Modern Aramaic and the Catholicization of Christian culture in northern Iraq
Language policy and missionary approach (19th-20th centuries)
p. 53-74
Résumés
Modern Aramaic manuscripts belonging to Chaldean and Catholic institutions of northern Iraq are becoming available in digitized copies thanks to the Iraqi Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. A first overview of the contents of these manuscripts shows both the strategies and the outcomes of an inexorable process of acculturation toward Catholicism that took place among East Syriac Christians in the Mosul region during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper illustrates this process, focusing on the use of Modern Aramaic to promote European ideas and devotions in northern Iraq and on Jacques Rhétoré OP (1841-1921) as a key figure in the missionary activities. His bilingual – French and Aramaic – La Montagnarde chaldéenne et l’ange celebrates the missionaries’ efforts to rescue the Chaldean “primitive nation” from the error of Nestorianism, fighting against Muslim oppression and the competing appeal of Protestant missions.
Les manuscrits en araméen moderne conservés dans diverses institutions chaldéennes et catholiques du nord de l’Irak sont désormais accessibles, pour la plupart, en version numérique, suite à l’investissement du Centre numérique irakien pour les manuscrits orientaux et du Hill Museum & Manuscript Library. Un premier aperçu de leurs contenus montre les stratégies et les résultats du processus d’acculturation vers le catholicisme chez les chrétiens syriaques de la région de Mossoul au cours des XIXe et XXe siècles. Cet article illustre ce processus à partir de l’utilisation de l’araméen moderne pour promouvoir les idées et les pratiques de dévotion européennes dans le nord de l’Irak, et en s’appuyant sur la figure missionnaire du père dominicain Jacques Rhétoré (1841-1921). En particulier, son ouvrage bilingue – en français et en araméen –, La Montagnarde chaldéenne et l’ange célèbre les efforts des missionnaires pour sauvegarder la « nation primitive » chaldéenne des erreurs du nestorianisme, mais aussi pour lutter contre l’attraction des missions protestantes et l’oppression musulmane.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : Église chaldéenne, Églises orientales, araméen moderne, Irak du Nord, Dominicains, Rhétoré
Keywords : Chaldean Church, Church of the East, Modern Aramaic, northern Iraq, Order of Preachers, Rhétoré
Texte intégral
1Many Modern Aramaic (MA) manuscripts belonging to Chaldean and Catholic institutions in northern Iraq and the surrounding region are becoming available in digitized copies thanks to the tireless and praiseworthy joint effort of the Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts (Iraq) and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), at the Benedictine Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. The manuscripts of the Dominican Friars of Mosul (DFM) form by far the most important collection from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view.1 The DFM collection contains the personal collection of MA manuscripts of the French Dominican Jacques Rhétoré (1841-1921, missionary from 1874 in Mosul and in the mountainous region between Van and Mosul), as well as many of his notes, study materials and the original works that he wrote in MA prose and/or poetry.2
2A first overview of the contents of these manuscripts3 shows both the strategies and the outcomes of an inexorable process of acculturation toward Catholicism that took place among East Syrians of the Mosul region between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper illustrates this process, focusing firstly on the use of MA as a vehicular language to promote European ideas and devotions among East Syrians in northern Iraq, and secondly on some works by Father Rhétoré, especially those revealing his missionary attitude and agenda.
Rhétoré’s handbooks
3Rhétoré wrote grammars of Armenian, Ṭūrōyo4 and Sureth. Ṣurayt is the current autoglottonym for Ṭūrōyo or Ṭōrānī, the cluster of Modern Aramaic dialects spoken by Syriac Orthodox Christians in Ṭur ‘Abdin (south-eastern Turkey). Sureth is the autoglottonym used among other names – (Vernacular) Aramaic, (Modern) Assyrian, Chaldean vulgar, (Modern) Syriac, Vernacular Syriac –, for North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) varieties that were and are spoken and occasionally written by Christians of various denominations – especially Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syrian Catholics – in northern Iraq, south-eastern Turkey, Syria and north-western Iran. The autoglottonyms Ṣurayt and Sureth, deriving from Classical Syriac (Cl. Syr.) surā’iṯ “in Syriac”, have a strong confessional connotation, since terms such as surāyē or suryānī simply mean “Christians” in many languages of the region.
4Rhétoré’s grammar of Sureth, i.e., Eastern MA (Grammaire de la langue soureth ou chaldéen vulgaire selon le dialecte de la plaine de Mossoul et des pays adjacents, printed in Mosul in 1912) is prescriptive rather than descriptive, clearly conceived as a tool to teach and learn the language and use it for practical purposes and in a proper way.
5Spelling conventions, morphological paradigms and lexical choices are proposed according to a classicizing standard – “la langue chaldéenne vulgaire grammaticale,” as he would call it – that echoes the standard literary language developed in the Protestant and Catholic missions of Urmia.5 Rhétoré occasionally notes dialectal variants, both in pronunciation and grammar, and scribal practices typical of the Mosul plain and neighboring regions, often stigmatizing them as “fautives.” Nevertheless, and in accordance with the practical purpose of the grammar, his mapping of Sureth is a rather simple dichotomy of dialects “of the plain (of Mosul)” vs. those “of the (Hakkari) mountains,” in contrast with the broader scope and greater detail of the Dictionary and especially the Grammar of the dialects of the vernacular Syriac: as spoken by the Eastern Syrians of Kurdistan, north-west Persia and the plain of Mosul, with illustrations from the dialects of the Jews of Zakho and Azerbaijan, and of the Western Syrians of Tur’Abdin and Ma’lula, which the Anglican missionary Arthur John MacLean published in Oxford, respectively in 1901 and 1895.
6Father Rhétoré never published an MA dictionary, but in a note of 1920 he lists among his writings “40 cahiers où il y a collationné de nombreux matériaux pour un Dictionnaire Soureth-français. A ces cahiers s’en ajoutent trois comprenant des notes non coordonnées à ajouter au dit dictionnaire.” Study materials that Father Rhétoré, his colleagues and informants may have prepared and used to write the Grammaire are abundant in the manuscript collection of the Dominicans of Mosul and most of them are lexical lists and bilingual glossaries.6 On the other hand, MacLean and other Anglican and Protestant missionaries were not active as Rhétoré was as poets in MA and according to the style and meters of traditional MA poetry. The comparison, indeed confrontation, between Catholics and Protestants resurfaces below, and in a much more dramatic way.
7Some years ago Bruno Poizat found in the archives of the Dominicans of Saulchoir (Paris) the autograph of another, unpublished handbook by Rhétoré, La versification en soureth, and published it as vol. 113 of the Subsidia series of Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium.7 In this work, the Dominican missionary shows that he is aware of the social function of poetry – in this case meaning lyrics for songs and hymns – among native Syrians: poetry serves liturgical and pedagogical purposes and is required on certain special occasions in public life such as liturgy, festivals, wedding feasts etc. He wrote La versification possibly as a tutorial for missionaries who may themselves compose verses, as he did under the pseudonym Yaqo Nukhraya (Jacques l’Étranger) or Yaqo bar Qushta (Jacques le Véridique).
