Armenian and Jewish Experience Between Expulsion and Destruction

The series European-Jewish Studies reflects the international network and competence of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish studies (MMZ). Particular emphasis is placed on the way in which history, the humanities and cultural sciences approach the subject, as well as on fundamental intellectual, political and religious questions that inspire Jewish life and thinking today, and have influenced it in the past.

Jews and Armenians are often perceived as peoples with similar tragic historical experiences. Not only were both groups forced into statelessness and a life outside their homelands for centuries, in the 20th century, in the shadow of war, they were threatened with collective annihilation. Thus far, academic approaches to these two "classical" diasporas have been quite different. Moreover, Armenian and Jewish questions posed during the 19th and 20th centuries have usually been treated separately. The conference "We Will Live After Babylon" that took place in Hanover in February 2019, addressed this gap in research and was one of the first initiatives to deal directly with Jewish and Armenian historical experiences, between expulsion, exile and annihilation, in a comparative framework. The contributions in this volume take on multidisciplinary approaches relating to the conference's central themes: diaspora, minority issues and genocide.