JAMES R. RUSSELL
Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA, USA
Address to the Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 26 April 2009
INTRO NOTE BY THE EDITOR: This moving address by the Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University was delivered at the Annual Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide which is conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The commemoration takes place in a context where for many years the Israeli government has failed to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and at times even has taken an intellectually aggressive position that no genocide was committed and the event in no way can be compared to the Holocaust of the Jewish people. There is therefore a further significance of the commemorative event at the Hebrew University as a meaningful statement of Israeli society's opposition to its government's policy of realpolitik collaboration with Turkish denial.
Memory is essential to full and healthy human nature. In his book,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the neurologist Oliver Sacks presents the heartbreaking portrait of a man whose faculty of remembering is so severely damaged that every few minutes he must be reminded of where he is, what he is doing, and who is with him. He cannot plan or put in perspective his experiences or form judgments about their value: his activity as a human being can have no real mental basis. At the other extreme those who remember absolutely everything equally and indiscriminately, like the fictional Funes the Memorious of Jorge Luis Borges, or Dr. Alexander Luria’s patient the mnemonist in Moscow, are equally incapacitated. So for memory to serve its proper purpose in life we seem also to need oblivion: forgetting is the necessary filter of the intellect. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has proposed a model for dealing with the ethical problem of what must be remembered and what is allowed to be forgotten, in the terms of thick and thin strands of relationship that impose commensurate burdens of responsibility. Thus, remembering the name of someone one has met at a party may be a very thin social strand, but knowing the full names of one’s parents is a thick cable of relationship. However the importance— the thickness— of the connection is not defined by proximity or blood relationship: if you see that stranger you met at a party being led off on a death march or herded into a cattle car to a concentration camp, the bond that connects you to this man whose name you do not recall is that of morality itself, the law of human compassion and solidarity. T he law is not just “That could be me so I have to intervene,” but also “Doing that to him means doing it to everyone, everywhere, forever,” since the crime compromises the definition of a man. Some kinds of crime were original to the 20th century and needed definition themselves: a Polish Jewish lawyer named Rafael Lemkin invented the term “genocide” in 1944 with reference to the mass murder of the Armenians in the first World War and of the Jews in the Second, in order to identify in law an unprecedented kind of murder. But whether my moral responsibility is to keep the blood of a single innocent from being shed— and Jewish law demands I do this whatever the risk to my own life— or to resist the racialist program of a government to exterminate an entire people, I still have recourse to memory, not of an event or of kinship but of the commandment, the a priori imperative “Thou shalt not kill.” Human moral memory is thus associative and involves both ideas and data: abstract principles order our recollection and perception of real events.
This idea is essential to the Jewish and Christian conceptions of the universe and its meaning. Our imperative Zakhor! Remember! implies both concrete history, from the creation of the world, the binding of Isaac, the exodus from Egyptian slavery and the journey to this land, all the way to the Holocaust and the restoration of the freedom of Israel, and the working out of a covenantal relationship based upon the ties of love and of the Torah. Zikhronot, Shofrot, Malkhuyot: the three great divisions of the prayers of Rosh Hashana. C hristians re-enact in ritual and in the calendar the same events and their recapitulation and resolution in the single life of Christ, from His Nativity and mission to His enslavement and humiliation on the Cross to His victorious Resurrection. We imagine the angel seated on the stone, maybe the same one who stayed Abraham’s hand and betrayed his haste and anxiety then in words that depart from the laconic spareness of Biblical style. Now the angel attempts irony or hauteur and says to the holy women, Why do you seek the living amongst the dead? And then his voice breaks at last, as for the very first time in history he declares, He is risen. The Armenian word for the Gospel, Avetaran, may mean simply “Recollection” and contain the Middle Iranian word ayad, “memory”, found in the formal narratives of the Avestan heroes, the ayadgars of Zarer or Jamasp; and indeed a segment of the Georgian liturgy, the iadgari, contains a slightly later form of this very word. The purpose of this sanctified memory is emulation: Let every man see himself as though he had gone forth from Egypt; or, Let every man’s life be an imitatio Christi. See yourself as a slave. See yourself crucified. Then you know who the man or woman is in the death march or the transport. We have these lines, spare as Scripture, by the modern Hebrew poet Dan Pagis, that telescope in this way the archetypal event of murder into the new archetype, the unprecedented horror:
