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The Young Turks’ Crime againstHumanity: The Armenian Genocideand Ethnic Cleansing in the OttomanEmpireYair Aurona

a The Open University, IsraelPublished online: 23 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Yair Auron (2014) The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The ArmenianGenocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, The European Legacy: Toward NewParadigms, 19:3, 382-383, DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2014.898934

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.898934

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Book Reviews

The Young Turks’ Crime againstHumanity: The Armenian Genocide andEthnic Cleansing in the OttomanEmpire. By Taner Akcam (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 2012), xlii + 483pp. $39.50/£27.95 cloth.

The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity is awelcome and important addition to the longlist of books by Taner Akcam on the historyof the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey.Not only is he a brilliant scholar but he hasbeen an active promoter of human rights andsocial justice in Turkey and elsewhere, and inthe long struggle for the recognition of theArmenian genocide by Turkey and the world.As indicated by the title and subtitle of hismeticulous study, Akcam’s focus is on theArmenian genocide as a crime against human-ity and an act of ethnic cleansing.

Akcam, who was born in Turkey, wasdrawn to politics from an early age . In 1975he was arrested in Ankara for his politicalwritings. In 1986 one of his closest friendswho, like him, was engaged in the strugglefor democracy and social justice, was killedinstead of Taner himself who happened notto have been on the scene. In 1988 he had toleave Turkey for Hamburg and later on toemigrate to the United States where today heholds the Maloosdian and Mugar Chair inArmenian Genocide Studies at ClarkUniversity.

Akcam is practically the first, though nolonger the only, scholar of Turkish origin topublicly acknowledge the Armenian geno-cide. He is one among very few scholars—inaddition to Wahakn N. Dadrian—who basetheir work on Turkish sources. Like otherperpetrators of crimes against humanity, theTurks have tried to destroy most of the archi-val sources on the Armenian genocide. Thusgreat efforts are required to locate originaldocuments and analyze them competently.Akcam’s study is based on more than 600Turkish documents and others from archives

in Austria, Germany, Israel, the United King-dom, and the United States. The book is ded-icated “to the memory of Hrant Dink, whosedream of bringing our two peoples [Turksand Armenian] together lives in my heart andsoul, and in honor of Vahakan N. Dadrian,with my deepest gratitude and respect.”Hrant Dink, a Turk of Armenian descent,was editor-in-chief of a bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper. Dink was assassinatedin Istanbul in January 2007. Many Turks arelikely to think Akcam has crossed over to theside of the “enemy” and would therefore seehim as a traitor.

In his book Akcam analyzes the internalsocial and political developments in the Otto-man Empire from the end of the nineteenthcentury to the end of the second decade ofthe twentieth century. The Muslims, themajority, could no longer hold together thediverse groups that peopled their territory.For the Turks the struggle against the Arme-nians was perceived as a life or death struggle.According to Akcam it was not enough toredraw the boundaries of territorial andcollective memories. The creation of anation-state required a third factor—that of acommonly shared memory, which combinesthe two. However, the essential feature of thisnewly constructed Turkish memory was thetotal denial of the Armenian genocide.

This policy of denial was initiated byMustafa Kemal, Ataturk, the founder of mod-ern Turkey. Because it has remained the offi-cial policy since Ataturk’s times and becauseof the political and social implications ofacknowledging the Armenian genocide, it hasbeen almost impossible for Turkish scholarsand leaders to undertake the task of re-evalu-ating their past. Once Turkey overcomes thepast by recognizing the atrocities of the Arme-nian genocide—which will surely happensomeday—it will be by virtue of the courageof scholars like Taner Akcam, the ongoingdebate inside Turkey, and the continued pres-sure exerted by western organizations.

The European Legacy, 2014Vol. 19, No. 3, 382–415

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Regrettably, the Armenian genocide isnot much studied in Israel and is still not rec-ognized by the state. Akcam’s Dialogues acrossan International Divide: Essays towards a Turk-ish-Armenian Dialogue (2001), appeared inHebrew translation in 2002. Akcam clearlybelieves in the power of dialogue to over-come old conflicts; like him, I too believe itis the only way to resolve such deep-seatedtensions and animosities that began almost100 years ago.

YAIR AURON

The Open University, Israel© 2014, Yair Auronhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.898934

Spectacular Performances: Essays onTheatre, Imagery, Books and Selves inEarly Modern England. By Stephen Orgel(Manchester: Manchester University Press,2011), xix + 283 pp. £60.00 cloth.

A new book by Stephen Orgel is always acause for celebration, and the present volume,a collection of thirteen essays, is no exception.One opens Spectacular Performances expectingnothing less than spectacular performances ofthinking and writing about the nature of per-formance in its multifarious forms in earlymodern England, and one is not disappointed.Orgel defines “performance” broadly, so as toinclude not only theatre and pageantry butalso “the deployment of a personal style...imagery of various kinds, and even... books,which in the early modern period ofteninclude strongly performative elements” (1).His own volume adheres to his description ofbooks in the introduction: less a static “repos-itor[y] of meaning” than a “complex perfor-mance, whether through the shifting relationof parts that make up a book’s whole or inthe relation of book to reader and reader tobook” (2). The essays that make up this col-lection animate one another and their read-ers/viewers, challenging them to become asopen and inquisitive as their author.

Eight of the essays in this collection arerepeat performances: previously publishedwork that appeared mostly within the pastdecade (with the exception of “Jonson and theAmazons,” first published in 1990). Of these

eight, at least two—“Not His Picture but HisBook” and “Ganymede Agonistes”—havebeen greatly expanded from their earlier ver-sions. Five appear here for the first time,including a fascinating exploration of royalimagery that begins by comparing QueenElizabeth’s coronation portrait with that ofRichard II.

Like good drama, these essays take us onunexpected journeys, with unanticipatedplot twists. “Seeing through Costume” takesdetours through the Tower of London andthe story of Arbella Stuart’s and her husbandWilliam Seymour’s use of disguise in escapingimprisonment as well as through later histori-cal periods. It considers, for instance, the fas-cinating case of the female jazz pianist BillyTipton, who passed as a man throughout along married life, before returning us to theearly modern period when, Orgel concludes,costumes were not the transparent fictionsthat they so often are for us but rather “thelegitimating emblems of authority” imbuedwith “social reality” (58).

Spectacular Performances wears its learninglightly, sporting more illustrations (a total of159) than endnotes (a total of 139). Only threeessays contain no illustrations at all, and takenas a whole, the book offers rigorous training inboth the theory and practice of how to readearly modern images. At times the volumegives the impression of a pleasant and invigo-rating stroll through galleries displaying paint-ings, woodcuts, engravings, architecturaldrawings, costume designs, movie stills, fron-tispieces, maps, and title pages, with one ofthe best possible guides to the visual arts of theearly modern period to serve as our guide, tointerpret, and, incidentally, to entertain aswell: for the essays are written with a brio thatis all too scarce in academic writing and toorarely coupled with the complexity of thoughtthat is everywhere apparent here. One of theconsiderable strengths of these essays is theirimmense usefulness to specialists whileremaining accessible to non-specialists.

The eleventh piece in the volume, “Pla-giarism Revisited,” offers a clue as to thecharacter of the whole. The title refers to anessay that Orgel had published in 1981, “TheRenaissance Artist as Plagiarist,” one that heplayfully refers to as having “sunk without atrace” (211), only to be revived for polemicalpurposes twenty-four years later by his friend

BOOK REVIEWS 383

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