8La versification contains an anthology of MA religious verses and is a goldmine of bio-bibliographical information on poets whose lives and works would otherwise be barely known. Several chapters are, however, more critical in nature and reveal the author’s attitude toward MA poetry and the society of which it is a typical cultural expression. According to Rhétoré, despite their religious inspiration and their roots in late Cl. Syr. hymnography, MA poems represent a simple and primitive form of folk poetry, which is cultivated by and for uneducated, often illiterate, peasants and herders. Rhétoré recognizes the oral context in which poems were produced and transmitted, the subordination of metrics to music, the circulation and success of texts thanks to roaming bards like David the Blind, Thomas Sindjari, and Elias of Tchamba, who travelled from village to village to sing fables, songs and hymns and collect food and money for their families. Nevertheless, as a nineteenth-century scholar, he is not methodologically equipped to appreciate the aesthetics of repetition and rhythm as well as the formulaic features of oral literature in the vernacular, while he criticizes the abuse of poetic license and of Arabic and Kurdish words, and the perceived prolixity and bad taste of MA poets.
Modern Aramaic as a pastoral choice in the Dominican mission of Mosul
9Rhétoré’s preference for the vernacular was probably the result of a fortunate consonance between his personal language experience and the push toward vernacularization that had taken place in the Ottoman Middle East, where literalized vernaculars emerged, among religious and linguistic minorities (Kurdish Muslims and MA speaking Jews and Christians in the region that concerns us here), alongside the “adoption and adaptation of the most important literary and political languages of the region, that is, Turkish and Arabic.”8 Father Rhétoré may indeed have recognized in or even projected onto the diglossia of the East-Syriac communities his own European linguistic background. Born in La Charité-sur-Loire, in Bourgogne, he possibly developed a special sensitivity for dialects during his early pastoral experiences in Mazères (Occitanie) and Corbara (Corsica).
10Moreover, the choice of the vernacular, besides or even instead of Cl. Syr. or other literary languages of the region, was in line with the language policy of the Italian friars who had led the Dominican mission from 1750 and in the first half of the nineteenth century, before the arrival of the French.9 Manuscripts bear witness to the interest of the Italian Dominicans in learning MA not only for practical pastoral purposes, but also to promote a first standardization of the vernacular as a language for education and liturgy and therefore a written literary language.10 Arguably, this double level of MA usages remained a characteristic of the Dominican mission in today’s northern Iraq throughout its history until the prevalence of Arabic in the twentieth century.11
11The ms. DFM 353 (19th cent.) is a good example of this phenomenon. It contains texts that the missionaries probably prepared to learn and practice MA and use it in their ministry. We find, for example, dialogues between characters with distinctive Italian names (Emilio, Vincenzo, Nestorio, Leopoldo… 40r-53v) and the dialogue of a confessor and a penitent, including a long list of sins, in Italian and MA (31r-39v). These MA dialogues are also included, with French translations, among other materials for linguistic and pastoral training, in the ms. DFM 359. The shift from Italian (and Latin) to French as a working language is a clear sign of the national character of the French Dominican mission of Mosul,12 at least as far as language policy is concerned.
12The same ms. DFM 353 contains texts that show the promotion of the vernacular at levels of use higher than the spoken colloquial language. We find one of the numerous copies, possibly versions, of an MA primer of Christian doctrine in questions and answers (5v-20r),13 similar to the so-called Catechism of Saint Pius X, as well as the Italian and MA translations of some Biblical texts: the books of the minor prophets Nahum, Jonah, Habakkuk and Haggai, the Gospel of John 1-3 and part of 4. It is perhaps surprising to find, in a Catholic mission, traces of a project of Bible translation, but, lectionaries and partial Bible translations in the vernacular were already being produced in the eighteenth century by native clergymen14 and in the Dominican mission of Mosul.
13The ms. DFM 4 displays in three columns, from right to left, the text of the Cl. Syr. version – called Pešiṭtā – of Genesis, a translation in an MA variety of the plain of Mosul, and an Italian translation that is possibly taken from the so-called Bibbia del Martini (late eighteenth century). From around Genesis 30 onward only the MA text is given in a one-column page layout. Unfortunately, the manuscript is not dated, but it is reasonable to assume that the translation was prepared under the patronage of the Italian Dominicans. A first survey has shown that it is based on the Cl. Syr. Pešiṭtā, and orthography and lexical choices are far less classicizing than in the Urmi Bible, as is customary in the native manuscript tradition of northern Iraqi Christians.15 The Urmi Bible, an MA translation of the Sacred Scriptures, was published by The American Bible Society in New York in 1893 and it is based on the Greek text of the New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament.16
14The ms DFM 337 (18th cent.) contains the Epistle to the Romans in Latin and MA. The missionaries’ attempt to (re-)introduce the reading of the Pauline Epistles during the Solemn Mass, according to Catholic usage, may explain their relative abundance in later lectionaries or partial Bible translations in Arabic Garshuni (e.g., QACCT 72, 1901), MA (DFM 317, 1848) and Turkish Garshuni (ACK 122, 1909). The surviving manuscripts and nineteenth-century missionary observers suggest that in the Ottoman period the Old Testament and the Epistle readings had largely fallen out of use.17 As late as 1942, the Chaldean monks of Our Lady of the Seeds (Alqosh) were asked to translate the Epistles of St Paul from the classical language to colloquial MA for the church of ʽAnkawa near Erbil (ACE 20).
15While the missionaries had to learn MA dialects to preach, confess and speak with the Christians who were the main addressees of their pastoral activities, catechesis, with up-to-date methods, and at least the scriptural readings and the hymns in the liturgy required a written form of MA: the Dominican mission was probably the most influential institution that promoted its standardization and diffusion in today’s northern Iraq during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Modern Aramaic works by Father Rhétoré and the Catholic agenda of the mission
16The collection of manuscripts that belonged personally to Jacques Rhétoré18 shows that he was engaged in the study of MA in various ways and with at least three interrelated objectives.
171. As his Grammaire and La versification demonstrate, he intended to write handbooks for the active and correct use of the language by foreign missionaries and native clergy.
182. The text samples and the bio-bibliographic information on MA poets, including himself, of La versification and the manuscripts of poems that he collected or copied himself show that he realized the cultural importance of the traditional stanzaic poems among the Aramaic-speaking Christians and their potential as pastoral tools for the mission. He tried to study and critically describe this popular poetic tradition with the intention of grafting onto it the shoot of genuinely Catholic contents. He possibly patronized contemporary native poets such as David Kora, David of Barzane and Thomas Tektek Sindjari and certainly appreciated the reworking of Italian Jesuit baroque sources in MA verses by Damyanos of Alqosh.19 In La versification, Rhétoré is of course rather precise in describing the poets’ positions toward “Nestorianism”, Catholicism and the Chaldean movement.20
193. While collecting, copying, and studying poems and writing an MA grammar and an ars poetica, Rhétoré learned how to compose original poems in and translate prose texts into MA.