On the eve of Yom ha-Shoah, on Hitler’s birthday— the day chosen for the Oklahoma City bombing and later for the Columbine school massacre— the president of Switzerland and the United Nations welcomed to Geneva the latest incarnation of Nazism, the chief of state of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The latter has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, and while thus committing the prima facie crime of incitement to genocide also has denied, and at the UN denied yet again, the historicity of the Holocaust. The great lie, the refusal to shoulder both historical memory and the moral responsibility inseparable from it that are together the markers of our finer nature and mainstay of the great faiths, here is seen for all it means: it is the way to the lost people, the way of those who have lost the good of the intellect, it is the gateway at which one leaves hope behind, it is the path into hell. Madmen and scoundrels deny the Holocaust; but it is not only the guilty successor state to the Ottoman Empire that flees from recognition of the Armenian Genocide and the consequent repentance and restitution moral memory demands. The government of the United States and other countries anxious to retain an alliance with Turkey at any cost, deny it too. But this violation of historical memory extends not only to the events of 1915 in Anatolia but to our own history. The leaders of Nili in the Yishuv in the Land of Israel knew about those events and confronted a similar Ottoman policy arrested only by the arrival of Allied forces. In Arthur Koestler’s novel of life on kibbutz Heftsiba, Thieves in the Night, the halutsim refer casually to the Armenian genocide as the prototype of what is in store for us if we fail in our self-defense. On the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Werfel published his novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, about an episode of successful Armenian armed resistance to the Genocide. The Nazis banned the book and Werfel fled to America. On the eve of the war Hitler infamously assured his generals they would not be punished for the atrocities to come, for “Who remembers the Armenians?” But some did: when it looked as though the Germans might push through Egypt and get here, a last stand was planned on Mount Carmel along the lines of Musa Dagh. After the war, an American Armenian named Avedis Derounian went to cover our War of Independence. He had published in 1942 under the assumed name of John Roy Carlson a bestseller Under Cover, an expose of Fascist organizations in the US. His new book, From Cairo to Damascus, published in 1950, predicts that a radical Islamic incarnation of fascism will prove far more deadly a threat to democratic societies than Communism; and praises the new State of Israel as a vision of what a free Armenia may someday be like. Recognition means in the strict sense coming to know something one has known before and forgotten: for most of the time since it happened, Jews have not just known of the Armenian Genocide but have acted in important and beneficial ways from that knowledge. Momentary and immoral oblivion has closed off to us in fact vital and nuanced aspects of the understanding of the most fateful century of our history.
I have spoken hitherto of the faculty of memory and oblivion as it relates to decent people, thinkers about philosophy and morality, and simply the innocent victims of murder. It seems fairly clear that the failure of human society actively to remember history and the values by which one lives through history has enabled mass murders to proliferate with an arithmetical frequency. Since the Second World War, we have witnessed genocidal murder in Biafra, Cambodia, the Sudan over four decades, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. In no case has there been effective international intervention, any more than there was specific Allied military action to stop the Holocaust. The destruction by Azerbaijan of the Armenian communities of Sumgait and Baku and the subsequent blockade by Turkey of the Republic of Armenia must be seen as policies genocidal in intent that have not come to complete fruition only because the Armenian nation has at last struck back successfully and hard against its oppressors, even as our country has against Arab aggression. So for all the resolutions against genocide, the studies and definitions and conventions, the fact is that nothing has changed since 1915 or 1939: the only remedy is for the intended victim to have a gun in his hand. Another point that must be made here is a crucial insight of Professor Yehuda Bauer: to the victim of such mass murder it does not matter whether the mode of death is a Rwandan machete, a Turkish yatagan, or a German machine gun. The terror, pain, suffering, humiliation are the same. So it is not only that we as humans are no safer than our Armenian and Jewish grandparents or great-grandparents. What happened to them, their dehumanization and death, is happening to somebody else, just as horribly, right now. And as long as power politics control memory and thwart the moral imperative, none of that will change.
