Definitional Issues
Rainwater, L., & Yancey, W. L. (1967). The Moynihan report and the
politics of controversy. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Reichman, R. (Ed.). (1999). Race in contemporary Brazil: From indiffer-
ence to inequality. University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press.
Reis, J. J. (1993). Slave rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim uprising of 1835
in Bahia. Trans. Arthur Brakel Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Roberts, W. A. (1942). The French in the West Indies. New York: Bobbs-
Merrill.
Sansone, L. (2003). Blackness without ethnicity: Constructing race in
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Armenian Diaspora
KhachigTololyan
DEFINITIONAL ISSUES
The term diaspora, w h e t h e r applied to A r m e n i a n s or other
social formations that do not live in their h o m e l a n d , has
had many definitions and applications t h r o u g h o u t its his-
tory. At its simplest and least precise, it has referred to all
35
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Wade, P. (1993). Blackness and race mixture: The dynamics of racial
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Waters, M. C. (1999). Black identities: West Indian immigrant dreams
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Wood, P. H. (1974). Black majority: Negroes in colonial South Carolina
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nationalism. In R.S. Hillman (Ed.), Understanding contemporary
Latin America, 2nd. ed. (pp. 229-261). Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publications.
Yelvington, K. A. (2001b). The Anthropology of Afro-Latin America
and the Caribbean: Diasporic dimensions. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 30, 227-260.
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Anthropology in the diaspora. Santa Fe, NM: School of American
Research Press.
dispersed people, w h a t e v e r the cause, size, organization,
or duration of dispersion. B y this definition, even the
small, e v e r - r e n e w e d contingents of y o u n g A r m e n i a n
scholars w h o studied G r e e k art and science in Athens,
Alexandria, Antioch, and C a e s a r e a f r o m the fourth to the
sixth centuries C.E. w e r e a diaspora. At various times, the
36
term has been used to refer to groups or colonies of
expatriates, exiles, migrant populations of elite 6migrrs,
prosperous merchant diasporas and impoverished labor
diasporas, border-crossing transnational nomads, clusters
of refugees, and communities of guest-workers, as well as
all sorts of ethnics, not to mention oppressed minorities
(e.g., "the queer diaspora"; Patton and Sanchez-Eppler,
1999). At its most complex, diaspora has been defined by a
constellation of features (Safran, 1991; Tololyan, 1996a):
1. The originating dispersion from the homeland occurs due to
coercion by military force or bureaucratic oppression that makes
continued life in the homeland intolerable for a large number of
people. Alternatively, what pushes people out of the homeland may
be economic or agricultural catastrophe (the Irish in the 1840s),
or forms of underdevelopment and poverty that result in a large,
persistent gap between the local economy and wealthier economies
elsewhere that exert a pull.
2. Diasporic dispersion is truly that: not a move by some
emigrants to just one other country, but a scattering to several.
3. The dispersed settle in host countries where they live either in
hierarchically encapsulated enclaves ("the ghetto," "Chinatown"
"the Armenian Quarter") or as subjects and citizens of states--and
as members of societiesmthat do not wish to accept them as fully
equal. The situation is complicated by the fact that the dispersed,
especially in their first several generations in the hostland, usually
do not desire full assimilation, but prefer to sustain their collective
identity by maintaining some cultural differences, while overcom-
ing various barriers to economic, social, and political integration
(Tololyan, 1996b).
4. As the dispersed struggle to preserve the collective cultural iden-
tity brought out of the homeland, they inevitably discover over time
that this is impossible; successful diasporas then fashion a new one
that has some real or imagined continuity with the earlier identity
and that creates boundaries, however porous, between themselves
and the host society. Both the diaspora and the host society
often patrol these boundaries, through practices of endogamy and
exclusion on any number of grounds (racial, religious, linguistic-
cultural, culinary, etc.).
5. The dispersed maintain relationships with their kin in the home-
land and in other scattered communities, at first through familial
ties that sustain transnational social fields, later through organized,
institutionalized means. These intradiasporic links have played
a crucial role in certain phases of Armenian history.
6. In most diasporas, a discourse of "return" develops, which
sometimes results in actual return or repatriation to the homeland
by individuals or organized groups (Jews to Israel, Armenians to
Armenia, freed former African-American slaves to Liberia), and
more often enables a rhetoric and practice of re-turn, of various
ways of "turning" toward the homeland by contributing to i t m
investing in it and intervening in its politics and culturemand
drawing from it (anything from new songs to spouses to cheap
labor) (Tololyan, 1996a).
Armenian Diaspora
7. Duration matters. A dispersion becomes a diaspora only when
it has endured as a distinct entity for a certain, undetermined,
number of generations.
At some point or another in its long history, the
Armenian diaspora, the second oldest in history, has
displayed every one of this constellation of features.
THE HOMELAND
Armenia's territorymthe land inhabited primarily by
Armenians, ruled intermittently by indigenous rulers and
often by foreign conquerors--has been as large as
180,000 km 2 and--currently--as small as 30,000 km 2,
about the size of Maryland. The ancestral territory of the
Armenians was bounded to the north by the Pontus
Mountains that line the southern shore of the Black Sea
and by the territory of what is now the Republic of
Georgia. It extended about 100 km west of the Euphrates
River Valley. To the south, it included the upper reaches
of the Tigris River and bordered on northern
Mesopotamia, currently the Kurdish-inhabited territory
of Iraq and parts of Syria. To the east, Armenia included
what is now the extreme northwest of Iran and the west-
ern third of what is now Azerbaijan, between the Araz and
Kur Rivers. Currently, only one-sixth of that land is
inhabited by Armenians, due first to variously coerced
emigrations and finally to the genocide of the Armenian
inhabitants of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1915.
