Introduction

1

Armenian historical and polemical sources on Iranian Jews in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries are in short supply. To explain this lack of sources, one needs to keep in mind the cohabitation patterns under Islamic rule. After the forced resettlement of Armenians to Iran by Shah Abbas I (1581–1629) in 1603/4, and shortly after their segregation in the New Julfa neighbourhood near Isfahan in 1655 by the order of Shah Abbas II (1642–1666) (Ghougassian 1998; Landau and van Lint 2015, 308–33), Armenians, as the main Christian community in Iran, struggled towards organizing their community in the face of two vital threats: post-Tridentine Catholic missionaries¹ and Shi’ite Muslims. Tridentine missionaries such as Augustinians from Goa (1602), Discalced Carmelites (1607), Capuchins (1628), and Jesuits (1647) flooded Safavid lands with the purpose of proselytizing Muslims and especially Eastern Christians (O’Malley 2000; Flannery 2013; Windler 2018b, 2018a; Tiburcio 2020, 18–24). This situation forced the miaphysite (non-Chalcedonian) Armenian Apostolic Church to delineate the boundaries of the Armenian faith, slowly switching to stricter strategies in attempting to reaffirm the Armenian orthodoxy (Windler 2018a, 205–34; Ohanjanyan 2020, 8–13, 47–48). Meanwhile, Armenians struggled to survive the intermittently recurring forced conversions to Shi’a Islam. Despite the lenient royal policy towards Armenians of New Julfa, in particular privileges that the wealthy merchants and khojas enjoyed under the auspices of the Queen Mothers (Ghougassian 1998, 60, 195),² forced conversions, instigated by the Shi’ite ulema, affected many Armenians, mainly those in Hamadan, Shiraz, and the peripheries of Iran (Ghougassian 1998, 71–76). No wonder that under such circumstances, the lion’s share of Armenian literature from the period is dedicated to the elucidation of relations with the Iranian administration, debates with European missionaries and Armenian converts to Catholicism, as well as accounts of the Afghan and Russo-Persian wars (Titanian 1965, 211–22).³

2

Nevertheless, a few Armenian texts speak about Jews in Safavid Iran, of which the most reliable is the Book of History of the seventeenth-century author Aṙak‘el Davrižec‘i (d. 1670) (Davrižec‘i 1990; Bournoutian 2005–2006). Davrižec‘i left a massive account about the forced resettlement of Armenians by Shah Abbas I to Iran, where he also described the relocation of Jews to inhabit the towns of Isfahan, Kashan,⁴ Farahabad, Tabriz, Shiraz, Kum, Ardabil, Lor, Kazbin, Bandarik, and several small villages. He also described the segregation of Jews in the remote suburbs of Isfahan during the reign of Shah Abbas II, and imparted essential details about the coercive mass conversion of Jews to Islam in 1656, who, he said, in reality remained anusim (forced converts) clandestinely professing Judaism (Davrižec‘i 1990, 357–72).⁵

3

It seems that Jewish sources are equally scarce when it comes to the Safavid period. The Judeo-Persian chronicle by Babai ibn Lutf titled Kitāb-i anusī (The Book of a Forced Convert) narrates the history of Jewish persecutions between 1617 and 1662 (Moreen 2018, 1050, 1981), whereas, as Vera Moreen states, Jewish sources contain little information on the Iranian Jews between 1662 and 1722 (Moreen 2018, 1050). In 1686 a Jewish polemicist from Kashan, Rabbi Yehudah ben El‘azar, warned against the messianic sect of Sabbateans infiltrating into the Jewish communities (Moreen 2003, 157–68). Sabbateans troubled Armenian historiographers, too. Indeed, Aṙak‘el Davrižec‘i, and another Armenian author, Zak‘aria K‘anak‘eṙc‘i (1627–1699), dedicated chapters to the spread of Sabbateanism (Davrižec‘i 1990, 490–99; K‘anak‘eṙc‘i 1870, 1:55–56).

4

The rise and dispersion of Sabbateans that profoundly influenced the further development of Judaism in the Ottoman Empire, Europe, and beyond, is a separate topic of research that goes beyond the scope of this article.⁶ Nor does the article intend to study the inner life or the history of conversions of Iranian Jews that has been thoroughly covered by scholars of the field (Moreen 1987; Spicehandler 1975). It instead aims to outline the available Armenian polemical literature from pre-modern Iran supported by texts produced within the Ottoman context,⁷ and analyze the Armenian-Jewish connections in the interfaith disputations that intensified within the Muslim environment. It further attempts to trace the transfer and appropriation of fashionable genres, ideas, and argumentations from Western polemical literature, as much as the extant Armenian sources from the Safavid to Qajar periods allow us to observe.

