Ana Kasparian and the Curious Case of Armenian Antisemitism

When Middleman Minorities Hate Other Middleman Minorities

Ana Kasparian, a Young Turk unironically posing as an Armenian Happy Merchant. Source: Know Your Meme (slightly modified)

“The ewe had bright eyes, rather like glass grapes. There was something human about her—something Jewish, Armenian, mysterious, indifferent, unintelligent. . . . Oh God, how desperately mankind needs to atone, to beg for forgiveness. How long mankind needs to beg the sheep for forgiveness, to beg sheep not to go on looking at them with that glassy gaze. What meek and proud contempt that gaze contains. What godlike superiority—the superiority of an innocent herbivore over a murderer who writes books and creates computing machines! The translator repented before the ewe, knowing he would be eating her meat the following day.”

— Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook

Ana Kasparian, co-host of the Young Turks online news show, is the daughter of Armenian immigrant parents.¹ She grew up speaking Armenian, and her paternal great-grandparents survived the 1915–1917 Armenian genocide organized by… the Young Turks. (Yes, the name of the show has gotten her in trouble with other Armenians.) Anahit Misak Kasparian (her non-passing name) has also ranted that “The goyim are waking the fuck up,” “You think you're God's chosen people while you behave like absolute demons,” and that “Israel is evil, genocidal, and has destroyed our country.” (She didn’t specify whether she meant Armenia or America.) Kasparian is uninsightful as a political commentator and uninteresting as a human being, so I wouldn’t normally comment on her. Yet the notion of an Armenian antisemite (and she’s not the only one: see also terminally online meathead Dan Bilzerian) does strike a strange chord. After all, if any people collectively resemble the Jews, surely it’s the Armenians. What, then, can the curious case of Armenian antisemitism tell us about antisemitism in general?

First, let’s recount the similarities between Armenians and Jews.

Jews and Armenians, Ancient Survivors

Both Armenians and Jews are small, ancient peoples rooted in the greater Near East. The earliest known appearance of the term “Israel” is on the Merneptah Stele, an ancient Egyptian document dated to around 1208 BCE.² “Armenia” first appears in the Behistun Inscription, commissioned by the Persian Emperor Darius and dated to around 520 BCE, although the Armenian ethnogenesis occurred centuries earlier. If you look at a map of the Roman Empire at its height in 117 CE, you’ll see many place names that no longer correspond to distinct living peoples, like Cappadocia, Cyrenaica, and Pannonia. But Judea and Armenia are still here in recognizable form, even though, after centuries of exile, persecution, and genocide, only about 16 million Jews and 11 million Armenians remain.³ Key to the survival of both groups is their close binding of ethnicity and religion. Judaism is (obviously) the ethnic religion of the Jews, while Armenian Apostolic Christianity is the national faith of the Armenians. In 301 CE, Armenia became the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Unlike missionary-oriented branches of Christianity, the Armenian church has primarily served to preserve the nation’s language, culture, history, and sense of purpose. Armenians, like Jews, are also historically endogamous, with intermarriage even to other Christians discouraged. (Though today, many diaspora Armenians, like diaspora Jews, marry outside of their group.⁴) Ironically, given Kasparian’s post, there’s even an Armenian word for outsiders that corresponds to “goy”: “odar.”

Both Armenians and Jews have lost and regained their political sovereignty over the centuries. The United Kingdom of Israel, idealized in the Hebrew Bible, is typically dated to around 1000 BCE. After it split into rival states, the Kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and the Kingdom of Judah to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Hasmonean Revolt restored Jewish independence from Seleucid Greek rule in the 2nd century BCE, though Judea became a Roman client state and then province starting in 63 BCE. Following earlier revolts against Rome, the Jewish uprising during the Byzantine–Sassanid War (602–628 CE) was the last, brief attempt at Jewish self-rule in the Holy Land until the establishment of modern Israel in 1948. (Though there were, at times, Jewish-ruled states outside the land of Israel, notably Himyar in Yemen and the Khazar Khaganate in the Northern Caucasus.) The Armenians reached their greatest territorial extent under Tigranes the Great in the 1st century BCE, only to intermittently lose sovereignty to the Romans and Persians. The Armenian Arsacid kingdom ultimately fell in the 5th century CE amid partition between these empires, with new Armenian states emerging from 885–1375 CE. Armenian political sovereignty disappeared again in the late medieval period and was only re-established in the 20th century, briefly after World War I and more durably with Armenia's independence in 1991.

