Nourishing Bodies and Souls: The Maronite Church’s Relief Effort in Mount Lebanon during the Great War War and famine relief in form of provisioning and humanitarian aid to Ottoman civilians in the Arab provinces has received little attention. Historians have mainly directed their attentions to foreign efforts in the Anatolian provinces, and in particular to the tremendous work of international missionaries and relief organizations in response to the Armenian genocide. For Beirut and Mount Lebanon, the war years often have been dismissed as a period of reduced if not discontinued communal, international, and state welfare work. This is not surprising since relief work in the region was not only overshadowed by the cruelty of the famine but also in the end proved unsuccessful in preventing mass starvation. Moving away from state and international humanitarian effort to local one, this paper focuses the Maronite Church’s active role in wartime provisioning, even if largely a failed attempt. It will be argued that the Church’s active participation in the politics of provision contributed to the reshaping of the political landscape of the mountain, by opening a space for the Church to reassert its power. The fact that the Church’s existing institutions and personnel could be utilized to distribute food even in the most remote corners of the mountain not only guaranteed its local political currency, but, as will be argued, also a seat at the post-war bargaining table.

This paper examines the role that Syrian and Lebanese emigrants played in famine relief efforts targeted at Ottoman Syrian. Using the records of Syrian ethnic organizations that worked within well-known U.S. associations like the Red Cross and Near East Relief, the paper argues that émigré participation in famine relief translated humanitarianism into a politics of intervention. For relief workers, raising money and aid to combat the Syrian famine was a philanthropic endeavor but not one divorced from the broader political goals of diasporic nationalism. The nationalist committees of New York and Boston raised relief but also collaborated with the Entente to move propaganda, Army recruits, petitions, and passports in support for an allied intervention against the Ottoman state. These groups, furthermore, competed with one another, transforming homeland relief part of a legitimate strategy for nationalist movements aimed at a free Syria. This piece examines the politics of humanitarianism from the eyes of Syrian and Lebanese émigrés, demonstrating the connections they made between philanthropy and liberation and the new political cleavages that this work engendered in Syrian American communities. In a wartime America where Ottoman ethnic politics were surveilled and feared, philanthropy transformed into a cognate for émigré patriotism.

Writing about the condition of refugees in the Russian Empire in 1916, Violetta Thurstan, a British nurse, lamented, “The English language lacks words to express the suffering that these people underwent, and nothing that we can imagine could be worse than the reality.” As many as 120,000 to 150,000 refugees passed through the Ottoman-Russian border already in summer and fall 1915 as a result of the war and the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman government against its own Armenian subjects. Exploring imperial Russia’s response to this refugee crisis on the Caucasus front of the Great War, my research project elucidates the complexity of humanitarianism at the beginning of the 20th century. To confront the emergency situation, imperial Russian authorities as well as non-governmental organizations were engaged in the Armenian relief effort in the Caucasus and elsewhere. Yet, were the voices of Armenian refugees heard or considered during the Russian relief work? Or were the refugees silenced and treated as another ‘wave’ of people ‘flooding’ the Russian Empire? Besides, what role did the objects of humanitarianism – refugees themselves – play? Drawing upon primary sources from Armenian, Georgian, and Russian archives for the first time, I address these core questions by analyzing the relief agencies’ reports, and the testimonies and memoirs of Armenian refugee-survivors forced back and forth the Ottoman-Russian borderline in 1914-1917.

The scholarship (and the popular discourse) on humanitarian efforts during the Armenian genocide focuses on the role of western missionaries and consuls, who emerge as selfless heroes protecting and saving hundreds of thousands of helpless Armenians. What remains neglected in scholarly inquiry is Armenian agency. In this paper, drawing upon previously untapped primary sources as well as fresh insights from others, I argue that it was the Armenians who drove this humanitarian resistance waged in the Ottoman Empire during the genocide. Focusing on Aleppo and a the network of concentration camps in Ras ul-Ain and along the banks of the Euphrates River from Meskeneh to Der Zor during the World War I, I explore the interactions between the local, regional, and central authorities on the one hand, and the humanitarian resistance waged by a network of Armenians aided by locals and western missionaries on the other, challenging explicit and implicit depictions of Armenians as passive recipients of violence on the one hand, and western humanitarianism on the other.