Cohabitation under Muslim Rule

5

Despite the abundance of Armenian historical accounts from the period, most of them speak evasively about Armenian-Jewish interactions. What we know for sure is that as dhimmis, Armenians and Jews were embedded into a multicultural and multi-religious environment composed of Greeks, Latins (i.e., Europeans), Ethiopians, Indians, Tajiks, Syrians, Uzbeks, Georgians, Albanians, Lezgins, various Caucasian ethnic groups professing many types of Christianity and Islam, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and representatives of other religious beliefs (J̌ułayec‘i 1905, 136–37).⁸ Persians and Jews ran the internal trade while Armenians were in control of foreign commercial traffic, according to a contemporary European traveler (Tavernier 1678, 234).⁹ Although Armenians and Jews were expelled from the center of Isfahan and segregated as “impure” (nejasat) on the outskirts of the city, cross-communal exchanges were inevitable (Chardin 1711, 1:78).¹⁰ Cohabitation in a deeply diversified society implied that both groups had general knowledge of each other’s beliefs, rites, and customs. However, there might have been certain ‘non-knowledge’ of serious specifics of the other community’s actual beliefs (Zwierlein 2016, 117–18). Such ‘non-knowledge’ is well-exposed in Yehudah ben El‘azar’s polemical treatise against Sabbateans, Muslims,¹¹ and Christians titled Ḥovot Yehudah (Duties of Judah).¹² Yehudah lived in Kashan and practiced medicine. The treatise, written in 1686, was in Judaeo-Persian, except for the epilogue, which was in Hebrew. In Ḥovot Yehudah, the author referred to all Christians as “Armenians” (Moreen 2003, 163; Tiburcio 2020, 58). Yehudah’s generalization suggests that for Iranian Jews, Armenians, as the majority Christian group in Iran, encapsulated general qualities of all Christians. Iranian Armenians, in their turn, at least the literate members of the community, were somewhat informed of actual Jewish rites. An example of this is Davrižec‘i’s story about the apostate Jew Avadia’s (Obadiah) assassination by three vengeful Jews who threw Avadia’s dead body in the square to be discovered by his wife. Explaining their actions, Davrižec‘i provides details about a Jewish custom according to which the widow (or a close relative) had to identify her husband’s dead body so that it became possible for the widow to enter a levirate marriage¹³ (Davrižec‘i 1990, 367). Davrižec‘i learned the details about this custom by asking around among Jews and wrote down what they had told him,¹⁴ which testifies to communication between Davrižec‘i and learned Jews in Isfahan as well as to knowledge exchange through questioning and answering (Zwierlein 2016, 147–57).

6

Based on Armenian sources, one might assume that despite the historical tension between Jews and Christians, mutual compassion between Armenians and Jews was at play in a common attempt to survive under Islamic rule. Periodically renewed oppressive measures aimed at the social disciplining of indigenous Christian dhimmis equally affected Iranian Jewish communities. While the ban on public drinking intermittently imposed on the Christian population (Matthee 2014) during the reigns of Shah Suleyman (1666–1694) and Sultan Husayn (1694–1722) did not crucially affect the Jewish community, accusations that Armenians and Jews caused the drought in 1678 led to heavy fines against both communities. Jews paid an extremely high price as their rabbis were brutally murdered and “their corpses, thrown out into the great royal square, called Maidan, lay for a week unburied,” until a tax of four tumans was levied for each corpse (Chick 1939, 408; Matthee 2005, 31). Armenians had a privileged position and a higher profile in the commerce of the Empire. Thereby, through the intervention of the Queen Mother, whose property was New Julfa (Ghougassian 1998, 60), this time Armenians avoided bloodshed and martyrdom, which was not always the case. Although Shahs Abbas I, Safi I (1629–1642), and Abbas II to a certain extent refrained from imposing mass conversion on the Armenians in New Julfa (Matthee 2019, 14–18),¹⁵ in 1628, not long before his death, Shah Abbas I confirmed Shaykh al-Islam of Isfahan Baha al-Din Amali’s decree. According to it, any Christian subject who converted to Islam would inherit the property of his Christian relatives (Chick 1939, 288).¹⁶ The decree was reaffirmed around 1657 under Shah Abbas II, apparently through the efforts of the grand vizier Muhammad Beg (Matthee 2019, 15). Besides Christians, it affected Iranian Jews, a fact reflected in Davrižec‘i’s story about Avadia threatening his Jewish uncle Samson in order to put his hands on the latter’s property after his death “according to the Persian law” (Davrižec‘i 1990, 368). Davrižec‘i felt for the Jews and saw them as co-destined with the Armenians to carry the hardships of Islamic rule; therefore, his accounts are saturated with compassion. Other Armenian historiographers remain silent about Iranian Jews or Armenian-Jewish interactions; meanwhile, the travelogues and memoirs of European merchants, ambassadors, painters, and priests add little material,¹⁷ stating mainly the wretched conditions the Jewish communities were forced to live in within Iranian society. The silence of the sources compels one to consult polemicists in order to determine whether polemicists contribute to the understanding of the matter.¹⁸

The Armenian-Jewish Connections in Christian Inter-Faith Polemics

7

Armenian inter-confessional polemical literature from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries is abundant. It reflects larger processes, such as the confessionalization that engulfed post-Reformation Europe.¹⁹ The influence of confessionalization²⁰ reached as far as the Armenian communities in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Iran. Numerous inter-confessional polemical treatises were being composed to counter the aggressive proselytizing of Tridentine Catholicism among Eastern Christians, and to demarcate the boundaries of Armenian orthodoxy. There are but a few polemical and apologetical works against Shi’a Islam and Muslims, while polemical pieces against Judaism and Jews were extremely few. Even so, the seeming lack of information about Jewish-Armenian relations is not so stark as it first appears. References to Jews crop up in Armenian inter-confessional theological literature, allowing us to reconstruct a critical yet subtle aspect of Jewish-Armenian connections that has to do with Chalcedonian Christians’ misperceptions about Armenians as representatives of an ancient Oriental Orthodox Church.

8

In medieval Christian polemics on Christological issues between miaphysite Armenians and dyophysite Byzantines and Latins, Jews appear as deicides²¹ in the debates on the sufferings and death of Christ. In theological debates, dyophysites accused miaphysite Armenians of ‘crucifying God’ when insisting on the ‘one nature in Christ.’ Miaphysites objected against the dyophysite position with the argumentation that if it was merely about the death of Mary’s Son on the Cross, then in vain Jews had been called deicides (astuacaspan; god-killers), as in that case, they should have been considered mere homicides.²² In the inter-confessional polemics from the early modern age, this same argumentation was still widely utilized. Now it was Catholic missionaries, more specifically the Armenian Catholics—the so-called aktarmas (Trk. lit. converted)—with whom Armenian Apostolic theologians would enter into intellectual debate. The Armenian Catholicos in Ējmiacin,²³ Alek‘sander J̌ułayec‘i (1706–1714), was hardly an exception. In his Book of Oratorical Disputation, penned on account of a great intra-communal turmoil between the Apostolic and Catholic Armenians at the turn of the seventeenth century, Alek‘sander insisted on his miaphysite position about the crucifixion of God by referring, among others, to the ‘deicide’ argumentation. He goes as far as to include it in a brief creed quoted beneath:

9

Jews became deicides because they abjured his [Christ’s] Deity saying, “You, a mere man, claim to be God,” therefore, they crucified him.