20Rhétoré’s MA production reflects the missionary project of Catholicizing the Christian culture of northern Iraq. Both missionaries and native authors and clergy embraced this project of Catholicization of the Syriac culture of the region. Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the MA and Cl. Syr. translations – often via Arabic – of works by authors such Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori (1696-1787)21 served as textual instruments for diffusing the ideas of the Catholic (Counter-) Reformation and European popular devotional practices such as the cult of Mary and the Saints – some of which were imported from European hagiography –, daily visits to the Eucharist, and the Via Crucis.22
21The publication of the Manuel de piété ou Livre de prières, de méditation et des offices (en langue chaldéenne) by the Persian Lazarist Paul Bedjan,23 as well as others of his works, created – as it were – a language, style and lexicon for the expression of Catholic devotion in MA. Finally, Catholics from Urmia to Mosul were able to hold in their hands a prayer book very similar to those circulating among contemporary Catholics in the national languages of France, Italy and Spain. The book was printed as a very elegant, and probably expensive, edition in Paris in 1886 and parts of it have been copied by more or less elegant and competent East Syriac hands, sometimes adapted to local dialects and spelling conventions.24
22More specifically, Rhétoré’s work seems to follow a typically Catholic, as opposed to Protestant, agenda. In contrast with the pioneering experiments of the Italian Dominicans, Rhétoré and the French Dominicans working at his time were apparently not as much concerned with Bible translation as they were interested in translating into MA European texts to be used in pastoral activities: not only the catechism, but also hagiographical narratives and textual supports for Catholic devotional practices. Unsurprisingly some of the latter texts have a clear Dominican connotation. For example, Father Rhétoré or one of his helpers translated into MA the rules of two confraternities for lay people belonging to Dominican spirituality: Confraternitas SS. Nominis Jesu and Militiae Angelicae seu cinguli Sancti Thomae Aquinatis (DFM 95 and 96, both dated 1877). A Life of St. Blaise, martyr and bishop of Sebaste and the Story of the martyrdom of the Holy Child Bar-Alaha and his Mother were written or translated in MA prose in 1879 (DFM 132 and 318). Possibly later, a Story of St. Benvenuta (Benvenuta Bojani, a pious lady of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, born in Cividale del Friuli and died in 1292) was written in this missionary milieu (DFM 428).
23Although it is not always clear what role he played, Rhétoré appears to have been involved in the preparation and publication of the following MA books of the Dominican Press of Mosul: a Book of the Rosary (Mosul 1884) that contains a number of his hymns;25 a collection of metrical fables and songs for children (mss.: DFM 270-1, 19th cent., and DFM 319, dated 1892-1894 ; book printed in Mosul in 1896), some of which may very well be poetic translations or adaptations from La Fontaine; two collections of stanzaic hymns (1896)26 and poems (Mosul 1914) ; and a Book of the infancy of our Lord Jesus Christ.27
24Native speakers probably assisted Rhétoré in writing MA poems and, in his turn, he may have helped native poets to write down their works according to the standard language he was promoting, polish their theological terminology and attune religious ideas to Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Rhétoré’s fables and hymns were published under the name of David the Blind. The missionaries preferred to attribute them to the popular native poet, a Chaldean Homer of the Christians of the Mosul plain in the nineteenth century. David had indeed helped Father Rhétoré, correcting and revising the texts, but the French Dominican claims to be the real author of the texts. On the other hand, Rhétoré lists among David’s works the famous hymn of St. Mary (incipit b-šemmā d-bābā w-bronā “In the name of the Father and the Son”), that was to become a kind of national anthem for the Chaldeans of the plain of Nineveh28 and has sometimes been attributed to the French missionary,29 given the Thomistic flavour of its theological language.
Nestorius and Luther
25Rhétoré cultivated MA poetry not only as a pastoral tool but as an instrument of both lyrical and political expression, written for himself and his – perhaps more imagined than real – European readership. Some of his poetic works seem to be a journal in verse of his experience among the Eastern Christians and an artistic way to express the missionary’s worldview and his perception of the history and culture of the lost souls that were the target of his missionary work.
26In his MA poem La Montagnarde chaldéenne et l’ange, the Chaldean mountain girl is a personification of the East Syrians, who refused union with Rome. On fol. 1r (recto=left page) the poem is dedicated to José María Larroca: “Au Révérendissime Père Marie Joseph Larocca [sic] Maître Générale de l’Ordre de S. Dominique Hommage de respect filial et d’affectueuse vénération à l’occasion de son Jubilé sacerdotal. f. J. Rh.” A first version or the first part of the poem must therefore have been composed while Father Larroca was Master of the Order of Preachers, i.e., between 1879 and 1891.30 Fol. 3r contains a detailed map of northern Mesopotamia (Mardin, Diyarbakir, Mosul and Urmia), color-coded by religious affiliation of the minorities (various Christian denominations and Yazidis). A dotted line indicates the “approximate” western border of the (Dominican) mission, as if it was conceived as a territorial entity, along the lines of a modern nation state. A nation, the “Nestorian nation,” is the Christian community that Rhétoré represents as a Chaldean mountain girl, as stated in the title of fol. 4r. The language of the poem is described as a standardized form of MA, “a grammatical Chaldean vulgar” in Rhétoré’s term: “La Montagnarde chaldéenne et l’ange. Pièce en langue chaldéenne vulgaire grammaticale, suivie de notes contenant un exposé de la situation physique, religieuse, morale et politique de la nation Nestorienne.” The poem consists of 70 quatrains of 8 syllable lines. Usually three MA verses are written on recto pages and French prose faces them on verso pages.
27In La versification, Father Rhétoré does not mention this poem, preserved as ms. 346 of the collection of the Dominican Friars of Mosul, in the list of his own works. The omission could be due to the author’s distancing from the contents of the poem, at a later stage of his experience as a missionary, or to the fact that it is a poem composed for a particular occasion, but never actually presented to the dedicatee and therefore perceived as an unpublished private document, perhaps confidential, and, moreover, an uncompleted work.
28The Chaldean mountain girl is described as a miserable servant, abandoned on the harsh and rugged mountains, who laments her misery and asks the Lord why He has been so hard only with her among the Christian peoples (vv. 1-13). Her guardian angel appears and tells her that the cause of her suffering is the great crime (gunḥā rabā) that she has committed in accepting Nestorius’s heresy. God punishes all those who embrace his heretical thoughts and the Chaldean Church is now surrounded by enemies. Inside her, all kinds of crimes and sins are committed and there are also Chaldeans who go abroad to collect money in her name (vv. 13-26).
29The direct speech of the Chaldean mountain girl and the angel are introduced and linked by several verses attributed to the writer (vv. 1-2, 11-2, 26, 68-9) as if he were a narrator and the dialogue were to be performed as a drama. The angel announces that finally God has heard the cry and the prayer of His servant, and has sent the missionaries to save her:
30 | ܒܓܵܘ ܦܘܼܩܕܵܢܹܗ ܫܠܝܼܚܹ̈ܐ ܩܸܡܠܲܝ. | À son ordre, des missionnaires se sont levés ; agneaux de paix ils ont parcouru tes montagnes y répandant la lumière du salut ; mais toi, toujours, tu as résisté à leur voix. |
31 | ܒܥܹܐܠܲܟܼ ܡܸܢܲܝ ܥܲܬܝܼܪܘܼܬܼܵܐ. | Tu leur as demandé la richesse, la puissance et les biens du monde et tu n’as compté pour rien les trésors contenus dans leurs paroles et leur prédication |
32 | ܚܘܿܪ ܒܣܸܡܝܘܼܬܼܵܐ ܪܵܒܿܬܼܵܐ ܕܗܵܘܢܲܟܼ. | Vois l’aveuglement extrême de ton esprit et la malice épaisse fixée en ton cœur : tu as repoussé la lumière du Seigneur et, en même temps, tu as accueilli chez toi une erreur nouvelle. |
33 | ܓܼܸܠܛܵܐ ܕܠܘܼܛܹܝܪ ܪܲܒܲܢ ܡܛܘܼܡܝܵܐ. | L’erreur de Luther, ce moine impur, qui foula aux pieds ses vœux, s’attacha à une femme et s’opposa à tous les Docteurs avec un orgueil sans exemple. |
3431 | ܓܼܸܠܛܵܐ ܣܸܢܝܵܐ ܡܠܹܐ ܒܝܼܫܘܼܬܼܵܐ. | L’erreur méprisable et remplie de malice car elle dessèche le cœur, ébranle la foi et produit de divisions. |
35 | ܒܫܸܡܵܐ ܕܸܦܪܘܿܛ ܟܦܵܝܫܝܼ ܩܸܪ̈ܝܹܐ. | On appelle du nom de Protestants ceux qui s’attachent à cette erreur et en effet comme des déchireurs ils se répandent par le monde apportant la mort dans le bercail du Christ. |
30. At his command, missionaries rose up;
as lambs of peace, they travelled through your mountains
spreading there the light of salvation;
but you always resisted their voices.
