The Ottoman Empire’s genocide of more than one million Armenians during World War I was one of history’s great tragedies. The Righteous and People of Conscience of the Armenian Genocide by Gérard Dédéyan, Ago Demirdjian, and Nabil Saleh, recently translated from the French by Barbara Mellor, includes numerous inspiring examples of people moved to act during the Armenian Golgotha, but the book’s downplaying of the Christian faith of many of these humanitarians is frustrating.
The job among the nations
Few people have experienced such perennial hardship as the Armenians. When St. Gregory the Illuminator baptized King Tiridates III in 301, Armenia became the first state the adopt Christianity as its official religion. Yet the coming centuries saw the Armenians conquered by the heathen Persians, Mongols, and Turks. In the 1890s, Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered the murder of up to 300,000 Armenians.
The Hamidian massacres were, however, only a harrowing indication of even worse things to come. During World War I, the nationalistic Young Turks government, one of the Central Powers along with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria, found the pretext for a final solution to the Armenian question when many Armenians saw Russia, part of the Entente and at war with Turkey, as possible liberators. After losing the Battle of Sarikamish, during which Armenian legionaries served Russia, Turkey initiated a genocide of Holocaust-like proportions. According to statistics provided by Dédéyan, Demirdjian, and Saleh, between 1.2 and 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians (out of a total of between 1.8 and 2.1 million) were killed. By comparison, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a similar proportion of European Jews, two-thirds, were murdered during World War II.
The genocide of six million Jews was appalling, yet after the war the Jewish people created an independent state that, while often having to defend itself against its Arab neighbors, enjoys a high standard of living and exercises political influence disproportionate to its small size. In contrast, after being mass murdered by the Young Turks, the Armenians became part of Stalin’s murderous empire. In 1988, Armenia suffered one of history’s most devastating earthquakes, killing tens of thousands of Armenians and leaving many others homeless. Since independence, Armenia has engaged in two wars with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, the most recent one resulting in the ethnic cleansing of the region’s Armenians. Poor and corrupt, Armenia experiences major brain drain.
In the West, Holocaust deniers are about as numerous and influential as flat earthers and, as the case of the English pseudo-historian David Irving shows, treated with deserved universal contempt. Yet publicly denying the Armenian genocide incurs zero political costs. The late Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, was an Armenian genocide denier, yet this in no way tainted her public image. In 2008, Barack Obama courted Armenian American voters in California by promising to recognize the genocide; he squandered eight long years when he could have done so, yet he still is beloved by the left.
The Armenian people, who have clung to their Christian faith longer than any other nation despite constant hardship, invite comparisons to the Biblical figure of Job. But the Armenian genocide, unlike the Jewish tragedy during World War II, is not the subject of well-known museums, books, and films in North America. The stories of those who acted heroically during the Armenian genocide are far less familiar than accounts of Holocaust resisters.
In this regard, the authors have made an important contribution. Their book follows a similar structure: after introducing a group of people (such as Muslim righteous, diplomats, or jurists and writers who fought for the truth about the genocide), which follow chapters each devoted to specific individuals.
An odd approach to Christianity
The Righteous and People of Conscience, however, has a major flaw: downplaying Christianity as a source of inspiration for many of the book’s protagonists. The authors devote an entire chapter to emphasizing that the Young Turks were secularists, and that Muslims instead saw Christians like the Armenians (and Jews) as dhimmis, or “People of the Book” who, while paying taxes from which Ottoman Muslims were exempted, were to be treated with respect. Meanwhile, in introducing the Arab “Righteous,” the authors note that, as anyone who has seen Lawrence of Arabia knows, the (mostly Muslim) Arabs were dominated at the time by the Ottoman Empire and thus regarded the Armenians as allies in oppression.
It seems that, in a post-9/11 world, the authors feel compelled to emphasize that the genocide was not a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations. Yet they offer no similar explanation of the theological notions and sense of cultural-religious kinship that inspired Christians to help the Armenians.