The Armenians are a blend of several peoples who
inhabited these territories, the earliest of which appeared
in the records of the Assyrian empire as dwelling to the
north of Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Turkey,
around 2000 B.C.E.; the second oldest group is recorded in
Hittite inscriptions from the eastern Euphrates River
Valley ca. 1350 B.C.E.; other components appear in adja-
cent regions, and also in what is now the southwestern
Transcaucasus, in subsequent centuries. By around 530
B.C.E., a people known as Armenian to its neighbors and
as Hai, Hye, or Khai to its members, emerged from the
amalgamation of these peoples. Their cultural identity
evolved slowly at first, through the syncretic amalgama-
tion of indigenous beliefs and practices with those
of Zoroastrian neighbors and Hellenistic conquerors. In
301 C.E., a massive shift of cultural identity began when
Armenia became the first state to convert to Christianity,
Historyof the Diaspora
11 years before Rome. The hold of Christianity was
definitively consolidated in the years 406 to 428 C.E.,
when an Armenian alphabet based on remarkably innova-
tive phonetic principles was adopted and the Bible trans-
lated. From then on, the Armenian Apostolic branch of
Christianity became perhaps the single most persistent
feature of Armenian identity, and, though much reduced
in its influence, it endures in that role to this day,
especially in the diaspora.
HISTORY OF THE DIASPORA
Starting in the late fourth century C.E., Armenians left
Armenia for three reasons: to study in the centers of Greek
culture; to fight in long-service military contingents guard-
ing the eastern boundary of the Persian empire and later the
eastern and northern frontiers of the Byzantine Greek
empire; and as a permanently deported population of men,
women, and children who were forcibly relocated to depop-
ulated regions of the Byzantine empire (Adalian, 1989).
Until the mid-eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire
recruited large military units both from Armenia proper and
from their kin among the relocated population. High offi-
cials, generals, and eventually emperors of Byzantium were
drawn from their ranks. Such individuals ceased to adhere
to the Armenian Apostolic version of Christianity or to
speak Armenian, but for a very long time retained kinship
ties to familial networks in both homeland and hostland.
Between the seventh and tenth centuries, Arab
Muslims fought with the Byzantines over large frontier
territories, causing the depopulation of parts of Cilicia
(now southern Turkey). Some Armenians were either
coercively relocated to or chose to settle in these territo-
ties. The pace of such population movements was accel-
erated between 1033, when the Seljuk Turks, who had
originated in Central Asia and ruled Persia, began to
invade Armenia, and 1071, when they shattered the
Byzantine army and conquered most of the Armenian
homeland. At this point, waves of emigration led to the
establishment of three very different kinds of diasporas.
The first, to Cilicia, was a territorialized diaspora,
which created a state (as much later Chinese immigrants
did in Singapore). Armenian nobles and their knights,
clergy, serfs, and supporting artisans moved to and settled
this sparsely populated territory, in which they cohabited
37
with the earlier wave of Armenian settlers, Greeks and
"Syriac" peoples. There are no reliable data on whether the
Armenians formed a majority or a plurality. Their leaders
addressed the question of diaspora in practical terms, keep-
ing up religious and cultural relations with the old centers
of the homeland while setting up new centers of worship
and scriptoria that could sustain the manuscript tradition
and innovate further. However, they also began to articulate
a textual sense of diaspora. In 1165, Nerses Shnorhali, the
newly elected Catholicos, or supreme leader of the Church,
addressed his first encyclical to "all the faithful of the
Armenian nation, those in the east who inhabit our home-
land Armenia, those who have emigrated to the regions of
the west, and those in the middle lands who were taken
among foreign peoples, and who for our sins are scattered
in cities, castles, villages and farms in every comer of the
earth" (Shnorhali, 2002, p. 13). The word he uses for this
scattering, tz'rvyalk, has a modem cognate, tz'ronk, which
is now a seldom-used term for diaspora. For much of their
history, Armenians used the word gaghout (from Hebrew
galut, exile) to signify a diasporic community. Currently,
the dominant word is spyurk, an ancient term whose conso-
nantal components, spr, are common to many related
words in Armenian and most Indo-European languages,
for example, sperm, spread, disperse, and diaspora.
Axmenian also uses several other words for those who live
outside the homeland. This rich vocabulary began to
emerge in the period under discussion.
The diasporic Cilician state endured until 1375 C.E.
After its fall, AS many as 150,000 fled the region, con-
tributing to the formation of new diasporas in Cyprus, the
Balkans, and Italy (Ajarian, 2003, p. 388), but many more
continued to live in the region until the genocide of 1915.
The second, smaller diaspora was founded by an
Axmenian nobleman who had converted to Islam and had
taken on the name Badr al-Jamali. He retained his vassals
and recruited other Armenian soldiers to his military con-
tingent. He entered the service of the Fatimid rulers of
Egypt and restored order for them, first in Syria and then
in Egypt. Appointed vizier, he and later his son ruled the
region (1073 to 1120), with the result that Armenian arti-
sans, merchants, clergymen, and their families settled in
Cairo. This diaspora of some 30,000 people endured for
several generations, then dispersed to other destinations
(Abrahamian, 1964, Vol. 2, esp. pp. 126-145; Dadoyan,
1997; Kurdian, 1949; Mikayelian, 1980).
38
The third diaspora was founded by refugees who
fled the invasion of the Seljuk Turks by going north along
trade routes with which they were already familiar.
Consisting primarily of merchants and skilled artisans
(workers in textiles, leather, and precious metals), these
refugees crossed the Black Sea and settled in the Crimean
peninsula, especially in the trading community of Caffa-
Theodosia. Dominated by Genoese merchants, this nomi-
nally Byzantine city connected the trade of the
Mediterranean to that of easternmost Europe. So many
Armenian refugees and, later, economic migrants came in
waves after 1060 C.E. that by the late fourteenth century it
was mentioned in some travelers' accounts as Armenia
Maritima (Adalian, 1989; Mikayelian, 1964).
