Jews and Armenians Between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic: Relationality, Genocide, and Survival, 1896-1928

Abstract

This dissertation constructs a relational history of Armenians and Jews throughout the process of the 1915 Genocide, centered in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul while also moving to the provinces and traveling transnationally to the United States. Through methods of spatial, social, and cultural history, as well as close attention to gender, memory, and historical silences, I examine how Armenians and Jews experienced the decades-long process of the genocide in relation to one another—the former as allegedly disloyal and therefore deserving of violence, and the latter as allegedly loyal and conditionally exempt from violence. The story of their shared experiences begins with the 1896 massacres targeting Armenians in retaliation for a revolutionary bank occupation in Istanbul, and ends with the 1928 Citizen Speak Turkish campaign primarily targeting Jews organized by Istanbul Law Faculty students. I examine liberal discourse and the institutions of citizenship, the military, and an orphanage in order to understand how state violence against Armenians reinforced the pressure on Jews to prove their loyalty to the state. I begin by weaving a tapestry of Istanbul's shared Jewish-Armenian neighborhoods to explore the everyday interactions and mutual perceptions of the groups in the Ottoman capital across the decades-long genocidal process. This spatial lens demonstrates that though state violence collapsed their diverse identities and shaped their mutual perceptions, Armenians and Jews regularly interacted beyond the purview of the state. Examining discursive responses to the genocide, I reveal that the pressure on Jews to remain silent was so strong that even a Zionist newspaper, which had drawn strong laudatory parallels to the Armenian nationalist movement in earlier years, responded to the acceleration of genocide in 1915 by celebrating Ottoman military victory at Çanakkale and aligning Jews with Muslims against an exterminating Christian hatred. My analysis then moves to the provinces as I compare the diaries and memoirs of Armenian and Jewish soldiers serving in the Ottoman military during the First World War. I analyze the gradients in how they witnessed, experienced, and remembered the genocidal process as well as the survival strategies that they employed, such as drawing on the rhetoric of liberal citizenship to demonstrate their masculine patriotism. Finally, I focus on Istanbul’s Ortaköy orphanage, created by Jewish women for Jewish girls, and examine how the conditions of state violence against Armenians and transnational relief for Armenians shaped the development of this Jewish institution. Drawing on archival material in English, French, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Western Armenian, and Ottoman Turkish as well as employing methods of oral history and history of the built environment, this research reveals a genocidal process that placed Jews and Armenians in opposition to one as they struggled to prove their belonging in order to access the protections of Ottoman and later Turkish citizenship.