Greeks, Armenians, And Jews

[DominO123]

Myths and Memories of the Nation by Anthony D. Smith; Oxford University Press, 1999

 

 

pp. 212-224

 

 

GREEKS, ARMENIANS, AND JEWS

 

The Jewish experience, then, has features that set it apart from those of other peoples. But, is the trajectory of the Jewish people in the modern era unique? Can we find other peoples with a rich sacred history and shared memories distilled in canonical texts and other writings; and who have similarly endured a millennial fate of dispersion in the hope of restoration?

 

There are a number of peoples who can boast a rich sacred history and memories enshrined in canonical texts and liturgies. They include the Orthodox Russians, the Ulster-Scots, the Afrikaners, the Muslim Arabs, the Monophysite Amhara and the Catholic Irish. Here we have not only chosen peoples, but peoples with a highly developed and sacred documentary record of their ideals and experiences. Only within the monotheistic traditions can we find that exclusive and strong conception of chosenness, whereby a people of clear ancestral descent is covenanted with its God in a sacred homeland for the fulfilment of its moral duties and hence the salvation of the world. 19

 

Yet even here all these peoples have remained rooted in their sacred homelands for centuries. Though oppressed and colonized by outsiders, they have never been expelled en masse, and so the theme of restoration to the homeland has played little part in the conceptions of these peoples. There are, however, two peoples, apart from the Jews, for whom restoration of the homeland and commonwealth have been central: the Greeks and the Armenians, and together with the Jews, they constitute the archetypal diaspora peoples, or what John Armstrong has called 'mobilized diasporas.' 20

 

Unlike diasporas composed of recent immigrant workers--Indians, Chinese and others in Southeast Asia, East Africa and the Caribbean-mobilized diasporas are of considerable antiquity, are generally polyglot and multi-skilled trading communities and have ancient, portable religious traditions. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians claimed an ancient homeland and kingdom, looked back nostalgically to a golden age or ages of great kings, saints, sages and poets, yearned to return to ancient capitals with sacred sites and buildings, took with them wherever they went their ancient scriptures, sacred scripts and separate liturgies, founded in every city congregations with churches, clergy and religious schools, traded across the Middle East and Europe using the networks of enclaves of their co-religionists to compete with other ethnic trading networks, and used their wealth, education and economic skills to offset their political powerlessness. 21

 

But the parallels go further. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians after their subordination to others and emigration or expulsion from their original homelands, became diaspora ethno-religious communities cultivating the particular virtues and aptitudes of their traditions. These included a respect for scholarship and learning, derived from constant study of sacred texts (and in the Greek case some of their ancient secular texts seen through religious filters); and hence a generally high status accorded to religious scholars and clergy within each enclave. Allied to this was a marked aptitude for literary expression--poetic, philosophical, legal, liturgical, linguistic, and historical.

 

The resulting fund of documentary records encoding shared memories and interpretations increased in practically every generation, enriching the ethno-heritage of these communities. The rise of diaspora communities in many lands further augmented that heritage through the growing emphasis on the autonomy of each community within a common ethnoreligious framework. Institutionally, that autonomy was greatest in the Jewish case, where it was reinforced by the autonomy accorded to each rabbi and congregation: in the Armenian case, there was a greater hierarchy of priests; while in the Greek case, the Patriarchate in Constantinople and the higher clergy exercised a tighter supervision over the lower clergy in each congregation, at least in theory. 22

 

There were also more specific links between the three ethno-religious diaspora communities. In Greek Orthodoxy, the Church became the new Israel, and the Emperor a Priest-King after the manner of Melchizedek, King of Salem. His capital, imperial Constantinople, was the new Jerusalem, with its 'temple' in Hagia Sophia, while Greek, the language of the New Testament, became the sacred language of a holy Orthodox community, in place of Hebrew and the Jews. At the same time, Greeks emigrated to many cities throughout Europe and the Levant, especially after the fall of Constantinople, becoming as polyglot and culturally adaptable as the Armenians and Jews. In many Mediterranean and European cities, Greek Phanariot merchants and traders dominated the commerce of the Ottoman empire, utilizing their kinship networks and social and religious institutions to maximize not only their business and assets, but also their cultural capital. Diaspora Greeks became especially prominent from the eighteenth century in the development of printing and the press, and experienced a major intellectual revival in cities as far afield as Vienna, Venice, Odessa, Paris, and Amsterdam. 23

