Jewish Reflections on Our Genocide

It is a documented fact that the survivors of the Armenian Genocide, now practically extinct, have not spoken to their children about it. Their silence has been explained as an attempt to spare their progeny the trauma they themselves experienced, or as their inability to come to terms with the magnitude of the devastation they suffered. But they spoke about it freely among themselves, as if attempting to glean from each other an understanding of what happened to them.

Frozen with terror, I strained to hear every word they spoke. While simulating sleep, I clenched my teeth on my blanket to prevent them from chattering and thus betraying my awareness. I remember hearing accounts about fathers being tortured to death in front of their families, of women and children forced out by the ten thousands on one-way death marches into the Syrian desert of Der-Zor, of churches set on fire with hundreds of refuge-seeking innocents trapped inside, of my maternal grandfather Garabed Kupelian, a beloved pastor, killed with eighteen Christian leaders on their way to a church convention in the city of Adana.”

And now, decades later, this newly published book makes a thunderous landing on my desk. Hardly cracked open, it forces me to re-examine my understanding of the Armenian Genocide. Instead of the formal academic book review I was assigned to turn in, here are a few observations thrown together which I hope will motivate readers to grapple themselves with the story.

The Thirty-Year Genocide was written by a team of two Jewish professors at the Ben Gurion University in Israel for the purpose of transforming “how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.” At first thought, the available Armenian Genocide literature is so extensive that it does not seem that much can be added to its understanding. However, the reader quickly discovers that the thoroughness and the minute attention given to the research challenges traditional insights and breaks new ground in several areas of Genocide theory. It is generally agreed that the designation “Armenian Genocide” refers to the campaign of spasmodic destructive frenzy that caused the Ottoman government to decimate the Armenian population that had occupied the land of Anatolia long before the Turkish hordes from central Asia had invaded it during the eleventh century. This book makes a persuasive case for the proposition that the Genocide was not primarily a systematic program of ethnic cleansing aimed at eliminating the Armenian population in one massive strike under the rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid. More accurately, it unfolded in three stages that led to the horrors of extermination inspired by the anti-Christian jihadist expressions of religious fanaticism that found their fulfillment in the policies of Mustafa Kemal. The book chronicles the evidence that the Armenians in Turkey suffered a protracted agony of extinction that stretched over three decades which culminated with the ascent to power of the founder of the Turkish Republic.

By cleverly exploiting the disarray of his country’s government, Kemal, the victor of the battle of Gallipoli, was able to exploit to his own advantage the turmoil of his time to secure a position of dominant military and political power. I remember sitting in class during the 1940s in my Parisian public school where he was depicted with reverence as the iconic revolutionary hero who delivered the Turks from the colonial ambitions of the Great Powers to lead his people from backward medieval conditions into the magic and the wonders of the modern world. Again, this book comes to our help by providing the elements of a realistic profile for Kemal that depict him as a somber, calculating, perfidious opportunist who manipulated the jihad option to bring the thirty-year Genocide to a climactic conclusion that was extended to include the Christian Greek and Assyrian minorities, and that surpassed in cruelty and savagery what had already been inflicted on the Armenians.

The existence of the Armenian Missionary Association of America bears witness to the emergence of a missionary movement among churches and denominations a century or more ago. Once the task of nation-building had been achieved in the Western countries, the eyes of Christians, especially Protestants, turned beyond their home-shores toward the spiritual, educational and medical needs of peoples on all continents that were devoid of the Christian message. As a result, missionaries from America and Europe were already present and active in Turkey when the Armenian massacres began in 1894. The authors of our book have taken time to describe and carefully reference scores of stories of interventions by dedicated Christian foreigners who reached out to harassed Armenians as protectors, intercessors, conciliators, providers, rescuers, first-responders, caregivers, doctors, nurses, guardians of orphans, chroniclers and gravediggers. This witness to the self-sacrificing dedication of the apostles of mercy gains credibility in consideration of the fact that it is borne in this book by two objective non-Armenian and non-Christian distinguished Jewish scholars. As a matter of fact, some of the readers who are holding this book in their hands at this instant, whether they know it or not, owe their existence to the altruism of those heroes who have now passed away in anonymous obscurity—many of them buried in nameless graves in the faraway land where they served. The authors of the book are to be congratulated for this tribute to the missionaries, carriers of mercy caught in a monstrous nightmare of rampaging inhumanity.