31. You asked them for wealth,
power and worldly goods
and you counted for nothing the treasures
contained in their words and preaching.
32. See the extreme blindness of your mind
and the thick malice fixed in your heart:
you have rejected the light of the Lord and at the same time
you have welcomed a new error in your house.
33. The error of Luther, that impure monk,
who trampled on his vows, took a woman for himself
and opposed all Doctors
with unprecedented pride.
34. The despicable and mischievous error
that dries up the hearts,
shakes faith
and produces divisions.
35. Those who are attached to this error
are called by the name of Protestant (proṭ)
and like rippers (pāroṭē) they spread through the world.
They brought death in Jesus’s sheepfold.
30Rhétoré makes the angel say that the Chaldean response to the missionaries’ work was vitiated by moral and theological flaws. The Chaldean nation asked for money and power from the missionaries rather than doctrine and education32 and added a second doctrinal “error” to traditional Nestorianism. The world ġelṭā (error) is highlighted by means of two stylistic devices that are typical of MA and, in general, oral-oriented poetry:33 verses 32 and 34 are linked by anadiplosis, 34 and 35 by anaphora. More sophisticated from a formal point of view are the wordplay proṭāyē (Protestants)/pāroṭē (rippers) in v. 35 and the antithetic transformation of the title of the first and famous Urmi Protestant periodical Zahrirē d-bahrā (Rays of light)34 into zahrirē d-’āḏ bēhrā d-duġlā (Rays of that deceitful light) in v. 37.
37 | ܙܲܗܪܝܼܪܹ̈ܐ ܕܐܵܕܼ ܒܹܗܪܵܐ ܕܕܘܼܓܿܠܵܐ. | « Les rayons de cette lumière » mensongère en venant dans ton pays y ont reçu bon accueil, et les prédicants de cette iniquité sont en pleine faveur chez toi. |
38 | ܐܵܡܪ̈ܝܼܟܵܝܹܐ ܘܐܸܢܓܠܝܼܙܢܵܝܹ̈ܐ. | Ce sont les Américains et les Anglais, presbytériens et épiscopaux. Ils se sont amassés sur ton cadavre comme des vautours contents d’avoir à le mettre en pièces avec leurs ongles impurs. |
37. “The Rays of the Light of deceit”
came to your country and have received a warm welcome
and the preachers of this iniquity
are in your favor with you.
38. They are Americans and British,
Presbyterians and Episcopalians.
They gathered round your corpse like vultures
eager to tear it into pieces with their filthy nails.
31Anglicans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians spread Luther’s error. Their preachers and the periodical Zahrirē d-bahrā were instrumental for the diffusion of Protestantism in the East. Anti-Protestant polemic was in fact a major concern for Father Rhétoré. He re-used as verses 35-6 of La Montagnarde chaldéenne et l’ange the opening verses of his poem On the Protestants, which is preserved in the second part of the notebook catalogued as DFM 318 and dated 1879. The texts are slightly different and in the poem On the Protestants a wordplay is added about the Protestants and Put, a son of Ham cursed by his grandfather Noah (Genesis 10:6):
ܒܫܸܡܵܐ ܕܸܦܘܿܛ ܟܦܵܝܫܝܼ ܩܸܪ̈ܝܹܐ. | Those who believe in Luther are called by the name of Put and like rippers (pāroṭē) they spread through the world. They brought death in Jesus’s sheepfold. |
32Be it in response to direct competition with Protestant missionaries in the region or as a projection in the East of European concerns, anti-Protestantism was to remain a live issue among Dominican missionaries. In 1923-1924 Father Louis Haze35 prepared a series of lessons in MA on Luther’s life and the refutation of his doctrine for the boarders of the Dominican school of Mar Ya’quḇ near Duhok (DFM 320), where Father Rhétoré had been active some 20-30 years before.
33When the Chaldean mountain girl asks the guardian angel how she can find salvation (vv. 43-4), the angel invites her to be humble and return to the voices of her fathers:
46 | ܪܚܘܿܫ ܒܓܵܘ ܐܘܼܪܚܵܐ ܕܒܵܒܵܘ̈ܬܼܲܟܼ. | Marche dans la voie de tes pères : Bar-Sabaé, la gloire de ta nation, Saint Ephrem, l’ornement de ton pays, et Mar Pétion la lumière de ta montagne. |
46. Walk in the way of your fathers:
Bar-Ṣab’ē, the glory of your nation,
Saint Ephrem, the ornament of your country,
and Mar Petion the light of your mountain.
34The angel’s invitation to return to the past glories of the Church of the East and its glorious authors and saints36 is followed by a long exaltation of union with Rome and the Pope as the only way of escape from the present misery. The Virgin Mary will liberate the poor Chaldean mountain girl, and the Anglican division is nothing but another source of suffering (vv. 45-63).
35The angel then asks the girl to spread his message to all the mountain tribes (vv. 64-5), who were in fact more reluctant to accept union with Rome. The “Nestorian” tribes are named one by one, with more or less honorific epithets, so as to state that they are the true Chaldean nation, that must accept union with Rome and orthodox theology or face God’s wrath and die, while tribes and flocks of the plain are already Catholic, safely protected within the borders of the Dominican mission.37
36Probably later, the poet added two verses (66-7), copied on ff. 22r-23v, that contain what looks like an easy post eventum prophecy: the Muslims will rise against her and kill her, while Qodchanis, the small village on the Hakkari mountains where the “Nestorian” Patriarch had sought refuge, will be destroyed. A note by the author explains:
Note. En 1916 les deux dernières strophes ont vu leur accomplissent [sic for accomplissement]. Chassés de leurs montagnes par les Kurdes, les nestoriens passèrent en Perse puis descendirent à Bakouba près de Bagdad où ils restèrent jusqu’à la fin du 1920. Ils revinrent à Mossoul pour essayer de retrouver un territoire habitable. Mais ils avaient [?] perdu dans l’exil et les guerres les deux tiers de leur nation, tous leurs villages étaient ruinés et Cothcanès détruit.
37In v. 66, what we now know as the Assyrian genocide, in which indeed two thirds of the Assyrian population were killed or died, sounds like a threat and is described as perpetrated by the Muslims “by God’s hand”.
