A connected history of eastern Christianity in Syria and Palestine and European cultural diplomacy (1860–1948)

ABSTRACT

The special issue critically explores, at a micro and macro level, the structural role and religious, cultural and political interactions of the Greek-Orthodox, Melkite and Syriac communities in late Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine. It seeks to identify archival gaps, and to link the study of the micro-scale level of everyday cultural and religious life to the macro-narratives of global change affecting Christian communities, in a connected perspective, via dynamics of cultural and religious personal and institutional interactions. The Christian communities, both as institutions and lay bodies, are of special interest for the field of Levantine studies, since they were placed at the heart of the local power game, expressing the quest for social emancipation, while also keeping close links with diplomatic actors, colonial institutions, and foreign religious agents. The research presented lies on the idea that the communities in focus were inextricably linked, being actors operating within the same multi-ethnic periphery, having the same legal status, and being in contact to foreign agents, while at the same time politically dependent to the centralized ottoman and mandatory authorities.

KEYWORDS:

• Eastern christianity
• connected history
• cultural diplomacy
• Ottoman Palestine
• Ottoman Syria
• mandate Palestine
• mandate Syria

Introduction

Farid Georges Kassab (1884–1970) fiercely rejected the ideas of Naguib Azoury and his Réveil de la Nation arabe (1905) (and according to Kassab, the Jesuit and Vatican agenda), denying the existence of a Christian ‘Oriental question’: ‘l’Orient n’appartient qu’aux Orientaux!’ (Kassab 1909, 33). Kassab, author of Palestine, Hellénisme et Cléricalisme (1909), came from a well-to-do Greek Orthodox family from Palestine. A pupil at the Frères school in Jaffa during the late Ottoman period, and later a student at Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes/Sorbonne in Paris, he was linked to Lebanese and Young Ottoman groups in Paris, as well as Polish and Russian revolutionary circles. He was also married to the Lebanese writer Salma Sayigh (1889–1953), famous for her struggle for the development of schooling and training for girls and women (Wild 1988). Leaving Lebanon in the middle of the 1920s to settle in Egypt, Kassab embodies the many levels of connectedness experienced by eastern Christian communities at the end of the Ottoman period and later in the League of Nations Mandatory territories of Syria and Palestine.

This special issue responds to some of the conceptual and archival challenges present in studying people like Kassab and the wider Christian communities of late Ottoman and Mandate Syria and Palestine. It seeks to identify archival gaps, and to link the study of the micro-scale level of everyday cultural and religious life to the macro-narratives of global change affecting Christian communities, in a connected perspective, via dynamics of cultural and religious personal and institutional interactions.

Until the last decade of the twentieth century, a comprehensive history of Christians in the Near East was a relatively understudied field of research. The ethnological and historical works on Christians, produced mainly by ecclesiastics, adopted a confessional point of view, insisting on the particularities of each confessional group studied in isolation. However, from 2000 onwards, scholarly interest in Christianity in the area of historical Greater Syria during the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods has grown (Heyberger and Girard 2015, Murre-van den Berg 2015).

As far as the Orthodox Church of Antioch is concerned, several studies have been published in Greek, Russian and French, covering a wide range of themes. Haris Theodorelis-Rigas (2015) has researched the identity construction process of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community of Greater Syria and its fluid character, as well as the development of state minority policies within the post-Ottoman modernising context. Lora Gerd (2014) and Denis Vovchenko (2013, 2016) have contributed work on the role of Russian diplomacy in Church politics and its impact on the social developments within the Ottoman Middle East. To these works, we should add the studies and collections of archival sources published in Russian by Nikolai Lisovoi (2000) and Mikhail Jakushev (2013). Anna Poujeau (2010) has explored the position of the Orthodox Patriarchate within the contemporary political landscape of Syria, putting special emphasis on the revival of the monastic movement, while Souad Abou el-Rousse Slim (2007) gives a thorough analysis of the waqf administration during Ottoman times, elaborating on the economic and social aspects of the question. Last but not least, we have to refer to the journal Chronos – Revue d'Histoire de l'Université de Balamand, which has been the locus of research on Arab Christianity since its establishment in 1998 (see also Verdeil 2001, Mack 2015, Dierauff 2020).

The role of culture has also been understudied in the analysis of the eastern Christian communities themselves (Abu-Ghazaleh 1973, Abujaber 2016), and for an overview in the region, (Kozma et al. 2015, Gorman and Irving 2020), and in comparative approaches with their Jewish and Muslim peers (Jacobson and Naor 2016, Sharkey 2017, Makdisi 2019, Assan et al. 2019, Dueck 2010).