10

And following the truth, we are not deceived by intricate ideas. We confess [that] God born from the Virgin endured the cross of sufferings, tasted death, and by so doing dissolved death. Therefore, we confess [that] the one who gave birth [to Him] is Theotokos, and the one who was born is God, we confess [that] the sufferings, and [that] the cross belonged to God, and [that] the one who was crucified was God, we confess the sepulcher of God, and that He who died [on the cross] was God, [we confess that] Jews are deicides and [that] the one who was assassinated is God. (J̌ułayec‘i 1783, 109, 111)

11

Another specific yet sensitive aspect of Jewish-Armenian connections within Christian inter-faith polemics is the ‘Jewishness’ or ‘Jewish-mindedness’ of which Armenians have been often accused, based on the speculation that the Armenians retained a close attachment to the Old Testament for some rites.²⁴ After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Orthodox and Catholic dyophysites saw ‘remnants of Judaism’ in Armenian Christianity, targeting these perceived ‘weak spots’ in their polemics regarding the ‘true faith and practice.’ The charges traditionally referred to the religious customs of matał,²⁵ the use of the unleavened bread for the Eucharist and abstinence from unclean animals in the Armenian Apostolic Church.

12

Since the Council of Chalcedon up to modern days, matał has become a stumbling stone for Armenian polemicists. It is a religious custom of blessing the salt for a slaughtered animal—a rite performed on the Easter feast, dominical feasts, saints’ feast days for the commemoration of the dead, and as alms for the poor. Chalcedonian Christian polemicists usually linked it to the Jewish animal sacrifice for the Passover (Kolbaba 2020, 125; Pogossian 2016, 187). From the Middle Ages, Armenian polemicists attempted to prove the Christian roots of matał to refute the accusations of being like Jews. A twelfth-century theologian, later the Catholicos of the Armenians based in Cilicia, Nersēs Šnorhali²⁶ (1166–1173), dedicated pages to the custom of matał that became an exemplary text for addressing the issue (Šnorhali 1788, 242–53). Šnorhali focuses on the blessing of the salt and the charitable function of matał. He also refutes the ‘Jewish origin’ of matał by highlighting the differences between the Armenian and Jewish customs of animal sacrifice (Šnorhali 1788, 243). There was a misperception about matał among unlearned Armenians, apparently influenced by the Old Testament narrative, as Šnorhali reproached those who marked the doorposts of their houses with the lamb’s blood, as Jews did on the Passover of Exodus (Šnorhali 1788, 251).²⁷

13

Another Armenian theologian, Nersēs’s contemporary from the Taron province in Great Armenia, Pōłos Tarōnac‘i, while debating with his Orthodox opponent named Theophistus, sets to justify matał:

14

Again we hear from you this thing that we perform our Pascal matał by slaughtering sheep. Many times you have reminded of and reproached us for this matter, and you have said that it belongs to the Old Covenant and resembles Jewish [animal sacrifices] … The Jewish [sacrifice] is not like our [matał]; theirs was a different custom, and symbolized a different [thing] and [had] a different meaning, while our [matał] is carried out for the sake of a meal, as [generally it is the case for] all meals, and means just “blessed food,” as it is not suitable to approach unclean food after taking Communion with the body and blood of our Jesus Christ, and it is obligatory to bless and eat salted meat, then approach other [types of] food. (Tarōnac‘i 1752, 278)

15

Importantly, Pōłos Tarōnac‘i’s polemical treatise against the Orthodox became popular in the eighteenth century, when a copy of it was discovered by archimandrite Margar Apuč‘exc‘i and published in Constantinople in 1752. The famous Apostolic polemicist Gēorg Mxlayim Ołli was the editor of the book, approving it for print. He considered Tarōnac‘i’s polemics a ‘unique’ and ‘utterly orthodox’ text to fight against dyophysites in general, and Catholic Armenians in particular (Tarōnac‘i 1752, 2–8, 356), since the same set of accusations against Armenians was inherited into the early modern inter-confessional debates.

16

European missionaries and Armenian Catholic converts used cliché argumentations against the rite of matał. Interestingly, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the missionaries retained some of these clichés in their polemical debates, but the Armenians’ ‘Jewish-mindedness’ was not a primary issue for Catholic polemicists to address in theological debates. The choice of argumentation depended on the purpose of polemics and the personal approach of missionaries from a particular Catholic order.²⁸ Whatever the case, the immediate refutation from the Armenian side was a traditional reaction in early modern Armenian theological literature. To mention but one author from the Armenian Iranian context one may cite Catholicos Łazar J̌ahkec‘i (1737–1751), who rejected the idea that matał had any connection to the Jewish animal sacrifice. J̌ahkec‘i resorts to the traditional argumentations about the dissimilarity between the Armenian matał and the Jewish sacrifice inherited from previous ages; meanwhile, following Šnorhali, he greatly elaborates on the social aspect of commemorating the dead through matał as an offering to the poor and an act of charity.

