in old Poland. The country’s economic backwardness and noble traditions created an atmosphere of contempt for trade as a profession. Therefore, since someone was a Jew, he had to think only of profit, personal interest, etc.: The Jew of such a stereotype was a man not only of a different faith, language and customs, but also of a different morality. He only thought about his own profit, he tried to deceive the Christian. He had here all the qualities that folklore gave to every merchant of the pre-capitalist economy everywhere. In Poland, where the tradesman was almost exclusively a Jew, these features were attributed to the whole caste.³⁵ The specific “commercial features” in the pre-capitalist and early capitalist economy were attributed in Poland to Jews. But Alexander Hertz mentions also that, similarly, in other countries, such features were attributed to Chinese, Armenians, Persians, etc.³⁶

 Aleksander Hertz, Żydzi w kulturze polskiej. Wstęp Czesław Miłosz (Warsaw: Biblioteka Więzi, 2014), 102.  Ibid., 103.  Ibid., 91– 105.

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Indeed, if we look at the explanation of Ronald Suny concerning the economic position of Armenians in the Caucasus, we will find many similarities with the explanation of Hertz about the perception of Jews in Poland: The suspicion and mistrust of commercial Armenian was widespread in the pre-capitalist political economy of pre-Reform Russia. Calculation of profit and economic efficiency rather than more customary and traditional form of exchange made the Armenian an alien element in the relatively stagnant economic world of Transcaucasia. He was, of course, the harbinger of a new social order based on market relations and rational economic considerations, but to Georgian peasants and nobles and Russian aristocrats and bureaucrats the loyalties of the Armenians were neither to the existing way of life nor to the country in which they found themselves.³⁷

Thus, the coexistence of stereotypes in perceptions of people who made experience (or at least had some imaginations) with areas inhabited by Jews in Eastern Europe and Armenians in the Caucasus made possible that Jews and Armenians became, to some extent, exchangeable elements by attempts to describe the reality.

3 “State within a State” Artur Leist explained that the Armenians came as exiles from their homeland to Georgia. They settled down there, especially in Tiflis. When Georgia was an independent state with national aristocracy of more influence and power, the position of the Armenians was perhaps more subordinate as it was later. Undoubtedly to Leist, Armenians acted then not so boldly. He also underlined that they were not oppressed, but have been received hospitably by the Georgians. But they were gaining slowly more and more material resources and hold trade and industry in their hands. So, in Leist’s eyes, “the Armenians in Georgia had been playing the role of Jews (…).” He maintained that there were enough Armenians in Georgia to create a “nation within a nation” and “to contribute to the impoverishment of the local population.”³⁸ A similar narrative of the motif of “ingratitude” can be found in anti-Semitic literature describing the history of Jews in Poland, where they were received hospitably in a spirit of tolerance. Teodor Jeske-Choiński wrote, for example, that the Polish king Casimir the Great, well disposed toward the Jews, accepted many of

 Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 39 – 40.  Leist, Szkice z Gruzyi, 50 – 51.

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them to come to Poland. The problem was that the king did not know the “psychology of Jews”³⁹: Germans, Armenians and Mohammedans polonized themselves and went hand in hand with Poland. And Jews, so generously gifted, hated their benefactors, despised their faith, sucked them out of mercy by usury and fraud, undermined their Christian ethics with their trading method, tried to appropriate their property, in brief, they were deceitful enemies, what they are until now.⁴⁰

For the kindness and religious tolerance, the Jews owed gratitude to Poland. However, they did not take part in the wars, preferring to lend money to the poor knights, who, after returning from the bloody battlefields, still had to give back money on the conditions of usury. Another “ingratitude,” according to Jeske-Choiński, was the destruction of Polish trade by Jews, and their greed and dishonesty.⁴¹ Jeske-Choiński claimed that “in the general social organism, they constitute a separate world, alien and hostile to everything that surrounds them, they are a nation within a nation, a state within a state.”⁴² It was obvious for this author that Jews, when building their “state within a state,”⁴³ were guided not only by usury and greed, but also by striving to rule over the whole world in the future.⁴⁴ The historian Jacob Katz placed the background of this phrase in the development of the concept of a modern state, which assumed state sovereignty and demanded loyalty, without tolerance of other, non-state structures usurping the functions of the state. He founded that the accusation of having “a state within the state” (and also in the variant: “a nation within a nation”) had been directed against various groups over time – against French Huguenots and their concessions granted them by the Edict of Nantes, but later also against Jesuits (who took part in the agitation against the privileges of the Huguenots), against Freemasons, and organized groups of merchant and craft guilds. The term evolved

 Teodor Jeske-Choiński, Historja Żydów w Polsce (Warsaw: Kasa Przezorności i Pomocy Warszawskich Pomocników Księgarskich, 1919), 73 – 74.  Jeske-Choiński, Historja Żydów, 117.  Ibid., 142.  Ibid., 192.  A term that can be found by Jeske-Choiński quite often: Jeske-Choiński, Historja Żydów, 16, 23, 30, 33, 62, 74, 111, 189, 192, 224, 239, 297, 305, 330.  Jeske-Choiński, Historja Żydów, 111.

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and it was absorbed into a canon of anti-Semitic allegations. It became an “antiSemitic slogan” in different countries and languages.⁴⁵ When Artur Leist published his book (in German and Polish) in 1885, the slogan of the Jewish “nation within a nation” or “state within a state” was not new. It had already circulated much earlier in many languages, including Latin, German, and French. Also in the Polish context, the term had a long tradition and different variants. For example, in a pamphlet published in 1785, an anonymous author was thinking about “improving Jews” and claimed that they were “Corpus in Corpore” or “Respublica in Respublica.”⁴⁶ In Leist’s times, “The Book of Kahal,” written by Jacov Brafman and first published in Russian in 1869, was quite popular. In this book, repeatedly republished and translated, we find claims about the exploitation of Christians, hatred of Jews for non-Jews, possession of power over the Jewish community, which should belong to the state and the alleged desire of Jews to take power over the world.⁴⁷ Thus, it is likely that Leist might have absorbed some stereotypes about Jews, for example, from such sources, in particular, the book of Brafman circulated at that time in languages spoken in the Russian Empire (Russian, Polish), of which the Caucasus was also a part. And the connotations, contained in the descriptions of the alleged characteristics of the Armenians, were undoubtedly understandable to people who knew the stereotypes used in relation to Jews.

4 Revolutionaries and Communists Ronald Suny, writing about perception of Armenians in the Russian Empire, pointed out that their images were changing there, as were the Armenians and their viewers. He divided them into three major types: 1. The Armenian as Christian. This image linked the Armenians suffering under Muslim rule to the declarations of protection by the Russian – Orthodox Empire. In many cases it referred to the times when the Caucasus had not been a part of the imperial Russia. 2. The Armenian as commercial. – These two sources of Armenian identification had a

 Jacob Katz, “A State within a State: the History of an Anti-Semitic Slogan,” in idem, Emancipation and Assimilation (Westmead, Farnbourough: Gregg, 1972), 47– 76.  Jędrzej Żydowski[?], Zydzi czyli konieczna potrzeba reformowania Zydow w kraiach Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey przez Obywatela bezimiennego (Warsaw: Nakładem i Drukiem Michała Grölla, 1785), 14.  Jakov Brafman, Kniga Kagala. Materialy dlja izučenija evrejskogo byta (Vilna: Pečatnja Vilenskago Gubernskago pravlenija, 1869).

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certain consequence: indeed a Christian, but on the other side, as commercial, Armenians were associated with Jews (as we could show above, such comparisons proved to be very fruitful) which brought about an interesting phenomenon of an ambivalent perception of them. At the end we would like to pay attention to the third type of image, which Roland Suny mentions, the Armenian as conspiratorial revolutionary.⁴⁸ For many years there existed the myth of the Armenian as a loyal subject of the Russian Empire. However, among some Russian officials and journalists, Armenophobia was growing. The editor of the newspaper “Kavkaz” in Tiflis formulated in this respect various theories, among others, about the Polish-Armenian “conspiracy”. He also looked for “Jewish” and “Gypsy” roots of the “parasitic” Armenian bourgeoisie.⁴⁹ After the pogrom of Jews in Kishinev in 1903, some people sensed that something would happen soon in the Caucasus. In the winter of 1905, the captain of one of the Black Sea ships told a journalist that a similar slaughter would take place soon in the Caucasus. That journalist contradicted that there were too few Jews living there. The captain said that this time it would not affect Jews, but Armenians. Pogroms were used as a tool for channeling social tensions. In some cases, the tsarist administration provoked an Armenian-Muslim conflict. In others, it was even not needed anymore. And the authorities did not try to prevent them.⁵⁰ In a wider time context, we can see after the annexation of the Caucasus to the Russian Empire the appearance and development of anti-Semitism there. But putting together Armenians and Jews in many comparisons cannot be explained with anti-Semitism alone. After all, during the unrest in Baku in 1915, the crowd shouted: “Down with the Armenians! Down with the Jews!”⁵¹ The association of Armenians and Jews with each other can also be found in Polish sources, created in the new reality, when the Bolsheviks took over the power in the Caucasus. Jan Berson, who visited Georgia in 1934, commented on the activities of Armenian communists, comparing them with Jews in Belarus and Ukraine. In his description, the stereotype of a Jew as a communist corresponds to the stereotype of an Armenian communist:

 Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 31– 33.  Jerzy Rohoziński, “Wojna ormiańsko-tatarska 1905 roku. Historyczna wrogość: mity i fakty,” in Dylematy kaukaskie. Problemy narodowościowe i migracyjne, ed. Maciej Ząbek et al. (Warsaw: DiG, 2010), 234.  Rohoziński, “Wojna ormiańsko-tatarska,” 235 – 38.  I. David, Istorija evreev na Kavkaze, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv: Cavcasioni, 1989), 549 – 50.

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The Armenian element in the Soviet service is distinguished by a particular eagerness, performing a role throughout the Caucasus similar to that of Jews in Belarus and Ukraine. Both of them are saved from the slaughter (or pogrom) only by the iron hand of authority – they are so much hated.⁵²

Bibliography Bałaban, Majer. Historia i literatura żydowska ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem historji Żydów w Polsce: dla klas wyższych, vol. 3: Od wygnania Żydów z Hiszpanji do Rewolucji Francuskiej (Od Zygmunta Starego do trzeciego rozbioru Polski). Lwów, Warsaw, Krakow: Wydawnictwo Zakładu Narodowego Imienia Ossolińskich, 1925. Bałaban, Majer. Żydzi lwowscy na przełomie XVI i XVII wieku. Lwów: Nakładem Księgarni H. Altenberga, 1909. Berson, Jan Otmar. Minus Moskwa: Wołga, Kaukaz, Krym. Warsaw: Rój, 1935. Brafman, Jakov. Kniga Kagala. Materialy dlja izučenija evrejskogo byta. Vilna: Pečatnja Vilenskago Gubernskago pravlenija, 1869. Butowd-Andrzeykowicz, Michał. Szkice Kaukazu, vol. 1. Warsaw: W Drukarni Jana Psurskiego, 1859. David, I. Istorija evreev na Kavkaze, vol. 2. Tel Aviv: Cavcasioni, 1989. Dmowski, Roman. Separatyzm Żydów i jego źródła. Warsaw: Nakładem Gazety Warszawskiej, 1909. Eichwald, Eduard von. Reise auf dem Caspischen Meere und in den Caucasus, vol. 1. Stuttgart, Tübingen: Verlag der J.G. Cottaʼschen Buchhandlung, 1834. Hempel, Friedrich Ferdinand, and Christian Gottfried Heinrich Geissler. Abbildung und Beschreibung der Völkerstämme und Völker unter des russischen Kaisers Alexander menschenfreundlichen Regierung oder Charakter dieser Völker: aus der Lage und Beschaffenheit ihrer Wohnplätze entwickelt und in ihren Sitten, Gebräuchen und Beschäftigungen nach den angegebenen Werken der in- und ausländischen Literatur. Leipzig: Industrie Comptoir, 1803. Hertz, Aleksander. Żydzi w kulturze polskiej. Wstęp Czesław Miłosz. Warsaw: Biblioteka Więzi, 2014. Hundert, Gershon. “An Advantage to Peculiarity? The Case of the Polish Commonwealth.” AJS Review 6 (1981): 21 – 38. Jeske-Choiński, Teodor. Historja Żydów w Polsce. Warsaw: Kasa Przezorności i Pomocy Warszawskich Pomocników Księgarskich, 1919. Katz, Jacob. “A State within a State: the History of an Anti-Semitic Slogan.” In idem, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History, 47 – 76. Westmead, Farnbourough: Gregg, 1972. Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy. Wspomnienia Polesia, Wołynia i Litwy, vol. 1. Wilno: Nakład Druk. T. Glücksberga, 1840. Leist, Arthur. Georgien: Natur, Sitten und Bewohner. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Friedrich, 1885.

 Berson, Minus Moskwa, 129.

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Leist, Artur. Szkice z Gruzyi. Warsaw: Nakładem księgarni A. Gruszeckiego, 1885. Lepecki, Mieczysław. Sowiecki Kaukaz: podróż do Gruzji, Armenii i Azerbejdżanu. Warsaw: Bibljoteka Polska, 1935. Miczyński, Sebastian. Zwierciadło Korony Polskiey. Vrazy ćięzkie, y vtrapienia wielkié, ktore ponośi od Zydow. Krakow: W Drukarney Macieia Jedrzeiowczyka, 1618. Naimark, Norman M. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2001. Ratuld-Rakowska, Maria. Podróż Polki do Persyi. Z przedmową T. Jaroszyńskiego. Część I. Warsaw: Drukarnia Aleksandra T. Jezierskiego, 1904. Rohoziński, Jerzy. “Wojna ormiańsko-tatarska 1905 roku. Historyczna wrogość: mity i fakty.” In Dylematy kaukaskie. Problemy narodowościowe i migracyjne, edited by Maciej Ząbek in cooperation with Patrycja Prześlakiewicz, and Iwona Kaliszewska. Warsaw: DiG, 2010. Schiper, Ignacy. Dzieje handlu żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich. Warsaw: Nakładem Centrali Związku Kupców w Warszawie, 1937. Sierakowski, Adam. Listy z podróży. Podróż na Krym, Kaukaz i do Tunisu. Warsaw: Drukarnia L. Bogusławskiego, 1914. Starowolski, Szymon. Prawdziwe obiáśnienie braterskiego napomnienia ad disidentes in religione. Krakow, 1648. Streit, Leon. Ormianie a Żydzi w Stanisławowie w XVII i XVIII wieku (szkic historyczny). Stanisławów: Nakładem Koła Naukowego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Uniwersytetu Hebrajskiego w Jerozolimie Oddział w Stanisławowie, 1936. Suny, Ronald Grigor. Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993. Wyganowski, Tadeusz. Wspomnienia z Kaukazu. Warsaw: Druk E. Skowrońskiego, 1907. Żydowski, Jędrzej[?]. Zydzi czyli konieczna potrzeba reformowania Zydow w kraiach Rzeczypospolitey Polskiey przez Obywatela bezimiennego. Warsaw: Nakładem i Drukiem Michała Grölla, 1785.

Stefan Hofmann/Theresa Eisele

“Natural Born Actors” on the Screen: Das alte Gesetz (1923) and the Theatricality of the Modern Jewish Experience On October 29, 1923, the silent film Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) celebrated its premiere in Berlin in the midst of political unrest and a severe economic crisis. The monetary hyperinflation in Germany had reached its peak during the fall of the year, causing numerous bankruptcies and impoverishing millions of people who lost their entire savings. Against this background, the screening of Das alte Gesetz took place at the elegant Marmorhaus cinema, which had received the name due to its marble façade. Famous for its modernist decorations, the cinema was located in the heart of the Kurfürstendamm boulevard, which had recently become Berlin’s main site for entertainment, shopping, and bourgeois self-presentation.¹ The content of the film seemed equally paradoxical at first glance, as it provided a sympathetic portrayal of Jewish life at a time when antisemitic propaganda and violence skyrocketed. Only seven days after the premiere the attacks on the so-called “Ostjuden” – Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, who had been drawn to the city in ever larger numbers since 1914 – reached new heights when several thousand people looted the predominantly Jewish Scheunenviertel neighborhood, chasing and beating everyone they perceived as Jewish.² Only four days later Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff tried to seize power with their Munich Putsch. In this tumultuous situation Das alte Gesetz depicted the history of Jewish acculturation through the lens of a young man’s journey from East to West. Das alte Gesetz is set in the middle of the nineteenth century and tells the story of Baruch (Ernst Deutsch), a young Jew from a traditional Eastern European shtetl, who wants to become an actor against the will of his father. He sneaks out of his parent’s house, goes out into the world, and joins a traveling theatre troupe, where he is discovered by the Archduchess of Austria, Elisabeth Theresia

 Maren Dorner, “Siegbert Goldschmidt und andere Kinounternehmer: Die Palastherren,” in Pioniere in Celluloid. Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, ed. Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Henschel, 2004), 93 – 99, here 95 – 97.  David Clay Large, “‘Out with the Ostjuden’. The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923,” in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Werner Bergmann, Christhard Hoffmann, and Helmuth Walser Schmidt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 123 – 40. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-008

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(Henny Porten). The Archduchess falls in love with Baruch and enables him to have a career at the famous Vienna Burgtheater. However, in order to follow his dream, Baruch needs to undergo a thorough transformation, adopt a bourgeois habitus, and transgress religious law.³ Das alte Gesetz was enthusiastically received by audiences as well as by critics. As a collaboration of famous Jewish director Ewald André Dupont (1891– 1956), Henny Porten (1890 – 1960) – the first female star of early German cinema –, and celebrated Jewish theatre actor Ernst Deutsch (1890 – 1969), the film had already attracted attention during its production. Several newspapers had followed its shooting, reporting details of Dupont’s artistic direction, and arousing interest in the topic.⁴ When the film premiered in October 1923 under the patronage of the mayor of Berlin, the Marmorhaus cinema was packed with people and their entrance fee was donated to the municipal charity kitchen. Critics acknowledged the proficiency of the actors, the work of the artistic team and technical staff. Four months later, in February 1924, the opening of the film in Vienna was advertised as the “grand premiere” of the week.⁵ Overall, Das alte Gesetz turned out to become the most successful film with an explicitly Jewish theme to be shot in Weimar Germany.⁶ In recent years, several scholars have directed attention to Das alte Gesetz, which led to a de novo restoration that premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2018, introducing the silent drama with restored intertitles to a wider public.⁷ Scholarship on E.A. Dupont has placed the film in the context of his cinematic oeuvre, Weimar Zeitgeist, and its filmic tendencies. Additionally, researchers of Weimar Film and the Jewish experience repeatedly linked Das alte Gesetz to questions of Jewish acculturation, connecting it to various other contemporary films with Jewish themes.⁸ Cynthia Walk and Daniel Wildmann com-

 Das alte Gesetz, dir. E.A. Dupont, DVD (Deutsche Kinemathek/Arte Germany, 2018), 135 mins.  See e. g. Friedrich Kroner, “Zwei Meter Film,” Prager Tagblatt, September 8, 1923, 22.  See e. g. Die Stunde, March 1, 1924, 9.  Irene Stratenwerth, “Ostjüdische Lebenswelten im Grossstadt-Kino: Um 1920 avanciert das Schtetl zur Filmkulisse,” in Pioniere in Celluloid, 221– 45, here 230.  Cynthia Walk initiated the restoration of the film in 2018, see Cynthia Walk, “‘Filmrettung: Save the Past for the Future!’ Film Restoration and Jewishness in German and Austrian Silent Cinema,” in Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema, ed. Valerie Weinstein and Barbara Hales (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2021), 327– 37.  See e. g. Jürgen Bretschneider, ed., Ewald André Dupont. Autor und Regisseur (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1992); Maren Dorner, “Ewald A. Dupont: Ein Freund tadelloser Mädchenbeine,” in Pioniere in Celluloid, 289 – 91; Stratenwerth, “Ostjüdische Lebenswelten im Grossstadt-Kino”; Valerie Weinstein, “Dissolving Boundaries: Assimilation and Allosemitism in E. A. Dupont’s ‘Das alte Gesetz’ (1923) and Veit Harlan’s ‘Jud Süss’ (1940),” The German Quarterly 78, no. 4

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bined these perspectives with analyses of the romantic feelings the Archduchess develops for Baruch.⁹ While all these articles touch upon acculturation as a central motive, Darcy Buerkle and Ofer Ashkenazi highlighted the relation of the film to the habitual and emotional dimensions of Jewish acculturation in the German-speaking realm.¹⁰ Building upon this scholarly work, this article proposes a reading of Das alte Gesetz which combines Jewish history with theatre theory and historiography. Therefore, it analyzes the film in the context of the theatricality of the Jewish experience in modern times. This paradigm, which has been suggested by Steven E. Aschheim, focuses on both the Jewish engagement with theatre and the association of Jewish life with theatre in a broad sense.¹¹ Investigating the performative dimensions of Jewish acculturation and the debates about them, the presentation of Jews on stage and the reactions of audiences, as well as the engagement of Jews in all areas of theatre-production, the study of theatricality illuminates central aspects of the diasporic Jewish existence. This article examines Das alte Gesetz as an outstanding visual document of this theatricality of the Jewish experience. It reads the film as a paradigmatic story of the performative dimension of acculturation and examines its plot as a teleological historiography of theatre. Moreover, this study situates Das alte Gesetz in the context of debates about an alleged affinity of Jews to acting, which were central to the self-perception of Jews in the German-speaking sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

(2005): 496 – 516; S.S. Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910 – 1933 (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2007), 21– 28.  Cynthia Walk, “Romeo with Sidelocks. Jewish-Gentile Romance in E. A. Dupont’s ‘Das alte Gesetz’ (1923) and Other Early Weimar Assimilation Films,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian Rogowski (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 84– 101; Daniel Wildmann, “Desire, Excess, and Integration. Orientalist Fantasies, Moral Sentiments, and the Place of Jews in German Society as Portrayed in Films of the Weimar Republic,” in Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler (Berlin, Munich, Boston: de Gruyter, 2015), 137– 55.  Darcy Buerkle, “Caught in the Act. Norbert Elias, emotion and The Ancient Law,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 83 – 102; Ofer Ashkenazi, “Jewish Displacement and Simulation in the German Films of E. A. Dupont,” in Space and Spaciality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), 88 – 102; Ofer Ashkenazi, Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 40 – 71.  For the concept of theatricality of the Jewish experience see Steven E. Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience,” in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, ed. Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 21– 38.

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1 The Theatre of Acculturation With the story of a young Jew from Eastern Europe who leaves the shtetl in order to become an actor, Das alte Gesetz took up a recurring theme in debates about Jewish acculturation. In the film, Baruch’s path is told as a story of a thorough transformation of his appearance, behavior, and manners. In order to leave the traditional existence in the Eastern European shtetl behind and become an actor at the famous Burgtheater, he needs to adopt a bourgeois habitus. This transformation is condensed in his sidelocks as visual marker of his Jewishness. In the staging of Romeo and Juliet by the traveling theatre troupe, he hides his sidelocks at first. When he removes his hat towards the end of the performance, however, they are revealed. The audience responds with laughter and scoffs at the “Romeo with sidelocks.” After his arrival at the Burgtheater, Baruch is given new clothes and with putting them on, he changes his movements, gestures, and behavior, emulating a bourgeois habitus. As a final step in his transformation, he cuts his sidelocks in front of a mirror, shedding the last visual marker of his Jewishness. This external transformation goes along with Baruch’s growing success on stage. The more he adopts a bourgeois appearance and norms of behavior, the more successful he is as an actor.¹² With the transformation of his habitus, Baruch epitomizes the performative dimension of the process of acculturation, which shaped the experience of the majority of German Jewry and of many Jews in the Habsburg Empire from the late eighteenth century onwards. Beginning in the 1780s, both the Haskalah and the debates about Jewish emancipation called for a transformation of the Jews through education and self-formation (Bildung). In order to end their separation from the society surrounding them, they were to learn German, acquire secular knowledge, and adopt the manners, behavior, and values of the emerging educated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbürgertum).¹³ In the debates about the legal status of the Jews, their transformation became a prerequisite for legal equality.¹⁴ The pressures to acculturate and the initiatives of the Maskilim ushered in a fundamental change among the Jews of the German-speaking realm: throughout the nineteenth century, an increasing number of them set out to transform their habitus and acquire Bildung, seeking to conform to the norms of behavior of the edu-

 See also Ashkenazi, “Jewish Displacement,” 94.  Zohar Shavit, “Train Up a Child: On the Maskilic Attempt to Change the Habitus of Jewish Children and Young Adults,” Journal of Jewish Education 82, no. 1 (2016): 28 – 53.  David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry. 1780 – 1840 (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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cated bourgeoisie. However, facing acculturation and the debates about Jewish emancipation, anti-Jewish ideologues started to claim that the Jews were unable to change, replacing the religious antagonism with the assertion of an unchangeable “nature” or “national character” of the Jews.¹⁵ Acculturating Jews found themselves therefore in a deeply ambivalent situation between the demands to transform themselves on the one hand and claims about their alleged unchanging nature on the other. As their acceptance within the general society was contingent upon the transformation of their habitus in order to resemble the ideal of the Bildungsbürger, they found themselves in a theatre-like situation in which they felt their social performance to be under special scrutiny.¹⁶ By the turn of the century the majority of the Jews in the German-speaking sphere had undergone the process of acculturation, which proved to be a key for their social mobility: a large share of them moved to big cities and entered the social strata of the Bildungsbürgertum. ¹⁷ This development was taken up by Das alte Gesetz. For Baruch the career as an actor is also a way of climbing the social ladder. When he learns for the first time about the Vienna Burgtheater, he is at once enamored with the description of the theatre as a “palace,” where the one who receives the most applause is rewarded with “medals and titles.” As he plans on leaving his shtetl, he hopes to become “famous and rich.” When he finally turns into an actor of the Burgtheater, he has accomplished this goal, living in a fancy house with a servant and moving within genteel circles of the Viennese high society. Thereby, his development epitomizes the dream to rise from rags to riches. With the successful acculturation the Jews shed visible markers of Jewish belonging. Through their adaptation to the image of the Bildungsbürger, they became invisible as Jews in everyday life. Against this background, anti-Jewish writings in the second half of the nineteenth century increasingly focused on the claim of an internal difference of the Jews. Their adoption of a bourgeois habitus was denounced as a mere imitation. With the emergence of full-blown antisemitism in the 1870s, the claim that Jews would only mimic their surrounding population in order to deceive, rule, and ultimately destroy it from within became a central aspect of anti-Jewish thought.¹⁸

 Jacob Katz, Vom Vorurteil bis zur Vernichtung: Der Antisemitismus 1700 – 1933 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), 55 – 67.  Aschheim, “Reflections on Theatricality.”  Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004).  Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800 – 1923 (Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982),

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However, the performative aspect of Jewish acculturation was not only an issue among outspoken antisemites. Around 1900 the rapid growth of the capitals Berlin and Vienna into metropolises where diverse populations encountered each other and the increasing possibilities of social mobility led to a heightened interest in role play, public appearance, and social performance in general. Theatre thus became a model of thinking about society.¹⁹ In this context, the transformation of the Jews was increasingly thought about in terms of theatre. An early but influential analogy between acculturation and theatre was drawn by Friedrich Nietzsche. In his unique way of thinking he characterized imitation and acting in everyday life as modes of behavior of the weak and constitutive for democracy, which he despised.²⁰ In his aphorism Vom Probleme des Schauspielers (The Problem of the Actor, 1882) he described the actor as the ideal type of his time. He asserted that under pressure and compulsion an inclination to acting arose, which he located especially among Jews: “As regards the Jews, however, the adaptable people par excellence, we should […] expect to see among them a world-wide historical institution at the very first, for the rearing of actors, a proper breeding-place for actors; and in fact the question is very pertinent just now: what good actor at present is not – a Jew?”²¹ Even though Nietzsche’s deliberations about the figure of the actor in the theatre of everyday life included anti-Jewish sentiments, as he alleged in the same aphorism that the Jews would rule the European press, he did not go so far as to accuse only Jews of acting. Rather, he regarded the inclination to act as a more general mode of behavior of his time, which he also found among the “lower class of the people,” diplomats, and women.²² Moreover, Nietzsche implicitly referred to the pressures of acculturation that caused the Jews to adapt to their surroundings, highlighting the performative dimension of their transformation. The parallelization of the process of acculturation with acting was frequently taken up after the 1880s and became a popular figure of thought. Moreover, it was oftentimes connected to Jews from Eastern Europe, who started to migrate 62– 79; Dan Diner, “Conspiracy,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, ed. Dan Diner on behalf of the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, vol. 2 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2019), 90 – 98.  Peter W. Marx, Ein theatralisches Zeitalter: Bürgerliche Selbstinszenierungen um 1900 (Tübingen: Francke, 2008).  Kyung-Ho Cha, “Psychologie als Überlebensstrategie: Die Evolution der Demokratie nach Friedrich Nietzsche,” ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 2 (2011): 121– 37.  Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Problem of the Actor,” in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, vol. 10: The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (Edinburgh, London: T. N. Foulis, 1910), 318 – 20, here 319, emphases in the original.  Ibid., 318 – 19.

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into western metropolises – especially Berlin and Vienna – in growing numbers in the 1880s. As they were clearly identifiable as Jews by their Yiddish language, their appearance, and their behavior, the Jews of Eastern Europe were seen by antisemites as visual evidence of the true nature of every Jew, a nature which acculturated Jews only disguised. For the Jews in Germany and Austria, the encounter with their unacculturated brethren from the East prompted them to question their own self-understanding. The perceived backwardness of the Jews from Eastern Europe seemed, on the one hand, to endanger the integration of the German and Austrian Jews, which led them to repudiate the “Ostjuden.” On the other hand, they served as a mirror for the process of acculturation, which the Jews in the German-speaking sphere had just undergone.²³ Karl Emil Franzos (1848 – 1904), one of the most influential German-Jewish writers dealing with the Jews of Eastern Europe, made the parallelization of acculturation and acting the cornerstone of one of his most remarkable novels. Franzos himself had been born in the Galician town of Czortkow (today Chortkiv, Ukraine), where he – as a child of an acculturated and German-speaking family – felt distanced from both the local Jews and from the gentile population. In his novellas, travelogues, and novels he described the life and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe as backward, contrasting it with German culture and Bildung. ²⁴ With his novel Der Pojaz (The Clown), he created an archetypical Bildungsroman about a young Jew from an Eastern European shtetl who aspires to become a German actor, which may have served as a model for Das alte Gesetz. ²⁵ The main character of Der Pojaz, Sender Glatteis, is an outsider in a fictitious shtetl in Galicia, but sticks out through his ability to impersonate other people. A visit to a theatre in Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine) turns into a life-changing experience. Even though Sender is unable to behave in the theatre as expected from a member of the audience, he immediately knows that all he wants in his life is to become an actor. The director of the theatre, an acculturated Prus-

 Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers; Steven E. Aschheim, “Reflection, Projection, Distortion: The ‘Eastern Jews’ in German-Jewish Culture,” Osteuropa 58, no. 8/10 (2008): 61– 74.  Margarita Pazi, “Karl Emil Franzos’ Assimilationsvorstellung und Assimilationserfahrung,” in Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Zweiter Teil, ed. Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Tübingen: de Gruyter, 1989), 218 – 33; Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 27– 31.  Karl Emil Franzos, Der Pojaz: Eine Geschichte aus dem Osten (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1994). First published 1905. A reviewer of the film premiere noted the common motive of the book and the film: M.S., “Film-Kritik. Das alte Gesetz. Marmorhaus,” Film-Kurier, October 30, 1923, 1.

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sian Jew, immediately recognizes Sender’s talent for the stage. However, in order to become an actor, Sender first has to learn German and acquire Bildung. Against the prohibitions of his orthodox community he studies German in the library of an abandoned monastery, gets acquainted with canonical plays, and later learns from various teachers. As he finally receives the invitation to join the troupe, he flees his shtetl, throws away his caftan, and shaves his sidelocks in order to complete his transformation. However, his stepmother persuades him to return home. Sick with tuberculosis that he contracted studying in the monastery, Sender is now allowed to attend a performance of his idol, the Jewish actor Bogumil Dawison.²⁶ Shortly after, he dies from his illness. In this story, Franzos connected theatre and Bildung as avenues to transform unacculturated Jews from Eastern Europe according to the model of German Jews, highlighting the theatrical nature of acculturation.²⁷ Like Baruch in Das alte Gesetz, Sender needs to refine his behavior, manners, and gestures. Moreover, both protagonists share the same innate talent for acting. Theatre thereby becomes a model for acculturation.

2 A Journey through Theatre Historiography The acculturation of Baruch not only follows topoi about social mobility and theatre, but it also adheres to a teleological tradition of theatre historiography that was hegemonic in the long nineteenth century. Driven by his longing for Vienna and his dream to become an actor, Baruch sets out on a historiographical journey. On his way westwards, he joins a traveling theatre troupe, leaves his religious traditions behind and meets – due to the advocacy of the Archduchess – Heinrich Laube, the director of the Burgtheater in Vienna, where he finally stars as Hamlet. Step by step, he develops his artistic personality with the help of a heterogeneous set of theatre practices from ritual Purimshpil to a bourgeois theatre stage. His transformation is intimately bound to his process of acculturation on the one hand and to his wanderings that mirror theatre historiography on the other. In this manner, Das alte Gesetz connects the “civic improvement of the

 Both Der Pojaz and Das alte Gesetz based their plots loosely on the life and career of the Jewish actor Bogumil Dawison (1818 – 1872).  Katharina Krčal, “‘[D]as ist ein Stück für Galizien’. Karl Emil Franzos’ Roman Der Pojaz im Spannungsfeld zeitgenössischer Theaterkulturen,” Chilufim. Zeitschrift für Jüdische Kulturgeschichte 13 (2012): 31– 50.

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Jews”²⁸ with the improvement of European theatre, conceptualizing both as formative and moral projects. The film, thus, expands on a reformed theatre historiography (Reformtheaterhistoriographie, Stefan Hulfeld) that was developed from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards and enforced with vehemence in the nineteenth century. Since the Enlightenment, many authors and intellectuals – all of them more theatre theorists than practitioners – aimed at a professional, institutionalized theatre art. They worked on the conceptualization of theatre as a civic project that was linked to a literary canon and a veristic style of acting and thus also corresponded anthropologically and morally to the ideals of the emerging bourgeoisie. As they strove for an “improvement” of theatre, their ideas were directed towards the future, committed to notions of progress, and focused on excluding or modifying anything that did not fit into bourgeois concepts of theatre, acting, and the human body.²⁹ According to their ideas, theatre would serve as a “moral institution,”³⁰ where actors performed according to the requirements of a bourgeois constitution of subjectivity. To this end, in the course of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, a whole range of theatre histories emerged that were sorted by region, language, nation or genre.³¹ Slightly heterogeneous in their subjects, these stories shared similar topoi, a common narrative structure, and one single goal: to found and promote a bourgeois national theatre with the help of historiography. One of the many eager intellectuals working on a new, theoretically sound understanding of theatre as a bourgeois and national institution was Eduard Devrient (1801– 1877). Born into the Devrient theatre family, he started his multivolume Geschichte der Deutschen Schauspielkunst (History of the German Dramatic Arts) in 1848, at last completing it two and a half decades later, in 1874. Under the impression of the failed Revolution of 1848/1849, he designed a theatre history that aimed directly at a bourgeois national theatre. In five volumes, he expounded his view on theatre, its development out of worship and ritual,  Prominently argued in 1781 by Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. Kritische und kommentierte Studienausgabe, ed. Wolf Christoph Seifert (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015). First published 1781.  Gerda Baumbach, Schauspieler: Historische Anthropologie des Akteurs, vol. 1: Schauspielstile (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012).  In his public lecture, Die Schaubühne als seine moralische Anstalt betrachtet (Mannheim, 1784), Friedrich Schiller, for example, called for such a moral institution.  See Stefan Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung als kulturelle Praxis: Wie Wissen über Theater entsteht (Zurich: Chronos, 2007), 87. Starting with Pietro Napoli Signorelli’s Storia critica de’ teatri antichi e moderni (Naples, 1777), Hulfeld analyzes how various historical works in Europe show a similar design in order to “refine” theatre as a national and moral institution.

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and suggested that it rose from the “primitiveness” of medieval theatre troupes to a national theatre with educational value.³² Building upon the achievements of his Enlightenment predecessors, Devrient focused on the national consolidation of theatre and, therefore, designed a linear historical account for the bourgeois stage.³³ In his work he outlined a coherent narrative, claiming a more or less continuous improvement of European theatre and acting. This idea also structured the film Das alte Gesetz. Indeed, Baruch’s adventures can be read as a stroll through the chapters of Devrient’s theatre teleology, while, actually, they follow a broader historiographical concept for which Devrient’s work can serve as merely one, yet very influential example. Both Dupont and Devrient take theatre as cultural practice in a religious or ritual context as their starting point. In a similar way as Baruch discovers his fascination with theatre through the festive plays during Purim, Devrient finds the “origin” of his teleology in religious worship. Starting from the Middle Ages, Devrient describes an “instinct for the theatrical arts” that mankind would possess by nature.³⁴ In a similar way, Baruch follows his “instinct,” despite the orthodox disdain for theatre. His longing to become an actor initiates a linear development that commences at Purim and leads him from a traveling theatre troupe to one of the most illustrious stages of bourgeoise theatre. When Baruch meets the traveling troupe on his way through the Habsburg provinces, he reaches the intermediate station of his “grand tour.” Devrient similarly unfolds this grand historiographical tour arguing that the actors of traveling theatre troupes further “developed” the dramatic arts, while he nonetheless insists on their inferiority. In his chapter about the “General Barbarization of Comedian Troupes,” Devrient bandied about their alleged repugnant and miserable lives, recognizing their artistic value only as a necessary step towards a greater goal. He accused them of basing their art on puppets, conjuring tricks, and juggling and refused to pay them any respect. Among others, he criticized the Viennese Stranitzky troupe for aiming towards the low tastes of the audiences.³⁵ Addressing their alleged immorality, he finally expressed his understanding for the exclusion of such actors by bourgeois society.³⁶ In a similar way, Dupont presents the members of the traveling troupe, whom Baruch joins for a time, as standing outside the bourgeois society. Baruch meets them – socially deprived and spatially set aside – in a rural area crossing     

See ibid., esp. 252– 55. Ibid., 254. Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, vol. 1 (Berlin: Elsner, 1905), 3 – 5. Ibid., 198 and 187. Ibid., 216 – 17.

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through the Habsburg provinces. Traveling as a loose community, their vehicles, clothing, and appearance hint at an unstable existence and a semi-professional activity; film critics even called them “people from the fleapit.”³⁷ In various scenes, the film illustrates that the group members lack a bourgeois habitus, have no (table) manners, and practice prostitution.³⁸ As a group of aristocrats attends one of their shows during their summer retreat, they are utterly amused both by the troupe’s amateurism and by Baruch playing the Shakespearean Romeo with sidelocks. However, as the film clarifies at the very beginning, the traveling theatre troupe is not Baruch’s final destination, but only a necessary intermediate station on his way to professionalization.³⁹ While the troupe is situated outside of the society it plays for, Baruch’s educational theatre journey extends into the center of nineteenth century bourgeois society and ends in an institutional theatre in the very heart of the imperial capital. The linear logic of his journey is supported by the structure of the film, which clearly separates the worlds of the shtetl, the traveling theatre troupe, and the bourgeois stage in Vienna. In this aspect it resembles Devrient’s theatre history, where the Commedia troupes are likewise treated only as an intermediate step.⁴⁰ While Baruch’s destination is the Viennese stage, Devrient describes the Mannheim national theatre as the first bloom of the newly reformed theatre based on bourgeois artistic ideals. Devrient was by far not the first and only one who tried to achieve a reformed theatre as a national and foremost theoretical project.⁴¹ His writings, however, were politically ambitious, partly commissioned by the Prussian Minis-

 Lichtbildbühne, November 3, 1923, 8.  See also Wildmann, Desire, Excess, and Integration, 147.  Both the film and Devrient’s historical description suggest a linear hierarchy within the theatre troupes, as well. Referring to August Wilhelm Iffland, Devrient describes the principle of “anciennity.” According to this principle, newcomers can only advance through years of service within the group’s hierarchy – for this reason, the protagonist Baruch first works as a service boy before he is allowed to step onto the stage. See e. g. Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, 199.  Both the subtitles of the film and the program booklet for the Berlin premiere clearly separated the following three spheres: the characters of the ghetto, the characters of the comedy, and the characters of Vienna at that time. See e. g. the program booklet for the film premiere in Berlin, 1923, Deutsche Kinemathek, n.p.  Around the same time that Devrient began his historiographical project, for example, the author Robert Eduard Prutz (1816 – 1872) published his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (1847). See Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung, 246 – 52.

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try of Culture, and widely noticed.⁴² When Devrient died in 1877, critics remembered him for his “dignified academic Bildung” and his endeavor to “improve” the dramatic arts “to the highest level.” His History was honored as “the first historical presentation of the development of the German dramatic arts.”⁴³ Until the late twentieth century it underwent several editions and new versions. In 1905 Hans Devrient republished his father’s oeuvre, which hitherto had reflected and shaped a teleological understanding of theatre history. Likewise at the fin de siècle, Fabius Schach (1868 – 1930) published an essay about the essence and history of Jewish theatre, focusing especially on the situation of Yiddish theatre in Eastern Europe (Das juedische Theater, sein Wesen und seine Geschichte, 1901). As an early member of the Zionist movement in Germany, Schach had shaped the Basel Program of the Zionist Organization and directed his attention towards the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Consequently, his article on theatre appeared in the magazine Ost und West (East and West), which saw it as its mission to bridge the gap between Jews from Eastern Europe and acculturated Jews in the German-speaking realm. Thereby, it was one of the most significant outlets of the Jewish Renaissance which emerged around 1900 in reaction to the pressure to assimilate and to rising antisemitism.⁴⁴ In his essay, Schach narrated an unfinished history of Jewish theatre and employed the same topoi that theatre theorists had shaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He located the beginnings of Jewish theatre in the early Middle Ages, in the “ghetto,” as well as in the “Jewish carnival” during Purim and then went on to give critical appreciation to Abraham Goldfaden as the pioneer of Yiddish theatre. Although Goldfaden would have promoted professional acting, Schach argued that his plays were “extremely naïve” and “clumsy,” his characters “unnatural,” the plot “improbable”: “the satirical jokes are so spicy that only a stomach of a savage can digest them.”⁴⁵ Summing up the achievements of Yiddish theatre in the nineteenth century with dissatisfaction, Schach expressed his concern about the lack of aesthetic and artistic education among the Jews. He therefore called for a “real Jewish drama of a higher genre.” A professional Jewish theatre of high quality, he hoped, would aid both nation-

 In his publication for the Ministry of Culture, Das Nationaltheater des Neuen Deutschland (1849), Devrient positioned theatre as a fundamental institution for the Prussian state. See e. g. Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung, 246.  Anonymous, “Eduard Devrient,” Signale für die musikalische Welt 4, no. 53 (1877): 835 – 36.  Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).  Fabius Schach, “Das juedische Theater, sein Wesen und seine Geschichte,” Ost und West 5 (May 1901): 348 – 51.

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building and education. Aiming in particular at the Jews of Eastern Europe, Schach stated: “A good national theatre, a real people’s stage would be a redeeming act.”⁴⁶ Schach based his historical perspective upon the nineteenth century national theatre historiographies when he characterized Yiddish theatre in a pejorative way as shabby variety entertainment (“Tingeltangel”) and advocated for its improvement via the detour of a literary canon.⁴⁷ His argument was similar to Devrient’s, who had claimed that the Jews had not developed a “truly dramatic art” during the early modern period.⁴⁸ However, by the time Schach published his essay, the reformed historiographies were already being challenged and transformed. Alternative accounts of European theatre appeared, while the heterogeneous movements of the avant-garde questioned concepts of nineteenth century thought, such as the adherence to a linear history, a veristic habitus, or a bourgeois literary canon. At the same time, theatre became a field of nationalist and antisemitic interventions which sought to ban Jews from culture and society. Against this background, many Zionists like Schach adopted bourgeois concepts in order to strengthen Jewish theatrical arts in national terms. Like Schach’s essay, the film Das alte Gesetz evinces how powerful those theatre historiographies of the long nineteenth century still were at a time when their presuppositions had long been up for debate. Arnold Zweig, who was influenced by the Jewish Renaissance, also followed this linear conception. In his essay Juden auf der deutschen Bühne (The Jews on the German Stage, 1928), he combined considerations about the relationship of Jews to theatre in general with observations about exemplary actors, playwrights, and entrepreneurs in German-speaking countries. Although he did not organize his theatre history in strict chronological order, he sketched a development from a “primordial instinct” of human beings to playful transformation via ritual and worship, from which ancient drama evolved. Thereby, he laid out a linear development that led to a bourgeois national stage.⁴⁹ Whereas Schach was drafting a Jewish theatre history, Zweig paid tribute to Jewish theatre artists on German stages and, in this manner, tried to situate them within a national history of German theatre.⁵⁰ With this approach he was closer to the narrative that Dupont had unfolded in his film Das alte Gesetz four years earlier. Dupont, Schach, and Zweig were all tied into those teleological historiographies in their     

Ibid., 358. Ibid., 352. Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, 5. See e. g. Arnold Zweig, Juden auf der deutschen Bühne (Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1928), 138. Ibid., 27– 28.

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own way and, in doing so, they took part in a pan-European power discourse from which marginalized traditions and theatre practices outside the European bourgeoisie were excluded or domesticated. While in the course of the nineteenth century the writings of theatre theorists culminated in a highly “competitive exhibition of European civilization” by means of theatre historiography,⁵¹ Jewish intellectuals tried to claim a place for the Jews within this narrative. Therefore, they joined a discourse that routed back to the eighteenth and nineteenth century. E.A. Dupont chose to participate in this discourse in a specific way. His film visualized the improvement of theatre, which reformed theatre histories diachronically extended over a period of five to six hundred years, synchronously interweaving it with the transformation of Baruch, which embodied a process of acculturation that took several generations. In the film Baruch completes his journey within a few months. As he migrates from the Eastern provinces to the capital of the Habsburg Empire, he experiences a bourgeois transformation through the different forms of theatre he is engaged in. As the film concentrates larger developments into a short period, it reveals a blind spot of the reformed theatre histories: despite theatre reformers trying to describe various forms of theatre as a line of succession, these very forms coexisted during the nineteenth century and, thus, enabled the Jewish population to perform different feelings of belonging in heterogeneous ways.

3 Debates about a Jewish Affinity to Theatre In Das alte Gesetz, Baruch’s success as an actor is shown as the result of his brave decisions, hard work, and the protection of the Archduchess. Most importantly, however, it is due to his talent. Already in the Purimshpil in his shtetl, he shows his aptitude for acting. Moreover, both the Archduchess and Heinrich Laube immediately recognize his talent. Baruch, therefore, is presented as a “natural born actor” who succeeds both on the theatrical stage and on the stage of everyday life. With this depiction, Das alte Gesetz took up an image that permeated discussions about the Jewish condition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the 1870s German-Jewish intellectuals increasingly reflected upon the Jewish relationship to theatre and acting. In line with Nietzsche’s notion of Jews as actors par excellence they focused on performative aspects of acculturation,

 Hulfeld, Theatergeschichtsschreibung, 87.

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while also noting the rise of Jewish theatre actresses and actors. The ability to blend in by adopting a bourgeois habitus thereby became the root of a commonly held notion of Jews as “natural born actors.” In the fin de siècle enthusiasm for scientist conceptions of social developments these deliberations were oftentimes combined with ideas from evolutionary biology. This tendency was also pioneered by Nietzsche, who had likened the Jews’ ability to adapt to their surroundings to the zoological phenomenon of mimicry, according to which a defenseless animal imitates the external appearance of an inedible or dangerous animal in order to protect itself from enemies.⁵² Franz Kafka’s Ein Bericht für eine Akademie (A Report to an Academy, 1917) is a case in point for the widespread conflation of the theatricality of acculturation with tropes from evolutionary biology, as the short story about an ape who learned human behavior was read by Max Brod as a “satire on assimilation.”⁵³ In a similar way Jewish intellectuals and politicians as different as Walter Rathenau, Max Nordau, and Theodor Lessing used biological and theatrical figures of thought in reflecting on the performative dimension of acculturation.⁵⁴ At the same time, antisemites took up the image of Jews as “natural born actors” and formulated theories of Jewish mimicry and deception. The conflation of concepts from theatre and evolutionary biology enabled them to connect the image of the “Ostjuden” with the phenomenon of acculturation and form a closed ideology, in which the Jews were invisibly ruling the world through secret machinations. In contrast to the antisemitic projections about the affinity of Jews to acting, Jewish intellectuals used theatre, acting, and imitation as concepts for thinking about the modern Jewish condition.⁵⁵ In the context of the search for authenticity and for allegedly true natures of peoples around 1900, however, they frequently articulated these thoughts through essentialist tropes. Nevertheless, as many German-Jewish intellectuals were pondering the performative dimension of acculturation and the ability of Jews to blend in by using theatrical

 Nietzsche, “The Problem of the Actor.” On the concept of mimicry and its application to human beings see Kyung-Ho Cha, Humanmimikry: Poetik der Evolution (Munich: Fink, 2010).  Andreas B. Kilcher, “Das Theater der Assimilation. Kafka und der jüdische Nietzscheanismus,” in Für Alle und Keinen: Lektüre, Schrift und Leben bei Nietzsche und Kafka, ed. Friedrich Balke, Joseph Vogl, and Benno Wagner (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008), 201.  See Kilcher, “Das Theater der Assimilation”; Hanna Engelmeier, Der Mensch, der Affe: Anthropologie und Darwin-Rezeption in Deutschland 1850 – 1900 (Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 276 – 300.  See also Galili Shahar, theatrum judaicum: Denkspiele im deutsch-jüdischen Diskurs der Moderne (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007).