A better book on a related topic is Armenian-American poet and academic Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. Written in 2003, Balakian laments that public awareness of the genocide had slid into oblivion. Yet he quotes President Herbert Hoover as saying that a century ago “the name Armenia was […] known to the American schoolchild only a little less than England.” Balakian chronicles many American fundraising campaigns to aid the Armenian plight, as well as the great political pressure on President Woodrow Wilson to do something (ultimately, in the spirit of Wilsonian idealism the president unsuccessfully proposed the creation of an independent Armenia in the Treaty of Sèvres).
Why did Americans (and Europeans) care about distant Armenia in 1915? Because Armenia is the world’s oldest Christian nation, and the West was then still very Christian! Wilson himself was a Presbyterian minister’s son. Whereas the authors emphasize the Muslim teaching on the dhimmis in explaining the motivation of the Muslim righteous, the uninformed reader could conclude that the numerous Christians mentioned in their book were motivated by secular humanitarianism, and their faith was incidental.
For instance, the book devotes a brief chapter to Alexandra Tolstoy, praising her for supporting the Armenians in the spirit of her father’s “humanitarian legacy.” Could not her father Leo’s devout (albeit anti-institutional) Christianity not have inspired her as well? The book does not even pose that question. The authors only quote in passing a letter by Johannes Lepsius, a German pastor and champion of the Armenians, that the Armenians are “[t]he most ancient people in Christendom;” otherwise, the readers will not learn of Armenia’s place in the Christian imagination.
When the authors do discuss Christianity, their approach is strange, even bizarre. In the concluding chapter, they pontificate on the concept of “righteousness.” They do summarize Biblical teachings and the scholastics, but they place them alongside many other sources, such as the pagan Greco-Roman philosophers and Muslim thinkers. The authors have the chutzpah to claim that “[t]he [French] Revolution went far beyond” Christian notions of natural law as—unlike Christian thinkers such as St. Thomas—the Enlightenment philosophers argued for the abolition of all privilege.
On the contrary, the French Revolution created the world’s first totalitarian state, where thousands of political opponents were killed. Some historians consider the brutal suppression of the War in the Vendée, in which French Catholics revolted against the Revolution, to be a genocide. While the book makes no mention of this, the irreligiousness of the Young Turks movement was inspired by post-1789 French secularism.
Finally, there is a chapter devoted to Pope Benedict XV and Cardinal Angelo Maria Dolci, Apostolic Vicar of Constantinople. Of the twentieth century’s popes, Benedict XV is perhaps the least appreciated, yet he was a major spokesman for peace and provider of direct humanitarian aid during the Great War. While the authors do praise Benedict, whom they compare to President Wilson for appealing for a new international order conducive to international cooperation, as well as Dolci for his appeals to the Turkish government to stop the genocide and establishment of an orphanage for Armenian children, they criticize the latter’s early belief that the Ottomans could be persuaded to stop the killings as “a certain initial naivety–rooted in his faith both in Christianity and in humanity.” The Armenian genocide was among the greatest crimes in recent history. Yet many people bore heroic Christian witness and aided their co-religionists.
The Righteous and People of Conscience of the Armenian Genocide is an important book because, like Peter Balakian’s work twenty years earlier, it reminds us how many Christians’ consciences were stirred and they refused to stand idle amidst absolute evil. Hopefully, someday a work will appear highlighting the Christian aspect of this major humanitarian aid rather than downplaying it as a source of strength and inspiration.
The Righteous and People of Conscience of the Armenian Genocide
By Gérard Dédéyan, Ago Demirdjian, and Nabil Saleh
Hurst, 2023
Hardcover, 520 pages, 40 b&w illustrations
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When I was a child, a haggard or mussed-up person was said to “look like a starving Armenian.” Alas, I didn’t realize what this odd idiom meant until many years later.
There are reports that the Turks in recent years have been obliterating Armenian historic sites so they can pretend these never existed.