17

[Matał] was not [established] by the Jewish Law, God forbid! Whoever observes it in [Jewish] manner, let he be condemned! And hence, whoever performs matał for Easter or Commemoration of the departed in Christ in accordance with the Jewish Law, is not only despicable but also wicked and harmful, as such a person reveals that he is not redeemed from his sins through the blood of Christ, but he is [still] a servant of the shadowy (stuerayin) [i.e., Old Testament] Law.²⁹ (J̌ahkec‘i 1735, 415)

18

My working hypothesis is that intra-Christian debates on matał escalated within the Muslim context because of the practice of Id-i Qurban or Kurban Bayramı (Feast of Sacrifice).³⁰ Id-i Qurban, celebrated with great festivity, might resonate with the Jewish and Armenian respective customs,³¹ and prompt cross-cultural exchange.³² Catholicos Łazar seems to have been well aware of the conflicts periodically occurring between the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic faithful on matał. Above all, it was due to the exorbitant forms the matał rite took in the hands of semi-literate priests in the remote villages of Iran,³³ against whom the Catholicos warned his flock in an effort to establish uniformity (J̌ahkec‘i 1735, 420).

19

A more elaborate debate between miaphysite–dyophysite positions focused on the use of the unleavened bread for the Eucharist as practiced by the Armenian Apostolic Church. The ‘Jewish’ argumentation was introduced to the debate through the first oration of Pseudo-Isaac³⁴—allegedly an Orthodox monk—dated to the mid-eleventh century.³⁵ The author labeled the unleavened bread that the Armenians traditionally used for the Eucharist as a “Judaic practice” that Armenians had been performing for centuries as “the seal of their Jewishness” (Isaacus Magnae Armeniae Catholicus 1864, 1175–80).³⁶ The same author accused Armenians of performing “Judaic sacrifice,” by which he meant the rite of matał (Isaacus Magnae Armeniae Catholicus 1864, 1181–6). Pseudo-Isaac’s oration became a yardstick against which anti-Armenian Orthodox polemics were measured after the eleventh century, when such authors as Euthymios Zygabenos (d. after 1118) abundantly utilized Pseudo-Isaac’s argumentations (Zigabenus 1865, 1173–90). Armenians, for their part, consistently opposed these allegations by pointing to the unleavened bread that Christ distributed at the Last Supper as it was commonplace among the peoples of the East. Thereby, they claimed the early Christian roots of using unleavened bread for the Sacrament of Eucharist.³⁷ The seventeenth-century Teatine missionary Clemente Galano (1611–1666), author of the seminal book Unity of the Armenian Church with Rome—another yardstick against which the Tridentine anti-Armenian polemics was now measured³⁸—refuted the allegations of Pseudo-Isaac’s oration, labeling them groundless (Galano 1658, 2, part 1:5). As a Catholic who utilized unleavened bread for the Eucharist, Galano considered the Eucharist with unleavened bread to be “the old and true tradition of the [early] church of the Apostles” (Galano 1658, 2, part 1:9).

20

Armenian polemics regarding Orthodox Christianity was minimal in early modern Iran due to the miserable condition of Greek and Georgian communities in Iran. Meanwhile, the issue of unleavened bread never bothered Catholic missionaries. On the contrary, it became ‘something in common’ with the Armenians, a similarity easing the endeavors toward the union with Rome; thereby, it ceased to be a priority topic of debates in the inter-faith polemics of this time. Some authors, such as the prominent Yovhannēs Mrk‘uz (worthless) J̌ułayec‘i (1643–1715) from New Julfa, never touched upon the topic in their works (J̌ułayec‘i 1688),³⁹ others spoke of it in general terms referring to the Old Testament custom, which proved Jesus to have broken unleavened bread as it was the eve of the Passover (J̌ahkec‘i 1735, 336–38).⁴⁰ Instead, some other customs of the Armenian Apostolic Church occupied the attention of Catholic polemicists, and hence were pushed to the foreground of the polemical stage.

21

The most intensified theological debate in the early modern period revolved around the fasts of the Armenian Apostolic Church, observed with extreme abstinence. The Oratorian priest Richard Simon wrote that there were “none in the Eastern Church that set a greater value upon fasts than the Armenians; and to hear them speak, one would say that their whole religion consisted in fasting” (Simon 1685, 129). On the same occasion Sir Paul Rycaut (1629–1700), a British diplomat and historian, assumed that “their [Armenians’] fasts are the most rigorous of any nation in the world” (Rycaut 1678, 415). Traditionally, during the Great Lent, Armenians would abstain from meat, dairy, fish, oil, and honey; for some fasts, they would consume only salt and bread, while they usually strictly refused to eat the meat of unclean animals such as hares, snakes, as well as all kinds of seafood like octopus, turtles, and mussels.⁴¹

22

The abstinence of Armenians from unclean animals incited Western missionaries to elaborate on it as on Armenian ‘Jewishness,’ while more sober minds would assume that it was a general practice for Eastern peoples as “they have always been more abstemious in their diet… than the Western or Northern Nations” (Rycaut 1678, 415). The debate on excessive fasting and abstinence was fueled to the fullest by Catholic Armenians throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apostolic Armenians, in their turn, would capitalize on the Old Testament to accuse both Western Christians and Armenian converts of deviating from the Law of God, forbidding them to eat unclean animals. As late as 1779, Catholicos Simēon Erewanc‘i (1763–1780) expressed his astonishment at those Christians, in particular Armenian Catholics, who consumed meat of unclean animals indiscriminately: Even the Pharisees distinguished between clean and unclean, following the Law of God “likewise the Jews observe nowadays,” let alone Christians who had to “surpass the Jews in everything” (Erewanc‘i 1779, 69).

