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Lessons Not Learned? The Yazidis and the Armenians of Musa Dagh

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  • Lessons Not Learned? The Yazidis and the Armenians of Musa Dagh

    Huffington Post
    Sept 2 2014

    Lessons Not Learned? The Yazidis and the Armenians of Musa Dagh

    Jess Olson , Associate Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva
    University in New York


    The crisis faced by the little-known religious minority, the Yazidis
    of northern Iraq, captured the attention of western humanitarians.
    Their capitulation to their pursuers, the forces of the Islamic State
    of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), whose strict interpretation of Islam
    regards the Yazidis as polytheists, would mean physical destruction.
    To escape, thousands of these practitioners of an obscure faith, who
    have dwelt in the Ninveh region for centuries, encamped on the
    desolate summit of Mount Sinjar, desperate for rescue by a foreign
    power.

    A remarkably similar story was told a little over eighty years ago by
    German-speaking Jewish novelist Franz Werfel, in his blockbuster novel
    The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Virtually unknown today, the 900-page
    novel was widely read when it appeared. Just in time to serve as a
    prescient critique of Nazism, it was optioned by studio giant MGM in
    1934 to produce an epic film starring a young Clark Gable, then on his
    way to winning an Academy Award for It Happened One Night.

    Werfel's inspiration was a footnote to the Turkish anti-Armenian
    atrocities of World War I. In June 1915, receiving news of mass
    expulsions and murder, the inhabitants of six Armenian Christian
    villages on the Mediterranean coast collected their few possessions
    and weapons, and fled to the summit of Musa Dagh, highlands on the
    coast of the Mediterranean, to escape the approaching Turks. The
    leader of the revolt, Moses Der Kalousdian, a European-educated
    Armenian gentleman, rallied the spirits of the villagers, held off
    assaults on their stronghold until, on the verge of capitulation, they
    were rescued by a passing French warship.

    Although the revolt of 4,200 Armenians at Musa Dagh received scattered
    attention in the press, it was a small event in a much larger
    conflict. It was Werfel's novel, though, that humanized the crisis,
    giving the western reader access to the perspective of the
    humanitarian refugee, in particular through his intimate portrayal of
    the protagonist, Gabriel Bagradian.

    Modeled after Moses Der Kalousdian, Bagradian is a man of two worlds:
    cosmopolitan Europe on the one hand, the earthy villages of his native
    Armenian Turkey on the other. The well-to-do Bagradian had left his
    village to seek refinement in Paris, but after a while his expatriate
    life revealed an inner void, and he returns home on the eve of World
    War I with his French wife Juliette and young son Stephan, seeking
    shelter from the hostilities and his own existential doubt.

    But the quiet life that Bagradian and his family seek evaporates in
    violence and insecurity. Under his leadership, the villagers retreat
    to Musa Dagh in the face of the approaching Turks. For forty days,
    they endure deadly attacks by the Turkish army, mishaps that cost them
    precious resources, and the collapse of morale against a hopeless
    siege. Bagradian himself suffers terribly as the threads to his
    European life are cruelly snipped one after the other. As the
    situation becomes more desperate, the villagers' only remaining hope
    is a swimmer dispatched into the Mediterranean, carrying letters
    begging for intervention by the Allied powers, hopeful of a passing
    allied ship.

    Although not as familiar to western readers as his contemporary Stefan
    Zweig, Werfel's associate who has enjoyed a renaissance, he was once
    equally familiar to an international audience. Born into a remarkable
    cohort of German-Jewish writers in Prague, Werfel counted among his
    friends Franz Kafka and Max Brod; an enthusiastic supporter was the
    caustic Karl Kraus. After his service in World War I, Werfel lived the
    life of the interwar cosmopolitan, one lovingly dramatized in Wes
    Anderson's recent film Grand Budapest Hotel. A lothario, his romantic
    entanglements included an affair with the ubiquitous Alma Mahler.

    But the war had changed him. Like Zweig (the inspiration for
    Anderson's film), Werfel was an ethical hedonist, railing against
    modernity's nihilistic trajectory; after the war, he added a deep
    humanism to his urbane commentary. Living in the heady literary air of
    Vienna and Berlin, Werfel's international breakthrough came with the
    1933 publication of Musa Dagh.

    Appearing early in the unfolding of the Nazi nightmare, Werfel's text
    was a chilling prophecy of things to come. The villains in the novel
    are not simply Turks, but a cohort of ideologically-driven racists who
    displace their more humane elders in pursuit of national purity.
    Werfel's Armenians would have resonated with the Jewish readership of
    his time especially, tinged with the same air of romanticism that many
    of Werfel's cohort felt towards the folkways of traditional Jewry.
    Indeed, the novel's descriptions of the brutality faced by a community
    pushed to its very limits are nearly indistinguishable from later
    Holocaust narratives, woven into images of Treblinka and the Warsaw
    Ghetto.

    As the Yazidi saga shows, the relevance of Werfel's work endures. The
    Forty Days of Musa Dagh raises fundamental questions of moral duty for
    modern man. When the evil of persecution rears its head with such
    unfathomable horror, what do we do? How do we react? To Werfel,
    whoever holds their morality precious must demand immediate
    intervention and rescue. In The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, as with the
    Yazidi crisis today, it the most powerful weapon of genocidal forces
    is not a machine gun or a howitzer, it is time -- the time of
    hesitation before action in the face of evil, the very time that dooms
    many of Bagradian's friends and family to their deaths. Time is of the
    essence; we hesitate at our moral peril.


    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jess-olson/lessons-not-learned-the-y_b_5754300.html


    From: Baghdasarian
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