The Crimean diaspora was the departure point for
many Armenians who went further into eastern Europe.
Around 1350, Casimir the Great, King of Poland (1333 to
1370) extended to non-Polish immigrant craftsmen and
merchants willing to settle in the city of Lvov (German
Lemberg; now Lviv in the Ukrainian Republic) the privi-
lege of living by their own communal and religious laws.
Armenians from the Crimea (and Jews from central
Europe), resourceful and already diasporic peoples, came
in large numbers and helped to make the city the trading
crossroads of eastern Europe. The process illustrates
a more general principle of diaspora formation in the
premodern period: Politically powerless to impose them-
selves, most diasporas develop when a niche opens up in
a host society that its rulers choose or are obliged to fill
by encouraging diasporic migration.
Between 1356 and 1604, Poland's was the largest
and richest Armenian diaspora community. At the end of
the 1400s, there was a community of around 200,000
Armenians in the kingdom (Ajarffan, 2002, p. 118).
(Both intrinsically and as a proportion of total population,
this was large. Scale matters, and in the Middle Ages,
most European populations, especially after the great
plagues, were at 1/10 of their current size.) The merchant
elite of this community financed some of the religious
and quasipolitical activities of the Armenian Church
in the homeland and elsewhere. Armenian clerical nota-
bles repeatedly traveled to Poland to raise funds, and
Polish Armenians toured other diasporic communities.
In the 1380s, the Armenian bishop of Jerusalem was
Polishborn. The mobility of diasporic elites long pre-
ceded contemporary globalization. "Lvov Armenians
were the first to be exposed to the modernizing currents
Armenian Diaspora
of Europe" in large numbers (Adalian, 1989, p. 91).
A printing press operated after 1616. Throughout the
period, the diasporic elites of this highly literate society
used the Armenian alphabet, rich in phonetic resources,
to produce works in Kipchak, the Turkic language that
was the lingua franca of the Ukrainian and south Russian
steppes (Schtitz, 1987). Even after the Armenian lan-
guage began to retreat from quotidian life, replaced by
Polish and Turkic languages, and some of the special
privileges granted by King Casimir were revoked,
Catholic missionaries striving to convert the Armenians
still felt it might be efficacious to use Armenian. This
effort resulted in 1668 in the first performance of a play in
Armenian, "The Martyrdom of St. Hripsime." Written by
the missionary Louis-Marie Pidou de Saint-Ollon in
Classical Armenian, the language of sacred texts, never
spoken in the diaspora after the eleventh century, it was
performed in Lvov. Remarkably, at a time when women
lived largely sequestered lives, the women's parts were
performed by women (Cowe, 2002).
Migration from Lvov to southern Poland (later
Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and elsewhere
created secondary diaspora communities that developed
along trade routes; many ruined and some standing
Armenian churches and monasteries dot the landscape of
the nearby regions of Moldova, Romania, and Ukraine,
attesting to that Armenian presence. Elsewhere in
Europe, much smaller and more evanescent diasporic
communities of merchants, clergymen, and craftsmen
emerged. The first Armenian book was published in
Venice in 1512, and the first printed Armenian Bible
appeared in Amsterdam in 1666, probably commissioned
by the homeland's leading clergy, who as yet had no
access to a printing press. The small, modernized
European diasporas functioned as "pipelines" of innova-
tions that slowly penetrated the Armenian homeland
(Hovannisian and Meyers, 1999). It is estimated that
between 1512 and 1750, the diaspora's presses published
around 570 books, some in energetic but ephemeral com-
munities, others in enduring diasporic enclaves. It is
impossible to offer here a full overview of all of them.
In general, at any one time there are three types of com-
munities in the Armenian diaspora: residual or declining;
dominant, as at Lvov; and emergent, such as the ones to
be discussed next (Tololyan, 2000, pp. 112-113).
New Armenian diasporas appeared in response to
the emergence of new states. When the Ottoman Turks
History of the Diaspora
conquered the Byzantine capital, renaming it Istanbul
(1453), they encouraged the immigration of Armenians
and (after 1492) Jews to the city and region. Armenian
settlement in Istanbul appears to have begun in earnest in
1461 (Bardakjian, 1982) and grew slowly at first, thanks
to migration from the older diasporas of the Crimea and
what is now Romania, due to the Ottoman conquest of
these regions, then more steadily due to a series of grim
events in the homeland. Between 1514 and 1639, the
Sunni Turkish and Shiite Persian empires fought a series
of wars of exceptional destructiveness on the Armenian-
inhabited territories straddling their frontier. Hundreds of
thousands of civilians died. A significant number of
refugees fled west into the Ottoman Empire, where they
settled in diasporic communities of villages, towns like
Bursa and Kotahya, and major ports like Smyrna and
Istanbul. In the latter, a community led by an elite of
financiers, skilled artisans, and clergy, gathered around
the Patriarchate, was to become one of the centers of the
diaspora after 1715.
Meanwhile, starting in 1603 to 1604 and throughout
his reign, which ended in 1629, Persia's Shah Abbas,
eager to populate his new capital, Isfahan, depopulated
the region of Julfa in the Armenian homeland (Herzig,
1996). Before the Turkish massacres of 1895 and the
genocide of 1915, this was the single largest demographic
disaster to befall the Armenian people. While the total
number of Armenians deported is unknown, figures rang-
ing from 100,000 up are cited; one contemporary source
mentions 60,000 families (McCabe, 1999, p. 54). Since
families routinely numbered between 6 and 10 individu-
als, this may well be an exaggeration, but there can be no
doubting the scale of the deportation, which denuded part
of Armenia's heartland of its indigenous inhabitants (this
region is now in Azerbaijan). It is estimated that over half
of the deportees died during the long trek to Isfahan; the
rest settled in New Julfa, a suburb of the capital, which
becamemthanks to their skill and to official encourage-
ment and concessions by the Shah--in remarkably short
order, a center of much more than regional trade. The
merchants, especially when politically favored by the
Persian court, proved exceptionally successful at organiz-
ing the silk trade to Europe, and then at penetrating the
markets of the Indian subcontinent (McCabe, 1999).