23

One might collect better-recorded charges on the matter of abstinence from the Ottoman context. Eremia K‘ēōmiwrčean refuted a series of allegations against Armenians, among them the mockery of “discrimination in food as [it is] a Jewish thing.”⁴² It was again Catholic Armenians ridiculing Apostolics for rigorous customs, the observance of which had greatly intensified within the Muslim halāl-harām (lawful-unlawful) dietary discourse.⁴³ Eremia, in his turn, reproached Catholic Armenians for eating harām meals by recollecting his conversation with an Armenian convert “Barseł from Erzurum⁴⁴ who left for Isfahan, [and] died [there],” and who once said that “eating [meat of] a dog is not harām.”⁴⁵

24

There were many other major and minor allegations about Armenian ‘Jewishness,’ the instances of which are spread all over the inter-confessional polemical literature from this period. On the other hand, little is known about the reaction of Jews concerning the intriguing quasi-similarities with Armenians. I leave it to the scholars of Jewish Studies to find out more details on this issue, and turn to another topic, namely, the rising literary interest of Armenians toward Jewish refashioned rites and spirituality as a result of global interactions in the eighteenth century (Weinstein 2017).

Revisiting the Image of Jews in the Eighteenth Century

25

The lack of Armenian anti-Judaic polemical and apologetical literature in the early modern era was compensated for by Armenians predominantly with the translated literature. In virtue of this, the literary perceptions about Jews were not typically shaped out of the cohabitation modes of the two nations and their engagement in social life. Similar to the Middle Ages, literary perceptions of Jews in the pre-modern age were often influenced by the translations of Western polemical treatises. The side-effect of this process was the borrowed misperceptions about Judaism lavishing in the works of Western authors (La Porta 2009). A widespread misperception can be epitomized in making Islamic and Judaic ‘errors’ equivalent based on their common origin (given the claims that Arabs descended from Abraham’s son Ishmael) and monotheistic views. This was reflected in the fourteenth-century author Peter of Aragon’s heresiological treatise translated from Latin into Armenian by the efforts of the Armenian Dominicans in K‘rna (Khachikyan 1977). Peter of Aragon assumed that Muslims erred exactly the way Jews and heretics did.⁴⁶ In the seventeenth century, this idea entered Armenian intellectual circles via the book of Capuchin missionary Justinien de Neuvy (Michael Febvre) titled Praecipuae Objectiones (Febvre 1679) and translated into Armenian in 1681 (Heyberger 2012).⁴⁷ On its pages, the author responds to objections of “Muslims, that is Jews,” redirecting his readers to check his objections to Muslims “that could also be utilized against Jews” (Febvre 1679, 96).

26

The Tridentine propaganda, much less the spread of Global Catholicism, supported the import of misperceptions and brand new or refashioned literary genres. Translations played not a minor role in the transmission of those genres furnished with innovative ideas and approaches. Through the Catholic environment, interest in the rites, rituals, and customs of contemporary Judaism (Weinstein 2011) infiltrated the circle of Iranian Armenian literati. Along the lines of renovated pre-modern European liturgical drama, the genre of passionistic lament was reintroduced into the Armenian ecclesiastical literature, giving a new push to the revival of the image of Jews as deicides to serve specific objectives.

27

The passionistic literature, or Passions, as I call it, became central in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, in support of European confessionalization strategies where sermons, laments, and martyrologies became instrumental for the indoctrination of the flock of a respective Church. The genre revolved around the medieval poem Stabat Mater that exposed the sufferings of Christ on the Cross and the lament of Mary standing at his feet (Bertoglio 2018).⁴⁸ In 1640, Alessandro Calamato (d. 1648) refashioned the narrative of sufferings in his treatise Doloroso Spettacolo della Passione into a lengthy drama to “impress the hearts of the faithful” (Calamato 1640). As refashioned and popularized in the early modern period, the genre found reception in the dhimmi Christian ecclesiastical literature, supposedly due to copious Christian martyrdoms under Muslim rule. The Greek theologian, physician Eustratios Argenti (d. 1757), composed two Sermons on the Passion of Christ and a Gospel of the Passion Collected from the Four Gospels in Greek (Ware 1964, 44). In the Armenian communities of both Ottoman and Iranian lands, refashioned passionistic literature circulated under the titles Testament (Treaty) of Passion⁴⁹ or Sermon on Good Friday (Harut‘yunyan 2020).⁵⁰

28

The variations of Passions in the vernacular and Armeno-Turkish (Turkish written in Armenian letters) gained momentum within the Ottoman Armenian communities.⁵¹ Among Iranian Armenians, it was the same Catholicos Simēon Erewanc‘i—the one reinforcing the self-perception of the Armenian ‘nation’ as of New Israel (Aslanian 2004, 40, 58)—who framed the Sermon on Good Friday according to the vogue of the time.⁵² It is partly based on a medieval text compiled by Grigor Tat‘ewac‘i (1346–1409) (Tat‘ewac‘i 1740, 580–83),⁵³ where the Gospel narrative is enriched with the display of customs at odds with the canons of the Apostolic Church, such as Mary’s pulling her hair out and tearing her clothes while mourning her Son.⁵⁴ Simēon greatly elaborates on the topic of Jews as “unjust and shameless judges,” reproaching them for the “unjust justice” they executed over Christ.