 

Armenians had even closer links with the Jews. The Armenian royal family had converted early to Christianity, claiming thenceforth to be the first Christian nation and the true heir of Israel. Armenians came to regard themselves as a chosen people, their kings and Bagratid nobles claimed Jewish descent, and their models of heroism were drawn from the Jews, notably Joshua and Judas Maccabeus. Like the Jews, Armenians lost their ancient kingdom on the field of battle (Avarayr, 451 CE) and were increasingly persecuted under the late Byzantine emperors after the final split with Greek Orthodoxy at the second Council of Dvin in 554 CE; many Armenians began to emigrate in this period and subsequently under the Muslim Arabs, some as far afield as Russia and India. Like the Jews, they yearned to return to their idealized mountain homeland with its revered sacred centre, Echmiadzin, and its holy mountain, Ararat; but more and more of them made their fortunes in distant communities as traders and artisans, and experienced both an economic and intellectual revival in the early modern period. 24

 

In each case, the concept of chosenness played a central role. For Greeks and Armenians, the myth of ethnic election was both direct and transmitted. It was an act of God who had singled out a special community of His faithful to live according to His holy laws and receive His special blessings, the blessings being conditional on the holding of correct beliefs and the performance of sacred obligations. As with the Jews, the overriding purpose was to become a holy people beloved of God, a people of priests worthy of the status and location which God had bestowed on the community. But, unlike the Jews, Armenians and Greeks saw their election as a reward for receiving the true faith rejected by the Jews. They were therefore required to supplant the Jews as the chosen people, and become the heirs of a people who had fallen from grace. In this sense, the chosen status of Greeks and Armenians was a legacy from the Jewish people, and only much later did the Orthodox community of true believers become imbued with Greek culture and a sense of Greek-speaking community. Though Orthodoxy never relinquished its religious universalism, by the late Byzantine empire the ideal of true faith and the myth of chosenness was increasingly vested in the Greek-speaking community, and to the outside world Orthodoxy became synonymous with Greek culture and origins. In the Armenian case, Gregorian Christianity was soon regarded as the peculiar possession of the Armenian kingdom and people, despite attempts to convert others to Gregorianism, with the result that the status of a chosen people was automatically conferred on the Armenian nation. 25

 

 

TRAUMA AND THE 'GOLDEN AGE'

 

But there was also another myth that provided the ground for the revolution of diaspora nationalism: the myth of a 'golden age' Myths of this kind can be found among many peoples, and sometimes they merge with recorded historical memories. For the classical authors, the golden age was set among the legendary Hyperboreans beyond the confines of the known world, at its outermost northern rim. For Confucian Chinese and Hindu Indians, it was set in the classical era of warring city-states, the age of saints and sages and warrior kings in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Similarly, the Book of Kings (the Shahnameh) of Firdausi looked back to the golden age of Chosroes and the Sassanid Persian emperors. In each case, an epoch is idealized through a mixture of fact and fantasy. Great personalities and events which have a foundation in documented fact are brought together and their stories are embellished and exaggerated, while the darker elements of the age are glossed over or purged away. In Jewish memory, the Davidic and Solomonic kingdom possessed a similar appeal; its heroes were magnified, their exploits continually recounted, its temple held up as the religious ideal, its literature treated as canonical. The religious interpretation and popular imagination have excised the hardships, corruption and exploitation of the united Israelite kingdom, though the original texts themselves are unsparing in their condemnations. Alternatively, the era of the great rabbis and Sanhedrin of Palestinian Galilee in the second and third centuries has come to possess all the elements of a golden age, its wisdom, virtue, heroism and autonomy. For Greeks and Armenians, the golden ages were located in their independent empire and kingdom: in the great ages of Byzantium, under Justinian, Heraclius, Basil, and others, ruling a mighty empire from the sacred city of Constantine; or in the great epochs of the Armenian kingdom, under Tigranes the Great (95-55 BCE), the Arsacid kings in the third and fourth centuries, and later under the Bagratids in the ninth century. 26