Ambitious youth from this diaspora, trained in innovative
accounting methods developed locally, borrowed capital
from the great magnates, and went on trading expeditions
39
to all of India and Burma, impenetrable Tibet, and even-
tually east through the areas now known as Singapore,
Malaysia, and Indonesia to the Philippines and south
China, even as their kin and colleagues traded in Russia,
the Ottoman empire, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, and
Britain. They managed a remarkable "intelligence net-
work" of couriers that may have accounted for their
commercial advantage (Aslanian, n.d.). For the first
50 years following 1604, New Julfa flourished not only
economically, but culturally: a press began to operate in
1638. Later, as it began to stagnate, its secondary dias-
pora in India flourished not just in terms of wealth, but
also in philanthropy and cultural activity. This diaspora
encountered the British in India, and the encounter led to
many economic, political, and cultural innovations. For
example, the first Armenian gazette-newspaper was pub-
lished in Madras in 1794; none appeared on the home-
land's territory until the mid-nineteenth century. This
community was responsible for a steady remittance of
funds to the homeland as well as the diaspora's religious
and educational associations, for the flourishing of
"print culture" and the literary imagining of national
community in that medium (Anderson, 1983), and finally
for the emergence of Armenian nationalism (Tololyan,
1999).
The Armenian diaspora of the later eighteenth
century saw itself (as did the religious leaders operating
out of Echmiadzin, the sacred center of Armenian
Christianity in the homeland) as the result of some willed
and much coerced dispersion from the homeland, as poly-
centric, and as threatened by its encounter with European
modernity, both in the West and in increasingly British-
dominated India. Responses to this perception included
(1) a project to create a textual canon that would give the
Armenians a unifying national culture, (2) attempts
by the first secular Armenian intellectuals to theorize
a return to the homeland, and (3) attempts to reempha-
size the role of Echmiadzin as both a sacred and an
administrative center (Aslanian, 2002). Often stateless,
Armenians in the occupied homeland as well as the dias-
pora had come to think of their robed religious leaders as
the uniformed bureaucrats of the Armenian Apostolic
faithful (the protonational entity that began to become
a modem nation in this period).
Paradoxically, the leaders of the first and most imme-
diately consequential of these three projects were not the
traditional Armenian Apostolic clergy, but rather Catholic
40
Armenian monks of the Mechitarist Order or Brotherhood.
They emerged as a late and entirely unintended result of
efforts by the Vatican's missionaries, who had endeavored
for centuries first to persuade the Armenian Apostolic
Church to agree to a self-subordinating union with Rome
and, failing that, to convert ordinary Armenians to
Catholicism. Diaspora Armenians in the papal dominions
of Italy, numbering several thousand, were sometimes
coerced to convert, and elsewhere were approached with a
variety of religious and secular inducements. It is all the
more remarkable, then, that Catholics of Armenian origin
eventually became instnunental in the nurturing of an
Armenian national culture with distinct Enlightenment
overtones and secular aspirations. In 1701, the Catholic
priest Mechitar secretly founded in the Ottoman Empire
the Brotherhood that bears his name. In 1717, this small
band settled in Venice, where the city granted the uninhab-
ited island of San Lazzaro to them. The Order grew by
attracting Armenians from the Ottoman Empire who were
Catholic in faith but retained their ethnonational identity;
later, Catholic Armenians from the diasporas of Hungary,
Romania, and Georgia joined them. With astonishing fore-
sight and energy, the scholar-monks of this diasporic
enclave set out to accomplish what one scholar has
described as a totalizing project (Nichanian, 1999), a cul-
tural program of research and publication that imagined
Armenian life and culture as lamentably fragmented, and
launched an effort to equip both the deprived homeland
population and the artisans and merchants of the diaspora
with the wherewithal of a national culture on the European
model. They published the first dictionary of Armenian (in
two volumes, 1749, 1769); a remarkably influential history
of the Armenian people (in three volumes, 1784 to 1786),
in which Father Mikayel Chamchian, the author, selected
elements from the many manuscript chronicles written by
earlier clergymen who had documented periods of that
history and synthesized them in a spirit of eighteenth-
century nationalism; the first manual of vernacular and
then classical Armenian grammar (1727, 1730); editions
of classics; translations from Italian, French, German,
Greek, and Latin; and textbooks on every topic. After 1772,
a split developed among the Mechitarist ranks, and the
dissenters moved to Trieste, then Vienna. In the latter, they
founded a monastery where, influenced by German schol-
arship and nationalism, they became in the nineteenth cen-
tury a rival of Venice, and also made decisive contributions
Armenian Diaspora
to the study of religion, literature, and the grammar and
philology of modem Armenian. This Mechitarist cultural
project was realized entirely in a tiny diaspora, with vital
contributions from the human, intellectual, and financial
resources of three other diasporasmin Istanbul, Isfahan,
and India.
The later eighteenth century also witnessed the for-
marion of an Armenian diasporic community in the multi-
ethnic and multinational lands ruled by the Russian Empire
of the Romanov czars. From the mid sixteenth century on,
Russia expanded, slowly, intermittently, but steadily, west
to the Baltic, south to the Black Sea, east to the Caspian
Sea, then to Siberia, Central Asia, and the Pacific Ocean.
Persian Armenian merchant elites had traded with Russia
in the seventeenth century and a few had settled there.