66 | ܐܝܼܫܡܵܥ̈ܠܵܝܹܐ ܕܟܸܡܚܲܕܪܝܼ ܠܲܟܼ | Les Ismaélites qui t’entourent main de Dieu ; ils te frapperont jusqu’à ce qu’ils t’exterminent si tu n’écoutes pas la voix de ton Maitre. |
66. The Ishmaelites who surround you
rose up against you by God’s hand.
They will hit you until they kill you
if you do not listen to the voice of your Lord.
38Rhétoré adopts the Biblical view of history, shared by MA poets, according to which nations are punished by God’s hand because of their sins. It is a commonplace in MA poetry that all disasters that befell the East-Syrian communities are punishments for the sins of the Christians.38
39According to MA tradition, in the last verses (68-9) the writer asks the readers to pray for the poor Chaldean girl and a poetic colophon is added in which the poet reveals something more of himself. The colophon is a quatrain of eight syllable lines, written with different inks to the poem, and contains a typical example of missionary psychology and rhetoric.
ܥܒܼܝܼܕܼܵܐ ܠܚܵܕ݇ ܐ݇ܢܵܫܵܐ ܢܦܝܼܩܵܐ ܡܼܢ ܐܘܼܡܬܼܹܗ. | Fait par quelqu’un qui est sorti de son pays, à [sic] laissé la douceur et l’affection des siens pour travailler au salut de sa sœur chaldéenne, afin que le Seigneur l’accepte dans la joie de sa maison. |
Made by someone who departed from his homeland
leaving the love and compassion of his family,
to work for the salvation of his Chaldean sister,
so that the Lord may accept her in the joy of his house.
40Toward the end of his life, Father Rhétoré returned to the theme of the tragic persecution and killing of Christians. His French prose report entitled Les chrétiens aux bêtes is considered one of the most accurate testimonies on the massacres of the Christians in Mardin in 1915.39 He also wrote an MA poem On the massacre of the Christians during the time of Sultan Reshad (DFM 188).40 In La versification he informs us that:
En 1914, par suite de la guerre qui eut lieu à cette époque il fut déporté avec deux autres missionnaires, d’abord à Mardine et puis à Konia jusqu’à la fin de la guerre en nov. 1918. […] Il se trouvait à Mardine pendant les massacres et il composa sur ce sujet une pièce de poësie [sic] de plus de onze cent vers, sous le nom de Jean Bar Qouchta.41
41The poem numbers 129 stanzas of 8 septenaries, with alternate rhyme. Verses are written on left pages, the number and first word of each stanza are rubricated. On the right pages there are explicative notes in MA prose. The text is composed in the wake of complaints and religious poems on wars, famines and epidemics that are attested in MA literature since at least the eighteenth century,42 but the combination of verses and explicative notes is an innovation by Father Rhétoré.
Concluding remarks
42MA manuscripts from northern Iraq bear witness to the dramatic process of Catholicization of the Christian culture that took place in the plain of Mosul and the surrounding region from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. MA traditional poetry and the translations into MA, often via Arabic, of European works on spirituality and devotion were instrumental in this process, in which both foreign missionaries and native clergymen were involved. With well-trained staff, schools and a printing press, the Dominican mission of Mosul was probably the most influential institution that promoted both the knowledge of MA among the missionaries and the diffusion of a standardized form of the vernacular. MA functioned as a pastoral tool and a way to foster education and intellectual life – good Catholic intellectual and spiritual life – among the East Syrians.
43The Italian friars who led the mission until the mid-nineteenth century started a project of translation of the Bible from Cl. Syr. to MA and translated into MA texts of Catholic devotion such as a short catechism in questions and answers, the litanies of Jesus, Mary and the Sacred Heart, the mysteries of the Rosary, and the acts of faith, hope, charity and contrition.
44When the French friars took over, Jacques Rhétoré became the leading figure of the mission’s language policy. He wrote and printed a grammar, conceived as a normative handbook of a standardized vernacular rather than a description of dialectal diversity in the Mosul region. He or his entourage translated into MA prose the rule of Dominican confraternities for lay people and a number of lives of saints and martyrs.
45Rhétoré also cultivated, throughout his life, a true passion for the traditional vernacular poetry of the East-Syrians, attested from the late sixteenth century onward. He collected, copied and studied manuscripts and wrote a handbook of metrics that is also a critical study of MA religious poetry and a sketch of its history. In cooperation with the native poet David the Blind, he wrote metrical fables, songs for children and hymns to be used in the schools and churches of northern Iraq. In the poem La Montagnarde chaldéenne et l’ange, dedicated to the master of the Order of Preachers between 1879-1891, but reworked over time, he describes the East-Syrian tribes of the Hakkari mountains as a miserable girl who will be punished by God if she does not recognize her errors, i.e., the Nestorian heresy and her Protestant sympathies.
46There is something tragic in Father Rhétoré’s ambivalent missionary approach to East-Syriac Christianity. On the one hand he was a passionate student of both Syriac cultural and spiritual heritage and Sureth oral poetry, so as to write and express himself, his missionary vision and psychology, in the poetic language of vernacular Modern Aramaic. Indeed, we owe to him much of what we know about Sureth religious literature. On the other hand, unquestioning loyalty to the Church and the Order to which he belonged led him to despise and condemn the East-Syriac original contiguity with the Nestorian “error,” as a kind of theological original sin, and the contemporary proclivity of many East-Syriac clergymen for Protestant money and influence.
47Anti-Protestant polemic was almost an obsession for the Dominican missionaries. Competition with Lutheran, and even more so with Anglican and American Evangelical, missionaries, was indeed a problem, especially in Persia, whereas in the Mosul region it seems to have re-proposed in the East stereotyped arguments of a European conflict of identities and nationalisms. Native Christians with their traditions and languages were seen as easily manipulated. America and the competing European powers were of course behind the various missions that tended to be national ones. The Dominican mission was no exception and, albeit rooted in religious concerns, its efforts for the Catholicization of East-Syrians in the nineteenth century may be seen as a consolidation of French culture, language and therefore political influence in the region.
L’œuvre des missionnaires se consacra […] à apporter le catholicisme aux chrétiens des autres confessions. L’appartenance à l’Église de Rome permit à l’Église chaldéenne de s’ouvrir sur le monde, mais elle contribua aussi à créer une fracture entre musulmans et chrétiens. Le ralliement au catholicisme avait aussi un ressort politique : le gouvernement français étendait à tous les catholiques de l’Empire ottoman43.
Bibliographie
Alichoran 2005 = J. Alichoran (ed.), Jacques Rhétoré. Les chrétiens aux bêtes. Souvenirs de la guerre sainte proclamée par les Turcs contre les chrétiens en 1915, Paris, 2005.
Alichoran 2006 = J. Alichoran, Un « aventurier » de la foi catholique, le Père Jacques Rhétoré (1841-1921), dans La Vie spirituelle, 763/160, 2006, p. 142-150.
Ashitha 1997 = O.M.G. Ashitha (ed.), Rabban Yonan Tkhomnaya. Guggi, with other poems [in Neo-Aramaic], Bagdad, 1997.
Becker 2015 = A. Becker, Revival and awakening. American Evangelical missionaries in Iran and the origins of Assyrian nationalism, Chicago, 2015.
