In the Snares of Xenophobia and Antisemitism : Armenian Refugees in France, 1920-1945
Dans les rets de la xénophobie et de l’antisémitisme : les réfugiés arméniens en France, des années 1920 à 1945
Résumé
Approximately 60, 000 Armenians took refuge in France at the beginning of the 1920s, after the victory of the Kemals in Turkey forced them to disperse. Through their suffering, their oriental exoticism, and even more so their status as stateless, these Armenians aroused compassion as well as rejection. In addition, for contemporaries their history of exile most closely resembled that of Russian Jewish refugees who had fled pogroms en masse in the late nineteenth century. For a wide variety of diverse observers, the comparison between Armenians and Jews made sense. Rather than focusing on the xenophobic fantasies that this comparison engendered, this article will rather concentrate on the capacity of the Jewish/Armenian comparison to reveal the disturbing anomie in which the Armenian refugees found themselves.