Between 1711 and 1723, Armenian refugees from the
Persian-occupied parts of the homeland joined the Russian
army and fought in the Caucasus, hoping that the Russians,
as Christians, would lift the burdens and restrictions
imposed by the capricious rulers of the increasingly
chaotic Muslim state of Persia. Long before diasporic lob-
bies emerged to argue for intervention and assistance from
the great powers (e.g., the Jewish, Cuban, and Armenian
lobbies in Washington, D.C., today) Armenian exiles and
refugees in the diaspora were lobbying Christian rulers and
organizing squadrons ready to fight in the armies of such
powers if they were willing to intercede for "regime
change" in the homeland. There is much evidence and con-
siderable scholarly debate about the role of clergymen in
these efforts. Of necessity, they traveled back and forth
between the homeland's sacred site, Echmiadzin, and the
diaspora communities to which they ministered, and to a
considerable extent they acted as pan-Armenian figures
who contributed to these movements (Aivazian, 2003;
Barkhoodaryan et al., 1989, pp. 158-159).
By the late eighteenth century, Russia had conquered
what are now its southemmost regions. Its policy was to
attract Armenian migrants from the homeland, from the
Kingdom of Georgia, and even from primary diasporas
such as the one in the Crimea, to settle them in these newly
conquered territories along its southern border. Due to
a combination of real incentives and unsavory policies,
abetted by some leaders of the Crimean Armenian dias-
pora and resisted by others, a significant fraction of that
diaspora's people migrated to the steppes of the Don.
Some 7,000 settled in 1778 in Nor Nakhichevan, now
History of the Diaspora
known as Rostov na-Donu. During the next century, its
population tripled even as that of the Crimea declined.
Other small but wealthy communities of Armenian mer-
chants formed in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Astrakhan
(on the Caspian Sea), while communities of peasants and
artisans also settled, between 1715 and 1735, in the most
southerly Russian steppes (in the northern foothills of the
Caucasus mountains), especially in Gh'zlar. For almost
two centuries, this nucleus of the eighteenth-century
Russian Armenian diaspora functioned as a magnet for
more refugees and small groups of emigrants from the
Persian and Ottoman Turkish Empires, who came inter-
mittently. As Russia expanded further south, took the
Caucasus Range and conquered the Transcaucasus, a new
Armenian society emerged on both sides of the mountain
range. Its elites consisted of the higher clergy and the
wealthy merchants (as had been the case since the begin-
ning of the Armenian diaspora), but by the mid-nineteenth
century a new group of secular intellectuals, pedagogues,
and artists also joined this leadership, infusing it with new
energy and creating tensions, as a significant fraction of
the intellectuals joined populist and socialist movements.
Between 1801 and 1828, Russian expansion into the
Transcaucasus led to the takeover of what is now the terri-
tory of the Republic of Armenia, with its capital at
Yerevan; of Georgia and its capital, Tbilisi; and the lands
of the Tatar Khans of Persia that lay east of Armenia and to
the north of the fiver Araz or Arax (after 1918, this latter
region became Azerbaijan, with Baku as its capital). Both
of the latter had Armenian populations. Georgia's
Armenian diaspora was concentrated in its cities, while
the lands of the Turkic and so-called Tatar lords that would
eventually become Azerbaijan had indigenous Armenian
populations in the conquered lands of Shamakh, Gantzak,
and Gharabagh. The latter two were parts of Armenian
kingdoms that had been defeated by the Mongols. In the
first two, the Axmenians were a minority by the time of the
Russian conquest; in the third, named Nagorny-Karabagh
by the Russians, they were and remain the absolute major-
ity. It is necessary but difficult to obtain an overview of the
Armenian diaspora in these two countries, whose histories
are tumultuous and whose populations constitute a con-
stantly shifting mosaic.
The Georgian Armenian diaspora dates back to the
twelfth century, when the borders of Armenian and
Georgian lands were ill established and many Armenian
41
lords served in the Georgian armies as commanders.
As late as 1821, of the 730 noble families of Georgia, 119
were of Armenian origin (Ajaryan, 2002, p. 28). The
population of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, was three-
fourths Armenian in 1801. Like the Poles, the Georgians
remained for a long time a people of agricultural serfs led
by a military aristocracy. In Lvov, business and crafts had
been primarily in the hands of Armenians and Jews; in
Tbilisi, Armenians predominated. This phenomenon of
the "middleman diaspora" (Zenner, 1991) is also found
in Thailand and Indonesia, where the Chinese diaspora
provided both the petty businessmen and the financial
magnates in societies whose indigenous majority
remained peasants until the mid-twentieth century. After
the Russian conquest, the development of oil fields in
Baku in Azerbaijan after the 1860s, and the transport
links provided by railway and telegraph, patterns changed
rapidly. At the start of World War I, around 240,000
Armenians lived in Georgia, more than 10% of that coun-
try's population; some 25% of the population of Tbilisi
was still Armenian, and nearly 20% of Baku's. These
Armenians were now an "intrastate diaspora" (Tololyan,
1991). That is, like those living in that portion of the
homeland that was incorporated into the Russian Empire,
those living in the diasporas of Georgia, Baku, the
Crimea, Rostov na-Donu, or Moscow were all subjects of
the same state. They did not cross frontiers when they
traveled, but zones of social and linguistic difference.
Russian was always the shared second languagemand
often the first languagemof the diasporic elite, who
rightly considered the largest town in Armenia proper,
Yerevan, a dusty provincial backwater compared to
Tbilisi, a city of considerable culture, let alone when
compared to Moscow and St. Petersburg. All but one of
the major Armenian novelists and poets of the nineteenth
century in this empire lived in Tbilisi, and its Armenian
theatre was exceptionally lively. (Significantly, both the
Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian and the great
Soviet film maker Sergei Paradjanov were Tbilisi
Armenians, and possessed a proudly hybrid culture.)
Tbilisi and Baku were the financial capitals of Armenian
philanthropists in the Russian Empire, one of whom
financed the building of the main Armenian Church for
the Paris Armenian Diaspora in 1904, an example of the
extent to which the Armenian elite's commitments within
the diaspora were multicommunal because Armenians in
42
many countries viewed themselves as one religionational
entity.
