The photograph at right is a picture from the Ottoman archives of a
Protestant Armenian family from Merzifon that migrated to Fresno,
California in March of 1908. Words on the back of the photo indicated
that they were issued a passport and relinquished their Ottoman
citizenship (terk-i tabiiyet) in order to go to America. The
father's name is Şekercioğlu (or we could say Shekerjian) Parsigh, the
mother's Porab, and the son's Mihran. The accompanying documents say
nothing about why they chose to emigrate.
Historians often attribute Armenian migration to the massacres of the 1890s and the general experience of persecution under Abdülhamid II. If this was the case, then the timing of the Shekerjian family's emigration was somewhat poor, since just a month later the events leading up to the 1908 Young Turk revolution and the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution would begin to unfold. The empire's non-Muslim communities largely welcomed this change, and many Armenian intellectuals in exile chose to return as a result.
Historians often attribute Armenian migration to the massacres of the 1890s and the general experience of persecution under Abdülhamid II. If this was the case, then the timing of the Shekerjian family's emigration was somewhat poor, since just a month later the events leading up to the 1908 Young Turk revolution and the reinstatement of the Ottoman constitution would begin to unfold. The empire's non-Muslim communities largely welcomed this change, and many Armenian intellectuals in exile chose to return as a result.
Yet, the set of documents that I will treat in this article deals with
an apparent acceleration of emigration in 1909. On September 1, 1909, a
Belgian newspaper reported that Armenians were leaving the provinces of
Malatya, Antep, and Mamuretülaziz. The ranks of Armenians in Aleppo and
the vicinity also thinned. Meanwhile, massive numbers of Christians were
leaving Mount Lebanon for the Americas. The reason given was the
prevailing violence, brigandage and lack of security in the Ottoman
Empire. Any avid reader of Western media outlets such as the New York
Times during the early twentieth century would have likely identified
the Ottoman Empire as a political entity constantly persecuting
Christians. The myriad stories about slaughtered and starving Armenians
were certainly not without basis, but the trope of oppressed Christendom
manifested itself in sensationalized and unsophisticated portrayals.
This was an issue for the post-1908 constitutional government of the
Ottoman Empire, for which both the security of its subjects and its
image abroad were major questions following the Adana Massacre of April
1909, in which tens of thousands of Christians and around 1,000 Muslims
were killed.
Given the prevalence of depictions of the bloodthirsty Turk, the Belgian
newspaper's attribution of migration to persecution would hardly have
surprised a Western audience. It did, however, seem to be news to the
Ottoman authorities, and they requested an explanation of the situation
on the ground from each of the governors of the provinces mentioned in
the article. Just as the Western press was always quick to report the
depredations of the terrible Turk, Ottoman reports frequently reflect a
tendency to downplay the sectarian aspects of any such events, and so
these reports must also be read with skepticism.
In the end, we cannot say exactly why Parsigh and his family and the thousands like them finally chose to emigrate. Maybe Parsigh left because of persecution, as readers of the Western press might expect, or maybe they left for economic reasons, as Mehmed Ali seemed to believe. They also might have left after converting to Protestantism. On a population level, these factors were all intertwined in the end. Economic explanations for migration were certainly valid and probably much more plausible than the sensational reports from the Belgian press described above. Yet, in light of what had just occurred in Adana and what was to come in term of violence between Muslims and Christians in Anatolia, the dismissive tone of reports by officials like Mehmed Ali also belies a certain indifference to the plight of Armenians on the part of local government.
However, it is clear that negligent though they may have been, Ottoman officials also did not want the Armenians to leave. As a result of the rise in emigration, the Ottoman government made an emergency order to halt the issuance of passports in Mamuretülaziz to stem the flow. The reasons for this measure seem to have been practical; migration decreased the labor supply and allowed men to escape military service. Of course, not having a passport didn't mean people stopped leaving. But it might have helped Ottoman officials sleep easier at night. As Reşat Kasaba details in A Moveable Empire, the late Ottoman state invested considerable resources in stopping people from moving. It told immigrants where to settle, forced nomads to stay put, and, as in the case of many Armenians, kept villagers in their villages. Amidst all these attempts to stop people from moving, the state also reserved the right to tell its citizens to move, a right that it would come to exercise in many extreme ways during the World War I period.
Sources : http://www.docblog.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2013/09/armenian-immigrants-united-states-california.html
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