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figures of thought, other Jewish thinkers began to positively relate to traits among Jews that made them stick out. An exemplary case for this development is Fabius Schach, who himself hailed from the Lithuanian region of the Russian Empire. In his aforementioned article Das Jüdische Theater, sein Wesen und seine Geschichte he used a description of an encounter with a Jew from Eastern Europe in order to exemplify his thesis of a Jewish predilection for acting: The Jew is a fighting nature, he talks and thinks dramatically. One needs only to observe how the Jew of the East speaks. With one gesture he says everything. […] A Russian Jew once wanted to tell me the difference between then and now. He told me only: ‘A mol is giwen a Zeit! Heint is a Zeit?’ I understood him better than if he had given me a long speech. Yes, I would have understood him through his facial expressions if he had not said a word. No people can speak so characteristically with their eyes and fingers.⁵⁶

For Schach, the expressive gestures and facial expressions of a Jew from Eastern Europe epitomized a Jewish affinity to acting. However, precisely these aspects of nonverbal communication had been regarded as peculiar Jewish traits of behavior that had to be curbed in the process of acculturation. Jewish teachers in Germany and Austria during the nineteenth century had went to great lengths to rid their students of these modes of expression in order to instill into them a bourgeois habitus.⁵⁷ Towards the fin de siècle, Schach and many protagonists of the Jewish Renaissance turned against these strict practices of acculturation. Disappointed by persisting antisemitism and estranged from Jewish traditions, they sought to connect with allegedly authentic forms of Jewish life and culture, which they regarded to be alive among Eastern European Jews.⁵⁸ Theatre, body language, and the notion of Jews as “natural born actors” gained central importance in the idealization of the Jews from Eastern Europe by their acculturated brethren. What had been regarded as hindering integration was now being celebrated as a national trait from which Schach started out his teleological theatre history. World War I served as a catalyst for the Jewish Renaissance and its relationship with theatre. During the war German-Jewish intellectuals like Hermann

 Schach, “Das Jüdische Theater,” 347– 48. Transliteration of the Yiddish as in the German original.  See e. g. the Jewish reform educator Anton Rée, who advocated to rid Jewish students from all traces of the Yiddish language and accompanying gestures in his book Die Sprachverhältnisse der heutigen Juden of 1844.  Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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Struck, Sammy Gronemann, and Arnold Zweig got in close contact with Jews in Eastern Europe, while serving in the German army. In Vilna (today Vilnius, Lithuania) they supported the founding and establishment of the Vilna Troupe, a Yiddish theatre company which set out to reform Yiddish theatre and educate its audiences through ambitious forms of theatrical art. In the interwar period the Vilna Troupe repeatedly toured Europe, supported by German-Jewish intellectuals. In Germany and Austria, however, their artful productions were perceived as expressions of an authentic Jewish culture.⁵⁹ Similar disparities between artistic design and perception occurred with the guest performances of the Yiddish Moscow State Jewish Theatre and the Hebrew Habima Theatre in the following years. Moreover, the guest performances of Jewish theatre companies from Eastern Europe became occasions for reflecting about the affinity of Jews to acting. In 1929, during a European tour of Habima, Chaim Nachman Bialik gave a lecture in Berlin on Habima and the relationship of Jews to theatre, discussing the topic with German-Jewish intellectuals like Martin Buber, Arnold Zweig, and Alfred Döblin. The participants in this discussion agreed that the relationship of Jews to theatre had already existed since biblical times. The Jewish affinity to acting was understood in this context as a national trait.⁶⁰ By the 1920s, the relationship of Jews to acting also became a cornerstone of avant-garde theatre. The Jewish experiences of difference, rejection, and non-belonging coincided with the feelings of an entire generation of the overall population. With the expressionist theatre the youth rebelled against their fathers, who represented the authoritative state that had caused the war. Jewish actors and directors identified with this rebellion, as the generation of their parents believed that acculturation would lead to acceptance in society, which was negated by the rise of antisemitism. The expressionist calls for a revolution, in which everyone could take part, attracted many Jewish artists who shaped the development of the new theatrical arts. In expressionist aesthetics, the embodiment of the inner state of characters through ecstatic gestures, grotesque bodies, and shrill voices was oftentimes understood as Jewish, related to the Jews from East-

 Debra Caplan, “Reinkultur in Yiddish: World War I, German-Jewish Encounters, and the Founding of the Vilna Troupe,” Aschkenas 24, no. 2 (2014): 243 – 59.  Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, “‘Geborene Schauspieler’ – Das jüdische Theater des Ostens und die Theaterdebatte im deutschen Judentum,” in Jüdische Selbstwahrnehmung/La prise de conscience de l’identité juive, ed. Hans Otto Horch and Charlotte Wardi (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), 195 – 215.

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ern Europe, and celebrated as an artistic innovation.⁶¹ Representing a quintessential difference and foreignness, Jewish actors like Ernst Deutsch became celebrated models of the theatre of the avant-garde and its politicization. Against this background, expressionist theatre director Leopold Jessner reevaluated the Jewish affinity to acting in 1922, conflating the experience of acculturation with the expressive acting style of his times: “Out of the restlessness of the infinitely erring and the longing to feel at home somewhere, the Jewish person assimilates himself into foreign figures as well as foreign countries and experiences all metamorphoses of a foreign physicality, which he lifts above the natural measure in fanatical ecstasy.”⁶² Arnold Zweig, who was intimately familiar with both the theatre of the avant-garde and forms of Jewish theatre from Eastern Europe, brought these aspects together in his book Die Juden auf der deutschen Bühne, in which he presented the Jewish affinity to theatre as a constitutive aspect for the Jewish experience in modern times.⁶³ Thereby, he described theatre as a cultural and social institution which was central for building communities, rather than a place for Bildung. ⁶⁴ The Jewish relationship to acting was to him an essential component of their identity. He described the Jews as a “Mediterranean people” who were talented orators. Moreover, their real pathos would lie in the gesture stemming from “national elements,” through which their whole body would serve as a “speech-organ.” This gestural nature would cause their predilection for acting and make them “natural born actors.”⁶⁵ Zweig pointed out that this talent would enable Jews to become excellent actors on a large scale. In his book he took up the success of Jewish artists within the theatre of the avant-garde, for example by praising Fritz Kortner for the quintessential “foreignness” he would exhibit in his performances.⁶⁶ Ending with a section on Jewish theatres like the Vilna Troupe and Habima Theatre, Zweig pointed towards a national connotation of his deliberations: the specific talent of Jews for acting could only fully be developed in an explicitly Jewish theatre.  Jeanette R. Malkin, “Transforming in Public. Jewish Actors on the German Expressionist Stage,” in Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, 151– 73; Shahar, theatrum judaicum, 187– 211.  Leopold Jessner, “Das ‘verjudete’ Theater,” in Leopold Jessner, Schriften. Theater der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1979), 61– 62 (first published in C.V.-Zeitung, May 18, 1922, 37).  Zweig, Juden auf der deutschen Bühne.  Peter W. Marx, “Arnold Zweig and the Critics: Reconsidering the Jewish ‘Contribution’ to German Theatre,” in Jews and the making of Modern German Theatre, 116 – 31.  Zweig, Juden auf der deutschen Bühne, 22– 23.  Ibid., 206 – 07.

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Das alte Gesetz combined two main threads of these discussions on the relationship between Jews and acting by parallelizing the history of acculturation with the career of an actor on the one hand and by taking up certain notions of the Jewish Renaissance on the other. The demand for an authentic depiction of the Jews from Eastern Europe was addressed through a meticulous stage design which portrayed the shtetl not as a dirty and dark place from which everybody wants to escape. Additionally, Avrom Morewski (1886 – 1964), an actor of the Vilna Troupe, played the role of the father of Baruch and the rabbi of the shtetl while at the same time serving as a consultant to Dupont to ensure the accuracy of the depiction of Eastern European Jewish life and culture.⁶⁷ Moreover, the film did not show the story of Baruch’s transformation as a one-dimensional success-story of acculturation. Rather, it also pointed out the negative aspects and losses connected to his trajectory of becoming an actor. When departing the shtetl he has to leave behind Esther, the girl he loves, as well as his family. The pains of abandoning his hometown become even more evident in the scene where he cuts his sidelocks, which is preceded by a shot showing the life in his shtetl, thus symbolizing that he is about to cut himself off from his past existence. As he stands in front of the mirror, the audience looks into his serious, gloomy face as Baruch cuts his sidelocks off in one long shot, through which the viewers can identify with the hard decision of the hero and the sacrifices which are connected to it.⁶⁸ Furthermore, Baruch is forced to work on Yom Kippur, as the premiere of the first production in which he is to star in the leading role falls on the highest holiday of Judaism. Finally, Baruch’s choice to become an actor comes with the price of a rift with his father, who considers his son’s new work and lifestyle a transgression. As Baruch visits his hometown for Pessach, his father declares that he is dead to him. Only Esther follows him to Vienna. However, the conflict between Baruch and his father is finally solved, when the rabbi reads Shakespeare and ultimately visits a performance of his son. The perspective of a happy ending symbolizes a possible reconciliation between a Western way of life and Eastern roots, between acculturated Jews and Jews from Eastern Europe.

 Walk, “Romeo with Sidelocks,” 97.  On the identification of the audience with Baruch in this scene see also Buerkle, “Caught in the Act,” 95.

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Conclusion The audiences of Das alte Gesetz met the film with enthusiasm. Critics praised the topic and especially the scenes that depicted Jewish life in Eastern Europe.⁶⁹ Some even hoped for a socio-political appeasement through the film, highlighting the empathetic acting of Ernst Deutsch and the touching fate of the Jews in Eastern Europe.⁷⁰ They referred with nostalgia both to the Habsburg Monarchy and to Jewish life in Eastern Europe before it had been devastated by World War I and its aftermath. At the same time, Das alte Gesetz unfolded a history of acculturation that was directed towards the future. Both perspectives were intimately bound to theatre as a cultural and social practice. Looking back onto the nineteenth century, Das alte Gesetz addressed numerous topoi of the theatricality of the Jewish experience, while at the same time being entangled in these topoi: it showed theatre as a place for Bildung that was designed to refine human beings and thereby offered avenues for Jewish advancement and integration through acculturation. Moreover, the film displays a parallel conception of Jewish acculturation and theatre historiography, which were both committed to the notion of progress. The belief in progress pervades Das alte Gesetz on all levels, as it conflates the history of theatre, migration, and acculturation into a comprehensive narrative of the Jewish experience in the European diaspora. The film, however, also included ruptures in these teleological concepts. Acculturation as well as a bourgeois national theatre are only possible at a price: Baruch has to cut himself off from his family, hometown, and religious practice. In a similar way, the notion of a bourgeois national theatre marginalized earlier theatre traditions. Both processes are linked to the idea of the universality of the bourgeois society. Nevertheless, Das alte Gesetz embraced the notion of progress, epitomized in theatre, and suggested in the happy ending a new vision for a Jewish self-understanding between East and West. In the program booklet of the Berlin premiere, Dupont described Baruch’s journey as a “way to the top,” visualizing this path with metaphors of light and shadow.⁷¹ Some reviewers took up this suggested interpretation. A journalist of the Prager Tagblatt, for example, ad Del., “Der neue Dupont-Film,” Lichtbild-Bühne, November 3, 1923, 8.  See. e. g. ibid.; St. Gr., “Ein Ernst Deutsch-Film,” Prager Tagblatt, November 4, 1923, 22. However, critics also mentioned the difficult political circumstances of the release and orthodox voices called for the ban of the movie poster. See digital booklet of the DVD (Deutsche Kinemathek/ Arte Germany, 2018), n.p.  Berlin program booklet, Deutsche Kinemathek, n.p. For visual strategies to illustrate progress see Ashkenazi, “Jewish Displacement,” 96 – 98; Lotte H. Eisner, Die dämonische Leinwand (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1980), 275 – 94. First published 1952.

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mitted that he could only connect aesthetically to the time of the Habsburg monarchy. Much more, he was enamored with the idea of progress as presented in the film. Focusing on the upheavals of the 1920s and the socially marginalized, he described progress as an urgent political necessity. He even demanded to preserve and strengthen the “faith in progress” in every single person: “Otherwise it would not be bearable at the bottom.”⁷²

Bibliography Anonymous. “Eduard Devrient.” Signale für die musikalische Welt 4, no. 53 (1877): 835 – 36. Aschheim, Steven E. “Reflections on Theatricality, Identity, and the Modern Jewish Experience.” In Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem, 21 – 38. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Aschheim, Steven E. Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800 – 1923. Madison, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Aschheim, Steven E. “Reflection, Projection, Distortion: The ‘Eastern Jews’ in German-Jewish Culture.” Osteuropa 58, no. 8/10 (2008): 61 – 74. Ashkenazi, Ofer. “Jewish Displacement and Simulation in the German Films of E. A. Dupont.” In Space and Spaciality in Modern German-Jewish History, edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, 88 – 102. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2017. Ashkenazi, Ofer. Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Baumbach, Gerda. Schauspieler: Historische Anthropologie des Akteurs, vol. 1: Schauspielstile. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012. Bayerdörfer, Hans-Peter. “‘Geborene Schauspieler’ – Das jüdische Theater des Ostens und die Theaterdebatte im deutschen Judentum.” In Jüdische Selbstwahrnehmung/La prise de conscience de l’identité juive, edited by Hans Otto Horch and Charlotte Wardi, 195 – 215. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997. Brenner, Michael. The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Bretschneider, Jürgen. Ewald André Dupont: Autor und Regisseur. Munich: Edition Text & Kritik, 1992. Buerkle, Darcy. “Caught in the Act: Norbert Elias, Emotion and The Ancient Law.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 8, no. 1 (2009): 83 – 102. Bułat, Mirosława M. “Wilnaer Truppe.” In Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, edited by Dan Diner on behalf of the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, vol. 6, 414 – 17. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2015. Caplan, Debra. “Reinkultur in Yiddish: World War I, German-Jewish Encounters, and the Founding of the Vilna Troupe.” Aschkenas 24, no. 2 (2014): 243 – 59. Cha, Kyung-Ho. Humanmimikry: Poetik der Evolution. Munich: Fink, 2010.

 St. Gr., “Ein Ernst Deutsch-Film,” Prager Tagblatt, November 4, 1923, 22.

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Cha, Kyung-Ho. “Psychologie als Überlebensstrategie. Die Evolution der Demokratie nach Friedrich Nietzsche.” ilinx. Berliner Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft 2 (2011): 121 – 37. Devrient, Eduard. Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst, vol. 1. Berlin: Elsner, 1905. Diner, Dan. “Conspiracy.” In Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, edited by Dan Diner on behalf of the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, vol. 2, 90 – 98. Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2019. Dohm, Christian Wilhelm. Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden: Kritische und kommentierte Studienausgabe, edited by Wolf Christoph Seifert. Göttingen: Wallenstein, 2015 (first published 1781). Dorner, Maren. “Ewald André Dupont: Ein Freund tadelloser Mädchenbeine.” In Pioniere in Celluloid. Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, edited by Irene Stratenwerth and Herbert Simon, 289 – 91. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004. Dorner, Maren. “Siegbert Goldschmidt und andere Kinounternehmer: Die Palastherren.” In Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, edited by Irene Stratenwerth and Hermann Simon, 93 – 99. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004. Eisner, Lotte H. Die dämonische Leinwand. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1980 (first published 1952). Engelmeier, Hanna. Der Mensch, der Affe: Anthropologie und Darwin-Rezeption in Deutschland 1850 – 1900. Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau, 2016. Franzos, Karl Emil. Der Pojaz: Eine Geschichte aus dem Osten. Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1994 (first published 1905). Hulfeld, Stefan. Theatergeschichtsschreibung als kulturelle Praxis: Wie Wissen über Theater entsteht, Zurich: Chronos, 2007. Jessner, Leopold. “Das ‘verjudete’ Theater.” In Leopold Jessner, Schriften. Theater der zwanziger Jahre, 61 – 62. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1979 (first published in C.V.-Zeitung, May 18, 1922, 37). Katz, Jacob. Vom Vorurteil bis zur Vernichtung: Der Antisemitismus 1700 – 1933. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989. Kilcher, Andreas B. “Das Theater der Assimilation. Kafka und der jüdische Nietzscheanismus.” In Für Alle und Keinen: Lektüre, Schrift und Leben bei Nietzsche und Kafka, edited by Friedrich Balke, Joseph Vogl, and Benno Wagner, 201 – 29. Zurich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2008. Krčal, Katharina. “‘[D]as ist ein Stück für Galizien’. Karl Emil Franzos’ Roman Der Pojaz im Spannungsfeld zeitgenössischer Theaterkulturen.” Chilufim. Zeitschrift für Jüdische Kulturgeschichte 13 (2012): 31 – 50. Lässig, Simone. Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Large, David Clay. “‘Out with the Ostjuden’: The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923.” In Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, edited by Werner Bergmann, Christhard Hoffmann, and Helmuth Walser Schmidt, 123 – 40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Malkin, Jeanette R. “Transforming in Public: Jewish Actors on the German Expressionist Stage.” In Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem, 151 – 73. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010.

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Marx, Peter W. “Arnold Zweig and the Critics: Reconsidering the Jewish ‘Contribution’ to German Theatre.” In Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem, 116 – 31. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Marx, Peter W. Ein theatralisches Zeitalter: Bürgerliche Selbstinszenierungen um 1900. Tübingen: Francke, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Problem of the Actor.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Oscar Levy, vol. 10: The Joyful Wisdom, translated by Thomas Common, 318 – 20. Edinburgh, London: T. N. Foulis, 1910. Pazi, Margarita. “Karl Emil Franzos’ Assimilationsvorstellung und Assimilationserfahrung.” In Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Zweiter Teil, edited by Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler, 218 – 33. Tübingen: de Gruyter, 1989. Prawer, S.S. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910 – 1933. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2007. Schach, Fabius. “Das juedische Theater, sein Wesen und seine Geschichte.” Ost und West 5 (May 1901): 347 – 58. Shahar, Galil. theatrum judaicum: Denkspiele im deutsch-jüdischen Diskurs der Moderne. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007. Shavit, Zohar. “Train Up a Child: On the Maskilic Attempt to Change the Habitus of Jewish Children and Young Adults.” Journal of Jewish Education 82, no. 1 (2016): 28 – 53. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry. 1780 – 1840. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Stratenwerth, Irene. “Ostjüdische Lebenswelten im Grossstadt-Kino: Um 1920 avanciert das Schtetl zur Filmkulisse.” In Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt, edited by Irene Stratenwerth and Herbert Simon, 221 – 45. Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004. Walk, Cynthia. “‘Filmrettung: Save the Past for the Future!’ Film Restoration and Jewishness in German and Austrian Silent Cinema.” In Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema, edited by Valerie Weinstein and Barbara Hales, 327 – 37. New York, Oxford: Berghahn 2021. Walk, Cynthia. “Romeo with Sidelocks: Jewish-Gentile Romance in E. A. Dupont’s ‘Das alte Gesetz’ (1923) and Other Early Weimar Assimilation Films.” In The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, edited by Christian Rogowski, 84 – 101. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Weinstein, Valerie. “Dissolving Boundaries: Assimilation and Allosemitism in E. A. Dupont’s ‘Das alte Gesetz’ (1923) and Veit Harlan’s ‘Jud Süss’ (1940).” The German Quarterly 78, no. 4 (2005): 496 – 516. Wildmann, Daniel. “Desire, Excess, and Integration: Orientalist Fantasies, Moral Sentiments, and the Place of Jews in German Society as Portrayed in Films of the Weimar Republic.” In Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, edited by Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler, 137 – 55. Berlin, Munich, Boston: de Gruyter, 2015. Zweig, Arnold. Juden auf der deutschen Bühne. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1928.

AGHET AND SHOAH

Experience – Memory – Self-understanding

Georg Wehse

Between Armenian Praise and Zionist Critique: Henry Morgenthau and the Jews of the Ottoman Empire 1 Introduction At the end of the year 1913, Henry Morgenthau Senior, then 57 years old, appeared for the first time on the diplomatic scenery when he was appointed United States ambassador to Constantinople. The New York businessmen and wellrespected philanthropist of German-Jewish origin entered the diplomatic corps of the United States, took office in the Ottoman capital, and soon found himself confronted with one of the greatest atrocities against humanity in the history of mankind. Upon his return in 1916, his autobiographical testimony, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,¹ published two years later, became the most iconic œuvre in the historiography on the Armenian Genocide. These memoirs, reproduced in Armenian, French, Greek, and Russian transformed the author into an international hero and a model for how to act when facing a genocide.² Morgenthau took action in not limiting himself to the forwarding of documents but in intervening directly with the main perpetrators and organizing relief. His deeds were not within the scope of his duties as ambassador which did not provide interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state. Morgenthau’s motives stood in sharp contrast to the customs of the diplomatic corps, recruiting itself mostly from an aristocracy, who regarded diplomacy as an art according to courtly customs, well thought out and planned. He didn’t pay much attention to tactical maneuvering, but acted with impulse in keeping with his philanthropic nature.³

 The book was published in the United States as Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story and in Great Britain as Secrets of the Bosphorus.  Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “Helden in Zeiten eines Völkermordes? Armin T. Wegner, Ernst Jäckh, Henry Morgenthau,” in Johannes Lepsius – Eine deutsche Ausnahme. Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, Humanitarismus und Menschenrechte, ed. Rolf Hosfeld (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013), 147.  Paul Rouben Adalian, “L’Ambassadeur Morgenthau et l’Élaboration de la Politique Américaine de Protestation et d’Intervention contre le Génocide (1914– 1915),” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 177– 78 (2003): 426; Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 5 – 9. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-009

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During the Second World War, Raphael Lemkin, the men who coined the term genocide, tried to convince the United States to enter the battlefield after escaping from the persecution of National Socialists in 1941. In his first speech he delivered at the Duke University he explained the German extermination plans and sought to convince the auditorium by referring to the year 1915, when the United States tried to save the Armenian people from Genocide.⁴ The chief prosecutor of the Wilhelmstraßenprozess (1947– 1949), Robert Kempner, remembered him more explicitly as the Jew who fought for the salvation of one million Armenians and went even further by proclaiming Morgenthau’s direct actions may thus be counted as a foundation for the transformation of international law and as first impetus for the now universally accepted principle that any crime against humanity, even if carried out by the State, can and must be fought by any other State.⁵ In 2013 Margaret Lavinia Anderson raised doubts about Morgenthau’s presentation of his struggle for the rescue of the Armenians and its undifferentiated reception. She pointed out that already in autumn 1915 complaints about Morgenthau’s inaction were heard. A correspondent of the London Times claimed that the “[a]ttempts of the American Ambassador to procure some alleviation of the lot of the Armenians have thus far proved unsuccessful. Mr. Morgenthau […] has wasted too much diplomatic energy on behalf of the Zionists of Palestine […].”⁶ While Anderson’s reasonable intervention is not to be discussed or repeated here, the quotation leads to a central question of this essay. Why did Morgenthau, in contrast to his reputation in Armenian historiography, not receive an overall positive reception among his Jewish contemporaries, namely that of pro-Zionist inclination? This could have been mainly due to the publication of Zionism a Surrender, Not a Solution in the American Magazine The World’s Work in July 1921. Therein he called Zionism the “most stupendous fallacy in Jewish History […] wrong in principle and impossible of realization […] unsound in its economics, fantastical

 Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial, ed. Donna-Lee Frieze (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2013), 102– 03.  Robert M.W. Kempner, “Ein Jude kämpfte für die Rettung von einer Million armenischer Christen: Die Taten des Henry Morgenthau sen,” Emuna-Israel Forum. Vereinigte Zeitschriften über Israel und Judentum 3 (1979): 36.  Anderson, Helden, 152: Anonymous, “Criticises Mr. Morgenthau. London Times Correspondent Says He Wasted Energy on Zionists,” New York Times, October 8, 1915, 3.

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in its politics, and sterile in its spiritual ideals.”⁷ In the aftermath he was accused of inciting hatred against Jews, dividing Jewry, and the article made him fall from grace in Jewish historiography.⁸ Morgenthau withdrew from organized Jewry, alienated from and finally broke up with old friends, who publicly offended him.⁹ In contrast to the mutual distancing between clear cut Zionism and Morgenthau’s positions stand his actions on Jewish behalf, namely that on the Yishuv – the Jewish community in Palestine – from the beginning and throughout his ambassadorship in Constantinople. In 1976, Morgenthau’s granddaughter Barbara Tuchman addressed the American Historical Association, explaining that only few historians knew his merits regarding the Jews in Palestine.¹⁰ The German Zionist Richard Lichtheim, located at Constantinople during the First World War, describing himself as Morgenthau’s “adviser on all Jewish issues,” stated that Morgenthau’s commitment to the Jewish settlement was mostly forgotten or never came to light in the United States.¹¹ Instead Morgenthau was affronted by Chaim Weizmann and Felix Frankfurter. The latter dedicated a very disparaging chapter in his biography to Morgenthau’s diplomatic actions.¹² What actually was Morgenthau’s position towards Jewish concerns in Palestine or Zionism? In his memoires Lichtheim remembered him as a man who knew almost nothing about Zionism when he set sail for Constantinople.¹³ From this initial point the present essay aims to outline Morgenthau’s involvement in Jewish matters and the development of his Jewish self-conception during

 “Zionism a Surrender, Not a Solution” is also the last chapter of his autobiography: Henry Morgenthau, in collaboration with French Strother, All in a Life-Time (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922), 385 – 404.  Naomi W. Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism: 1897 – 1948 (Hanover, London: Brandeis University Press, 2003), 66 – 67, 72.  Samuel Untermyer, “Zionism – A Just Cause,” The Forum 66 (1921); Henry Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991), 208.  Barbara W. Tuchman, “Das assimilatorische Dilemma: Die Geschichte des Botschafters Morgenthau,” in In Geschichte Denken: Essays, ed. Barbara W. Tuchman (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1984), 239.  Andrea Kirchner, “Ein vergessenes Kapitel jüdischer Diplomatie,” Naharaim 9 (2015): 146; Richard Lichtheim, Rückkehr: Lebenserinnerungen aus der Frühzeit des deutschen Zionismus (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970), 235.  Harlan B. Phillips, ed., Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (New York: Reynal & Company, 1960), 145 – 53; Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 246– 51.  Lichtheim, Rückkehr, 235.

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the First World War, with a special focus on his stance on Zionism.¹⁴ This chapter attempts to examine how the murderous policies of the Young Turks against the minorities of the Ottoman Empire impacted him. The boosting of distinct facets of his Jewish self-understanding caused misunderstandings in especially Zionist historiography and led him on a different way from his American fellows of German-Jewish origin like Jacob Schiff or Oscar Straus. The reason suggested here to explain his ambivalent memorization in different cultural contexts is that his experiences as American diplomat even fostered his persuasion, which in his case, as completely emancipated American Jew, ultimately relied on the precepts of acculturation and integration.

2 The Jewish Post Henry Morgenthau was the son of the German-Jewish cigar manufacturer Lazarus Morgenthau, who had abandoned the family’s rabbinical tradition. From the Grand-Duchy of Baden the family immigrated to the United States in the 1860s, not for political reasons, but after the father’s business failed. In New York Henry Morgenthau had to contribute to the family’s income and finance his education to lay the groundwork for his career. He understood that education was of paramount importance to realize his highest aim to become “a worthy citizen of the United States.”¹⁵ The graduation from Columbia Law School was followed by a very successful engagement in real estate and his advancement can be considered as a prime example of the “American Dream.” Morgenthau retired from business in 1905 to dedicate his wealth to a career in politics. On this way he sought to achieve a merited place among his peers in the Jewish and Protestant elite. Having only little experience, mostly in local politics where he fought for better working conditions, his friends were surprised about his plan to “embark to the untried sea of politics.”¹⁶ Most of the Ger-

 In 1919 Henry Morgenthau attended the Paris Peace Conference and was named head of the American commission to investigate Jewish matters in Poland. The nomination itself and the final report provoked conflictive reactions by Polish and Jewish diplomats. These experiences as well as those of the investigations also had an influence on his attitude towards Jewish affairs, but can’t be discussed in the framework of this essay and will be examined in further research.  Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus, 57.  Morgenthau, Life-Time, 128.

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man-Jewish parnassim ¹⁷ belonged to the generation of ’48, which had emigrated after the failed revolution of 1848 and sided with the Republicans. As Morgenthau didn’t belong to this cohort, his chances to compete with their representatives for reputation and posts were bad. He had to ally with dissenters or political underdogs, thus he became President of the Free Synagogue of Manhattan, whose Rabbi, Stephen S. Wise, was a leading figure in the Zionist movement.¹⁸ Wise greatly impacted Morgenthau’s fortune when he introduced him to Woodrow Wilson of the Democratic Party, whom was given only poor chances in the 1912 election campaign. But the circumstances of a split Republican camp allowed Wilson to become President of the United States. As one of the biggest spenders, Morgenthau hoped to be rewarded with the distinguished post as secretary of treasury. He aimed to follow the footsteps of Oscar Straus, who was the first Jew holding the office as a secretary. But Wilson thought to place Morgenthau in the American tradition of appointing especially Jews for the embassy to Constantinople, destined to take care of their brethren in the Ottoman Empire. Morgenthau as well as the Jewish community weren’t pleased with this offer. The Jewish vote had gained importance for presidential elections and they expected an appropriate reward. In a letter to the President he expressed that Wilson’s decision was conflicting with the “expressed policy of selecting men solely on their merits and not on account of their religion.” Morgenthau wanted to know why Jews should be treated differently than Methodists or Baptists.¹⁹ But Wilson saw it as indispensable to have a Jew at this post.²⁰ Finally Wise convinced Morgenthau to take the position by pointing out the importance of the duty. The Maccabean, mouthpiece of the Federation of American Zionists, welcomed Morgenthau’s appointment – but “its confidence proved to be misplaced.”²¹

3 The Jewish Ambassador and the Yishuv Morgenthau reached Constantinople on November 27, 1913. Lacking the diplomatic qualifications for this job in general, from now on he was commissioned

 Arthur Hertzberg, Shalom, Amerika! Die Geschichte der Juden in der Neuen Welt (Munich: Knesebeck, 1992), 122.  Stephen S. Wise, Challenging Years: The Autobiography of Stephen Wise (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 84.  Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus, 103 – 04.  Ibid., 103.  Cohen, Americanization of Zionism, 33.

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to take care, inter alia, of problems concerning the Jews that never had occupied him before. Selig Adler assumed that he was “either indifferent or actually hostile to Jewish nationalist aspirations.”²² If this was the case at this point it can’t be proven by available facts. But a skeptical attitude, deriving from his belonging to those generations of American Jews who had emigrated from Central Europe by the mid-nineteenth century, often just called “German Jews” in American history, can be assumed. This elite considered itself as Americans first after having experienced a rapid process of Americanization and no accusation of a double allegiance should interfere with it.²³ At the farewell at the White House the President ensured his backing and encouraged Morgenthau by reminding him: “anything you can do to improve the lot of your co-religionists is an act that will reflect credit upon America, and you may count on the full power of the Administration to back you up.”²⁴ Already in the first months in office in 1913 – 1914 the situation of the Jews in Palestine came onto the agenda as well as American missionary activities. Whereas Morgenthau devotes considerable space to the latter in his memoires, he keeps silent there regarding the former. ²⁵ From Wise, who had visited Palestine earlier, he already knew about the so-called “Red Ticket,” a document Wise was forced to sign allowing him to stay in Palestine for a certain period of time only. Wise protested that he was offended to be treated like that as a Jew and as a citizen of the United States.²⁶ The “Red Ticket” was one of the Sublime Porte’s restrictions to Jewish settlement in Palestine. Jewish visitors were allowed to stay no longer than three months as tourists or pilgrims. This measure did not aim to abandon Jewish immigration as such, which had been steadily increasing since the 1880s, primarily from Czarist Russia. In combination with a prohibition of land purchase for foreign Jews, the Ottoman government tried to force the Jews to naturalize and become citizens of the Empire. In fact, no Jew who stayed longer than allowed had been expelled during the three decades before the World War.²⁷ One would assume that Morgenthau would support the government’s efforts to naturalize

 Selig Adler, “The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (1948): 304.  Joseph Tabachnik, “American-Jewish Reactions to the First Zionist Congress,” Herzl Year Book 5 (1963): 57.  Morgenthau, Life-Time, 175.  Ibid., 212.  Wise, Challenging Years, 40.  Lichtheim, Rückkehr, 222– 24; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881– 2001 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 41– 42.

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the Jews, but he cooperated with the Grand Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire²⁸ to reach the abolition. In spring of 1914 Morgenthau went on a journey planned by US-Consul Samuel Edelman, who envisaged a trip with the American Bible Society to visit Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus with the focus on Christian institutions. From Morgenthau’s memoirs we again only learn that he visited the settlements of the manifold Christian missions.²⁹ His great granddaughter Pamela Steiner admitted that all of Morgenthau’s publications expressed “how he wished to be understood – as a man, as an American, as Jew, as a public servant, and as a participant in and reporter of great events.”³⁰ Due to Ara Sarafian we are able to contrast the memoires with Morgenthau’s diary-like notes. These constitute a valuable source and a complement to his memoirs. By offering intimate insights into the events taking place between 1913 and 1916 they allow the reconstruction of the development of Morgenthau’s attitude towards Zionism.³¹ Richard Lichtheim was able to adjust Consul Edelman’s plans. Visiting the Jewish colonies as well as meetings with prominent Zionists were put on the agenda.³² At the beginning of April 1914 the party reached the port of Jaffa. Morgenthau was elated by a drive through Tel Aviv and attested the young settlement a “splendid shape.” They left for Petah-Tikva to find a prosperous colony of Jews growing oranges, wine, and almonds. On the way back to Jaffa he had a talk with Dr. Arthur Ruppin, who told him that they were only teaching Hebrew to hinder their boys from emigration. From the notes it can be deducted that Morgenthau was skeptical on political Zionism but open-minded to the practical implementation. He showed a restraint from prejudging and wanted to form his own opinion. In any case, he felt “impressed that it would be a great thing for the Jews to have a real haven of tolerance.”³³ The notes reveal that everywhere the group arrived they visited not only missionary institutions but also went to establishments of the Hilfsverein der Deutschen Juden, the Alliance Israélite Universelle or B’nai B’rith. Morgenthau got acquainted with David Yellin, Nahum Sokolow, and Israel Auerbach. Aaron

 Chaim Nahum (1872– 1960) served as the Grand Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire from 1908 – 1920.  Morgenthau, Life-Time, 211– 33, especially 212.  Pamela Steiner, “Henry Morgenthau’s Voice in History,” The Journal of Psychohistory 42 (2015): 201.  Ara Sarafian, ed., United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913 – 1916 (Reading: Taderon Press, 2004).  Lichtheim, Rückkehr, 236.  Entry of April 2, 1914, in Sarafian, Diaries, 40.

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Aaronsohn took him to his laboratory in Atlit and to Zikhron Ya’akov. From the leaders of the colonies he learned about their hardships and concluded: “They need moral backing and financial backing for public utilities.”³⁴ The colonists felt very comfortable with Morgenthau’s stay and as Alexander Aaronsohn stated, Morgenthau had given “evidence of his sincere friendship. These things count in the East, and I soon got the reputation of having influential friends.”³⁵ In Beirut Morgenthau came in contact with a society for Jewish students. These students, mostly from Russia, were not allowed to study under the Czarist regime. He remarked that they were “all nationalists but amenable to reason.”³⁶ Still in Beirut, he wrote a letter to Wise detailing his enjoyment of his tasks as Ambassador. In particular, the trip through Palestine and Syria had changed his mind about his office. He wrote about having “had a succession of the most delightful experiences during the last month that I have ever had in my life.”³⁷ After his return to Constantinople he again turned to Wise. He still seemed euphoric about the “serious sincerity” and the “deep-rooted conviction” of the “better and younger element of Jews that [he had] found at Jaffa, Haifa and Beirut.” These elements “have converted me,” Morgenthau said, “to the view that it is highly desirable that the Jewish people be given a chance to develop their desire for a quasi national [emphasis mine] existence.” This remarkable formulation is indicating a little flirtation with the ideas of Zionism. He also referred to the contrary conditions of Petah Tikva and Zikhron Ya’akov, where he was especially delighted by the “self-respecting manhood and womanhood,” and the Jewish quarters of Cairo and Jerusalem, where he felt reminded of the miserable situation of the Jews in the diaspora.³⁸ Therefore he proposed to move the Jews of the cities into the colonies and considered the colonization also a solution to Jewish misery in Russia by proposing it to the Russian ambassador Mikhail M. Giers.³⁹ Two month later he appeared more skeptical. He wrote to Wise that it would be “ill advised to try and place a large number of Jews in Palestine or to invest large sums of money in the Turkish Empire.”⁴⁰ Morgenthau gave expression to

 Entry of April 12, 1914, in ibid., 45 – 46.  Alexander Aaronsohn, With the Turks in Palestine (London: Constable and Company, 1917), 100.  Entry of April 25, 1914, in Sarafian, Diaries, 51.  Henry Morgenthau, Letter to Stephen S. Wise, April 21, 1914, Library of Congress (LoC), Morgenthau Papers (MP), Reel 13.  Henry Morgenthau, Letter to Stephen S. Wise, May 5, 1914, LoC, MP, R13.  Entry of May 21, 1914, in Sarafian, Diaries, 59.  Henry Morgenthau, Letter to Stephen S. Wise, July 11, 1914, LoC, MP, R13.

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his doubts concerning the colonization and named challenges like the acquisition of land, the absence of water, the expensive fuel hardening the formation of factories, as well as the relation to the Arab neighbors. In particular, the richer Arabs tried to prevent Jewish endeavors.⁴¹ Morgenthau himself took action according to his philanthropic temperament in initiating measures to help. He contacted Jacob Schiff, who had close ties to the Red Cross, to organize aid for the Hospitals in Jerusalem and suggested the establishment of a free-loan society for Palestinian Jews as well as a special fund for orange growers.⁴² To David Yellin he explained his idea to purchase the sites surrounding the Wailing Wall and to make a park of it.⁴³ Towards Richard Lichtheim and Nahum Sokolow he outlined his plans, based on the assumption that Zionism’s main mistake was the focus on Palestine, to urge the Wali of Beirut⁴⁴ to get land concessions in the north.⁴⁵ His actions led Lichtheim to the conclusion that in order to understand Morgenthau and his Jewishness, it does not need definitions or treatises on the relationship of Jewish race, religion, and nation. Morgenthau’s Jewishness found its expression in his warm-heartedness and the resulting involvement in charitable endeavors.⁴⁶

4 The Yishuv at the Outbreak of the World War In 1908 the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) had ceased the absolute rule of the Sultan in the Ottoman Empire and forced the constitution of 1876 to be reinstalled. The Young Turk revolution introduced the second era of parliamentary politics seeming to promise improvements regarding the protection of the Empire’s minorities, now represented in the Parliament. But, as it turned out, the Young Turks initiated a slow process of Turkification of the non-Turkish regions of the Empire. They banned other languages than Turkish from administrative institutions like schools or courts and preferred Turkish officials for government

 Henry Morgenthau, Letter to Stephen S. Wise, May 5, 1914, LoC, MP, R13.  Naomi W. Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (Hanover, London: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 214.  Henry Morgenthau, Letter to Stephen S. Wise, June 2, 1914, LoC, MP, R13.  Bekir Sami Kunduh (1867– 1933).  Lichtheim, Rückkehr, 237– 38.  Richard Lichtheim, “Henry Morgenthau: Eine psychologische Skizze,” Juedische Rundschau, Mai 7, 1915, 147.

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positions.⁴⁷ After the Empire had lost almost all its remaining European provinces in the First Balkan War (1912– 1913) a group of subversives led by Ismail Enver and Mehmed Talât took the opportunity for a coup d’état, leading to the end of a shared government with the Sultan and the elimination of the opposition. The Balkan Wars were accompanied by terrible atrocities. Christian as well as Muslim villages were devastated and their inhabitants murdered or deported. More than one and a half million impoverished Muslims fled from the Balkan and settled in Anatolia. They brought horrifying stories about the atrocities perpetrated by their Christian neighbors with them and “were a constant reminder of humiliation and defeat.”⁴⁸ The CUP politics under the leadership of the triumvirate of Talât, Enver, who both shared Balkan roots, and Ahmed Djemal, who was born in Mytilene on Lesbos, became more and more radical and determined by the maxim Turkey to the Turks. In January 1914 the government started to put their anti-Christian policy into practice by uprooting between 100,000 and 200,000 Greeks from the coastal areas.⁴⁹ These proceedings were noticed by Morgenthau after the return from his trip. He had heard of troubles with the Greek employees of the Singer Company in Smyrna who were forced by the government to leave the country.⁵⁰ These were the methods planned by party leaders to displace non-Muslims – respectively “to ‘encourage’ them to emigrate.”⁵¹ At first, Morgenthau depicted the animosity against the Greeks as conflict over the sovereignty over the North Aegean islands. He interpreted the deportations in the framework of military competition and even as necessity to prevent sabotage or conspiration.⁵² But he began to doubt the official explanations and when he discovered that the Ministry of Evkaf had ordered the boycotting of Greek businesses he saw these measures as “another bit of evidence of their general purposes.”⁵³ Morgenthau stressed that the “boycott didn’t discriminate Jews, who have always been more popular with the Turks.”⁵⁴ And after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, triggering the events leading to the First World

 Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894 – 1924 (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2019), 137.  Ibid., 142.  Ibid., 149.  Entry of June 10, 1915, in Sarafian, Diaries, 66.  Morris and Ze’evi, Thirty-Year Genocide, 150.  Entry of June 16, 1915, in Sarafian, Diaries, 69.  Entry of June 20, 1915, in Sarafian, Diaries, 70 – 71.  Henry Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1918), 32.

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War, various threats for the Jews arose from outside. For the so-called “old Yishuv” it meant the derogation of vital donations from abroad, and for the workers on the coast and the farmers a decrease of exports. Imports of food also became questionable. Morgenthau immediately cabled to New York to ask for assistance from the Jewish relief organizations. His son-in-law Maurice Wertheim brought financial aid on an American warship to Jaffa, contributed by Jacob Schiff, the Zionist Organization of America and Nathan Straus.⁵⁵ The most dangerous menace constituted the fact that the greatest part of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv and Jaffa were Russian subjects and thus affiliated with a hostile power.⁵⁶ Their situation endangered heavily after the Minister of the Navy, Djemal, was appointed commander of the fourth army and Governor of Syria. He initiated a policy of persecution against all non-Turkish minorities in opposition to the point of view of the central government about the Jewish minority. In December 1914 he ordered the deportation of all foreign subjects. Against this order Morgenthau intervened at the Sublime Porte and averted the expulsion in cooperation with the German Ambassador Baron Hans von Wangenheim. They achieved the facilitation of naturalization terms, especially exemptions regarding the military service. For the Jews who refused to become Ottoman citizens Morgenthau organized opportunities to emigrate.⁵⁷ Thus he effectively contributed to the survival of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. In a truly philanthropic manner replying to a letter of thanks from Arthur Ruppin he stated being grateful for being “the chosen weapon to take up the defence” of his co-religionists.⁵⁸

5 The American Ambassador and the Young Turks After the Ottoman Empire entered the battlefield by bombing Odessa at the end of October 1914, a Russian counterattack followed via the Caucasus. On the Ottoman side, the “Special Organizations” (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa) perpetrated massacres against the Armenian population along the frontlines. In spring 1915 the Armenian population of the Vilâyet Van fled to the capital and resisted against the massacres. Elsewhere, in Zeytun the Armenians defied the violence of the Special Organizations. What followed would become “a makeshift lab and a model for the campaign of deportation-cum-genocide that would begin a  Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism: 1897 – 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 194.  Lichtheim, Rückkehr, 248 – 49.  Kirchner, Ein vergessenes Kapitel, 147.  Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism, 194– 95.

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month later.”⁵⁹ In distant Constantinople Morgenthau slowly recognized “that the Turks are disregarding that this is an Ottoman Empire and that Armenians, Greeks, Jews etc. are just as much entitled to it as the Turks.”⁶⁰ While the genocide unfolded, Morgenthau tried to confront the perpetrators. During a dinner with Talât at the end of April 1915 the atrocities came up for discussion. Talât trivialized the real intentions of the mass murder and stated that they only intended to bring the Armenians into the interior of Anatolia where they could do no harm.⁶¹ Through various reports of the US-consular and missionary network Morgenthau knew what really was going on. From Bedri Bey, the Constantinople Chief of Police, he learned how the party-leaders made the decision to deport and murder the Armenians by adapting methods from the former deportation of the Greek population.⁶² As the Empire now was either at war with the great powers or allied with the others, the CUP felt that they could “put into effect their long cherished plan of exterminating the Armenian race.”⁶³ Morgenthau urged for assistance from several religious institutions of the United States, leading to the foundation of the interreligious Armenian Atrocities Committee.⁶⁴ He sent a cable to Washington declaring that the extent of the measures were expulsions and excess against peaceful Armenians. Terrible eye witness reports made it clear to him “that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.” Morgenthau was aware of the hopelessness of his situation. He feared that protest notes or threatening gestures would fade away without effect or worsen the situation. He believed that “nothing short of actual force which obviously United States are not in position to exert would adequately meet the situation.”⁶⁵ When the politics leading to genocide had started in January 1914 with the boycott of Greek businesses in Trabzon and Samsun Morgenthau acknowledged that the Jewish minority was preserved by the CUP. They requested to mark Jewish shops with signs to indicate their nationality and profession such as “‘Isaac the Jew, shoemaker’.”⁶⁶ But when the genocide was in full swing the Ambassa Morris and Ze’evi, Thirty-Year Genocide, 164.  Entry of May 12, 1915, in Sarafian, Diaries, 229.  Entry of April 24, 1915, in ibid., 215 – 16.  Entry of August 7, 1915, in ibid., 297.  Morris and Ze’evi, Thirty-Year Genocide, 154.  Lutz Fiedler, “Armenian Atrocities Committee,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, ed. Dan Diner (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 186 – 91.  Jan Henning Böttger, “‘It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress’: Henry Morgenthau sen. und der armenische Genozid 1915,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 60.  Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus, 32.

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dor got constantly reminded that the attitude towards the Jews could change and was totally dependent on the arbitrariness of the Turkish leaders. Following Morgenthau’s notes Talât made no secret of his suspicion and distrust of Zionism and valued the Zionists as mischievous. Morgenthau interpreted that Talât feared internal troubles more than the war and that the CUP saw the Zionists as a possible menace which had to be crushed.⁶⁷ Hans-Lukas Kieser attributed the Jews of Palestine to be a potential victim of the murderous CUP-politics but they were lucky by suffering only “occasional duress” due to the US-diplomacy, German protection, and Talât. The protection of the Germans and the CUP-leader derived mainly from the hope of gaining support by real or imagined Jewish influence on world politics for their war efforts.⁶⁸ The fact the Governor of Syria Ahmed Djemal could only reluctantly accept Talât’s view that the Jews of Palestine should be exempt from anti-autonomist policies and the threats of the Ottoman Minister of Foreign Affairs Halil Menteşe, who made no secret of his animosity against the Zionists, must have increased the fears of American ambassador for his brethren. Menteşe confronted Morgenthau with the minutes of a meeting of a Zionist committee formed in Alexandria to accuse him. The minutes of the meeting stated that the American ambassador was very friendly towards the Zionist movement and did everything possible to protect them. The Minister warned the Ambassador that the CUP would be very displeased if a foreign government would encourage the Zionist movement and that they had not only to get rid of them but if they “did anything improper or attempted to make propaganda for nationalism, it would injure all the Jews in Turkey” and if he found out the Jews would agitate in favor of the Entente, the Turkish leaders had to deport them.⁶⁹ The Grand Rabbi Nahum persuaded Menteşe the committee was only collecting money and wasn’t involved in any propaganda. But the Minister reminded the Grand Rabbi of the dangers of Zionist agitation and threated “You know what has happened to the Armenians!”⁷⁰ Until Morgenthau left Constantinople, he supported the Yishuv with the distribution of relief funds. In one of their last talks, the Grand Rabbi showed him his intention to resign from his post because the Jews now came to feel the CUPpolicy to push out any non-Moslems from leading positions in the army, the government or in schools. Morgenthau convinced him to continue and to intervene on behalf of the rights of the Jews. He reminded him how important it was to be  Entry of April 24, 1915, in Sarafian, Diaries, 215 – 16.  Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 295 – 96.  Ibid., 296, entry of November 23, 1915; in Sarafian, Diaries, 391– 93.  Entry of November 30, 1915, in ibid., 400 – 02.