So, having considered the victims, how do the perpetrators see these matters? What makes it possible for them to do what they do? Very briefly, it would seem that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the tools of linguistic and then biological science were perverted to the use of ideologies that elevated into a kind of life-and-death issue a social dichotomy that has long existed in human affairs. In his recent book, The Jewish Century, the historian Yuri Slezkine perceives in developed societies ethnic and religious groups definable as either Apollonian or Mercurian. To the former category belong communities who identify themselves primarily with a particular land and line of descent— Blut und Boden— and adhere to related ideals, such as aristocratic hierarchy, athleticism, and military service. To the latter category, the one named after the Roman messenger god, belong Jews, Armenians, Overseas Chinese, and others whose role for whatever reason is trans-national and based on social and geographic mobility, mental agility, and the transfer of information and goods. Whereas in traditional society these groups, however necessary, are tolerated as inferiors, in the modern environment of industrialization, urbanization, and global trade they pose, or are perceived to pose, a threat to the dominance of a traumatized old order. The anxieties of that old order express themselves in nationalist ideologies that see Armenians and Jews as subversive, as decadent, as linguistically crude, as physically inferior, as Communists, as capitalists, as eternal outsiders to be feared and shunned, as insidious parvenus to be feared and shunned, and so on. This is how they saw us. And here is an example.
Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (in the interests of time I’ll call him just Max henceforth) was a Baltic German aristocrat from a landed noble family, a superb cavalryman and exemplary soldier in the Kaiser’s army. In World War I he served as German vice-consul at Erzurum, and was awarded the Iron Cross for his service. He disliked the Armenians: in his dispatches he calls them “Jews of the East”, “crafty merchants”, “unscrupulous”, and so on: all the code words of the distaste of the landed aristocrat Apollonian for the Mercurian who lives by his wits. However when the Genocide of the Armenians began in 1915, Max condemned it in his letters to his superiors as a policy based on “racial hatred” (his words) rather than military necessity. This is an important point: the policy of exterminating the Armenians was not so much part of wartime Ottoman policy as a project the conditions of war made easier than otherwise, but which in the end actually overrode and even contradicted the considerations of strategic advantage. Many Turkish observers also understood this mass killing as qualitatively different from the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890’s— for although this time too the slaughter was officially called jihad, none of the limitations hitherto imposed by Islamic law now applied. Nobody was protected as a noncombatant, a woman, or a child. The similarity of this situation to the Nazi Holocaust a quarter century in the future, could not be clearer. Max made heroic efforts to save Armenians— some whom he knew on his office staff, others, total strangers— from deportation and certain death.
The German diplomatic and military authorities in Turkey were generally unsympathetic to Max’s protests and overruled, ignored, or even forbade them. It is not that the Germans supported the extermination of their Christian co-religionists. And it was German scholars who had established not long before that the Armenian language was part of the same Indo-European family as German: the Armenians— and some pro-Nazi members of the community boasted of this in the 1930’s and 40’s and still do— were to be considered racially Aryan. Germany simply did not wish to alienate its ally in the war by interfering in what it regarded as an internal matter. At the end of the war Max returned to Europe and was briefly arrested during the abortive Communist revolution in Germany. Jews were prominent in the Russian, Hungarian, and German revolutions; and anti-Semites exaggerated that role to great benefit. Max was shocked by the collapse of the old order and felt the Jews were to blame: he met Hitler in 1920, became a leading member of the Nazi party, and was killed in the Munich putsch of 1923. After Hitler’s rise to power a decade later, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter was buried in a special tomb and commemorated as a hero-martyr to the cause. It is a disturbing story. We know that the future commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz had served in Turkey as a young recruit during the Armenian Genocide: perhaps he learnt the ideology and practice of modern mass murder then. But Max, who saw clearly the senselessness of the consuming hatred, the demonization of the Armenians by a Muslim society, was unable to translate that insight into the language of his own culture— to perceive the malign absurdity of anti-Semitism. Perhaps the hatred of Armenians, of Rwandan Tutsis, of Biafran Ibos, of Darfurians is local, while anti-Semitism is so deeply rooted in world culture, so perennial— Hannah Arendt prophesied that it would be the only ideology to survive the 20th century— that there has to be a different cure and associative memory is not enough.
