Armenophobia in the West

[gamavor]

Not that it is something new, however worth reading.

 

 

 

VIRTUOUS VICTIMS? IMAGINING ARMENIANS IN THE WEST

Matthias Bjornlund

 

The Armenian Weekly Magazine

April 2012

 

During the winter of 1902-03, small groups of Armenian refugees began

arriving in Sweden, survivors of the 1890's Abdulhamid massacres,1

and according to newspaper reports some even made it all the way to

Norway.2But it was claimed by an alleged authoritative source that

such groups were not, or not necessarily, actual Armenians at all. In

the summer of 1903, a party of "fake Armenians" arrived in Copenhagen,

ostensibly collecting funds for victims of the massacres. As a Danish

popular periodical wrote in a rather sarcastic tone that speaks

volumes of widespread perceptions of the Oriental Other:

 

Bjornlund 1 287x300 Bjørnlund: Virtuous Victims? Imagining Armenians

in the West

 

A German handcolored depiction of Armenians from J. A. C. Löhr,

Die Länder und Völker der Erde; oder vollständige Beschreibung

aller funf Erdtheile und deren Bewohner [The Countries and Peoples

of the World; or a complete description of all five continents and

their inhabitants , Vol. II, Leipzig 1818, p. 55. The accompanying

text acknowledges that there are conflicting views on Armenians--some

say they are devious, some that they are honest--but the emphasis is

on Armenians as basically cowardly merchants.

 

A few days ago, Copenhagen had the honor of receiving a strange

visit. It was said that a group of unfortunate Armenians had arrived

from Riga to collect money for the victims of the cruelties perpetrated

by the wild Kurds, and the noble feelings already began to stir in

the soft Danish hearts. Later the feelings took another direction. It

so happens that the Asiatic party, consisting of six men, one woman,

and four children, had not counted on the fact that at the moment

there lives a man in Copenhagen who could check them thoroughly: The

former Turkish consul general, Ali Nouri, whose name will be familiar

to the readers of this journal as a regular contributor. ... Police

Inspector Petersen then summoned the Swedish Turk, and he quickly

informed the police about the true nature of these 'Armenians.' It has

become a large and profitable industry among industrious inhabitants

of Asia Minor to journey around Europe begging, falsely claiming to

be refugee Armenians. ...

 

It is no wonder that such swindlers quickly inspire others. They

come home, buy a house, and live off their money--and they are not

unwilling to share this business secret with family and friends for

a fee. At the moment Europe is being flooded with hundreds of these

charlatans, and they have even extended their business to America.3

 

How Ali Nouri Bey (a.k.a. Swedish convert, Ottoman dissident, and

Young Turk sympathizer Gustaf Noring) managed to determine that the

members of the "Asiatic party" were not Armenians but, as he claimed,

Chaldeans, is unclear. In any event, as a result of instant taxonomy,

they were shipped off to Lubeck, Germany. Whatever their claim to

"true" Armenianness and victimhood, the apparent fact that this and

many similar groups made a living traveling through Europe, reaching

as far as Scandinavia on a wave of sympathy in the wake of the 1890's

massacres, shows that the "Armenian Question" was a matter of serious

concern way beyond the Ottoman borders.

 

Who, then, were the Armenians suddenly mentioned so often in

newspapers, petitions, public speeches, academic publications,

even police reports? How should they be classified, what was

their "essence"? This became a hot topic, a battleground between

realpolitik and humanitarianism, between more or less scientific world

views, political ideologies, religious affiliations, and economic

interests. As seen in the example above, human taxonomy is rarely

an innocent occupation: How Ottoman Armenians were classified in the

West--in Europe and North America--could have direct and far-reaching

consequences when linked to discussions of the Armenian Question,

in general, and to issues of intervention, proselytizing, and relief

work, in particular. Did Armenians deserve aid? Were they worthy

of the money and time spent by good Western citizens? The question

of how to define the "true nature" of various Ottoman groups even

became a topic when discussions of whether any given group deserved,

or were capable of managing, a national home when the empire was

carved up in the wake of World War I.4 In this article a small

but representative sample of mainly Scandinavian sources is used

to analyze and categorize--classify, as it were--Western attitudes

towards Armenians in the wake of the 1890's Abdulhamid massacres in

the Ottoman Empire in an attempt to address these questions.

