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Judgment Unto Truth: Witnessing the Armenian Genocide
This dramatic personal narrative is a unique contribution to understanding past and current events in the Near East. These memoirs of an American Protestant clergyman reveal little known aspects of major events in Asia Minor in the early twentieth century, give valuable insights to their background, and describe pivotal interrelationships with the western world. Those perceptions are woven into the story of the author's protracted genocidal experiences.
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First published January 1, 1990
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June 9, 2025
This is a memoir of catastrophic lucidity, charting the collapse of a people through the sharp eyes of a man who was both survivor and witness, interpreter and almost-corpse, shepherd and fugitive. The plot - if we dare borrow a word too genteel for the concatenation of betrayals and slaughters - is structured around his life in the Armenian Christian community of Urfa before, during, and after the 1915 genocide.
We get a long, boiling scream through twenty years of horror. He begins as a barefoot child dragged over rooftops during the 1895 Marash massacre, sees his brothers gunned down mid-prayer, and ends up a respected pastor and government translator, an Armenian trusted by the very authorities killing his people. “Turks and Armenians lived side by side for centuries,” he writes with cutting irony, “until the moment came to kill us.”
Along the way: he hides from snipers in a church attic, persuades British officials to temporarily reoccupy Urfa, is imprisoned and interrogated by Turkish secret police, and survives what he calls “the mass rape of our cities disguised as military logistics.”
The book is stuffed with scenes so grotesquely specific they repel summary: a child breastfeeds on his mother’s corpse; a bribe convinces a judge to erase a notebook listing Armenian defenders; an orphanage is burned down after housing refugees; church altars are turned into butcher slabs.
One Turkish official justified burning Armenians alive in the church by quoting the Qur’an, then stole their wedding rings from the ashes. In the streets of Urfa, Turkish soldiers played a game: tossing Armenian infants in the air and skewering them with bayonets, tallying points for accuracy.
One young girl, bleeding from repeated assaults, was paraded through town as a “traitor to Islam” for refusing conversion; her body was dumped in the Euphrates like waste.
Jernazian recalls watching a Turkish officer stuff an Armenian priest’s mouth with pages from his own Bible before executing him. When asked what crime the victims had committed, a gendarme smirked: “They were Armenians. That is enough.”
In Aleppo, bribes were accepted in soap, sugar, or daughters. One woman, gang-raped and then discarded, crawled naked into a bakery to feed her child dough from the floor—she died with flour on her lips. The Turks called this “relocation.” Jernazian called it “the science of extermination.”
Time and again, Jernazian slips between roles: he’s the translator for Turkish war officials and the secret scribe for the Armenian resistance; he recites Biblical comfort to widows one night and deciphers Turkish military orders the next. In Urfa, he observes the community’s fatal debates—whether to resist, comply, plead, pray.
The real drama is this: how long can intelligent people convince themselves they are not next? By the time the defenders of Urfa decide to fight, the Turks are already torching houses and slitting throats. “Even the infants were counted among the rebels,” he notes acidly.
The resistance is led by Mgrdich Yotneghparian, a sort of Armenian Zorro who appears in Turkish uniform, disappears through trapdoors, blows up ammunition depots, and dies with dignity in the rubble of his city.
After the fall of Urfa, Jernazian catalogues confiscated property while watching Turkish officials loot with ledgers. “Abandoned goods,” they call the homes of murdered neighbors.
Elsewhere, he questions whether a foreign consular agent truly committed suicide or was silenced by his own government.
There’s wit buried in the bile - when a Turkish soldier claims the Armenians plotted rebellion, Jernazian asks dryly, “With what? Our spoons?”
The final chapters are pure escape-room theology: he bribes his way out of prison with a loaf of bread, avoids re-arrest with a forged letter, and ends his tale with both defiance and disbelief. “The snare is broken,” he writes, “and we are escaped.” But only just.
No prophet, no caliph, no scholar gets a free pass to dehumanize others. Judgment Unto Truth shows us what happens when religious supremacy mixes with political power and ethnic hatred: extermination masked as piety, genocide codified as divine will.
“When they swore on the Koran to protect us, we knew it was time to dig our graves.”
Armenians were treated as rayah (cattle), and “infidel” was a death sentence. When certain interpretations of Islam declare non-Muslims to be lesser beings, when Houti, Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Iranian, or Ottoman edicts cloak mass murder in Qur’anic language, and when international denial of those crimes is still sanctified by silence - that’s racism in vestments.
This harrowing memoir begs us to demand reform, not reverence. Challenge clerics who defend racial hierarchies. Denounce theocrats and organizations who claim divine permission to dominate others. Teach historical truth, even when it wounds pride. Support Muslim thinkers, reformers, and ex-Muslims who risk their lives to oppose theocracy and ethnonationalism. Support unequivocally the brave people who fight the Jihadi psychopaths. And most of all, reject the cowardice of moral relativism. Racism in the name of Allah is still racism.
