In the aftermath of genocide: Armenians and Jews in twentieth century France.

Abstract

This dissertation compares the impact of the genocides of World War I and II on the ethnic and national affiliations of Armenian and Jewish survivors. Specifically, it focuses on Armenians and Jews in France, the only Western European nation to provide homes to substantial survivor communities. The intended victims had been attacked at many levels. Not only had they been uprooted from homes and communities, but they also had faced an ideological onslaught that had dubbed them unfit to live in their own societies. The principal concern of this study, then, involves determining how survivors responded to this attack after the persecutions had ended. Did these experiences challenge previously held notions of faith, communal solidarity, and national identity? And, if so, how did they respond to those challenges at both the individual and communal levels? I argue that in the immediate aftermaths of their respective genocides, neither Armenian refugee populations in France nor the much longer established Jewish communities responded to the systematic attacks against them by fundamentally questioning the possibility of living as national minorities in larger nation states. While both experienced a surge of support for their own nationalistic movements and while some opted to leave France for their homelands, the overwhelming majority chose to remain in their dispersed communities without engaging in much sustained public dialogue on the question. The nation in which they settled did much to ensure that such discussions remained muted. A long tradition of state-centered and assimilationist models of government in France's civic self-definition shaped the incorporation of all ethnic and religious minorities into the state. Armenian and Jewish genocide survivors were no exceptions, and the tradition of intense cultural conformity shaped how they came to terms with their genocidal pasts. A comparative study of these two cases, then, directs our attention to the importance of context in shaping minority culture. If Armenians and Jews faced distinctly different conditions during and after their respective genocides, a comparison between them nevertheless suggests that the common denominator, integration into the French state, was the single largest factor in shaping their communities in the aftermath.