Россия и Арабский мир: к 200-летию профессора Санкт-Петербургского университета Шейха ат-Тантави (1810–1861)

209 faith of the Turks. 1 Conceivably, Sussnitzki sought to lead the reader to the conclusion that if these were the character traits of the Armenians and Greeks, who controlled such important economic branches as commerce and finance, it was hardly surprising that the Ottoman Empire found itself in a deep economic crisis. Two developments led to the formulation of this new variant, and both are connected with perceptions and attitudes prevailing in the public dis- course in imperial Germany in the two decades preceding the First World War and during the war years themselves: (1) Scholars, journalists and writers of travelogues whose focus of inter- est was on the archeology, anthropology and history of Anatolia or the Otto- man Empire joined forces to support a significant aspect of Germany’s policy towards the Ottoman Empire in the period under discussion. This policy in- cluded support, to varying degrees, for the attitude of the Ottoman govern- ment toward the Armenian population of Anatolia and Istanbul. German writers accused the Armenians, and to a lesser extant the Greeks, of causing grave economic damage to the Ottoman economy and were to blame for the crisis in which the empire found itself. These accusations were accompanied by racist aspersions. Norbert Saupp 2 and Hilmar Kaiser, 3 who studied this subject, provide numerous examples of this attitude toward the non-Muslims. For example, Alfred Körte, a renowned German archeologist, published a number of articles in 1894 and 1895 in which he claimed that the Armenians were guilty of exploiting the Turkish farmers. Moreover, the Armenians were accused of cheating: “Wherever there is cheating in Anatolia it is connected with the Armenians” (“… wo man in Anatolia betrogen wirt, hat man es mit Armeniern zu thum ”). 4 Körte warned German businessmen who had invest- ments in the Ottoman Empire of acts of cheating by the Armenians. They were an obstacle to advancing German economic and commercial interests in the East, and should consequently be weakened, he held. Articles written in German publications during the first decade of the 20th century and later, during the First World War, intensified their attacks on the Armenians. They were reported to exact exorbitant interest and to extort their borrowers, and, moreover, to serve the economic interests of Great Britain while harming the 1 Sussnitzki, Ibid.; Issawi, Ibid. 2 Norbert Saupp, “Das Deutsche Reich und die Armenische Frage, 1878- 1914,” PhD dissertation, University of Köln, 1990. 3 Hilmar Kaiser, Imperialism, Racism, and Development Theories: The Con- struction of a Dominant Paradigm on Ottoman Armenians, Ann Arbor: Gomidas Institute, 1997. 4 Quoted by Kaiser, p. 11, n. 5.