 

Intellectual Armenophobia

 

In general, knowledge about Armenians (and all other Ottoman groups)

before the Abdulhamid massacres was marked by racism, religious

prejudice, or superficial research. It has been said that "in its

narratives of cross-cultural contact, the Western form of the travel

book continually sees otherness as inferiority."5 While this is

not necessarily true, the information about Armenians that reached

Western countries was in fact mainly provided by popular travelogues

or ethnographic accounts that often portrayed Armenians as greedy,

devious, and cowardly--in short, like Jews were supposed to be.6 One

early example will suffice to illustrate this point: In a detailed

and otherwise rather nuanced account of encounters with Armenians,

Greeks, Turks, and Jews in Constantinople in 1831, Danish theologian

J. F. Fenger could only compare Armenians to Jews, "God's chosen people

wandering the earth, worshipping material goods and a dead religion."7

 

LB nr 92 01 08 194x300 Bjørnlund: Virtuous Victims? Imagining

Armenians in the West

 

A postcard from the archives of the Danish Women Missionary Workers,

c. 1910, one of a series sold to raise money for missionary work among

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The caption reads: 'Young Armenian

women in national costumes' These Armenian women, probably from the

Kharpert region where the Danish organization was based, would have

looked exotic in the West at the time, but they do not look weak or

passive as 'Oriental' women often do in Western imagery. It is rather

an image of strong, assertive women, an image which women missionaries

would not have picked at random to put on a postcard. Virtuous victims,

perhaps, living proof that missionary work mattered?

 

But it took a human catastrophe, the Abdulhamid massacres, to truly

put a distant, "exotic" people like the Ottoman Armenians on the

map in the Western world. These events happened to more or less

coincide with the rise of certain vital aspects of the modern

age: scientific classification; nationalism; racial thinking;

public opinion; improved means of transportation and communication

increasing the speed, quality, and quantity of travel and news reports;

professionalized grassroots movements; debates on human rights and

humanitarian intervention, etc. Thus, the nature and timing of the

massacres made the Armenian Question an issue among populations, not

just elites. Nor was it an issue only for major countries like Great

Britain, France, or Germany with significant political and economical

interests in the Near East. Scandinavian and other "peripheral"

sources suggest that Armenophobia and Armenophilia in fact became

truly widespread transnational cultural phenomena during and after the

1890's massacres. Indeed, this quote by famed Norwegian author Knut

Hamsun (later to become a Nobel laureate in literature and a staunch

supporter of the Nazi regime in Germany) is quite representative of a

certain type of Western reaction to the resurfacing Armenian Question:

 

Armenians are the trade Jews of the East. They penetrate everywhere,

from the Balkans to China, in every city you go to the Armenians are

up to their old tricks. While the papers of the West are overflowing

with tears over the misfortune of this people it is not rare to

hear in the East that they deserve their fate, they are remarkably

unanimously represented as a people of scoundrels. In Turkey proper

they push the country's own children out of one position after the

other and take their places themselves. Trade falls into their hands,

pawn-broking and money. And the extortion.8

 

With apparent ease intellectuals such as Hamsun extended

their "classic" (ethno-religious) and/or "modern" (racialized)

anti-Semitism to include Armenians and other "similar peoples," like

Greeks. Especially those with no nation state--Jews and Armenians--were

viewed with contempt. In an age of nationalism, persons without a

national home were cosmopolitan, city people, rootless; they were

"modern," removed from the soil in body and soul and thus unclean,

suspicious, and possibly or even inherently subversive. Often, Jews

were the prism, their alleged traits were the traits of the negative

other par excellence. Any person or people, Semitic or not, deemed

to possess some or all of these traits were considered unreliable

at best. At worst they were considered deserving of persecution

or destruction.

 

Edward Said wrote that Islamophobia is a "secret sharer"

of anti-Semitism.9 Armenophobia was certainly also a "sharer"

of anti-Semitism, and it was hardly a secret: Anti-Semitism and

Armenophobia went hand in hand in the media and popular culture around

the turn of the century and for decades to come, often contrasted

with other, "nobler" peoples.10 For every villain there is a hero in

the classification game.

