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SÖYLEDİKLERİ VE YAZDIKLARI
rose dangerously fifteen years prior to the Holocaust, was a
movement that had been continuing actively since the beginning of
the second millennium. In Western Europe in general and in
Germany in particular, there had been innumerable cases of
attacks on the Jews in the aftermath of epidemics such as
plaguenatural disasters such as floods or earthquakes or defeats
suffered in wars. In the course of these attacks, members of the
Jewish community were killed, and their assets were plundered. In
other words, the Christian communities blamed the Jews for the
disasters that struck them. They accused the Jews of deicide or
killing Jesus Christ, for which they were considered to be ‘Anti
Christ’. There exist thousands of documents and publications
cataloging various aspects of anti-Semitism. There were anti
Semites even among the Renaissance writers whom one should
expect to be rational thinkers. Anti-Semitism can be discerned
frequently also in some of the romantic writers of the age of
Enlightenment. It is no secret that to a certain extent Heidegger
and even Jung, a leading philosopher and a psychiatrist of the last
century, were anti-Semites.
In Ottoman history, on the other hand, there had never been a
similar ‘anti-Armenianism’. There was no biologically motivated
super-race theory for the Muslims to debase the Armenians,
portraying them as a subhuman race, or a Social Darwinism that
would complement this attitude. Since Islam considered the
Christians to be a “people of the book”, that is, believers in
monotheism, the Muslims never directed against the Christians
the kind of accusations the Christians levelled at the Jews. In
natural or man-made disasters, the Armenians or the other
Christian groups were never turned into a scapegoat. On the
contrary, the Armenians came to be called “the loyal people”. They
were active in the realm of public service. They became civil
servants, some of them serving at the highest ranks of the central
administration as governors, paşas or provincial governors,
representing their state as ambassadors—even serving as the
country’s foreign minister. Since they had the opportunity to be
trained at the schools opened by the missionaries in the Ottoman
Empire as of the beginning of the 19th century, they quickly
flourished and came to dominate the empire’s economy. Unlike the
Jews in Europe, they were not banned from practicing certain
professions. They were not forced to live in ghettos. Though they
were the most affluent class, they were not subjected to pogroms
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