1916 : Max Jacob, un poète au secours de l’Arménie martyre

In April of 1916, Max Jacob published a lengthy poem of love and death entitled The Allies are in Armenia. The world was deep in the throws of the Great War, and the Ottoman Empire was carrying out its « great crime »: the programmed destruction of the Armenian people. Why this poem, when Max Jacob was not a member of the armenophile movement? The poem was in fact the fruit of a durable and sincere friendship that the poet had forged with the Armenian Joseph Altounian in the artistic milieu of Monmartre at the beginning of the century. It also reflected the emotion of a Jew recently converted to Catholicism who was now faced with a martyred Christian nation, of which he in fact knew little about. Max Jacob could not have foreseen that, less than thirty years later, after the Armenian people, it would be the Jewish people – himself included – who would be the victim of genocide.