The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a 1933 novel by the Austrian-Jewish author Franz Werfel. Based on the events at Musa Dagh in 1915 during the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the book played a role in organizing the Jewish resistance under Nazi rule. It was passed from hand to hand in Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, and it became an example and a symbol for the Jewish underground throughout Europe. The Holocaust scholars Samuel Totten, Paul Bartrop and Steven L. Jacobs underline the importance of the book for many of the ghettos' Jews: "The book was read by many Jews during World War II and was viewed as an allegory of their own situation in the Nazi-established ghettos, and what they might do about it."The book was also read by many young Jews in Eretz Yisrael, and they discussed it while preparing to defend Haifa against a possible Nazi invasion. Prof. Peter Medding of Hebrew University of Jerusalem writes: "Between the wars, Franz Werfel's popular novel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, had a profound effect on young Jews in Palestine and in the European ghettos" Yair Auron, an Israeli historian, says that "Werfel's book shocked millions throughout the world and influenced many young people who grew up in Eretz Yisrael in the 1930s. For many Jewish youth in Europe, "Musa Dagh" became a symbol, a model, and an example, especially during the dark days of the Second World War." Jews who read the book believed that the novel, though speaking about the Armenians, contained many allusions to Judaism and Israel in relation to Werfel's own beliefs, and it had a profound impact upon many of them. Auron cites a quotation from Forty Days of Musa Dagh which reads, "To be an Armenian is an impossibility" as reminiscent of a similar circumstance that Jews faced during that era.Auron states that readers of Musa Dagh will have a difficult time believing that the book was written before the Holocaust. Lionel Bradley Steiman writes: In hindsight, the book appears an almost uncanny adumbration of aspects of the later Nazi Holocaust in which the Jews of Europe perished. Adolf Hitler's propaganda machine also recognized the parallels suggested by the book, and the book was burned along with other books that were not considered to have proper ideology.Merrill D. Peterson mentions the review written by Louis Kronenberger in the New York Times Book Review, in which Kronenberger made the point that the book "was inferentially about the plight of the Jews in Germany even though the story concerned the Armenians." Merrill D. Peterson says that after the novel was published in Hebrew in 1934, "it was quickly taken up and recognized by Jewish youth in Europe and Palestine as "a Jewish book" - not because the author was Jewish but because it addressed the condition and the fate of the Jews under the Nazi peril."Peter Balakian describes how the U.S. State Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) surrendered to the demands of Turkey and forced MGM to drop the project to make a film based on the novel and once again compares this event concerning the novel to the fate of the European Jews: "This was 1935. How much did FDR's State Department know about what Hitler was doing to the Jews of Europe, and how much did it care?" Source: Wikipedia (en)