Historians Clash on Scholars' Role

Essay in Armenian Forum Reviews the Debate

Princeton, NJ (28 February 2003)—The Armenian history department of Yerevan State University shocked public opinion in the Armenian diaspora with a proclamation issued in December 2001. It claimed that Armenian-American historians “openly distorted and falsified many important issues” in Armenian history, and that many of them were in the service of Turkish-Azerbaijani revisionism. The proclamation endorsed a 1998 book in which the Yerevan-based scholar Armen Ayvazian charges his Armenian-American colleagues with treason.

In an important new essay, Sebouh Aslanian of Columbia University engages in a careful and detailed critique of Ayvazian’s book. Aslanian’s 38-page essay, “‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’: Reflections on the Uses of Revisionism and Nationalism in Armenian Historiography,” appears in the current issue of Armenian Forum: A Journal of Contemporary Affairs.

Aslanian reports that Ayvazian’s book consists of two sections. The first assails Ronald Suny’s Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History, which is “one of the most widely read works on Armenian history published in the West.”

The second section explores Western scholarship on the origins of the Armenian people and the status of classical Armenian texts. The targets of this section include Robert Thomson, Nina Garsoďan, James Russell, Levon Avdoyan, George Bournoutian, Robert Hewsen, Peter Cowe, and John Greppin.

Aslanian considers Ayvazian’s book “a symptomatic text of a new ethos surrounding nationalist history in Armenia.” The role of historians in this ethos is “to generate and maintain national identity” and “to defend the security interests of the state.”

Ethnogenesis

In this ethos, historians are expected to give only politically acceptable answers to scholarly questions. One’s view on the origins of the Armenian people, for example, is “the ultimate litmus test of loyalties. Scholarly considerations (such as truth) are blithely shunted aside,” Aslanian writes.

According to Aslanian, most historians who deal with this question in the West agree that the origins of Armenians are “clouded in obscurity.” They say the best evidence, however, indicates that Armenians probably emerged from the convergence of native and immigrant populations in the Armenian Plateau between the twelfth and sixth centuries B.C.

Ayvazian’s book, on the other hand, insists that Armenians are racially pure descendants of natives of Armenia. He goes so far as to cite craniological evidence in support of his position. Ayvazian is not content, however, to treat this matter as a question of evidence and scholarship. For him, the so-called immigrationist position weakens Armenian claims to Armenia. Armenian historians who take the position must be doing the bidding of “Turkey’s NATO ally, the United States,” or else they are dupes.

Aslanian, in his review, characterizes this approach as the “blackmail of revisionism”—an attempt to intimidate historians with whose findings one disagrees. Nonetheless, Aslanian carefully considers the evidence offered in Ayvazian’s book.

Overall, Aslanian agrees with Ayvazian that the work product of the Armenian-studies establishment in the United States requires a thorough scholarly critique. He is thus disappointed that Ayvazian’s book “consistently misrepresents the views of the author’s adversaries, often by deliberately distorting passages out of their context. Its inflammatory rhetoric and sweeping denunciation, based not so much on scholarly criteria as on political ones, actually prevents the author from critically engaging with some of the real academic shortcomings of Armenian studies in the West.”

The Faculty Weighs In

Ayvazian’s book would be readily dismissed as a crude polemic, were it not for the reception it has received in Armenia. Even the venerable journal of the Academy of Sciences, Patma-Banasirakan Handes, has given the book a glowing review. The proclamation of the Armenian history faculty at Yerevan State University, mentioned above, takes the matter a step further. It attacks scholars who do not speak out in favor of Ayvazian’s views for their “neutral stance.”

Referring to the Yerevan State University proclamation, an editors’ introduction in Armenian Forum observes:

“The resolution stands as an unequivocal announcement that the work of scholars from Yerevan State cannot be credible, for they would suppress any evidence that did not lead to certain preordained conclusions.

“At a meeting with Armenian Forum editor Vincent Lima in February 2002, the dean of the Faculty of History, Babken Harutiunian, disavowed the resolution, adding that it was adopted without his knowledge while he was abroad. It seems especially important to recognize that the people who pushed the resolution through do not speak for all their colleagues, and to continue to seek out and engage serious scholars trained and based in Yerevan—of which there are many. Indeed, we are pleased to include in this issue the work of two such scholars.”

Armenian Forum, vol. 2, no 4 is available by calling toll-free 1-888-927-6369 (or 1-609-883-6333 outside the USA and Canada) or writing forum@gomidas.org, or by writing Armenian Forum, PO Box 208, Princeton, NJ 08542-0208.

The link below helps us count the number of visitors to our Web site.