When Judea met Armenia. Source: Wikimedia Commons

For both peoples, the loss of political sovereignty was coupled with demographic dispersion. The Babylonian conquest marked the first Jewish exile. Though the Persians would later encourage Babylonian Jews to return to their homeland, many remained in the diaspora thereafter. (Jewish diaspora communities also preceded the Babylonian exile. Notably, a separate Jewish temple on Elephantine Island in Egypt was established around 650 BCE.) But the aftermath of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–74 CE) and especially the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE) resulted in mass death, enslavement, and displacement that radically altered Jewish demographics. Though Jews were still the largest group in their homeland until perhaps the late 4th century CE, Judaism became increasingly diaspora-centered, with major European branches emerging in the early medieval period. Long-standing Jewish communities also existed throughout the Middle East and as far afield as India. Although there was always a Jewish presence in the Holy Land, the Jews only reclaimed their majority there as a result of the modern Zionist movement. Today, around half of all Jews are Israeli, while just a third of ethnic Armenians live in the Armenian ethnostate.

Historically, the Armenians remained concentrated in the Armenian Highlands until the rise of the Mediterranean-adjacent, Crusader-allied Kingdom of Cilicia (1080–1375 CE), reflecting a westward political shift and population movement under Seljuk Turkic pressure. At the same time, they also established a far-flung trading diaspora, extending from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia. In 1604–1605, Abbas I of Persia carried out large-scale deportations of Armenians into Iran both to create a buffer zone against the advancing Ottomans and to harness their commercial skills. Due to the Great Surgun (“exile”), earlier Turko-Mongol invasions, and prolonged Ottoman–Iranian warfare, Armenians lost their majority in present-day Armenia to Muslim populations, including Turks and Kurds. When the Russians acquired the region in 1828, they strategically encouraged Armenian resettlement as a sort of Armenian proto-Zionism, while local Muslims moved to Iran. Historic Western Armenia, now part of Turkey, was cleared of Armenians as a result of the 1915–1917 genocide, with survivors fleeing to Russian Armenia or elsewhere in the Middle East and beyond. Thus, while Iranian Armenia was about 80% Muslim, Armenia today is around 98% Armenian Christian. Modern Armenia, like Israel, also has a right of return for its diaspora, while the Soviets earlier encouraged Armenian repatriation. Indeed, Kasparian’s father was born in Damascus but moved to Armenia with his family, while Bilzerian—a multigenerational American—became an Armenian citizen in 2018.⁵

Jews and Armenians—like overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and Indians in East Africa, among others—have historically been middleman minorities. They established niches as traders, money lenders, and service providers. Middleman minorities provide economic value, which is why the ruling authorities invite them to their lands. For example, Ashkenazi Jews began settling in Central Europe around 800 CE, encouraged by Charlemagne and later kings and bishops. But middleman minorities also generate resentment among the masses, which is why they are frequently subject to persecution, expulsion, pogroms, and worse. The same epithets and stereotypes—like “parasite,” “exploiter,” and “clannish”—have been applied to Korean shopkeepers in black American ghettoes, Armenian traders in Ottoman cities, and Jewish peddlers in Polish villages. Moreover, as economic Thomas Sowell writes, “The same capacity for hard work, frugal living, and long-term planning which was essential for survival as middleman minorities has often led to great success in education, in the professions, and in large-scale business enterprises.” But greater success can lead to even greater resentment from a hostile majority. The middlemen are then seen as parvenus who’ve upended the natural order. Sowell notes that “while the Holocaust was the ultimate catastrophe for Jews, it was also the culmination of a long history of lethal mass violence unleashed against middleman minorities around the world.” Adolf Hitler made the link between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide explicit, remarking in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”⁶

But if Armenians and Jews have so much in common, why do conspiracy theories focus on the Elders of Zion, not the Elders of Ararat? Why are “the goyim waking the fuck up,” but not the odars? Why don’t non-Armenians even know what “odar” means? To answer these questions, let’s review some of the key differences between Jews and Armenians.

Why Not “The Eternal Armenian”?