 

Examples of Western intellectual Armenophobia are legion and can be

found in major newspapers, periodicals, authoritative encyclopedias,

and publications from large, respected publishing houses. In 1900,

a major, authoritative Danish ethnographical volume briefly defined

Armenians as "an intelligent race," but--paraphrasing the classic

proverb, "One Greek cons two Jews, one Armenian cons two Greeks"

11--more greedy, cunning, and ruthless than Greeks and Jews,

"races" that, it is implied, were already plenty greedy, cunning,

and ruthless.12 Danish reporter Frantz von Jessen wrote during the

1903 uprising in Ottoman Macedonia that "all connoisseurs praise the

Turks at the expense of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews."13 Yet another

variation of the stereotype can be found in a book by Swedish officer

and war correspondent Spada (Johan Christian Janzon), Incursions

into the Orient. Here, Spada also contrasts in a typical fashion

what is described as the loud and cunning behavior of Greek, Jewish,

and Armenian merchants at a Constantinople bazaar with the dignified,

calm, and stoic composure of the Turkish merchants.14

 

Such views spread into educational materials, including a geography

textbook endorsed by the Danish Ministry of Culture,15 and they were

indeed quite common in the press as well from early on. In 1895,

in a leading Danish journal, it was stated that though there was no

excuse for the ongoing Abdulhamid massacres, and though the Western

Powers and Russia could reasonably demand that the empire avoided such

incidents in the future, it was equally reasonable and understandable

that "strict measures" were applied to suppress the Armenians:

 

A rebellious Armenian in the Ottoman Empire is quite the same as a

rebellious Hindu in British India; the Sultan cannot tolerate that

the orders of his officials are being challenged by such an ignorant

and restive people as the Armenians who are subjects in his Empire,

and when the Mohammedans are defending themselves in their own country

they are only exercising their right.16

 

This was a defense of empire and imperialism, wherever and

with few restrictions; a defense of Turks/Muslims as perhaps

brutal masters, but rightful masters nonetheless, pitted against

Armenians/Christians. They, in turn, were lowly, rebellious, cunning,

intelligent and/or primitive subjects (logical consistency is rarely

a hallmark of racist beliefs), a miserable people who brought their

misery upon themselves through protests or provocations; they were

alien usurpers with no rightful claim to influence or equality,

let alone power or land.

 

Armenophobia could also be an expression of a "scientific" racist

negative stereotype influenced by a certain branch of Marxist

thinking--the widespread variant of the comprador or "middleman" thesis

that brands groups like Jews, Greeks, and Armenians as parasitic,

bourgeois agents of international capitalism and imperialism,

preventing a certain "progressive" economic development in, for

example, the Ottoman Empire.17 For sure, very many merchants, etc.,

in the Ottoman Empire were Armenians, Jews, and Greeks, but this

fact alone hardly explains the outright hatred directed at these

groups. On April 30, 1909, on the front page of the official organ for

the Danish Social Democratic Party, Social-Demokraten, a background

article on Turkey, the Motley Empire, was printed following the Adana

massacres. The reality of the massacres was readily acknowledged,

but rather than seeing Armenians and other Ottoman Christians

as "virtuous victims," they were once again designated as cold,

calculating, dishonest business-minded people that belonged to an

economic class exploiting the "honest" and "easygoing" Turks.

 

There were variations of Armenophobia based on the primacy of the

environment, not biology, in determining human behavior. According to

such explanatory models, Armenians were not born, say, bloodsuckers

or "vagabond, ransacking, plundering invaders" as Mustafa Kemal

(Ataturk) characterized them in 1920.18 (They were in fact usually

not associated with such martial traits in the West until during

and after World War I, when actual or invented armed resistance and

"cultural machismo" became assets in the competition between would-be

nation states.) Armenians had rather developed their alleged negative

traits after centuries of oppression by the Turkish invaders,

but were now exploiting their proud but indolent masters.19 As

a former Serbian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire put it, "It is

said that in cunning and astuteness the Jews are innocent babes when

compared with the Armenians. Personally, I do not believe that that

has anything to do with the race, and probably it is the result of

the peculiar circumstances in which they live. Give them liberty,

give them the responsibility of a self-governing nation, give them

possibilities of higher culture, and the Armenians, in a couple of

generations, would prove to be a noble and generous, as well as a

highly intelligent race."20 Finally, some claimed that while the

Armenians encountered in the ports and bazaars of Constantinople and

Smyrna (Izmir) were notorious cheats and liars, Armenian peasants

were honest and laborious, uncorrupted by city life.21

 