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on good terms with the authorities. Morgenthau finally ascertained that it was “not surprising that the strongest men are panicstricken. The Jews are fearing the fate of the Armenians.”⁷¹

6 The Morgenthau-Missions to Gibraltar Morgenthau returned to the United States to support Wilson’s re-election in February 1916. Even though Palestine hadn’t been subject of the campaign, Morgenthau openly imparted in a public speech in Cincinnati on May 21 that the Turkish rulers had spoken to him about the sale of Palestine. He told the audience that the Ottoman Empire in this way could secure money after the war. He even admitted the conversation had tried to figure out if Palestine should become an international state or a republic. Morgenthau recommended to establish a harbor at Jaffa to bring tourists to Jerusalem. Finally, he disclosed that the Porte was earnestly considering sending Grand Rabbi Nahum as Ottoman ambassador to the United States.⁷² Just two days later the London Times covered the speech, but it took two months until the sensational report circulated in the European press: “A Jewish Republic in Palestine?”, “A Hebrew Republic?” or “A Zionist Republic?” The distinguished Copenhagen Politiken of July 25 stated: “Mister Henry Morgenthau, who himself is an enthusiastic Zionist, has taken part in the agitation of the Zionists, and this is the circumstance which has caused a recall.” The Juedische Rundschau corrected this false remark about the intention of the recall and made clear that Morgenthau was not an organized Zionist but stated that he never concealed his sympathies for the Jewish settlement as well as Zionist work.⁷³ Morgenthau’s approach to purchase Palestine instead of capturing it, additionally helping the Ottoman Empire financially, meshed with Wilson’s campaign slogan “He kept us out of war!” But after Wilson’s successful re-election in November 1916 the situation rapidly changed and the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, whereas they remained neutral towards the Ottoman Empire. To justify the intervention Morgenthau gave publicity to the genocide through his Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story by exposing Germany as pri-

 Entry of January 4, 1916, in ibid., 427– 28.  Anonymous, “Turkey and the Zionists: Reported Willingness to Sell Palestine,” The Times, May 23, 1916, 7; anonymous, “Turks May Sell Palestine: Ambassador Morgenthau Thinks That Jews may Buy Holy Land,” Jewish Chronicle, May 26, 1916, 3.  Anonymous, “Sensationsmeldungen,” Juedische Rundschau, August 4, 1916, 257; Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism, 275 – 77.

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marily responsible. In the foreword he described his intention to convince the American people that the Germans not only were planning the conquest of the world, but induced the greatest crime in modern history.⁷⁴ On May 16, Morgenthau discussed a strategy with the Secretary of the State Robert Lansing to stop Germany by splitting the Central Powers through a separate peace with the Young Turks. He outlined that the mood in Constantinople had turned against their German allies, but that German battle cruisers Goeben and Breslau, being anchored in the straits since 1914, were threatening to bombard the capital. Morgenthau proposed to eliminate them by torpedoes from Allied submarines. Wilson made the decision to send him across the Atlantic on a secret mission to negotiate peace camouflaged as investigation of the situation of the Jews in Egypt.⁷⁵ In the meanwhile, the British Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour had travelled to Washington to coordinate the British-American war aims with Woodrow Wilson, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement. After the hoped-for military defeat and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire the United States should accept a mandate for Palestine. Somehow the British Foreign Office acquired knowledge of Morgenthau’s secret mission but didn’t attach much importance to it. However, Chaim Weizmann feared that such an undertaking might undermine the aspirations of the Arabs, Jews, and Armenians for national independence. Weizmann intercepted Morgenthau at Gibraltar on his way to neutral Switzerland, where the latter wanted to meet Turkish officials. They discussed the plans and considered a common approach.⁷⁶ One can only speculate about the course of this conversation. It was discussed by Felix Frankfurter and Weizmann in their memoirs, while Morgenthau mentioned them only in passing.⁷⁷ In the end, Morgenthau had changed his mind, not only due to Weizmann’s persuasiveness, but also by virtue of the Constantinople embassy employee Arshag K. Shmavonian, Morgenthau’s former close confidant, who informed him that he

 Morgenthau, Secrets of the Bosphorus, Preface. The German responsibility in the planning and execution of the genocide is in fact much more complex. For a differentiated examination see Christoph Dinkel, “German Officers and the Armenian Genocide,” The Armenian Review 44 (1991); Eric D. Weitz, “Germany and the Young Turks. Revolutionaries into Statesmen,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).  Robert Lansing, Memorandum of Henry Morgenthau’s Secret Mission, June 10, 1917, LoC, Robert Lansing Papers, Box 7, Folder 2.  Weizmann, Trial and Error, 246 – 47.  Ibid., 246– 51; Philipps, Reminisces, 145 – 53; Morgenthau, Life-Time, 287.

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was now considered persona non grata by the CUP-leaders, not forgiving his indiscretion in May 1916.⁷⁸ Research has largely agreed with the Zionists’ interpretation that the peace mission was merely a coup of Morgenthau, who tried to write world history on his own and was exposed by his lack of planning in Gibraltar, whereupon he abandoned his mission.⁷⁹ For Morgenthau the mission turned out to be a total fiasco for its real purpose could not be kept secret. That it passed through the New York press was blamed on him and burdened his friendship with Wilson. It also confirmed Morgenthau’s lack of necessary diplomatic finesse to succeed in such a venture. His idealism, sometimes misunderstood as naivety, was no match for the “murky waters of international intrigue.”⁸⁰ While the failure represented a severe setback for Morgenthau, it had an unintended quasi-promoting effect on the Balfour Declaration. A separate peace endangered the Zionist’s plans and showed the British that their American allies were pursuing other goals in shaping the post-war Middle East. In this way it opened the doors for a closer union between Great Britain and Zionism for a “declaration of sympathy with Zionist aspirations.”⁸¹ On December 9, 1917, the British Army took Jerusalem. Four days later the New York Times published a letter to the editor. Therein Morgenthau once more praised the Jewish colonies in Palestine and the revitalization of the Hebrew language. He further noticed that the Zionists would not understand the impossibility of having all Jews return to the “Holy Land” and admitted that only some Jews in the United States would like to spend their life there. The majority did not want to surrender their citizenship but “still wish to have a share in the preservation […] of a free, Jewish Palestine.”⁸²

 Frank W. Brecher, “Revisiting Ambassador Morgenthau’s Turkish Peace Mission of 1917,” Middle Eastern Studies 24 (1988): 360.  Geoffrey Lewis, Balfour and Weizmann: The Zionist, the Zealot and the Emergence of Israel (London, New York: Continuum, 2009), 140 – 42; Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (Jerusalem, London: Magnes Press, 1983), 350 – 60; Joseph Adler, “The Morgenthau Mission of 1917,” Herzl Year Book 5 (1963); Jehuda Reinharz, “His Majesy’s Zionist Emissary: Chaim Weizmann’s Mission to Gibraltar in 1917,” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992); Brecher, “Turkish Peace Mission of 1917”; Richard Ned Lebnow, “The Morgenthau Peace Mission of 1917,” Jewish Social Studies 32 (1970); William Yale, “Henry Morgenthau’s Special Mission of 1917,” World Politics 1 (1949); Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914 – 1918 (London: Routledge & Paul, 1973), 211– 26.  Reinharz, Zionist Emissary, 273.  Lebnow, Peace Mission, 285.  Morgenthau, Life-Time, 290.

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Conclusion Following the end of the war, Morgenthau accompanied the American Commission to Negotiate Peace to Paris and came deeply involved in the future of Armenia. He was a strong advocate of an American mandate for Constantinople and Armenia⁸³ and sharply argued against concessions for Turkey. The United States should establish a center for peace “from which democratic principles shall radiate and illuminate that dark region of the world. […] If Constantinople is left to the Turk; if the Greeks, the Syrians, the Armenians, the Arabs and the Jews are not freed from the most revolting tyranny that history has ever known, […] the sacrifices of the last four years have been in vain.”⁸⁴ He reached the state of a national hero in Armenia due to his actions and through his report Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. His merits regarding the Yishuv he omitted in his own historiography. That they were not entirely forgotten was due to contemporaries like Richard Lichtheim. He showed his gratitude by publishing an article in the Juedische Rundschau in May 1915, full of praise for a number of outstanding characteristics of Henry Morgenthau. He reports that when he asked about his thoughts on the future prospects of Zionism, Morgenthau pointed out the difficulties and went on that he would support every cause undertaken in the interest of Judaism if he believed it could bring about any benefit. Lichtheim closed the article by praising Morgenthaus’s efforts: “Without it, more serious damage could have been done in these months. But tirelessly he stood up for us, and in many cases, he succeeded in protecting Jewish interests in Turkey. The Zionists know what they owe to him and will not forget it.”⁸⁵ Contrary to Lichtheim’s prediction, the Zionist historiography mainly forgot Morgenthau’s merits, or even worse, his remembrance was even contemptuous. His complex reasons for distancing himself from political Zionism were not easily understood facing the catastrophe for the Jews, namely after the Shoah. However, others stated that he “saved [the Jewish Colony of Palestine] from starvation and probably extinction” and “the nucleus of the future state of Israel survived.”⁸⁶ Or Alexander Aaronsohn, who feared the Yishuv might suffer the Arme-

 Ibid., 423  Ibid., 423 – 37.  Lichtheim, “Henry Morgenthau,” 145 – 47.  Barbara Tuchman, “The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” in The Palestine Question in American History, ed. Clark M. Clifford et al. (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 11.

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nian fate, stated that “the Russian Jews in Palestine, who, when war was declared, were to have been sent to the Mesopotamian town of Urfa – there to suffer massacre and outrage like the Armenians. This was prevented by Mr. Morgenthau’s strenuous representations.”⁸⁷ Lichtheim reasoned that Morgenthau’s attitude influenced by philanthropy and assimilationist views could easily have been integrated into the comparatively less radical American Zionism.⁸⁸ In particular, the Balfour-Declaration had labelled the movement with “the seal of international respectability.”⁸⁹ Elsewhere, American Reform Jew Morgenthau could easily have converted, a term he uses himself in his notes, to Zionism as some of his fellows did.⁹⁰ Witnessing the Armenian genocide may have contributed to not turning to this camp. When the atrocities culminated in July 1915, he wrote a letter to his son. He outlined that the permanent reception of reports about “the inhuman treatment that the Armenians are receiving […] makes me feel most sad, their lot seems to be very much the same as that of the Jews in Russia, and belonging to a persecuted race myself, I have all the more sympathy with them.”⁹¹ He admitted only in private to have recognized the fate of his Jewish brethren in Russia in the destiny of the Armenian Christians. For the same reason he might have opposed political Zionism what meant the postulation of a Jewish nation for him and surely, he feared it would fuel nationalist, anti-Jewish tendencies hindering the Jews from their acculturation into the majority societies, which still was his preferred way out of the misery. In his memoirs he announced his motives to intervene on behalf of the Armenians by reproducing an interview with Talât, who asked him why he as a Jew was interested in the fate of the Christians. Morgenthau explained that he was the ambassador of the United States. That the USA was made up of 97,000,000 Christians and 3,000,000 Jews meant to him to act as a 97 percent Christian in his ambassadorial duties. He made clear that he did not appeal “in the name of any race or any religion, but merely as a human being.”⁹² To have acted out of a truly American self-understanding reflected the process of acculturation he experienced in the United States.

 Aaronsohn, With the Turks, 108 – 09.  Lichtheim, Rückkehr, 234– 35.  Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, 233.  Jonathan D. Sarna, “Converts to Zionism in the American Reform Movement,” in Zionism and Religion, ed. Shmuel Almog et al. (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 189.  Sarafian, Diaries, XI.  Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus, 220.

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He also admitted the belonging to another “race” might have fostered the suspicion of a double allegiance, an allegiance “necessarily implied in and cannot by any logic be eliminated from establishment of a sovereign State for the Jews in Palestine.”⁹³ Opposing Zionism meant for Morgenthau to oppose the idea of one state for all Jews in Palestine but nevertheless to donate generously and engage for the colonization. This engagement turned out to be vital for the Yishuv. Morgenthau’s attitude can be described as non-Zionism or as cultural Zionism.⁹⁴ This thesis is substantiated by a statement of 1926, when Morgenthau proposed a national loan for Palestine. He admitted “that he was not going to lend his services in order to create in Palestine ‘The’ Jewish National Homeland, but ‘A’ homeland, without any emphasis being laid on the word ‘National’. […] Jews going to Palestine should eschew politics and talk more about cultural work and arts with a view to creating a spiritual center only. What may happen say, after ten, twenty, thirty or forty years is not for us to determine, but must be left to future prosperity to settle.”⁹⁵

Bibliography Aaronsohn, Alexander. With The Turks in Palestine. London: Constable and Company, 1917. Adalian, Paul Rouben. “L’Ambassadeur Morgenthau et l’Élaboration de la Politique Américaine de Protestation et d’Intervention contre le Génocide (1914 – 1915).” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 177 – 178 (2003): 425 – 35. Adler, Joseph. “The Morgenthau Mission of 1917.” Herzl Year Book 5 (1963): 249 – 81. Adler, Selig. “The Palestine Question in the Wilson Era.” Jewish Social Studies 10 (1948): 303 – 34. Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, “Helden in Zeiten eines Völkermordes? Armin T. Wegner, Ernst Jäckh, Henry Morgenthau.” In Johannes Lepsius – Eine deutsche Ausnahme: Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, Humanitarismus und Menschenrechte, edited by Rolf Hosfeld, 126 – 59. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2013. Anonymous. “Criticises Mr. Morgenthau. London Times Correspondent Says He Wasted Energy on Zionists.” New York Times, October 8, 1915. Anonymous. “Turkey and the Zionists: Reported Willingness to Sell Palestine.” The Times, May 23, 1916. Anonymous. “Turks May Sell Palestine: Ambassador Morgenthau Thinks That Jews may Buy Holy Land.” Jewish Chronicle, May 26, 1916. Anonymous. “Sensationsmeldungen.” Juedische Rundschau, August 4, 1916.

 Morgenthau, Life-Time, 350.  Cohen, Jacob H. Schiff, 236.  Anonymous, “Morgenthau Urges National Loan for Palestine,” The Sentinel, April 23, 1926, 32.

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Anonymous. “Morgenthau Urges National Loan for Palestine.” The Sentinel, April 23, 1926. Brecher, Frank W. “Revisiting Ambassador Morgenthau’s Turkish Peace Mission of 1917.” Middle Eastern Studies 24 (1988): 135 – 363. Böttger, Jan Henning. “‘It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress’: Henry Morgenthau sen. und der armenische Genozid 1915.” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 51 – 77. Cohen, Naomi W. Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership. Hanover, London: Brandeis University Press, 1999. Cohen, Naomi W. The Americanization of Zionism: 1897 – 1948. Hanover, London: Brandeis University Press, 2003. Dinkel, Christoph. “German Officers and the Armenian Genocide.” The Armenian Review 44 (1991): 77 – 133. Fiedler, Lutz. “Armenian Atrocities Committee.” In Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, vol. 1, edited by Dan Diner, 186 – 191. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Friedman, Isaiah. Germany, Turkey, and Zionism: 1897 – 1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Hertzberg, Arthur. Shalom, Amerika! Die Geschichte der Juden in der Neuen Welt. Munich: Knesebeck, 1992. Kempner, Robert M. W. “Ein Jude kämpfte für die Rettung von einer Million armenischer Christen: Die Taten des Henry Morgenthau sen.” Emuna-Israel Forum. Vereinigte Zeitschriften über Israel und Judentum 3 (1979): 34 – 36. Kieser, Hans-Lukas. Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. Kirchner, Andrea. “Ein vergessenes Kapitel jüdischer Diplomatie.” Naharaim 9 (2015): 128 – 150. Lebnow, Richard Ned. “The Morgenthau Peace Mission of 1917.” Jewish Social Studies 32 (1970): 267 – 85. Lemkin, Raphael, Totally Unofficial, edited by Donna-Lee Frieze. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2013. Lichtheim, Richard. “Henry Morgenthau: Eine psychologische Skizze.” Juedische Rundschau, May 7, 1915. Lichtheim, Richard. Rückkehr: Lebenserinnerungen aus der Frühzeit des deutschen Zionismus. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1970. Morgenthau, Henry. Secrets of the Bosphorus. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1918. Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918. Morgenthau, Henry, in collaboration with French Strother. All in a Life-Time. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922. Morgenthau, Henry III. Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991. Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881 – 2001. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Morris, Benny, and Dror Ze’evi. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894 – 1924. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2019. Phillips, Harlan B., ed. Felix Frankfurter Reminisces. New York: Reynal & Company, 1960. Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

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Reinharz, Jehuda. “His Majesy’s Zionist Emissary: Chaim Weizmann’s Mission to Gibraltar in 1917.” Journal of Contemporary History 27 (1992): 259 – 77. Sarafian, Ara, ed. United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913 – 1916. Reading: Taderon Press, 2004. Sarna, Jonathan D. “Converts to Zionism in the American Reform Movement.” In Zionism and Religion, edited by Shmuel Almog, Jehuda Reinharz, and Anita Shapira, 188 – 203. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1998. Steiner, Pamela. “Henry Morgenthau’s Voice in History.” The Journal of Psychohistory 42 (2015): 200 – 20. Tabachnik, Joseph. “American-Jewish Reactions to the First Zionist Congress.” Herzl Year Book 5 (1963): 57 – 64. Tuchman, Barbara. “The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.” In The Palestine Question in American History, edited by Clark M. Clifford, Eugene V. Rostow, and Barbara Tuchman, 8 – 23. New York: Arno Press, 1978. Tuchman, Barbara W. “Das assimilatorische Dilemma: Die Geschichte des Botschafters Morgenthau.” In In Geschichte Denken: Essays, edited by Barbara W. Tuchman, 239 – 49, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1984. Untermyer, Samuel. “Zionism – A Just Cause.” The Forum 66 (1921): 210 – 27. Weitz, Eric D. “Germany and the Young Turks. Revolutionaries into Statesmen.” In A Question of Genocide. Armenians and Turks at the End of the Empire, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, 175 – 98. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Weizmann, Chaim. Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949. Wise, Stephen S. Challenging Years: The Autobiography of Stephen Wise. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949.

Harutyun Marutyan

The Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: Trauma and Its Influence on Identity Changes of Survivors and their Descendants

The important events of human life, as a rule, are followed by talking about them, narrating, writing, and sharing with others, or the desire of all the above. However the situation is different when those events have a traumatic nature. Trauma is a response not so much to an event as to the meaning given to that event.¹ The traumatic memories are very painful to the survivors, so they usually do not have the desire to share the information about those traumatic events with their relatives or the younger generation. Why? It seems to the survivors that by doing so, they can “taint” the youth with their pain, and cause them trauma as well. Therefore, many survivors keep silent, or just share their memories with people of a similar destiny, and not with their children, as a rule. One of the solutions for the survivors is to write down their memories in order to transmit them to their relatives or the public in general. Either way, the identity of genocide survivors is being changed; they are no longer the same people they were before the tragic events they underwent, them or their relatives. In general, the relation between silence and speech is considered as one of liberation, both politically and personally: to reveal truths which have been denied and to remind the world of its responsibilities to those who have suffered, on the one hand; to heal the self by the very act of speaking out and being heard on the other.² After the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia on December 2, 1920, talk of the Genocide gradually died down and discussion of Turkish-Armenian antagonism was not encouraged. Any mention or discussion of subjects like the Armenian Genocide and Western Armenia, be it the nostalgia for the lost homeland or a secret hope to return, praising of the past, massacres of Armenians by the Turks or the Armenians’ struggle against them, generally the memo-

 Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, “Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History: Introduction,” in Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, ed. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 97– 103.  Hodgkin and Radstone, “Remembering suffering,” 97– 99. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-010

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ries of self-defense and songs dedicated to it, etc. had been strictly prohibited.³ All Armenian writers imprisoned in 1936 – 1937 were convicted for being “nationalists.” Notably their absolute majority came from Western Armenia. Many of them were Genocide survivors or refugees, or were from Eastern Armenian provinces handed in 1921 to Turkey by the bolsheviks. This was the tableau of 1920 – 53’s Soviet Armenia, which had its significant influence on the general situation and private manifestations of genocide memory among the survivors. In the accurate description of the outstanding prosaic, publicist and public figure Vardges Petrosyan: “For 45 years, from 1920 to 1965 each 24 April we were even deprived of … the right for sadness.”⁴ On April 24, 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide was commemorated in Yerevan on state and national levels. Tens of thousands of people, including survivors and their descendants, took to the streets, which was quite unusual during the Soviet period.⁵ The commemoration of April 24, 1965 in Yerevan broke the wall of official silence and revealed the truth about one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century to a wide public. These demonstrations, along with a rapid growth of interest in the theme of Genocide in art and literature before and after, came to prove that the memory of the Genocide persisted in the minds and hearts of the people, despite the official policy of consigning it to oblivion. The situation was different in the case of Israel. Here, Holocaust survivors did not receive sufficient attention during the first 10 – 15 years in the post-Holocaust, because they were “slaughtered like sheep”, without fighting or any resistance. That is to say, they (the survivors) were somehow guilty for their suffering and the innumerable losses they had. Whereas in the newly established state,

 Harutyun Marutyan, Iconography of Armenian Identity, vol. 1, The Memory of Genocide and the Karabagh Movement (Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2009), 38 (Anthropology of Memory, 2).  Vardges Petrosyan, “At the Different Sides of Psycological ‘Barbed Wire’,” in Vardges Petrosyan, Our People are Mine, as is … My Grief. Compilation of Publicist Articles [Mer zhoghovurdn imn e, inchpes … im vishte], ed. Levon Ananyan (Yerevan: Hayastan, 2003), 132 (in Armenian).  Haig Sarkissian, “50th Anniversary of the Turkish Genocide as Observed in Yerevan,” The Armenian Review 19, no. 4 (1966): 23 – 28; Avag Harutyunyan, The 50th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and the Second Republic [Hayots tseghaspanutyan 50-rd tarelitse yev Yerkrord Hanrapetutyune] (Yerevan: Noravank, 2015), 47– 52 (in Armenian); Harutyun Marutyan, “Formation, Development, and Current State of the Armenian Genocide Victims Remembrance Day (Part 2),” Tseghaspanagitakan handes [Journal of Genocide Studies] 7, no. 2 (2018): 103 – 08 (in Armenian).

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at war since the very beginning of its existence, armed resistance was glorified and embellished.⁶ In the Armenian reality, the thesis “slaughtered like sheep” was no more than public hearsay and did not become a topic of thorough historical investigation, but had a certain impact on the identity of young people. I will try to develop. In Soviet Armenia, since 1965, unofficially and later officially, “Remembrance Day of the Armenian Genocide Victims” was commemorated. In other words, only the victims were officially remembered. For decades, it was considered that only the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia and the Russian great people saved genocide survivors from final destruction. In the mid 1960s, the Soviet ideology was not against such an interpretation. After all, in this case the “friend” or “eternal friend” of the Armenian people was clearly pointed out, “friend” who was meant to protect the Armenians from the “eternal enemy.”⁷ These ideological interpretations led to the deepening of the victim stereotype. In Armenia, during the Karabakh Movement or the Armenian Revolution (February 1988-August 1990), based on my analysis, the victim’s stereotype was overcome, which, in my opinion, contributed to the victory of the Armenian side in the Karabakh-Azerbaijani war.⁸ However, the formal formulation of April 24 remained the same, only the victims of the Armenian Genocide were remembered. Meanwhile, many people, and the youth in majority, just do not want to feel like the heirs of victims, “victims slaughtered like sheep.” In this regard, I believe it is not a coincidence that along with April 24, April 23 has been established. In Yerevan, since the year 2000, every April 23 a torchlight march is held, which begins with the burning of the Turkish flag at Liberty Square and lighting the first torch from that fire. The organizer of those marches is the youth wing of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Party, and the vast majority of the participants are young. Vocal slogans are mostly of a claims nature, and the march goes on to the Armenian Genocide Memorial accompanied by patriotic songs.⁹ In other words, the march is very different from the silent and restrained march on April 24 which is accompanied by classical and religious music by Komitas and Chopin. Meanwhile, in Israel the issue has been solved 67 years ago. When we compare the formulations of the memory of Israel and Armenia, we will see the qual Cf.: Roni Stauber, “Confronting the Jewish Response During the Holocaust: Yad Vashem – a Commemorative and a Research Institute in the 1950s,” Modern Judaism 20 (2000): 277– 98.  Harutyun Marutyan, Iconography of Armenian Identity, 33 – 34, 203 – 06, 234– 37.  Ibid., 276 – 78.  Marutyan, “Formation,” 130.

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itative differences. Whereas the memory of the Armenian genocide victims is observed on the day of the mass arrests of the Armenian intelligentsia in Constantinople and the beginning of the deportations, Holocaust Commemoration Day, after a long debate, was chosen to be remembered on the twenty-seventh of the Jewish month of Nisan. Officially it is called Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day. In 1953, the Israeli parliament chose that day because it is at the midpoint between the beginning of the revolt of the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw against the fascists and the day of the Independence of Israel. Let me note also that the official name of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem is “Yad Vashem: The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority,” which by itself points to the intent and aim of the museum, which is to strengthen or shape the elements of a certain type of identity. The Memorial Complex was founded in 1953, by the decision of the state parliament, and the functions of the national memorial complex are clearly enshrined in the founding law. The nine articles of the law clarify who must be remembered: the victims, their families, communities, heroes, Jewish soldiers, partisans, their supporters and those who were trying to maintain their dignity. Thus, six out of nine articles are addressed to fighting and resistance. This is quite a clear statement. And its coverage is one of Yad Vashem’s main tasks. In some way or another, Holocaust Memorial Day, unlike the Armenian one, refers to the idea of struggle, fighting, and combat to a considerable degree.¹⁰ The reality is that in the case of the Armenians during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, self-defense battles were organized in a number of Armenian-populated cities, and lasted for many weeks and months. First of all were densely populated towns and large settlements: Shatakh/Tagh (April 1May 14, 1915), Van (April 7-May 3, 1915), Shapin-Garahissar (June 2– 29, 1915), Mush (June 26 – 29, 1915), Fentejag (June 6/26-August 3, 1915), Urfa (September 29-October 23, 1915), Marash (January 21-February 10, 1920), Hajn (April 1-October 15, 1920), Ayntap (April 1, 1920 – February 8, 1921). Resistance was shown in the provinces of Gavash (Vaspurakan) from April 3 to May 11, 1915, Pesandasht (Shatakh region of Vaspurakan) from April 14 to May 10, 1915, the Armenian settlements in the regions of Yozghat (Ankara province) in 1915 – 1917, Sasun (April-Au-

 Matthias Haß, “The Politics of Memory in Germany, Israel and the United States of America,” The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies: Working Paper Series 9 (2004): 6 – 12, http://ccges.apps01.yorku.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/hass-the-politics-of-memory-ingermany-israel-and-the-united-states-of-america.pdf.

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gust, 1915), Musa-Ler (July 21-September 12, 1915), Khnus (May, 1915) and the region of Khotorjur (January 20-May, 1918).¹¹ In the provinces, in many small and large villages the Armenians had defended themselves against the enemy for a few hours or up to several days and weeks. In other words, during the years of the Genocide, Armenians in many places have protected themselves, their relatives and families, and their settlements. The only self-defense in the big cities which ended in victory was in Van, where later Armenian volunteer detachments and Russian troops entered. Here, Armenian authority survived for 72 days, that is to say, the victory was accompanied by political success. However, later, Russian troops retreated unexpectedly and forced the Armenian forces to retreat along with them. And so on for four times. That last time the Armenian authorities had no choice but to leave the city.¹² It follows from the above that Armenians resisted for a short period in certain places or for weeks and months in other places depending on the level of organization or availability of weapons and ammunition. The phenomenon is too multifaceted and the evaluations differ but it is absolutely clear that in many cases the Armenian civilian population was not “just slaughtered like sheep,” as it is sometimes represented in the circles mostly unaware of what was going on. The people “slaughtered like sheep” would have been unable to bond in May 1918, under the conditions of the ongoing World War and the absence of statehood; to win in the battles of Sardarapat and Aparan, to resist in

 Ruben Sahakyan, The Genocide of Western Armenians and Self-Defense Battles in 1915 [Arevmtahayutyan tseghaspanutyune yev inqnapashtpanakan krivnere 1915 tvakanin] (Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2005, in Armenian); idem, Self-Defense Battles in Western Armenia in 1915 and Armenian Revolutionary Federation [Inqnapashtpanakan krivnere Arevmtyan Hayastanum 1915 tvakanin yev HH Dashnaktsutyune] (Yerevan: Hay Dat, 2010, in Armenian); Edik Minasyan, “Self-Defense Battles of Armenians in 1915,” Haykakan banak [Armenian army] 1– 2 (2015): 88 – 134 (in Armenian).  Arsen Keorkizyan, The Heroic Battle of Vaspurakan [Vaspurakani herosamarte] (Beirut: Atlas, 1965, in Armenian); Suren Sargsyan, “Heroic Battle of Van,” in Capitals of Armenia. Book 1: Van [Hayastani mayraqaghaqnere. Girq 1: Van]. Proceedings of the International Conference, dedicated to 2865th Anniversary of the First Record about City of Van (October 7 – 9, 2010), compiled and edited by Harutyun Marutyan (Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2013), 163 – 169 (in Armenian); Avetis Harutyunyan, Religious and Cultural Life of Van-Vaspurakan and the Attempt of the Creation of Statehood (1908 – 1918) [Van-Vaspurakani kronamshakutayin kyanqe yev petakanutyan steghtsman pordze (1908 – 1918)] (Etchmiadzin: Mayr Ator, 2018, in Armenian).

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Gharakilisa and thus save the entire population of Eastern Armenia from yet another genocide.¹³ But the losses at the time of the Genocide were also incredibly great, huge. Besides 1.5 million victims (about two thirds of Western Armenians), Armenians have lost their historic homeland, where they had been living for around 5,000 years. Human and territorial losses were accompanied by the loss of cultural heritage as well. In the absence of an independent statehood and Lenin-Stalin dictatorship, there were no public discussions, nor how and whom to remember. The role of the resistance had not been properly assessed, neither by the survivors, nor by their descendants, as the Armenians were finally defeated and had to leave their homeland. The state mentality and its intellectual creators had a certain role in overcoming the traumatic memories among the broad masses of the people. In the case of Israel, as we mentioned earlier, after only five years of independence, a solution to overcome the trauma was implemented; the solution which has been applied for more than six decades, and which gives excellent results. In the 1950s it was strengthened by the apology of Germany for the Holocaust and the decades-long payment of compensations.¹⁴ The whole world recognizes the Holocaust and it is being commemorated at UN level. In the Armenian case, there was no recognition of the guilt by the successors of the genocidal state; this made the issue of the importance of the genocide recognition by the world a priority for the Armenians and the concentration of enormous intellectual resources to that effect. And in fact it was so; the overcoming of a traumatic element in the memory of genocide is determined to a large extent by the impulses coming from the outside; which states have recognized it? What did leaders or prominent

 Harutyun Marutyan, “The Phenomenon of Self-Defense During the Years of the Armenian Genocide and the Problem of Reformulation of the Memory Day,” Tseghaspanagitakan handes [Journal of Genocide Studies] 3, no. 1– 2 (2015): 76 – 77 [“The Caucasian Frontline of the First World War: Genocide, Refugees and Humanitarian Assistance.” Proceedings of the International Conference, The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan, April 21– 22, 2014] (in Armenian).  Harutyun Marutyan, “Financial Idemnification of Germany to the Jews: Formation, Process, Current Situation,” in The Main Issues Western Armeniancy’s Claims: Collection of Conference Papers, ed. Artashes Shahnazaryan and Harutyun Marutyan, compilers Andranik Arshakyan and Vladimir Vardanyan (Yerevan: Tigran Mets, 2009), 86 – 100; idem, “From the Jewish Experience of Receiving Compensations: Creation and Activities of the ‘Claims Conference’ Organization,” in The Armenian Genocide and the Problem of Reparation. Proceedings of the International Conference [Hayots tseghaspanutyune yev hatutsman himnakhndire], 156 – 73, ed. Armen Maruqyan (Yerevan: Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia, 2017, in Armenian).

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scholars say about the Armenian Genocide? Attempts to transfer the issue to a legal dimension lag behind the organizational and material resources. As a result, in the Armenian reality, for around a century, the memory of “Armenian Genocide victims” has been commemorated on official and non-official levels. Participants in documented or undocumented self-defense battles are included in the list of “victims” as well. For decades, this single emphasis brings with it manifestations of an inferiority complex, or the phenomenon of perceiving genocide memory as a burden, and in some cases the acknowledgement of the necessity to take action to “get rid of” it. On the other hand, it is obvious that in the Armenian reality the “traumatic memory of the genocide,” which was typical in the 1960 – 70s, does not exist anymore for the young generation. This is partially due to the fact that the genocide survivors have passed away, and the collective memory of the Genocide in the fourth generation is replaced by the historical memory, post-memory of the Genocide. That is to say that the primary source of information of genocide memory is not the eyewitnesses or survivors, but the history books, fiction literature, films, and mass media instead. In this case, for example the “healing trauma” formulation which is sometimes heard in the speeches of politicians and in mass media is already out of date. We have to acknowledge that the traumatic memory of the genocide with the passing away of the survivors is undergoing a change, and the process of forming a new culture of “genocide memory” is taking place. Its characteristic features are: – Acknowledging the fact that the issue of recognition or non-recognition of the Armenian Genocide is essentially politicized on international platforms; – Practical attempts to overcome traumatic tones in the memory of genocide; – Gradual growth of the role of a legal element in the memory of genocide. On this basis, our times are characterized by the search for answers to the slogan “I remember and demand” proposed by the authorities and accepted by the public on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide: – Whom do I remember? – What do I remember? – How do I remember? – What do I demand? – From whom do I demand? In the process of looking for answers to the first two questions that is – emphasizing the fact of the Armenians as fighters during the Armenian Genocide at the institutional level is being ignored. What is the way out? I think it is high time to reconsider the significance of Memory Day, to reform it, at least to make changes

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in accents and to put this formula in circulation: “Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day: Victims, Defenders, Survivors.”¹⁵ I think the discussions and research over the answers of the above five questions can become the foundation basis for the new quality of genocide memory of the Armenian society. *** A hundred years have passed and there has been a substantial change in the content of the trauma of genocide. It is difficult to provide a brief explanation of the manifestations of this change, however, in a very schematic way it can be characterized as follows։ for survivors, and especially eyewitnesses, the genocide trauma was largely associated with the loss; human (relatives, acquaintances, fellow villagers, friends), material (home and household, immovable and movable property accumulated over the years, wealth), spiritual-cultural (monasteries and churches, dialect, music) and was reflected in the theme of “land and water” longing. Nowadays, the trauma of genocide is frequently and further expressed in the awareness of the continuing injustice, in a complaint against denial, while “mitigation” of the loss of the historical homeland is facilitated by its “virtual recovery.” This is reflected in the annual visits of thousands of people to Historic Armenia, in creating relevant platforms in social networks for sharing photos and videos of those visits, in raising the issue of claims in various ways. At the same time, Turkish denialism tightens its terms, although trying to fit them neatly into “humanitarian” statements. One of them was directly related to the “attempt” to mitigate the trauma of genocide. The example of this was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “condolences” to the Armenians in April 23, 2014. In his statement, Erdogan, in particular, said: “The incidents of the First World War are our shared pain. To evaluate this painful period of history through a perspective of just memory is a humane and scholarly responsibility. … Regardless of their ethnic or religious origins, we pay tribute, with compassion and respect, to all Ottoman citizens who lost their lives in the same period and under similar conditions.”¹⁶ In response to this, speaking to Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, UCLA Armenian studies Prof. Richard Hovannisian expressed disappointment at Erdogan’s statement as simply a diplomatic exercise. “On the surface, it may look to be a step forward, but if one analyzes the statement carefully, it becomes evident that it is a diplomatic way of repeat Marutyan, “The Phenomenon of Self-Defense,” 79; Harutyun Marutyan, “The Reconsideration of April 24,” August 9, 2015, accessed March 17, 2020, http://boon.am/harutyun-mar utyan/.  http://asbarez.com/122206/repackaging-denial-erdogan-issues-statement-on-events-of-1915/.

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ing what has been said by the Turkish state many times; that is, placing Armenian suffering within the context of general, shared suffering, thereby minimizing and relativizing Armenian victimization without addressing the enormity of the crime, the responsibility to face up to it, and the necessity to take measures to alleviate the enduring pain and losses of the victims and their descendants,” Hovannisian said.¹⁷ Erdogan’s “condolences” are a specific continuation of the earlier “trauma” theme manipulation, as early as in 2011, authored by then Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. In his publications/speeches, he called on Armenians to address the Genocide question through a concept he termed “just memory.” It is “unjust” to place these traumatic events at the center of everything, Davutoglu noted in the Turkish Policy Quarterly article.¹⁸ A Guardian article later insisted that Armenians (and indeed Christians) were not the only ones to have suffered during this period. “While much of western history tells of the suffering of the dispossessed and dead Ottoman Christians, the colossal sufferings of Ottoman Muslims remains largely unknown outside of Turkey. … Communal and national memories of a pain, suffering, deprivation and monumental loss of life continue to keep the Armenian and Turkish peoples apart. Competing and seemingly irreconcilable narratives on the 1915 events prevent the healing of this trauma” [emphasises are mine – H.M.]. The author went on to insist that Turkey had proposed a joint commission in an effort to allow the emergence of a socalled “just memory.” The specific continuation of “just memory,” “healing trauma,” “common pain,” “mutual suffering,” “Armenian tragedy” line was bringing forward the idea of Muslim “rescuers” of Armenians during “1915 events.”¹⁹  Ibid. Cf. with the statement of another American-Armenian historian, Prof. R.G. Suny: “Mr. Erdogan has offered his condolences to the descendants of those massacred, thus shifting the state’s narrative from condemnation of treacherous rebels to sorrow for victims of war, both Christian and Muslim.” R.G. Suny, “The Cost of Turkey’s Genocide Denial,” New York Times, April 23, 2015, accessed March 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/opinion/thecost-of-turkeys-genocide-denial.html.  Ahmed Davutoglu, “Turkish-Armenian Relations in the Process of De-Ottomanization or ‘Dehistoricization’: Is a ‘Just Memory’ Possible?” accessed March 17, 2020, http://turkishpolicy. com/pdf/vol_13-no_1-davutoglu.pdf; idem, “Turks and Armenians – We Must Follow Erdoğan’s Lead and Bury Our Common Pain,” The Guardian, May 2, 2014, accessed March 17, 2020, https:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/02/turks-armenians-erdogan-condolences1915-armenian-massacre; Andranik Israyelyan, “Can Davutoglu’s ‘Just Memory’ Concept Bring Justice?,” Asbarez, May 20, 2015, accessed March 17, 2020, http://asbarez.com/136232/can-davu toglus-just-memory-concept-bring-justice/; cf.: Taner Akcam, “What Davutoglu Fails to Understand,” Armenian Weekly, May 19, 2010, accessed March 17, 2020, http://armenianweekly.com/ 2010/05/19/akcam-davutoglu/.  Cf.: Baruch Tenembaum and Eduardo Eurnekian, “The Unsung Turkish Rescuers,” September 30, 2010, accessed March 17, 2020, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-unsung-Turkish-res

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A great number of survivors paid a huge price – material, psychological, moral etc. On the eve of the centennial of the Armenian Genocide there was quite a lot of talk regarding the rescue of Armenians by Turks/Kurds, that is to say that part of the survivors were rescued with the help, with the participation of Muslim Turks/Kurds. At first glance it seems that this did truly happen: thousands survived owing to the intervention of Turkish and Kurdish people. But I want to stress on the difference between the terms “survived” and “rescued” as these are two different phenomena. The question is: what was the “price” paid for that. Yes, part of the survivors – escaped death by being forcibly converted to Islam or converted under threat of death; – stayed alive by being subjected to sexual harassment and exploitation; – got married to the murderer of his/her family or his offspring and had children; – served at perpetrator’s home and made ends meet; – worked in the perpetrator’s farm for months and years, providing economic benefit for him; – gave the child as a “gift” to aliens while facing imminent death. Thus, defining the phenomenon of “rescue” is a problem indeed. So, which are the criteria that enable us to determine a “true” rescue from a “false” one? One need not look far for the answers as the issue is already indirectly touched upon in the text of the 1948 Genocide Convention and particularly Article II: […] genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.²⁰

cuers-419536. For the detailed analysis see Harutyun Marutyan, “The Issue of the Rescue of Armenians by Ottoman Subjects During the Armenian Genocide,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 26 (2017): 39 – 61.  http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html, accessed March 17, 2020.

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In 2008 the second and fourth items of this article underwent an additional amendment in the UN Security Council Resolution 1820 adopted on June 19, which proclaimed that in the context of armed conflict or genocide, rape, and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.²¹ What does the Jewish experience indicate? One of the most important institutions in charge of preserving the memory of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust is Yad Vashem. Apart from this task, one of the principal duties of the museum is to convey the gratitude of the State of Israel and the Jewish people to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. According to the Yad Vashem’s official site, “This mission was defined by the law establishing Yad Vashem, and in 1963 the Remembrance Authority embarked upon a worldwide project to grant the title of Righteous among the Nations to the few who helped Jews in the darkest time in their history.”²² The basic conditions for granting the title are: 1. Active involvement of the rescuer in saving one or several Jews from the threat of death or deportation to death camps; 2. Risk to the rescuer’s life, liberty or position; 3. The initial motivation being the intention to help persecuted Jews: i. e. not for payment or any other reward such as religious conversion of the saved person, adoption of a child, etc. 4. The existence of testimony of those who were helped or at least unequivocal documentation establishing the nature of the rescue and its circumstances.²³ Rescue of Jews took many forms and required varying degrees of involvement and self-sacrifice. The title of the Righteous is reserved for the smaller group of those who actively risked their lives or their freedom for the express purpose of saving Jews from persecution and murder. There is a wider circle of men and women who assisted the persecuted in the darkest hour of Jewish history, but  “United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1820 (2008), Adopted by the Security Council at its 5916th meeting, on 19 June 2008,” in Security Council Demands Immediate and Complete Halt to Acts of Sexual Violence Against Civilians in Conflict Zones, Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1820 (2008), accessed March 17, 2020, https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/% 7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S%20RES%201820.pdf. See also “Rape: Weapon of War,” accessed March 17, 2020, https://www.ohchr.org/en/newsevents/ pages/rapeweaponwar.aspx.  “The Righteous Among the Nations: About the Program,” accessed March 17, 2020, https:// www.yadvashem.org/righteous/about-the-program.html.  “The Righteous Among the Nations: FAQ,” accessed March 17, 2020, https://www.yadva shem.org/righteous/faq.html.

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whose help did not involve the taking of risks. These humane people have Yad Vashem’s greatest appreciation and their deeds are being documented by them. Nevertheless, even though their aid was crucial to the Jews’ survival, in the absence of risk, they do not qualify for recognition within the framework of the Righteous program.²⁴ The title is not attributed if the motivation is other than the rescue of persecuted Jews. Such other motivations can be: (1) financial gain; (2) the wish to religiously convert the rescued persons, or the protection of converted Jews because they are viewed as Christians and the rescuers feel that they should not be treated as Jews; (3) the wish to take in a Jewish child for the purpose of adoption; (4) rescue as a result of resistance activity that was not aimed at saving Jews.²⁵ Yet another reason for not attributing the title may be that while saving one or several Jews, the very same rescuer was involved in murder, war crimes or causing harm to others.²⁶ Up to this point, everything seems to be more or less clear regarding the granting of the title. There is a distinct methodology that has been in operation for more than half a century, and it is possible to filter stories connected to the rescue of the members of the Jewish community during the Holocaust.²⁷ Since the establishment of the title, more than 27,000 individuals have been honored for their efforts. It is a system that has been acknowledged by the Jewish people, as well as by humanity in general. If these provisions are effective for the Jewish community, it is safe to assume that these provisions (perhaps with certain modifications to fit the Armenian experience better), could also work in the case of the Armenian Genocide victims and rescuers. Let us not forget the fact that the persecution of the Jewish community and their subsequent destruction in Germany and wider Europe began only a decade or so after the end of the Armenian Genocide (1915 – 1923), having in common with the latter many similar ideological beliefs, economic motivations, and mechanisms of destruction.

 Ibid.  Ibid.  Ibid.  There is enormous literature on the issue. See http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/ pdf/bibliography_righteous_among_the_nations.pdf, accessed March 17, 2020. In the Yad Vashem website can be found publications on the issues of rescue of the Jewish people during the Holocaust in the different countries of Europe. See http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/right eous/resources.html. A fundamental work on the issue is, in particular, the following book: Martin Gilbert, The Righteous. The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003).

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I have done a research regarding the question of the rescue of Armenians during the Genocide. In that research I have examined 600 eyewitness testimonies, collected from the survivors of 1915 – 16 – 17. All these documents are compiled in three volumes, “The Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey. Testimonies of Survivors. Collection of Documents,” published by National Archives of Armenia in 2012. I came to the conclusion that in most cases those who had survived did not owe their lives to actions taken, and therefore they cannot be qualified as “rescued.” Let me give some details. In some cases, people were saved owing to advance information about an impending massacre. But none of these interventions seem to have contained risk factors, i. e. substantive threats to the informers’ well-being and freedom should they become known. In addition, there are no indications that this information (even transmitted secretly or indirectly) could endanger the informant’s official position or community standing. Hence, such information, important as it may have been for the survival of the Armenians, is not considered “rescue” in the strictest sense of the word or by the criteria set by the Institute of the “Rightеous.” The analysis of the stories indicates that the “promise of rescue” becomes an important motif. In my research I have come across 30 instances of interventions, when Armenians, trusting the rescue promises made by their Turkish, Kurdish or Circassian neighbors, acquaintances, or friends, went to them for refuge but these “friends” broke their promises killing the Armenians whom they had hidden in their homes. In many cases when the promises were indeed kept and promisees were indeed saved, it was done for monetary gain rather than for humanitarian reasons. Among 600 eyewitness testimonies, I counted about 50 instances of intervention, which could be safely categorized as instances of being “rescued” for economic exploitation. Another way by which an Armenian could be saved was religious conversion, or more appropriately, compulsory and forced adoption of Islam, or conversion in case of real danger to life. The phenomenon of forced religious conversion, with its ability to afflict “serious mental harm” on individuals undergoing that situation, falls under Article 2 of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” in other words, it is an important component of the genocidal act. As such, a forced conversion, by definition, falls out of the category boundaries of the Institute of the “Righteous.” The sexual exploitation, namely the rape of Armenian women and children, was widespread. In many instances rape was never a singular act, but usually part of a wider repertoire of physical violence against the victims that lasted

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days, weeks, months. Sexual exploitation was sometimes followed by being forced, compelled, to marry a Muslim man; in this way, a woman’s or a girl’s physical life was spared. However, rapes inflicted “serious bodily or mental harm” to the members of the group subjected to it, which corresponds to point (b) of Article 2 of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Besides, massive rapes led to a huge number of children being born of non-Armenian fathers, hence jeopardizing the reproduction and continuation of a group of people (in this case – Western Armenians), namely their physical existence which complies with point (d) of the same Convention: “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” The above-cited numerous examples make it rather clear that despite the fact that many individuals survived the massacres physically, they underwent tremendous psychological trauma not least because these “acts of rescue” included or were otherwise accompanied by economic and sexual exploitation, forced conversions, etc. by rescuers themselves. Without disregarding the outcome of these rescues, or diminishing their significance (many lives were indeed saved), it should be pointed out that they nevertheless fall short of meeting the criteria set by the Institute of the “Righteous” and cannot be regarded as authentic humanitarian acts. It is to be noted that these are not obvious manifestations of a genocidal logic. There are however instances of genuine rescues, which in some cases have clearly distinguishable charitable motivations and in some other cases have much more complex motivations. The important thing to keep in mind in this context is that these rescues contained risk factor for the rescuers, and moreover were not accompanied (at least there is no evidence in the narratives and it is impossible to check) by sexual and economic exploitations or incidents of forced religious conversion. The rescuers were neighbors, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, sometimes even strangers. The primary motivation for rescue was humanitarian, be it pity, sympathy, morality, and perhaps other similar factors. One of the characteristics of the genuine rescues is that the majority of the subjects were women and children; the examined 600 stories of survivors contain a very small number of cases of rescued men or whole families. One more nuance should be noted, however; in many cases the number of the rescued or those who escaped death due to the righteous was so small that survivors easily remembered their numbers and in some cases even the names of their saviours in the smallest details. Rescuers belonged to different nationalities: Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, and Yezidis. Thus, when the debate about these acts, qualified as “rescue” ones, is taken out of the domain of public and social journalism and brought into another dimension, aligning it with the principles set forth by the Institute of the “Right-

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eous among the Nations,” another picture comes forth. It seems to me that in this way the possibility to be led by groundless and subjective estimations is being considerably narrowed down. Whether we want it or not, “rescues,” which, according to internationally accepted standards are considered to be genuine, were not a common occurrence during the Armenian Genocide, but happened far more sparingly than has been presented of late for various political and propagandist purposes.²⁸ Not concentrating on the differences of source situation of the Armenian Genocide and Jewish Holocaust, there are certain conceptual differences in the ways the Armenians and Jews were rescued. There are types of rescue during the Armenian Genocide that are absent during the Holocaust. For example some leaders or other influential persons of some localities even openly or through the use of force protected their Armenian population from the Ottoman army or the Kurdish tribes. This phenomenon can be explained by the relative weakness of the Ottoman central authorities in the concerned localities. This protection also deterred the Muslims to act against local Armenians, thus creating a sort of protection for them. Resistance and self-defense of Armenians can also be assessed in this context. Another difference is connected with women and children, who were sometimes considered as not posing real threat or danger, and thus subsequently spared. In some instances, the neighbors chose not to inform the authorities about the Armenians receiving refuge in their neighborhood. The reason here was probably the strong neighborly ties, rather than the desire to save the Armenians.²⁹ Now, a hundred years later, we are witnessing another reality in Western Armenia and Anatolia. Many materials, gradually academic researches, are coming to the question of what happened to the “rescued” or “survived” Armenian people and their descendants left in Turkish-Kurdish society. The people who were “saved” – adopted, married with, formed families, who at first glance would become equal citizens of the Turkish state. In fact, as the press articles, memoirs,

 Cf.: Burçin Gerçek, “Turkish Rescuers: Report on Turks who reached-out to Armenians in 1915,” with the supervision of Prof. Taner Akcam; and transcription of Ottoman archives documents by Ömer Türkoglu. Accessed February 14, 2021, http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/wp-content/files_mf/1435335304ReportTurkishrescuerscomplete.pdf. The list contains information on various Turkish and Kurdish officials, as well as a further 80 regular citizens. The list overall contains information on 184 individuals, not all of whom are identified by name.  See for details Marutyan, “The Issue of the Rescue of Armenians,” 60. Cf.: Robert Rozett, “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 13, no. 1 (2019): 3.

