ABSTRACT
The devastation enveloped the very fabric of the Armenian nation in terms of its social, religious, and cultural institutions. The Armenians were essentially destroyed on account of their identification with Christianity in general; the Jews were mainly destroyed for a diametrically opposite reason, namely, for their dissociation from Christianity and for all that such dissociation implied. The types of atrocities detailed in the memorandum sent to the Armenian patriarch represent the memories and images that Armenians continue to harbor, assigning to their genocide the attribute of singularity. The histories of Jews and Armenians span millennia punctuated by episodes of sustained persecution. As minorities, Jews and Armenians have been frequent targets of persecution throughout history but especially in modern history. The nature of warfare is such, for example, that as a rule it allows legislative authority to subside, if not to vanish entirely, with the executive branch of the government as the main beneficiary of the emergency powers' accruing to it.
