In January 1907, a young Georgian, fleeing the Tsar’s police, boarded a ship bound for Italy from Odessa. The name of this young man, who studied at the Jesuit theological school in Tbilisi, was Joseph Jughashvili. Years later, he would go down in history as “Stalin.”
Joseph stayed at the “Roma e Pace” hotel in Ancona, then moved on to Venice. Here he worked as a sexton in an Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro.
After a while, Joseph, who left this monastery where Lord Byron had studied the Armenian language a century ago, went to Berlin with his 20 terrorist friends. On June 26, 1907, together with this team, they carried out a bank robbery in Tbilisi, in which dozens of innocent people were injured.
So, what was special about the Armenian monastery that Stalin stayed at for months before this bloody action?
Venice
Venice, a bridge between the East and the West, was home to Jews from both the West, especially Spain, and Ottoman lands. The first ghetto, meaning a Jewish neighborhood, was established here – “ghetto” means foundry, the Jewish neighborhood was named after it because it was founded where the cannon foundry was.
The merchant aristocrats who ruled Venice were aware of the abilities of the Jews. In the 18th century, a Jew named Johann Jacob Schudt had written: “For every noble family in Venice, there is a Jew, whom they trust, with whom they share the family’s most secret affairs.”
Venice had Ignatius of Loyola, who was allegedly a Jew and came from Spain, found the Jesuit order under the name Society of Jesus in 1540. Mekhitar of Sebaste, a Catholic Armenian from Sivas, had wanted to establish a similar sect for Armenians ever since he met the Jesuits. He founded this sect, which is named after him, in Morea with the support of Venice. However, later he moved the headquarters of the order to Venice, to the island of San Lazzaro, which was assigned to him. The priests who grew up here went to the Ottoman lands and began to instill nationalist ideas in Armenians whom up until that time were known as Millet-i Sadıka (Loyal People) by the Turks.
Young Armenians
Venice was also the birthplace of Freemasonry in Europe. In the 16th century, the Young (Giovine) movement was founded in the city against the Catholic Roman Church. The spokesperson of this secret society was Father Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi, an admirer of Machiavelli, was allegedly the leader of a secret academy where his politics were studied. Many famous names in Europe, especially in Protestant countries, were in contact with Sarpi. Trajano Boccalini, the founder of the Rose Cross, or Rosicrucian Society, was also one of the names in Sarpi’s network. This network later turned into Freemasonry. Even in the 18th century, Adam Weishaupt, the Jesuit founder of the Illuminati sect, was recommending Sarpi’s books to his brothers who had just entered the sect.
Italian Freemason Giuseppe Mazzini founded a secret political movement in the 19th century called Giovine Italia (Young Italy). This Young movement, coordinated by Mazzini from London, was copied in various countries. The Young Turks gathered in Paris established the Committee of Ittihat and Terakki (Union and Progress) in Thessaloniki, where the Italian influence was strong. Meanwhile, Young Armenians formed Dashnaktsutyun, also known as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. The Dashnaks’ flag was designed by the sect in San Lazzaro.
The Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II was the common enemy of both societies. European powers, especially Britain, were creating anarchy in Anatolia using the Dashnaks, and when the Sultan intervened, they put pressure on the Ottomans and tried to gain concessions by presenting him as an Armenian murderer. Sultan Hamid, who entrusted his personal treasury to Armenian bankers, was trying to protect his Armenian subjects from the nationalist currents and Dashnak rebels as much as he could. However, every Armenian killed in the uprisings made Dashnaktsutyun happy because it strengthened the national cause they were following. In fact, Dashnaks from time to time personally killed Armenian citizens who opposed their cause.
New Turkey
Young Turks and Young Armenians, in the congress held abroad between Dec. 27 and 29, 1907, decided to dethrone Sultan Hamid and switch to the constitutional monarchy system. For this, armed resistance against the government, strikes, non-payment of taxes, propaganda in the army would be followed. As a matter of fact, the Young Turks, who had the support of Italy behind them, started a rebellion in Thessaloniki the next year and succeeded in proclaiming the Constitutional Monarchy; however, Sultan Hamid was still on the throne.
Determined to take down Sultan Hamid, the Young Turks gathered an army in Thessaloniki in the spring of 1909. The army composed of Bulgarian, Greek, Jewish, Macedonian, Albanian and Armenian gangs set out for Istanbul, the center of the Empire. When the army arrived around Hadımköy outside Istanbul, representatives of Dashnaktsutyun, including the Armenian deputy Vartakes Effendi, went out to greet them. Young Turks, especially Major Enver Bey, thanked the Armenian delegation for their actions. The soldiers replied, “Long live the Dashnaktsutyun Society!” and applauded.
The Ottoman Empire virtually came to an end when the Young Turks who occupied Istanbul captured Abdulhamid, the Sultan of the Turks and Caliph of the Muslims, and imprisoned him in the house of an Italian Jew in Thessaloniki.
Jews and Armenians
Even the Armenian massacre in Adana in 1909 could not break the friendship between the Young Turks, the owners of New Turkey, and the Dashnaks. In fact, both committees signed a cooperation agreement in August 1909. But the main intellectual engines of the Committee of Union and Progress were Italian Jews. The most famous among them was Emmanuel Carasso, the master of the masonic lodge in Thessaloniki, to which the Young Turks belonged. Working with Venetian businessman Giuseppe Volpi, Carasso had distributed four tins of gold he attained from an Italian bank to the Unionists to start the 1908 revolution. He boasted, “What we couldn’t get Sultan Abdulhamid to do for TL 25 million what we had the Unionists do for TL 400,000.”