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and finally the research shows, everything is not so smooth. Real, physical rescue often brings about the psychological traumas of “survivors,” their perception as “outsiders” of the society, and constant stressing of this condition by others. In this case, unlike the Armenian reality, the pain caused by the genocide, as trauma, even after one hundred years, is present in the generations of the “rescued.”³⁰

Bibliography Akcam, Taner. “What Davutoglu Fails to Understand.” Armenian Weekly, May 19, 2010. http:// armenianweekly.com/2010/05/19/akcam-davutoglu/. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) A of the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948. http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html. Davutoglu, Ahmed. “Turkish-Armenian Relations in the Process of De-Ottomanization or ‘Dehistoricization’: Is a ‘Just Memory’ Possible?” Turkish Policy Quarterly, Spring 2014. http://turkishpolicy.com/pdf/vol_13-no_1-davutoglu.pdf. Davutoglu, Ahmed. “Turks and Armenians – We Must Follow Erdoğan’s Lead and Bury Our Common Pain.” The Guardian, May 2, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2014/may/02/turks-armenians-erdogan-condolences-1915-armenian-massacre. Gerçek, Burçin. “Turkish Rescuers: Report on Turks who reached-out to Armenians in 1915,” with supervision of Prof. Taner Akcam; and transcription of Ottoman archives documents by Ömer Türkoglu. Accessed February 14, 2021. http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/wp-content/files_mf/1435335304ReportTurkishrescuerscomplete.pdf. Gilbert, Martin. The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003. Harutyunyan, Avag. Hayots tseghaspanutyan 50-rd tarelitse yev Yerkrord Hanrapetutyune [The 50th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and the Second Republic]. Yerevan: Noravank, 2015 (in Armenian). Harutyunyan, Avetis. Van-Vaspurakani kronamshakutayin kyanqe yev petakanutyan steghtsman pordze (1908 – 1918) [Religious and Cultural Life of Van-Vaspurakan and the Attempt of the Creation of Statehood (1908 – 1918)]. Etchmiadzin: Mayr Ator, 2018 (in Armenian).

 Rubina Peroomian, And Those Who Continued Living in Turkey after 1915: The Metamorphosis of the Post-Genocide Armenian Identity as Reflected in Artistic Literature (Yerevan: Gasprint, 2008); Ruben Melkonyan, “The Current State of the Armenian Ethnic Component in Western Armenia,” in The Main Issues Western Armeniancy’s Claims: Collection of Conference Papers, 136 – 47; Harutyun Marutyan, “Traumatic Memory as an Important Factor for Preservation of Armenian Identity in Turkey,” On the Problems of Armenians of Turkey. Bulletin of “Noravank” Foundation [Turqiayi hayutyan khndirneri shurj. Teghekagir “Noravank” himnadrami] 22 (2008): 110 – 21 (in Armenian).

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Haβ, Matthias. “The Politics of Memory in Germany, Israel and the United States of America.” The Canadian Centre for German and European Studies: Working Paper Series 9 (2004): 6 – 12. http://ccges.apps01.yorku.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/hass-the-politicsof-memory-in-germany-israel-and-the-united-states-of-america.pdf. Hodgkin, Katharine, and Susannah Radstone. “Remembering Suffering: Trauma and History: Introduction.” In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, edited by Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, 97 – 103. London, New York: Routledge, 2003. Israyelyan, Andranik. “Can Davutoglu’s ‘Just Memory’ Concept Bring Justice?” Asbarez, May 20, 2015. http://asbarez.com/136232/can-davutoglus-just-memory-concept-bring-justice/. Keorkizyan, Arsen. Vaspurakani herosamarte [The Heroic Battle of Vaspurakan]. Beirut: Atlas, 1965 (in Armenian). Marutyan, Harutyun. “Traumatic Memory as an Important Factor for Preservation of Armenian Identity in Turkey.” Turqiayi hayutyan khndirneri shurj. Teghekagir “Noravank” himnadrami [On the Problems of Armenians of Turkey. Bulletin of “Noravank” Foundation] 22 (2008): 110 – 21 (in Armenian). Marutyan, Harutyun. “Financial Idemnification of Germany to the Jews: Formation, Process, Current Situation.” In The Main Issues Western Armeniancy’s Claims: Collection of Conference Papers, edited by Artashes Shahnazaryan and Harutyun Marutyan, compilers Andranik Arshakyan and Vladimir Vardanyan, 86 – 100. Yerevan: Tigran Mets, 2009. Marutyan, Harutyun. Iconography of Armenian Identity, vol. 1, The Memory of Genocide and the Karabagh Movement. Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2009 (Anthropology of Memory, 2). Marutyan, Harutyun. “The Phenomenon of Self-Defense During the Years of the Armenian Genocide and the Problem of Reformulation of the Memory Day.” Tseghaspanagitakan handes [Journal of Genocide Studies] 3, no. 1 – 2 (2015): 76 – 80 [“The Caucasian Frontline of the First World War: Genocide, Refugees and Humanitarian Assistance.” Proceedings of the International Conference, The Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan, April 21 – 22, 2014] (in Armenian). Marutyan, Harutyun. “Aprili 24-i verabanadzevume” [The Reconsideration of April 24]. Interview to “Boon.TV,” August 9, 2015. Video, 11:53. http://boon.am/harutyun-mar utyan/ (in Armenian). Marutyan, Harutyun. “From the Jewish Experience of Receiving Compensations: Creation and Activities of the ‘Claims Conference’ Organization.” In Hayots tseghaspanutyune yev hatutsman himnakhndire [The Armenian Genocide and the Problem of Reparation. Proceedings of the International Conference], edited by Armen Maruqyan, 156 – 73. Yerevan: Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Republic of Armenia, 2017 (in Armenian). Marutyan, Harutyun. “The Issue of the Rescue of Armenians by Ottoman Subjects During the Armenian Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 26 (2017): 39 – 61. Marutyan, Harutyun. “Formation, Development, and Current State of the Armenian Genocide Victims Remembrance Day (Part 2).” Tseghaspanagitakan handes [Journal of Genocide Studies] 7, no. 2 (2018): 103 – 08 (in Armenian). Melkonyan, Ruben. “The Current State of the Armenian Ethnic Component in Western Armenia.” In The Main Issues Western Armeniancy’s Claims: Collection of Conference Papers, edited by Artashes Shahnazaryan and Harutyun Marutyan, compilers Andranik Arshakyan and Vladimir Vardanyan, 136 – 147. Yerevan: Tigran Mets, 2009.

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Minasyan, Edik. “Self-Defense Battles of Armenians in 1915.” Haykakan banak [Armenian army] no. 1 – 2 (2015): 88 – 134 (in Armenian). Peroomian, Rubina. And Those Who Continued Living in Turkey after 1915: The Metamorphosis of the Post-Genocide Armenian Identity as Reflected in Artistic Literature. Yerevan: Gasprint, 2008. Petrosyan, Vardges. “At the Different Sides of Psycological ‘Barbed Wire’.” In Vardges Petrosyan, Mer zhoghovurdn imn e, inchpes … im vishte [Our People are Mine, as is … My Grief. Compilation of Publicist Articles], edited by Levon Ananyan, 127 – 155. Yerevan: Hayastan, 2003 (in Armenian). “Rape: Weapon of War.” https://www.ohchr.org/en/newsevents/pages/rapeweaponwar.aspx. “Repackaging Denial: Erdogan Issues Statement on ‘Events of 1915’.” Asbarez, April 23, 2014. http://asbarez.com/122206/repackaging-denial-erdogan-issues-statement-on-events-of1915/. “Resources.” https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/resources.html. Rozett, Robert. “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology.” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 13, no. 1 (2019): 1 – 14. Sahakyan, Ruben. Arevmtahayutyan tseghaspanutyune yev inqnapashtpanakan krivnere 1915 tvakanin [The Genocide of Western Armenians and Self-Defense Battles in 1915]. Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2005 (in Armenian). Sahakyan, Ruben. Inqnapashtpanakan krivnere Arevmtyan Hayastanum 1915 tvakanin yev HH Dashnaktsutyune [Self-Defense Battles in Western Armenia in 1915 and Armenian Revolutionary Federation]. Yerevan: Hay Dat, 2010 (in Armenian). Sargsyan, Suren. “Heroic Battle of Van.” In Hayastani mayraqaghaqnere. Girq 1: Van [Capitals of Armenia. Book 1: Van]. Proceedings of the International Conference, dedicated to 2865th Anniversary of the First Record about City of Van (October 7 – 9, 2010), compiled and edited by Harutyun Marutyan, 163 – 69. Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2013 (in Armenian). Sarkissian, Haig. “50th Anniversary of the Turkish Genocide as Observed in Yerevan.” The Armenian Review 19, no. 4 (1966): 23 – 28. Stauber, Roni. “Confronting the Jewish Response During the Holocaust: Yad Vashem – a Commemorative and a Research Institute in the 1950s.” Modern Judaism 20 (2000): 277 – 98. Suny, R.G. “The Cost of Turkey’s Genocide Denial.” New York Times, April 23, 2015, https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/opinion/the-cost-of-turkeys-genocide-denial.html. Tenembaum, Baruch, and Eduardo Eurnekian. “The Unsung Turkish Rescuers.” September 30, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-unsung-Turkish-rescuers-419536. “The Righteous Among the Nations: About the Program.” https://www.yadvashem.org/right eous/about-the-program.html. “The Righteous Among the Nations: FAQ.” https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/faq.html. “United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1820 (2008), Adopted by the Security Council at its 5916th meeting, on 19 June 2008.” In Security Council Demands Immediate and Complete Halt to Acts of Sexual Violence Against Civilians in Conflict Zones, Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1820 (2008), https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/ atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/CAC%20S%20RES%201820. pdf.

Öndercan Muti

Memory in Motion: Armenian Youth and New Forms of Engagement with the Past After answering a series of questions on the Armenian Genocide, Aram,¹ a 19year-old student at Yerevan University, starts showing signs of being tired of the topic: “Many foreigners, especially in Europe, they don’t know much about Armenians and when they say ‘Armenian’ the first thing that comes to their mind is the genocide. Aside from that, there are tons of things to know about Armenian culture, Armenian traditions.” The young audience following the interview with curiosity nods, and finally someone takes the initiative to intervene: “Do you know what is the first thing appearing when you write ‘Armenian’ on google?” Although the context makes it easier to guess, I can’t help looking at Aram’s phone on the table. One of the younger volunteers of the youth organization, where we sit and talk, acts quickly and shows everyone the results. Not bothered with friendly interventions, Aram concludes his thought: “If we speak about the Armenian victims all the time, our hands are tied. It is time now to talk about victories, brighter chapters in our history.” As “the foreigner” in the room – not from Europe but Turkey – asking questions about what Aram and others have learned about the Armenian Genocide at school, I inevitably start questioning my own knowledge about Armenian history and culture. Yet Aram was not the only one: during the two-years long research, criticism on over-contextualizing of the Armenian Genocide and the related hereditary victimhood (Lim 2010) has become a common point raised by many young Armenians in Armenia as well as in France, Germany, Lebanon, and Turkey.² The fact that it was hard to define an important socio-historical event adopted effectively by Aram’s age group in Armenia piqued my interest (Fırat et al. 2017). Although being concerned with the past, memory is shaped in the present and requires performance and work (Erll and Rigney 2009; La Capra 1998). Furthermore, conditions of remembering keep changing: on April 23, 2018 a historical milestone was reached in Armenia, when PM Serzh Sargsyan resigned, unable to withstand one-month long mass protests. His resignation was followed by a series of mem-

 To protect their privacy or anonymity, no actual names of participants were used in this article.  For further information on the project, conducted by a research group from the Association for the Study of Sociology of Memory and Culture in Istanbul, see www.en.memoryon.org. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-011

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orable events and notable social changes, so that April 23 became an important date, a lieu de mémoire, marking the “Velvet Revolution”. It was equally exciting to see how the major political victory of April 23, taking place only one day before the official remembrance day of the Armenian Genocide, made way for confronting long-established patterns of its commemoration. Some young Armenians, in and outside of Armenia, quickly reacted to the unique overlap of the two historical dates via social media. Comments posted on the same day of Sargsyan’s resignation as well as April 24 strike a chord with Aram’s criticism by alluding to the topic of hereditary victimhood and over-emphasis on the collective past. For instance, a post on Instagram by a young woman celebrating “a new narrative written in modern-day Armenia & across the Armenian Diaspora” emphasized that “the youth is transforming our history from victimhood to empowerment,” of course “while efforts for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide continue.” Young Armenians in Yerevan, Los Angeles, Beirut, and Paris saw the opportunity to start a conversation about the hope given by the revolution and remembering the future along with the past (Huyssen 2000). This paper will analyze new forms of engagement with the past suggested by young Armenians. As collective representations of the past construct social identities and provide historical continuity and meaning (Traverso 2007), every generation, with their unique ways of experiencing the present, imagines the content and direction of collective representations differently (Bottos and Rougier 2006). Moving beyond commemorations, mass media texts/products, and institutionalized memory places, my analysis relies on largely overlooked narratives as well as reactions to the dominant interpretations of the past, trying to understand how young Armenians challenge, transform or ignore certain representations of the collective past and identity. To this end, based on data collected before and after the Velvet Revolution of 2018, this chapter aims to look into the ways in which Armenian youth challenge the hereditary victimhood and nationalist narratives of the Armenian Genocide. The interplay between personal experiences and memory politics will be the guiding puzzle to unpick how individuals give meaning to official or conventional narratives and commemorations of the past. Thus, this chapter aims to follow the actuality of the re-narration of the Armenian Genocide and to understand the generational needs and interpretational frameworks at play (Welzer 2010).

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1 Generations and Collective Memory At the peak of discussions on the “Lost Generation” of WWI, German sociologist Karl Mannheim assumed a link between socio-historical breakthroughs taking place during the socialization process of the same age group and the formation of generations (Mannheim 1928).³ Addressing Aristotle’s concept of entelechy (mainly referred in physics and biology to explain the motion or generation of a natural object according to its potential), Mannheim distinguishes “generation units” and “generation in actuality”, i. e. he gives a further definition of generation than being merely a cohort. According to this analysis in his The Problem of Generations, “generation as actuality” is characterized by the “participation in the common destiny of this historical and social unit” that actualizes the “generation status,” that is, a social group chronologically situated in the same era and also sharing the same historical-social space. Generation as actuality implies that the historical-social events that have taken place during the socialization process of individuals have been effective in the formation of a generation in a sociological sense. Consequently, Mannheim’s definition transforms the problem of generations to a problem of knowledge: “how society’s accumulated cultural heritage is transmitted from generation to generation at a time when the status both of knowledge itself, and those charged with passing it on, stands in question” (Bristow 2016). No doubt, with Mannheim’s definition, generations become mnemonic communities, since they are defined by common reference to certain past events by individuals who are located in the same historical period (Erll 2014). In this sense, “generation” and “collective memory” converge, since the latter can similarly refer to a “distribution… of what individuals believe, feel, and know about the past” (Schwartz 2008). As a result, first-hand experiences and self-acquired memories play a defining role in binding individuals and forming generations (Mannheim 1928). Nonetheless, this explanation has been challenged and altered by contemporary research in two manners: studies on cultural and collective memory argue that while memories are expressed through text, visual or audio mediums, these various media also influence the formation and narration

 Mannheim personally witnessed a series of historical milestones: he was born in the Hungarian-Austrian Empire, witnessed WWI and its great catastrophe and dissolution of empires, taught in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, took refuge in the Weimar Republic, experienced exile again under the Nazi regime, observed political and cultural revolutions, lived consequences of technologically advanced warfare, and informed about the industrial methods of genocide.

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of individual and collective remembrance (Assmann 2011; Erll and Rigney 2009; Hajek 2016; Kansteiner 2006). In a similar vein, mediated memories of past events can have a bonding power, even over a cohort who did not directly experience them. As in the case of Holocaust remembrance in Israel, and the Armenian Genocide in Armenia, remembering can become a national commitment, and the deliberate and thoroughly carried out commemoration can ensure that memory of certain events remain vivid and relevant (Coming and Schuman 2015; Fırat et al. 2017). Yet, the transmission of cultural heritage and knowledge about the past, both at familial and societal levels, is a process of interpretation and re-narration, according to present needs and future projections (Schuman, Belli, and Bischoping 1997; Welzer 2010). Accordingly, different generations tend to interpret not just recent or actual political and cultural events but also past events, in distinct ways. What we remember is selective and the product of a process of meaning making, and so it is tied to attempts to form a (new) group identity (Halbwachs 1992). Thus, the imagination of national belonging, political goals and knowledge about the past is linked to age along with class and gender. It follows then that every generation understands and depicts nation and heritage with a unique perspective thanks to its historical positioning and related constraints and possibilities (Bottos and Rougier 2006). Therefore, my aim is to explore the unique perspectives of young Armenians in relation to their generational positioning and need to attach new meanings to the Armenian Genocide.

2 Data and Methodology This research is based on two layers of data. Firstly, a group of interviews were conducted by the Foundation for Sociology of Memory and Culture (BEKS) during field research between 2015 – 2017. The research group, which I was part of, interviewed 108 Armenians between the ages of 19 and 35, living in Yerevan and Gyumri (Armenia), Istanbul (Turkey), Beirut (Lebanon), Paris and Marseille (France), Berlin and Cologne (Germany). Since the communities in these countries followed distinct paths, the data collected made it easier to reflect on national and transnational frameworks of memory. These two years of fieldwork provided a crucial opportunity for a compact period of ethnographic observation of mnemonic traditions, commemorations or public reminders of the genocide. The second layer of the data was collected more recently in Yerevan, Armenia. I conducted close to a year of fieldwork, following the social and political transformation which occurred with the Velvet Revolution. In addition to academic conferences and workshops, I visited NGOs and organizations active in

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the field of human rights and peace building, and attended official commemoration events for the Armenian Genocide and the revolution. One of the findings of the first phase of research in 2015 was that it was difficult to define a sociohistorical event that had taken place during the socialization process of our interview partners. As a researcher, it was exciting to observe how young people embraced the revolution and how they struggled for social change on many issues. Besides the participant observation, I conducted 10 in depth-interviews with activists, students, and white-collar workers. While most of the interview partners were born and raised in Armenia, some of them were born outside of Armenia and recently moved to Hayasdan (Armenia). For the most part, I will include these more recent interviews to explain the changing geography of the remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. With the aim of moving beyond the state and its institutions’ monopoly over the forming of collective memory, I asked the interview partners about their individual commemorative rituals, interpretations of institutionalized commemorations, official narratives of the past, and the link between memory and everyday life (Kidron 2009; 2010). Although research on memory politics has been thoroughly analyzed in relation to the interplay between national identity and collective memory (Anderson 1983; Assmann 2007; Bond and Gilliam 1994; Gillis 1994; Koselleck 2001), the focus has remained on the political and cultural elites in the (re‐)writing of history, with little attention being paid to the individual agency outside of these actors. Neither the political and social nor the narrative means are equally distributed in any given society, and in a similar vein, not every individual has the same level of access to ongoing discussions on the collective past (Bourdieu 1998). Therefore, I attached importance to collect narratives and focus on experiences and positions excluded from academic and political discussions.

3 Hereditary Victimhood and The Problem of Agency Following an interview with members of a German-Armenian youth initiative, I requested the interview partners’ evaluation. This was approximately a week before the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in 2016. The participants willingly answered plenty of questions for one and a half hours, covering, I assumed, a wide range of topics: “Well, actually, you did not ask us about Armenians being a ‘victim nation’. I was expecting to talk more about this.” After her colleague’s feedback, Tamar, a student from Berlin, elaborated: “That is why recognition

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of the genocide is so important for me. I do not always want to be identified with it and not want the next generation to be so heavily confronted with it. It is important to commemorate the genocide, but I do not want people to associate Armenians only with it.” Tamar’s objection to being identified only with the genocide was repeated by many young Lebanese Armenians just a week later. Disapproval of the Armenian genocide being the sole defining characteristic of Armenian identity became the tie binding together the majority of participants: young Armenians in different countries suggested an altered engagement with the past based on the needs and demands of the present. Likewise, the crucial characteristic of the remembrance of “being a victim nation” did not meet the needs and demands of many participants. Once the dichotomy of victims and victimizers is embedded in the collective memory and identity, victimhood becomes hereditary, strengthens the collective, and even binds generations (Lim 2010). Having existed under various imperial powers for centuries, the experience of the genocide has deepened existing notion of victimhood in Armenian. Indeed, in both diaspora and in Armenia, the theme of “being a victim nation” has become a characteristic of the remembrance of the genocide (Panossian 2002). Yet, one must consider the over-contextualization of the past by the underprivileged group, seeking justice, in relation to the de-contextualization of the past by the perpetrator group in order to deny responsibility for past crimes (Lim 2010). Here, I use over-contextualization as over-emphasizing and de-historicizing of the past. and de-contextualization as terminating the historical cause and effect relation to unsettle the categories of victim and perpetrator. Considering the asymmetric interplay between over-contextualization and de-contextualization, it is impossible to understand the great emphasis laid on the Armenian Genocide without the denialism of Turkey. However, the shared objection to being “identified with the Armenian genocide” or only as a victim group can be described as a generational need to reclaim agency, as Aram’s remark reminds us: “If we speak about the Armenian victims all the time, our hands are tied.” Considering the transnational and non-homogenous characteristics of Armenian identity and collective memory, these needs should be understood as multifaceted. Yet for the most part, the paradigm of conceding to victimhood is perceived as hindering agency. As the interviews undertaken before the Velvet Revolution reveal, young Armenians reject and challenge certain representations of the past generated and circulated by political or cultural elites. Certainly, quick reactions to the unique overlap of two historical dates via social media were remarkable but not out of the blue: social media offered a multi-channeled platform for competing and

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contested interpretations of the collective past in a new post-genocidal context. Beyond question, the Velvet Revolution, as a historical event experienced firsthand, offers a new common reference point, a framework of what a generation believes, feels, and knows about the collective past. However to understand the re-interpretation process, we should look closer at the mnemonic conditions developing with the revolution and analyze the “new” types of engagement with the past vis-à-vis the “old” ones.

4 “We need a new approach, another method”: Challenging the Victimhood Nationalism “It was the narrative of the old government.” Datev, a young artist, feminist and anti-militarist activist, is vigilant but optimistic about the future: “We need a new approach, another method to talk about the genocide than just being victims… And I see a potential in some fractions of the new government to have a new approach, to learn about the other side of history.” She gives me examples, including Anna Hakobyan’s – the editor-in-chief of Armenian Times and the spouse of the current Armenian Prime Minister Nigol Pashinyan – initiative, “Women for Peace”. Datev, with a mural of women and members of the LGBTI community marching and celebrating March 8 behind her, points out the nationalist and militarist narrative circulated in the public memory of the Armenian Genocide and its exclusionary logic: It is not just about the hatred towards Turks or other people, in general, nationalism targets anyone different, who do not live with ‘traditional values’, who are others. The huge part of the hate speech aims at us – feminists and LGBTs. And we feel this hatred every day, from family to different institutions. And the revolution did not help to overcome this nationalistic attitude.

We conducted the interview at a feminist library and queer cafe, khohanots – “Khoh means to think, but politically. This is where we gather, discuss and cook new ideas.” Since its opening in May 2018, the initiative itself was forced to change locations “because of homophobic attitude.” They are currently once again looking for a new place: “We do challenge nationalism and militarism every day. We took risks to speak about militarism and its dangers affecting us every day.” While nationalism rests on the image of the other/enemy, “victimhood nationalism” (Lim 2010) depends on and cements the figure of the other/ victimizer. Both Turkish and Armenian history textbooks join forces in producing a single-voice uttered by marked political elites, excluding the richness of

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human experience and perceptions (Akpınar, Avetisyan et. al. 2017). Much as the Turkish official narrative circles around a persistent denial of the systematic killings of Ottoman Christians during and prior to WWI and puts an emphasis on the “survival” of the state, Armenian textbooks maintain a strong theme of “victimhood” extending to a period prior to the Ottoman Empire. In a romanticized image of the (traditional/patriarchal) family/nation, the roles of women and men have always been envisaged similarly: women as mothers (and iconic symbols of the nation) and men as protectors (and agents of the nation) (Nagel 1998; Pettman 1996). Accordingly, as Datev illustrates, any individual or group not conforming to this binary model becomes targeted as a threat to the imagined organic unity of the state and family, i. e. “traditional values”. Yet the collective past is not simply a topic in history books. In addition to monuments, institutions, and rituals, representations of the Armenian Genocide are circulated through various media. In addition, street, town or shop names related to the genocide build an everyday web of associations. Individuals build complex links both to conscious efforts and random forms of remembering via personal and everyday experiences, beliefs, and future expectations. This complex mnemonic web raises the question of reinterpretation: to what extent can the representations of the past shaped by official commemorations, textbooks, memory institutions be challenged or contested? “It is a bit of a tricky topic in Armenia. It takes a lot of courage to talk about, or I don’t know… I really resist talking about the Armenian Genocide because it is monopolized by nationalists and by the former regime.” Lusine, a journalist covering human rights and issues related to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, describes the definite boundaries of how the Armenian Genocide is framed in public memory. Like Datev, ascribing it to “the old regime,” she can’t hide her excitement when recounting “the unprecedented” commemoration of 2018: Last year (2018), of course, there were celebrations on 23th of April. I think on the 24th people felt calm and some justice happened. ‘Yes, our grandparents were killed, but we were able to make some change at least for our children.’ And it was a kind of happy and spiritual and harmonious moment for a lot of people. At least, they were going to Tsitsernakaberd [The Armenian Genocide memorial complex] in peace. Everything was so fresh, and everybody was occupied with the current situation. It was a real unprecedented thing.

But one year later, she observes “a return to the classic style of commemorating. When you just hear news about Portugal recognizing the genocide, and Israel considering it. And of course, if Trump is going to use the G-word or not… I think it is a setback because there is no attempt to have a new public discussion about the genocide and relations with Turkey.”

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Gayane, working for an international development foundation, reminisces about the unique atmosphere of the April 24, 2018 and describes a hopeful mode of commemoration: “I think everyone was feeling independent, confident and hopeful and still keen to commemorate.” She also finds it difficult to have a discussion about the dominant representations and images of the Armenian Genocide, “because there are lots of emotions involved. It is not like discussing a legal term about some issues. It is something emotional because it is your past, your history.” For the majority of memory research, public and institutional memory steals the spotlight. Even novel forms and norms of remembrance which challenge existing narratives of the past are treated as interventions in the public sphere, i. e. counter memory. Also revolutions attract more academic attention as an area of contestation between new and old elites. However, the experiences shared above demonstrate that victimhood nationalism is not just employed by the political elites in a top-down fashion but is rather a net-like organization operated by various interest groups to exercise power (Foucault 1980). Essentially, the acceptable norms and practices of commemoration and narration are not solely encountered during rituals or in institutions, but are tied to various aspects of everyday life. Hence, the assumption of a sole narrative framework binding and meeting the needs of a multi-local, mnemonic group with diverse references to the collective identity (Beukian 2018) simply falls short. Especially, in terms of the public and private memories, one should consider the memory’s located specificies and and the importance of building theory from the groud up (Radstone 2011). For instance, Tamar Shirinian recently elaborated on how the distinction between public and private spaces becomes blurred in post-Soviet Armenia, where everyday intimate encounters still carry narratives of genealogical belonging to a small nation-family (Shirinian 2018a, 2018b). In this respect, I will examine agency in memory transmission within the family, since, in addition to the family history, family members play a crucial role in giving meaning to commemorations, public speeches, textbooks or images in movies or museums. The fact that in many Armenian communities, except in Turkey, one has to confront the legacy of the genocide at a very early age underlines the value of immediate transmission, i. e. through family.

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5 Civic Engagement with the Past: Making Room for the Other(s) “Ideally, I would try not to make the genocide the focus of their identities and the sole purpose of their existence as Armenians.” Michael, as with all interview partners, has Western Armenian roots yet, unlike the others, is not a hayasdantsi (from Armenia). Shortly after graduating, he decided to go and visit the “Republic of Armenia”. Although very patriotic, Michael felt a lack of connection to the “Armenia that exists today.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, with Lebanese Armenian and South American roots, he had a lot to carry to Hayasdan: “to deal with my baggage around being gay and [diaspora] Armenian – there was still this clash of identity for me.” “The genocide issue is a form of identity building because our identities, in the diaspora at least – I don’t talk about Hayasdan – revolved around genocide. Factually, it is the reason why we live in the diaspora.” And this explains his concern about how he would talk with his children about the genocide. In a similar vein, Levon Abrahamian maintains that the shared experience of the survivors of the genocide created a collective memory in the diaspora, resembling the “Myth of Beginning”, hence connecting the origin story to this particular historical event (Abrahamian 2005). Memory, indeed, converges on an origin, a common reference point, uniting and explaining other events in one homogeneous time and tenacious past (Assmann 1992). “I love to think that I would be very careful about how I would talk about the genocide,” says Michael, “And I don’t want Turkey and Turks to be this scary thing, you know, in their brains that they are not allowed to talk about or to interact with.” Before moving to Armenia, he had an exchange semester in Istanbul, and since that “positive” experience he has been frequently visiting Turkey to take part in various activities organized by LGBTIQ communities. During Istanbul Pride week, he once organized a dance workshop, where the participants learn queer Armenian traditional dance. Besides discussing LGBTIQ activism and rights in Armenia, he tried “to link these issues and genocide under this umbrella of human rights. So, at pride events, I would bring up the genocide issue. And I think it has made a lot of people uncomfortable, or for some people it doesn’t make sense, but I think it is something that needs to be talked about, and people need to be reminded of.” Along the same line, he argues that there is a lack and therefore need of making connections between the remembrance of the Armenian Genocide and ongoing or past injustices and atrocities: “Why weren’t we talking about Native Americans? Why weren’t we talking about black slavery? They [community leaders] never drew these connections between

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these topics. And there is a lot that can be done around organizing with other communities that have similar experiences and struggles.” Similarly Lusine, who covered the commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Istanbul, engages in the possibility and limits of making connections between struggles for current and historical injustices, and collective memories: “If you want to bring some changes in Armenia, you should talk about Yezidi and Russian minorities, or Syrian Armenians who recently migrated here, or you should be able to talk about deported Azerbaijanis.” In Istanbul she observed that “for human rights defenders in Turkey” the recognition of “the Armenian Genocide is part of a bigger conversation because they were equally talking about Alevis, domestic violence (some people were from feminist organizations, they informed me about the actual situation), LGBTIQ issues – so all of these topics were connected to each other.” Her observation raises the question of what happens when memory confronts different histories and actors in multiple public spheres (Rothberg 2009). This point actually is particularly significant because commemorative practices, images, and narratives of the Armenian Genocide move beyond national borders, coming into contact with various, alternative forms and social frameworks which multiply on a global memoryscape (Philips and Reyes 2011). On the global memoryscape, tensions between national and transnationalmemory practices can generate arenas (or transform existing ones) where unexpected forms and encounters emerge (Breckenridge and Appadurai 1995): “I don’t walk to Tsitsernakaberd on 24th of April, I go there some other time during the year. Yet for the past several years, I went there only with guests from Turkey. I guess it was my way of commemoration (laughs).” Arev, an environmentalist, researches and covers issues like food security, clean energy, and human rights. As a Hrant Dink Foundation fellow, she has done research on environmental policies and movements in Turkey. She highlights the increased mobility and exchange of ideas between the two countries and the developing network between environmentalists through common projects. Having attended the commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Istanbul, she is pleased to accompany or be accompanied by guests from Turkey in the memorial complex in Yerevan, who usually visit the city for social or cultural projects: “For me, it is much more important to remember on a personal level. And the guests from Turkey, they can join me in commemorating or I can join them. It is a special way to remember because I go there with people who are willing to go there and don’t deny their own history. And we can talk about the past together. It is a very special and emotional way to commemorate.” While Arev’s example reminds us the enhancing encounters of different narratives of shared pasts on a global memoryscape,it remains to a

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large extent unexplored how the meaning of (national) memory sites and rituals change. To remember is to create (Deleuze 2000). Memory is performative in the sense that it is a practice of re-narrating, attaching new meanings and emotions to certain events. On that note, transmission of the collective past becomes a matter of the present and future, by introducing new forms of engagement with the past from the present standpoint while thinking about the future. Incorporating the memory of the Armenian Genocide into a wider global political memoryscape is therefore not only about connecting past and ongoing catastrophes, but also for facilitating the social and political agency. The need for making room for other histories of loss, survival, and injustice can be considered as a way to overcome the hereditary victimhood contradicting the idea of agency (Ktshanyan 2016). Yet the victim is unimaginable without the victimizer, and the hereditary victimhood rests on the persistency of this dichotomy (Lim 2010). In this way, challenging the notion of victimhood means challenging the image of a “permanent” enemy: The approach of showing very violent and graphic images [of the Armenian Genocide] and also depicting Turks as these people who commit genocide, as these violent oppressors, does not help [to secure the justice]. It is very emotional. It is hard not to be emotional about this subject, of course. You can’t separate emotions from this. But I think that it only contributes to the perpetuation of victimhood – victimhood for Armenians but also the perpetuation of the image of Turks and Turkey as our oppressors, as the enemy. (Michael)

Making room for diverse memories and experiences, this multidirectional dynamic embraces new visions of solidarity and new possibilities of co-existence by making way for marginalized memories (Rothberg 2014), for instance “examples of coexistence with Turkish and Azeri people” (Datev) or “examples of people helping others, of many people hiding their neighbors [during the Armenian Genocide]” (Arev). Memory applies itself to an origin, a common reference point uniting and explaining all events in one homogenous time and tenecious past (Assmann 1992). Nonetheless, framing the Armenian Genocide in relation to other experiences “as a historical incident” (Datev) ascribes it a historical meaning related to a certain period with distinct causes and effects rather than an origin. While demanding the official recognition of past crimes and seeking justice, alternative modes of engagement with the past offered by young Armenians challenge victimhood nationalism in terms of asserting agency for social change. Making room for other experiences and memories, implementing the collective past into a broader narrative aims at fostering civic engagement with the past to influence the present and future (Kleist 2017). The current post-genocidal

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framework in Armenia reveals the new meanings of the Armenian Genocide as alternatives to old modes of remembrance (“of the old regime”), rather than causing a rupture.

Conclusive Remarks Enzo Traverso, citing Walter Benjamin, describes all current struggles as struggles for a redemption of the past, since they are nourished not only by the ideal of liberated descendants but by the image of enslaved ancestors (Traverso 2007). Generations, as mnemonic groups, act as mediators between individual and collective, past and future. New generations address the past in dialogue with their own experiences rather than reproducing it, and individuals reinterpret representations of the past circulated in the public space in relation to their own lives, beliefs, and commitments in the present, as well as future projections (Corning and Schumann 2015). In this chapter, I presented and analyzed the reinterpretation of certain themes and content of the memory of the Armenian Genocide, while illustrating alternative approaches to the past than that of victimhood nationalism. Rather than assuming a uniting narrative and interpretation of the past, collective memory can be seen as an area of competition and contestation between various groups, interests, and institutions. Steady self-images and influential representations of the collective past can be challenged within the mnemonic group, in addition to the political and cultural elites attempting to adjust them according to social and political needs. In a similar vein, the theme of “being a victim nation” in the collective memory has been reshaped, challenged or adjusted over time (Marutyan 2009; Panossian 2002). Therefore, the Velvet Revolution is seen as producing a new context to encourage and reveal the reinterpretation process, rather than a breakthrough. Considering the wide range of discomfort with and rejection of hereditary victimhood, the political and social change in Armenia can be seen as marking the difference between old and new approaches to the past, rather than causing it. Young Armenians negotiate images and representations of the collective past and give them a new meaning according to generational needs in terms of tensions between local and transnational aspects of remembrance, personal experiences and public representations of the past, possibilities of and limitations to agency. However, challenging the established traditions, narratives and images is constrained, as new and alternative readings are in competition for access to the public field. For this reason, the question of transmission – or “re-narration” (Welzer 2010) – offers a methodological tool to understand the process of

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finding new meanings and new forms of engagement with the past in order to change the future.

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Foucault, Michel. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972 – 1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Gillis, John R. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Hajek, Andrea. “Feminist Impact: Exploring the Cultural Memory of Second-Wave Feminism in Contemporary Italy.” In Memory in a Mediated World: Remembrance and Reconstruction, edited by Andrea Hajek, Christine Lohmeier, and Christian Pentzold, 129 – 41. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Huyssen, Andreas. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics.” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 21 – 38, Kansteiner, Wulf. In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television and Politics after Auschwitz. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006. Kidron, Carol. “Toward an ethnography of silence: the lived presence of the past in the everyday life of Holocaust trauma survivors and their descendants in Israel.” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (2009): 5 – 27. Kidron, Carol. “Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (2010): 429 – 51. Kleist, Olaf. Political Memories and Migration: Belonging, Society, and Australia Day. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Gebrochene Erinnerung? Deutsche und polnische Vergangenheiten.” Neue Sammlung 42, no. 1 (2002): 113 – 23. Ktshanyan, Julieta. “Problems around Teaching the History of the Armenian Genocide in Armenian Schools.” In History Can Bite: History Education in Divided and Postwar Societies, edited by Denise Bentrovato and Martina Schulze. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2016. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998. Lim, Jie-Hyun. “Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories: National Mourning and Global Accountability.” In Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, edited by Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, 138 – 62. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010. Mannheim, Karl. “Das Problem der Generationen.” Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie 7 (1928): 157 – 85. Marutyan, Harutyun. Iconography of Armenian Identity, vol. 1, The Memory of Genocide and the Karabagh Movement. Yerevan: Gitutyun, 2009. Nagel, Joane. “Masculinity and nationalism: gender and sexuality in the making of nations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 242 – 69. Panossian, Razmik. “The Past as Nation: Three Dimensions of Armenian Identity.” Geopolitics 7, no. 2 (2002): 121 – 46. Pettman, Jan Jindy. “Nationalism and After.” Review of International Studies 24 (1998): 149 – 164. Phillips, Kendall R., and G. Mitchell Reyes. Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2011. Radstone, Susannah. “What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies.” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 109 – 23.

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Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. “Locating Transnational Memory.” European Review 22, no. 4 (2014): 652 – 56. Schwartz, Barry. Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Shrinian, Tamar. “The nation-family: Intimate encounters and genealogical perversion in Armenia.” American Ethnologist 45, no. 1 (2018): 48 – 59. Shrinian, Tamar. “A Room of One’s Own: Woman’s Desire and Queer Domesticity in the Republic.” Armenian Review 56, no. 1 – 2 (2018): 60 – 90. Traverso, Enzo. Gebrauchsanweisungen fü r die Vergangenheit: Geschichte, Erinnerung, Politik. Münster: Unrast Verlag, 2007. Welzer, Harald. “Re-narrations: How pasts change in conversational remembering.” Memory Studies 3, no. 1 (2010): 5 – 17.

Cultural Representations: Identity Constructions and Negotiation Processes

Miranda Crowdus

Collective Memory in Israeli Popular Music: (Re)constructions across Generations Many theories have been developed regarding collective memory and its application in popular music. Most of these ideas originate in the theory of Maurice Halbwachs (1877– 1945), specifically, in his work La Memoire Collective. ¹ Halbwachs’ ideas follow from the great founder of sociology Emile Durkheim’s recognition that social cohesion and organization require a vision of a common past, which Durkheim explored through the ideologies of commemorations.² According to Halbwachs, individuals experience different processes of memory – remembering and recall – as individuals and as groups. In many cases, collective memories provide a framework for the way that we remember events as individuals, whether it be a socially experienced memory or whether it be that the memory process is learned through membership to a group.³ In other words, collective memory can be seen as the schemata that frame the way individuals remember. Popular music has been studied both as an important component for constructing personal memory as well as a medium through which collective identity is forged.⁴ Popular music takes on a significant role in the process of remembering and recall for many reasons. In part, its ability to effectively aid in the construction of collective memory is owing to its popularity. Moreover, in current times it can be easily disseminated to many groups and individuals from many backgrounds and age groups, and can also be harnessed to stir the emotions in a variety of ways. Discussing popular recorded music, van Dijck argues that “specific affects and emotions are attached to particular songs, a connection that is literally located in the body/mind… musical memories are enabled through instruments for listening.”⁵ This far-reaching and emotional “embeddedness” al-

 Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris: Albin Michel [1941], 1997).  Barbara A. Misztal, “Durkheim on Collective Memory,” Journal of Classical Sociology 3, no. 2 (2003): 123 – 43.  Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris: Albin Michel [1941], 1997), 38 – 39.  Scholars have argued that individual memory and collective identity cannot be considered separately, but are intrinsically interconnected, e. g. José Van Dijck, “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 5 (2006): 357– 74.  José Van Dijck, “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 5 (2006): 358. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-012

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lows popular music to easily frame pivotal historical events and experiences in collective memory. To give a well-known example rooted in German history, the iconic song by the Scorpions “Winds of Change” became a channel through which collective memory of the unification of East and West Germany, the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, was processed.⁶ Von Appen attributes the popularity of the song as owing to a number of factors: being “in the right place at the right time”, the fact that it has a calm feel to it, tonal chord progressions typical in western popular music of its time, and its non-explicit political content. Here, keeping the content generally political, but simultaneously vague, gave listeners the ability to ascribe several political meanings to the song, which, in turn increased its initial popularity. Ironically, von Appen himself, who was 14 years old when the song acquired such significance, detested it at the time precisely owing to its popularity along with its lack of explicit politics. During a time when his generation sought to “rebel” against the establishment, the song was adored by many people of the older generation (his mother included), which was one of its many unlikeable characteristics.⁷ Thus, while popular music configures collective memory, it is possible to deliberately reject its significance or to offer or compose a “replacement” prototype of popular music to reconstruct collective memory. This is not only achievable through imbuing a new song or artist with significance through which collective memories are then constructed, but is often arrived at through the transformation of the songs that have already acquired significance. The rest of this chapter examines the latter phenomenon in the context of modern Israel. While Israel was established on the basis of a common, unifying Jewish collective identity, it is also a highly politicized space, characterized by political, social, and religious contestations and tensions, both Jewish and non-Jewish. This situation arguably causes popular music and its construction and transformation to be of particular importance in the construction of collective memory. In the Jewish-Israeli experience, collective memories take on a special significance in how they are transmitted in Israeli popular music. In academic scholarship particular attention has been paid to how popular music negotiates Israeli national identity. A sub-section of this scholarship has explored how Israeli popular music negotiates collective memory of the Holocaust. This chapter examines

 This was so much the case that the song became a metaphor for major social changes or renewal. In fact, the song was written before the event and the Scorpions never imagined that their song would become a sort of unofficial anthem for German unification.  Ralf von Appen, “A Re-Encounter with the Scorpions’ ‘Wind of Change’”, in Perspectives on German Popular Music, ed. Michael Ahlers and Christoph Jacke (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 88 – 93.

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how these collective memories of the Holocaust communicated through popular music are then transformed by the current generation of young adults to take on new meaning. Yehuda Poliker’s 1988 music album Efer Veavak (Ashes and Dust) is an ideal example to show how collective memory of the Holocaust is negotiated through popular music. The album is considered one of the few true classics in Israeli rock and was produced by Yehuda Poliker and Ya’akov Gilad, two Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors. Poliker is the son of Auschwitz survivors from the Jewish community of Salonica, Greece, a once-thriving multi-cultural community that was virtually annihilated during World War II. Of the 56,000 Jews of Salonika, 97 % perished in the Holocaust. The traditional function of rock-and-roll, as a genre that emerged in the USA in the 1960s, has been to distinguish between the outdated and irrelevant ideologies and experiences of the previous generation and the new, genuine direction of youth culture. As is often the case when a musical genre takes root outside of its place of origin, the genre acquires new meanings. Here, in the Israeli context, the genre becomes imbued with what Motti Regev calls “local authenticity”.⁸ The central theme of the album Efer Veavak is not novel youth culture but rather transmitted collective memory of the Holocaust from generation to generation. The focus on collective memory of the past strongly differentiates the album from American counterparts, although in other respects, textually and musically, the rock-and-roll genre is fundamentally the musical “language” of the children of Holocaust survivors, Poliker and Gilad’s generation. Among the themes of Holocaust survival in this album are the doomed attempt of survivors to rebuild their lives in Israel after the war, a visit to the train station at Treblinka, and the fear and anticipation of the effects of the Holocaust on the next generation. The album projects a dramatization of the interrelationship of the memories of the generation of Holocaust survivors and their children. The albums’ songs shift perspective; some take the perspective of the Holocaust survivors, others that of their children and some enact conversations between the two generations. Several aspects of the album reflect a shift from parent to child. A dramatic instance of the function of Poliker’s songs in collective memory transmission is noted by the Israeli writer and poet Karen Alkalay-Gut (b. 1945): “I chanced to hear on the radio a recording of a live concert of Poliker in a park near my house. An audience of thousands of teenagers was singing the chorus of

 Motti Regev, “Israeli Rock, or a Study in the Politics of ‘Local Authenticity’,” Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992).

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a song written by Yacov Gilad to his mother upon her planned visit to Poland (“Ashes and Dust”).” In the chorus of “Ashes and Dust”, Poliker asks “Are you going? Then where are you going? Forever is just ashes and dust” (paraphrased). These questions and remark are directed at Gilad’s mother and, more generally, at the previous generation who decide to “revisit” their Holocaust experiences. Observing the teenagers in the park, Alkalay-Gut reflects on the real, invisible, charge of collective memory in her remarks about the audience response: “could it be that that entire audience understood the experience, understood the pain and sympathy of the speaker, the guilt of survival and the knowledge of his own irrevocable injury as the child of survivors? I doubt it, yet something must have been caught of the warmth and sensitivity of the address in the song from son to mother.”⁹ Whether or not the teenagers understood the complexity of their response, the musical medium acted as the transmitter of collective memory of the Holocaust, evoking and instilling the feeling of responsibility that so many of the second generation has for its parents into a generation of Jewish-Israeli teenagers far removed from the Holocaust. Thus key iconic memories are communicated: despair over the impossibility of resolving the inner turmoil caused by the inevitable, tragic events of history, the attention to practical details of life, such as food, clothing, the proximity of family and close friends. These emphases on basic forms of subsistence might often seem obsessive to those of us who have not lived through hunger and cold and the loss of loved ones. These fixations of Holocaust survivors constituting many personal, individual memories are synthesized in the album, are further transformed into frameworks of emotion. These “frameworks” here are designed to be easily accessible to a Jewish-Israeli audience across the generations, both in terms of the greater culture and education system that teaches about the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. The popular musical context and the widereaching ephemeral performance through which it is communicated heighten the accessibility of the transmitted collective memory. In the same album, the song “A Window facing the Mediterranean” expresses the Holocaust survivor experience of immigration to Eretz Yisrael, specifically the emotional turmoil of a young Jewish man who has escaped war and hardship and arrives in Jaffa where he finds a small dwelling space on the roof of an abandoned building. This song is possibly a personal reflection on the experience of Poliker’s father, who arrived in Jaffa by boat following World War II. The image of the window on the Mediterranean in Poliker’s song is a poignant one, reflected

 Karen Alkalay-Gut, “The Experience of the Holocaust in Israeli Rock Music,” karenalkalaygut.com, accessed December 2018.