 

The myth of the golden age long antedates the modern era. It is part of the shared memories of the community and may function as its mythomoteur, the myth that is constitutive of its polity. This was very much the case for the later Greek and Armenian millets under Ottoman rule. However, even when it becomes part of the constitutive myth, other myths and memories may be equally important. In the Jewish case, and this marks it out from the two other cases, another myth is more central: the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation on Mount Sinai. The link between the Jewish liberation myth and the memories of a golden age is twofold: on the one hand, through the belief in a chosen people covenanted to its God, and on the other hand, in the location of myths and memories within or in relation to the Holy Land. The Abrahamic and Mosaic election myth sets out God's promise of fulfilment in the holy land, the liberation Exodus myth points the way towards the holy land, and the Davidic golden age kingdom becomes its first fulfilment in the holy land. Enter the orbit of just one of those myths, share in only one of these collective memories, and the logic of their relationship points forward, under propitious circumstances, to a second fulfilment. 27

 

What are those circumstances? There are two kinds of fertilizing conditions for the working out of the inner springs of communal memory and myth. The first is negative, the experience of catastrophe and trauma, sudden or prolonged or both. The second is positive, the provision of channels and vehicles of collective action. The modern epoch provided both, but did so in the case of diaspora peoples within a received framework of meaning which 'made sense' of the new conditions.

 

Let me start with the Greeks and their sense of trauma. For the Greek Orthodox community, the catastrophe came in 1453. The fall of Constantinople spelt the end of the universal Byzantine empire and the leading role of Orthodox Greek-speakers and Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean. It also entailed a sense of Greek Orthodox captivity, the Tourkokratia, which weighed down the Greek spirit and enchained the true faith. Reduced to one of several millets in the Ottoman empire, the Greek-speaking Orthodox community under its Patriarch yearned for the end of Muslim rule and the restoration of the Byzantine empire. Yet, though they might call themselves Romaioi, the educated Greek-speaking Orthodox classes were increasingly imbued with Greek culture (including classical secular culture) and with hostility to Ottoman Muslims (and Latin Christians). In the Greek War of Independence, a majority of rebels fought (insofar as they fought for any ideal) for the restoration of the Orthodox Byzantine empire and the return to Constantinople, but an articulate minority of intellectuals and traders looked further back to Periclean Athens for their inspiration in creating a modern westernized national state. Here too it was a case of restoration. But the restoration in question was also a regeneration from social and economic backwardness through a moral revolution of secular education in enlightened classicism. This was the message of Katartzis, Rhigos Pheraios, Adamantios Korais and other diaspora Greek intellectuals, though it took until 1922, the year of further disaster at the hands of a militant Turkish state, to translate that message into the dominant policy of the Greek state. 28

 

In the Armenian case, the disaster was more generalized. It took the form of dispossession of the homeland, first on the battlefield of Avarayr when the Arsacid kingdom was destroyed--commemorated annually (on 2 June) to this day, along with the Armenian commander, Vardan Mamikonian--then through the loss of the Bagratuni kingdom and the principality of Cilicia and the resulting expulsions of Armenians, through the Ottoman conquest to the great massacres of 1895-96 in Constantinople under Sultan Abdul Hamid and finally the attempted genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire engineered by the Young Turk regime in 1915. The ensuing division of Armenia, with only one part obtaining independence, and the current struggle over Nagorno-Artsax, suggests the achievement of only a partial restoration, one that would hardly satisfy the various Armenian nationalist parties of the late nineteenth century, or fully assuage the sense of both recent and millennial trauma. 29

