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

210 interests of their own country and of Germany. In an article written in 1917, Edward Banse went even further in justifying the persecution of the Armeni- ans because they constituted a threat to the existence of the Ottoman Empire. 1 (2) The negative attitude towards the Armenians was nurtured by an- other source that became increasingly popular in Germany at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries: “the racial theory.” According to this theory, negative qualities such as a proclivity for fraud, deceit and theft were inborn and common to entire ethic communities, hence the conclu- sion that action must be taken against them. It was within the framework of this discourse in Germany that Suss- nitzki’s article on the ethnic division of labor in the empire was written. It was presented to the reader as a study that to all intents and purposes was scientific, and as such it was accepted by scholars not only at the time of its publication but also decades later. 2 Yet, does this article meet the threshold requirements of a scientific study? It appears that at least from two stand- points the answer is negative. First, Sussnitzki’s central thesis that the com- mercial and financial sectors were controlled by the Greeks and Armenians is unfounded and uncorroborated in the article itself. He did not provide any data or descriptive information that could validate his arguments. In the sec- tion in which he discussed commerce, he referred the reader to three sources 3 which ostensibly address the control of the Greeks and Armenians over spe- cific spheres of commerce, yet only one of the three is relevant to the thesis (a study of the fur trade in Istanbul and Asia Minor). Second, the article con- tains racist slurs against Ottoman Armenian subjects, and to a lesser degree against Greek subjects. Third, according to the criteria prevailing at the time, not to mention in later periods, the journal in which the article was published could not be considered a scientific publication. The Archiv für Wirtschaftsforschung im Orient was in fact an organ of the Deutsch-Türkische Vereinigung, which was founded in 1914 with the support and encouragement of the German foreign ministry. Among the founders and members of the association were representatives of German firms active in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Orient Bank, the Deutsche Bank and the Anatolische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft. Together with the German foreign ministry, these firms financed an important part of the association’s activities. From the outset, the association’s main goal was to advance the dissemination of German culture and language in the Ottoman Empire. In time, additional roles were assigned to it, the most important of which was 1 Ibid., p. 20, n. 36. 2 Issawi, pp. 114-15. 3 Sussnitzki, p. 396, n. 2; p. 398, n. 2.