For the interwar period and for Palestine (Jayyusi 2015), studies have often portrayed Christians via the sectarianism (Davies 2008) of the British Mandate authorities, Christian nationalism and their religious institutional history. Laura Robson (2011) has explored how the continuation of the Ottoman millet system by the British Mandate led to the gradual marginalisation of Palestinian Christians. Noah Haiduc-Dale (2013) has discussed the place of indigenous Christians in the nation-building process in Mandatory Palestine, challenging the national/communal divide thesis. Erik Freas (2016) has studied the place of Christians in the construction of Palestinian national identity and how this process, which was directly related to the Tanzimat reforms, influenced their overall relations with the Muslim community in the late Ottoman period. Anthony O’Mahony’s various edited volumes (1999, 2003, etc) have had a significant impact in this regard, while many relevant contributions have been published in non-religiously oriented journals. The religious presence of European states in the ‘Holy Land’ has been explored from national history perspectives (Trimbur and Aaronsohn 2001, Arielli 2010, Murre-van den Berg 2006, 2010, Goren 2009), while religious studies have explored the history of local communities, mainly of Jerusalem (Papastathis 2016, 2020, Gerd 2014, Astafieva 2013). The special issue of Jerusalem Quarterly on diplomacy (Mazza 2017) explored the effects of diplomatic agency in political, cultural and religious affairs within late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. Studies on educational policies, language use and their impact have presented a more complex portrait of these communities from a religious and political perspective (Okkenhaug 2002, Sanchez 2016). However, their overlapping religious and cultural identities, dynamism, and networks (including Orthodox Russia and the Soviet Union) have hardly been explored, apart from Sarah Irving’s work on intellectual networks (Norris 2017 and Irving 2017, 2018), partly due to the inaccessibility of local archives.

Over the last decade, the Planet Bethlehem Archive project has brought to light a significant number of unexplored archives on the modern history of Bethlehem, while the online catalogue and edited volume Open Jerusalem (Dalachanis and Lemire 2018) has placed new emphasis on the concept of citadinité (citizenship). It conceives Jerusalem not only as a social environment of religious and geopolitical significance, but as an urban space that works as the focal point for the formation of diverse collective identities in constant interaction with each other. The publications of the MisSMO project (Christian missions and societies in the Middle East: organisations, identities, heritagization, 19–20 centuries) have emphasised the intertwined and complex links between missionaries and local populations in the Levant region from renewed gendered, cultural and heritage perspectives (Neveu and Gabry Thienpont 2021; Bourmaud et al. 2021; Neveu, Sanchez Summerer, and Turiano 2021). More recently, another important topic explored has been language and its relation to religion and the development of collective identities of non-Arabic and non-Muslim communities within the emerging national movements of the post-Ottoman Middle East (Murre-van den Berg, Sanchez Summerer and Baarda 2020). A special issue of Social Sciences and Missions (Bourmaud and Sanchez Summerer 2019) has focused on the political aspect of the missionary enterprise in late Ottoman Near East, and analysed the contradictory ways in which missionaries and the Christian communities around them reacted to and were transformed by the ideologies of Arabisation and its proponents. Lately, the CrossRoads project and its recently edited volume (Sanchez Summerer and Zananiri 2021) analysed the ways in which Palestinians were integrated into global circuits of culture, during a period corresponding to European states’ investment in culture for their own nationalist promotion abroad, and the social and religious transformations of Arab Christian communities via cultural lenses and from an entangled perspective.

Adding to these contributions, this special issue intends to further extend our knowledge in this field of study by offering an overall perspective on the structural role of, and interaction between, foreign actors, local cultural norms and religious institutions in articulating communal ideologies and identifications. It endeavours to address Palestinian and Syrian Christianity not in isolation but as part of a broad nexus of church institutions, social networks and political/religious lobbies and cultural institutions. The basic assumptions are that Syrian and Palestinian Orthodox and Melkite Christianity in the late Ottoman and Mandate period were inextricably linked, that their history is connected and the role of cultural interactions fundamental. Firstly, because under Ottoman rule both regions were parts of a unified geographical entity, i.e. Greater Syria, divided afterwards along constructed borders on the basis of colonial objectives. Secondly, because of the close religious links between Jerusalem and Damascus. Damascus was the central authority of the Jerusalem Melkite congregation, while the Arab Orthodox in Palestine were closely connected with their co-religionists under the See of Antioch. Both were under the rule of the foreign Greek hierarchy, while their cause was supported by Russia at a diplomatic and religious level. Moreover, the Patriarch of Antioch in late Ottoman times was usually elected from the ranks of the Greek Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre; the Jerusalem Patriarchate therefore had an important say in the affairs of the Antiochian Church. Moreover, the two confessions are historically connected. The Melkite Church was created from within the Orthodox Church, following the same doctrines and theological framework but differentiated by its acknowledgement of the Pope as its spiritual head. The competition between these two communities was intense, as many ecclesiastics and local congregations switched confessional identities, driven by personal and/or financial motives as well as social loyalties and kinship. Last but not least, this special issue, following the established paradigm, puts emphasis on the connection between eastern Christianity and European cultural diplomacy, as reflected in the capitulations regime, active interests in promoting education among local Christian communities, and the religious protectorate enjoyed by a part of the Christian population and institutions in terms of respecting the status quo of the Holy Places, as well as counteracting proselytism.