Most fundamentally, Armenians are not negatively depicted in the holy book of a world religion. It would be anachronistic to call the New Testament antisemitic. The Gospels were themselves written by Jews engaged in an intra-Jewish dispute with other Jews. When, in John 8:44, Jesus—a Jew like John—tells a group of Jews, “You are of your father the devil,” he was not attributing genealogical evil to his own people. But racial antisemitism, which formally emerged in the 19th century, is the secularization of a millennia-old theological enmity given expression by figures ranging from John Chrysostom to Martin Luther.⁷ The presence of Jews as both a middleman minority and the religious symbol of perfidy in Christendom gave antisemitism its all-consuming, metaphysical resonance. The 1940 Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew was inspired by the medieval myth of the “Wandering Jew,” which in turn drew on the notion of Jewish blood guilt for the death of Christ. As Christians living amidst Muslims, the Armenians also suffered from religious subjugation. But they didn’t play a starring theological role as murderers of Muhammad. (Nor did Middle Eastern Jews, who, while oppressed, historically fared better than their European brethren—though Islamic tradition blames Arabian Jewish tribes for conspiring against the Prophet.) To be clear, Armenians also experienced religiously justified violence. But anti-Armenianism has been mostly localized to Turkey and the Caucasus, whereas antisemitism is a global phenomenon. Armenian haters also don’t blame nearly every perceived ill of the modern age (capitalism, communism, mass migration, wars, etc) on Armenians, while antisemites cast Jews as diabolical masterminds.

The reason why Jews get blamed for modern life relates to the nature of the Jewish dispersion. Whereas the Armenian diaspora was smaller, and historically concentrated in the Middle East and Caucasus (though traders lived farther afield, and, particularly following the genocide, large communities also formed in Russia, the US, and France), the demographic weight of world Jewry had shifted to Europe in the early modern period. Thus, when the Enlightenment, capitalism, liberalism, socialism, and modernity as we know it first emerged in the West, Jews were there to take the fall. (For militant secularists like Voltaire, Judaism could also be blamed for Christianity itself.) The Jews’ status as a middleman minority, coupled with a storied tradition of religious scapegoating, made them the perfect devil for a godless age. Of course, Jews also benefited from their civic emancipation, which started in the late 18th century following the French Revolution. Their rapid rise and newfound visibility in mainstream society—aided, per Sowell, by the skills they acquired while filling demanding, though often hated, economic roles—made them an easy target for demagogues. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jesuits and Freemasons also competed for the title of world-historical villain, but the 1903 Tsarist forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion—which Hitler said “reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims”—solidified the Jewish world conspiracy as one of the enduring myths of our time.

The Zionist movement was, in large measure, a reaction to European antisemitism. However, Jewish resettlement of Israel was coupled with the importation of European antisemitism to the Middle East, which fused with traditional anti-dhimmi attitudes. Notably, the 1988 Hamas Covenant references both anti-Jewish Islamic verses and the Protocols. Compared with the Armenian resettlement of their own homeland, Zionism inspired greater enmity largely due to later timing and religious geography. In terms of timing, the Armenians became a majority in Russian (formerly Iranian) Eastern Armenia by the mid–late 19th century following migrations from Iran and the Ottoman Empire. That majority was transformed into overwhelming dominance by the influx of Ottoman Armenian refugees after the genocide. The population displacements of the 1918–1920 Armenian–Azerbaijani war (and later Nagorno-Karabakh conflict) contribute to regional tensions, but weren’t globally sacralized like the Nakba. By contrast, large-scale Jewish immigration to the Holy Land began in the late 19th century, increasing incrementally through successive waves until a major influx of refugees arrived before, during, and after the Holocaust, followed by the mass immigration of Jews expelled from Muslim lands. Israel’s establishment thus interacted with the rise of modern Islamism, pan-Arabism, and anti-colonialism, becoming their ideological target. Additionally, while Armenia is located on the periphery of the Muslim world and has no religious significance in Islam, the land of Israel is in the Arab heartland and considered holy by Muslims (by virtue, ultimately, of being considered holy by Jews). While Muslims displaced by Armenians were absorbed into neighboring states, the Palestinian Arabs formed a national identity that has now become a holy cause for Islamists and leftists—who, in turn, often channel classical antisemitism. Witness Kasparian, once a self-declared progressive, casting herself as an oppressed goy.

