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ABSTRACT
The Palestinian cultural Nahḍa that emerged with local nationalism in the early twentieth century was in part carried forward by members of the Arab-Palestinian Orthodox community. Their status in the Palestinian and Arab society of the time has to be contextualised in their relationship to the Russian language and even more so to the Russian educational enterprise in Palestine. Some of these cultural agents attended the schools of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IOPS) which were first set up in isolated villages in the Galilee region and later in Nazareth and Beit Jala. This article, based primarily on Arabic-Palestinian sources as well as my research in some of the looted Palestinian archives located in Jerusalem, stresses the relationship between the Russian educational missionary enterprise in Palestine and the leaders of the Arab Nahḍa. The historical development of this Russian enterprise, which included the development of different schools and teaching programmes, is connected to case studies of a number of cultural agents and the fields in which they excelled (teaching, translation, the press, literature, music and theatre). This article finally focuses on the Palestinian Nahḍawi cultural field which has been neglected by previous research for various reasons (linguistics, access to archives and the prevalence of Egypt and Lebanon in the study of Nahḍa themes). Focusing on a cultural approach, this article provides a better understanding of the making of Palestinian national and cultural consciousness. (I would like to dedicate this paper as a tribute to Ḥanā abū Ḥanā (1928-).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Zohar (Citation2020) argues that foreign literature, including Russian literature, translated into Hebrew played an instrumental role in the making of a modern Hebrew literature and culture in Palestine at the beginning of the twentieth century.
2 The 1948 destruction of historic Palestine deprived the Palestinians of their archives (Tamari and Farraj Citation2009, Sela Citation2015) since they were looted and became a booty of war: ‘over the years, Israel and its pre-State and states institutional, public, national and private archives became an important reservoir of information about the Palestinians in the first half of the century’ (Sela Citation2015, p. 82). The pre-1948 Palestinian archives were not returned, however, several projects, such as Aūrāq (Birzeit), Archives of Plunder (Bezalel Academy of Arts), ẖazāʾin (Jerusalem), Palestinian Oral History Archive, American University of Beirut and the Institute for Palestine Studies Archive, aim at reconstituting this memory by exploiting sources from archives in Israel and Great Britain, but also from private and family collections.
3 The Pen League was the first Arab literary society based in North America (New-York) established in 1920 by Arab intellectuals.
4 It is also worth mentioning the research work of Spencer Dan Scoville (Citation2012) which is rightly presented as the first critical exploration of the Russian-Arab cultural exchange that took place in the Levant in the years leading up to World War One.
5 Some of the artists that Boullata names are: Sophie Halaby (1905–1998), Nicolas Saig (1863–1942) and Khalil Halabi (1889–1964).
6 Concerning the number of schools and students, Merav Mack explains
The first school was opened in 1882 by the Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, known simply as ‘the Society’. Two years later, the Society opened another three schools, and by the end of the century it operated 68 schools in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon with a total number of 9998 students. Before World War I forced the closure of all the Christian Orthodox schools, there had been 114 schools with approximately 15,000 students. (Mack Citation2015, p. 250)
7 In her article published in this current issue, Lora Gerd connects Russian policy and the creation of a national Arab Church. The gradual Arabisation of the Patriarchate of Antioch and the creation of a national Arab church had been the target and the mainstream of Russian policy since the 1840s.
8 I refer here to a network of schools that taught an Arabic curriculum; this does not include key works and initiatives of other Palestinian figures such as the educational reformer Khalīl al-Sakākīnī:
The most important schools of this nation are foreign religious ones, and the government schools to this day are still not equipped with modern methods … The major factor in awakening national sentiment is the language and its literature … nationalistic teachers must share with their students literature in the Arabic language that inspires enthusiasm and brings life to their souls … (Yacqūb Citation2012, p. 12)
For Emanuel Beška,
Khalil al-Sakakini employed radically new teaching methods atal-Madrasa al-Dusturiyya [The Constitutional School] which he established in Jerusalem after his return from the United States in 1909. Pupils of all creeds were accepted. Corporal punishment was eliminated, there were no exams, no marks or prizes; instead, both the teachers and pupils had to evaluate themselves (…). (Beška Citation2015, p. 42)
9 These are private traditional Muslim schools belonging to the Waqf.
10 Better known as La Revue des études byzantines, it is a Catholic journal devoted to the study of Greek Christianity and Byzantine civilisation. It was founded in 1897 under the title Échos d'Orient.
11 McCarthy (Citation1990), gives more precise statistics.
12 Linked to the common usage of Moskobiyyah, Nu'aymah writes: ‘al-mūskūvī – related to Mūskfā or Moscow – became mūskbī in our colloquial language. And the country of the Russians became known to us as bilād al-Miskub’ (Nu'aymah Citation1964, p. 74).
13 Mutasarrifate refers one of the Ottoman Empire's subdivisions following the Tanzimat reforms.
14 My translation from Arabic.
15 Al-Hilāl was a cultural journal established in Cairo in 1892 by the Lebanese intellectual Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914).
16 For more information on historical and conceptual approaches to language in the region see Murre, Sanchez Summerer and Baarda (2020) and Suleiman (Citation2013). In The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence 1914–1948, Parsons writes ‘the elite Ottoman Civil school system was reserved for children of landowners or important merchant families’ (Parsons Citation2017, p. 4).
17 Russia was the owner of the Russian Convent of the Mount of Olives, the Tower of the Ascension, the Threshold of the Judgment Gate in Jerusalem, orange groves in Jaffa and a chapel and hermitage in Wadi Feran.
18 The Sa'alik refers to individuals who lived on the fringes of tribal society particularly during the pre-Islamic era but also during the Umayyad and Abbasid periods. This group includes several famous poets such as 'Urwa ibn al-Ward al-'Abasi (555–607) and Al-Shanfarā (?–525).
19 For this purpose, the National Library of Jerusalem has in recent years recruited Palestinian librarians to handle Arabic materials. The exchanges I had with them attested to the massive influx of boxes dating from the Nakba period.
20 It is significant that the Palestinians continued to attend schools in the Soviet Union to complete their education.
21 For more details on the Palestinian press, see: (Ayalon Citation1995, Kabha 2001, Gorman and Monciaud Citation2017).
22 An-Nafir had first been published in 1904 in Alexandria under the title an-Nafir al-'Uthmani by Ilīā Zakā’s brother, Ibrahim Zakā.
23 ‘The Young Worker’ in modern Hebrew, this was a Zionist group which merged into MAPAI, one of the main Israeli political parties.
24 ‘Labour Unity’ in Modern Hebrew, this group developed into the Israeli Labour Party and was led by David Ben-Gurion.
25 Eretz Israel is the name used by Zionists to refer to Palestine.
26 As mentioned above, ʿUda met Ignatii for the first time during his visit to Nazareth in 1910.