29

Simēon’s anti-Judaic inclination is noticeable throughout the text, but he opposes biblical Jews rather than the actual Jewish people with whom the Armenians interacted in everyday life.⁵⁵ Such tendencies were dictated by the ‘canon’ of the passionistic literature, to which depicting biblical Jews as villains was central. At the same time, the Sermon was meant to be read from the church pulpits. It could fuel anti-Judaic sensibilities of the populace even if it hardly aimed to do so. Normally, priests would read passionistic sermons out loud during the evening Service on Good Friday to make the faithful mourn and lament over the sufferings of God Incarnate.⁵⁶ By and large, the message of the passionistic literature was that of endurance, since Christ’s followers had to put up with persecutions, sufferings, and martyrdom. Martyrdom was a common occurrence under Muslim rule; meanwhile, seeking martyrdom contributed to the dhimmi community-building via the revival of a Christian, and more specifically a confessional, consciousness (Krstić 2011, 143–64).⁵⁷

30

Jews, as ‘eternal enemies of Christians,’ typologically represented persecutors in the Passions, who might be replaced over time and under different circumstances.⁵⁸ In the New Testament context it was Jews, and now it was Muslims to assume the role of persecutors. Simēon’s frequent emphasis on the “unjust judges” gives the impression that it was the Muslim judge (Trk. kadı; Ar. qāḍī) he attempted to reach out to, given the sociopolitical situation of the time and numerous martyrdoms that Christians underwent irrespectively of their confessional adherence. The Muslim kadı were instrumental in giving effect to Christian martyrdoms, adjudicating at the courts Christians were brought to on charges of blasphemy or reneging on Islam. In most cases the kadı would find a fault in the accused Christian and would sentence him to death.⁵⁹ In this respect, Simēon’s critique is extremely vocal as he demands justice for the accused:

31

Oh, [you], judge, and lawless high priest, you become shameless, and [you] judge your lawgiver. … Oh, [you] lawless, if you are [indeed] a judge, [first] find the guilt then subject Him to beating. If He has [done] anything wicked, testify about the wicked [things] and judge Him, and if not, [and] if on the contrary, [He has done] good [things], then why do you allow to beat Him? … ‘Yes, He said, you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of Mighty God and coming on the clouds of heaven’ [Mark 14:62]. Then, you will learn who is the [real] judge and what is the [accurate] judgment.⁶⁰

32

As Jewish priests represented the contemporary kadı at the courts, likewise Judas represented a collective image of traitors, his kiss—the act of betrayal. Betrayal was widely attested under Muslim conversion policies, as the conversion of Christians was not only a top-down but rather a bottom-up and horizontal process; a friend, a business partner, a neighbor would deliberately indict a Christian for blasphemy or apostasy out of envy, zeal, rancor.⁶¹ Along the same lines, Mary’s lament reflected the multiple voices of neo-martyrs’ female kin. Having the Gospel narrative as its point of departure, the passionistic literature echoed contemporary neo-martyrologies that, in their turn, were anchored on the New Testament topoi of sufferings. The martyrology of youth Nikołayos is a good example of such textual impacts. Upon seeing his mother on his way to the place of execution, Nikołayos utters, “Do not stay here, but go home, for I put myself to death for the name and the love of Christ.”⁶² Most of the Passions imitate this passage, which is not found in the Gospels; in the Passions Jesus on the Cross orders Mary, “Do not cry, mother, do not cry! … Go home, mother … as your grief hinders me from departing.”⁶³ At the same time, Nikołayos’s via dolorosa is nothing but the crucifixion topos in the Gospels with the engagement of a Muslim mob instead of the Jews.⁶⁴

33

The Passions incorporate bits and pieces of polemics with Jews, but all the same, they could hardly be considered as polemical literature per se. To the best of my knowledge, there is no solid polemical piece against Jews from the early modern Iranian Armenian context at all.⁶⁵ The rare polemical pieces one might detect are treatises translated into the Armenian language toward the end of the eighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation, followed by the Catholic Counterreformation, enhanced in-depth Biblical studies that catalyzed revisiting the image of Jews both in ecclesiastical literature and in the writings of humanists. New anti-Judaic polemical works started to circulate among European intellectuals, particularly after the printing of Kabbalistic works in Italy (Idel 2004) and placing the Kabbalah in the ascendancy over philosophy in Jewish learning (Hacker 2018a, 854–57).⁶⁶ These works aimed to shed light on and refute the ‘long hidden customs and rituals’ of Jews. Through the workshop of the Armenian Catholic and Apostolic translators in Ottoman lands, the anti-Judaic treatises of Paolo Sebastiano Medici and Neofit Cavsocalviţiu were introduced into the circle of Iranian Armenian intellectuals.⁶⁷

34

The polemical treatise Riti, e Costumi degli Ebrei Confutati (Rites and Customs of the Jews Refuted) of Paolo Medici,⁶⁸ a former Jewish rabbi converted to Roman Catholicism, abridged by another Jewish convert, Niccolò Stratta, was translated into the Armenian language (Medici 1742). In 1760, Father Ignatius, an Armenian Catholic priest from the Mekhitarist Order, the pupil of the founder Abbot Mxit‘ar Sebastac‘i (1676–1749),⁶⁹ translated an abridged version of Medici’s treatise from its original Italian. The second translation of the entire treatise was done from Greek by the Armenian Apostolic priest Melk‘iset‘ Banaser (d. 1774) in Constantinople in 1766.⁷⁰

35

The scandalous treatise by a Jewish convert to the Orthodox faith, monk Neofit or Neofit Cavsocalviţiu,⁷¹ published in Iasi in 1803 under the title Înfruntarea Jidovilor (Confronting Jews), was translated into Armenian in 1808 from the original Romanian (Moldavian) by an Armenian priest in Iasi, Nersēs Harut‘iwnean.⁷²

36

The two treatises share common topics and motives. The extensive chapters speaking about the credibility of the blood libel, an alleged ritual murder of Christians,⁷³ and the detailed description of that ‘secret custom’ by an insider,⁷⁴ that is, a former rabbi, is just one of the similarities. Besides, the books introduce Jewish festivals and feasts, each from their own author’s perspective and purpose. On close inspection, one would detect the gist of both treatises to deal with messianic issues resonating with the apocalyptic anticipations driven by the spirit of the age (Zeitgeist). Each of the treatises speaks of patriarchs and prophets who foretold the coming of Christ as the true Messiah.

37

Paolo Medici aimed to convey the message to his former fellow Jews. He exhorted them to see the root of misfortunes that befell Jewish communities in Europe in the rejection of Christ as Messiah. As for Neofit, apart from praising Christianity as holding the truth about the Messiah, he went beyond Jewish-Christian generic debate. He also engaged in disputation with Christian ‘heretics,’ narrowing his argument down to the exclusivity of the Orthodox faith.

38

The comparative analysis of the content of the treatises is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that their popularity earned them translations into many languages and a wide reception among Christian communities. The Armenian translations received reception among Catholic and Apostolic Armenians, but most of the copies come from Constantinople in terms of provenance.⁷⁵ This is understandable, first, because due to the location of the Ottoman Empire, its Christian subjects, specifically Constantinopolitans, were more inclined to accommodate European polemical trends; second, because the Ottoman Jews, as Armenians, were essential players in the economic arena of the Empire (Hacker 2018a, 844–54). Thereby, they were regarded as undesirable competitors to defeat (Leber 2021).

39

The scarce manuscript colophons give insight into the real reasons for translating anti-Judaic pieces into Armenian. In his colophon, the translator of Neofit’s treatise, priest Nersēs Harut‘iwnean, assumed that Jews had always been the enemies of Christians, whereas Christians had been thinking well of them.⁷⁶ For this reason, when he saw the book, he decided to translate it into Armenian “so that every one of our nation [could] read it and take heed of their wicked deeds and [could] recognize them as the true enemies of ours.”⁷⁷ The translator himself was astonished at the treatise’s content since he spoke of it as of some kind of revelation. His knowledge about Jews and his attitude towards them in everyday life seems to have been somewhat more positive. Apparently, this was the case for Armenians in general; otherwise, the translator would not have felt the urge to translate the book to inform ‘the entire nation’ that they had false perceptions about Jews.

40

So far, no copy of Paolo Medici’s and only one copy of Neofit’s treatises come from the Iranian context. The latter belongs to the pen of bishop Yovhannēs Šahxat‘uneanc‘ (1799–1849), a member of the Supreme Council and Head of the manuscript repository of the Mother See of Holy Ējmiacin, a member of the Holy Synod, later the prelate of the Armenians in Georgia. Most probably, Šahxat‘uneanc‘ became acquainted with the treatise in Constantinople when he was still an archimandrite. He was dispatched there by order of Catholicos Ep‘rem Joragełc‘i (1809–1835) to assist the catholicosal legate (nuirak). Šahxat‘uneanc‘ copied the book in 1822 but steered clear of indicating his name on the title page.⁷⁸

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What compelled Šahxat‘uneanc‘ to copy a treatise adapted more to the polemical needs of Armenian clerics of Constantinople? Perhaps it was due to the willingness to have its copy in Ējmiacin as a ‘knowledge reservoir’ for later usage (Leber 2021, 72; Grunert and Syndikus 2015), given the gradual strengthening of the Jewish community in Iran in the nineteenth century (Avery, Hambly, and Melville 1991, 7:731). His preference of Neofit’s treatise over that of Paolo Medici’s could be conditioned with the pages-long question and answer section of the treatise serving as a manual on confronting Jews during debates on faith. It is possible that after the Polozhenie was enacted in 1836,⁷⁹ when Šahxat‘uneanc‘ became a permanent member of the Holy Synod, he made use of the treatise while examining the individual petitions from Jews asking to join the Armenian Apostolic Church (Hamed-Troyansky 2021).⁸⁰ However, the fact that he refrained from indicating his name, as well as the absence of other copies of Neofit’s treatise among the Iranian Armenians, support the supposition that either there were no serious tensions between Armenians and Jews, or, for various reasons, anti-Judaic (anti-Kabbalistic) books were not welcomed among the Armenian ecclesiastical elites of Iran, and later, Russia. Whatever the cause, the Armenian translation of Neofit’s book was never published or popularized in the centuries to come, whereas its Russian translation with its several editions became a notorious polemical tool for propaganda against Jews in nineteenth-century Imperial Russia (Burmistrov 2004; Weinberg 2014).⁸¹

Conclusion

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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mark a new era in the coexistence modes for dhimmi Armenians and Jews under the Safavid, Afghan, and Qajar religious policies and socio-political agendas that affected both groups’ internal affairs, their social status, and cross-communal exchanges. The emergence of new elites in Safavid society, where Julfan Armenians enjoyed relative autonomy, represented by the wealthy merchants as the Empire’s trading force and go-betweens in the West and Mughal India, could hardly secure them from coercive conversions that the Armenians underwent in the cities other than Isfahan. It made them co-destined with suppressed communities of Jews engaged mainly in internal commerce as wine traders in the Shiraz region, medicament traffic, and the like. Both peoples survived the side effects of the Safavid Shi’itization policies aimed against Sunni Ottomans and sectarian elements of the Empire, Nadir Shah’s (1736–1747) attempts at reconciliation with Sunnis through Ja’far-i mazhab (law of Jafar), as well as the tension between the monarchy and the ulema in the Qajar period, resulting in political empowerment of the ulema and its engagement in everyday life of society. Somewhat resilient to the aftermath of multiple and multi-vector interstate wars, Armenians remained intermediaries between the Christian West and Muslim Iran during the Qajar period. The situation changed positively for the Jews, who were able to enlarge and strengthen their communities in Iran throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, despite the long-lasting cohabitation and an intertwined history, the scarcity of Armenian historical sources about Iranian Jews and their relations with Armenians leads to the assumption that for Armenians, Jews were not a crucial factor in shaping broader communal life within the Empire. Moreover, the absence of Armenian anti-Judaic polemical literature, and its import from Europe via the Ottoman Armenian translators, speaks for the supposition that Jews were not considered a capital threat to the Iranian Armenians. The only threat that caught the historiographers’ attention was the Sabbatean movement. Consequently, it was reported and recorded in greater detail by Armenian authors. The realities were slightly different in the Ottoman realm due to several factors—the greater number and higher social status of Jewish communities,⁸² different engagement modes between Jews and Armenians under Ottoman policies, and the impact of anti-Judaic tendencies of the European countries neighboring the Empire. The anti-Judaic European compositions were translated into Armenian within European and Ottoman Armenian communities; meanwhile, a more intense communication on a day-to-day basis supplied the writings of Ottoman Armenians with more details on Jewish customs and cross-communal relations.⁸³ Nevertheless, the literary polemics engaged the ‘confessional others’ more than any other religious group. Likewise, Ottoman Armenians and pre-modern Iranian Armenians directed their entire polemical panoply against the ‘confessional others’, in particular the ‘inner enemies,’ that is Catholic Armenians. The latter, too, were concentrated more with inter-confessional rhetoric due to the specifics of the confessional age expressed in the urge to define one’s confession and constitute one’s confessional identity. Inter-confessional polemics provides us with much data on the perceptions about Armenians and Jews as well as their quasi-similarities as seen through the eyes of confessional rivals. The close affinity of some ancient customs of the Armenian Apostolic Church with the Old Testament context was exaggerated in constant charges of Armenian ‘Jewishness’ by their opponents. Although a groundless product of theological speculations, in real life, those charges could resonate with some peculiarities of other religions informed by the multicultural social fabric, hence, could give an impression of actual similarities. In the light of this, it is not surprising that from the nineteenth century onwards, Jews in the South Caucasus under Imperial Russia, but also the Ottoman Empire (The Mserians 194),⁸⁴ individually appealed to convert to the Armenian Apostolic rather than any other Christian faith. As argued in Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s important article (Hamed-Troyansky 2021), economic benefits seem to have been a plausible reason for these conversions. Still, for a bona fide conversion, there should have been something additional and, perhaps, more intimate (such as the alleged similarities) to make an ordinary Jew sincerely prefer Armenian Christianity over imperial Orthodox faith.

Acknowledgments

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I wish to thank Zaroui Pogossian, Alexandra Cuffel, and the anonymous readers for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

Manuscripts

Aragonac‘i, Petros

44

Girk‘ datastanac‘ [A Book of Judgment]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M484, 323r–327r.

Erewanc‘i, Simēon

45

Ktak ew k‘aroz meci urbat‘in i xač‘elut‘iwn K‘ristosi Astucoy meroy [A Testament and Sermon on Good Friday for the Crucifixion of Christ, our God]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M5156, 270v–278v.

J̌ułayec‘i, Yovhannēs Mrk‘uz

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Hakačaṙut‘yun ǝnd despan patri Samsonin or ełew i t‘ivn hazar ČLZ. ew marti IE. [Polemics with the Consul Father Sanson that Happened in the Year of 1687, on March 25]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M727, 114r–122r.

J̌ułayec‘i, Yovhannēs Mrk‘uz

47

Yohannu bani ǝspasaworē aṙ Barseł traban vepi erkabnaki grec‘eloc‘d patasxani [The Response of Yovhannēs, the Servant of the Logos, to Your, Barseł the Dyophysite’s Polemical Writing]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M575, 27r–48r.

K‘ēōmiwčean, Eremia

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J̌atagovut‘iwn Hayastaneac‘ ekełecvoy [Apology of the Armenian Church]. Library of Mekhitarist Congregation, Venice. V317(1841).

K‘ēōmiwčean, Eremia

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Girk‘ patmabanut‘eanc‘ i zanazan yałētic‘ [Book of Historiographies on Various Disasters]. Library of Mekhitarist Congregation, Venice. V509.

K‘ēōmiwčean, Komitas

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Vasn yetin žamanakis azgis meroy hakaṙakut‘ean, or ǝnd mimeans, vasn kat‘ōlikutean ev yałags oroy haytneloy umemn yerkrord Lusaworič‘ koč‘eloy yomanc‘ ev vasn norin gorcoc‘n ev varuc‘n ev vasn hamaxohic‘ norin [Concerning the Confrontation of our Nation against Each Other in the Recent Times, [also] Concerning Catholicism and about a Certain Person who was Called by Some the Second Illuminator and on his Deeds and Attitude, and his Partisans]. Bibliothèque nationale de France. BNF Arm. 196, 18r–52v.

Medikeanc‘, Połos

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Ōrēnk‘ ew sovorut‘iwnk‘ ebrayec‘woc‘ [The Laws and Customs of Jews]. British Library Manuscript Collection, London. LOB156 (BL Or. 15631).

Mxlayim Ołli, Gēorg

52

Ǝnddem Yunac‘ metropolitin [Against the Metropolitan of Greeks]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M2080, ff. 112r-116v.

Neofit

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Girk‘ čakatamartut‘ean aynm, or uni hakaṙakut‘iwn ǝnddēm hrēic‘ kam mnal azat i č‘arut‘enē noc‘in arareal i Nesbitosē umemnē Yunac‘ abełayē or erbemn rabuni noc‘in [A Book of Combat which Contains Controversy against Jews, or [a Book] about Steering Clear of their Wickedness Composed by a Greek Priest named Nesfitos, who used to be their Rabbi]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M935.

Ōjnec‘i, Vardan

54

Patmut‘iwn Hayoc‘ [History of Armenians]. Matenadaran Manuscript Repository, Yerevan. M4331.

Archival Documents

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Xostovanut‘iwn hawatoy Hrēic‘n darjelo i krōns hayadawan k‘ristoneut‘ean i Kostandnupōlis [Confession of Faith by Jews in Constantinople Converted to the Armenian Christian Faith], June 4, 1829. Matenadaran, Yerevan. The Mserians Fund, folder 194, doc. 278.