Middlemen Are Human (All Too Human) Too

Despite their differences, Armenians and Jews still have more in common with each other than with any other people. Armenians have even been called “the Jews of the Caucasus” (though there are, in fact, actual Jews of the Caucasus).⁸ So why aren’t the two groups allies? Historically, many Jews have advocated for the Armenians, including Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish-American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who tried to intercede on behalf of the Armenians; Franz Werfel, an Austrian Jew who dramatically depicted the Armenian genocide in his 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh; and Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the term “genocide” in response to both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. But the relationship has been far from sanguine. Hitler considered the Armenians, who speak an Indo-European language, to be shifty but Aryan, and a small Armenian Legion led by national hero Garegin Nzhdeh fought for the Nazis. On the other hand, several Jewish Red Army POWs were hidden by the unit (similar physiognomy surely helped), and some Armenians rescued Jews during the Holocaust. More recently, Armenian–Jewish relations have been strained by geopolitics. In the face of Arab rejectionism, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, sought alliances with non–Muslim Arab regional powers, including Turkey. For the sake of that now-strained relationship, Israel does not officially acknowledge the Armenian genocide—though many Israelis, from former president Reuven Rivlin to current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have personally done so. Israel also has close ties to oil-rich Azerbaijan, Armenia’s neighboring rival, and provided it with military support during the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Somewhat counterintuitively, Christian Armenia cooperates with Shi’ite Muslim Iran in the region, whereas Shi’ite Azerbaijan is partnered with Jewish Israel.

Still, even before that traumatic conflict, a 2015–2016 survey found that 32% of Armenians wouldn’t accept Jews as fellow citizens—the highest percentage in all of the Central and Eastern European countries polled. An r/armenia Reddit thread provides interesting theories on the results, including that “Armenian responses are driven more by the fact that many Armenians are unwilling to accept anyone who is not Armenian as a 'fellow citizen,’ which would naturally include Jews,” and that “Both are middlemen minorities. Both have exceptional skills in many fields. Both have to compete with each other in these fields. In every field, Armenians see in Jews a more successful version of themselves.” Undoubtedly, too, a subset of Armenians, like all people, are prone to dumb conspiracy theories.⁹ Some Armenians even blame the Dönme, a crypto-Jewish Turkish sect, for the Armenian genocide. (So do some Turks, in order to deflect blame.) To Armenia’s credit, its capital, Yerevan, has a split memorial to the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Unfortunately, that memorial has also been defaced with swastikas multiple times. Meanwhile, in Israel, Haredi Jews harass Armenians in Jerusalem's Old City. Perhaps the takeaway here is that humans—with the aid of ethical principles—are capable of empathy across tribal lines. As the Hebrew Bible commands: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” But humans are also quite capable of having been strangers, then going on to oppress other strangers without a second thought. Armenians and Jews have a lot in common. People in general have a lot in common. The curious case of the Armenian antisemite is but one example of the curious case of the flawed, fallen human being.

1. I thought of titling this post “The Kurious Kase of Armenian Antisemitismian” but decided it was over the top. Still, I leave it here for your amusement.

2. Ironically, the stele reads “Israel is laid waste—its seed is no more.”

3. A member of Judea’s Herodian dynasty, Aristobulus of Chalcis, was even appointed King of Lesser Armenia by Emperor Nero.

4. Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov is a notable product of Jewish–Armenian intermarriage.

5. Dan Bilzerian’s father, Paul Bilzerian, is a convicted corporate felon born in Miami, Florida. I’ll refrain from Happy Merchant references.

6. In 1898, following the Ottoman Hamidian massacres, the Jewish author Bernard Lazare ominously wrote, “I know full well that the Christian peoples have the option of the Armenian solution, but their sensitivity would not allow them to envisage this.”

7. In embryonic form, racial antisemitism also existed in early modern Spain and Portugal, where “purity of blood” statutes targeted converted Jews and their descendants starting in the 15th century.

8. Many middlemen minorities are known as the “Jews of” somewhere, including the Igbo (“Jews of Nigeria”), Parsis (“Jews of India,” though, again, there are actual Indian Jews), and diaspora Lebanese (“Jews of West Africa”).

9. Kasparian herself posted that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Mossad.