U.S. historian and publisher William M. Sloane neatly summed up

some important basic assumptions shared by all the above Orientalist

persuasions in 1914:

 

It is no exaggeration to say that the passing generation had in its

youth little conception but that the homogeneity of nationality

with which they were familiar at home was to be found within the

territories represented by each of these dividing lines. If it was

England for the English and France for the French and so on, why not

Turkey for the Turks? Starting from this deep-seated conviction, a

few of the better educated and more intelligent read such delightful

books of travel in Turkey and the Orient as Byron and Kinglake had

rendered attractive and fashionable. Even from the perusal of them,

there survived a general impression that within the Ottoman Empire

there were ruling Turks who were Mohammedans and gentlemen; that

the aristocracy was fairly refined and likewise Mohammedan; and that

there was otherwise a huge plebeian mob separated in refinement and

culture from the rest by an impassable chasm.22

 

The beginnings of Armenophilia

 

While Armenophobia was arguably widespread among intellectuals,

it was hardly the "natural" unchallenged position in the West.

 

Pro-Armenian sentiments appear, in fact, to have been more common,

perhaps because support for the persecuted Armenians was not "negative"

or speculative like Armenophobia. It was a tangible "good cause" with

larger potential for mobilization, as many found it easy to sympathize

or even identify with the victim group, and it had broad appeal, as it

commonly transgressed otherwise rigid boundaries of religion, politics,

class, and gender. Whether based on notions of Christian solidarity,

human rights, or plain outrage, condemnation of the massacres was an

issue for feminists, conservatives, liberals, and school children,

Christians, Jews, pacifists, atheists, and military men, evolving into

a virtual counter-discourse to Armenophobia. Detailed information

on the massacres quickly became available and helped create this

situation, as in 1895 when a popular Norwegian journal with readers

and contributors from Denmark as well as Norway published a serialized

treatment of the massacres, their background, the Armenian Question

in general, and Europe's responsibility to protect the Ottoman

Armenians.23

 

"Europe" felt otherwise, but despite political inaction, the Ottoman

Armenians were not quickly forgotten. Papers and public figures raised

awareness of the atrocities, thereby laying part of the foundation

for the substantial missionary and relief work that lasted through

the Armenian Genocide and beyond. Missionaries and relief workers

were sent to the Ottoman Empire, thousands of "ordinary citizens" in

Scandinavia alone donated money for the cause or sponsored Armenian

orphans, while articles, pamphlets, and books on the subject kept

being published, including in Scandinavia: Swiss theologian Georges

Godet's Les souffrances de l'Arménie was translated for a Danish and

Norwegian audience in 1897, with the proceeds of the sale going to

"the miserable Armenians," and Edouard (Edward) Bernstein's speech on

the sufferings of the Armenians was published in several countries.24

In 1904, Johannes V. Jensen, a Danish author who received the Nobel

Prize in Literature in 1944, had an encounter with an Armenian massacre

survivor as one of the central scenes in his popular novel Madame

D'Ora, which was published simultaneously in Denmark and Norway.25

The Suffering Armenian had become a literary figure.

 

Partly as a reaction to Armenophobe stereotypes, pro-Armenians began

at the turn of the century to introduce what became a recurring

theme of depicting Armenians as a persecuted people that not only

deserved sympathy, but respect for their virtues and accomplishments,

whether acquired or "natural." In missionary circles there was much

Armenophobia, especially early on, but it was often stated outright

that, by sticking to their faith through centuries of oppression and

persecution, culminating with the genocide, Armenians had become

virtuous by redeeming themselves and their "petrified" Apostolic

Christianity. They had become the "martyred people," a people to

be admired and respected as "keepers of the faith," even if they

remained alien, "Oriental," in the eyes of the Western beholder. Danish

relief worker Karen Jeppe, on the other hand, believed Armenians were

"naturally virtuous," and she consistently underlined in public what

she believed to be either Western or generally positive qualities

of Armenians--Christianity, work ethic, honesty, moral conduct,

willingness to sacrifice.26

 