In the nineteenth century, small numbers of
Armenians formed emergent diasporas in the United
States, Britain, France, Bulgaria, and especially Egypt,
where a prosperous small community existed, with an elite
of financiers who played a significant role in the country's
administration. Nevertheless, the polycentric Armenian
diaspora was organized around Istanbul and Tbilisi.
In Istanbul, the amira who had emerged in the eigh-
teenth century as wealthy taxfarmers, money lenders, and
leaders of emerging industry were supreme until the
1830s. Members of this elite had been competing fiercely
during the previous century for control of the Patriarchate,
whose leading cleric, the patriarch, was recognized by the
Ottoman state as the nominal leader of the Armenian
millet. This consisted primarily of all the adherents to the
Armenian Apostolic Church (some non-Armenian eastern
Christians were lumped into this group as well). In other
words, the leadership of the Armenian subjects of the
Ottoman state, who numbered some 2 million, half of
them in the conquered homeland and the others in the
intrastate diaspora, were largely led and administered
from Istanbul. During a transitional period, the leadership
of the amira was challenged after 1848, with some suc-
cess, primarily by a coalition of bourgeois professionals
and businessmen who were encouraged by the attempts of
the Ottoman sultans to reform their state. In the period of
the Ottoman reforms (ca. 1852 to 1871) change happened
rapidly within the Istanbul diaspora. In politics, attempts
were made to democratize the administration of the com-
munity's internal affairs, from the level of parishes and
local schools all the way up to the election of a representa-
tive assembly. In 1863, an azgayin sahmanatrootyun, liter-
ally a "national constitution," was signed into law, though
all its provisions were never put into practice. The well-
designed communal administrative infrastructure that this
diasporic millet, or community, financed through self-
taxation was effective and elaborate: a hospital, a semi-
nary, orphanages, countless churches, a theatre, and press
media in both Armenian and Turkish emerged. As the
Apostolic Armenians' leadership competed with American
and Armenian Protestant missionaries for the communal
loyalty and religious adherence of their constituency, phil-
anthropic and pedagogic institutions became stakes in the
struggle; they multiplied and improved. In the cultural
Armenian Diaspora
realm, standard western Armenian was formalized as the
language of newspapers, schools, literature, and public
discourse, though the vigorous forms of the Istanbul ver-
nacular and the regional dialects of recent emigrants from
the homeland persisted in spoken speech. At virtually the
same time, a standard written form of the eastern
Armenian dialect emerged in Tbilisi. In other words, mod-
em standard Armenian was created by cultural producers
in the diaspora. This testifies to the vigor and ingenuity of
the diaspora, which accomplished in short order a linguis-
tic standardization that is normally performed by the
bureaucracies of the larger nation-states.
The prosperous and educated elites of these two
intrastate diasporas were not in steady contact with each
other, since the Russian and Ottoman Empires fought sev-
eral wars in the nineteenth century and were not kindly
inclined to cross-border contact among their minority sub-
jects. With sad irony, what this meant was that only a few
clerics and, by the 1880s, students and secular intellectuals
were in contact. These created the Armenian Hnchak Party
(Switzerland, 1887) and the Hye Heghapokhaganneri
Dashnaktzootyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation,
ARF) in Tbilisi in 1890. Both, along with others created
before and after them, played an important role in the
decades that followed, but the Dashnak Party, nationalist
and socialist in orientation, loomed largest. Its activities,
though drawing on ideas, funds, and people in diaspora
(after 1896 funds also came from the U.S. Armenian dias-
pora), were focused by the slogan "depi yerkir" [to the
homeland]. The ARF rallied oppressed Armenians in the
eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, infiltrating militants
(armed with the help of the Persian Armenian diaspora)
into those regions. Despite many successes, it could not
substantially challenge the Ottoman Empire, to which
change came for a while due to the internal, briefly
democratizing coup of 1908. A very brief honeymoon
period followed. Between 1908 and 1914, an extraordi-
narily promising group of young Armenian writers and
thinkers emerged in the Istanbul diaspora community,
which surpassed the one in Tbilisi.
Certain features of the pregenocide diaspora should
be emphasized. Its upper echelons displayed, as current
diaspora theory likes to emphasize, a great deal of
mobility. They communicated and they traveled. But the
mass of each diasporic community--be they prosperous
craftsmen, small shopowners, poor laborers, and, in
The Armenian Diaspora after the Genocide
Persia, peasants--was rooted in the Armenian quarters
of cities and surrounding market villages. In Aleppo
and Jerusalem and especially in Tbilisi and Istanbul,
Armenian quarters for those of modest means endured for
some centuries and were inhabited by a sedentary popula-
tion which thought of itself as natives of the locality. They
saw themselves as distinct from the gharib and ban-
toukhd element, the desperately poor rural Armenians
who kept on coming from the homeland to look for work
as day laborers. While the clerical, merchant, and later
intellectual-artistic elites displayed the diasporic feature
of mobility and developed a rhetoric of the "unity" of
the religionational entity--hye azg, as they called it--
dispersed across homeland and diaspora, most ordinary
people did not know themselves as diasporics; they were
locals and often proudly so. Being settled, away from the
tormented homeland, in the great and prosperous cities of
foreign empires, was desirable to them: they built to stay,
and the sources reflect their pride in what they built in
"their" cities. The diaspora was indeed a network and a
webmfavored tropes of contemporary analysis--along
whose routes some Armenians moved. But the network
also had nodes, as networks must, and these network-
anchoring nodes had deep roots in host-country soil. The
currents of funds, thought, goods, and travelers that
flowed across diasporic Armenian circuits were gener-
ated from the great cities where the reality and the logic
of the sedentary held sway in demography and cultural
patterns.