In this regard, the British ambassador in Istanbul, Sir Gerard Lowther, wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Hardinge, the official head of the British Foreign Office, on May 29, 1910, and said:
“The Young Turkey movement in Paris was quite separate from and in great part in ignorance of the inner workings of that in Salonica … Some years ago Emmanuele Carasso, a Jewish Mason of Salonica, and now a deputy for that town in the Ottoman Chamber, founded there a lodge called ‘Macedonia Risorta’ in connection with Italian Freemasonry … The inspiration of the movement in Salonica would seem to have been mainly Jewish, while the words ‘Liberte,’ ‘Egalite’ and ‘Fraternite,’ the motto of the Young Turks, are also the device of Italian Freemasons. The colors of both, red and white, are again the same. Shortly after the revolution in July 1908, when the Committee established itself in Constantinople, it soon became known that many of its leading members were Freemasons … It was noticed that Jews of all colors, native and foreign, were enthusiastic supporters of the new dispensation, till, as a Turk expressed it, every Hebrew seemed to become a potential spy of the occult Committee, and people began to remark that the movement was rather a Jewish than a Turkish revolution.”
Lowther said that Jews and Freemasons were brought to all critical positions in the government in New Turkey and that they did not like the other minorities living in Turkey, especially the Armenians, who were an economically active nation: “Javid Bey, Deputy for Salonica, an exceedingly clever and gifted Crypto-Jew and Freemason, was made Minister of Finance, while Talaat Bey, also a Freemason, became Minister of the Interior … It is obvious that the Jew, who is so vitally interested in maintaining his sole predominance in the councils of the Young Turkey, is equally interested in keeping alive the flames of discord between the Turk and his (the Jew’s) possible rivals, i.e. the Armenians, Greeks, etc., while it is to be inferred that he would not be averse to the new regime increasing the national indebtedness to the Hebrew financiers.”
Armenian deportation
With the encouragement of Jews like Carasso, the Unionists, who started to dream of a national state, began to purge the liberal Young Turks among them. Although they received the support of all of Europe during the revolution, they gradually moved away from liberal England and approached Germany. In the policy of luring the Young Turks in Parliament to the side of Germany, the names of two Jews, in particular, stood out: Baron Max von Oppenheim, who belonged to the family that owned one of the nine Jewish banks that remained untouched during Adolf Hitler’s rule, and David Sassoon Effendi, the deputy of Baghdad, who was a member of the famous Sassoon family.
The friendship between the Young Turks who started to follow a nationalist policy, and the Young Armenians came to a complete end with the Raid of Bab-ı Ali (the Sublime Porte) in 1913, also known as the 1913 Ottoman coup d’etat. Enver, the “Hero of Liberty” who had been the Berlin attache since the proclamation of the Constitutional Monarchy in 1908, and his men seized power in New Turkey all to themselves after this masonic coup d’etat financed by the German Jews.
Turkey entered the world war, which started the next year, on the side of Germany. While the Unionists spent tens of thousands of Muslim Turkish youth on the fronts for their political goals and personal interests, they did not forget the Gregorian Armenians. In 1915, while Armenian men were at the front, they decided to deport their families. Thousands of Armenian citizens were deported from Anatolia to Syria under the supervision of German and Unionist officers. Some of them died or were killed on the way.
At the head of the organization that arranged the Armenian deportation was Şükrü (Kaya), the right-hand man of the Minister of Internal Affairs, Talat Pasha. “Gypsy” Talat was the master of the Grand Orient of Turkey, which the Young Turks founded in 1909 as the Turkish leg of the Grand Orient of Italy (Grande Oriente d’Italia). Şükrü would also later be promoted to the title of master.
Baron von Oppenheim was working for German intelligence in World War I. Wearing Muslim clothes, he encouraged the massacre of Armenians in mosques and scolded the Turkish officers who showed pity and mercy to the Armenians. Zionist Alfred Nossig, who would later be killed by the Jews for collaborating with the Nazis, also came to Istanbul, met with Talat and Enver Pashas and Carasso on this issue and supported the deportation.
Sultan Mehmed V, who was almost a puppet in the hands of the Unionists, could not interfere with the Young Turks. The fate of those who tried to intervene was not good either. Prince Yusuf Izzeddin Effendi, the son of Sultan Abdulaziz, who was killed by the Young Turks for opposing the proclamation of the Constitutional Monarchy, shared the same fate with his father when he objected to the deportation.
Malta exiles
When the Germans and Young Turks lost the war, the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress fled abroad. Allied ships occupied Istanbul in 1918. The Unionists, who committed war crimes by playing roles in the Armenian deportations and massacres, were tried and arrested by the sultan’s government in Istanbul, like the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials. Those found guilty were deported to Malta by England. However, as a result of the intervention of Italy, they were released in 1921 and most of them returned to Anatolia and joined the new government established by the Young Turks in Ankara.
Talat, Enver, Cemal and Said Halim Pashas who were abroad wanted to return to Turkey and lead the new movement in Ankara. However, in an operation called Operation Nemesis, supported by British intelligence, they were killed one by one by the Dashnaks. When the Allies, especially America, ignored the demands of the Armenians in Lausanne, the Armenian case in Anatolia was closed.
Sources
- ‘An inner view of the intellectual and political forces which are predominant in the Ottoman Empire.’, Memorandum of the Government of India, Jan 1917, British Library, IOR/L/PS/18/B267.
- Letter from Gerard Lowther to Charles Hardinge, 29 May 1910, Foreign Office 800/193A (Lowther Papers).