Coakley – Taylor 2006 = J.F. Coakley, D.G.K. Taylor, Syriac books printed at the Dominican Press, Mosul, in G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone, Piscataway NJ, 2006, p. 71-110.
Destefanis 2011 = S. Destefanis, Hell and paradise: Baroque sources, in A. Mengozzi (ed.), Religious poetry in vernacular Syriac from northern Iraq (17th-20th centuries). An anthology, Leuven, 2011 (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 628), p. 29-41.
Duval 1889 = P.-G. Duval, La mission des dominicains à Mossoul, Paris, 1889.
Filoni 2015 = F. Filoni, La Chiesa in Iraq. Storia, sviluppo e missione, dagli inizi ai nostri giorni, Vatican City, 2015.
Flynn 2016 = Th. O Flynn, The western Christian presence in the Russias and Qājār Persia, c. 1760-c. 1870, Leiden, 2016.
Galletti 2006 = M. Galletti, Studi italiani sulla lingua curda, in P.G. Borbone, A. Mengozzi and M. Tosco (ed.), Loquentes linguis, Wiesbaden, p. 291-299.
Galletti 2010 = M. Galletti, Le Kurdistan et ses chrétiens, Paris, 2010.
Impagliazzo 2000 = M. Impagliazzo, Una finestra sul massacro: documenti inediti sulla strage degli armeni, 1915-1916, Milan, 2000.
Khan 2016 = G. Khan, The Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Assyrian Christians of Urmi, 4 vol., Leiden, 2016.
Kildani 2010 = H. Kildani, Modern christianity in the Holy Land. Development of the structure of churches and the growth of Christian institutions in Jordan and Palestine, Bloomington IN, 2010.
Mengozzi 1999 = A. Mengozzi, The Neo-Aramaic manuscripts of the British Library: notes on the study of the Durıkyātā as a Neo-Syriac genre, in Le Muséon, 112/3-4, 1999, p. 459-494.
Mengozzi 2002 = A. Mengozzi (ed.), Israel of Alqosh and Joseph of Telkepe, A story in a truthful language. Religious poems in vernacular Syriac (North Iraq, 17th Century), Leuven, 2002 (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 690).
Mengozzi 2011 = A. Mengozzi, Introduction, in Id. (ed.) Religious poetry in vernacular Syriac from northern Iraq (17 th-20 th Centuries). An anthology, Leuven (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 628), 2011, p. v-xxiv.
Mengozzi – Miola 2018 = A. Mengozzi, E. Miola, Paronomastic infinitives in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic. A typological approach, in Aramaic Studies, 16, 2018, p. 270-299.
Murre-van den Berg 1999a = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, From a spoken to a written language. The introduction and development of literary Urmia Aramaic in the nineteenth century, Leiden, 1999 (“De Goeje Fund”).
Murre-van den Berg 1999b = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, The American Board and the Eastern Churches: the “Nestorian” mission (1844-1846), in Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 65/1, 1999, p. 117-138.
Murre-van den Berg 2006a = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, A Neo-Aramaic Gospel lectionary translation by Israel of Alqosh, in P.G. Borbone, A. Mengozzi and M. Tosco (ed.), Loquentes linguis, Wiesbaden, 2006, p. 523-533.
Murre-van den Berg 2006b = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, Paul Bedjan, missionary for life (1838-1920), in Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug [Reprint], Piscataway NJ, vol. 6, p. 339-369.
Murre-van den Berg 2008 = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, The one talent is the words of the teaching of our Lord. The Gospel translation and commentary of Deacon Israel of Alqosh, in G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone, Piscataway NJ, 2008, p. 497-516.
Murre-van den Berg 2015 = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, Scribes and scriptures. The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman provinces (1500-1850), Leuven, 2015.
Murre-van den Berg, 2020 = H.L. Murre-van den Berg, Arabic and its alternatives: language and religion in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, in H.L. Murre-van den Berg, K. Sanchez Summerer and T. Baarda (ed.), Arabic and its alternatives: religious minorities in the formative years of the modern Middle East (1920-1950), Leiden, 2020, p. 1-49.
Poizat 2013 = B. Poizat, Jacques Rhétoré, La versification en soureth (araméen contemporain), Leuven, 2013 (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 647).
Regards sur l’éducation chez les Chrétiens d’Orient 2014 = Regards sur l’éducation chez les Chrétiens d’Orient à travers le fonds photographique ancien (1890-1930) de l’École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, https://ita.calameo.com/read/0037993771ade6e51bf6a, Paris, 2014.
Riccardi 2015 = A. Riccardi, La strage dei cristiani. Mardin, gli armeni e la fine di un mondo, Bari-Rome, 2015.
Notes de bas de page
1 hmml.org. Books and manuscripts have been recently rescued from IS violence by the heroic Superior of the Dominicans of Mosul Michaeel Najeeb. Before the war in 2014, Father Najeeb was very active in digitizing collections belonging to the Iraqi Dominicans and other private and public Christian libraries of the plain of Mosul and northern Iraq. Some of the manuscripts preserved by the Dominican Friars of Mosul probably served as preparatory materials for Catholic missionary activities and as textual supports for the printed editions of books used in churches, parishes and schools. See Coakley – Taylor 2008, for a catalogue of the Syriac books printed by the Dominican Press in Mosul.
2 A detailed survey of Rhétoré’s fonds can be found in Poizat 2013, p. 95-99. On Rhétoré as a missionary, see also Alichoran 2006.
3 In August 2017, thanks to a Nicky B. Carpenter Fellowship in Manuscript Studies, I was able to consult the Iraqi collections preserved in digitized form at HMML.
4 Rhétoré’s Ṭūrōyo grammar (DFM 354 in HMML catalogue and Paris Saulchoir C2 in Poizat 2013, p. 85) is unpublished so far.
5 Murre-van den Berg, 1999b.
6 DFM 178: Copy of the shorter catechism printed in Mosul by Rhétoré, with notes on MA dialect of Gawar (19th cent.); 226 (19th cent.): Conjugation Tables, French and MA; 227 (20th cent.): Conversation Practice, French and MA; 238, 240, 242-4, 261, 363 (19th-20th cent.): MA-French Dictionary ; 239 (19h-20th cent.): MA-Arabic-Kurdish-French Dictionary; 241: MA-Arabic-Italian (19th-20th cent.); 242, 261-2: MA-French-Arabic Dictionary (19th-20th cent.); 245 (20th cent.): MA-French Workbook, Verbs (20th cent.); 266: Elements of Grammar of MA (“Chaldean vulgar”); 343 (1876): MA conjugation tables and grammar notes (1876); 347 (1891): MA-French grammar and conjugation tables (1891); 351 (19th cent.): Word lists (p. 1-), an account of local history of the “Nestorian churches” (p. 7-), MA-English glossary (p. 26); 355 (19th-20th cent.): Comparative notes of various languages incl. Armenian, Persian and MA.