 

That sense of trauma is particularly acute and well-documented among the Jews. Indeed, history as martyrology became a common mode of presentation of the Jewish experience, according well with the way in which each new disaster was placed within a religious framework of meaning which could be traced back to the ancient prophetic responses to national catastrophe. The idea that collective disaster is the direct outcome of collective sin, of the violation by the people of the covenant, of their failure to live up to the obligations which that covenant required, continued to explain and legitimize God's harsh judgements, at least until the Emancipation led to an increasing rejection of the religious framework itself. Even then the sense of guilt lingered on to undermine the secular confidence of Jewish enlighteners ( Maskilim), as each hammer-blow of religious and racial persecution destroyed the initial messianic optimism with which they greeted the age of assimilation. The pogroms of 1881, which are usually taken to mark the birth of Zionism in the shape of the First Aliyah, the publication of Leo Pinsker's seminal booklet, Auto-emancipation ( 1882), and the foundation of the Hovevei Zion movement, were really only one of a series of increasingly severe reminders of the failure of non-Jewish society to accept the Jews socially, while according them legal equality and political freedoms. 30

 

In fact, the first stirrings of Jewish nationalism and Zionism occurred some years earlier, in the writings of Rabbis Alkalai and Kalischer, Moses Hess and Peretz Smolenskin during the 1850s-70s. They were moved both by specific catastrophes, such as the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840 and the new political anti-semitism in Central Europe, as well as by the new channels, resources and examples all around them. Of these, the most important was the ideology and movement of nationalism itself. From at least the 1810s the ideology and language of nationalism was disseminated across Europe, and in 1848 nationalist movements began to demonstrate their potential. The unification of Italy and Germany by 1870 further revealed the power inherent in the national ideal. Yet it would be a mistake to see the rise of Greek, Armenian, and Jewish nationalisms from the 1800s to the 1880s as mere reactions to these threats or as somehow deriving from the nationalisms of the great powers. Certainly, diaspora nationalists learned from them strategies and methods of resistance and drew comfort and inspiration from their success. But the growth of diaspora nationalisms does not simply follow on from these pressures or from other, better-known movements. Externally, one must rather look to the factors of urbanization, commerce and secular education to supply the social basis of diaspora, as of other nationalisms, and to imperial attempts to modernize their domains and divide their subject peoples, to account for the timing of these nationalist movements. Among Jews, growing alienation of the urbanized intelligentsia at the failure of Alexander II's reforms in the Romanov Empire, coupled with considerable expansion of secular education and assimilation among Russian Jews, prepared the ground for the reception of both the diaspora autonomism of Simon Dubnow, and the Zionism of Hovevei Zion. 31

 

Trauma involves not only a sense of loss and dispossession, but also of betrayal. The Greeks and Armenians felt not only a sense of collective bereavement, of reduction to passive subject status, but also betrayed by their own Christian kinsmen, who failed to deliver them from Islam, the Ottoman yoke and captivity or genocide. In the case of the Jews, these feelings of exile, bereavement and impotence which had been assimilated into the religious framework and given ritual expression, were subsequently inflamed by the betrayal by the civilized West which had promised the Jews legal equality, only to render it hollow by social and cultural prejudice and finally by the silence of indifference in the hour of extermination. This is what the Russian Jewish intellectuals felt when confronted by the relative indifference of their Russian counterparts to the horrors of the pogroms of 1881; and this of course is what the great mass of Jews came to feel when they grasped the full extent of the Holocaust and the failure of the West to undertake preventive action. 32

 