That may be an explanation. It is not an excuse. After all, some of our own people who ought to know better from the experience of the Holocaust still deny the Armenian Genocide too, though such denial, as I have suggested, is a recent anomaly, a departure from the norm. The linkage of the memory of events, was eigentlich gewesen war, “that which actually happened”, to an ordering system of moral values, is a defining feature of true human nature. But with us, an awkward species of perpetual learners, nature and nurture are locked in a fateful dance. As in the case of von Scheubner-Richter, what ought to be natural often fails us and turns out to be something that really has to be taught and learnt. An elderly Arab gentleman on a Nazareth street once asked me what I did. “I’m a teacher,” I told him. “Then you must teach your students to love each other,” he said.
Now, at the outset I spoke of how oblivion is a necessary part of this art of moral memory: there are things that have to be forgotten, for people to carry on living. I know very well from shattering my leg in a recent and terrible motorcycle crash that not all the particulars of pain and disability should be recalled, to do so stalls one’s ability to recover. And some of the experience I thought I’d never forget, I’m mercifully beginning to here and there. But there are things I want to hang on to. The slogan of my generation, or one of them anyway, was that the personal is political. It grew out of the thought of Prof. Herbert Marcuse, a fellow student of Hannah Arendt’s whose New Left thought was a reaction in part against the dehumanizing abstractions and Nazi enthusiasm of his teacher Martin Heidegger. One pervasive emotion from the period of hospitalization and convalescence is particularly important: even though I was in the care of committed professionals and loving relatives and friends here in the only country where I feel fully enfranchised, the country I love beyond all others and want to make my home, despite all that, the fact that I was hopping feebly on crutches, fearful of the smallest stair or polished floor, unable to dress or shower or feed myself without help, while others walked boldly and freely and lived normally, made me feel humiliated and less than a man, less than human. It is a feeling worse than death and though I worked hard with a brilliant physical therapist (and still am), I felt the world was my enemy, life was a curse, and I wanted to die. We speak of the Armenian martyrs and the victims of the Shoah. We know the details of their deaths. But how did they feel as the Turks and the Germans deliberately, mockingly humiliated and hurt them, murdering their manhood before their bodies died? I have felt only a flicker of the flame of that hell and it has burnt me to a cinder. But maybe now I understand a little more and can teach and fight better, as a professor, as a caring person, as an Israeli.
So let us remember and honor the martyrs of the Armenian Genocide, not as strange figures of the past, but as our own, and do whatever it takes to stop genocidal killers and preachers of hatred right now. There can be no oblivion at all in this act of memory and moral responsibility. Nikto ne zabyt i nichto ne zabyto, “Nobody and nothing is forgotten!” insist the words of Olga Bergholtz on the monument to the victims of the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. May God not have mercy on us if we forget a thing. And in the name of the murdered, the innocent, the incorruptible, the immortal, please stand for the Armenian requiem prayer. I verinn Yerusaghem, i bnakarans hreshtakats, ur Yenovk yev Yeghias kan tseratsyal aghavnakerp, i drakhtin Yedemakan paytsarratsyal arzhanapes, voghormats Ter voghormya hogvotsn mer nnjetselots.
Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA, USA
Address to the Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, 26 April 2009
INTRO NOTE BY THE EDITOR: This moving address by the Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University was delivered at the Annual Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide which is conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The commemoration takes place in a context where for many years the Israeli government has failed to recognize the Armenian Genocide, and at times even has taken an intellectually aggressive position that no genocide was committed and the event in no way can be compared to the Holocaust of the Jewish people. There is therefore a further significance of the commemorative event at the Hebrew University as a meaningful statement of Israeli society's opposition to its government's policy of realpolitik collaboration with Turkish denial. Memory is essential to full and healthy human nature. In his book,The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the neurologist Oliver Sacks presents the heartbreaking portrait of a man whose faculty of remembering is so severely damaged that every few minutes he must be reminded of where he is, what he is doing, and who is with him. He cannot plan or put in perspective his experiences or form judgments about their value: his activity as a human being can have no real mental basis. At the other extreme those who remember absolutely everything equally and indiscriminately, like the fictional Funes the Memorious of Jorge Luis Borges, or Dr. Alexander Luria’s patient the mnemonist in Moscow, are equally incapacitated. So for memory to serve its proper purpose in life we seem also to need oblivion: forgetting is the necessary filter of the intellect. The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has proposed a model for dealing with the ethical problem of what must be remembered and what is allowed to be forgotten, in the terms of thick and thin strands of relationship that impose commensurate burdens of responsibility. Thus, remembering the name of someone one has met at a party may be a very thin social strand, but knowing the full names of one’s parents is a thick cable of relationship. However the importance— the thickness— of the connection is not defined by proximity or blood relationship: if you see that stranger you met at a party being led off on a death march or herded into a cattle car to a concentration camp, the bond that connects you to this man whose name you do not recall is that of morality itself, the law of human compassion and solidarity. T he law is not just “That could be me so I have to intervene,” but also “Doing that to him means doing it to everyone, everywhere, forever,” since the crime compromises the definition of a man. Some kinds of crime were original to the 20th century and needed definition themselves: a Polish Jewish lawyer named Rafael Lemkin invented the term “genocide” in 1944 with reference to the mass murder of the Armenians in the first World War and of the Jews in the Second, in order to identify in law an unprecedented kind of murder. But whether my moral responsibility is to keep the blood of a single innocent from being shed— and Jewish law demands I do this whatever the risk to my own life— or to resist the racialist program of a government to exterminate an entire people, I still have recourse to memory, not of an event or of kinship but of the commandment, the a priori imperative “Thou shalt not kill.” Human moral memory is thus associative and involves both ideas and data: abstract principles order our recollection and perception of real events.
This idea is essential to the Jewish and Christian conceptions of the universe and its meaning. Our imperative Zakhor! Remember! implies both concrete history, from the creation of the world, the binding of Isaac, the exodus from Egyptian slavery and the journey to this land, all the way to the Holocaust and the restoration of the freedom of Israel, and the working out of a covenantal relationship based upon the ties of love and of the Torah. Zikhronot, Shofrot, Malkhuyot: the three great divisions of the prayers of Rosh Hashana. C hristians re-enact in ritual and in the calendar the same events and their recapitulation and resolution in the single life of Christ, from His Nativity and mission to His enslavement and humiliation on the Cross to His victorious Resurrection. We imagine the angel seated on the stone, maybe the same one who stayed Abraham’s hand and betrayed his haste and anxiety then in words that depart from the laconic spareness of Biblical style. Now the angel attempts irony or hauteur and says to the holy women, Why do you seek the living amongst the dead? And then his voice breaks at last, as for the very first time in history he declares, He is risen. The Armenian word for the Gospel, Avetaran, may mean simply “Recollection” and contain the Middle Iranian word ayad, “memory”, found in the formal narratives of the Avestan heroes, the ayadgars of Zarer or Jamasp; and indeed a segment of the Georgian liturgy, the iadgari, contains a slightly later form of this very word. The purpose of this sanctified memory is emulation: Let every man see himself as though he had gone forth from Egypt; or, Let every man’s life be an imitatio Christi. See yourself as a slave. See yourself crucified. Then you know who the man or woman is in the death march or the transport. We have these lines, spare as Scripture, by the modern Hebrew poet Dan Pagis, that telescope in this way the archetypal event of murder into the new archetype, the unprecedented horror:
Katuv ba-iparon ba-karon ha-khatum.// Kan ba-mishloakh ha-zeh/ Ani Khava/ im Hevel beni/ im tir’u et bni ha-gadol/ Kayin ben Adam/ tagidu lo she-ani
“Written in pencil in the sealed cattle car.// Here in this transport/ I Eve/ with Abel my son/ if you see my elder son,/ Cain, son of Man,/ tell him that I”
On the eve of Yom ha-Shoah, on Hitler’s birthday— the day chosen for the Oklahoma City bombing and later for the Columbine school massacre— the president of Switzerland and the United Nations welcomed to Geneva the latest incarnation of Nazism, the chief of state of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The latter has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel, and while thus committing the prima facie crime of incitement to genocide also has denied, and at the UN denied yet again, the historicity of the Holocaust. The great lie, the refusal to shoulder both historical memory and the moral responsibility inseparable from it that are together the markers of our finer nature and mainstay of the great faiths, here is seen for all it means: it is the way to the lost people, the way of those who have lost the good of the intellect, it is the gateway at which one leaves hope behind, it is the path into hell. Madmen and scoundrels deny the Holocaust; but it is not only the guilty successor state to the Ottoman Empire that flees from recognition of the Armenian Genocide and the consequent repentance and restitution moral memory demands. The government of the United States and other countries anxious to retain an alliance with Turkey at any cost, deny it too. But this violation of historical memory extends not only to the events of 1915 in Anatolia but to our own history. The leaders of Nili in the Yishuv in the Land of Israel knew about those events and confronted a similar Ottoman policy arrested only by the arrival of Allied forces. In Arthur Koestler’s novel of life on kibbutz Heftsiba, Thieves in the Night, the halutsim refer casually to the Armenian genocide as the prototype of what is in store for us if we fail in our self-defense. On the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Werfel published his novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, about an episode of successful Armenian armed resistance to the Genocide. The Nazis banned the book and Werfel fled to America. On the eve of the war Hitler infamously assured his generals they would not be punished for the atrocities to come, for “Who remembers the Armenians?” But some did: when it looked as though the Germans might push through Egypt and get here, a last stand was planned on Mount Carmel along the lines of Musa Dagh. After the war, an American Armenian named Avedis Derounian went to cover our War of Independence. He had published in 1942 under the assumed name of John Roy Carlson a bestseller Under Cover, an expose of Fascist organizations in the US. His new book, From Cairo to Damascus, published in 1950, predicts that a radical Islamic incarnation of fascism will prove far more deadly a threat to democratic societies than Communism; and praises the new State of Israel as a vision of what a free Armenia may someday be like. Recognition means in the strict sense coming to know something one has known before and forgotten: for most of the time since it happened, Jews have not just known of the Armenian Genocide but have acted in important and beneficial ways from that knowledge. Momentary and immoral oblivion has closed off to us in fact vital and nuanced aspects of the understanding of the most fateful century of our history.
I have spoken hitherto of the faculty of memory and oblivion as it relates to decent people, thinkers about philosophy and morality, and simply the innocent victims of murder. It seems fairly clear that the failure of human society actively to remember history and the values by which one lives through history has enabled mass murders to proliferate with an arithmetical frequency. Since the Second World War, we have witnessed genocidal murder in Biafra, Cambodia, the Sudan over four decades, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. In no case has there been effective international intervention, any more than there was specific Allied military action to stop the Holocaust. The destruction by Azerbaijan of the Armenian communities of Sumgait and Baku and the subsequent blockade by Turkey of the Republic of Armenia must be seen as policies genocidal in intent that have not come to complete fruition only because the Armenian nation has at last struck back successfully and hard against its oppressors, even as our country has against Arab aggression. So for all the resolutions against genocide, the studies and definitions and conventions, the fact is that nothing has changed since 1915 or 1939: the only remedy is for the intended victim to have a gun in his hand. Another point that must be made here is a crucial insight of Professor Yehuda Bauer: to the victim of such mass murder it does not matter whether the mode of death is a Rwandan machete, a Turkish yatagan, or a German machine gun. The terror, pain, suffering, humiliation are the same. So it is not only that we as humans are no safer than our Armenian and Jewish grandparents or great-grandparents. What happened to them, their dehumanization and death, is happening to somebody else, just as horribly, right now. And as long as power politics control memory and thwart the moral imperative, none of that will change.