7 Poizat 2013.
8 Murre-van den Berg 2020, p. 15.
9 The Mission was founded in 1749, with the permission of Pope Benedict XIV and in 1754 obtained recognition from the sultan and the protection of the British Embassy in Istanbul. The French Embassy initially refused to offer its protection, since the French wanted the return of the French Capuchins, who had missions in Mosul and Diyarbakir between 1636 and 1724. See Galletti 2006, p. 292-294 and 2010, p. 104-115 on the history of the “Italian period” of the Dominican Mission of Mosul and its leading scholars Domenico Lanza (1718-1782), Maurizio Garzoni (1734-1804) and Giuseppe Campanile (1762-1835). In the years 1842-7, the abbot Giuseppe Valerga (1813-1872) cooperated with the Dominicans of Mosul, Kildani 2010, p. 293-294. From 1847 until his death in 1872, Valerga was Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, where he “established the Latin Catholic Patriarchal entity in modern history,” see Kildani 2010, p. 291. Valerga was frequently in contact with the Italian-born French Consul Paul-Émile Botta (1802-1870), who served first in Mosul and then in Jerusalem, Kildani 2010, p. 307 and 321-327. French friars arrived in Mosul in 1856 and in 1859 de Propaganda Fide officially entrusted the Mission to the French Province of the Order of Preachers, Duval 1889, p. 4.
10 Ms. DFM 266: Elements of MA Grammar (“Elementi grammaticali per caldeo-volgare”); Italian-MA-Arabic Vocabulary; Italian-MA (“Chaldean vulgar”) Vocabulary by P. Marchi, O.P., Abbot Valerga, and R.P. Garignani, O.P. (18th-19th cent.); 267 (18th-19th cent.): Italian-MA dictionary ; 338 (1787): Printed Italian-Kurdish Grammar and Vocabulary, with MA glossary added, by P. Maurizio Garzoni [Garzoni’s Grammar and Vocabulary marked the beginning of Kurdish linguistics (Galletti 2006)]; 343 (1876): MA Conjugation tables and grammar notes (1876); 347 (1891): MA–French grammar and conjugation tables (1891); 351 (19th cent.): Word lists (p. 1-), an account of local history of the “Nestorian churches” (p. 7-), MA-English glossary (p. 26) ; 355 (19th-20th cent.): Comparative notes of various languages incl. Armenian, Persian and MA.
11 On the language policy of the Dominicans in the Syro-Chaldean Seminary of Mosul, see Baarda’s contribution to the present volume. The Dominicans of Mosul are today a small, bilingual (Arabic and French), entirely Iraqi community, unfortunately displaced first from Mosul to Qaraqosh, where the friars have heroically continued their pastoral and cultural activities, and then, since 2014, to ‘Ankawa-Erbil.
12 Filoni 2015, p. 119 on the arrival of the French Dominicans in Mosul and the relationship of the mission with French diplomacy: “Nel 1856 … la Provincia francese dell’Ordine dei Predicatori aveva accettato di rilevare la missione di Mosul tenuta da oltre un secolo dai domenicani italiani e di farne un centro importante della propria attività nel cuore della Mesopotamia. Con l’arrivo del padre Hyacinthe Besson, pro-prefetto della missione di Mosul, infatti, si ebbe uno slancio notevole legando Mosul ai domenicani e alla Francia, che vi nominò pure un vice-console, il quale divenne quasi un tutore della missione stessa.” In fact, already in an Italian inscription dated 1845, the Dominicans thanked the French vice-consul M. Rouet for his “efficacious protection” of the Mission, Galletti 2010, p. 155.
13 Of some texts the Italian or Latin originals are given, while some texts are in Cl. Syr. or Garshuni Arabic, which is a rather faithful portrait of the multilingualism of the Dominican mission and of the East-Syrian communities in the Mosul region. Other copies or versions of a Christian doctrine in questions and answers may be found in the following mss.: BJI 32 (19th cent.), DCA 53 (1929), 56 (late 19th cent.?), DFM 178, 340 (19th cent.), PLT_AFYM 2 (1850), 4, 10 (1839). A Petit catechisme en langue chaldéenne vulgaire was published by the Dominican Press in Mosul in 1885, fourth reprint in 1908, Coakley – Taylor 2008, p. 87 and 108.
14 The MA Gospel lectionary ACA 2 (copied in 1766 by the deacon Israel son of Simon) is probably an early copy of the text studied by Murre-van den Berg (2006a) in an 1888 Urmi manuscript, which according to the colophon is in its turn a copy of a 1769-70 Alqosh manuscript. Murre-van den Berg correctly stresses the importance of this 18th-cent. lectionary from northern Iraq, in comparison with later nineteenth-century translations of the Bible, more or less directly influenced by Protestant missionaries in the Urmi region. Exegetical additions show the author’s attachment to the native Syriac tradition, perhaps in reaction to Catholic proselytism, Murre-van den Berg 2008 and 2015, p. 156, and may be a very early written testimony of the practice of oral translation of the Biblical readings from Cl. Syr. to the vernacular, during the liturgy. Such an “argumic” practice is still alive in Syriac Christian assemblies of the plain of Mosul, see Mengozzi 2012, p. 341.
15 Mengozzi – Miola 2018, p. 284-285. On the predominantly phonetic spelling in the native tradition of MA manuscripts, see Mengozzi 2002, p. 23.
16 Murre-van den Berg 1999a, p. 109. On the basis of Murre-van den Berg’s 1999b thorough analysis, Khan 2016, vol. 1, p. 8-9 underlines the classicizing bias of the Neo-Aramaic translation of the Bible prepared by the American Protestants, as regards spelling, lexical choices and syntax.
17 Murre-van den Berg 2015, p. 154.
18 Poizat 2013, p. 84-86, gives lists of Rhétoré’s works: articles and letters published in missionary periodicals in France, books printed by the Dominican Press in Mosul, manuscripts preserved in the Dominican libraries of Paris and Mosul.
19 On Damyanos’ reworking of themes and motifs of Italian baroque authors such as the Jesuits Paolo Segneri (1624-1694) and Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti (1632-1703), see Destefanis 2011.
20 The criticism against Nestorianism that Rhétoré (Poizat 2013, p. 58) attributes to Israel of Alqosh (early seventeenth century) is most probably based on an ideological variant in the manuscript available to him: Israel of Alqosh was a proud supporter of the East-Syriac tradition, against the “Jacobite” corruption, Mengozzi 2011, p. viii. Examples of Rhétoré’s anti-“Nestorian” and pro-Catholic bias can be seen in the biographical portraits of Yonan of Tkhuma and the poetess Anne of Telkepe, Mengozzi 2011, p. xiv and xxii.
21 Such as the MA translations of the Book of Preparation for Death (DCA 124, 1853, from Arabic), The Necklaces of the Holy Liturgy (DFM 99, 19th-20th cent.). Timoteos Maqdasi bishop of Zakho translated from Latin into Cl. Syr. History of Heresies and Their Refutation (ACZ 10 and 24, 1903) and Moral Theology (ACZ 6,1910 ; 8, 1914). Visits to the Holy Eucharist and the Virgin Mary (a prayer for each day of the month), attributed to Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori is one of the most frequently copied MA texts.
22 On the Catholicization of the Chaldean liturgy see Murre-van den Berg 2015, p. 149-150.
23 On Paul Bedjan, his intellectual and missionary activities, see Murre-van den Berg 2006b.
24 This return from printed books to manuscripts is a fascinating subject, that deserves a thorough investigation. In HMML digitized copies of Iraqi collections, I have seen scores of prayer books that look like and may very well be handwritten copies of Bedjan’s Manuel de piété or serving the same purpose.