In 1903, a Danish periodical published Armenian poems introduced

and translated by writer and feminist activist Inga Collin (from

1904 Inga Nalbandian, after her marriage to an Armenian scholar),

who later became an important figure in the international Armenophile

movement as well as the International Woman Suffrage Alliance well

into the 1920's. In her introduction, she stated that "awareness of

the limitless sufferings of the Armenian people has eventually been

thoroughly raised, it has in a manner of speaking become part of

today's culture; but awareness of the great spiritual value of this

mistreated people is completely lacking in this country."27 There

was an implicit, sometimes explicit, message from Collin, Jeppe,

and others to domestic and international audiences where many were

exposed to anti-Armenian articles, etc., and where many (but far

from all) believed that freedom from foreign rule or oppression was a

Western or white prerogative anyway. The message was that Armenians as

virtuous victims had the same rights to peace, prosperity, security,

self-rule, or independence as other "civilized peoples."

 

In the end, the Ottoman Armenians were destroyed by the Young Turk

dictatorship, partly to avoid giving Armenians exactly such rights,

while the survivors were persecuted by the Kemalists and abandoned

by Western governments. And in that sense Armenophobia, realpolitik,

or just plain indifference prevailed over pro-Armenian sentiments.

 

Furthermore, as the Armenian Question ceased being a media issue

in the 1920's, most intellectuals and ordinary citizens found new

worthy causes to fight for or donate money to. But while other

causes célèbres came and went, the most dedicated of the Western

missionaries, relief workers, and activists carried on their work

among the remnants of the Ottoman Armenians in exile--some, like

Danish missionary nurse Maria Jacobsen, almost until the Armenian

Question resurfaced once more in the 1960's.

 

Endnotes

 

1. Tomas Hammar, Sverige åt svenskarna. Invandringspolitik,

utlänningskontrol och asylrätt 1900-1932, Stockholm: Caslon Press

1964, p. 70.

 

2. Nordlands Avis, June 30, 1904; Ranens Tidende, July 12, 1911.

 

3. Hver 8. Dag, No. 41, 1902-1903, July 12, 1903, pp. 643-644.

 

4. See, e.g., G. W. Prothero, ed., Armenia and Kurdistan, no. 62 in the

series Handbooks Prepared under the Direction of the Historical Section

of the Foreign Office, London: H.M. Stationery Office 1920, p. 4.

 

5. Howard J. Booth, "Making the Case for Cross-Cultural Exchange:

Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana," in Charles Burdett and Derek

Duncan, eds., Cultural Encounters: European Travel Writing in the

1930s, Berghahn Books 2002, p. 163.

 

6. See, e.g., Alexander von Humboldt, A. v. Humboldts Reiser i

det Europæiske og Asiatiske Rusland, transl. by Hans Sødring,

Copenhagen: F. H. Eibes Forlag 1856, p. 231; Pierre Loti, Tyrkiske

Kvinder: Nutidsroman fra de tyrkiske Haremmer, transl. By Elisabeth

Gad, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1908, p. 15. For an early, relatively

positive appraisal of Ottoman Armenians, see P. Blom, Fra Ã~Xsterland,

Christiania: Alb. Cammermeyer 1875, pp. 71ff.

 

7. J. F. Fenger, "Erindringer fra et Ophold i Constantinopel i Aaret

1831," part II, Nordisk Kirke-Tidende, vol. 4, no. 37, Sept. 11,

1836, pp. 576-591.

 

8. Knut Hamsun, "Under Halvmaanen," in Stridende Liv: Skildringer

fra Vesten og Ã~Xsten, Gyldendal: Copenhagen and Kristiania [Oslo]

1905, pp. 204-206.

 

9. Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books 1978, pp. 27-28.

 

10. See, e.g., J. E. Rosberg, Bland alla slags Nationer under Himmelen

den Blå, Helsingfors: Söderström & Co. 1923, p. 197; Dr.