The book reads like a confession from the front row of Hell. Every fifteen pages, something astonishing erupts: a decapitation in church, a forged manifesto, a mother smothering her child to keep it from Turkish hands. Jernazian testifies. He knows that history will repeat itself unless we remember and do something. His weapon is specificity. And his revenge is this book.
We get a long, boiling scream through twenty years of horror. He begins as a barefoot child dragged over rooftops during the 1895 Marash massacre, sees his brothers gunned down mid-prayer, and ends up a respected pastor and government translator, an Armenian trusted by the very authorities killing his people. “Turks and Armenians lived side by side for centuries,” he writes with cutting irony, “until the moment came to kill us.”
Along the way: he hides from snipers in a church attic, persuades British officials to temporarily reoccupy Urfa, is imprisoned and interrogated by Turkish secret police, and survives what he calls “the mass rape of our cities disguised as military logistics.”
The book is stuffed with scenes so grotesquely specific they repel summary: a child breastfeeds on his mother’s corpse; a bribe convinces a judge to erase a notebook listing Armenian defenders; an orphanage is burned down after housing refugees; church altars are turned into butcher slabs.
One Turkish official justified burning Armenians alive in the church by quoting the Qur’an, then stole their wedding rings from the ashes. In the streets of Urfa, Turkish soldiers played a game: tossing Armenian infants in the air and skewering them with bayonets, tallying points for accuracy.
One young girl, bleeding from repeated assaults, was paraded through town as a “traitor to Islam” for refusing conversion; her body was dumped in the Euphrates like waste.
Jernazian recalls watching a Turkish officer stuff an Armenian priest’s mouth with pages from his own Bible before executing him. When asked what crime the victims had committed, a gendarme smirked: “They were Armenians. That is enough.”
In Aleppo, bribes were accepted in soap, sugar, or daughters. One woman, gang-raped and then discarded, crawled naked into a bakery to feed her child dough from the floor—she died with flour on her lips. The Turks called this “relocation.” Jernazian called it “the science of extermination.”
Time and again, Jernazian slips between roles: he’s the translator for Turkish war officials and the secret scribe for the Armenian resistance; he recites Biblical comfort to widows one night and deciphers Turkish military orders the next. In Urfa, he observes the community’s fatal debates—whether to resist, comply, plead, pray.
The real drama is this: how long can intelligent people convince themselves they are not next? By the time the defenders of Urfa decide to fight, the Turks are already torching houses and slitting throats. “Even the infants were counted among the rebels,” he notes acidly.
The resistance is led by Mgrdich Yotneghparian, a sort of Armenian Zorro who appears in Turkish uniform, disappears through trapdoors, blows up ammunition depots, and dies with dignity in the rubble of his city.
After the fall of Urfa, Jernazian catalogues confiscated property while watching Turkish officials loot with ledgers. “Abandoned goods,” they call the homes of murdered neighbors.
Elsewhere, he questions whether a foreign consular agent truly committed suicide or was silenced by his own government.
There’s wit buried in the bile - when a Turkish soldier claims the Armenians plotted rebellion, Jernazian asks dryly, “With what? Our spoons?”
The final chapters are pure escape-room theology: he bribes his way out of prison with a loaf of bread, avoids re-arrest with a forged letter, and ends his tale with both defiance and disbelief. “The snare is broken,” he writes, “and we are escaped.” But only just.
No prophet, no caliph, no scholar gets a free pass to dehumanize others. Judgment Unto Truth shows us what happens when religious supremacy mixes with political power and ethnic hatred: extermination masked as piety, genocide codified as divine will.
“When they swore on the Koran to protect us, we knew it was time to dig our graves.”
Armenians were treated as rayah (cattle), and “infidel” was a death sentence. When certain interpretations of Islam declare non-Muslims to be lesser beings, when Houti, Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Iranian, or Ottoman edicts cloak mass murder in Qur’anic language, and when international denial of those crimes is still sanctified by silence - that’s racism in vestments.
This harrowing memoir begs us to demand reform, not reverence. Challenge clerics who defend racial hierarchies. Denounce theocrats and organizations who claim divine permission to dominate others. Teach historical truth, even when it wounds pride. Support Muslim thinkers, reformers, and ex-Muslims who risk their lives to oppose theocracy and ethnonationalism. Support unequivocally the brave people who fight the Jihadi psychopaths. And most of all, reject the cowardice of moral relativism. Racism in the name of Allah is still racism.
The book reads like a confession from the front row of Hell. Every fifteen pages, something astonishing erupts: a decapitation in church, a forged manifesto, a mother smothering her child to keep it from Turkish hands. Jernazian testifies. He knows that history will repeat itself unless we remember and do something. His weapon is specificity. And his revenge is this book.
October 15, 2012
A really good book. The story is fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. This is an eyewitness account to the Aremenian genocide in Turkey and spans almost 30 years of the author's life as an Armenian living under Ottoman rule.
Most people have no idea where Armenia even is, let alone know about the Ottoman Turks solution for the "Armenian Question".
Most people have no idea where Armenia even is, let alone know about the Ottoman Turks solution for the "Armenian Question".
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews