In Re: [Mondoweiss] Herzl’s contempt for Armenians was an original sin of Zionism

Phil Weiss’s blog entry Herzl’s contempt for Armenians was an original sin of Zionism fails to address the history of Jewish-Armenian relations in Central and Eastern Europe.

Eastern European and to some extent Central European Jews simply did not get along with Armenians as I point out in In re: [Stephen Walt] The Cairo speech (round two):

1) In re: Armenians. I disagree with some of the analysis in The Banality of Indifference, but it is worth reading. Commemoration: Palestinian and Armenian Genocides discusses the callousness of the Zionist settlement in Palestine toward Armenians.

The miserable Jewish/Zionist record toward Palestinians may result from the historical Yiddish and Ottoman Jewish hostility toward Armenians. Traditional Yiddish “ethnography” treats Armenians as the descendants of Amalek. The Yiddish derogatory terms for Armenians are timkhe and mokh from the Hebrew version of Ex. 17:14.

I can make a good case that such hostility towards Armenians arose because Jews competed with Armenians for control of the same economic niche in both historic Poland and the Ottoman Empire.

There was no religious content in Jewish attitudes. Ethnic Ashkenazim and Ottoman Jews considered Armenians descendants of Amalek not for any religious reason but because of the economic competition, which continued into the early 20th century.

I have found the derogatory term Timkhe in the German writings of Austrian Jews that had converted to Catholicism.

Herzl’s father’s family came from an area of Hungary/Serbia where Jewish-Armenian competition and mutual animosity was quite intense.

When Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was placing restrictions on Jews, she was showing favoritism to Armenians.

BTW,  even though Phil believes he would have been a Zionist if he had lived at the beginning of the twentieth century in Austrian or Russian Ukraine, I am fairly certain that he would have been an anti-Czarist revolutionary.