 

L. Sofer, "Armenier und Juden," Zeitschrift fur Demographie und

Statistik der Juden, no. 5, 1905, p. 65.

 

11. Stephen H. Astourian, "Modern Turkish Identity and the

Armenian Genocide: From Prejudice to Racist Nationalism," in Richard

G. Hovannisian, ed., Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian

Genocide, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press 1998, p.

 

30.

 

12. Kristian Bahnson, Etnografien fremstillet i dens Hovedtræk, vol.

 

II, Copenhagen: Det Nordiske Forlag 1900, pp. 357-358.

 

13. Frantz von Jessen, Mennesker Jeg Mødte, Gyldendal 1909, p. 84.

 

14. Spada, Ströftåg i Orienten, Stockholm: Oscar L. Lamms Förlag

1881, pp. 212-213. See also Vahagn Avedian, The Armenian Genocide

1915. From a Neutral Small State's Perspective: Sweden, unpublished

MA Thesis, Uppsala University 2008, p. 29.

 

15. Johannes Holst, Geografi med Billeder, 17. ed., 296,000-320,000

copies, Copenhagen 1914, p. 92.

 

16. Illustreret Tidende, no. 3, Oct 20, 1895, p. 34.

 

17. See Hilmar Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories:

The Construction of a Dominant Paradigm on Ottoman Armenians,

Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute 1997; Margaret Lavinia Anderson,

"'Down in Turkey, Far Away': Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres,

and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany," The Journal of Modern History,

vol. 79, March 2007, pp. 80-111; Mark Levene, "Port Jewry of Salonika:

Between Neo-colonialism and Nation-state," in David Cesarani, ed., Port

Jews: Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres,

1550-1950, London and Portland, OR.: Frank Cass 2002, pp. 135-36;

Ingrid Leyer Seeman, "A Turkish Proverb and Its Tradition," Haigazian

Armenological Review, vol. 28, 2008, pp. 391-405.

 

17. Fatma Ulgen, "Reading Mustafa Kemal Ataturk on the Armenian

genocide of 1915," Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 44, no. 4, 2010, p. 380.

 

18. Fra alle Lande, no. 2, 1876, pp. 47-49.

 

19. Chedo Mijatovich [Ä~Ledomilj MijatoviÄ~G], "The Problem of the

Near East. I. Sultan Abdul-Hamid. A Character Sketch," The Forthnightly

Review, no. CCCCLXXVIII, New Series, Oct. 1, 1906, p.

 

577.

 

20. Vatche Ghazarian, ed., Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: An

Anthology of Transformation, 13th-19th Centuries, Waltham, MA:

Mayreni Publishing, p. xxi; J. E. Rosberg: Jordens Länder och Folk:

Geografisk Handbok, vol. II, Stockholm: Bokförlaget Natur och Kultur

1926, p. 165.

 

21. William M. Sloane, The Balkans: A Laboratory of History, New York:

Eaton and Mains 1914, p. 23.

 

22. Mac Coll Malcom, "Til belysning af det armeniske spørgsmaal,"

in Gerhard Gran, publ., Samtiden. Populært tidsskrift for litteratur

og samfundsspørgsmaal, vol. 6, Bergen: John Griegs Forlag 1895,

pp. 318-336, 384-395.

 

23. E. Bernstein, Det Armeniske Folks Lidelser, Tale holdt i Berlin

d. 28 Juni 1902, Copenhagen: Jul. Gjellerups Boghandel 1902. German

version: Die Leiden des armenischen Volkes und die Pflichten Europas,

Berlin 1902. On Bernstein, see also Yair Auron, The Banality of

Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide, Transaction Publishers

2000, pp. 110-111.

 

24. Johannes V. Jensen, Madame D'Ora, Copenhagen and Kristiania

[Oslo]: Gyldendal 1904, pp. 28-29.

 

25. Matthias Bjørnlund, "Karen Jeppe, Aage Meyer Benedictsen and

the Ottoman Armenians: National Survival in Imperial and Colonial

Settings," Haigazian Armenological Review, vol. 28, 2008, pp.

 

9-44.

 

26. Dansk Tidsskrift, 1903, p. 764. Italics in original.