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that either trauma or socio-economic changes or political penetration, let alone the example of other nationalisms, dictated the course of modern Jewish nationalisms. We know all too well the genuine differences in goals and means between cultural and political Zionists, revisionists and minimalists, let alone between Zionism and its rivals, territorial nationalism and diaspora autonomism (or even Bundism). All of these, except perhaps Bundism, derived their concepts and ideals from the diaspora situation of the Jewish people, and from the variety and powerlessness of its separate enclave communities. But Zionism was able to draw on something more. To the comparative, sociological and political analysis of the others, it could add a much deeper understanding, in historical and cultural-religious terms, of the experience of the Jewish people. In this respect, territorial nationalism was at a disadvantage. True, it accorded with the spirit of the modern era in grasping the centrality of the national state, and arguing that the Jews must become like any nation and so acquire both a territory of their own and a sovereign state. But what was 'their own'? The territorialists forgot that nationalism is also a doctrine of authenticity. Nationalists do not seek to acquire any territory. They want their 'homeland' that is, an historic territory which their people can feel is theirs by virtue of a convincing claim of possession and efflorescence sometime in the past. In the case of the Jews, this conviction was provided, and accepted by the vast majority of the people, by the documentary title-deed of the Bible. In an opposite way, diaspora autonomism was also always at a disadvantage. In a world of compact, exclusive and competing national states, minority autonomy was ultimately a matter of sufferance, not right. Dubnow was correct in claiming that the Jews had in the medieval past enjoyed communal autonomy and had fashioned vital cultures in their many diaspora centres. Unfortunately, the modern world of national states was unable to tolerate millets. His hope that the Jewish diaspora enclaves could now combine autonomy with equality within a concert of civilized national states was always likely to be utopian even for well-intentioned regimes in stable and democratic states. 33

 

Dubnow may have been politically naive in the context of mid- twentieth centuryEurope but he was right about the culture-bearing potential of diaspora ethnies. The question is whether such cultures can flourish in the modern epoch without a national centre in a homeland. In the absence of a sovereign homeland, can a diaspora long survive and bear cultural fruit? Blacks, Chinese, Indians, Irish, Lebanese have felt the need for sovereign homelands in a world of nation-states, even when they proved unable to provide material assistance. So have the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. Their diasporas continue to prove culturally fertile in a triangular relationship with the national centre and the host society. But in each case, the necessary condition was the acquisition of a national centre in the homeland, and preferably a sovereign one, and this was one reason for the triumph of Zionism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES:

 

 

19. There are parallels outside the monotheistic traditions--notably the Persian Shi'ites, the Buddhist Sinhalese and the Punjabi Sikhs--but they lack the strenuous covenantal character of the monotheistic cases; cf. Akenson, God's Peoples.

 

20. John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, 1982. Partial exceptions are furnished by the Irish diaspora, occasioned by the great potato famine of 1845, and the Afrikaner trekkers who escaped British rule by moving into Natal and the Orange Free State after 1835.

 

21. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism; Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States, London, 1977, ch. 10.

 

22. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, ch. 7; K. V. Sarkissian, "'The Armenian Church'", in A. J. Arberry (ed.): Religion in the Middle East: Three Religions in Concord and Conflict, vol. 1: Judaism and Christianity, Cambridge, 1969; C. A. Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821-52, Cambridge, 1969.

 

23. N. H. Baynes, and St. H. L. B. Moss (eds.), Byzantium: an Introduction to East Roman Civilization, Oxford, 1969, pp. 119-27; Cyril Mango, "'The Phanariots and Byzantine Tradition'", in Richard Clogg (ed.), The Greek Struggle for Independence, London, 1973; Paschalis Kitromilides, "'The Dialectic of Intolerance: Ideological Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict"', Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, vol. 6, no. 4 ( 1979), pp. 5-30; Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, pp. 176-81.

 

24. K. S. Atiyah, A History of Eastern Christianity, London, 1968, pp. 315-56; David Lang , Armenia, Cradle of Civilization, London, 1980, ch. 8; Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, ch. 7.

 

25. Of course, there are many differences between the three ethno-religious diaspora peoples, notably the number of co-ethnics residing inside the homeland for most of the period of exile and the geopolitical location of those homelands in relation to powerful overlords and neighbours. But for our purposes these are secondary to the factors that have made the popular ideal of spiritual redemption and political restoration so central to their destinies. Cf. Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West, London, 1959; Atiyah, A History of Eastern Christianity, pp. 315-28; Lang, Armenia; Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, ch. 7.