This diasporic world came to an end in the Ottoman
Empire when, during World War I, from April 1915 on,
that state carried out the genocide of its Armenian citi-
zens. Of 2 million Armenian citizens, 1.5 million were
murdered. In Istanbul, 1,500 leaders of the community
were killed but the population was left untouched--the
Ottoman capital could not have run without them. The
survivors fled to the Middle East, to the West, and to
Armenia. Around 250,000 took refuge in the Russian
Empire's Armenian provinces and in the communities of
its intrastate diaspora. In 1918, these provinces became
the territory of a tiny and shaky Republic of Armenia that
emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman and Russian
Empires. It is significant that the declaration of the inde-
pendence of this state was made in Tbilisi, in diaspora,
before the representatives of the Armenians of the
Transcaucasus moved to Yerevan, the small town that
43
became the capital of a new republic. Two years later,
Lenin's armies, reclaiming what the Romanov czars had
lost, ended this republic's existence. It became a Soviet
Socialist Republic, a component of the USSR, which
became independent again in 1991 with the fall of the
Soviet Union. Another 240,000 survivors found refuge in
Greece and especially the Arab Middle East. From among
these survivors of the genocide, the new Armenian
diaspora emerged.
THE ARMENIAN DIASPORA
AFTER THE GENOCIDE
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne marked the rise of
modern Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, a
casualty of World War I; it also officially marked the end
of Armenian dreams of a return to the 65% of homeland
territory that the international treaty recognized as part of
Turkey. Some 60,000 Armenians remain in Turkey,
almost all in Istanbul (Anon, 2004). Though reduced, the
stamp of centuries-old local Armenian identity remains
powerful, and secondary diasporas of Istanbul Armenians
in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States
remain linked to this great city in a powerful transnational
social field.
The rest of the Armenian diaspora has undergone
almost unimaginably rapid and various change in the
years that have passed since Lausanne. Of the 240,000
genocide survivors in the Middle East, half entered some
form of bondage, were converted to Islam, and disap-
peared. The other half at first lived in shantytowns outside
major cities such as Beirut (Lebanon), Aleppo (Syria),
and Mosul (Iraq). Rallied by the surviving clergy and sec-
ular leaders who had been active in the infrastructure of
the Armenian millet system of the Ottoman Empire, and
helped by some assistance from the U.S. Armenian dias-
pora, the refugees constructed new communities where
refugee shacks had stood. "Compatriotic" unions of emi-
grants from specific regions of the homeland who had
settled in the United States but stayed in touch con-
tributed funds to help family and kin who survived to
construct these communities, often named after their
homeland towns. This work of survival and development
was also a labor of memory more complex than the
authoring of literary texts and nostalgic memoirs alone.
44
Together, they created a complex of words and buildings,
narratives, and habitation patterns that require untangling
in other contexts.
The development trajectories of the new diasporic
communities in the Middle East were unsteady, given to
rapid change. Jerusalem, for example, where at least
some Armenians have lived continuously since the
fourth-century conversion to Christianity and where there
has been an officially recognized Patriarchate with
authority over some holy sites since 1311, had a popula-
tion of 1,300 Armenians in 1914 (Sanjian, 2001), a num-
ber quadrupled by refugees a decade later, and fewer than
2,000 now. On different scales, similar changes happened
elsewhere. The region that eventually became Lebanon
had some 5,000 Armenians in 1914, 210,000 in 1974, and
probably no more than 70,000 today, after the cata-
strophic Lebanese civil war, which lasted from 1975 to
1990. In Syria, the new refugee and old diaspora popula-
tion combined went from around 110,000 in the 1920s to
70,000 now, with the rest emigrating to Lebanon, Western
Europe, North America, Argentina, and Australia.
Similarly, the Armenian population of Persia/Iran swelled
in 1945 to around 225,000, counting the survivors who
settled there after the 1915 genocide and those who fled
communism. Today, after some return migration to
Armenia and especially after the Khomeini revolution,
around 70,000 are left. Egypt, which had become an
exceptionally prosperous and influential diasporic site,
had some 40,000 Armenians in an unusually activist com-
munity that deteriorated rapidly after Gamal Abdel
Nasser's regime began to nationalize minority properties
in the mid-1950s. Today, fewer than 7,000 Armenians are
left in the residual diaspora of Egypt.
It is necessary to make some generalizations (accom-
panied by the usual caveats about them) concerning the
postgenocide trajectories of these communities. They
were led by religious leaders, but the church had lost most
of its religious conviction and authority after the genocide
of 1915, and functioned as a marker of identity and as an
arena for communal focus, made possible by the fact that
the Arab states followed the Ottoman millet pattern and
recognized the non-Arab peoples among them as defined
by their religious character. The struggle over who would
organize and lead the survivors was rhetorically fierce. It
involved secular intellectuals (teachers, writers, members
of the Dashnak, Hnchak, and newer Ramgavar political
Armenian Diaspora
parties) and businessmen who organized the financial
affairs of communal institutions. The reclaiming of old
loyalties and the implantation of new ones was conducted
in lively, if poorly funded, media and in all the sites of a
vigorous diasporic civil society and public sphere
(Tololyan, 2000; Werbner, 1998). Socialists, Communists,
and nationalists who adhered to the leadership exercised
by the Communists in Soviet Armenia clashed with oppo-
nents, primarily in the Dashnak Party, both over local
issues such as control of parish councils and ecclesiastical
institutions, and geopolitical matters, such as the proper
orientation of the diaspora to the sovietized homeland. On
at least one occasion, in 1958, the usual polemic turned
violent in Lebanon, and 30 Armenians died at each other's
hands.
The pressure to fully integrate, let alone assimilate,
into the host societies was minimal until the 1960s, and has
steadily accelerated since then, leading both to increased
emigration to the West and to accelerated integration of
those who have stayed. In the past two decades, full social
and political integration of Armenians into Arab societies
has become imaginable, and is beginning to occur.
