Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern Europe is the third volume in the series “Arabic Christianity: Texts and Studies,” published by Brill. This area of study was launched in the journal al-Machriq (1898) by the formidable Jesuit scholar, Louis Cheikho of St. Joseph University in Beirut (d. 1927), and it has been gaining momentum in scholarship ever since. As the condition of Christians becomes more and more precarious in the Middle East, the study of their history, theology, and cultural legacy becomes urgent. This book is a welcome contribution in a field where there is much-needed scholarship.
The book originated in a conference of which thirteen papers are included. It is in three parts, with an epilogue in which Ioana Feodorov describes the exhibit of Melkite icons in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1969. She gives a detailed history of that groundbreaking exhibit, describing the role her father, Virgil Cândea, played in its inception. The exhibit was so original that many similar exhibits have been organized in the past half-century—as the article by Charbel Nassif shows (in the chapter preceding Feodorov's, in Part 3). Nassif describes the subsequent exhibits in Syria, Lebanon, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and Germany, adding a list of the names of local painters in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the names of the few foreign painters, and a survey of the modern historians who have studied the icons (317–325). As Nassif sadly concludes, however, many of the icons were stolen or destroyed during wars in Lebanon and Syria.
The articles in the book cover a vast geographical range, from Eastern Europe to the Ottoman Levant, and therefore the chapters differ widely in their subject matter. Part 1 opens with an article by Bernard Heyberger, in which he describes the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Christians, emphasizing the role that the church played in the connections between the two communities. The article is followed by Constantin A. Panchenko's study of the role of the Wallachian monks of the Monastery of St. Catherine in populating St. Saba in Palestine in the sixteenth century, and the Slavic support to the “monastic brethren in Palestine” (43).
Two of the most important figures in the history of Antiochian Orthodoxy were Patriarch Makarios and his son, deacon Paul, and Part I concludes with Vera Tchentsova's study of the second journey of Makarios to Russia (1666–1668). By drawing on primary Russian sources, she describes his role as a carrier of “un Rameau d'olivier” (57). The patriarch participated in resolving the Nikon crisis for Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich as well as the disagreements over the proper rites and disciplines of the Orthodox Church. Part 2, “Interchange and Circulation,” continues with Paul, who wrote an account of his and his father's journey from Aleppo to Moscow between 1654 and 1656, the longest travelogue in Arabic of the early modern period into the Christian West (unfortunately, there is still no definitive edition of this work). The discussion by Mihai Tipău emphasizes the uniqueness of this journey and Būlus's reliance on Greek sources and personal observations in describing the Byzantine monuments and churches, icons, and miniatures in Constantinople and its environs. Carsten Walbiner focuses on hitherto unexamined Arabic descriptions of Russia in the works of Makarios, emphasizing the importance of the patriarch in translations from Greek into Arabic. Sofia Melikyan follows with a discussion of the role of Makarios in the consolidation of the use of the synaxarion.
Ideally, the essays on Makarios and his son would be in one unit. But Part 2 continues with Stefano Di Pietrantonio's meticulous study of an eighteenth-century manuscript of an Arabic translation from Greek of a book of rhetoric. The author carefully includes a survey of variants and annotations (some of which referred to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey), along with brief discussions of other authors on rhetoric. The final article in this part is by Ioana Feodorov, who examines the theological background of the Beirut psalter of 1752. By comparing translations starting with Sophronios of Kilis and concluding with the seventeenth-century Ukrainian Orthodox author, Peter Movilă, she conclusively demonstrates the indebtedness of the Arabic version to the earlier sources.
Part 3, “Sources and Historiography,” includes a bibliographic study of the Christian Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv (Yulia Petrova). It is followed by another bibliographic study of eleven Arabic printed books in Saint Petersburg, part of the Rousseau family collection from the latter part of the eighteenth century, which Rousseau père wanted to offer to Napoleon (Serge A. Frantsouzoff). The penultimate article in this part is a biography of the Russian orientalist Alexandra Mikhaïlova (d. 1979), a student of the grand orientalist Ignace Kratchkovski. It discusses her contribution to Arabic studies while navigating Soviet bureaucracy (Elena A. Korovtchenko).
This book is a valuable contribution to the study of “Arabic Christianity.” As Samuel Noble and Alexander Treiger noted in The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700–1700 (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014, 5), “Close to 90 percent of the vast corpus of Arab Christian literature [is not yet] edited or translated, let alone adequately studied.” This vast corpus presents the voice of Arab/ic Christians, which should make possible a fresh study of the history of Christianity in the Arab East.