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in Zionist literature and art, signifying hope in the face of hardship. The lengthy introduction in this song, including the low, sustained notes in the synthesizer, paint a picture of an elemental and all-encompassing background: the sea, the shores of Jaffa as the boats bearing new immigrants to the “homeland” arrived. The melody of the Greek bouzouki played by Poliker references a memory of the artist’s own origins as well as that of his survivor parents. The bouzouki echoes a once thriving Jewish-Greek city, now eradicated, with the remnants of its small continuity in the new land. Halbwach’s notion that collective memory frames individual memory is evident here since the reference is as much collective as it is personal, reflecting Poliker’s own family. Thus, personal autobiographical experiences of the previous generation, Poliker’s parents in particular, are combined with broader narratives concerning Jewish-Israeli identity and belonging. This example reinforces Meyers’s and Zanberg’s idea that collective narratives of the Holocaust are simultaneously very public as well as very private.¹⁰ While there has been a significant amount of scholarship dedicated to the negotiation of collective memory through popular music, little has been written on how popular music can be altered to construct new collective memories, new collectivities of identity and belonging as the music is passed from generation to generation. In fact, young people respond to new situations and realities: “remembrance is always embedded, meaning that the larger social contexts in which individuals live stimulate memories of the past through frames generated in the present.”¹¹ Artists of Israeli popular music have often evoked Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust; however, others have also appealed to the Holocaust collective memory in order to unify local identities outside the sphere of Jewish-Israeli belonging. Collective memory can be renegotiated in newly composed popular music through intertextual references or citations of the “original” popular song. The hip hop ensemble System Ali, founded in 2006, uses Poliker’s “A window Facing the Mediterranean” to juxtapose both Jewish and non-Jewish collective memories. The band is somewhat of an anomaly in the popular music scene in Israel, although perhaps not in the hip hop genre in Israel, which is, by definition, fragmented.¹² Most of the band members were born in the late eighties or early nineties: thus, they represent the next generation, the children of Poliker’s generation

 Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg, “The Sound-Track of Memory: Ashes and Dust and the Commemoration of the Holocaust in Israeli Popular Culture,” Media, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2002): 389 – 408.  Van Dijck, “Record and Hold,” 358.  Miranda Crowdus, Hip Hop in Urban Borderlands: Music-Making and Intercultural Dynamics on the Margins of the Jewish State (Bern: Peter Lang, 2018).

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and the grandchildren or even the great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. The unity in diversity message that is conveyed is represented metaphorically in the identities of the group members, who identify as Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian, Russian, and other. It is also reflected in the group’s “musical bricolage” aesthetic, as their musical idiom draws on several genres, such as reggae, klezmer, hip hop, pop, rock, and classical music. Key band members write their own original lyrics, often referencing Israeli literature or song lyrics, often integrating these into the musical fabric to make poignant political observations in performance. These lyrics are delivered in a variety of languages, such as Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, Amharic, and local dialects. System Ali’s music and politics of inclusion is evident in the identities of its band members who come together across religious, ethnic, and gender boundaries. Considering the multiple levels of diversity of the band, it makes sense that such an ensemble would transform the collective memories imbedded in the songs of the previous generation into something more broadly inclusive. System Ali’s 2007 song “Natush” draws on collective memory of dispossession in an unusual way and, arguably, acts as a commentary on the original song and, by extension, the “original” collective memory: the song begins with a direct quotation from Poliker’s song “Chalon Mashkif Layam Hatichon” (1988) (“Window Facing the Mediterranean”).¹³ The original 1988 Poliker song, upon which the song “Natush” is based, evokes the collective experience of Jewish Holocaust refugees coming to the “Promised Land”. A generation after the composition of Poliker’s song, System Ali’s transformative version unites different collective memories connected to the same location, namely, Jaffa. The opening sung melody of System Ali’s “Natush” is a direct quotation of the Poliker song which is well-known to Jewish-Israelis, and even popular among members of the younger generation. However, even in the cited section, System Ali changes the significance of the song. Gone is the lengthy, nostalgic introduction that sets the mood for the melancholic refugee experience. This experience begins in medias res, with the lyrics, rather than the wistful musical tableau introducing the song. Adding to this feeling of disjuncture, other band members interject short comments in Hebrew, Russian, and Russian-Hebrew dialect, adding their own personal experiences and questioning the lyrics, sometimes with tongue-in-cheek remarks. The sung melodic quotation is slow, and nostalgic. By contrast, the interjections are interactive and sound improvised, whether they are or not. The juxtaposition of the quotation and the interjections challenges the point of view of the Poliker quotation and brings the immigrant

 I discuss System Ali’s “Natush” in detail in my book Hip Hop in Urban Borderlands (2018).

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refugee narrative to the present, even as it binds it to the past. Following the Poliker quotation, Neta, the accordion player, incredulously yells: “natush?”. This response is the culmination of the interjections. The opening “dialogue” questions not the Jewish refugee experience, but perhaps its overwhelming significance in the diverse, fragmented reality of the urban landscape. Thus the collective memory of Poliker’s song, represented by the opening quotation, is cumulatively transformed, until the word “natush?” At that point, the uniformity of the memory is ultimately rejected by the group. Highlighting the abandonment of houses in Jaffa specifically refers to the Palestinian population that once lived in them before the Jewish settlement. System Ali’s song “Natush” thus transforms Poliker’s collective memory to evoke the collective memory of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinians at different historical moments. After the cry “natush?” referencing the Palestinian collective memory of dispossession, the song abandons the Poliker song. In most versions of the song, a performer releases a torrent of provocative rap in Arabic, often highlighting the experience of a young woman in the Jaffan “ghetto”. The lyrics are vivid and current, describing how someone was shot while selling drugs, girls that “have no future”, and how people were evacuated from their homes. This rap section acts as a realization of the introductory interjections, bringing the listener from the collective nostalgic past of the Jewish collective to more recent collective memories of multi-cultural Jaffa. Moreover, the rap re-orients the collective experience expressed in Poliker’s rock ballad to one that is narrated in the “extreme personal”¹⁴ describing quotidian events in a specific urban space.¹⁵ The conclusion returns to the Poliker song by citing its concluding melody and lyrics in which the protagonist wistfully declares that he has a folding bed big enough for three, so he can sleep, along with his partner and child, against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea. In the System Ali version, the family collective described by the protagonist becomes the diverse band members: “[o]n the words ‘you, the boy, and I’ [‘at, ani, vehayeled’] Enchik states, ‘and Amne and Muhammed and Yonatan too,’ and the whole band laughs in response. The comical interjection becomes an act of inclusion, the inclusion of all members of the System Ali family as part of, not one, but several, dispossessed communities.”¹⁶ Through their laughter and performance all of them can share in the collective memory associated

 The “extreme personal” is a theoretical term that I have developed in my analysis of rap music to describe the way in which lyrics are often presented as highly personal and disclosed, or even private, despite being “aired” on a public platform.  Halbwachs acknowledges not only the psychological collective memory, but its “embeddedness” in the everyday, including physical spaces and objects.  Crowdus, Hip Hop in Urban Borderlands, 140.

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with the Jewish refugee experience in Poliker’s original song. The common physical locale, the “window” through which the collective memory is accessed, connects the cited song with System Ali’s version; through the transformation, it is the ideological or iconic significance of Jaffa that is transformed. In “Natush”, collective memory is broadened from a Jewish-Israeli post-Holocaust paradigm to a multiple-historical experience rooted in Jaffa, an urban-specific scheme encompassing Jewish and non-Jewish identities. In Halbwach’s terms, System Ali’s use of the Poliker song has reformulated the social and historical representations, making a new framework for collective memory. The transformation enacted by System Ali does not mean, however, that “Ashes and Dust” is a nationalist, Zionist album, requiring political correctives through a popular music “intervention” by a more enlightened generation. On the contrary, the nuanced personal experiences, coupled with Poliker and Gilad’s “conversations” with their parents in “Ashes and Dust” already provide a nuanced, complex backdrop ripe for reinterpretation. Moreover, Israel as a Jewish nation is only very faintly present in the album: “Israel is present in the Gilad-Poliker songs only by delicate insinuation: a small room overlooking the Mediterranean, a private, safe haven for refugees rather than a national homeland for a persecuted people.”¹⁷ It is precisely the nuance and the focus on the personal that makes it an effective medium for the transformation enacted by System Ali. Overall, these representations of collective memory in popular music are evidence that the Holocaust, including the experiences of the survivors and the following generations, is one of the more enduring aspects of Jewish-Israeli collective memory. Israeli society has demonstrated the need to tell and retell collective versions of the Holocaust story, including its aftermath, even though the reasons for and the environment of the retelling might always be changing. Meyers and Zandberg argue that this retelling reflects current changes in the Israeli Holocaust story and thus enables observers to better understand not only this process of retelling, but also its function in the construction of the Israeli public memory. The album “‘Ashes and Dust’ is an example of how Israeli artists in the late 1980s, many of them survivors or children of survivors, began to express their memories in a way “that intentionally distanced the Holocaust from the Israeli political scene and focused on either personal experiences or the universal moral implications of the Holocaust.”¹⁸ This process of embedding Holo Fania Oz-Salzberger, “Israelis and Germany after the Second World War: Is Reconciliation Possible?” in Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies, ed. Daniel Chirot, Gi-Wook Shin, and Daniel Sneider (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014), 201.  Meyers and Zandberg, “The Soundtrack of Memory,” 395.

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caust experiences into the collective consciousness moved away from the largescale nationalist production of culture, generating a diverse cluster of experiences within a common frame. System Ali’s response to Poliker 20 years later can be seen partially, at least, as the response of the next generation, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. They are able to integrate the Jewish survivor experience to current non-Jewish experience of memories of collective dispossession including the Palestinian collective experience, as well as that of other, non-Jewish collective memories, based on the urban space in which these collectives dwell. This example illustrates a growing phenomenon in Israeli popular culture and public memory, in which the construction of collective memory has moved towards a “privatization”, representing a shift from the control of collective memory creation of official memory agents to more localized ones, which at once are influenced more by global, rather than national, forces. This process is what Seroussi calls “the present, growing compartmentalization or privatization of the Israeli soundscape into units representing the individual sonic interests of discrete social constellations… balanced by the forces of globalization and homogenizing technologies.”¹⁹ Current representations of collective memory in popular culture, therefore, represent the interactions of different agents, operating in various states of socio-political reality and musical aesthetics. This process of privatization gives actors the opportunity to draw attention to what is important for them rather than an official state ideology or “objective” historiographical approaches, resulting in new sonic reverberations of generations making their voices heard.

Bibliography Alkalay-Gut, Karen. “The Experience of the Holocaust in Israeli Rock Music.” karenalkalay-gut.com (blog entry). Crowdus, Miranda. Hip Hop in Urban Borderlands: Music-Making and Intercultural Dynamics on the Margins of the Jewish State. Bern: Peter Lang, 2018. Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel [1941], 1997. Meyers, Oren, and Eyal Zandberg. “The Sound-Track of Memory: Ashes and Dust and the Commemoration of the Holocaust in Israeli Popular Culture.” Media, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2002): 389 – 408. Oz-Salzberger, Fania. “Israelis and Germany after the Second World War: Is Reconciliation Possible?” In Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies,

 Edwin Seroussi, “Nostalgic Zionist Soundscapes: The Future of the Israeli Nation’s Sonic Past,” Israel Studies 19, no. 2 (2014): 40.

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edited by Daniel Chirot, Gi-Wook Shin, and Daniel Sneider, 186 – 210. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. Regev, Motti. “Israeli Rock, or a Study in the Politics of ‘Local Authenticity’.” Popular Music 11, no. 1 (1992): 1 – 14. Seroussi, Edwin. “Nostalgic Zionist Soundscapes: The Future of the Israeli Nation’s Sonic Past.” Israel Studies 19, no. 2 (2014): 35 – 50. Van Dijck, José. “Record and Hold: Popular Music between Personal and Collective Memory.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 5 (2006): 357 – 74. Von Appen, Ralf. “A Re-Encounter with the Scorpions’ ‘Wind of Change’.” In Perspectives on German Popular Music, edited by Michael Ahlers and Christoph Jacke, 88 – 93. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017.

Hervé Georgelin

Historical Awareness in Zavèn Bibérian’s Autobiographical Longer Fragment: A Rare Perception of both Armenian and Jewish Sufferings

Zavèn Bibérian (1921– 1984) is a major contemporary literary author in Western Armenian,¹ one of the representations of the so called Istanbulahay kraganutiun or Istanbul-Armenian literature, a label that insists on the change of political regime experienced by the community in this city during the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian world (from 1915 onwards), which turned Istanbul in an isolate and the demise of the Ottoman empire, and its replacement by a national state, which made the surviving community an oddity, alongside the Greek-Orthodox and Jewish populations still living in Turkey after the signature of the Treaty of Lausanne, which anchored in international law the institutional existence of these officially recognized minorities. Bibérian’s fame was however limited to a narrow circle of literary connoisseurs, mostly based in or related with Istanbul, until the 1980s. But he also was a frantic journalist and a political activist, intellectually involved in political disputes and then institutionally organized as a Turkish citizen in the ranks of the İşçi Partisi, a leftwing Turkish political organization. As far as we are informed, he was no member of any Armenian political party, even in the time of his self-decided short-term exile. Finally, Bibérian was a memorialist. His long autobiographical fragment has recently been Note: Armenian in this text is transcribed simply, rendering, as far as possible, the Western Armenian phonetics.  His fictional work in Armenian consists mainly of three novels and a volume of short stories: Lgrdadzə [The Trollop], 1959, Angoudi siraharner [Pennyless Lovers], 1962, Mrchunnerou verchalouysə [The Sunset of the Ants], and Dzovə [The Sea], 1961. These are Bibérian’s published works during his lifetime. They have all recently been republished in the most cautious and respectful way by Aras Yayıncılık, Lgrdadzə (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2020); Angoudi siraharner (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2017); Dzovə (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2017); Mrchunnerou verchalouysə (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2007). There may be other major, even if fragmentary, manuscripts somewhere in Istanbul or in Lebanon. Bibérian translated Lgrdadzə [The Trollop] into Turkish and he titled his translation Yalnızlar [The Lonely People], which was recently republished by Aras Yayıncılık (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2012). Quotes refer to the new editions by Aras Yayıncılık. Bibérian’s posthumous fame was strengthened by Marc Nichanian’s article “Zavèn Bibérian’s Ants,” Haratch [Forward], January 3, 1988, 16 653 (in Armenian). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-013

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published in Istanbul, where he had written it in the original language of redaction, that is in French, for he had reached, thanks to his school training but first and foremost his own curiosity, literary mastery in his three languages, Armenian, Turkish, and French.² Based on the editing work performed on the manuscript of this fragment and a thorough reading of Bibérian’s literary legacy, this article aims at shedding some light on an incomparable Armenian mind in contemporary Turkey, whose active policy of denial and repression of dissent did not succeed in preventing Bibérian neither from developing a precise perception of the past on the former Ottoman lands, nor from bearing testimony about the treatment of the remaining Armenians together with other non-Sunni Muslim citizens. Bibérian certainly took notice of the Jews remaining in Turkey and seems to have been deprived of the usual antisemitic prejudices among Oriental Christian populations. Who was Zavèn Bibérian (1921– 1984)? He was born to a well-off Armenian family in Istanbul and had a privileged and protected infancy. He greatly benefited from the still rich Armenian educational and cultural life. He could attend an Armenian primary school close to his house on the Asiatic shore of Istanbul, in the quarter of Moda. The Armenian press was still a vivid concern with possibilities of new creations and initiatives. His family had a quite rich private library including books in Armenian and French. Bibérian’s spoken and read Armenian was certainly backed by this environment. Young Zavèn was sent to a French-language, Catholic lycée still operating today in Istanbul: the lycée Saint-Joseph, located in Kadıköy, ancient Chalcedon. He had to learn French from scratch there, which he did in some months, and he appropriated the language so intimately that he much later put emphasis on the fact that his inner psychological life and thoughts were formulated in French and not in his other languages. Living in Istanbul meant for Bibérians being connected with the West. Zavèn’s father was also fluent in German and had studied in Austria. Despite Zavèn’s passion for the French language, his strong character made him deeply resent the harsh and unfair climate, for which to his mind the Jesuits were responsible. He then left the lycée Saint-Joseph without the much coveted baccalauréat. Thirdly, the young man had the opportunity to benefit from the state-run educational system. Zavèn attended the İstanbul Ticari İlimler Akademisi or Istanbul Academy of Trade and Commerce Sciences close to the Hippodrome, in the ancient part of the city. He would study there only two years without completing his training as a business administrator but learning enough accounting so that he could

 Zavèn Bibérian, Car vivre, c’était se battre et faire l’amour: Fragment autobiographique d’un Arménien d’Istanbul, 1921 – 1946 (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2019).

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work as an accountant in small businesses, which would facilitate his non-profitable activities in the Armenian press of Istanbul after WW2 and his political involvement. Last but not least, Zavèn Bibérian was also a private person, experiencing various situations and emotions which are reflected upon and reused in his writings, fictional or autobiographical: he was a son, a brother – he had an elder sister, a lover in his youth with a surprising high degree of freedom, a husband later on, and in his forties he fathered a girl, still living in Istanbul today. His private side is certainly echoed in his fictional work, however, it would be erroneous to consider his fictional work as a mere projection of Bibérian’s ego in some form of pedestrian autofiction. Motives, settings, momentary interpretations and thoughts are elaborated and reassembled in a complex way. There are many differences between his autobiographical text and his fictional works. Main characters are and are not Bibérian’s Doppelgänger. Bibérian’s childhood and teenage included the experience of discrimination as a local Christian. Surprisingly enough, he first confronted discrimination at the lycée Saint-Joseph,³ which he would thematize in a short story later on.⁴ Jesuit educators would favor Catholic children over local Christians and would know how to flatter Turkish heads of family by privileging their offspring. This explains why Bibérian did not stay at the Jesuit-run lycée but dropped out. In a more expected way, Zavèn experienced again discrimination for being Armenian in his much beloved state-run technical school. A French teacher would know how to ridicule his best student, who had turned into a rival not only in French but also in the eyes of a female student, by evoking Zavèn’s ethno-religious background. The young man was in his second year and could not believe what was happening to him. He also discovered that Armenians in the official history textbooks were presented as foreign people in the Ottoman empire, ironically deprived of local past, who had to be mentioned only as a sudden phenomenon from the Hamidian period onwards as felonious traitors. Zavèn was then ostracized by more mediocre students but of Turkish background and there was no way out of this unfair and unpleasant situation in Zavèn’s opinion but dropping out again. Young Bibérian’s pride and sense of self-respect made it impossible for him to accommodate blatant injustice. As a reaction to repeated injustice, he was tempted by “Armenian nationalism” as a symmetrical response to triumphant Turkish nationalism. I would argue though that this was not to be Bibérian’s ultimate response to the difficulties of life as an Armenian in Turkey. Bibérian was too subtle a mind

 Accessed March 1, 2021, https://www.sj.k12.tr/index.php/fr/.  Bibérian, Babayin Dghan [Daddy’s Son], 101– 13 in Bibérian, Dzovə.

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to remain in the posture of a victim only. In fact, he was also aware that the Turkish and the Armenians resembled each other like Siamese brothers. In particular, in his novel The Trollop, the main character is a Turkish young woman originally from inner Turkey.⁵ Gülgün is ill-treated by her foster family who pretend to be her adoptive family whenever this suits them, but is reminded of her real ancillary status as soon as Gülgün takes her closeness to her foster parents too seriously. In fact, as Bibérian’s autobiography fragment reveals, the main character was based on an observed case in Plovdiv among local Armenians. Similar to the psychological processes producing dreams according to Freud’s theories, Bibérian’s fictional creativity transposes settings from one world, here the Armenian one, to the other one, here the Turkish one, illustrating in a bold and almost sacrilegious move the closeness of behavioural patterns among Western Armenians and Turks in analogous social situations. In this relatively short and quick rhythmed novel, the daily injustice inflicted on non-Sunni non Turkish citizens of Turkey is also present, but Bibérian excels at entangling narrative threads, offering his readers a condensate of Turkey’s complex social and political situation as a background, while refusing oversimplifications, be they more flattering for an Armenian readership. In his masterpiece, The Sunset of the Ants, although again many elements clearly evoke the unjust treatment of non-Turks by contemporary Turkey, I would advocate that Bibérian emphasized in his main character, that of an Istanbul young Armenian man who may resemble him in some ways, not only the destructions suffered by Western Armenians but certainly the internalization of injustice by Istanbul Armenians and the acceptation, almost to the degree of some liking, of catastrophes inflicted upon them.⁶ By no means did Bibérian remain stuck in the Armenian nationalism understandably tempting him in his early youth. Bibérian’s later elaboration and political maturing do not however mean that Bibérian had no intimate knowledge of the hardships endured by Armenians, together with Jews and Greek-Orthodox in Turkey. He experienced in his own skin the main events that disrupted the alleged normalcy of life of Istanbul-Armenians. These coincided with Bibérian’s coming of age. The main disrupting event was the discriminatory mobilization of 20 age-classes of non-Muslims not in the Turkish army but in unarmed battalions in order to perform “Public Works”, or Yirmi kur’a Nafıa askerleri in Turkish. This decision deprived all of a sudden non-Muslim families of their main economic providers and social war Bibérian, Lgrdadzə [The Trollop].  Mrchunnerou verchalouysə clear invites Bibérian’s Armenian readers to self-reflection and to overcoming comfortable rhetoric victimhood. Understandably enough this makes him a challenging writer.

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rants, since men had back then a stronger role in dealings with the outside world at large and the state administration especially. The removal of young and active men made the threat of a general massacre more credible. Were they conscripts or hostages at the mercy of a nationalist state, which had accepted reluctantly their existence in 1923? Bibérian clearly indicates in his autobiographical text that the urban non-Muslims were unskilled workers for the tasks they were supposed to perform: building roads, bridges or restoring buildings. They never managed to perform any lasting work. The whole scheme had in fact only one aim, that of weakening the minority groups, by exhausting the male population of these groups. In a subtle and dialectical way, Bibérian also sees the Nafıa as a non-Muslim institution, creating the conditions of unheard-of common experienced brotherhood between Turkey Armenians, Greek-Orthodox, and Jews. The forced-labour battalions would concern Biberyan after his first “leave” from the army, in which he was first drafted, although he never carried arms in this first institution. This experience would have sufficed to make him “an angry young man.”⁷ The context of WW2 offered Turkey the opportunity of destroying what remained of non-Muslim economic safety by imposing on the official minorities an extraordinary property tax, the Varlık Vergisi. ⁸ In contrast with WW1, during WW2, Turkey remained formally neutral, while maintaining trade links with both Germany and the Allies, capitalizing on its unique geopolitical location and making the best possible profit out of its neutrality. It should be remembered that since the 1920s, fascism had fascinated many who deemed democracy an outdated pattern. The New Turkish regime was no exception. Front pages in the press of the one-party regime would regularly praise fascist Italy. In fact, Nazi Germany was fascinated by the Kemalists who had succeeded in putting in question the detrimental victors’ settlement at Sèvres (August 1920), by imposing a more advantageous deal in Lausanne (January-July 1923). Kemalist Turkey was tempted to use the failure of the League of Nations and her formal neutrality in the conflict to definitely solve her “minority problem,” the same way as Germany was doing away with her “Judenfrage” with no international hindrance since 1935, as far as social, political, and economic ostracization was concerned, and 1941 as far as mass massacres in the much coveted Eastern European Lebensraum

 Ein junger zorniger Mann became a standard expression after WW2 in Western Germany for writers, who would reject the unbearable heritage of Nazi and post-Nazi society.  The seminal work on this question was written by a high-rank state employee of the Turkish fiscus: Faik Ökte, The Tragedy of the Turkish Capital Tax (London: Croom Helm, 1987).

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were concerned,⁹ and 1942, in the case of methodical and industrial extermination in Central Europe.¹⁰ Simultaneously, the Varlık Vergisi ruined the Armenian, Jewish, and Greek-Orthodox local communities. The abusive tax was abolished after pressures from the victor-to-be US, in 1942, after the Nazi defeat in Stalingrad (February 1943). Despite promises in the aftermath of the war, after a formal multiparty regime was enforced in Turkey, no compensation has ever been paid to official minorities. Bibérian was also affected by this fiscal discriminatory policy of Turkey. His once well-off father would never recover his former advantageous economic and social status. This is a motive present as the background of Bibérian’s narrative in The Twilight of the Ants, although this is not the one topic on which the author focuses. It just appears as one of the factors making Bared, the main character, inadequate to his life in Istanbul, after WW2. In Bibérian’s autobiographical fragmentary manuscript, Bibérian gives a clear picture of his fine perception of the past, presumably already during his youth, but certainly in his mature age, when he wrote his text in the sixties and seventies. The major milestone of contemporary Western Armenian history, that is the Young-Turkish genocide of Armenians of 1915 onwards, was silenced in contemporary Turkey.¹¹And yet it was omnipresent for those, similar to Bibérian, who were willing to perceive it. While the Armenian Population of Republican Istanbul was complex and stratified, and the Bibérians were members of a privileged business and tradition-based Armenian bourgeoisie, Bibérian took early notice that there were others at the bottom of the social ladder. These were the “wrecks of the mass deportation of Armenians.”¹² Apart from the state-driven denial, social prejudices among Armenians reinforced the silence about and the blindness towards the past catastrophe or the scars it left behind.

 Research has developed lately about this aspect of the Nazi genocide of European Jews. In English, Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 1992). Research and public work are conducted in France by Father Patrick Desbois and his foundation Yahad in unum, accessed March 1, 2021, https://www.yahadinunum.org/fr/.  Jan Karski, born Kozielewski (1914– 2000), among others, desperately tried to mobilize Anglo-Saxon governments in order to prevent the destruction of European Jews, to no avail. The Polish diplomat is known for his diplomatic dispatch The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland (London: Polish government-in-exile, 1942), for his unique interview in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985); he turned a literary figure, among others, in Yannick Haenel’s controversial novel Jan Karski (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).  Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016).  Bibérian, Car vivre, 52: “épaves de la grande déportation arménienne.” This is an expression he uses too about some Armenians in Plovdiv.

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The young boy was not supposed to socialize with these underdogs. His mother would not approve of contacts between Zavèn and Armenian children of refugee families from the former inner provinces of the Ottoman central lands. The silenced Armenian nation did not abolish neither class distinction nor symbolic geography. Solidarity among Armenians who, in different conditions, and survived annihilation, was limited, once in post-genocidal Istanbul. The second vivid element of Bibérian’s awareness of the 1915 trauma was the memories within his own family of the conscription during WW1 of non-Muslim men in Amele Taburları, that is in unarmed battalions of forced labour. Bibérian as a young man had limited interest and patience for the invasive recollections of men who either escaped the ordeal or survived it. Both in his autobiographical text and his fiction, The Twilight of the Ants, the young man’s point of view is imposed on the reader. Once again, Bibérian dynamically combines historical awareness and psychological subtlety. Far from ignoring the past, Bibérian posits that there is no possibility for a healthy Armenian (or not) mind to sacrifice the present to an excessively pervasive commemoration of experienced trauma, which prevents the living from moving on in their own period of time – an unpopular idea in the post-diaspora Armenian world for understandable reasons.¹³ Zavèn Bibérian did not want to serve in the Turkish army, because this was the army of the heir-state of the genocidal Ottoman Empire under the Young Turkish rule. But apart from this, not knowing on which side Turkey would take part in the war, basic geopolitics inclined Bibérian to see his country waging war against the USSR. When were the Russian and the Ottoman empires allies? If both countries were to be involved in the conflict, they would probably be again on opposite sides, then Zavèn Bibérian could be required to kill Soviet Armenian soldiers, which was a disheartening perspective. The young man had enough agency and resources to find a provisory escape from Turkish conscription.

 Similarly, Judaism demands memory and commemoration but also requires choosing life and not ailment, I mean here a morbid form of life, or death. 1. Samuel 25.29 (King James’ Bible): “Yet a man is risen to pursue thee, and to seek thy soul: but the soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life with the Lord thy God […].” I came across this basic dimension of Judaism thanks to Valérie Zanetti, Dans le faisceau des vivants (Paris: L’Olivier, 2019), which is devoted to the Israeli author, Aharon Applefeld, and was written as a tribute to his memory shortly after his passing. Zanetti, his translator into French, herself a Sephardic Jew, decided to make a pilgrimage to former Austrian Tschernowitz (formerly Cernăuți in Romania and today Černivci in Ukraine), where the author, then Erwin Appelfeld, lived a happy childhood and was promised to become a member of the German-speaking Jewish intelligentsia (Kulturbürgertum), and then experienced the destruction of his surroundings, and the deportation of his family. In a way, Bibérian would make a similar pilgrimage to the inner provinces of Turkey, and confront the centuries-old past of the Armenians on these lands, prior to 1915.

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Most legally, Bibérian sought for a refuge outside of Turkey. He had not been drafted yet and Turkey was not at war with anyone. Bibérian had contacts thanks to his parents’ friends in Plovdiv (former Greek Philippopole and more recently Ottoman Filibe). Ironically, this is to be considered as an advantage of the situation of the contemporary dispersion of Armenians after 1915 – 1923, caused by the Young Turkish genocide of Ottoman Armenians. Survivors were prevented from coming back to their lands in the inner provinces of the vanquished Ottoman empire, prevented from constituting an openly Armenian collective life on the spot, had people survived there or managed to come back. They had to stay briefly or even settle down, first of all in the neighbouring foreign countries, formerly established or created out of the territory of the Ottoman empire: in independent Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, and in Greater Syria under British and French rules. His time in Bulgaria was more than a holiday, although Bibérian had a limited touristic visa to sojourn there. But there too, he developed his talent for observation and reflected about the Armenian past and present, because the change of place rearranged his perception of the recent post-genocidal history of the Armenians, silenced in Turkey proper.¹⁴ The people with whom he related in Plovdiv were Armenians, originally from what had become the territory of Turkey. They were either refugees from what had become Turkey or descendants of Armenians from the former central Ottoman lands. Besides, Bulgaria had, for at least some Armenians, an enviable recent past. It was a piece of land of mostly Christian populated Ottoman Balkans, which had succeeded to become independent. This was a fascinating success story in comparison with the disaster experienced by Ottoman Armenians. There is a tradition of admiration towards Bulgaria among Armenian nationalists. The Armenian Revolutionary Movement was active in pre-WWI Bulgaria. Bibérian had the experience of being welcome and even highly-regarded at first as an Armenian. This was new to him and opposite to what he had experienced until then in Turkey, especially at the lycée Saint Joseph, at the Turkish school for business administration or, more dramatically, at the nationalist demonstration in favor of the annexation of the sanjak of Alexandretta (Hatay). This experience suggested that things could be different and that the bad reputation of Armenians in his country was an arbitrary construct. It would reinforce the self-esteem of the young man and make sharper his perception of the injustice to which he was exposed.

 Suciyan, The Armenians, 202: “To this day, the post-genocide denialist habitus has defined the existence of Armenians in every way and the lives of other groups whose conflicts with the state remain unsolved.”

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Bibérian’s curiosity and openness towards new and different things are perceptible in the pages devoted to his journey to and sojourn in Bulgaria. On his trip to Plovdiv, Bibérian experienced his adequacy to the world outside of Turkey. He was able to communicate with Bulgars in French, which retained in the forties in the Balkans its status of lingua franca, the very language he chose to write his memories in decades later. Bibérian took benefit from his travel by train in order to expose himself to the Cyrillic script and learn some simple words of Bulgarian language. He would retain this curiosity during his stay in Plovdiv and would take a liking to this language along with other Slavic languages, which had some presence in Turkey proper, because of the presence of Muslim refugees from the Balkans (muhacir) in contemporary Turkey, that of Russian Molokans in the provinces of Kars and Ardahan or the more isolated presence of Slav expatriates in contemporary Turkey. His stay was an intense and positive experience but the young man finally had to return to Istanbul, because his visa could not be extended. Plovdiv, shortly before WW2 ravaged the Balkan peninsula, was a decisive period in Bibérian’s ideological maturing. He probably experienced extreme Armenian nationalism there as a threatening ideological dead-end. Zavèn had to face unveiled fascism, an ideology much en vogue since the triumph of Mussolini in Italy at the end of October 1922. It was tempting too for some Armenians, for it was interpreted as a possibility of revenge against the Sovietization of Armenia in late November 1920 and possibly against the Ottoman Genocide of Western Armenians from April 1915 onwards. Fascism could be seen by some Armenians as a possibility of forceful correction of the past. It could be perceived as the legitimate tool in order to question the new order inherited from the Lausanne treaty (January and July 1923), which replaced that of Sèvres (August 1920) and which was beneficial to the Armenian national cause, because it foresaw the inclusion of some Western Armenian territories in the newly proclaimed independent republic of Caucasian Armenia. From his experience and political culture in Turkey, Zavènhad until then nurtured a vague fascination for the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which had governed the first Republic of Armenia (May 28, 1918-November 29, 1920/ April 2, 1921). The party had always been illegal in the Republic of Turkey. Bibérian could only imagine what the party had done within the Ottoman Empire, as an underground organization under the Hamidian rule and as a legal party after July 1908, that is the Young Turkish revolution, adopting a friendly attitude towards the CUP as an ally, even calling Ottoman Armenians to serve in the Ottoman army in July/August 1914. The encounter with reality sobered up Bibérian’s vague enthusiasm. His expost description of what he saw in the Armenian community of Plovdiv does not

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leave any doubt: “The Armenian Nazis trained the Armenian teenagers.”¹⁵ Bibérian deemed the action of the local supporters of Tro harmful to the local Armenian youth and useless otherwise.¹⁶ In retrospect, Bibérian condemned any aggression against the USSR, that is possibly against Soviet Armenia. The sojourn in Plovdiv played a major role in his move beyond narrow Armenian nationalism as an understandable but most possibly sterile response to the Turkish oppression of Turkish Armenians. Bibérian’s evolution was eased by the personal interest he had in the political setting. In the few weeks he stayed in Plovdiv, Bibérian succeeded in having some affairs with local Armenian girls. His sweetheart’s family in Plovdiv was torn apart by the impact of fascism. The cult of strength and purity even destroyed his girlfriend’s sister’s psychological balance. Most real people, in this case real Armenians, could not fit in the pervert human mould of Nazi ideology. After his return to Turkey, Bibérian was drafted. He would remain conscripted 42 months, that is more than three years. During his conscription time, Bibérian kept evolving, and did so because he remained open to signs around him, more specifically to different traces of the multiple past of the inner provinces, that is traces of non-Armenians in what was officially only Turkish Anatolia. Not all Armenians or Greek-Orthodox conscripts were able to make this tedious and dangerous time a beneficial political and intellectual phase. His very first period of somehow almost regular military service, although he would never bear an arm, took place in the Black Sea region and this was a revelation for him. Knowing about the history of Armenians thanks to a private library was a privilege but remained a disincarnated experience. In disheartening and absurd trecks in the mountainous regions, Bibérian had the opportunity to see with his own eye the Armenian ruins of churches and schools, then still much present in the landscape, close to Gümüşhane (former Argyropole). Bibérian had known before that these places had been inhabited from times immemorial

 Bibérian, Car vivre, 2019, 132: “Les nazis arméniens de Bulgarie entraînaient les adolescents…”  See for more details: Enno Meyer and Ara Berkian, Zwischen Rhein und Arax: Neunhundert Jahre deutsch-armenische Beziehungen (Oldenburg: Heinz Holzberg Verlag, 1988), 107– 10. Compared to some hundreds of Armenians under the command of General Tro (Trasdamad Ganayian, 1884– 1956), who served for the Third Reich on Soviet territories, the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Armenians drafted in the Red Army set the record straight as far as Armenian participation in WW2 is concerned. Tro was only the disavowed leader of a mere fraction of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation whose main bureau rallied the enemies of the Axis. However, this character has been reintegrated into the contemporary Armenian political pantheon, with his ashes recently transferred to independent Armenia, and discussing his behavior in WW2 is taboo for most. Bibérian was once again an annoying precursor.

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by non-Turks. The direct contact with this past, brought to an abrupt end by the Ottoman genocide, the persecution of Pontic Greek-Orthodox by both the ailing empire and the Kemalist movement, and finally the compulsory exchange of Greek-Orthodox sealed in Lausanne, as early as January 1923, nurtured his accurate perception of the past and at least a momentaneous resentment towards Turkish nationalism. One of the especially dense moments of his first military period was his unit’s stationing within the former Orthodox cathedral of Trabzon (former Trebizond), Hagia Sophia, transformed into a detention camp for unarmed recruits, both non-Muslims and Kurds. Mixing in a bivouac urban non-Muslims, that is Gâvurlar, with Muslim Kurdish recruits at that time was a malicious decision on the part of the Turkish authorities, given the hostility between urban youths and rural young men, most of them illiterate in Turkish, and the enmity ingrained in Muslim recruits at that time against non-Muslims. Beyond the unpleasant experience of being assaulted by Kurdish recruits, which the Turkish commandment would not have liked to acknowledge but was forced to because of the intervention of Istanbul Turkish teachers living nearby, Bibérian took the opportunity under unfavorable circumstances to broaden his perception range of what Turkey really was in the early forties. This was a double enlightening experience for Bibérian as a young man and for a contemporary reader of his fragmentary memoirs: neither the buildings, the recruits encountered nor the population were as Turkish as they should have been according to the credo of the Republic of Turkey. Decades before the topic of Gizli Ermeniler [Secret or hidden Armenians in Turkish] became a fairly openly discussed topic, at least in learned circles, both Armenian and Turkish, Bibérian experienced that Muslims in Turkish Anatolia were children or grand-children of “opportunist” or forced converts.¹⁷ Zavèn even made the effort to understand what little dialectal Armenian the young men, officially or socially Turks and Kurds, may still have known. Bibérian’s attitude is not typical for Istanbul Armenians of bourgeois origins, who usually used to despise provincial dialects and would certainly not accept the inbetween situation of real provincial Armenians caught in a Muslim social life, despite their Christian origins. This is still today an uncomfortable topic. Some people may think that reverse conversion to Christianism to the descendants

 The groundbreaking book in this area was the testimony by Fethiye Çetin, Anneannem [My Grandmother] (Istanbul: Metis, 2004, in Turkish). Since then, many books have evoked the topic: Laurence Ritter and Max Sivaslian, Les restes de l’épée: les Arméniens cachés et islamisés de Turquie (Paris: Thaddée, 2012); Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier, Le Fantôme arménien (Paris: Futuropolis, 2015); Avedis Hadjian, Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018).

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of converts to Islam is the best they can offer. Some may advocate that there is such a thing as Armenianness combined with Muslim faith, although millennia of Armenian history are in fact the narrative of confrontation between Armenian Christianism against forms of Islam, that is in the case of the current Turkish territory Sunni orthodoxy. Is it possible to oversee this polarization? The scene at Haghia Sophia in Trabzon – some Kurds unexpectedly offered their help to the targeted Christian recruits revealing themselves as in-fact Armenians – is a first but in the course of his entire service in the Nafıa, this topic reemerges again and again. Sons of converts would feel concerned by religious celebrations held by Istanbul Armenian or Greek-Orthodox drafted people and would try to attend liturgies, although they would not know how to take part in formalized rituals. Bibérian’s memoirs are a convincing proof that Anatolia, Turkey at large was and still is full of people who are the long-term victims of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenian world. In the same way as Étienne Copeaux put it, the territory proper of the Turkish national state contradicts the exclusive Turko-centric narrative that discursively turns Anatolia as the bulwark of Turkishness.¹⁸ The reality of local Greek and Armenian pasts impressed Bibérian. At many places in Turkish Anadolu, ruins bear testimony of ancient Armenian presence, and even of former Armenian statehood. Not only did Bibérian observe ruins but he also knew how to interpret what he saw. This is an experience which was not common in Republican Turkey. Istanbul-Armenians were and still are often reproached with their lack of awareness of realities in the Ottoman and afterwards Turkish provinces. By making the best of his difficult years in the Nafıa, Bibérian clearly distinguished himself from this pattern. At the different places, he was posted, Bibérian would meet with locals, whose existence were ignored or despised. This is especially true in the case of the Alevi Kurds, in former Cilicia (more or less corresponding with the Turkish region of Çukurova). Moreover, these unexpected locals were aware too of the local medieval Armenian past.¹⁹ Zavèn had then no idea about Kurds or Alevism. But his intelligence and strong personality enabled him to distinguish the complex reality despite Turkish Nationalism and demographic engineering. Spontaneous life creates or recreates human complexity, if not hindered. Enlightening empirical experiences were however suppressed by the Turkish state, which banned and bans the Armenian past from the official

 Étienne Copeaux, Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste 1931 – 1993 (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997).  Bibérian, Car vivre, 343: “Les indigènes le nommaient Levon Kalesi (forteresse de Léon).”

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historiographical discourse.²⁰ More practically, the Turkish authorities forbid access to Armenian sites, by allocating specific places to the military domain. However, the locals may know about the former Armenian presence and proved more difficult to be affected by the official propaganda. They even make spontaneously the connection between local medieval ruins and the young Armenians posted close to their settlement, which surprised Bibérian.²¹ Bibérian made an extreme experience about the erasing of Armenian former presence in the space. He was confronted with the Turkish police within a building which used to be Armenian Property. Once discharged from the Nafıa, in Istanbul, Bibérian got involved in journalism. His sharp tones in the Istanbul based Armenian press, both in Armenian but also in Turkish, would cause his protestation against the arbitrary and discriminating treatment of Armenian in contemporary Turkish society, especially in the Turkish media, to cause drepression under a false pretext. Bibérian was subjected to police interrogation at the Directorate for Safety which used to be an ancient Armenian property ceased and expropriated. Bibérianis was in a position as the heir of the Armenian tradition of the city on how to interpret what he experienced and decipher it for his future readers. Bibérian knows what “Sanasaryan Hanı” once was, that is a vakıf property which was a source of income (in the form of rents) for the major Armenian college, that once existed in Erzurum, and had been founded by Mgrditch Sanassarian in 1882, Sanassarian Highschool,²² which was used by the Kemalist movement as the seat of the congress of Eruzrum (July 23-August 7 1919) in a city cleansed from its Armenian inhabitants. Bibérian, at least at the time of redaction of his memoirs, appears to be a rare fully aware witness of the perversion of places and symbols, that is of the past by the denialist heir-state of the Ottoman empire. Current official Turkish sites even mention the past use of the building, without expanding on the reasons why Armenians would not use this building any longer.²³

 Étienne Copeaux, Une vision turque du monde à travers les cartes de 1931 à nos jours (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000).  Bibérian, Car vivre, 346: “Mes enfants, nous vous connaissons bien (il parlait plutôt des Arméniens). Nous savons parfaitement qui vous êtes.”  For more details on Sanassarian High School, see Pamela J. Young, “Knowledge, Nation, and the curriculum: Ottoman Armenian education (1853 – 1915)” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001), accessed March 1, 2021, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_ val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3001076.  See, as an example, an official Turkish site, accessed March 1, 2021, https://erzurum.ktb.gov. tr/TR-181311/erzurum-kongresi.html.

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The main difficulty for people living in an ethno-cultural community-based society, such as the Ottoman one or the post-Ottoman one like Istanbul or Aleppo, is to experience the reality of other people belonging to other communities, with which one is not supposed to interact at all. There are times when and places where some people are allowed to interact, the bazar being the best example. Jews were and to an extent still are taboo within post-Ottoman societies. They were so ostracized by Arab governments that they are absent now in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. Theoretically, they could have remained and thrived in Turkey but, in retrospect, one can only see their demographic losses from the foundation of the Republic of Turkey until today. Theoretically, Turkish Jews, in continuity with the Ottoman Jewish experience, were the most compliant of the non-Muslims. The Jewish community was the first to officially renounce its separate family-law, embracing the new legal order of contemporary Turkey, putting pressure on the other official minorities to follow suit, which caused resentment among Turkish-Armenians and Turkish-Greek-Orthodox.²⁴ Some Turkish Jews ostensibly tried to participate in the establishment of the new Turkish nationalist (milli) and secular (laik) doxa. For instance, Moiz Kohen (1883 – 1961), who chose Munis Tekinalp as official Turkish name, contributed to the assimilation of his community, by publishing his “ten commandments” in 1928, in order to make former Ottoman Jews model Turkish citizens.²⁵ His efforts did not prevent him from finishing his life in exile, in France. However, his personality and political involvement did contribute further to the image of the Jews as the most loyal, possibly excessively loyal, non-Muslim community to the new regime among both official Christian minorities. Jews were openly targeted in 1934, during the so-called events in Thrace, by violent attacks aiming at terminating their presence in the Western-most province of contemporary Turkey.²⁶ Those who did not emigrate to British Palestine or the West had to relocate in Istanbul, thus ending the centennial Jewish presence in Edirne (Adrinople), Tekirdağ (Rodosto) ou Kırklareli (Kırkkilise). Antisemitism was a commonplace in contemporary Turkish politics in the years of rapprochement with Nazi Germany. However, apart from the violent uprooting of Thracian Jews in 1934, officials would neither target this group more than other non-Muslims nor expel the Jewish Turkish citizens to the Third Reich. I would argue that Eastern Christians, among others Armenians, have nourished  Rıfat N. Bali, The Silent Minority in Turkey: Turkish Jews (Istanbul: Libra, 2013), 119: “The Jews as a community from which the Armenians should draw an example.”  Bali, The Silent Minority, 112: “Tekin Alp, ideologue of Turkification.”  Laurent-Olivier Mallet, La Turquie, les Turcs et les juifs: Histoire, représentations, discours et stratégies (Istanbul: Les Éditions ISIS, 2008), 249: “Le judaïsme turc et la vague brune.”

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a traditional religious Antisemitism for centuries.²⁷ The phenomenon evolved in Armenian communities within Arab countries to a sharp hostility towards the State of Israel, in accordance with the inimical representations of the larger population who, rhetorically at least, identify with the Palestinian Arabs. Young Zavèn Bibérian was not familiar with Jews in Turkey. There is no mention of them in his autobiographical fragment until he meets real Jews during his long conscription. But then, as at so many other times, he embraced the encounter and made the best of the new comradeship, evaluating people without prejudice and with fairness, independently from their origins. The vague category turned his years at the Nafıa into an experienced daily closeness. In a sense, the conscription of non-Muslims forced young men out of their preconceptions inherited from the former Ottoman social order. In his memoirs, Bibérian says: “I had Jewish comrades.”²⁸ This expression can be read as an oxymoron for many Armenians. It certainly emphasizes the unusual aspect of such an encounter. One may object that Bibérian wrote his autobiographical fragment in retrospect after his full conversion to internationalism and may project a brotherhood on the past experience which may have been more difficult in reality. But at any rate, readers can observe that some of his Jewish comrades were very close to his heart, while others less so. Ironically, the future successful France-based singer, Mario Doreno from Izmir, wasn’t his friend. Bibérian made direct references in his manuscripts to the destruction of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Some of his close Jewish comrades were in fact Parisians with a Turkish passport who could escape Nazi-occupied France thanks to their official nationality. He took a liking to them and was eager to listen to their memories of Paris, to sing the French songs they knew and above all converse in French with them. Bibérian had to help them with his bilingualism French-Turkish, for the Parisians did not speak Turkish at all and had to serve in a country they had never seen. Although the three men in question in Bibérian’s book knew nothing about Turkey and no word of Turkish when they arrived, they were not deported by the occupation forces or the French police, and Bibérian is aware of their right decision to come to Turkey, be it only a virtual homeland. When Bibérian reflects about non-Muslim men’s experience in the ranks of the

 Near-Eastern antisemitism appears to me as belonging mostly to the first category, that grounded on religious reasons, as defined by Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, vol. 1, L’âge de la foi, and vol. 2, L’âge de la science (Paris: Point, 1991). A recent book has been devoted to antisemitism by Greek orthodox on Ottoman lands: Leon Kontente, L’Antisémitisme Grec en Asie Mineure (Smyrne 1774 – 1924) (Istanbul, Libra, 2015).  Bibérian, Car vivre, 293: “Ici, je dois établir nettement une réalité: je n’ai jamais été antisémite. […] J’avais des camarades juifs que j’aimais beaucoup.”

