Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism
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Abstract
This chapter looks at the novel historical claim that Turkey had played a major role rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. This brash claim ignored the fact that Turkish diplomats in Europe had systematically stripped Turkish Jews of their citizenship, or refused to recognize them as citizens. Turkey did not take the opportunity to save tens of thousands of Jewish citizens in Europe from the Nazi reign of terror, instead condemning thousands of them to miserable deaths in the camps. Discounting these inconvenient truths, Jews and Muslims promoted the narrative of Turkish rescue of Jews. The claim was promoted by the Turkish Foreign Ministry working together with Jewish historians outside of Turkey and was explicitly linked to denying recognition of the Armenian genocide. According to this view, genocide is an if/then proposition: if one accepts the fable that Turks and Jews have lived in peace and brotherhood for five hundred years, as opposed to the historical record which narrates a completely different story, then one trusts that Turks could not possibly have perpetrated a genocide against the Armenians.
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Memory Holocaust Holocaust Commemoration Jewish - Muslim Relations Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial
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195–217
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978-3-030-87797-2
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Link to article (paywalled), Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism
Bibliographic Information
Whitewashing the Armenian Genocide with Holocaust Heroism. . 2022: 195–217. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1007/978-3-030-87798-9_9