Within this framework, this special issue investigates how cultural diplomacy functioned in Palestine and Syria from the second half of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries. It questions how these policies impacted on the cultural identification of indigenous Christians in comparison with their Palestinian and Syrian compatriots, focusing on attempts at ideological and political influence and domination by multiple actors, each with a diversity of diplomatic and cultural ends. It examines these disputes as they were reflected in the religious and social landscape and analyses the variety of Christian Arab agendas towards such policies, paying special attention to the communities that constituted the majority of the Christian populations: Eastern Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Melkite.

Questions, themes and subjects

This special issue includes analytical contributions all based on newly researched archives or a new analytical grid, tackling questions on connectedness at various levels. It asks a series of questions, linked to the puzzle around cultural and religious actors, agency, agendas, cooperation, domination, and appropriation during the late Ottoman period and the British and French Mandates, and envisages the dynamics at local, regional, and transnational spheres, instead of studying a mere aggregation of communal and institutional histories.

It also intends to deprovincialise the history of Arab Christian communities, looking at how diverse actors operated on different scales: macro (state and supra-national entities), micro (individuals) and meso (network and institutions) levels (Ouahes 2018). How did Arab Christian communities use European cultural agenda(s) to promote and safeguard their national and communal affiliations and interests? What was the cultural and ideological framework that European representatives used? How did European representatives contribute to the initiation of, or opposition to, sectarianism in Palestine via cultural agendas?

Furthermore, how did local political authorities (the Sublime Porte, the British authorities in Palestine or the French administration in Syria), as well as other external power players with special interests in the field, impact the different Christian communities? What were the strategic aims and policy of the local religious institutions? What was the political behaviour of Melkites and Greek Orthodox in relation to the emergence of Arab Nationalism and the place of foreign actors in this process?

By choosing a chronological structure from the late Ottoman period through the interwar years to the Second World War, this special issue seeks to shed new light on a question that scholars have not investigated systematically. The focus on this period stems from two basic reasons. Firstly, it marks the gradual establishment of modern structures of social operation, such as challenges to religious authority and elites or the formation of Arab nationalism. Secondly, it is the transition period from imperial to colonial rule, in which cultural diplomacy and religion played an instrumental role in legitimising new political regimes, but on the other hand helped the promotion of these communities by their own leaders outside the Middle East. The Eastern Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox and Melkite communities were placed at the heart of these developments, expressing the quest for national and religious emancipation, while also keeping close links with diplomatic actors, colonial institutions, and foreign religious agents.

Lora Gerd (Russian Academy of Sciences) studies Russian church policy in Syria from the 1870s to 1914. She claims that Russian politicians in general aimed to support the Arab clergy against the Greek hierarchy, though preserving a good relationship with the latter was consistently regarded as of great importance. The article focuses on the Russian patronage of groups of Greek Catholics willing to adopt Orthodoxy as well as the establishment of the schooling network as a soft power mechanism for social control. Lastly Gerd explores why, compared to other regions of the Middle East, the ‘soft power’ of Russian church policy in Syria before WWI was more successful.

Dimitrios M. Kontogeorgis (University of Cyprus) uses unpublished archives and press articles to examine Greek public opinion on the 1860 civil war in Mount Lebanon and the image constructed for the various ethnic, linguistic and religious groups of Syria in Greece during the 1840s–1860s. Moreover, he explores the character and ‘mission’ of the Greek Orthodox Church in the region as debated among Greek consuls and Foreign Office officials. The different shades of opinion were highlighted during the first Greek ‘humanitarian intervention’, in the summer and autumn of 1860. The article suggests that for the government in Athens, this mission was a question of prestige, while for Greek intellectuals it had much broader implications since it reinforced a feeling of cultural affinity between Greeks of the nation-state and the Christians of Syria.

Maria Litina (National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation) follows the career of Patriarch Cyril II (1845–1872), who embodies the transition of the Jerusalem church’s operations from a centralised structure of imperial character directly dependent on the Church of Constantinople to an autonomous religious entity with a crystallised Greek national identity. The author focuses on questions concerning Cyril’s election by the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre; his involvement in the schism with the Bulgarian Church; his stance vis-à-vis the demands of the Arab Orthodox congregation in 1872, which was viewed by the religious establishment as a threat to the alleged Greek character of the institution; the Patriarchal real estate in Russia and Romania; and the question of the Holy Places.

