“As for the recent unpleasantness [anti-Armenian massacres]? A “well-deserved ‘misfortune,’” [Hans] Barth assured readers, brought on by the violence of Armenian tax resisters and terrorists. Embarrassed, perhaps, by the discrepancy between these revolutionaries’ pitiful efforts at propaganda of the deed and the retaliations wreaked on a whole people, Barth then grasped the nettle of the victims’ national character. Armenians, he averred, were impossible not to dislike. In contrast to “The Turkish Peasantry: Core of the Nation” (another chapter title [in his book Turk, Defend Yourself!]), these [Armenians] were usurers who “plundered” their honest, hardworking Muslim neighbors. Pretty flimsy stuff, but its appearance in Die Zukunft showed that serious people took it seriously. And Barth’s philippic against the Armenians gained credibility from the fact that it was joining a discourse that had existed before his intervention and would continue long after his own contribution had been forgotten. This was a discourse that “essentialized” the Christian of the Near East. In one strand, he was the born victim, whose cries for help we have become tired of hearing. “Always beaten, always massacred, incapable of looking a warrior in the face, perpetually offering his throat to the saber”: such was the characterization by Ernest Renan (a central figure in [Edward] Said’s indictment of Orientalism) of the “eternal Christian of the Orient,” applied approvingly, by Die Zukunft’s editor, to the Armenians. As [Johannes] Lepsius [German Protestant missionary and orientalist particularly concerned with the Armenian plight] observed mordantly, “for a good part of our cultivated society” the dictum of the critic Alphonse Karr was all too true: “Il y a quelqu'un de plus odieux que le bourreau, c'est la victime.” [“There is someone more hateful than the hangman: the victim.”] Cringing (yet insolent), the Armenian-as-victim was of course the flip side of the second strand: the Armenian-as-shyster, who fleeced the Turkish peasant, amassing the entire Ottoman economy into his own sticky hands. Barth himself “proved” the stereotype by trotting out a “proverb” beloved of all self-proclaimed experts on the Orient from London to Petersburg: “One Greek is able to cheat two Jews, but one Armenian can cheat two Greeks.” Elements of this discourse had already appeared in the works of orientalists such as Alfred Körte, the archaeologist; Karl Krummbacher, founder of Byzantine studies in Germany; and Hugo Grothe, a geographer who assured readers that not Muslim fanaticism (the explanation of choice among armenophiles) but Armenian exploitation was responsible for the violence. By 1913, Grothe was arguing that Muslim looters were merely reappropriating what Armenians had stolen, an argument ready for retooling after 1933, when he joined the SA. With the sanction of such scholarship, the discourse of Armenian-as-exploiter made frequent appearances in newspapers close to the government, ready for quoting in other venues. It was also common in Pan-German circles. The Left sometimes proved as susceptible as the Right. The democratic Frankfurter Zeitung published lines by the poetess Kassia, in its series “Famous Women in Ancient Greece and Byzantium,” that described the Armenians as “quite horrifying people,” malicious in low positions, worse when prosperous, and worst of all when they rose to high estate. This “apt” little epigram from the ninth century was billed by the editors as a “contribution to the current debate.” It supported, they pointed out helpfully, the “Turkish view in substance, if not in particulars.” The double-dealing Armenian also turned up in travel articles by Friedrich Naumann, the charismatic Left Liberal leader whose democratic nimbus Liberals in the postwar Federal Republic have been proud to claim for themselves. […] In describing an evening spent with German expats in Constantinople, Naumann quoted at length one who, to unanimous accord, justified the massacres as the “self-defense” of honest, upright Turks, a people exploited by the grasping Armenian, who would steal from his own brother, sell his wife and prepubescent daughter, and morally befoul the whole city. Naumann’s description was immediately lifted by Karl May, the era’s most popular adventure writer. In the Empire of the Silver Lion (1898) quoted Naumann to add force to the novelist’s own axiom that the “hawk-nosed Armenian” was someone who […] could be counted on to have a hand in the game “whenever and wherever in the Orient any kind of vile thing” went down. Since May’s previous writings had long made his distaste for Armenians clear, we may wonder who was recycling them. We recognize these stereotypes, of course, but we associate them with other victims. And we have become so familiar with Edward Said’s famous analogy between antisemitism and its “secret sharer,” Orientalism (described by him as antisemitism’s “Islamic branch”), that we have all but forgotten that these tropes were once used against a Christian people on behalf of a Muslim one. This too was Orientalism. It was also, as Hilmar Kaiser’s analysis of the afterlife of these tropes in a certain kind of leftist scholarship as shown, another Socialism of Fools.”
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