 

26. For the ideals of Jewish golden ages, see Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, Introduction; and I. Eisenstein-Barzilay, "'National and Anti-National Trends in the Berlin Haskalah'", Jewish Social Studies, vol. 21 ( 1959), pp. 165-92. For Greek Byzantinism, see John Campbell and Philip Sherrard, Modern Greece, London, 1968, ch. 1. For Armenian golden ages, see David Lang, The Armenians, A People in Exile, London, 1982.

 

27. Irving Zeitlin, Ancient Judaism, Cambridge, 1984, ch. 3; Grosby, "'Religion and Nationality'"; Akenson, God's Peoples, Part I.

 

28. See Campbell and Sherrard, Modern Greece, ch. 1; Baynes and Moss, Byzantium, pp. 43-4, 119-27; C. Koumarianou, "'The Contribution of the Greek Intelligentsia towards the Greek Independence Movement'", in Richard Clogg (ed.), The Struggle for Greek Independence, London, 1973; Paschalis Kitromilides , "'Imagined Communities and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans'", European History Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2 ( 1989), pp. 149-92.

 

29. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: the Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley 1963, Richard Hovannisian, Armenia: The Road to Independence, Berkeley, 1967; Christopher Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation, London, 1980; Lang, Armenia, chs. 7-8 and his The Armenians.

 

30. Leo Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation, New York, 1948; Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, Introduction; Vital, The Origins of Zionism.

 

31. Baron Salo, The Russian Jew under Czars and Soviets, New York, 1964, especially Chs. 9-10; Louis Greenberg, The Jews of Russia, 2 vol., New York, 1976.

 

32. Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, Introduction; David Aberbach, Trauma, Loss and Bereavement, London, 1993; Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, Oxford, 1994.

 

33. On Dubnow and his diaspora nationalism, see his essays edited and introduced in Koppel Pinson, Nationalism and History, Philadelphia, 1958.

Edited July 27, 2003 by Fadix

[pyrheraklit]

I don't think the concept of choseness was ever dominant in Greeks. One thing common in Greeks of all eras, thing which could in a way justify the otherwise mythical continuity of Greek people through time, is their openess to other cultures. This was their big advantage and big disadvantage at the same time, depending on their power condition. Greeks in diaspora are assimilated with the local culture after 3rd generation, in sharp contrast with, say, muslims or jews.

 

Universalism is a main characteristic of Orthodoxy not a marginal one. Autonomy of the various national orthodox churches is a clear example. It's sure the Patriarchate was always Greek, but compared to Roman Catholics and Popes, never had a serious and concrete political role. To be specific, the role of Patriarchate and religion authorities in the greek war of independence was at least controversial.

 

Concerning historical analysis, differences almost always are more significant than similarities. Truth lies in differences, similarities are often dangerous being reassuring.

[DominO123]

Thanks for your comment, but I had no opinion on the article I posted, I as well didn't knew this thing about "choseness"of the Greeks.

[gamavor]

Never heard before about any choosiness among Armenians with regard to God. Each ethnicity suffers from certain level of self-liking-ness. Armenians are not exception. As to the Greeks I can attest to their openness.

[KnightOfArmenia]

I don't think the concept of choseness was ever dominant in Greeks. One thing common in Greeks of all eras, thing which could in a way justify the otherwise mythical continuity of Greek people through time, is their openess to other cultures. This was their big advantage and big disadvantage at the same time, depending on their power condition.

That is, actually, not true at all; Greeks wouldn't even accept other Greeks that weren't of the same city-state; the only way to become a citizen was to be born in that city and be the son/daughter of two citizens yourself (Pericles was the greatest Athenian leader in history, and is revered to this day; his son, however, was not a citizen, because he married a woman that was not an Athenian).

 

They were the same throughout the Roman days, when they looked down their noses at the Romans who had conquered them.