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Nafıa, he often adopts the vocabulary usually used for the Shoah. He speaks of him being detained in concentration camps. From time to time, readers can get the impression that the author equalizes both ordeals. But in other passages, Bibérian clearly establishes a hierarchy.²⁹ The Turkish Nafıa was a lesser evil in comparison with the extermination organized in Nazi Europe. It could have been a first step in the physical elimination of all minorities in Turkey but it remained a possibility, certainly very frightening during this time, while the Shoah was an implemented scheme, until the very last months of the conflict.³⁰

Concluding Remarks Zavèn Bibérian’s fine perception of history on the one hand and, on the second hand, his interest for non-Armenians who may experience too difficult times, because of political, economic or national reasons, were not very popular among his fellow Turkey Armenians: “But Armenian public opinion reacts differently.”³¹ Soon after coming back to Istanbul from his last posting in Anatolia, he would put his anger at the service of the Armenian-language press. He had the opportunity to restore a dormant newspaper, Nor Or (New Day), and make a daily out of it. Bibérian was interested in Turkish-Armenians’ unfair and harsh treatment but would also deem it necessary to speak about all groups ill-treated, such as Muslim peasants in contemporary Turkey. He received negative echoes for that.³² In an unusual manner, the past would not exonerate the present for Bibérian as an adult, who never claimed any monopoly on suffering for his own self or his fellow Armenians. In Janine Altounian’s words, the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians did not succeed to annihilate the very category and the worth of alterity in Bibérian’s mind.³³

 Bibérian, Car vivre, 291: “Je suppose qu’il serait injuste de leur part d’identifier le Nafıa avec les camps nazis pour Juifs.”  For instance, Jews from Ioannina were deported in late March 1944, Cretan Jews were deported at the beginning of June 1944, and the Jews from Rhodes were deported as late as in late July 1944, while the Nazi army would retreat from Greece in September 1944. For more details, see Odette Varon-Vassard, Des Sépharades aux Juifs grecs: Histoire, mémoire et identité (Paris: Le Manuscrit, 2019).  Bibérian, Car vivre, 500: “Mais l’opinion arménienne réagit autrement”.  Ibid.: “Qu’est-ce qui lui prend de s’occuper des Turcs?”  Janine Altounian, L’effacement des lieux: Autobiographie d’une analysante, héritière de survivants et traductrice de Freud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 68: “Les familles de survivants, agglutinées ainsi en un lien fusionnel excluent chez leurs différents membres toute appropriation d’un corps propre et délimité par rapport à leurs autres – vivants ou morts. Leurs

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This may explain why life does not come to a stalemate according to Bibérian’s perception of history. There is room for an intensive personal life and political action in the general arena and not limited to the frightened Armenian community. His personal perception and political convictions stood in sharp contrast with the habitus of Istanbul Armenians and made him unpopular among these latter. However undervalued and non-representative Bibérian was in his time and at his place, this is an author worth reading, translating, and interpreting. His difficulties in daily life and his political and social failures shed light on Turkey’s contemporary history and the dead ends in which Istanbul-Armenians are put and cannot often dare escaping.

Bibliography Altounian, Janine. L’effacement des lieux: Autobiographie d’une analysante, héritière de survivants et traductrice de Freud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. Bali, Rıfat N. The Silent Minority in Turkey: Turkish Jews. Istanbul: Libra, 2013. Bibérian, Zavèn. Mrchunnerou verchalouysə [The Sunset of the Ants]. Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2007 (in Armenian). Bibérian, Zavèn. Yalnızlar [The Lonely People (self-translation of Lgrdadzə [The Trollop])]. Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, in 2012 (in Turkish). Bibérian, Zavèn. Angoudi siraharner [Pennyless Lovers]. Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2017 (in Armenian). Bibérian, Zavèn. Dzovə [The Sea]. Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2017 (in Armenian). Bibérian, Zavèn. Car vivre, c’était se battre et faire l’amour: Fragment autobiographique d’un Arménien d’Istanbul, 1921 – 1946, edited by Hervé Georgelin. Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2019. Bibérian, Zavèn. Lgrdadzə [The Trollop]. Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2020 (in Armenian). Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. Çetin, Fethiye. Anneannem [My Grandmother]. Istanbul: Metis, 2004 (in Turkish). Copeaux, Étienne. Espaces et temps de la nation turque: Analyse d’une historiographie nationaliste 1931 – 1993. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1997. Copeaux, Étienne. Une vision turque du monde à travers les cartes de 1931 à nos jours. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000. Hadjian, Avedis. Secret Nation: The Hidden Armenians of Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris, 2018. Karski, Jan. The Mass Extermination of Jews in German-Occupied Poland. London: Polish government-in-exile, 1942.

héritiers sont ainsi marqués, dans leur enfant, par un empêchement à s’autonomiser en advenant à une subjectivation de leur être au monde,” and 162: “Cette absence de rapport à l’altérité chez ceux qui ont connu la terreur rend le témoignage d’événements traumatiques impossible parce que celui-ci ressortit à la structure ternaire de toute transmission […].”

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Kontente, Leon. L’Antisémitisme Grec en Asie Mineure (Smyrne 1774 – 1924). Istanbul: Libra, 2015. Mallet, Laurent-Olivier. La Turquie, les Turcs et les juifs: Histoire, représentations, discours et stratégies. Istanbul: Les Éditions ISIS, 2008. Marchand, Laure, and Guillaume Perrier. Le Fantôme arménien. Paris: Futuropolis, 2015. Meyer, Enno, and Ara Berkian. Zwischen Rhein und Arax: Neunhundert Jahre deutsch-armenische Beziehungen. Oldenburg: Heinz Holzberg Verlag, 1988. Nichanian, Marc. “Zavèn Bibériani Mrchunneroun” [Zavèn Bibérian’s Ants]. Haratch [Forward], January 3, 1988 (in Armenian). Ökte, Faik. The Tragedy of the Turkish Capital Tax. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Poliakov, Léon. Histoire de l’antisémitisme, vol. 1, L’âge de la foi, and vol. 2, L’âge de la science. Paris: Point, 1991. Ritter, Laurence, and Max Sivaslian. Les restes de l’épée: les Arméniens cachés et islamisés de Turquie. Paris: Thaddée, 2012. Suciyan, Talin. The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016. Young, Pamela J. “Knowledge, Nation, and the Curriculum: Ottoman Armenian education (1853 – 1915).” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001. Accessed March 1, 2021, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88 – 2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev: mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3001076. Zanetti, Valérie. Dans le faisceau des vivants. Paris: L’Olivier, 2019.

Birgit M. Körner

“Global Solidarity is Something to Warm the Cockles of Your Heart¹”: Holocaust and Genocide in Ephraim Kishon’s “Israeli Satire” The so-called “Israeli satires” of the Hungarian-born Israeli writer Ephraim Kishon (1924– 2005) were most famous in the postwar Federal German Republic.² Of the total circulation of his books estimated at around 43 million, 33 million were published in German. Kishon, who wrote countless humoresques and satires as a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Maariv, was labeled a figure of reconciliation between Jews and Germans after the Holocaust in Germany. His funny texts were considered to contribute to this process. For example, on the commemoration of his death in 2005, the then Minister of Culture, Christina Weiss, told the magazine Der Spiegel: ‘He has been a development aid worker in the best sense of the word, helping many Germans to overcome their anti-Semitic blindness.’ Through him, the Germans have learned to laugh together again with Jews (author’s translation).³

This is a problematic statement for several reasons, especially concerning Kishon’s early texts in the 1960s. First of all, Kishon was a Holocaust survivor himself, something his German readers did not generally realize or emphasize. Second, there is also the question if Jews and non-Jewish Germans ever laughed together in the first place, and about what exactly.⁴ The problematic extension of this attitude is clearly visible in Rudolf Krämer-Badoni’s review of Kishon’s first  Ephraim Kishon, Noah’s Ark: Tourist Class (New York: Atheneum, 1962), 143.  On Kishon’s success in Western Germany see also Gabriel N. Finder, “An Irony of History: Ephraim Kishon’s German Triumph,” in A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, ed. Gabriel N. Finder et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 141– 53.  Anon., “Ephraim Kishon gestorben. ‘Ein Genie des Humors’,” Spiegel, January 30, 2005, accessed March 23, 2020, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/ephraim-kishon-gestorben-eingenie-des-humors-a-339343.html: “‘Er war ein Entwicklungshelfer im besten Sinne, der vielen Deutschen half, ihre antisemitischen Verblendungen zu überwinden.’ Die Deutschen [haben] durch ihn gelernt, wieder gemeinsam mit den Juden zu lachen.”  On the violent potential of “German Humor” see Martina Kessel, Gewalt und Gelächter: “Deutschsein” 1914 – 1945 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-014

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collection of satires and humoresques Dreh’n Sie sich um, Frau Lot! (Look back, Mrs. Lot!, English edition 1960) in the FAZ, a German daily, in November 1961. Krämer-Badoni emphasized the paradigm of a supposed reconciliation in an even more radical way: “How should we interact with Jews? With consciousness it should be said: as if nothing had happened” (author’s translation).⁵ Krämer-Badoni made this statement in the year of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem that brought the testimonies of the Holocaust survivors into court and into public consciousness for the first time (in Israel, but also abroad).⁶ He also made this statement before the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials from 1963 to 1968, thereby weakening any consciousness about the extent of what had happened to develop. From the beginning, Kishon’s humorous texts were used to dissolve (unconscious) feelings of guilt and shame about the German crimes against humanity into “harmless” laughter about Jews in Israel. Most problematic about the alleged idea of supposedly laughing together on the ground of a supposed agreement “that nothing has happened” is that Kishon’s own survival of the Holocaust is not acknowledged as well. While the Holocaust is not completely absent from his texts (as will be shown later on), Kishon has shared the story of his survival in detail only in his autobiography Nichts zu lachen in 1992 (“Nothing to laugh about”, no English edition). His decision aligns with the trend of many survivors publishing their memories, autobiographies or giving testimony in interviews around the mid1980s and in the 1990s.⁷ In his autobiography and in poetic statements in interviews thereafter, Kishon has explicitly connected his satiric and humoresque writing to his experience of persecution and survival during the Holocaust. He states that the ability to laugh about even absurd and brutal circumstances and events saved his life and preserved his dignity (see chapter two). By taking Kishon’s poetics seriously, the following chapters will show traces of his experience of the Holocaust and his survival in his texts, even if such el-

 Rudolf Krämer-Badoni, “Kishon, Ephraim: Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot,” FAZ, November 11, 1961, 27: “Wie also sollen wir den Juden begegnen? Mit vollem Bewußtsein sei es gesagt: als wäre nichts geschehen.”  Stephan Landsman calls this a “shift to the in-court narration of the victims’ stories”. Stephan Landsman, “The Eichmann Case and the Invention of the Witness-Driven Atrocity Trial,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 51, no. 69 (2012): 69.  See Sascha Feuchert, “Einleitung: Holocaust-Literatur” in Holocaust-Literatur: Auschwitz. Für Sekundarstufe I. ed. idem (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 27.

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ements appear surprising in innocent stories about bureaucracy, marital life, troubles with children, and handymen that turn up late in Israel. This article will concentrate on the German translations of Kishon’s humorous stories by his famous translator, the Austrian Jewish writer and editor Friedrich Torberg (1908 – 1979). The German editions of Kishon’s texts differ from the original Hebrew versions. This is due to the fact that Torberg translated Kishon’s texts from the English editions with a rather free approach.⁸ He changed punch lines, names, and the placements of stories in the books, and he chose which stories would be suitable for a German audience. Therefore the German versions of Kishon’s stories can be considered as separate versions made in a collaboration with changing power dynamics between Kishon and Torberg.⁹ This article will also show that Torberg censored some more direct mentions of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust because he wanted to market Kishon as a brand of “new Israeli humor,” unburdened from the past. After providing insight into Kishon’s narration of his survival in the context of the Hungarian participation in the Holocaust, this chapter will illustrate how the Holocaust and genocide in general are broached in Kishon’s “Israeli satires”, which readers generally perceive as harmless. It will show that Kishon only referred to his experiences directly in his autobiography, which is in the form a “biographical dialog” with the Israeli journalist Yaron London and in later interviews. There are no autobiographical stories or novels about it. However, there are unsettling text passages on one hand, which refer to his experiences of persecution on a subtextual level and work with motives and emblems of the Holocaust. On the other hand, Kishon as a columnist for Maariv wrote political satires which deal with anti-Semitism, German National Socialism, and the Holocaust directly. Last but not least, Kishon as a political writer questioned and wrote satirically about the ability of the international community to prevent future genocides.

1 Kishon as a Hungarian Holocaust Survivor Kishon’s persecution and survival occurred in the context of the Hungarian collaboration with the National Socialist regime. Hungary took on a special posi The editor of the correspondence of Kishon and Torberg, David Axmann, calls Torberg’s free translations “Nachschöpfungen” (re-creations). David Axmann, “Zwei wahlverwandte Urheber,” in Ephraim Kishon and Friedrich Torberg, Dear Pappi – My beloved Sargnagel: Briefe einer Freundschaft, ed. Lisa Kishon et al. (Munich: Langen Müller, 2008), 15.  Some part of their correspondence in English has been published in German: ibid.

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tion, as Raul Hilberg described: “By 1944 only one important area was still untouched by deportations, only one Jewish community still intact. The area was Hungary, and 750,000 Jews had survived within its borders.”¹⁰ Starting in 1938, Hungary under Miklós Horthy passed explicit anti-Semitic laws to restrict the civil rights of the Hungarian Jews.¹¹ In summer 1939, Hungary entered the Second World War alongside the “Third Reich”. All military-aged Jewish men had to perform Arbeitsdienst (Hungarian: Munkaszolgálat, forced labor), where they were deployed to the Eastern Front under harsh circumstances, enormous brutality, and an immense loss of life.¹² Kishon’s father was forced to serve as well in 1942.¹³ On the other hand, Hungary retained some independence and in 1941 the Hungarian Regent of the Empire (Reichsverweser) Horthy refused to deport the Hungarian Jews. The deportations to the Auschwitz extermination camp started only after the occupation of Hungary by the “Third Reich” on March 19, 1944. After the SS-officer (SS-Standartenführer) Edmund Veesemayer became Reich Plenipotentiary in Hungary, the preparations for the deportations by the Sondereinsatzkommando led by Adolf Eichmann started immediately. At the beginning of April 1944, the “yellow star” was installed, as well as so-called “Jewish houses” (Judenhäuser) and ghettos.¹⁴ Though the deportations took place later in Hungary, they were executed with the utmost efficiency of the now established “Eichmann system.” In only two months, between May and July 1944, 43,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Responding to international pressure, Horthy stopped the deportations on July 9, 1944. But as he declared the exit of Hungary from World War II on October 15, 1944, the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross Movement assumed power under Ferenc Szálasi. The forced labor battalions were deported as “leased Jews” (Leihjuden) to the Austrian border and given over to the SS. They had to build the so called “South-east wall” against the invasion of Vienna by the

 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews. Third Edition. Vol II (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2003), 853 – 54.  Vgl. Walter Manoschek, “Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder!” Adolf Storms und das Massaker an Juden in Deutsch Schützen (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), 25.  Manoschek, “Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder”, 26. Manoschek states that until April 1944, about 80,000 Hungarian Jews had been conscripted to forced labor service, and that all in all about 130,000 Jewish men had to perform military forced labor (26 – 27).  Ephraim Kishon, Nichts zu lachen (Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1992), 51. No English edition.  On the anti-Jewish policies see: Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/1945 (Stuttgart, Zurich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002), 132– 48.

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Red Army. Budapest, Kishon’s native city, was one of the last districts on the deportation lists. Due to refugees from the East front the deportations could not be conducted in as organized a manner as before. This allowed around 119,000 Jews to survive in Budapest, in many cases in hiding.¹⁵ Kishon has recalled his experiences in his autobiography, which was conducted as an interview with the Israeli journalist Yaron London, and called “a biographical dialog” in the Hebrew version.¹⁶ Kishon, under his birth name Ferenc Hoffmann, had been conscripted as a forced laborer in the Hungarian forced labor system. Together with the other military-aged men of his birth year 1924, he was deported from Budapest on May 15, 1944 and overseen by Hungarian guards.¹⁷ His battalion number was 107/303, noted by another forced laborer, Tibor Vajda.¹⁸ Kishon had to work in the forced labor camps Jolsva und Fuelek (present-day Slovakia) in the armaments industry.¹⁹ Kishon reports forced marching, poor nutrition, illnesses, inadequate housing, roll calls, life-threatening work conditions, heavy physical work without proper equipment, penalties, and executions. But he also recalls friendships and comradeship with other members of his battalion. Later promoted to work in an office due to his skills in chess, Kishon was able to plan his escape with a friend, Janos Lizsauer. In his autobiography, he recounts how he forged their identification papers, stole clothes from the Slovakian workers, and fled together with his friend on the train, where their Slovakian co-workers did not denounce them.²⁰ Tibor Vajda, who fled from Fuelek as well, dated their escape October 8, 1944 (Kishon November/December 1944)²¹, and estimates that only 10 – 15 % of their comrades survived.²²  Manoschek, “Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder”, 31.  Yaron London and Ephraim Kishon, Du-Schiach Biografi (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Ma’ariv, 1993, in Hebrew).  Kishon, Nichts zu lachen, 52– 57.  Tibor Timothy Vajda, In the Whirlwind of History: Struggle on and Keep the Faith (Lincoln, NE: iUniverce, 2003). About Vajda’s involvement in Stalinist crimes see Tibor Pethö, “Wallenberg and the Jewish Doctors,” Hungarian Review 4, no. 4 (2013), accessed March 23, 2020, http://hungarianreview.com/article/Wallenberg_ and_the_jewish_doctors.  Both camps were recognized as forced labor camps on August 28, 2003. “Haftstättenverzeichnis,” accessed March 23, 2020, www.bundesarchive.de/zwangsarbeit/haftstätten/index.php.  Kishon, Nichts zu lachen, 66.  Not being able to give exact dates is common for survivors of the forced labor service, due to the marching, and esp. to survivors deported to Slovakia (at all). Dan Danieli, “Interviews with Survivors of the Hungarian Forced Labor Services: An Evaluation,” in The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later, ed. Randolph L. Braham et. al. (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2006), 67.

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In Budapest, Kishon was reunited with his sister and father, who tried to survive hidden in an empty flat, aided by a former neighbor József Gabrowitz.²³ Endangered by the bombings, Kishon survived in hiding till the Soviet Army liberated Budapest in January 1945. Afterwards, he was arrested by Soviet soldiers who deported him for forced labor, uninterested in his status as a Jewish survivor.²⁴ Kishon fled again and reached his close family – his mother, father and sister – who survived the Holocaust in Budapest as well.

2 The Creation of a “New Israeli Humor” in Cooperation with his Translator Friedrich Torberg Kishon’s status as a Jewish victim of persecution by the NS-system did not fit well with the model of a “new Israeli humor” he himself, his translator Torberg, and the Langen Müller publishing house wanted to promote at the beginning of the 1960s. Jewish themes were seen as “political” in the post-war discourse in the Federal Republic of Germany,²⁵ so Torberg tried to promote Kishon’s texts as unpolitical and rather harmless. Following this approach, the “new Israeli humor” was meant to have almost no connection to the post-World War II and post-Holocaust tradition of a socalled “Jewish humor.”²⁶ Torberg explained this on the dust-jacket of Kishon’s first book in German Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot! (1961): What has been known and appreciated in the world as “Jewish humor” is only a small component here […]. But the essence and main features of the humor created by Ephraim Kishon are Israeli through and through. The self-critical element of his satire makes fun of the

 Vajda lists 15 by name. Vajda, In the Whirlwind of History, 196 – 97.  Kishon, Nichts zu lachen, 70 – 72.  Ibid., 117– 20.  Gilad Margalit, “Israel through the Eyes of West German Press 1947‒1967,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 11 (2002): 235.  The term “Jewish humor” is used to signify a discourse to avoid essentializing. It includes everything that was labeled as “Jewish humor” at a certain point in history. As Preisendanz stated, humor is never a transtemporal, but a historical, phenomenon. Wolfgang Preisendanz, “Humor,” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Georg Braungart, Klaus Grubmüller, Friedrich Vollhardt et al. (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2000), vol. 2: 100 – 03: 100, 103. Wisse states that the discourse about “Jewish humor” started during the Enlightenment period: Ruth R. Wisse, No Joke: Making Jewish Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 20.

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small shortages and defects of Israeli day to day life, not to advert a hostile critique, but to happily acknowledge them: as normal by-products of a normal life (author’s translation).²⁷

Torberg designed the “new Israeli humor” following the Zionist argument that the founding of a Jewish national state would bring about a normalization of Jewish life. As soon as the population consisted of a Jewish majority, they would be able to lead normal lives and “Jewish humor” would normalize to be its happy companion and not a psychologically twisted response to anti-Semitic surroundings. Torberg interpreted the internal Jewish self-criticism, which is an important part of what is known as “Jewish humor”, as a reaction to anti-Semitic criticism from the surrounding population in the diaspora. The counterpart to this “new Israeli humor” would be the traditional Eastern European “Jewish humor”, which has been called “die letzte Waffe der Wehrlosen” (“the last weapon of the defenseless”), following psychoanalytic theories.²⁸ Normalization is one major aspect of Torberg’s strategy to define “Israeli humor”. The others are exoticization and universalization: This new Israeli humorist conveys two new important insights: 1. In Israel everything is different than anywhere else, and 2. In Israel everything is exactly the same as anywhere else. For the stories are about human beings. With human attributes – and only therefore do they provide reasons for amusement (author’s translation).²⁹

To claim that in Israel all is different is a form of exoticization. On the other hand, the universalization is present in the phenomenon that readers (at least

 Dust-jacket of Kishon, Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot!: “Was bisher in der Welt als ‘jüdischer Humor’ bekannt und geschätzt war, tritt hier nur noch als Komponente auf […]. Aber Wesen und Grundzüge des von Ephraim Kishon in die Welt gesetzten Humors sind bereits durch und durch israelisch. Das selbstkritische Element seiner Satire nimmt die kleinen Mängel und Defekte des israelischen Alltags nicht deshalb aufs Korn, um einer feindlichen Kritik zu steuern, sondern um sie fröhlich einzubekennen: als normale Begleiterscheinungen eines normalen Lebens.”  Freud attributed a special kind of self-criticism to it: Sigmund Freud, “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten” [1905], in idem, Studienausgabe, Bd. IV: Psychologische Schriften, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2000), 127. Theodor Reik wrote about wit as a weapon: Theodor Reik, Lust und Leid im Witz (Vienna: Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1929), 90.  Ibid.: “Dieser neue israelische Humorist [Kishon] vermittelt zwei wichtige neue Erkenntnisse: 1. daß in Israel alles ganz anders ist als anderswo und 2. daß in Israel alles ganzgenau [sic!] so ist wie anderswo. Denn es sind Menschen, von denen diese Geschichten handeln, Menschen mit menschlichen Eigenschaften – und damit allein bieten sie schon Grund zur Heiterkeit.”

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in Western or industrialized countries) could identify with the problems in Kishon’s stories because they address common and general problems of humanity. Torberg’s effort to provide a definition and promote a clear distinction to the old Eastern European “Jewish humor” of the diaspora illuminate that Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot! was much more than just another humorous publication. Torberg frames the book as a contribution to the debate about “Jewish humor” after the Holocaust. This debate was mostly an inner Jewish dialog initiated by the controversial collection Der jüdische Witz. Soziologie und Sammlung (1960) (“The Jewish Wit. Its Sociology and a Collection”, no English edition)³⁰ by the Jewish sociologist Salcia Landmann. The collection was very popular with the non-Jewish German-speaking audience, but received harsh criticism from Jewish readers, especially Torberg himself. Landmann stated in her introduction that the Eastern European framed “Jewish wit” had been destroyed during the Holocaust together with its producers and recipients. For her, no new forms of “Jewish humor” could arise in the US or Israel.³¹ Torberg disagreed with her conclusion in his polemic essay ‘Wai geschrien!’ oder Salcia Landmann ermordet den jüdischen Witz. (1961) (“Screaming wai! Or Salcia Landmann murders Jewish wit”) and cited his own translation of Kishon’s satires as proof of the opposite.³² He also accused Landmann of editing her source material and integrating anti-Semitic passages, which would evoke anti-Semitic effects among non-Jewish German readers.³³ Torberg’s definition of the “new Israeli humor” with Kishon’s stories as an example make them appear unencumbered by the legacy of the NS-regime and the Holocaust, and provided a carefree excess for non-Jewish German readers. Kishon’s personal truth was completely different. After speaking about his experiences in the 1990s, Kishon based his poetic concept of humor explicitly on his experiences of persecution and survival.

 Salcia Landmann, Der jüdische Witz: Soziologie und Sammlung (Olten, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1960).  Salcia Landmann, Als sie noch lachten (Munich: Herbig, 1997), 25 – 26. On the connection of military and humorous tradition in Israel see Dominik Peters, “Die Palmach in Wort und Witz,” Trumah – Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg 23 (2016): 66 – 77.  Friedrich Torberg, “‘Wai geschrien!’ oder Salcia Landmann ermordet den jüdischen Witz. Anmerkungen zu einem beunruhigenden Bestseller,” Der Monat 14, no. 157 (1961): 48 – 65. Gabriel N. Finder came to a similar conclusion: “Torberg was apparently motivated […] by his belief that Kishon’s work represented nothing less than the salvation of Jewish humor in Germany.” Finder, “An Irony of History,” 144.  Torberg, “‘Wai geschrien’,” 48 – 65.

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3 Humor as a Survival Strategy In his autobiographic narrative, Kishon linked the beginning of his own writing, “his birth as an author” of satirical texts, directly to his experience of persecution and survival of the Holocaust. In an interview with the magazine FOCUS in 1994, Kishon stated that without the NS-regime and the Holocaust he probably would have been a writer, but not a satirist: “Presumably, I would have become a writer in any circumstance. But in becoming a satirist, Adolf [Hitler] had some influence. That’s for sure” (author’s translation).³⁴ In his autobiography Nichts zu lachen Kishon describes the moment he became a writer: he wrote the first draft of his first satiric novel while hiding in a cellar in Budapest, in danger of bombs, and only surviving on tomato sauce.³⁵ It was first published with the title Mein Kamm in Germany 1997 (“My comb”, no English edition). In a wordplay on Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic and racist autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf (1925/6, My Struggle), Kishon described the persecution of bald people similar to the persecution of Jews. From 1992 onward, Kishon has stated his poetics and incorporated his experience of survival by stating: “There is no other way. Only laughter. Someone who laughs is not defeated. As long as I am able to laugh, I am a human being with honor” (author’s translation).³⁶ With these words, Kishon defines humor as a technique of empowerment to protect one’s honor and dignity, even under extreme circumstances. Another early example of Kishon’s use of satire in writing about his survival and the persecution he endured is the short autobiographical statement on the back of his first German edition of satires Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot!. Before publishing his autobiography in 1992 as an interview, Kishon had never told his story of survival in detail, but he had not completely denied it either: “…

 Rainer Schmitz, “Beim Humor haben Betrüger keine Chance,” FOCUS Magazin, August 22, 1994, 34, accessed March 23, 2020, https://www.focus.de/kultur/medien/interview-beimhumor-haben-betrueger-keine-chance_aid_146869.html: “Wahrscheinlich wäre ich unter allen Umständen ein Schriftsteller geworden. Aber daß ich ein Satiriker geworden bin, da hat Adolf [Hitler] mitgespielt. Das ist sicher.”  Kishon, Nichts zu lachen, 108 – 11.  Ephraim Kishon, Allerbeste Geschichten (Munich: Langen Müller, 2005), 26: “Es bleibt nichts anderes. Nur Lachen. Jemand, der lacht, ist nicht besiegt. So lange ich lachen kann, bin ich ein Mensch mit Ehre.”

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born on August 23th, 1924 in Hungary, newborn 1949 in Israel. Too many schools. Too many labor camps: Hungarian, German, Russian” (author’s translation).³⁷ In his short curriculum vitae, Kishon chose an indirect and actually rather trivializing way to incorporate his Holocaust survival. He did not omit it, but with the description “too many labor camps, Hungarian, German, Russian,” the primary responsibility of Germany for the Holocaust seems minimalized. Even if Kishon experienced his persecution as Hungarian in nature and was disillusioned about the extent of collaboration with the NS-system in Europe,³⁸ his “assignment” to forced labor service came when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in May 19, 1944. Even more unsettling is the comparison to compulsory education: “too many schools, too many labor camps,” which trivializes the imprisonment in a forced labor camp with starvation and daily death threats by comparing it with the unwillingness to attend school. Still, it is a satirical way of conveying a hurtful truth. Kishon did not keep quiet about his experiences completely, but he still concealed their extent.³⁹ Thereby Kishon contributed to the effort to present himself and his “Israeli satires” as a new Israeli author with only a brief European history during World War II and the Holocaust. Kishon publicly embraced his role as a survivor only in the 1990s like many survivors did. But as will be shown in the following chapters, there were traces of it before, hidden in his humoresques and satires or plainly visible in his political statements on anti-Semitism.

4 Irritating Passages At first glance one would not expect references to Kishon’s experiences of persecution and survival during the Holocaust in his stories about washing machines with a life of their own, handymen who never arrive, Israeli bureaucracy, absurd family situations or the troubles of being a tourist. But there are unsettling text passages, which refer to his experiences of persecution on a subtextual level and poetological work with motives and emblems of the Holocaust.

 Dust-jacket of: Ephraim Kishon, Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot! (Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1961): “… am 23. 8.1924 geboren in Ungarn, neugeboren 1949 in Israel. Zu viele Schulen. Zu viele Arbeitslager: ungarische, deutsche, russische.”  Kishon, Nichts zu lachen, 136.  Kishon also stated that he felt he had not suffered that much compared to others sent to the death camps, so he kept quiet. Ibid., 63. The suffering of forced laborers was only fully acknowledged in the 2000s.

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The humoresque “Gibt es einen typisch israelischen Humor?” (“Does a typical Israeli humor exist?”) from Kishon’s second book in German Arche Noah. Touristenklasse (1963; Noah’s Ark. Touristclass, 1962)⁴⁰ illustrates the category of “irritating text passages” with a subtextual message, especially in the German version. The English version of the text is called “I Placed Ushers on Your Walls, Jerusalem” as a direct translation from the Hebrew and focuses on the theme of the Jewish usher or security guard. This is also the theme of the short introduction which prefaces the story: “‘There must be order!’ it says in the Talmud.⁴¹ That is why one of the most respected professions in Israel is that of the usher, whose task it is to prevent public disturbances” (86). The humoresque starts in a quite harmless way. The narrator, an Israeli author, gets invited by the secretary of the culture club (“Hail Fellow Club”) to give a lecture on the theme addressed in the German title of the story: “Is there a genuine Israeli humor, and if yes, why not?” (86). As the narrator arrives at the venue, the “gate” with “iron bars” (Gittertor) has already been closed. He does not get access through the back door either, despite being the invited lecturer. Instead he becomes involved in a rather nasty confrontation with some Israeli security guards (Ordner, English: “stalwart usher”), who attack him with broomsticks. He tries to call the organizer, to send a telegram, and even to write a message with a lipstick on the back door, but with no success. While trying all these approaches, he gets to know Mendel, the “Varied Artistic Program” (das gemischte künstlerische Programm), a seemingly Eastern European musician who carries several instruments on his person and was scheduled to provide some music at the event. Kishon’s story is one about Israeli ushers, making fun of the fact that they take their orders too seriously without logic, mentioning twice that they wouldn’t even let in the Prime Minister Ben Gurion, even if the seat was reserved especially for him. It is Torberg who gives the grotesque a new focus in the German version. Changing the title transforms it into a meta-poetic grotesque which should provide a statement about the “new Israeli humor” that he and Kishon promote and are promoted as.⁴² Torberg also brings out the underlying theme in the his-

 Kishon, Noah’s Ark, 86 – 90. The following quotes of the English edition are marked in brackets.  This is a reference to the six orders (Hebrew: sedarim) of the Mishnah.  Torberg translated the title as “Ordnung muss sein” (“There has to be order”) in the advanced publication in his magazine FORVM. Ephraim Kishon, “Ordnung muss sein,” FORVM 10, no. 110 (1963): 85 – 86.

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torical context around 1961 when the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem also raised questions about the role Jewish leaders and guards played in the Holocaust.⁴³ The plot culminates in a grotesque orgy of violence. As the excluded performers break through the iron gate with a towing bar (“a stout scaffolding beam”, 89), a confrontation with the security guards ensues: The infighting was short but violent. The chief usher rushed Albert and felled him with one blow of his bear paw. I dodged the chair thrown at me, then ran zigzag toward the auditorium to avoid the bullets. The chief usher left the body of the Artistic Program and jumped me from behind, but grabbed only my coat, which I left in his hands. I burst into the lecture hall, my head bloody but unbowed (90).⁴⁴

The grotesque and eerie feeling about the passage is heightened further by the following statement of the club’s secretary: Yes, these things happen sometimes,” Stockler agreed. “Perhaps our ushers are overeager, but believe me, it would be much worse if they weren’t. Last year the poet Melamed-Becker was strangled as he attempted to crawl in through the air-conditioner pipes (90).⁴⁵

In the German version, Torberg emphasizes Mendel’s death by writing “lifeless body”, but for Melamed-Becker he changes “strangled” into “almost suffocated” (beinah erstickt). Here, at least with the term “air-conditioning pipes” (Ventilationsanlage), a reference to the suffocation of Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other death camps is a plausible association or subtext. There are other subtle elements that support such an interpretation, most of all the iron gate, which is mentioned several times. In the context of the Holocaust, the iron gate is perceived as an emblem of the concentration camps,

 Kishon has written a satirical scene about the Eichmann Trial “2x2=Schulze” (English: “2x2= Schultz”). Ephraim Kishon, Arche Noah: Touristenklasse (Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1963), 134– 38. Kishon, Noah’s Ark, 150 – 56.  “Der Nahkampf war kurz und heftig. Mendel brach unter der Pranke des Ober-Ordners zusammen. Ich entging dem Stuhl, den man als Wurfgeschoß gegen mich benützte, durch eine geschickte Körperdrehung und rannte im Zickzack, um den Kugeln kein Ziel zu bieten, gegen den Vortragssaal. Der Ober-Ordner ließ den leblosen Körper des Gemischten Programms liegen und sprang mich von hinten an. Mein Mantel blieb in seinen Händen. Ich selbst taumelte auf das Podium, blutverschmiert, aber ungebeugt” (Kishon, Arche Noah, 63).  “Solche Sachen kommen vor. Vielleicht sind unsere Ordner ein wenig übereifrig. Aber glauben Sie mir: es ginge sonst noch viel schlimmer zu. Voriges Jahr ist der bekannte Lyriker Melamed-Becker beinah erstickt, als er versuchte, sich durch die Ventilationsanlage in den Saal zu zwängen” (Kishon, Arche Noah, 64).

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like the ones with the inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work Brings Freedom”) at the main camp in Auschwitz or the concentration camp in Dachau. And there is the original main theme of the grotesque, the Jewish usher or security guard, which had a whole other discussion attached to it around the time the grotesque was written and published close to the Eichmann Trials in Jerusalem 1961. During the trials, the role of Jewish leaders and Jewish personnel in the ghettos, concentration and extermination camps in the context of collaboration and the mindless following of orders in general was discussed, for example, in the famous controversy about Hannah Arendt’s articles in The New Yorker (1963) and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).⁴⁶ Kishon incorporates indirect references to Holocaust motives in this story and the scene of violence, but this interpretation is emphasized by the translation. Torberg also changed the name of the “Varied Artistic Program”, “one obstinate young man with an accordion case” from Albert (88) to Mendel, giving it a distinct Jewish Eastern European notion. Mendel as the representation of a form of Eastern European entertainment is killed by the guards in the story, while the narrator succeeds “[his head] bloody but unbowed” (90). These events therefore emphasize an answer to the meta-poetic question raised in the title. Still, it should be mentioned that the grotesque is also an intertextual reference to Franz Kafka’s parable Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law, 1915/19), known as the Torhüterlegende (“The legend of the gate keeper”).⁴⁷ In Kafka’s story, the protagonist (“a man from the country”) waits patiently for the permission of the guard to go through the open gate, just held back by “not yet” and some vague threat that there will be more and higher level guards waiting inside. He gets obsessed with the guard, tries to bribe him, but never tries to actually go through the door or to attack the guard. He learns right before he dies that this gate was only meant for him. In Kishon’s version, the protagonist is confronted with a new version of the Jewish guard, viciously attacking him for trying to reach the place he was meant to be. But we now have a new hero as well who tries everything possible to go through the gate and reach his rightful place without being intimidated by the guards. As in Kafka’s story, the guard’s role is ambivalent: the guards try to prevent his entry, but in the end are content with him giving his lecture and clap for him (90).  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963). Arendt described Eichmann’s behavior: “He did his ‘duty’ […]; he not only obeyed ‘orders’, he also obeyed the ‘law’” (ibid., 135).  I owe this reference to a discussion with students during my workshop at the European Summer University for Jewish Studies at Hohenems, Austria 2018.

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The question raised by the title in the German version, Gibt es einen typisch israelischen Humor? (Is there a special kind of Israeli humor?), deserves closer attention. During the absurd scene of violence, the Eastern European “Varied Artistic Program” Mendel is killed by the guards and left behind. The narrator, on the other hand, who represents the Israeli author and columnist Kishon, symbolizes the new prototype of the Israeli myth of Jews that fight and win wars. He survives the fight and reaches the stage “bloody, but unbowed” (blutverschmiert, aber ungebeugt, like Kishon survived the Holocaust and became a famous Israeli satirist). The guards who had attacked and persecuted him now applaud him. All of these events prompt the narrator to state that “there definitely is a special kind of humor in Israel …” (90).⁴⁸ However, the original lecture he prepared had the opposite conclusion: “I had prepared a wonderful lecture in which I pointed out that there was no native Israeli humor because the authorities were not supporting the humoristic institutions” (88). It begs the question whether the absurd behavior of the ushers and the club secretary is what provides the Israeli humor in the end. The new or typical aspect of an “Israeli humor” in this depiction would be feistiness, the will to fight, to not surrender and to survive, whereas the old Eastern European “Jewish humor” is to be (almost) suffocated, shot, or extinguished. Torberg’s editing in the translational process brings out these aspects as the main features and as the meta-poetic statement of the story. With framing the murdered “Varied Artistic Program” as Eastern European and emphasizing the indirect references to the Holocaust and its emblems, he shifts the focus of the story, fitting his own construction of Kishon’s new “Israeli humor”. He also supports a Zionist narrative of fighting and emerging out of the “degeneration” of the diaspora with the accordion hindering Mendel during running and fighting.

5 Kishon on Genocide and the Possibilities of Intervention by the International Community As the interpretations have shown, Kishon is not only a writer of harmless humorous stories about Israeli day-to-day affairs. Right from the beginning, he is also a political author, as almost all satirists are. Kishon also wrote directly about anti-Semitism and German National Socialism in his column in Maariv, especially prominent in the context of the Six-Day War in 1967.  “Es gibt ganz entschieden einen typisch israelischen Humor …” (Kishon, Arche Noah, 80).

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In his satire “Split Personality”⁴⁹ Israel’s situation before the 1967 Six-Day War is compared to Czechoslovakia’s in 1938, which had been “deedlessly” left to Nazi Germany because of the policy of Appeasement by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, a comparison that had been made widely in Israeli media and politics in 1967.⁵⁰ Here, Kishon sketched the world history utopia of a Czechoslovakia, which had reacted to the threat with a first strike like Israel in 1967. This utopia implicates the prevention of the Holocaust or at least a massively reduced numbers of victims: AFTER nerveracking [sic] negotiations lasting for many months […], an agreement was signed in Munich and world peace saved at the last moment. True, Czechoslovakia was delivered into the clutches of the mad Hitler, but there was no choice. Neville Chamberlain and M. Daladier convinced the Czechs that they could not resist the armed might of Germany … Next day in the afternoon, Czechoslovakia destroyed Hitler’s army and occupied Nazi Germany. By the evening not a trace of it was left. This is what happened here. The world is still blinking its eyes, is speechless and a silly grin plays on its lips. Chamberlain mumbles: “Well, this was to be foreseen, these Jews – heh, heh, heh …”⁵¹

Kishon hints at an anti-Semitic position of Chamberlain and the world, when he lets him laugh about “these Jews” and attribute hidden powers to them like a conspiracy theorist: “heh, heh, heh …”. Kishon implies that the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) and his Appeasement policy 1938 were driven by anti-Semitic stereotypes.⁵²

 Ephraim Kishon and Kariel Gardosh, So Sorry We Won! (Tel Aviv: Maariv Library, 1967), 89 – 90. Not included in the German edition. Ephraim Kishon, Pardon, wir haben gewonnen: Vom Sechstagekrieg bis zur Siegesparade 1 Jahr danach. Satiren mit Cartoons von Dosh (Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1968).  Tom Segev, 1967. Israel, the War and the Year that transformed the Middle East (London: Little Brown, 2007), 342.  Kishon and Gardosh, So Sorry We Won!, 90.  Maybe the similar surname of the British theorist of racial anti-Semitism Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855 – 1927) inspired this rendition. Neville Chamberlain’s politics are not known as anti-Semitic, still a letter to his sister dated July 30, 1937 speaks of a negative attitude towards Jews. Moshe Arens, “British anti-Semitism? What Else Is New,” Haaretz, May 17, 2016, accessed March 23, 2020, https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-british-anti-semitismwhat-else-is-new-1.5383374.

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Torberg did not include “Split Personality” in the German version of So Sorry, We Won! partly because the significance of the Holocaust for Israel and the fact that Israeli politics were not discussed in German media in the 1960s,⁵³ so the German readers would lack context. But Torberg notoriously edited passages with references to the Holocaust or NS-Germany in Kishon’s texts to nurture support for Israel and to spare the German readers.⁵⁴ In his later years, Kishon attributed not only his concept of humor but also his political attitude to his Holocaust survival, as a short note titled “Perpetrators and Victims” (“Täter und Opfer”) shows: “I am a product of the Holocaust, a tourist from hell. Therefore, I am not what is called a liberal in Germany. That is to say, I support the victims, not the murderers” (author’s translation).⁵⁵ Many of Kishon’s political texts belong in the context of the Cold War and the Bloc confrontation between East and West Israel got in-between. For example, a harmless humoresque about a séance starts with references to the end of the world as debated at that time: “We chatted about the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb and the approaching end of the world for a while” (author’s translation).⁵⁶ In the context of the Cold War, genocide had become a possibility to destroy humanity as a whole. In his political texts, Kishon reveals himself to be a pessimistic humanist. Again and again, he broached the issue of present-day anti-Semitism and doubts the ability of the international community to prevent further genocides, for example, in the satire Wie Israel sich die Sympathien der Welt verscherzte (1963) (“How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy”⁵⁷). Kishon drafts a dystopia in the context of the Sinai campaign in 1956 by exploring what would have happened if the Arab states would have destroyed Israel. Kishon describes in detail how the international community couldn’t prevent the destruction of the Jewish state only eight years after its foundation and ten years after the end of the Holocaust.

 Astrid Hub, Das Image Israels in deutschen Medien: Zwischen 1956 und 1982 (Frankfurt a. M. et al.: Lang, 1997), 183.  Birgit M. Körner, “‘We Have to Watch ou[t] for [the] Propaganda Effect’ – Ephraim Kishon und Friedrich Torberg publizieren ‘israelischen Humor’ zum Sechstagekrieg 1967,” Naharaim. Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 13, no. 1– 2 (2019): 139 – 62.  Kishon, Allerbeste Geschichten, 47: “Ich bin ein Produkt des Holocaust, ein Tourist aus der Hölle. Deswegen bin ich auch nicht das, was man in Deutschland einen Liberalen zu nennen beliebt. Ich stehe nämlich auf der Seite der Opfer, nicht der Mörder.”  Ephraim Kishon, “Kontakt mit dem Jenseits,” in Kishon, Arche Noah, 31– 35, 31: “Wir plauderten eine Weile über die Atombombe, die Wasserstoffbombe und den bevorstehenden Weltuntergang.”  Kishon, Noah’s Ark, 143 – 49. The following quotes of the English edition are marked in brackets.

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The absurdities of the actions and negotiations at the United Nations Security Council are described: “Even before the Security Council convened, the Secretary General had sent two personal emissaries to the Middle East, but they did not receive entry visas to Egypt and had to follow the events from Copenhagen” (144). This is followed by a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution for an immediate cease-fire, where the resolution with votes 22:7 gets blocked by the veto of the Soviet Union (144). Another attempt is blocked by the Soviet Union as well (145), then a “extraordinary session” is called, but the result is still unsatisfying: “But the drafting of the final text took a number of days, as the original draft called for ‘immediate’ ceasefire, while the Indonesian amendment used the expression ‘as soon as possible’. The parties finally compromised on ‘speedy’” (145). During this satirical escalation of diplomatic negotiations, the destruction of the Israeli state is executed: “By then the fighting had reached the hearts of the large cities. [W]ithin five days […] [t]he Arab Supreme Command agreed to the cease-fire. On the shores of bombed-out Tel Aviv and Haifa, 82,616 Jewish survivors were sheltered in camps⁵⁸ under U.N. protection” (145). At that time, the population of Israel consisted of 2.5 million Jews, so that 2.4 million Jews would have died in this fictitious war. This marks the turning point of the satire: “And then, world conscience awakened. Public opinion was gripped by such consternation that its echoes reverberated even in the Eastern Bloc” (145). The international community shows solidarity only after Israel’s destruction, with memorial services and the admission of the few survivors. Kishon mocks the rhetoric of commemoration ceremonies (of the Holocaust) and the declarations are accompanied by a long list of absurd emergency measures after the catastrophe. Some of them are reminders of the immigration policies for Jewish refugees during the Holocaust: The White House submitted an extraordinary bill to Congress for the immediate admittance of twenty-five thousand Israeli refugees. The President’s speech sparked unprecedented worldwide enthusiasm. Switzerland immediately offered two thousand transit visas and Guatemala increased its quota for Jewish immigrants from five hundred to seven hundred and fifty (147).

Manifests are written, cultural heritage should be preserved (UNESCO), streets are named “Israel Street”, and the United Nations decide to keep the Israeli flag:

 Torberg used the term Zeltlager (Kishon, Arche Noah, 104) [tent camp], which evokes another impression than Lager [camp] which is also a short form of Konzentrationslager (concentration camp) in German.

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The Israeli refugees […] were overwhelmed with affection and admiration. They inspired such a wave of enthusiasm for Israel as had not been witnessed since the creation of the Jewish state. In most countries, main thorough-fares were named after Israel and the U.N. memorial session decided almost unanimously (!) not to fill the chair of the Jewish delegate but to leave it vacant, also to let the Zionist flag stay among those of U.N. member states. Enthusiasm reached its climax when the Russian Foreign Minister unexpectedly proposed the holding of an Israel Day (149).

The conclusion of the satire is that after the destruction of Israel, world peace is possible: “World peace again had good prospects, humanity was again filled with hope for a brighter and happier future. Israel itself became the international symbol of Justice and Morality” (149). In his texts and interviews, Kishon makes the case that Israel acquired a new status of minority in the international community similar to that of Jews in the diaspora. Contrary to Zionist beliefs, even a Jewish national state could not end the Jewish minority position and the anti-Semitic threats in a global context. The same symptoms known from the Diaspora experience on a national scale can now be found on an international scale. In the satire “How Israel Forfeited World Sympathy”, Kishon calls out the ritualized commemoration practices the international community is willing to provide for the victims and survivors of wars and genocides only after the catastrophe has taken place, instead of concentrating on the prevention of wars and genocides. At the same time, he calls out the inability of the international community to prevent such crimes and violence and to prioritize human rights and their protection due to political, economic, strategic or political interests, plus an uninterested public caught up in its day to day affairs. Only 11 years after the end of the Second World War, Kishon paints a pessimistic picture of the possibilities of intervention by the international organizations founded for this purpose after the war.

Conclusion Kishon’s poetic concept of humor, humoresque, and satiric writing derives from his survival of the Holocaust. Even though he was promoted as an Israeli writer of a “new Israeli humor”, Kishon’s stories bear traces of his survival in direct and indirect ways. His translator into German, Friedrich Torberg, emphasized the more subtle traces in the context of the discussion of whether there could be a “new Jewish humor” after the Holocaust. But he also omitted more direct statements to spare the German non-Jewish readers.

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For Kishon as a Holocaust survivor, the appropriate reaction to the old and new threats to Jewish life is self-defense: physically through armed combat, psychologically with an attitude of humor even under extreme circumstances, and in a literary manner through writing humoresques and satires because, in his words, “There is no other way. Only laughter. Someone who laughs is not defeated. As long as I am able to laugh, I am a human being with honor.”⁵⁹ In doing so, Kishon’s funny texts encompass the whole spectrum of (Jewish) humor. Some are harmless and some are almost sarcastic, but all of them express an ethical dimension or attitude which makes them relevant beyond their date of origin.

Bibliography Anon. “Ephraim Kishon gestorben. Ein Genie des Humors.” Spiegel, January 30, 2005. Accessed March 23, 2020. http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/ephraim-kishon-gestorben-ein-genie-des-humors-a-339343.html. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963. Arens, Moshe. “British anti-Semitism? What Else Is New.” Haaretz, May 17, 2016. Accessed March 23, 2020. https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-british-anti-semitism-what-else-is-new-1.5383374. Axmann, David. “Zwei wahlverwandte Urheber.” In Ephraim Kishon and Friedrich Torberg, Dear Pappi – My beloved Sargnagel: Briefe einer Freundschaft, edited by Lisa Kishon and David Axmann, 13 – 17. Munich: Langen Müller, 2008. Danieli, Dan. “Interviews with Survivors of the Hungarian Forced Labor Services: An Evaluation.” In The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later, edited by Randolph L. Braham and Brewster S. Chamberlin, 63 – 75. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2006. Feuchert, Sascha. “Einleitung. Holocaust-Literatur.” In Holocaust-Literatur: Auschwitz. Für Sekundarstufe I, edited by idem, 5 – 29. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000. Finder, Gabriel N. “An Irony of History: Ephraim Kishon’s German Triumph.” In A Club of Their Own: Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, edited by Gabriel N. Finder and Eli Lederhendler, 141 – 53. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten” [1905]. In idem, Studienausgabe, vol. IV: Psychologische Schriften, edited by Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey, 9 – 219. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2000.

 Kishon, Allerbeste Geschichten, 26.