Sadia Agsous (CRFJ Centre de Recherche français de Jérusalem) studies the relationship between the Russian missionary educational enterprise in Palestine and the leaders of the Arab Nahda, based primarily on Arabic Palestinian sources. Agsous describes in depth the Russian educational enterprise in late Ottoman times, giving a detailed account of schools and their curricula, as well as biographies of some of their graduates who became key figures of the cultural renaissance in Palestine during this period. She suggests that the key to understanding the role of Russia in the development of the Arab Palestinian national consciousness is the establishment of Arabic as the language for teaching in the Russian schooling network.

Sotiris Roussos (University of the Peloponnese) contributes a chapter on the potential categorisation of the survival strategies developed by the Greek Orthodox, Assyrian, Chaldean and Syrian Orthodox communities after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He proposes that the first was that of co-optation by the state authorities, the second, that of protection by the Great Powers, the third that of armed resistance and the creation of autonomous enclaves and the last that of integrating themselves into Arab nationalism, lowering the banner of religion and becoming strong advocates of Arab nationalism encompassing Muslims and Christians alike. The chapter presents a comparative approach to these strategies in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century to the formation of the Mandates.

The next chapter, by Konstantinos Papastathis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki/Leiden University) explores the events that took place within the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem during the transition period of the establishment of British rule in Palestine. The article focuses on the religious policy agenda of the new authorities, as well as the diplomatic and cultural factors influencing the decision-making process. Moreover, it critically assesses the political connotations of the dispute between the hierarchy and the lay community within the framework of the respective Greek and Palestinian nation-building processes. Finally, it elaborates on the legal aspects of the controversy, and how this was related to the power struggle between religious institutions with conflicting interests.

Raymond Kevorkian’s (University Paris VIII) contribution studies the wave of Armenian refugees in Jerusalem from 1916 to 1926 and its effect on urban development, on the basis of unexplored archival material that will form the heart of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem due to open in 2021/2022. Drawing on a remarkable selection of visual sources from the WWI and early Mandate periods, he suggests that the Monastery of St James underwent a profound transformation during British rule, and focuses on the role of the Church in the settlement of refugees and the care of orphans within this.

Bernhard Kronegger (Erfurt University) deals with the Melkite Church during the colonial period and the internal Catholic debate between Latinisation and Arabisation. The article therefore focuses on interventions by the Holy See vis-à-vis the Melkite Church in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Special attention is given to the presentation and use of cultural and religious stereotypes within the argumentative discourse of the church hierarchy of the Melkite and Latin Catholic Churches, providing new insights into the complex relations between the Holy See and one of its Uniate churches within the context of the struggle for religious and political independence.

Angelos Dalachanis (EFA French School at Athens/CNRS) meanwhile examines the Greek Ladies’ Union of Jerusalem in the late Mandatory period. The author suggests that the minutes of this group’s gatherings bring to us unheard voices of Jerusalem, giving us an opportunity to understand the different strategies women developed to make their views known within their community, to examine their philanthropic activities within the charitable universe of the holy city and, most of all, to deal with multiple political developments at different levels during a period which is not only sensitive regarding the future of Palestine but also for the future of the Christian communities in Jerusalem.

Sarah Irving (Edge Hill University/Leiden University) reconstructs the role, marginalised in most writings on the subject, of members of the Syriac Orthodox community in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, examining the ways in which the parts they played were informed by their status as Christians, scholars and religious leaders in late Mandate Palestine. As a counterpoint to this, the case also highlights how the needs of the community – particularly in the wake of the Nakba in 1948– were tied to a kind of cultural diplomacy by the head of the Syriac Orthodox church in Jerusalem in ways which sought to depict the congregation as refugees, as Christian Palestinians, and as owners and valid beneficiaries of the region’s archaeological heritage. Irving argues that the concept of cultural diplomacy enables us to elucidate the community’s role, both as a target of such diplomacy by European and American scholars, and as an aspiring player in this field in an attempt to raise awareness and funds for needy Palestinian Christians.

Linking the study of the micro-scale level of everyday cultural and religious aspects to the macro-narratives of global change affecting Christian communities is an invitation, for the CrossRoads project, to further envisage movements of circulation that challenge some of the conclusions of macrohistorical research (Ghobrial, 2019). The next step will be to re-evaluate the influence of Marxism on the Greek Orthodox community, which was historically urban, mercantile and, by the time of the British Mandate, a significant fraction of a growing middle class and how it created contradictory approaches towards a nationalist agenda during the 1940s, 1950s and the 1960s.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karène Sanchez Summerer

Karène Sanchez Summerer is an Associate Professor at Leiden University and the PI of the project 'CrossRoads. European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians. A Connected History, 1920-1950'.

Konstantinos Papastathis

Konstantinos Papastathis is an Assistant professor at the Department of Political Science of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He also participates in the project CrossRoads at Leiden University.