So, having considered the victims, how do the perpetrators see these matters? What makes it possible for them to do what they do? Very briefly, it would seem that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the tools of linguistic and then biological science were perverted to the use of ideologies that elevated into a kind of life-and-death issue a social dichotomy that has long existed in human affairs. In his recent book, The Jewish Century, the historian Yuri Slezkine perceives in developed societies ethnic and religious groups definable as either Apollonian or Mercurian. To the former category belong communities who identify themselves primarily with a particular land and line of descent— Blut und Boden— and adhere to related ideals, such as aristocratic hierarchy, athleticism, and military service. To the latter category, the one named after the Roman messenger god, belong Jews, Armenians, Overseas Chinese, and others whose role for whatever reason is trans-national and based on social and geographic mobility, mental agility, and the transfer of information and goods. Whereas in traditional society these groups, however necessary, are tolerated as inferiors, in the modern environment of industrialization, urbanization, and global trade they pose, or are perceived to pose, a threat to the dominance of a traumatized old order. The anxieties of that old order express themselves in nationalist ideologies that see Armenians and Jews as subversive, as decadent, as linguistically crude, as physically inferior, as Communists, as capitalists, as eternal outsiders to be feared and shunned, as insidious parvenus to be feared and shunned, and so on. This is how they saw us. And here is an example.
Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (in the interests of time I’ll call him just Max henceforth) was a Baltic German aristocrat from a landed noble family, a superb cavalryman and exemplary soldier in the Kaiser’s army. In World War I he served as German vice-consul at Erzurum, and was awarded the Iron Cross for his service. He disliked the Armenians: in his dispatches he calls them “Jews of the East”, “crafty merchants”, “unscrupulous”, and so on: all the code words of the distaste of the landed aristocrat Apollonian for the Mercurian who lives by his wits. However when the Genocide of the Armenians began in 1915, Max condemned it in his letters to his superiors as a policy based on “racial hatred” (his words) rather than military necessity. This is an important point: the policy of exterminating the Armenians was not so much part of wartime Ottoman policy as a project the conditions of war made easier than otherwise, but which in the end actually overrode and even contradicted the considerations of strategic advantage. Many Turkish observers also understood this mass killing as qualitatively different from the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890’s— for although this time too the slaughter was officially called jihad, none of the limitations hitherto imposed by Islamic law now applied. Nobody was protected as a noncombatant, a woman, or a child. The similarity of this situation to the Nazi Holocaust a quarter century in the future, could not be clearer. Max made heroic efforts to save Armenians— some whom he knew on his office staff, others, total strangers— from deportation and certain death.
The German diplomatic and military authorities in Turkey were generally unsympathetic to Max’s protests and overruled, ignored, or even forbade them. It is not that the Germans supported the extermination of their Christian co-religionists. And it was German scholars who had established not long before that the Armenian language was part of the same Indo-European family as German: the Armenians— and some pro-Nazi members of the community boasted of this in the 1930’s and 40’s and still do— were to be considered racially Aryan. Germany simply did not wish to alienate its ally in the war by interfering in what it regarded as an internal matter. At the end of the war Max returned to Europe and was briefly arrested during the abortive Communist revolution in Germany. Jews were prominent in the Russian, Hungarian, and German revolutions; and anti-Semites exaggerated that role to great benefit. Max was shocked by the collapse of the old order and felt the Jews were to blame: he met Hitler in 1920, became a leading member of the Nazi party, and was killed in the Munich putsch of 1923. After Hitler’s rise to power a decade later, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter was buried in a special tomb and commemorated as a hero-martyr to the cause. It is a disturbing story. We know that the future commandant of the concentration camp at Auschwitz had served in Turkey as a young recruit during the Armenian Genocide: perhaps he learnt the ideology and practice of modern mass murder then. But Max, who saw clearly the senselessness of the consuming hatred, the demonization of the Armenians by a Muslim society, was unable to translate that insight into the language of his own culture— to perceive the malign absurdity of anti-Semitism. Perhaps the hatred of Armenians, of Rwandan Tutsis, of Biafran Ibos, of Darfurians is local, while anti-Semitism is so deeply rooted in world culture, so perennial— Hannah Arendt prophesied that it would be the only ideology to survive the 20th century— that there has to be a different cure and associative memory is not enough.
That may be an explanation. It is not an excuse. After all, some of our own people who ought to know better from the experience of the Holocaust still deny the Armenian Genocide too, though such denial, as I have suggested, is a recent anomaly, a departure from the norm. The linkage of the memory of events, was eigentlich gewesen war, “that which actually happened”, to an ordering system of moral values, is a defining feature of true human nature. But with us, an awkward species of perpetual learners, nature and nurture are locked in a fateful dance. As in the case of von Scheubner-Richter, what ought to be natural often fails us and turns out to be something that really has to be taught and learnt. An elderly Arab gentleman on a Nazareth street once asked me what I did. “I’m a teacher,” I told him. “Then you must teach your students to love each other,” he said.
Now, at the outset I spoke of how oblivion is a necessary part of this art of moral memory: there are things that have to be forgotten, for people to carry on living. I know very well from shattering my leg in a recent and terrible motorcycle crash that not all the particulars of pain and disability should be recalled, to do so stalls one’s ability to recover. And some of the experience I thought I’d never forget, I’m mercifully beginning to here and there. But there are things I want to hang on to. The slogan of my generation, or one of them anyway, was that the personal is political. It grew out of the thought of Prof. Herbert Marcuse, a fellow student of Hannah Arendt’s whose New Left thought was a reaction in part against the dehumanizing abstractions and Nazi enthusiasm of his teacher Martin Heidegger. One pervasive emotion from the period of hospitalization and convalescence is particularly important: even though I was in the care of committed professionals and loving relatives and friends here in the only country where I feel fully enfranchised, the country I love beyond all others and want to make my home, despite all that, the fact that I was hopping feebly on crutches, fearful of the smallest stair or polished floor, unable to dress or shower or feed myself without help, while others walked boldly and freely and lived normally, made me feel humiliated and less than a man, less than human. It is a feeling worse than death and though I worked hard with a brilliant physical therapist (and still am), I felt the world was my enemy, life was a curse, and I wanted to die. We speak of the Armenian martyrs and the victims of the Shoah. We know the details of their deaths. But how did they feel as the Turks and the Germans deliberately, mockingly humiliated and hurt them, murdering their manhood before their bodies died? I have felt only a flicker of the flame of that hell and it has burnt me to a cinder. But maybe now I understand a little more and can teach and fight better, as a professor, as a caring person, as an Israeli.
So let us remember and honor the martyrs of the Armenian Genocide, not as strange figures of the past, but as our own, and do whatever it takes to stop genocidal killers and preachers of hatred right now. There can be no oblivion at all in this act of memory and moral responsibility. Nikto ne zabyt i nichto ne zabyto, “Nobody and nothing is forgotten!” insist the words of Olga Bergholtz on the monument to the victims of the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. May God not have mercy on us if we forget a thing. And in the name of the murdered, the innocent, the incorruptible, the immortal, please stand for the Armenian requiem prayer. I verinn Yerusaghem, i bnakarans hreshtakats, ur Yenovk yev Yeghias kan tseratsyal aghavnakerp, i drakhtin Yedemakan paytsarratsyal arzhanapes, voghormats Ter voghormya hogvotsn mer nnjetselots.
“In heavenly Jerusalem, in the dwelling places of the angels, where Enoch and Elijah abide in age in likeness unto doves, now in their deservèd splendor in the paradise of Eden, merciful Lord, on the souls of our departed have mercy.”
James Robert Russell (born in October, 1953, New York City) is a scholar and professor in Ancient Near Eastern, Iranian and Armenian Studies. He has published extensively in journals, and has written several books. He is the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and sits on the executive committee of Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