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Gerlach, Christian, and Götz Aly. Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/1945. Stuttgart, Zurich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2002. “Haftstättenverzeichnis.” Accessed March 23, 2020. www.bundesarchive.de/zwangsarbeit/ haftstätten/ index.php. Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Third Edition. Vol II. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2003. Hub, Astrid. Das Image Israels in deutschen Medien: Zwischen 1956 und 1982. Frankfurt a. M., Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna: Lang, 1997. Kessel, Martina. Gewalt und Gelächter. ‘Deutschsein’ 1914 – 1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019. Kishon, Ephraim, and Friedrich Torberg. Dear Pappi – My beloved Sargnagel: Briefe einer Freundschaft, edited by Lisa Kishon and David Axmann. Munich: Langen Müller, 2008. Kishon, Ephraim. Allerbeste Geschichten. Munich: Langen Müller, 2005. Kishon, Ephraim. Nichts zu lachen. Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1992. Kishon, Ephraim. Pardon, wir haben gewonnen: Vom Sechstagekrieg bis zur Siegesparade 1 Jahr danach. Satiren mit Cartoons von Dosh. Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1968. Kishon, Ephraim, and Kariel Gardosh. So Sorry We Won! Tel Aviv: Maariv Library, 1967. Kishon, Ephraim. Arche Noah: Touristenklasse. Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1963. Kishon, Ephraim. “Ordnung muss sein.” FORVM 10, no. 110 (1963): 85 – 86. Kishon, Ephraim. Noah’s Ark: Tourist Class. New York: Atheneum, 1962. Kishon, Ephraim Kishon. Dreh’n Sie sich um, Frau Lot! Munich, Vienna: Langen Müller, 1961. Kishon, Ephraim. Look Back, Mrs. Lot! New York: Atheneum, 1960. Körner, Birgit M. “‘We Have to Watch Ou[t] for [the] Propaganda Effect’ – Ephraim Kishon und Friedrich Torberg publizieren ‘israelischen Humor’ zum Sechstagekrieg 1967.” Naharaim. Journal of German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History 13, no. 1 – 2 (2019): 139 – 62. Accessed March 23, 2020. https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/naha.2019.13.issue-1 – 2/naha-2019 – 0001/nahaha-2019 – 0001.xml. Krämer-Badoni, Rudolf. “Kishon, Ephraim: Drehn Sie sich um, Frau Lot.” FAZ (November 28, 1961): 27. Landmann, Salcia. Als sie noch lachten: Das war der jüdische Witz. Munich: Herbig, 1997. Landmann, Salcia. Der jüdische Witz: Soziologie und Sammlung. Olten, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1960. Landsman, Stephan. “The Eichmann Case and the Invention of the Witness-Driven Atrocity Trial.” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 51, no. 69 (2012): 69 – 119. London, Yaron, and Ephraim Kishon. Kishon: Du-Schiach Biografi. Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Ma’ariv, 1993 (in Hebrew). Manoschek, Walter. “Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder!” Adolf Storms und das Massaker an Juden in Deutsch Schützen. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. Margalit, Gilad. “Israel through the Eyes of West German Press 1947‒1967.” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 11 (2002): 235 – 48. Peters, Dominik. “Die Palmach in Wort und Witz.” Trumah – Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg 23 (2016): 66 – 77. Pethö, Tibor. “Wallenberg and the Jewish Doctors.” Hungarian Review 4, no. 4 (2013). Accessed March 23, 2020. http://hungarianreview.com/article/Wallenberg_and_the_jewish _doctors.

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Preisendanz, Wolfgang. “Humor.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Georg Braungart, Klaus Grubmüller, Friedrich Vollhardt et al., vol. 2, 100 – 03. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2000. Reik, Theodor. Lust und Leid im Witz. Vienna: Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1929. Schmitz, Rainer. “Beim Humor haben Betrüger keine Chance.” FOCUS Magazin (August 22, 1994): 34. Accessed March 23, 2020. https://www.focus.de/kultur/medien/interview-beim-humor-haben-betrueger-keine-chance_aid_146869.html. Segev, Tom. 1967. Israel, the War and the Year that transformed the Middle East. London: Little Brown, 2007. Torberg, Friedrich. “‘Wai geschrien!’ oder Salcia Landmann ermordet den jüdischen Witz. Anmerkungen zu einem beunruhigenden Bestseller.” Der Monat 14 (1961): 157: 48 – 65. Vajda, Tibor Timothy. In the Whirlwind of History: Struggle on and Keep the Faith. Lincoln, NE: iUniverce, 2003. Wisse, Ruth R. No Joke: Making Jewish Humor. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Lawrence Baron

Persistent Parallels, Resistant Particularities: Holocaust Analogies and Avoidance in Armenian Genocide Centennial Cinema Turkey’s denial that the Aghet “Armenian term for the Genocide” happened and its exertion of dipomatic pressure to halt the production or limit the distribution of feature films depicting the Genocide retarded the development and dissemination of such movies. With the exception of the American silent film Ravished Armenia (1919) which predated the founding of the Republic of Turkey,¹ motion pictures focusing on the systematic mass murder and expulsion of Armenians in Turkey or on the festering wound this ordeal left in the collective memory of Armenian communities in the diaspora did not get made until the 1970s.² In the interim the Holocaust became widely acknowledged as a historical fact that frequently was dramatized in films. Confronted with Turkish denialism and the belatedness of international recognition of the Armenia Genocide, the first movies tackling the subject drew visual and verbal parallels to the Holocaust and the films about it to establish the equivalence of the two events as genocides.³

 Ravished Armenia aka Auction of Souls, directed by Oscar Apfel (USA: First National Pictures and Selig Studios for the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, 1919); Anthony Slide, “Introduction,” in Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, ed. Anthony Slide (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 7– 18; Leshu Torchin, Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 21– 60.  Armen T. Marsoobian, “The Armenian Genocide in Film: Overcoming Denial and Loss,” in The History of Genocide in Cinema: Atrocities on Screen, ed. Jonathan Friedman and William Hewitt (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 2017), 73 – 86; Alan Whitehorn, “The Armenian Genocide in Feature Films,” The Armenian Weekly, October 20, 2017, accessed January 10, 2019, https://arme nianweekly.com/2017/10/20/armenian-genocide-feature-films/. The dearth of films about the genocide was also true for movies produced in Soviet Armenia before the 1970s which only tangentially addressed the genocide. See Siranush Galstyan, Cinema of Armenia: An Overview (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2016), 1– 91.  Lawrence Baron, “The Armenian−Jewish Connection: The Influence of Holocaust Cinema on Feature Films about the Armenian Genocide,” in The Holocaust: Memories and History, ed. Victoria Khiterer with Ryan Barrick and David Misal (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 289 – 310. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-015

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The circumstances necessitating this strategy began to change slowly in 1965 with the mass demonstrations of Armenians in Yerevan commemorating the arrest and deportation of Armenian intellectuals 50 years earlier and Uruguay recognizing the Aghet as a genocide. The Yerevan protest mobilized the Armenian community of Montebello, California to lobby their city to erect a memorial in 1968 on public property to honor the victims of the Genocide. In the ensuing years American Armenian organizations lobbied at the state and federal levels to pass resolutions recognizing the Genocide. In 1975 the United States House of Representatives adopted a resolution commemorating the Genocide, but circumspectly omitted any mention of Turkey. Despite intense Turkish opposition, the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations approved a subcommittee report in 1985 that included the Aghet among the genocides of the twentieth century. Two years later the European Parliament demanded that Turkey acknowledge the Genocide setting the precedent for the European Union to require this of Turkey as a prerequisite for accepting it as a member of the organization. In 1991 the Republic of Armenia attained its independence. The number of countries recognizing the Genocide has accelerated considerably, from three by the end of the 1980s to nine during the 1990s and 31 since 2000.⁴ Moreover, in 2014, the Turkish Prime Minister offered condolences for the “inhumane consequences” of World War One on the Armenians without conceding that they were the result of a systematic genocidal policy.⁵ The centennial of the Genocide in 2015 occasioned a spate of documentary and feature films about the Ottoman Empire’s extermination and expulsion of the Armenians residing within Turkey and the subsequent repercussions of these policies. Given that the Empire’s declaration of Jihad against Islam’s enemies was issued in 1914 and World War One lasted until 1918, I consider movies released between 2014 and 2018 centennial films. The corpus of Genocide feature films made in that five year period outnumbers all the Armenian Genocide films made between 1919 and 1990 and all those produced between Armenian independence and the centennial as dated from the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War One (see Table 1).

 Michael Bobelian, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 121– 34, 164– 234.  Guney Yildiz, “Turkey offers condolences to Armenians over WWI killings,” BBC News, April 23, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27131543 (accessed January 30, 2019).

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Table 1: Production of Genocide feature films and documentaries. Years

Genocide feature films

Genocide documentaries

 – 





 – 





 – 





 – 





This chapter poses the question of whether the Armenian Genocide films released to coincide with the centenary departed from the prior practice of invoking Holocaust images, references, and tropes or whether they continued this legitimation strategy. In other words did the increasing international recognition of the Genocide, the existence of a sovereign Armenian state, and the publicity generated by the centennial lessen the exigency of proving its historicity by analogizing it to the Holocaust? Or do the makers of centennial films employ more particularistic iconography to differentiate the Genocide from the Holocaust?

1 The Persistent Parallels to the Holocaust in Armenian Genocide Films Michael Rothberg calls the process of couching a prior or contemporary instance of ethnic cleansing, massacre, or genocide in narrative and visual terms associated with a better known example of analagous policies “multidirectional memory.” It is employed to highlight the severity of eggregious instances of states expelling or murdering an ethnic, racial, or religious group by evoking associations with the icononography and narrative strategies of a more familiar past event. To be sure, comparisons can relativize and trialize when they facilely equate disparate phenomena like abortion to genocide. Rothberg, however, warns against presuming that such comparisons inevitably will diminish the magnitude of the victimization each group has sustained.⁶ Before and during the Holocaust, European Jews perceived precedents for their destruction and persecution in the tribulations of the Armenians under the wartime Ottoman Empire. These overlooked examples of multi-directional

 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1– 29.

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memory illustrate how the juxtapositions of the suffering endured by the two peoples were neither ahistorical nor contrived. The Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin struggled to coin a term for the systematic cultural, political, and physical destruction of a national, political, religious, or racial group to conceptualize the collective crimes he witnessed in antisemitic Polish pogroms and knew about like the annihilation of the Armenians. He eventually extrapolated this classification to Hitler’s “Final Solution.”⁷ Similarly, the Jewish-Austrian author Franz Werfel wrote his international bestselling novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933) not only to draw attention to the plight of the Armenian orphans he encountered while touring the Middle East, but also to alert the world that Jews faced a similar grim fate in Germany when Hitler became chancellor.⁸ A member of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Warsaw recalled his commander saying, “the Warsaw Ghetto uprising could not be understood without reading The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” Likewise, Zionist leaders devised a contingency plan for transforming “Mt. Carmel into a Musa Dagh” in case German troops ever invaded Palestine from North Africa.⁹ Made towards the end of the Soviet Thaw, Aleksandr Askoldov’s The Commissar (1967) contains a rare movie scene when the Armenian genocide was cited as a portent of the Holocaust.¹⁰ The Red Army billets a pregnant female commissar with a poor Jewish tinker named Yefim. Hunkered down in a cellar with the commisar and his family as a pogrom rages above them, he wonders whether anyone would care or remember if the Jews of his shtetl were killed: “Can you tell me, Comrade Commissar, why is it so? How indignant everybody felt when the the British attacked the Boers; how distressed we all were when the Turks massacred the Armenians, but will anyone raise his voice if tomorrow Yefim Magazanik is no more?” This scene segues into the commissar’s premonition of the Germans rounding up Jews before killing them during World Two. The Commissar appeared six years after the publication of Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar condemning the USSR’s failure to memorialize the eponymous ravine as the site of the largest German execution of Jews on Soviet soil. Askoldov assumed Soviet audiences were familiar with the Armenian Genocide because his film

 John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (Balsingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 6 – 25; Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2017), 17– 36; Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 1– 30.  Edward Minasian, Musa Dagh (Nashville: Cold Tree Press, 2007), 45 – 63.  Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 2009), 292– 312.  Commissar, directed by Aleksandr Askoldov (USSR: Gorky Film Studios and Mosfilm, 1967).

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was released two years after the Yerevan demonstrations in 1965 and the same year the city built its Genocide memorial. Thereafter, the Kremlin abandoned the “thaw” instituted by Khrushchev in the prior decade and suppressed movements for ethnic autonomy, Jewish emigration to Israel, or further reform. Commissar ended up being shelved and not released until 1988 as a token of Gorbachev’s glasnost “openness” policies.¹¹ Following the defeat of Hitler, the Holocaust emerged as the paradigm of genocide. This resulted from several factors. Turkey leveraged its strategic importance in the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli Conflict to undercut efforts to gain international recognition of the Aghet as a genocide and to intimidate Hollywood from representing it on screen as had been the case in 1935 when threats of a Turkish and possible French boycott of MGM productions forced the studio to drop its plan to film Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. ¹² Meanwhile, the shocking newsreel footage of skeletal survivors and corpses in the liberated concentration and death camps, the evidence of Nazi ruthlessnes presented at the Nuremberg Trials, the dependence of East and West Germany on their superpower patrons, and Israel’s commitment to publicize the Holocaust resulted in it becoming the best known genocide of the twentieth century.¹³ Turkish pressure prevented the The Forty Days of Musa Dagh from being made into a movie until 1982.¹⁴ Coming on the heels of NBC’s miniseries Holocaust (1978), Sarky Mouradian’s low budget adaptation of the novel which he titled Forty Days of Musa Dagh clearly forged links between the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah.¹⁵ The narrator cites Hitler’s infamous assurance to his generals in 1939 on the eve of the invasion of Poland that there would be no consequences for killing Jews because nobody remembered the attempted obliteration of the Armenians.¹⁶ If the linkage between the Armenian Genocide and the

 Marat Grinberg, Aleksandr Askoldov: The Commissar (Bristol: Intellect, 2016); Olga Gershenson, The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 158 – 72; Elena Monastireva-Ansdell, “Redressing the Commissar: Thaw Cinema Revises Soviet Structuring Myths,” Russian Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 230 – 49.  Minasian, Musa Dagh, 65 – 168.  Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Deborah E. Lipstadt, Holocaust: An American Understanding (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).  Minasian, Musa Dagh, 191– 242.  Forty Days of Musa Dagh, directed by Sarky Mouradian (USA: High Investments Films, 1982).  Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “Who Still Talked about the Extermination of the Armenians? German Talk and German Silence,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göcek, and Norman Naimark

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Holocaust was not sufficiently evident, the banner emblazoned on the videotape sleeve for the film informs its home viewers that the movie is about “the first holocaust of the 20th century.”¹⁷ Hitler’s statement appears in the dialogue, epilogue, or prologue of other Armenian Genocide films. Assignment Berlin, a dramatization of Soghomon Tehlirian’s 1921 assassination of Talaat Pasha in Berlin for ordering the Genocide and his subsequent trial, concludes with Hitler’s cynical comment.¹⁸ In Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (2002), the character Raffi repeats Hitler’s comment to counter the denial of the Aghet expressed by a Turkish-Canadian actor playing Jevdet Bey in the film being shot within the film: “Do you know what Adolf Hitler told his military commanders to convince them that his plan would work? Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?”¹⁹ The film’s postscript reads: “The historical events in this film have been substantiated by holocaust scholars, national archives, and eyewitness accounts” though Egoyan like the VHS box for Forty Days of Musa Dagh tellingly does not capitalize the word “holocaust.”²⁰ As Leshu Torchin observes: “Filtering the memory of the Armenian Genocide through the lens of the Holocaust, as in the case of Hitler’s quotation, contributes to the claim that not only should these events be remembered, but they should be remembered and recognized as genocide.”²¹ Only one of the ten centennial motion pictures reprises the Hitler quotation. 1915: The Movie dramatizes the backstage dynamics, rehearsals, and performance of a play staged in Los Angeles for the centennial.²² Ghosts of Armenians who perished in or survived the Genocide haunt the actors and actresses cast in it. The pompous lead portraying an Ottoman officer offers to shepherd the Armenian woman he loves away from a death march. He asks a reporter covering the production: “Do you know Hitler encouraged his generals on the eve of the Hol-

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 199 – 220; Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 258 – 99.  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, directed by Sarky Mouradian (1982; Los Angeles: Parseghian Records, 1989). VHS.  Assignment Berlin, directed by Hrayr Toukhanian (USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1982).  Ararat, directed by Atom Egoyan (Canada and France: Alliance Atlantis, ARP Sélection, Ego Film Arts, Harold Greenberg Fund, Movie Network, Serendipity Point Films, Super Écran, and Telefilm Canada, 2002).  Atom Egoyan, Ararat: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), 103.  Leshu Torchin, “Since We Forgot: Remembrance and Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Virtual Archives,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 91– 92.  1915: The Movie, directed by Alec Mouhibian and Garin Hovannisan (USA: Bloodvine Media and Strongman, 2015).

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ocaust by saying, ‘Who today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?’ Do you realize the implication of that statement for Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan?” The reporter replies that local Armenians are demonstrating against the play climaxing with the woman fleeing with the officer and abandoning her community and family. One protestor outside the theatre sarcastically exclaims: “I’m sure in the sequel they’ll show Anne Frank smooching a Nazi.” Armenian centennial films generally employ inferential rather than denotative associations with the Holocaust. Some directors presume their narratives and visualizations of the Armenian Genocide will resonate with prior audience awareness of the Shoah and movies about it; whereas others do not deliberately draw these comparisons, but the viewers perceive resemblances on the basis of what they have known and have seen about the Holocaust. Earlier Armenian Genocide movies depended on this more subtle form of intertextuality. The Lark Farm (2007) directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, echoed the plotline of the famous Italian Holocaust novel and film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970).²³ Adapted from the novel Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan, it recounts the story of a wealthy Armenian family, based on her grandfather’s family, laboring under the delusion that their affluence and influence will insulate them from the wave of ethnic cleansing sweeping through Ottoman Turkey. Their false sense of security is symbolized by the imposing villa named the Lark Farm where they retreat from the carnage and chaos afoot in their province. The parallels between the two movies stem from the resentments felt by Turks and Germans towards the disproportionate economic success in their “homelands” of Armenians and Jews, whom historian Robert Melson characterizes as “upwardly mobile pariahs.”²⁴ Film critics discerned the narrative similarities between the two movies. Angus Wolfe Murray pointed out that “the family at the center, like the FinziContinis, is upper-middle class, successfully integrated within Turkish society, and as such, seemingly impregnable from political shifts of opinions, whether

 The Lark Farm, directed by Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani (Italy, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Spain: Ager 3, France 2 Cinéma, Flach Film, Sagrera TV, Nimar Studios, Rai Cinema, Eagle Pictures, Televisión Española, Canal +, 27 Films Production, ARD Degeto Films, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Media Programme of the European Union, and Istituto Luce Cinecittà, 2007); The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, directed by Vittorio De Sica (Italy and West Germany: Documento Film and CCC Filmkunst, 1970).  Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 43 – 100.

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from the religious right or the secular left.”²⁵ The reviewer for Variety felt that the Turkish onslaught on the lives and property of the Armenians depicted in the film “will instantly push Holocaust buttons for most viewers.”²⁶ After watching Lark Farm, the Jewish actor Tcheky Karyo who appears in it broke into tears because it reminded him of what his uncle and grandfather endured as Jews during the Holocaust.²⁷ The Promise (2016), the biggest budget and most publicized of the centennial films, reenacts a gathering of German and Turkish generals and officials to celebrate Germany’s gift of battleships to the Turkish navy.²⁸ This party provides a catalyst for American journalist Chris Myers to launch into a tirade against Germany’s expansionist ambitions, its call for the Ottoman Empire to declare a Jihad, and the lethal danger the latter poses to the Armenians. His concerns seem validated when the Germans start singing, “Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles.” To those acquainted with the history of the Third Reich, the scene foreshadows Hitler’s unbridled imperialism and genocidal crusade in World War Two. Turkey’s entry into the war sparks an anti-Armenian pogrom. The beatings of Armenians, pillaging of their shops, and shattering of store windows conjure up the images and sounds of Kristallnacht. Like Forty Days of Musa Dagh and Assignment Berlin, The Promise stages an abreviated version of American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau confronting Talaat Pasha with evidence of the Turkish liquidation of the Armenians. Talaat evinces surprise that an American Jew like Morgenthau would be worried about the welfare of foreign Christians. When this conversation originally appeared in the ambassador’s memoir, it recorded Morgenthau’s appeal to Talaat and Talaat’s bewilderment that Morgenthau as a Jew had raised the issue.²⁹ Perhaps due to the terseness of intertitles in silent films or its pre-Holocaust production date, Ravished Armenia’s scene of the Morgenthau appeal to Taalat to stop the deportatations and murders of Armenians omits any mention of his being Je-

 Angus Wolfe Murray, “The Lark Farm,” Eye for Eye, November 21, 2007, https://www.eye forfilm.co.uk/review/the-lark-farm-film-review-by-angus-wolfe-murray (accessed June 1, 2020).  Deborah Young, “The Lark Farm,” Variety, February 14, 2007, https://variety.com/2007/film/ markets-festivals/the-lark-farm-1200510317/, accessed June 1, 2020.  Sona Haroutyunian, “Translation and Representation of the Armenian Genocide in Literature and Film,” in Armenia, Auschwitz, and Beyond, ed. Michael Berenbaum, Richard Libowitz, and Marcia Sachs Littell (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2016), 37.  The Promise, directed by Terry George (Spain and USA: Babieka, Survival Pictures, and Wonderful Films, 2016).  Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1918), 326 – 42.

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wish.³⁰In the wake of the Holocaust, however, that information carries ironic and sininster implications since audiences are likely to know that European Jews were destined to endure the same decimation as the Armenians in the next world war. Assignment Berlin expands on this retrospective awareness with a Turkish officer attending the meeting where the extermination order was conveyed to the upper echelons of the Ottoman government that the same treatment should be meted out of all all non-Muslim minorities in Turkey including the Jews. Director Terry George understood that The Promise would elicit comparisons with genocides like that of the Jews in the Holocaust, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and contemporary instances of ethnic cleansing and massacres such as the ISIS assault on the Yazidis. He recognized how regimes dehumanize and villify groups as national threats to garner active or passive support their elimination. In one interview George asserted, “Again, once you create that enemy within, you can consolidate your support and feed off the fervor of that to pick out all of your opposition.”³¹ Since he did not want to distract the film’s focus on the Genocide, George deleted “our Wannsee Conference scene” of a meeting when Talaat briefed Dr. Nâzım about the Ottoman Empire’s plan to rid Turkey of its Armenians.³² Army of Crime (2009) seamlessly merges the Armenian Genocide and Jewish Holocaust by recounting the true story of how the Armenian émigré poet Missak Manouchian recruited Armenian and Jewish immigrants in Nazi-occupied France into an underground cell which assassinated German officers and sabotaged war industries.³³ As the tale of their terror campaign unfolds, the shared experiences of past persecution and current vulnerability as outsiders within

 “Title List for the Film,” in Ravished Armenia and the Story of Mardiganian, ed. Anthony Slide (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 208. Recently found footage of Morgenthau playing himself in the film was screened at the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan in 2015 as part of its centennial commemoration.  Terry George quoted in Christopher DiCarlo, “Interview with Terry George: Director of The Promise,” Humanist Perspectives 199 (Winter 2016/2017), https://www.humanistperspectives.org/issue199/dicarlo.html (accessed January 26, 2019).  Bonus: Deleted Scene “Cleansing the Empire,” The Promise, DVD (University City: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017). Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 173.  Army of Crime, directed by Robert Guédiguian (France: Agat Films & Cie, Studio Canal, Canal +, CinéCinéma, France 3 Cinéma, France 3, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Soficapital, La Région Île-de-France, Agence Nationale pour la Cohésion Sociale et l’Egalité des Chances, Procirep, Angoa Agicoa, and MEDIA Programme of the European Union, 2009).

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wartime France justifies their resort to violence against a racist regime. Aided by French collaborators, the Germans eventually captured and executed them. Other centennial films draw on common tropes found in cinematic and literary treatments of the Armenian Genocide and Holocaust. Muteness often serves as a metaphor for the inability survivors of genocides experience when they try to convey what they had endured to those who have been unscathed by such catastrophes. In her comparative study of Armenian and Jewish literary responses to genocide, Rubina Peroomian calls this phenomenon “paralysis of diction.”³⁴ Sara Horowitz describes this futility in Holocaust fiction as “voicing the void.”³⁵ Two classic cinematic examples of this trope appear in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1964) and Frunze Dovlatyan’s Korot (1990).³⁶ In the former, Sol Nazerman is a Holocaust survivor who finds it increasingly difficult to repress his encroaching memories of losing his family and being incarcerated in a concentration camp. When the ambitious young man who apprenticed with him in the pawnshop is mortally injured trying to defend Sol from a gang of robbers, Nazerman cradles his head in his hands, but his anguished scream is silent.³⁷ In Korot a peasant named Arakel cannot tolerate dreams he has of Turkish soldiers rampaging through his village and slaying women and children. He surreptiously crosses the Turkish border from Soviet Armenia to visit the remains of his former hometown. While rummaging through the debris, he meets an orphaned Armenian girl who has been adopted by Kurds. Like Sol Naserman, she tries to scream, but cannot emit any sound.³⁸ When Arakel returns to his home, the police arrest him for being a spy. The final scene shows him being deported to Siberia on a train with other dissidents. It segues from an image and sound of the train rolling along tracks back to Arakel’s wagon where he hangs himself out of despair. His limp body swinging in the compartment crowded with other politi-

 Rubina Peroomian, Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 218.  Sara R. Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).  The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet (USA: Landau Company and The Pawnbroker Company, 1964); Yearning aka Karot, directed by Frunze Dovlatyan (Soviet Union: Armenfilm, 1990).  Peter Wilshire, “The Representation of Trauma and Memory in The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965,” Offscreen 23, no. 9 – 10 (October 2019), https://offscreen.com/view/the-repre sentation-of-trauma-and-memory-in-the-pawnbroker-sidney-lumet-1965, accessed June 25, 2020.  Tim Kennedy, “Cinema Regarding Nations: Re-imagining Armenian, Kurdish, and Palestinian National Identity in Film” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 2007), 62– 65.

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cal prisoners resembles recurring scenes of Jews packed in cattlecars transporting them to death camps. Directed by Turkish-German director Fatih Akin and scripted by celebrated Armenian American screenwriter Mardik Martin, The Cut (2014) chronicles the deportation of its protagonist Nazaret to a slave labor brigade in the desert, his refusal to convert to Islam to stay alive, his survival of an execution of his forced labor brigade because a Turkish soldier severs his vocal chords rather than slitting his throat, and his subsequent mute quest to locate his twin daughters in Syria, Lebanon, Cuba, and the United States where they purportedly immigrated. After Nazaret loses his voice, the movie underscores his pathos through his pained facial expressions, sad eyes, and hand gestures rather than with dialogue. Condemned to silence personally by his injury and collectively by Turkish denialism, the eponymous cut signifies a gaping wound to the Armenian people, their erasure from their ancestral homeland, and the rupture in Nazaret’s prior life as a scissor maker, husband, and father. Reversing the pattern of referencing the Holocaust in Armenian Genocide films, Atom Egoyan’s Remember (2015) recounts a tale of elderly Holocaust survivors conspiring to assassinate the SS guard who killed their families at Auschwitz to implicitly allude to the toxic legacy of Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide.³⁹ Having worked at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the wheelchairbound Max determined that their Nazi nemesis Otto Wallisch evaded arrest and resides somewhere in Canada or the United States under the pseudonym Rudy Kurlander. The other Auschwitz survivor Zev remains physically fit but suffers from dementia. After Zev’s wife dies, Max recruits Zev to murder Wallisch because it is no longer practical to arrest and try him in court. Max writes a letter instructing Zev about his mission and urges him to read it every day to remind him what he is supposed to do. Zev undertakes this assignment and successively fails as the first Rudy Kurlander is a Wehrmacht veteran of the North African campaign, the second is a homosexual who had been interned at Auschwitz, and the deceased third had been too young to serve in the SS but inculcated his son to be a virulent anti-Semite. When Zev finally confronts the guard he recognizes from Auschwitz, he forces him at gunpoint to confess he served there, but he exposes that Zev was his fellow guard Wallisch. Zev either had repressed his tainted past or forgotten it as a consequence of his dementia. Max, on the other hand, exploited Zev’s amnesia to execute his  Remember, directed by Atom Egoyan (Canada, Mexico, Germany, and South Africa: Serendipity Point Films, Distant Horizon, Detalle Films, Egoli Tossell Film, Telefilm Canada, Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, Ontario Media Development Corporation, and The Harold Greenberg Fund, 2015).

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former accomplice and revert to his murderous alter-ego. Max acts as a proxy for Armenians stymied by Turkey’s refusal of Turkey to recognize and redress the wrongs done to their ancestors. Zev symbolizes a guilty Ottoman perpetrator or contemporary Turk who respectively followed orders or subsequently believed his government’s lies. The themes of forgetting and revenge illustrate how selfdelusional memories can be and how slender the chances for attaining belated justice are after so much time has elapsed. Interviewed about the film, Egoyan stated, “Sometimes you get the opportunity to make a film that actually explores a part of history that is uncharted. With Ararat the transmission of trauma reverberates through four generations. How the pain of that is, and the echoes are felt 100 years later. Similarly, this story is dealing with how memory can be denied and suppressed ─ and the corrosive effect that has on both the denier and the victim.”⁴⁰ As in Ararat and The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Egoyan postulates that the representation and transmission of traumatic events alter as perpetrators, survivors, and their descendants subjectively refashion them into narratives that reinforce their conceptions of themselves and their national identities.⁴¹ He decided to frame Remember as a Holocaust narrative because its widespread recognition allowed him to dispense with flashbacks picturing the iconic atrocities Zev and his confederate committed.⁴²

2 Iconic Particularities in Centennial Cinema Genocides share characteristics that shape the images and plots commonly employed in motion pictures. Scenes of leaders and their henchmen denouncing the targeted group as a threat to national security, expropriating or vandalizing their homes and property, maltreating them, and relocating them to concentration camps or remote inhospitable areas to perish from deprivation, disease, executions, overwork, or torture bear a generic resemblance. Being similar, howev-

 Atom Egoyan quoted by Jeremy Gerard, “Atom Egoyon on his Nazi Revenge Drama ‘Remember’ With Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau─Q and A,” Deadline Hollywood, March 11, 2016, http://deadline.com/2016/03/atom-egoyan-remember-nazi-revenge-drama-deadline-qand-a-1201717868/, accessed April 20, 2016.  Daniel Magilow, “The era of the expert: dementia, remembrance, and jurisprudence in Atom Egoyan’s Remember,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 4 (2019), https://www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17504902.2019.1637494, accessed June 17, 2020.  Simon Braund, “A Conversation with Atom Egoyan (Remember),” hammertonail.com, December 14, 2015, http://www.hammertonail.com/interviews/a-conversation-with-atom-egoyanremember/, accessed January 29, 2019.

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er, does not mean being identical. Genocides possess signature iconographies which render them unique. In the case of the Holocaust, many verbal and visual symbols emblematize the event. Cattle cars, crematoria smokestacks, electrified barbed wire fences, empty gas canisters of Zyklon B, mounds of confiscated shoes and shorn hair, the number six million, numbers tattooed on arms, striped uniforms, and yellow Stars of David facilely come to mind. These concepts and icons resonate with the audiences because they have been frequently exposed to them in documentaries, feature films, and photographs.⁴³ Due to the protracted dearth of movies dealing with the Armenian Genocide, audiences possess less familiarity with the iconic images and references associated with it. The extant intertitle list for Ravished Armenia enumerates what might have become the widely recognized attributes and visuals of the Genocide if Turkey had not repressed films depicting it. These include the disarming of Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army, mass shootings of Armenian men toiling on labor battalions, Armenian women raped or sold into slavery, Armenians pushed off barges to drown, and Armenian children, elderly, and women trudging across barren landscapes to their final destination in the desert where the vast majority died from dehydration and starvation.⁴⁴ While similar scenes recur in subsequent Armenian Genocide movies, Turkish denialism and lobbying, Soviet caution about offending Turkey or stimulating Armenian nationalism, and the interim between the Genocide and the upsurge of films about it restrained how filmmakers tackled the subject.⁴⁵ As Table 2 reveals, only one movie, Armenia Ravished, was set in the Genocide between 1919 and 1964. The Soviet film They Are to Live (1960) followed an Armenian man who had fled Turkey after the Aghet returning to find his brother and nephews after World War Two.⁴⁶ Despite being about a Greek teen who escaped the Hamidian Massacres to go to the United States, Elia Kazan’s America, Amer-

 Oren Baruch Stier, Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1– 31.  “Title List for the Film,” Ravished Armenia, ed. Anthony Slide, 207– 13.  Baron, “The Armenian-Jewish Connection,” 297– 99; Galstyan, Cinema of Armenia, 41– 152. Soviet censors allowed Armenian directors to make films about Armenian culture and earlier historical events and to introduce the Genocide so long as their films showed Armenian survivors finding a progressive home in Soviet Armenia.  They Are to Live, directed by Laert Vagharshyan (Soviet Union: Hayfilm Studio, 1960).

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ica (1963) sometimes gets categorized as a Genocide film due to its compelling recreation of Ottoman attacks on Christian communities.⁴⁷ Between 1965 and 1990, only the Forty Days of Musa Dagh delved directly into the Genocide. Dzori Miro (1981) starts with its Armenian namesake losing his family and fighting Turks during the Genocide, but ends with him forming a new one with an Armenian refugee woman in Soviet Armenia.⁴⁸ Assignment Berlin introduces episodes from the Genocide through reenacted sequences reflecting Morgenthau’s memoir and witness testimony from the Tehlirian Trial. The Soviet films Life Triumphs (1977) and Yearning (1990) revolved around Armenian men clandestinely crossing into Turkey to visit the villages where their families once had lived. These sites awaken haunting memories of the Genocide that are conveyed surrealistically and symbolically.⁴⁹ Table 2: How the Armenian Genocide Is depicted or referenced in Genocide films. Years

Set in Hamidian Flashbacks Staged Return to Historian genocide massacres to the reenactment site of testimony genocide genocide

 – 



 – 













 – 





 – 











Dialogue

 



After Armenian independence was achieved and before the centennial, the only Armenian film set entirely during the Genocide was The Lark Farm. Ararat explored intergenerational trauma and the myriad of ways Armenian Genocide survivors and their children reconstructed the Genocide in the present. Henri Verneuil’s Mayrig (1991), an autobiographical film about being the son of

 America, America, directed by Elia Kazan (USA: Athena Enterprises and Warner Bros., 1963); Peter Balakian, “Elia Kazan and the Armenian Genocide: Remembering America, America,” Salon, April 23, 2015, https://www.salon.com/2015/04/23/elia_kazan_and_the_armenian_geno cide_remembering_america_america/, accessed June 5, 2020.  Dzori Miro, directed by Zhirayr Avetisyan (Soviet Union: Yerevan Film Studio, 1981).  Life Triumphs aka Nahapet, directed by Henrik Maylan (USSR: Armenfilm, 1977).

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Armenian immigrants in France, furnished the historical reason for why his parents left Turkey by opening with a reenactment of the Tehlirian Trial and a flashback illustrating a survivor recalling his suffering in the Genocide.⁵⁰ Lost Paradise (1991) and Armenia aka Voyage to Armenia (2006) portrayed descendants of those who died or survived the Genocide returning to places where their ancestors formerly dwelled.⁵¹ In Army of Crime (2009) and Aram (2002) Armenians in Vichy and post-World War Two France engage respectively in anti-Nazi and anti-Turkish terrorism to revenge the festering legacy of the Genocide which they mention in dialogue.⁵² Conversely, four of the ten centennial films−The Cut, Lost Birds, The Promise, and Armenia, My Love−are set in Turkey during World War One. The latter commences with an Armenian family gathered around a table for Easter dinner. A grandmother schools her grandson Tigran about Armenian history accompanied by reenactments of the first time Armenian women encountered Christ’s apostles in 33 CE and the healing of King Tiridates III by Gregory the Enlightener that prompted the king to convert and declare Christianity the state religion of Armenia in 301 CE.⁵³ She then surveys how Armenia had been conquered by a succession of invaders from Central Asia ending with its current rulers the Ottoman Turks to explain why she distrusts the Young Turk leaders who have summoned Tigran’s father Grigor along with other prominent Armenians to Constantinople on April 24, 1915. The conclave that he attends is luridly depicted as a banquet featuring scantily clad belly dancers with snakes draped over their necks. When Grigor asks when negotiations between the government and the Armenian representatives will begin, the Turks stab him to death. Notwithstanding the artistic license which director Diana Angelson takes with this scene, her ex-

 Mayrig, directed by Henri Verneuil (France: Carthago Films, Quinta Communications, and TF1 Films Production, 1991).  Lost Paradise, directed by David Safarian (Armenia: Armenfilm and Armenfilm Studios, 1991), Armenia aka Voyage to Armenia, dir. Robert Guédiguian (France: Agat Films & Cie, France 3 Cinéma, Canal+, CinéCinéma, Cofimage 17, Soficinéma, Banque Populaire Images 6, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Région Provence Côte d’Azur, and Paradise Films, 2006).  Aram, directed by Robert Kechichian (France: Bac Films, Canal+, Les Films A4, Studio Images 8, and StudioCanal, 2002), Army of Crime, dir. Robert Guédiguian (France: Agat Films & Cie, StudioCanal, France 3 Cinéma, Canal+, CinéCinéma, France 3, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, Agence Nationale pour la Cohésion Sociale et l’Egalité des Chances, La Région Île-de-France, Procirep, Angoa-Agicoa, Soficapital, and MEDIA Programme of the European Union, 2009).  Armenia, My Love aka Armenia, My Country, My Mother, My Love, dir. Diana Angelson (USA: Flawless Production, 2016).

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tended treatment of Armenian history and of the “Red Sunday” arrest of Armenian intellectuals provides more historical context than had been the norm in previous films. Born and raised in Romania, she felt obligated to communicate the story of the first Christian nation and its suffering since most Romanians like Armenians belong to the Orthodox Church.⁵⁴ Emulating a technique employed by Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993), she switches the film after the “Red Sunday” scene from color to black and white, plunging audiences into the gloom of the extermination. Other centennial films note that anniversary of “Red Sunday” has become the iconic date when communal commemorations of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day are observed. In the horror film Armenian Haunting (2018), a young woman videotapes interviews of her elderly grandmother who survived the Genocide and then turns the camera on herself to explain, “Today is April 24th, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. 1.5 million Armenian women, children, and men were slaughtered by the Turkish government.”⁵⁵ The director of the play about the Genocide in 1915: The Movie informs its audience that its performance coincides with the centennial. The bulletin board for the production displays a notecard bearing the date April 24, 1915. After opening with a flashback to the Tehlirian Trial, Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad (2015) shifts to the Armenian community in Marseilles memorializing the Genocide five decades later in church on April 24. Although primarily a love story about an Armenian American man and a female Turkish college student, Tabu (2017) features excerpts from an interview of Peter Balakian to historicize why members of their families vehemently oppose the relationship. In one clip he specifically discusses the disarming and killing of conscripted Armenians in the Ottoman Army and how “Red Sunday” in effect decapitated the ranks of Armenian elites.⁵⁶ While bigger budget centennial films like The Cut and The Promise can be faulted for their overwrought epic styles and melodramatic plotlines, they cinematically created more memorable reenactments of major events from the Genocide than their predecessors. With the generous funding of nearly 100 million

 Vahram Emmiyan, “Interview with Diana Angelson, Director of ‘Armenia, My Love’,” Horizon, March 13, 2016, https://horizonweekly.ca/en/82392-2/, accessed June 23, 2020.  Armenian Haunting, dir. Art Arutyunyan (USA: Red Nightmare Films, 2018).  Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad, dir. Robert Guédiguian (France: Agat Films & Cie, Canal+, France Télévisions, Ciné+, France 3 Cinéma, Alvy Productions, La Banque Postale Image 7, Indéfilms 3, SofiTVciné 2, La Région Île-de-France, Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée, La Banque Postale Image 8, and Orjouane Productions, 2015); Tabu, dir. David Robert Deranian (USA: Salient Clear, 2017).

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dollars furnished by the Armenian American magnate Kirk Kerkorian, The Promise mounted some of the most cinematically spectacular scenes of the Armenian Genocide to ever appear on screen.⁵⁷ Even critics who bemoaned the maudlin love triangle at the film’s core conceded that its staging of key historical incidents was extremely impactful. In an otherwise mixed review, James Berardinelli commended The Promise for its powerful representation of the incidents of inhumanity that characterized the Genocide: “The film as a whole is like a kick to the gut. Its depictions of brutality, unusually strong for a PG-13 production, are sufficiently graphic to bring home the tragedy of the situation on a visceral level.” He singled out the scenes of the “roundups of Armenians, the labor camps, the death marches and mass killings, and the battle of Musa Dagh” as particularly effective.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, far more critics and scholars lambasted how it Hollywoodized subject material that deserved to be handled with greater restraint and less sensationalism.⁵⁹ The Cut’s mise en scène of bedraggled Armenians snaking through the desert to their ultimate demise in the Syrian desert of Deir ez-Zor similarly captures the desolation, harshness, and vastness of the inferno through which they are driven. As one critic noted, the impact of this sequence is heightened by a “droning electric guitar score” that registers as “a dull ache that imperceptibly builds in strength as time passes.”⁶⁰ The bleak panorama dwarfing the Ras-al-Ayn encampment where an estimated 80,000 Armenians met their excruciating deaths vividly reproduces the backdrop where those who had managed to survive the enervating trek and assaults by marauders and Turkish guards expired. Comparing an archival photograph of the compound of makeshift tents comprising this fatal terminus to Akin’s depiction of it demonstrates the verisimilitude he achieved.⁶¹

 Peter Bart, “Kirk Kerkorian Finally Bet Big-Time to Make the Movie That Meant the Most to Him,” Deadline, April 20, 2017, https://deadline.com/2017/04/the-promise-kirk-kerkorian-movie1202072621/, accessed June 15, 2020.  James Berardinelli, “The Promise,” Reel Views, April 20, 2017, https://www.reelviews.net/ reelviews/promise-the_1, accessed June 15, 2020.  Sophie Balakian and Virginia R. Dominquez, “The Promise and The Lost City of Z: Diasporas, Cinematic Imperialism, and Commercial Films,” Anthropologica 61, no. 1 (2019): 152– 55.  Simon Abrams, “The Cut,” RogerEbert.com, September 18, 2015, https://www.rogerebert. com/reviews/the-cut-2015, accessed January 27, 2019.  “Tent Camp in Syrian Desert,” Photo Collection of Armin T. Wegner, Armenian National Institute, https://www.armenian-genocide.org/photo_wegner_view.html?photo=tents.jpg&collec tion=wegner&caption=Tent+camp+in+Syrian+desert, accessed June 20, 2020.

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Another exceptional aspect of The Cut lies in its treatment of the arduous quest Nazaret embarks on to locate his daughters after the war.⁶² The immediate aftermath of the Armenian Genocide has largely been neglected in pre-centennial Genocide films. When it has been introduced in centennial films, the reunions of Armenian families usually occur at Syrian orphanages as in The Lost Birds (2015) or sites of escape and resistance like Musa Dagh as in The Promise.“⁶³ Finding lost children and spouses proved difficult because they often had been converted to Islam and absorbed into Turkish families as their own offspring or wives. Akin devotes the second half of his film to Nazaret’s tenacious search for his two daughters. His odyssey traversed two continents and four countries. In the course of it he learns that his daughters had been left with Bedouins and shunned as undesirable brides in Lebanon and Syria because they bore tattoos inscribed on Armenian women by Kurds and Turks. The lameness of one daughter from an injury inflicted on her during captivity dimmed her prospects for marriage to a potential husband in Cuba. After travelling to Florida and North Dakota, Nazaret locates one daughter, but discovers that her sister died of scarlet fever. Hamid Dabashi praised Akin for recounting the struggle of Armenian survivors to restore family ties after the Genocide.⁶⁴ Two other centennial films introduced the otherwise overlooked subject of the tattoos inscribed on Armenian girls and women to either stigmatize them as prostitutes and slaves or protect them by indicating they had been incorporated into the families of Islamic ethnic groups within Turkey.⁶⁵ The granddaughter in Armenian Haunting probes her grandmother about the significance of the tattoos on her fingers. The grandmother disingenuously claims that it was an Armenian custom to tattoo their children in the Ottoman period, but her granddaughter realizes that her grandmother is ashamed about the markings because they identified her as a slave or sex slave. During one of Peter Balakian’s commenta-

 Keith David Watenpaugh, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2015), 116 – 23; Vahram L. Shemmassian, “The League of Nations and Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors,” in Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard Hovannisian (London: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 81– 112.  Lost Birds, dir. Ela Alyamac, Aren Perdeci (Turkey: Kara Kedi Film, 2015).  Hamid Dabashi, “Turkish ‘genocide’ film: An epic too late?”, Al Jazeera, September 18, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/09/turkish-genocide-film-an-epic-to20149188328656238.html, accessed January 27, 2019.  Liz Ohanesian, “The Complicated History of Armenian Women’s Genocide-Era Tattoos,” LA Weekly, November 29, 2017, https://www.laweekly.com/the-complicated-history-of-armenianwomens-genocide-era-tattoos/, accessed June 4, 2020; see also the documentary Grandma’s Tattoos, dir. Suzanne Khardalian (Sweden: HB PeA Holmquist Film, 2011).

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ries in Tabu, he describes the sexual violence perpetrated against Armenian women as a photograph of one of them with tattoos etched on her forehead and chin is shown. The ongoing Turkish refusal to acknowledge the Genocide, the belated international recognition of it, and the rage inherited by the progeny of those who survived it permeate the centennial films. The obsessed director of the play in 1915: The Movie torments its female lead to facilitate her possession by the ghost of the character she is playing. Since the ancestral soul inhabiting her body resists abandoning her family for the safety proffered by the Ottoman officer, the director must coax her to go with the officer to assure Armenian survival. The final scene blurs the boundary between the past and present. The director carries the boy playing the actress’s son through a crowd of protesting Armenians in 2015. This image then segues into him carrying his son on a death march in 1915. The actress who went with the Turkish officer reappears visibly pregnant and peering out of the entrance of his home after the procession of Armenian men with her husband and son has passed. She will give birth to the next Armenian generation even though he and her son will expire. The director articulates the cost of his fixation on the Genocide: “We can’t go on like this possessed and deranged by our past. We must settle our scores with history, and, move on, move on.” The film’s co-director Alec Mouhibian elaborated on this issue: “Denial has afflicted an ongoing psychic assault on 10 million Armenians − and an even deeper curse on all those in Turkey residing upon the ghostlands of 1915. Recognition alone will not restore the victims, or the lands, but it will introduce a measure of the humanity that has been deprived for one hundred years.”⁶⁶ Five of the other ten Centennial films reiterate this preoccupation with seeking personal or political closure to the pent-up Armenian frustration and rage over delayed recognition and restitution. Let me focus on the divergent ways two of them approach this topic. Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad surveys three generations of Armenians residing in France in the early 1980s. The grandmother who survived the Genocide is consumed by a desire for revenge and her daughter empathizes with her outrage. Her son-in-law preserves his Armenian identity culturally, but avoids further involvement that might jeopardize the life his family enjoys in France. His son absorbs much of his grandmother’s anger and actualizes it by joining an Armenian terrorist cell that assassinates Turkish diplomats in Europe. Though debates over the efficacy and morality of terrorism punctuate

 Alec Mouhibian quoted in Mark Tapson, “A New Film Takes on the Armenian Genocide,” Frontpage Mag, May 3, 2015, https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/256252/new-film-takes-arme nian-genocide-mark-tapson, accessed January 24, 2019.

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the film, its director Robert does not denounce the resort to violence originating from a just cause: “Regardless of what one thinks of these attacks and their legitimacy, we are forced to admit today that, without them, we would not be here. They reawakened, redynamized [sic], reunited Armenians around the world who had probably – and this is what the young people behind the attacks thought – rested on the laurels of routine commemorations, without doing much else.”⁶⁷ This unapologetic message is tempered in the movie by the mother’s attempt to reconcile her son with an innocent bystander he had severely injured and eventually returning in 2001 with the latter to bury the grandmother’s ashes in her home of Marmashen near the famous monastery there. Tabu offers a more conciliatory perspective. The brother of its Armenian American protagonist cannot contain his anger and revulsion when he describes the atrocities Ottoman Empire committed against his grandmother and her family during World War One. That Turkey refuses to concede that the Empire’s murderous transgressions constituted genocide exacerbates his indignation. He videotapes himself venting about these iniquities, repeatedly watches the Genocide documentary featuring Peter Balakian, and vehemently opposes his brother dating a Turkish woman. He insists that she and her Turkish girlfriend watch the documentary too, prompting the latter to dismiss its compendium of allegations as lies. What overcomes the seemingly insurmountable odds against the romance between the Armenian and Turkish lovers is the Armenian grandmother recollecting how compassionate Turks rescued her. The centennial also occasioned the making of two movies by Turkish directors in order to prod their nation to come to terms with its shameful past. As previously noted, the German filmmaker Fatih Akin hails from a Turkish family. He made The Cut to educate Turkish audiences about the Genocide: The Armenian genocide is something very deep and immovable in our culture and history. It’s a blind spot where not so many people know about it, and not so many people talk about it. One of my main reasons for doing the film is to produce something where people come out and inform themselves, discuss, and start to create room where they can reflect on their own history and trauma.⁶⁸

 “Interview with Robert Guédiguian,” Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad, Press Kit, https:// mk2films.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2016/07/dont-tell-me-the-boy-was-mad-pressbook. pdf, accessed June 18, 2020.  Alex Sakalis, “Turkey is Changing and I am Part of that Change: An Interview with Fatih Akin,” openDemocracy, April 21, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-makeit/armenia-interview/, accessed June 18, 2020.

