Tweet
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.
From: A. Papazian
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.
From: A. Papazian