25 The book may contain an abbreviated version of Andrew Pradel, Manuel du très-saint Rosaire (Paris 1862) or the MA version of its Arabic translation, Coakley – Taylor 2008, p. 86.
26 Second edition in Mosul, 1954, and reprinted in Baghdad, 1990, p. 94-95.
27 Ms. dated Ashitha 1909 and now in Paris, book printed in Mosul in 1913, ibid. p. 108.
28 Recordings can be found online, associated with various images : www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmtpNMa8vI4 (sung by Father Yoḥannan Cholagh, Alqosh 1935-2006), /watch?v=6dAHJn_XdOQ, /watch?v=-z0xY57hP5M&, /watch?v=a5qZcsKMbSY.
29 Coakley – Taylor 2008, p. 95 ; Mengozzi 2011, p. xv.
30 On p. 4r a pencil note informs us that another copy “se trouve dans le grand cahier de poésies avec des changements”. Design, calligraphy and decorations suggest that DFM 346 may be the original copy. The practice of donating poems in exotic languages was customary among orientalists in European academies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and missionaries were very active in selling and donating oriental manuscripts to western academies and libraries. Father Rhétoré, e.g., donated a manuscript collection of poems to the Franco-American coptologist and semitist Henri Hyvernat on the occasion of the latter’s visit to Van in 1888. The manuscript is preserved at the Catholic University of America (Washington DC), where Hyvernat was the first professor of scripture and oriental languages, Poizat 2013, p. 86.
31 V. 34 is on p. 27 (f. 33v).
32 Foreign missions, and perhaps foreign governments for or through the missions, invested substantial sums of money and human resources in the region. Sometimes they actually paid salaries to native East-Syriac clergymen to obtain their support. See, e.g., Duval 1889, p. 31; Murre-van den Berg 1999b, p. 124 ; Flynn 2016, p. 733 on the American mission in Urmia and Fiori’s contribution to the present volume on the derogatory terms “wet” (paid by Catholic missionaries) and “dry” Christians in Mosul. A systematic study of funding, structures and the relationships with local clergy of the Catholic missions in the region has still to be done and may shed light on their relationships with France as a colonial power.
33 Mengozzi 2002, p. 75-79.
34 On the American mission in Urmia and the periodical Zahrirē d-bahrā, see Becker 2015.
35 Louis Haze OP was a student of l’École biblique in Jerusalem in 1904. He worked as a missionary in Mosul from 1909 to 1914 and went back to Iraq in 1923, to teach at the Dominican boarding school for boys of Mar Ya’quḇ from September 1923 to May 1924 (Regards sur l’éducation chez les Chrétiens d’Orient, 2014, p. 76). The school had been founded by Father Agostino Marchi, native of Lucca, in 1842 (Duval 1889, p. 25). Some of Haze’s notebooks and other materials for the boarding school of Mar Ya’quḇ are preserved in the library of the Dominican Friars of Mosul. DFM 349 is a collection of four notebooks, containing three versions/copies of a treaty on the Church and the Papacy (written in 1898-1899). All texts are in French with an MA translation en face.
36 Rhétoré was also a good Syriacist and has left a number of study materials on Cl. Syr. literature: Notes syriaques 1-5 (DFM 365-9, 1915) ; 6 (370, 1916); excerpts and translations of Ephrem, Jacob of Serugh, Balai, Thomas of Marga, and other authors, in Cl. Syr. and French translation (371, 1916); Notes syriaques 8 (372, 1917).
37 Assyrian scholar and author Odisho Malko Giwargis Ashitha 1997, p. 18-19, quotes this couple of verses by Rhétoré in the introduction to a collection of poems by Rabban Yonan of Tkhuma and vehemently criticizes the French missionary, who is harshly described as a raven that flies from village to village to convert Assyrians to Catholicism. I am grateful to Nicholas al-Jeloo, of the University of Melbourne, for drawing this text to my attention.
38 Mengozzi 1999, p. 478-479.
39 Riccardi 2015, p. 8. The manuscript is preserved at the Dominican library of Paris, Saulchoir. It has been published in Italian translation in Impagliazzo 2000 and published with notes by Alichoran 2005.
40 Poizat 2013, p. 86.
41 Poizat 2013, p. 76.
42 Mengozzi 2011, p. xvii-xix. The ms. CAM 76, copied in April 1928 by the deacon Matikha son of Joesph of Alqosh, contains many of these poems: On the Russian-Turkish War by Stephan Rayes of Alqosh (45v-52v), On the massacre of Adana by the deacon ʽAmma (?) of Telkepe (1909, 83v-87r), On the massacre of the Christian people in Armenia by the priest Hormizd (1895, 118v-121v), On the massacre of Alqosh by Isaac Maqdassi of Alqosh (1832, 121v-123v), Lament on killing and plundering by the priest Matē Esnāk (1904, 123v-126r), On the attack to Alqosh in the year 1922 of the Greek by the priest Israel of Alqosh (128r-131r), On the attack to Alqosh in 1832 by Damyanos of Alqosh (in Cl. Syr., 131r-133v), On Rome (probably on the capture of Rome in 1870) by the priest Isaac Maqdassi of Alqosh (1870, 136r-138r), On the attack to Alqosh in 1832 by Joseph ʽAbaya of Alqosh (145v-151v), On the Patriarchs of our Chaldean Church by Ḥanna Khāwšābu and Joseph Ḥanina of Alqosh, pupils of the Patriarchal Seminary (1921, 154v-159v), On the Accident to the Families Rayes and Shushane, by Isaac Maqdassi, 1872 (175v-176v), On Seferberlik, by ʽIsa Maqdassi of Alqosh (1914, 176v-178r), On the war of Alqosh, by Isaac Maqdassi (1840, 178r-180v).
43 Galletti 2010, p. 116-117. Still in 1888, the French claimed their right to protect all Eastern Christians precisely because of the presence of French missions in the region for more than three centuries (Filoni 2015, 143). For a German (Protestant) perception of the French protection of the Christians and its geo-political significance, see Fiori’s contribution to the present volume.
Auteur
University of Turin – StudiUm – Asian and African Studies – alessandro.mengozzi@unito.it
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Le Thermalisme en Toscane à la fin du Moyen Âge
Les bains siennois de la fin du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle
Didier Boisseuil
2002
Rome et la Révolution française
La théologie politique et la politique du Saint-Siège devant la Révolution française (1789-1799)
Gérard Pelletier
2004
Sainte-Marie-Majeure
Une basilique de Rome dans l’histoire de la ville et de son église (Ve-XIIIe siècle)
Victor Saxer
2001
Offices et papauté (XIVe-XVIIe siècle)
Charges, hommes, destins
Armand Jamme et Olivier Poncet (dir.)
2005
La politique au naturel
Comportement des hommes politiques et représentations publiques en France et en Italie du XIXe au XXIe siècle
Fabrice D’Almeida
2007
La Réforme en France et en Italie
Contacts, comparaisons et contrastes
Philip Benedict, Silvana Seidel Menchi et Alain Tallon (dir.)
2007
Pratiques sociales et politiques judiciaires dans les villes de l’Occident à la fin du Moyen Âge
Jacques Chiffoleau, Claude Gauvard et Andrea Zorzi (dir.)
2007
Souverain et pontife
Recherches prosopographiques sur la Curie Romaine à l’âge de la Restauration (1814-1846)
Philippe Bountry
2002