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?" Some Jews believed that the book "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was full of symbolism connected to Jewish history and Judaism. They used to say about the book: "Only a Jew could have written this work". Yair Auron writes that he has no doubts that Musa Dagh is Mount Moses. The book's title is "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" although according to different documentary sources, the rebellion lasted for 36 days, or for 53 days, or 24 days. Apparently no source says forty days, and Auron believes that this number was chosen to symbolize the forty days of the Great Flood, or the forty days that it took Moses to ascend the mountain. Writer and journalist Huberta von Voss says:  Werfel filters the true story of the Armenians' resistance through a Hebrew prism: the chronicle of the exodus. Forty days of resistance, forty years wandering in the desert. Werfel describes the exodus from Egypt, from fate-imposed passivity. The social order in his novel is extracted from the Torah with a firm gouge. One a political leader, the other, a spiritual leader, they guide the fighting chosen people: of course, they are Moses, the prophet, and Aaron, the high priest. Ms. von Voss also makes a parallel between the hero of the novel Gabriel, which means "hero of God" and Moses in the Bible. They both grew up as strangers to their people.