Armenian-Jewish Connections in the Light of Pre-Modern Armenian Polemical Literature from Iran and Its Wider Context

Abstract

The reconstruction of Armenian-Jewish relations in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries is not an easy task due to the scarcity of historical material. Both peoples underwent resettlement, segregation, coercive conversions under Muslim rule (fighting the side-effects of religious policies for social disciplining), political agendas, the influx of Catholic missionaries, and interstate wars throughout the Safavid to Qajar periods. The current article attempts to revisit the perceptions about Jews and Armenians within inter-confessional debates by examining the early modern polemical literature from the Iranian Armenian context and by employing textual material from the Ottoman Armenian milieu that complements the Iranian case. It further aims to reveal the specifics of the Armenian-Jewish connections in the Persianate Muslim environment and detect the reasons for the ambiguous silence in the Armenian literature from the period in question.