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Buoyed by initial positive reactions to the film from Turkish journalists who saw The Cut at European film festivals, Akin looked forward to it being screened in Turkey.⁶⁹ Despite threats of boycotts of the film and personal reprisals against him, it received bookings in a few provincial Turkish theatres and predictably provoked negative criticism from reviewers operating under the scrutiny of the state.⁷⁰ This had been the fate of Ararat when it was broadcast on Turkish television in 2006.⁷¹ Touted as the “first movie produced in Turkey on the Armenian Genocide,” Lost Birds procured a modest subsidy from the Turkish Culture Ministry which surprisingly did not require any script changes. Turkish director Ela Alyamac and Armenian-Turkish director Aren Perdeci applied for Turkish funding since its approval insured they would be permitted to shoot their film in Anatolia and cast it with descendants of Ottoman Armenians.⁷² The probable reason for Turkish approval arose from the film’s “fairy tale” treatment of how two young siblings find refuge in a Turkish orphanage after fleeing from their abandoned house and plundered village. Alyamac and Perdeci hoped that how their film gingerly handled this controversial subject would “build a bridge between people who once lived on this land in harmony.”⁷³ Rather than disconcert audiences with gory violence, the film celebrates the resilience of its child protagonists. Yet it sketches the contours of the Genocide evolving from the arrest of the siblings’ grandfather for owning a hunting rifle, the offscreen deportation of their family and neighbors, the ruins of their hometown, and Armenian mothers separated from their children awaiting reunions in Aleppo. It garnered the Armin T. Wegner Award bestowed upon “a motion picture that contributes to the fight for social conscience and human rights.”⁷⁴

 Jochen Kürten and Oliver Glasenapp, “Processing a Collective Trauma,” Qantara.de, September 11, 2014, https://en.qantara.de/content/fatih-akins-film-about-the-armenian-genocide-proc essing-a-collective-trauma, accessed June 18, 2020.  Orhan Kemal Cengiz, “First Turkish film to show Armenian genocide wins harsh reception,” Al-Monitor, August 7, 2014, https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/08/cengiz-filmabout-1915-threats-armenians-agos-fatih-akin.html, accessed June 18, 2020.  Özlem Köksal, “Past Not So Perfect: Ararat and Its Reception in Turkey,” Cinema Journal 54, no. 1 (2014): 45 – 64.  Catherine Yesayan, “Lost Birds: A Movie Review,” Asbarez.com. November 25, 2015, http:// asbarez.com/142242/lost-birds-a-movie-review/, accessed January 31, 2019.  Simone Zoppellaro, “The first movie produced in Turkey on the Armenian genocide has been directed by Ela Alyamac e Aren Perdeci. Our interview ‘Lost Birds’,” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, August 14, 2015, https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Turkey/Lost-birds-163507.  “Armin T. Wegner Award,” The Armin T. Wegner Society of USA, http://www.armin-t-wegner. us/wegner-award/, accessed January 31, 2019.

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Of course, glossing over horrific events from the Genocide invited trenchant criticism as well. Sevim Gözay, for example, wondered whether a similar Holocaust film would receive accolades if it were just about “a few Jews who have come to a picnic, a few disappeared, and two are trying to survive.” Rather than depicting the brutality meted out during the Armenian relocations alluded to in Lost Birds, Gözay added, the film showed “none of it,” surmising that this was why the Turkish government lent its imprimatur to the project.⁷⁵ These are valid points, but overlook that Lost Birds was targeted at youngsters and earned a PG rating. Early childhood educators have challenged similar censure of Holocaust books and films aimed at juveniles by contending that the level of maturity of younger readers and viewers dictates how graphic and unsettling such works should be.⁷⁶

Conclusion As is the case with Holocaust films, many critics and scholars dispute the adequacy of any feature film to recreate a semblance of what it felt or looked like to endure such unremitting dehumanization, deprivation, and violence. Claude Lanzmann articulated the most radical rejection of realistically representing the Holocaust when he declared: “The Holocaust is unique because it created a circle of flames around itself, a boundary not to be crossed since horror in the absolute degree cannot be communicated. Pretending to cross that line is a grave transgression.⁷⁷ To be sure, mediated representations can never fully duplicate the objective and subjective reality of what victims of genocide underwent. Nevertheless, feature films possess the potential to enable viewers to vicariously witness the horrors of state-sanctioned mass murder and foster audience empathy with those slated for extinction. Raising the viewer’s consciousness that such infamies occurred may stimulate collective action to achieve retrospec-

 Sevim Gözay, “Yitik Kuşlar: İlk Yerli Ermeni Tehciri Filmi,” Tersninja.com, March 31, 2014, https://www.tersninja.com/yitik-kusla/, accessed June 19, 2020.  Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Holocaust Cinema (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 180 – 95; Adrienne Kertzer, My Mother’s Voice: Children, Literature, and the Holocaust (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002).  Claude Lanzmann quoted in Stuart Liebman, “Introduction,” Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7; Armen Marsoobian’s criticism of The Cut indicates a similar, albeit less vehement, distrust of epic depictions of genocide, Marsoobian, “The Armenian Genocide in Film,” 88 – 90.

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tive recognition and restorative justice.⁷⁸ Fulfilling that potential requires the cognitive and emotional receptivity of audiences, but that chain of reactions has been triggered in the past in West Germany by the mini-series Holocaust (1978) that influenced the Bundestag to abolish the statute of limitations on murder in 1979 and by Hotel Rwanda (2004) that mobilized a grassroots movement to deter the genocide contemporaneously unfolding in Darfur.⁷⁹ Whether higher profile films about the Armenian Genocide can spark a similar political groundswell remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the more polished productions released during the centennial have started to erode the reluctance of commercial studios to produce and promote bigger budget mainstream movies about the Armenian Genocide. After all, The Cut and The Promise attracted famous actors, directors, and substantial funding. Though neither performed well at the box-office, The Cut received theatrical releases in 21 countries and The Promise in 34. Both are widely available on cable and internet streaming services.⁸⁰ Turkey’s strategy of preempting and repudiating the saga of the Armenian Genocide delineated in the The Promise tacitly affirmed its concern that the movie could sway international public opinion. The Turkish studio ES co-produced The Ottoman Lieutenant with the Turkophile American company Eastern Sunrise Films. The latter specializes in pro-Turkish programming like the popular revisionist Turkish television series The Lost Sultan: Abdulhamid Han (2017– 2019).⁸¹ One enthusiastic fan lauded this idealized chronicle of the reign of Abdul Hamid II for showing “how the west and the Zionists try to destroy the Ottoman imperium and the harmony [sic] way of living from inside.”⁸² The Ottoman Lieutenant’s plotline bolsters the Turkish government’s official justification that the wartime measures taken against the Armenians were neccessary to quell their treasonous defection to Russia and organization of an armed domestic insurgency. The makers of The Ottoman Lieutenant sped up its premier to precede

 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).  Caroline Sharples, Postwar Germany and the Holocaust (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 134– 40; Leshu Torchin, Creativing the Witness, 186 – 89.  These figures were compiled from the release data on each respective film on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com).  Eastern Sunrise Films, http://www.easternsunrisefilms.com/project/payitaht-abdulhamid/, accessed January 31, 2019.  Metinx, “Review of Payitaht Abdülhamid,” March 16, 2018, https://www.imdb.com/review/ rw4093327/?ref_=tt_urv, accessed January 19, 2019.

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that of The Promise. ⁸³ Pro-Turkish internet trolls conducted an online campaign to post negative user reviews of The Promise on the Internet Movie Database website before it arrived in theatres.⁸⁴ These endeavors to discredit and overshadow The Promise failed with it generating 20 times more revenue in ticket sales than The Ottoman Lieutenant. ⁸⁵ The latter’s key scene where the outraged titular character rescues Armenian women and children from a deportation march inadvertently confirms what Prime Minister Erdoğan conceded in his condolence statement of 2014, namely, that the Armenians had experienced “events which had inhumane consequences – such as relocation – during the First World War.”⁸⁶ To conclude, some centennial films continued to draw explicit or implicit comparisons with the Holocaust, but did so less frequently than their precursors. Since both genocides share attributes like death marches, destruction and expropriation of property, rape, sites of extermination, and the political and psychological impact on perpetrators, survivors, and their heirs, audiences more familiar with Holocaust cinema than its Armenian counterpart will discern deliberate and unintentional parallels in the imagery, plots, and tropes in films about both genocides. Nonetheless, it appears that most of the makers of centennial movies feel more confident that their productions no longer need to reference the Holocaust to legitimate the Armenian calamity as a genocide. I ascribe this phenomena to their realization that the Genocide has become more more widely known through the advocacy of the Republic of Armenia and the lobbying efforts of the Armenian diaspora, the growing corpus of books about it−some of which are by Turkish scholars−, the steady rise in the number of countries recognizing the Genocide, and the proliferating coverage of it and the centennial in the media and popular culture. Regarding the latter, one can scoff at the significance of a celebrity like Kim Kardashian championing the cause of recognizing the Genocide, but she apparently influenced the vote in the United States Senate to finally recog Alex Ritman and Mia Galuppo, “The Promise vs. The Ottoman Lieutenant: Two Movies Battle Over the Armenian Genocide,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 21, 2017, https://www.hollywoo dreporter.com/news/promise-ottoman-lieutenant-two-movies-battle-armenian-genocide-996196, accessed January 31, 2019.  Mia Galuppo and Natalie Jarvey, “Hollywood is Losing the Battle Against Online Trolls,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 17, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-is-los ing-battle-online-trolls-992582, accessed January 31, 2019.  “Movie Comparison: The Ottoman Lieutenant (2017) vs. The Promise (2017),” The Numbers.com, https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/custom-comparisons/Ottoman-Lieutenant-The/ Promise-The-(2017), accessed January 31, 2019.  Yildiz, “Turkey offers condolences.”

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nize it in 2019.⁸⁷ President Biden’s acknowledgment of the Genocide two years later culminated a process of popularization and recognition spanning the last three decades. Most directors of centennial films assumed greater audience foreknowledge of the Aghet enabling them to focus more on its particularities and less on its parallels to the Holocaust. Pundits of Turkish politics can prognosticate better than me about the prospects for when and if Turkey will ever admit that what the Ottoman Empire visited upon Armenians during World War One constituted a genocide and whether that will spur the country to implement a program of restitution. As a form of “soft” diplomacy, movies will play a role in incrementally influencing audiences from below and governments from above to take steps to fracture the wall of denial Turkey has erected around itself. To paraphase Leonard Cohen, the resulting cracks eventually will let the light get in.⁸⁸

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Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1918. Mouhibian, Alec, and Garin Hovannisan, directors. 1915: The Movie. USA: Bloodvine Media and Strongman, 2015. Mouradian, Sarky, director. Forty Days of Musa Dagh. USA: High Investments Films, 1982. Mouradian, Sarky, director. Forty Days of Musa Dagh. 1982; Los Angeles: Parseghian Records, 1989. VHS. “Movie Comparison: The Ottoman Lieutenant (2017) vs. The Promise (2017).” The Numbers.com. Accessed January 31, 2019. https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/custom-comparisons/Promise-The-(2017)/Ottoman-Lieutenant-The#tab=day_by_day_comparison. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Ohanesian, Liz. “The Complicated History of Armenian Women’s Genocide-Era Tattoos.” LA Weekly. November 29, 2017. Accessed June 4, 2020. https://www.laweekly.com/the-com plicated-history-of-armenian-womens-genocide-era-tattoos/. Peroomian, Rubina. Literary Responses to Catastrophe: A Comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish Experience. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993. Power, Samantha. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Ritman, Alex, and Mia Galuppo. “The Promise vs. The Ottoman Lieutenant: Two Movies Battle over the Armenian Genocide.” The Hollywood Reporter, April 21, 2017. Accessed January 31, 2019. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/promise-ottoman-lieutenant-two-mov ies-battle-armenian-genocide-996196. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Safarian, David, director. Lost Paradise. Armenia: Armenfilm and Armenfilm Studios, 1991. Sakalis, Alex. “Turkey is Changing and I am Part of that Change: An Interview with Fatih Akin.” openDemocracy. April 21, 2015. Accessed June 18, 2020. https://www.open democracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/armenia-interview/. Sharples, Caroline. Postwar Germany and the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Shemmassian, Vahram L. “The League of Nations and Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors.” In Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide, edited by Richard Hovannisian, 81 – 112. London: Transaction Publishers, 2003. Slide, Anthony. “Introduction.” In Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian, edited by Anthony Slide, 1 – 18. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Stier, Oren Baruch. Holocaust Icons: Symbolizing the Shoah in History and Memory. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Tapson, Mark. “A New Film Takes on the Armenian Genocide.” Frontpage Mag. May 3, 2015. Accessed January 24, 2019. https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/256252/new-film-takesarmenian-genocide-mark-tapson. Tanöz, Mert. “Yitik Kuşlar: İlk Yerli Ermeni Tehciri Filmi.” Tersninja.com. March 31, 2014. Accessed June 19, 2020. https://www.tersninja.com/yitik-kusla/. Taviani, Paolo, and Vittorio Taviani, directors. The Lark Farm. Italy, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Spain: Ager 3, France 2 Cinéma, Flach Film, Sagrera TV, Nimar Studios, Rai Cinema, Eagle Pictures, Televisión Española, Canal +, 27 Films Production, ARD Degeto Films,

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Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Media Programme of the European Union, and Istituto Luce Cinecittà, 2007. “Tent Camp in Syrian Desert.” Photo Collection of Armin T. Wegner, Armenian National Institute. Acessed June 20, 2020. https://www.armenian-genocide.org/photo_wegner_ view.html?photo=tents.jpg&collection=wegner&caption=Tent+camp+in+Syrian+desert. “Title List for the Film”. In Ravished Armenia and the Story of Mardiganian, edited by Anthony Slide, 207 – 13. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1997. Torchin, Leshu. Creating the Witness: Documenting Genocide on Film, Video, and the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Torchin, Leshu. “Since We Forgot: Remembrance and Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Virtual Archives.” In The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, 82 – 97. New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. Toukhanian, Hrayr, director. Assignment Berlin. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1982. Vagharshyan, Laert, director. They Are to Live. Soviet Union: Hayfilm Studio, 1960. Verneuil, Henri, director. Mayrig. France: Carthago Films, Quinta Communications, and TF1 Films Production, 1991. Watenpaugh, Keith David. Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Whitehorn, Alan. “The Armenian Genocide in Feature Films.” The Armenian Weekly. October 20, 2017. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://armenianweekly.com/2017/10/20/arme nian-genocide-feature-films/. Wilshire, Peter. “The Representation of Trauma and Memory in The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965).” Offscreen 23 (2019): 9 – 10. Accessed June 25, 2020. https://offscreen. com/view/the-representation-of-trauma-and-memory-in-the-pawnbroker-sidney-lumet1965. Wolfe Murray, Angus. “The Lark Farm.” Eye for Eye, November 21, 2007. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/the-lark-farm-film-review-by-angus-wolfe-mur ray. Yesayan, Catherine. “Lost Birds: A Movie Review.” Asbarez.com. November 25, 2015. Accessed January 31, 2019. http://asbarez.com/142242/lost-birds-a-movie-review/. Yildiz, Guney. “Turkey offers condolences to Armenians over WWI killings.” BBC News, April 23, 2014. Accessed January 30, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe27131543. Young, Deborah. “The Lark Farm.” Variety. February 14, 2007. Accessed June 1, 2020. https:// variety.com/2007/film/markets-festivals/the-lark-farm-1200510317/. Zoppellaro, Simone. “The first movie produced in Turkey on the Armenian genocide has been directed by Ela Alyamac e Aren Perdeci. Our interview ‘Lost Birds’.” Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, August 14, 2015. Accessed June 10, 2020. https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/ eng/Areas/Turkey/Lost-birds-163507.

Contributors Authors Prof. Dr. Emeritus Lawrence Baron held the Nasatir Chair in Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University from 1988 until 2012. He received his Ph.D. in modern European intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin where he studied with George L. Mosse. He taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He has authored and edited four books including The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press, 2011) and Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and edited a special issue of the journal Shofar on Holocaust and Genocide cinema. He served as the historian and as an interviewer for Sam and Pearl Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. His contribution to Holocaust Studies was profiled in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge, 2010). In the fall semester of 2015, he taught a graduate seminar on Genocide Cinema at the Richard Stockton University of New Jersey. Dr. Judith Cohen is adjunct graduate faculty in the Music Department of York University, Toronto, Canada, and visiting faculty at the ALEPH Ordination Program, Philadelphia, USA. She obtained her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in 1989 and her M.A. in medieval studies in 1980, both at the Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada. An active singer, multi-instrumentalist, and storyteller, she has authored many peer-reviewed book chapters and articles, and recorded several CDs. She prepared the liner notes for the Alan Lomax Spanish Recordings (Rounder Records 2001 – 2006) and is working on an edition of Lomax’s 1952 Spanish field diary. Her main fields of research are Sephardic music, music among the Crypto-Jews of Portugal, music in the three religious communities of medieval Iberia, and traditions of the Sephardic diaspora. Her distinctive lecture-with-performance presentations also integrate Yiddish songs, music of the Balkans, Morocco and French Canada, and pan-European balladry. Prof. Dr. Miranda Crowdus is Director of the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Her research, teaching, and publications are interdisciplinary and intersectional and explore negotiations of both localized and transnational Jewish experiences, particularly those on the periphery of mainstream Judaism. Her recent book, Hip Hop in Urban Borderlands (2018), focuses on how Jewish and non-Jewish minority identities construct and negotiate narratives of belonging in urban Israel through creative popular culture transformations of Jewish practices and texts. She is currently researching the distinctive musical-liturgical traditions of the Romaniote Jews. Theresa Eisele M.A. is a theatre scholar specializing in perceptions and performances of Jewishness from a theatre historical perspective. She held teaching and research posts at the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna, the Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Leipzig, and the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow. In 2021, she is a Marietta Blau Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Her latest publications include the book Szenen der Wiener

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Authors

Moderne. Drei Artefakte und ihre Vorstellungswelten des Jüdischen (Göttingen 2021, ed. Yfaat Weiss in the series toldot). Further research interests and teaching experiences comprise European theatre history in the nineteenth and twentieth century, notions of authenticity, historical anthropology, and acting theories. Dr. Hervé Georgelin is a French historian specialized in the culture and history of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire and the heir-states. He has authored two books about the cosmopolitan port-city of Smyrna/Izmir: La fin de Smyrne: du cosmopolitisme aux nationalismes (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005) and more recently Smyrne dans la guerre: novembre 1914 – 8 septembre 1922 (Athens: Hêrodotos, 2019). He also devotes time to literary translations from Modern Greek and Western Armenian into French. Among others, he has translated two novels by Zavèn Bibérian, Le Crépuscule des fourmis (2012) and La traînée (2015), both published in Geneva by MētisPresses. In 2019, he edited Zavèn Bibérian’s large autobiographic fragment Car vivre, c’était se battre et faire l’amour, published by Aras Yayıncılık in Istanbul. He is currently lecturer of history at the Department of Turkish Studies at the National and Capodistrian University of Athens. Stefan Hofmann M.A. is a historian of Modern Jewish History, currently working on a study of the relationship of Jews to theatre in nineteenth century Germany. He is research associate at the Saxonian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, where he is involved in several long-term projects in the field of Jewish Studies. He served in the editorial staff of the seven volume Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur (editor in chief: Dan Diner; German edition: 2011 – 2017; English translation as Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture: 2017 ff.) and is copy editor of the two series Archive of Jewish History and Culture and Library of Jewish History and Culture, which publish critical editions of sources. His areas of research include the cultural and political history of the Jews in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the history of theatre and film, as well as the history of antisemitism. Dr. Birgit M. Körner is a postdoctoral researcher on the project “The reinvention of ‘Jewish Humour’ by Ephraim Kishon and his translator Friedrich Torberg.” The project is funded by the Swiss National Fund (SNF) at the Center for Jewish Studies, University of Basel. Previously, she has worked at the University of Giessen as a research assistant at the Institute for German Studies and as an academic assistant at the Research Center for Holocaust Literature (“Arbeitsstelle Holocaustliteratur”). During her doctoral studies, she received a research grant from the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Her dissertation about the poetics of the German-Jewish author Else Lasker-Schüler in the context of the Jewish Renaissance (“Else Lasker-Schülers Poetologie im Kontext des Kulturzionismus”) was published in 2017 by Böhlau. Prof. Dr. Elad Lapidot is Professor for Hebraic Studies at the University of Lille. He is the author of Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020); Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited by Elad Lapidot and Micha Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018); Etre sans mot dire: La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010). His research interests are social and political philosophy, hermeneutics, philosophy of translation, and rabbinic thought.

Authors

299

Dr. Arpine Maniero is research assistant at Collegium Carolinum – Research Institute for the History of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. She is responsible for electronic publishing and is the coordinator of the hybrid series DigiOst. Her latest book is Umkämpfter Weg zur Bildung. Armenische Studierende in Deutschland und der Schweiz von der Mitte des 19. bis Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). Her research interests lie in the fields of migration studies, transfer of knowledge and culture, and history of religion. Dr. Harutyun Marutyan is Director of “Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute” Foundation. He is the author of The Role of Memory in the Structure of National Identity: Theoretical Questions (Noravank, 2006, in Armenian); Iconography of Armenian Identity. Volume 1: The Memory of Genocide and the Karabagh Movement. Anthropology of Memory 3 (Gitutyun, 2009); coauthor of Stalin Era Repressions in Armenia: History, Memory, Everyday Life. Anthropology of Memory 5 (Gitutyun, 2015, in Armenian); Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity, edited by Levon Abrahamian and Nancy Sweezy (Indiana University Press, 2001); editor of Capitals of Armenia. Book 1: Van (Gitutyun, 2013, in Arm.); co-author and co-editor of Stories on Poverty and Stories on Poverty. Book 2 (Yerevan, 2001 and 2007, in Armenian). His research interests include genocide memory and national identity, modern national movements (Karabagh Movement), traditional Armenian culture etc. Dr. des. Öndercan Muti received his PhD in sociology from Humboldt University of Berlin. As a founding Member of BEKS Istanbul (The Association for the Study of Sociology of Memory and Culture), he has participated in several research projects with the association, including one on the collective memory of the 1980 Turkish coup d’état “September 12th, Never Again” and more recently on the “Postmemory of the Armenian Genocide – A Comparative Study on the 4th Generation in Turkey, Armenia, and Diaspora”. Currently, he is working on publishing his dissertation on the memory of the Armenian Genocide and intergenerational relations in different Armenian communities. Maciej Wąs M.A. studied at Maastricht University/the Netherlands, and the Free University of Berlin. He graduated from the European University Viadrina at Frankfurt (Oder)/Germany in Eastern European History, Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences. His projects and publications have focused on the history of the infrastructure, science, and technical elites in the Soviet Union, and on the phenomena of mobility, tourism, migrations, deportations, and repressions in Eastern Europe. He conducts researches and gives seminars as an independent researcher on the history of the Eastern European Jews. A recent publication of his is “Perceiving the Others: Some Remarks on the Testimonies of Polish Jews in Soviet Central Asia during the War”, in Jewish Refugees and Evacuees in the Soviet Union, 1939 – 1946: Studies, Documents and Testimonies, edited by Zeev Levin (76 – 103, Jerusalem: Amutat Hazid haKavod/Aguda Yisra’elit le-Mad’anim Olim, 2020, in Russian). Georg Wehse M.A. is a Doctoral Candidate in the project “Europäische Traditionen –Enzyklopädie jüdischer Kulturen” of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig. He is preparing a critical edition of documents under the title “American Diplomacy and Jewish Philanthropy. Henry Morgenthau’s Diplomatic Career Between 1913 and 1923.” He has been working as Research Associate for the Saxon Academy since 2020. From 2013 to 2017 he worked as research assistant for the Forschungsstelle für Vergleichende Ordensgeschichte in Dresden. He

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Authors

studied history, political science, and sociology at the Technische Universität Dresden and the Université de Nantes. He completed his M.A. degree in 2017 at the TU Dresden. His research focusses on Jewish diplomatic history. Dr. Anush Yeghiazaryan is a post-doc in Social Science Archive (University of Konstanz), where she received her doctorate in 2019. The title of her thesis is “Zur Bedeutung des Vardan-Mythos für das Selbstverständnis der Armenier in der Diaspora und Republik Armenien” (On the Significance of the Vardan Myth for the Self-Perception of Armenians in the Diaspora and the Republic of Armenia). Her teaching and research activities are in the field of qualitative social research. Her main research interests include symbol and ritual research, qualitative methods of social research, as well as research on Armenia and the diaspora. Dr. Heidy Zimmermann has been a member of the research staff and curator at the Paul Sacher Foundation since 2002. She studied musicology, German language and literature, as well as Jewish studies in Basle, Lucerne, and Jerusalem (PhD 1999, published as Tora und Shira. Untersuchungen zur Musikanschauung des rabbinischen Judentums, 2000). From 1995 to 2002 Zimmermann was a research assistant and lecturer at Basle University. She has published numerous articles on aspects of Jewish Music and on twentieth-century music (especially on Stefan Wolpe and György Ligeti). She has co-edited several books, such as Jüdische Musik? (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary (Mainz: Schott, 2006), and Avatar of Modernity: The “Rite of Spring” Reconsidered (Boosey & Hawkes, 2013).

Editors Dr. Regina Randhofer has been a research associate at the European Center for Jewish Music at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media since 2016. After completing her piano studies at Cologne University of Music, she studied musicology as well as German, and Italian language and literature in Cologne and Jerusalem (PhD published as Psalmen in einstimmigen vokalen Überlieferungen, Peter Lang 1995). After years of teaching at universities in Germany, Israel, and Hungary, she was from 2007 to 2015 a research associate in the Academy project “Europäische Traditionen – Enzyklopädie jüdischer Kulturen” at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, Leipzig. From 2016 to 2019, she served as vice-chair of the German-Armenian Society. Her current research project “From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back - The Letters of German-Jewish Musicologist Edith Gerson-Kiwi (19081992)” deals with the German-Jewish cultural heritage in Israel. Prof. Dr. Sarah M. Ross is Professor of Jewish Music Studies and Director of the European Center for Jewish Music at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, where she is active in teaching and researching Jewish music and other ethnomusicological topics. She is the editor and author of Jüdisches Kulturerbe MUSIK – Divergenzen und Zeitlichkeit (Peter Lang, 2021), and author of A Season of Singing. Creating Feminist Jewish Music in the United States (Brandeis University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Cultural Mapping and Musical Diversity (Equinox, 2020) and Judaism and Emotion. Texts, Performance, Experience (Peter Lang, 2013). Her research interests include Jewish music in Germany after 1945, Jewish cultural heritage and cultural sustainability, science policy etc. Ross is co-founder of the academic network “Jewish Cultural Heritage” and of “Präsenzen – Netzwerk jüdische Gegenwartsforschung e.V.” – a German scholarly association on Jewish contemporary research.

Index of Subjects Aachen 108 Adrinople (Edirne) 240 Aix-en-Provence 57 f. Al-Andalus 24 Aleppo 240, 287 Alexandretta (Hatay) 234 Alexandria 171 Amsterdam 13 Anatolia 1, 168, 170, 195, 236 – 238, 242, 287 Andalusia 77 Ankara, province 184 Aparan 185 Aragon 78 Ardahan, province 235 Argentina 90 Argyropole (Gümüşhane) 236 Armenian Highlands 1 Armenia 1 – 9, 29, 31 – 44, 46 f., 97 – 111, 115 – 123, 125 – 129, 159 f., 169 f., 171, 173, 175 f., 181 – 190, 192 – 196, 199 f., 202 – 211, 227 – 243, 267 – 277, 279 – 291 – Eastern Armenia 182, 186 – Western Armenia 181 f., 186, 195 f., 208, 227, 230, 232, 235 Asia 121, 228 – Central Asia 120, 281 Astrakhan 120 Atlit 166 Auschwitz 88, 219, 246, 248, 256 f., 277 Austria 5, 29, 36, 38 f., 46, 106, 131, 137, 146 f., 201, 228, 233, 247 f., 270 Avarayr 29, 31, 33 – 35, 42 Ayntap 184 Babylon 4, 79, 81, 89 Baden, Grand-Duchy of 107, 162 Baghdad 77 Baku 128 Balkans 234 f. Bavaria 107 Beirut 166 f., 200, 202 Belarus 128 f. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-017

Belgium 108 Belmonte 84 – 88, 92 f. Bembasha 83 Berlin 51, 53 – 56, 61 – 63, 66, 101 – 105, 131 – 132, 136 f., 141, 147, 150, 202 f., 218, 272 – West Berlin 66 Bern 105, 108 Black Sea 128, 236 Bosnia 82 f. Brazil 87, 90 Budapest 249 f., 253 Bulgaria 82, 234 f., 273 Cairo 77, 165 f. Calcutta 34 California 51, 268 Canaan 25 Canada 77, 82, 277 Carpathians 53 Casablanca 80 Castile 78 f. Caucasus 6, 100 f., 115 f., 118 – 123, 125, 127 – 129, 169 Cernăuți (Černivci, Tschernowitz) 233 Černivci (Cernăuți, Tschernowitz) 233 Chalcedon (Kadıköy) 32, 228 Chernivtsi (Czernowitz) 137 Chortkiv (Czortkow) 137 Cilicia 238 Cincinnati 172 Cologne 202 Comtat Venaissin 7 Constantinople 7, 159, 161, 163, 166, 170 f., 173, 175, 184, 281 Córdoba 77 Crete 243 Cuba 277, 284 Çukurova 238 Czechoslovakia 259 Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) 137 Czortkow (Chortkiv) 137

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Index of Subjects

Dachau 257 Damascus 58, 165 Darfur 289 Darmstadt 103 Deir ez-Zor 283 Djugha 39 Dorpat 99 Edirne (Adrinople) 240 Egypt 82, 84, 87, 173, 240, 261 Erzurum 239 Europe 3, 4, 6, 37, 39, 41, 57, 67, 80, 97 f., 103, 105 f., 120, 123 f., 136, 139 f., 140, 143 f., 147, 150, 168, 172, 192, 199, 232, 241 f., 254, 268 f., 275, 285, 287 – Central Europe 164, 232 – Eastern Europe 4, 6, 54, 66 – 68, 90, 103, 121, 125, 131, 134, 136 – 138, 142 f., 146 – 150, 231, 251 f., 255, 257 f. – Southern Europe 115 – Western Europe 35, 54, 97 f., 120 Fentejag 184 Fès 77, 82, 92 Filibe (Philippopole, Plovdiv) 234 Filzberg 1 Florida 284 France 3, 51, 122, 199, 202, 232, 240 f., 275 f., 281, 285 Frankfurt 246 Freiburg i. Br. 107 Fridberg 103 Fuelek 249 Galicia 81, 137 Gavash 184 Geneva 102, 105 Georgia 34, 99, 117 – 119, 121 – 123, 125, 128 Germany 4, 55, 69, 97, 99 – 104, 106 – 110, 118, 131 f., 137, 142, 146 f., 172 f., 186, 192, 199, 202, 218, 231, 240 f., 245, 247, 250, 252 – 254, 259 f., 270 f., 274, 289 – Federal German Republic 245 – Western Germany 8, 231, 245 Gharakilisa 186

Gibraltar 172 – 174 Great Britain 159, 174 Greater Syria 234 Greece 58, 219, 234, 242 Gümüşhane (Argyropole) 236 Gyumri 202 Habsburg Empire 134, 144 Haifa 166, 261 Hajn 184 Halle 105, 108 Hatay (Alexandretta) 234 Heidelberg 105, 107 Hilversum 63 Hungary 247 f., 254 Ioannina 242 Iran 5, 29, 36, 39 – 41, 46 Isfahan 29, 39 – 41, 47 Israel 8, 51, 53, 66, 75, 77, 84 f., 87, 89 f., 92, 174 f., 182 – 184, 186, 191, 202, 206, 218 f., 221, 224 f., 233, 241, 245 – 247, 249 – 252, 254 f., 258 – 262, 271 Istanbul 8, 199, 202, 208 f., 227 – 230, 232 f., 235, 237 – 243 Italy 58, 231, 235 Izmir 90, 241 Jaffa 165 f., 169, 172, 220 – 224 Jena 103 Jerusalem 66, 89, 165 – 167, 172, 174, 184, 246, 255 – 257 Jolsva 249 Jordan 240 Kadıköy (Chalcedon) 228 Kahnawá:ke 82 Karlsruhe 103, 108 Kars, province 235 Khnus 185 Khotorjur 185 Kırkkilise (Kırklareli) 240 Kırklareli (Kırkkilise) 240 Kishinev 128 Koethen 103 Konigsberg 101 Krakow 115

Index of Subjects

Kütahya Kybarty

1 11

Latvia 1 Lausanne 57, 227, 231, 235, 237 Lebanon 36, 58, 199, 202, 227, 240, 277, 284 Leipzig 101 – 105, 109 Lesbos 168 Liège 108 Lithuania 56, 60, 115, 146 f. Los Angeles 200, 208, 272 Lwów 118 Manhattan 163 Mannheim 139, 141 Marash 184 Marmashen 286 Marseille 202, 282 Mediterranean Sea 223 Middle East 174, 261, 270 Mittweida 103 Mons 108 Montebello 268 Montreal 76 f., 82, 90, 92 f. Morocco 77, 80 f., 89 Moscow 99, 122, 147 Munich 63, 101, 103 – 105, 108 f., 131, 259 Musa Dagh (Musa-Ler) 185, 270 – 272, 274, 280, 283 f. Mush 184 Mytilene 168 Navarre 78, 90 New England 16 New York 51, 62, 66 f., 159 f., 162, 169, 174 North Aegean islands 168 North Africa 270, 277 North Dakota 284 Odessa 63, 169 Ottoman Empire 1, 35, 111, 122 f., 159, 162 f., 165, 167, 169 f., 172 f., 184, 206, 227, 229, 233 – 235, 239, 268 f., 274 f., 286, 291

305

Palestine 1, 7, 53, 58, 60, 62, 90, 104, 160 f., 164, 166 f., 169, 171 – 177, 240, 270 Paris 53, 59, 162, 175, 200, 202, 241 f. Persia 29, 32, 35, 39, 44, 120 – 122, 124 Pesandasht 184 Petah Tikva 166 Philippopole (Filibe, Plovdiv) 234 Plovdiv (Filibe, Philippopole) 230, 232, 234 – 236 Poland 56, 63, 115 – 118, 123 – 126, 162, 220, 271 – Congress Poland 122 f. – Kingdom of Poland 123 Portugal 79, 84, 86 f., 90, 206 Provence 53, 57 Ras-al-Ayn 283 Red Sea 84 Rhodes 242 Rodosto (Tekirdağ) 240 Roman Empire 7 Rome 66 Rumania 234 Russian Empire (Russia) 1, 6, 42, 44, 97 – 103, 105 – 110, 123, 127 f., 146 Rwanda 273, 275, 289 Salonica 76, 88, 219 Samsun 170 Sarajevo 83, 87 Sardarapat 42, 185 Sasun 184 Satmar 26 Scheunenviertel 55, 131 Sèvres 231, 235 Shapin-Garahissar 184 Shatakh (Tagh) 184 Slovakia 249 Smyrna 168 Soviet Union (USSR) 44, 117, 261 Spain 78 f., 81, 84, 90 Stalingrad 232 St. Petersburg 56, 99 Switzerland 99, 101, 106, 109, 173, 261

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Index of Subjects

Syria 36, 58, 166, 169, 171, 209, 240, 277, 284 Syrian desert 283 Tabris 39 Tagh (Shatakh) 184 Teheran 29, 39 Tekirdağ (Rodosto) 240 Tel Aviv 53, 165, 169, 261 Tetuan 89 Thrace 240 Tiberias 92 Tiflis 99, 117 f., 125, 128 Trabzon (Trebizond) 170, 237 f. Transcaucasia 125 Tras-os-Montes 84 Trebizond (Trabzon) 237 Tschernowitz (Cernăuți, Černivci) 233 Turkey 7 f., 36, 58, 89 – 91, 93, 111, 168, 171, 175, 182, 189, 193, 199, 202, 204, 206 – 210, 227 – 238, 240 – 243, 267 f., 271, 273 – 275, 278 – 281, 284 – 287, 289, 291 Ukraine 128 f., 137, 233 United States (US) 3, 7, 159 – 164, 170, 172 – 176, 268, 277, 279, 290

Ur 25 f. Urfa 176, 184 Uruguay 268 USSR (Soviet Union) 43, 233, 236, 270 US (United States) 165, 170 f., 232, 252 Van 184 f. – Vilâyet Van 169 Vaspurakan 184 Venezuela 90 Venice 34 Vichy 281 Vienna 29, 36 – 38, 40 f., 46 f., 56, 132, 135 – 138, 141, 149, 248 Vilna (Vilnius) 147 – 149 Warsaw 99, 122, 184, 270 Washington 170, 173 Yerevan 29, 42 – 45, 47, 182 f., 199 f., 202, 209, 268, 271, 275 Yozghat 184 Zeytun 169 Zikhron Ya’akov Zurich 105

166

Index of Names Aaronsohn, Aaron 166 Aaronsohn, Alexander 166, 175 Abdul Hamid II 289 Abraham 25 f., 116 Abrahamian, Levon 208 Achron, Joseph 56 Adler, Selig 164 Aguado, Berta (Bienvenida) 89 Akin, Fatih 277, 283 f., 286 f. Alajaji, Sylvia 3 Alkalay-Gut, Karen 219 f. Altounian, Janine 242 Alyamac, Ela 287 Anderson, Margaret Lavinia 160 Andrzeykowicz, Michał 117 Angelson, Diana 281 f. Applefeld, Aharon (Erwin Appelfeld) Arendt, Hannah 68, 257 Aristotle 201 Arslan, Antonia 273 Aschheim, Steven E. 133 Ashkenazi, Ofer 133 Askani, Hans-Christoph 20 Askoldov, Aleksandr 270 Auerbach, Israel 165 Axmann, David 247

Bloch, Ernest 51, 57 Boskovich, Alexander Uriah 53 Boyarin, Daniel 16 Brafman, Jacov 127 Brod, Max 55, 145 Buber, Martin 19, 23, 54, 61, 147 Buerkle, Darcy 133

233

Balakian, Peter 282, 284, 286 Balfour, Arthur James 173 f., 176 Baron, Lawrence 8, 267 Bartók, Béla 53, 56 Beatriz, Countess of Dia 77 f. Bedri Bey 170 Ben Avi, Itamar 24 Ben Gurion, David 255 Ben Yehuda, Eliezer 24 Benjamin, Walter 21 f., 211 Berardinelli, James 283 Bereshit, Rachel 90, 92 f. Berson, Jan Otmar 117, 128 Bialik, Chaim Nachman 147 Bibérian, Zavèn 8, 227 – 239, 241 – 243 Birnbaum, Nathan 54 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695403-018

Çetin, Fethiye 237 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 259 Chamberlain, Neville 259 Chamchean 34 f. Chopin, Frédéric 183 Chotek, Sophie 168 Clarkson, Austin 51 Clifford, James 54, 175 Cohen, Judith 5 f., 76, 82 f., 86, 88 f., 92 f. Cohen, Leonard 291 Collaer, Paul 59 Copeaux, Étienne 238 Crowdus, Miranda 8, 217 Curran, Alvin 51, 53, 55, 66 f., 69, 71 Dabashi, Hamid 284 Davutoglu, Ahmet 189 Dawison, Bogumil 138 Demirchian, Derenik 42 f. Desbois, Patrick 232 Deutsch, Ernst 131 f., 148, 150 Devrient, Eduard 139 – 143 Devrient, Hans 142 Djemal, Ahmed 168 f., 171 Döblin, Alfred 147 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm 139 Doreno, Mario 241 Dubnow, Simon 57 Dupont, Ewald André 6, 132, 140, 143 f., 149 f. Durkheim, Emile 217 Edelman, Samuel 165 Egoyan, Atom 272, 277 f. Eichmann, Adolf 246, 248, 256 f.

308

Index of Names

Eichwald, Eduard von 120 Eisele, Theresa 6, 131 Engel, Joel 56 Enver, Ismail 168 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 188 f., 290 Ermolnikoff, Rahel 51 f., 52 – 54 Falla, Manuel de 56 Feldman, Morton 66 Finder, Gabriel N. 252 Frankfurter, Felix 161, 173 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria Franzos, Karl Emil 137 f. Freud, Sigmund 230, 251

Hoffmann, Ferenc (Ephraim Kishon) Hofmann, Stefan 6, 131 Horowitz, Sara R. 276 Horthy, Miklós 248 Hovannisian, Richard 188 f. Hovhannisyan, Henrik 35 Hulfeld, Stefan 139 Hundert, Gershon 115 f.

168

Gabrowitz, József 250 Galli, Barbara Ellen 17, 19 f. Garfinkle, Bouena Sarfatty 75 – 77, 88, 92 Geissler, Christian Gottfried Heinrich 120 George, Terry 275 George IV, Catholicos of All Armenians 99 Georgelin, Hervé 8, 227 Ghevond 33, 47 Giers, Mikhail M. 166 Gilad, Ya’akov 219 f., 224 Goldfaden, Abraham 56, 142 Gould, Melissa 66 Gözay, Sevim 288 Gradenwitz, Peter 58 Gregory the Enlightener 281 Grey, Madeleine 60 Grigor of Narek 34 Gronemann, Sammy 147 Hacohen, Eliahu 58 Haenel, Yannick 232 Haïm, David 88 Hakobyan, Anna 205 Halbwachs, Maurice 217, 223 Halevi, Yehuda 5, 15, 17 – 27 Haskert 32 Heine, Heinrich 68 Hempel, Friedrich Ferdinand 120 Hertz, Aleksander 123 – 125 Hilberg, Raul 248 Hitler, Adolf 118, 131, 253, 259, 270 – 272, 274

249

Ibn Labrat, Dunash 77 f. Ibn Tibbon, Yehudah 24 Idelsohn, Abraham Zvi 1 Iffland, August Wilhelm 141 Imastaser 33 Isabekyan, Eduard 42 Jagoda, Flory 87, 89, 93 Jeske-Choiński, Teodor 125 f. Jessner, Leopold 148 Juansher 34 Kafka, Franz 145, 257 Karapetian, Hovhannes 108 Kardashian, Kim 290 Karski, Jan (Jan Kozielewski) 232 Karyo, Tcheky 274 Katz, Jacob 126 Kaufman, Piotr Mikhailovich fon 99 Kazan, Elia 279 f. Kelly, Barbara L. 59 Kempner, Robert M. W. 160 Kerkorian, Kirk 283 Khachatrian, Jenja 33 Khrushchev, Nikita 271 Kieser, Hans-Lukas 171 Kishon, Ephraim (Ferenc Hoffmann) 8, 245 – 263 Kohen, Moiz (Munis Tekinalp) 240 Komitas Vardapet 1 Körner, Birgit M. 8, 245 Kortner, Fritz 148 Kozielewski, Jan (Jan Karski) 232 Krämer-Badoni, Rudolf 245 f. Kunduh, Bekir Sami 167 Kurtz, Arved 62 Landmann, Salcia

252

Index of Names

Lansing, Robert 173 Lanzmann, Claude 232, 288 Lapidot, Elad 5, 15 Lasker-Schüler, Else 55 Laube, Heinrich 138, 144 Lavoie, Marie-Noëlle 59 f. Leist, Artur 119 – 121, 125, 127 Lemkin, Raphael 160, 270 Lepecki, Mieczysław 117 f. Lessing, Theodor 145 Levi, Salli 51 Levy, Isaac Jack 88 Lichtheim, Richard 161, 165, 167, 175 f. Liebermann, Armin 62 Lifshitz, Efraim Dov 58 Lizsauer, Janos 249 Loewenson, Alice Jacob 51 f., 63 London, Yaron 247, 249 Ludendorff, Erich 131 Lumet, Sidney 276 Lunel, Armand 58 Luther, Martin 21, 23 Maksimov, S. 119 Maniero, Arpine A. 6, 97 Mannheim, Karl 201 Manoschek, Walter 248 Manouchian, Missak 275 Marsoobian, Armen T. 288 Martin, Mardik 277 Marutyan, Harutyun 7, 181 Melson, Robert 273 Menteşe, Halil 171 Meyers, Oren 221, 224 Miczyński, Sebastian 115 f. Mikhashoff, Ivar 66 Milhaud, Darius 5, 51–53, 56–61, 70 f. Mkhitar Gosh 34 Morewski, Avrom 149 Morgenthau, Henry 7, 159 – 177, 274 f., 280 Morgenthau, Lazarus 162 Morley, Hilda (Morley-Auerbach) 60, 63 Mouhibian, Alec 285 Mouradian, Sarky 271 Mussolini, Benito 235 Muti, Öndercan 7, 199 Myers, Chris 274

Nadel, Arno 51 f. Nahum, Chaim 171 f. Naimark, Norman M. 122 Nerses V Ashtaraketsi 99 Nichanian, Marc 227 Nietzsche, Friedrich 136, 144 f. Nordau, Max 145 Ökte, Faik

231

Parpeci, Lazar 32, 43 Pashinyan, Nigol 205 Perdeci, Aren 287 Peroomian, Rubina 276 Petrosyan, Vardges 182 Phleps, Thomas 62 Poliakov, Léon 241 Poliker, Yehuda 219 – 225 Porten, Henny 132 Preisendanz, Wolfgang 250 Prokofiev, Sergey 60 Prutz, Robert Eduard 141 Rathenau, Walter 145 Ratuld-Rakowska, Maria 121 f. Ravel, Maurice 60 Rée, Anton 146 Regev, Motti 219 Rosenzweig, Franz 5, 15 – 25, 27 Rothberg, Michael 269 Rudnyckyi, Antin 62 Ruppin, Arthur 165, 169 Salinas, Francisco de 78 Sanassarian, Mgrditch 239 Sarafian, Ara 165 Sarah (Sarai) 25 Sargsyan, Serzh 199 Schach, Fabius 142 f., 146 Schalit, Heinrich 51 f. Schiff, Jacob 162, 167, 169 Schiller, Friedrich 139 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 20 – 22 Schoenberg, Arnold 55 Seroussi, Edwin 225 Shmavonian, Arshag K. 174 Shnorhali 33

309

310

Index of Names

Shushanik 34 Sierakowski, Adam 117 f., 120 Signorelli, Pietro Napoli 139 Sokolow, Nahum 165, 167 Spielberg, Steven 282 Starowolski, Szymon 116 Steiner, George 19 Steiner, Pamela 165 Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold von 20 Stolypin, Pyotr Arkadyevich 100 Straus, Nathan 169 Straus, Oscar 162 f. Stravinsky, Igor 56 Struck, Hermann 55, 147 Suny, Ronald Grigor 125, 127 f., 189 Szálasi, Ferenc 248 Talât, Mehmed (Talaat) 168, 170 f., 176, 272, 274 f. Tamanyan, Alexander 43 f. Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio 273 Tehlirian, Soghomon 272, 280 – 282 Tekinalp, Munis (Moiz Kohen) 240 Tiridates III 281 Torberg, Friedrich 247, 250 – 252, 255 – 258, 260 – 262 Torchin, Leshu 272 Traverso, Enzo 211 Tuchman, Barbara W. 161 Tumanian, Hovhannes 37 Vajda, Tibor Timothy 249 f. Vardan Mamikonyan 5, 29, 31–44, 46–47 Vasak 32 Veesemayer, Edmund 248

Verdi, Giuseppe 81 Verneuil, Henri 280 Vučković, Nina Şalom

82 f., 87, 92

Walk, Cynthia 132 Wangenheim, Hans von 169 Wardrop, Oliver 121 Wąs, Maciej 6, 115 Wehse, Georg 7, 159 Weiss, Christina 245 Weizmann, Chaim 161, 173 Werfel, Franz 270 f. Wertheim, Maurice 169 Wertheimer, Jack 100, 110 Wiener, Barry 51 Wildmann, Daniel 132, 141 Wilson, Woodrow 163, 172 – 174 Wise, Stephen S. 163 Wisse, Ruth R. 250 Wolfe Murray, Angus 273 Wolpe, Stefan 5, 51 – 53, 55 – 57, 60 – 65, 68, 70 f. Wyganowski, Tadeusz 121 f. Yayıncılık, Aras 227 Yeghiazaryan, Anush 5, 29, 47 Yeghishe 32 – 35, 43 Yellin, David 165, 167 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny 270 Zandberg, Eyal 224 Zanetti, Valérie 233 Zimmermann, Heidy 5, 51 Zweig, Arnold 54 f., 143, 147 f.