Despite the tumult of internal struggle, the post-
genocide Armenian communities were extraordinarily
successful at constructing thriving economic and social
lives and at instilling a form of "exilic nationalism"
(hoping for return to the homeland) that endured until the
1970s. Between 1946 and 1948, an astonishing "repatri-
ation" took place, in which 105,000 aging survivors and
their families "returned" to the "homeland": not the
actual sites from which they came, now in Turkey, but
the homeland now redefined as Soviet Armenia. The fact
that they were willing to sustain the illusion of a new life
in Stalin's state is a testimony to the extent of patriotic
and exilic yearning. Between 1923 and 1962, a total of at
least 200,000 Armenians went to settle in Soviet
Armenia from all diaspora communities. Since the
1970s, however, around 1,200,000 have left the home-
land, enlarging old diasporic communities. In the West,
the exilic nationalism of the survivors has been replaced
by a genuinely diasporic transnationalism (Tololyan,
2000, p. 107) that is constructing new links with post-
Soviet Armenia. In post-Soviet Russia, there are now at
least 1.5 million Armenians, over half of whom are post-
1991 migrants from Armenia. Their links to the home-
land are strong but evolving. New organizations are
The Armenian Diaspora after the Genocide
emerging to claim leadership and to advertise their role
as mediators of links between the governments of Russia
and Armenia and the struggling new migrants. It is diffi-
cult to characterize, as yet, the nature and extent of their
integration into the host society; currently, tensions are
high.
This narrative must turn to what it cannot adequately
represent in this space: the steady rise of the "Western"
diasporic Armenian communities of the United States,
France, and elsewhere. There were 50,000 Armenians in
the United States in 1914 (Mirak, 1980, 1983). After the
genocide of 1915 and some slow migration that acceler-
ated when Middle Eastern and then homeland Armenians
joined the post-1965 immigration, there are now around
800,000 Armenians in the United States. Los Angeles
may be the second largest "Armenian" city in the world,
after Yerevan, Armenia's capital. There are some 40,000
Armenians in Canada, 30,000 in Australia, 60,000 in
Argentina and 15,000 in the rest of Latin America
(Matiossian, in press), around 300,000 in France, and
another 100,000 in the rest of Europe. The U.S. commu-
nity has the population, finances, organization, and some
access through lobbies to the U.S. government that make
it matter most both among the diasporic communities and
to the homeland's new government. It also has the attrac-
tion that comes from being part of American societym
wealthy, consumerist, offering real and imagined
opportunitiesmand so remains the magnet for new sec-
ondary and even tertiary migrations. It is common to find
Armenians who have held refugee status and two or even
three citizenships in a lifetime whose final destination
becomes the United States.
In the production of ideas and culture, and in
the nurturing of important links with the homeland, the
Armenian community of France is very important.
The others all conduct similar efforts on smaller scales.
The local differences and heterogeneity of these commu-
nities are very real. However, so are the shared features
nurtured by kinship ties and community organizations
that make the diaspora part of the Armenian transnation,
composed of the homeland state, the struggling enclave
of Nagorny-Karabagh that is formally in Azerbaijan, and
the worldwide diaspora.
Today, Armenian diaspora populations, especially in
the USA, must be thought of as composites. Some bear
Armenian names but are in effect assimilated. The majority
45
are Armenian-Americans, hyphenated ethnics who are
comfortable with a symbolic Armenian identity, which
they sometimes declare and enact spontaneously, and at
other times when pressed by kin; they manifest a mini-
mum of commitment to some communal institutions and
practices (such as the church, dances, and communal
functions, and sending checks to lobbying organizations)
but are not fully engaged in diasporic life. Those who are
so engaged have transnational commitments that they
manifest toward kin elsewhere, to institutions dedicated
to fostering connections between diaspora communities
and above all with the homeland; they travel to both, and
are active in cultural productionmthe diaspora's media
and public sphere remain vigorous. A few diasporic
Armenians have been political militants, as in Lebanon
from 1975 to 1983, when short-lived but very significant
Armenian terrorist movements emerged in the chaos of
the civil war.
The current agenda of the diaspora, both formally
managed by organizations and informally animating indi-
viduals' commitments, involves several efforts. The most
pressing is that of sustaining a distinct identity in the face
of strong inducements to assimilation in receptive and
pluralist societies in the West, where pervasive individu-
alism, exogamy, erosion of language, and even of religion
(through the efforts of evangelical Protestantism) are all
potent factors. The creation of appropriate links to the
post-Soviet republic of the homeland at every level has
also been a pressing concern, made complex by the
painful recognition that kinship alone cannot bridge dif-
ferences bred by centuries-old, divergent trajectories in
the development of social attitudes in the homeland and
various diasporas. The creation of links also involves both
struggle and cooperation at every level of life, as in the
intellectual and political task of defining a transnational
consensus as to what "Armenian" interests are, as
opposed to what Armenia's interest is. The development
of philanthropic and investment strategies that the dias-
pora might enact in Armenia is a pressing concern, as is
the formulation of practices that might assist the recovery
of the Armenian population of Karabagh, which, along
with Azerbaijan, was devastated by the war of 1992
to 1994, which killed at least 30,000 people and left
hundreds of thousands on both sides homeless. Finally,
there is the effort, slowly reanimated since 1965, the
50th anniversary its launching, to get Turkey and the
46
international community to recognize officially the still-
denied genocide of the Armenians.
As Jivan Tabibian, a diaspora-born scholar who is now
a diplomat for the Republic of Armenia said, Amaenians
"are not place bound, b u t . . , are intensely place- conscious"
(Viviano, 2004, p. 40). Today, the Armenian diaspora con-
sists of both strong localized, sedentary centers and a mobile
population, and its renewed, post-Soviet attachment to the
homeland remains a major factor in its collective life.
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