1A number of Catholic missions in the Middle East were, apart from their missionary work, also renowned for scholarly production in the fields of theology, history and philology of Near Eastern Christianity. This is certainly the case for the missions in Beirut and Mosul, that have been characterized by the publication of a wealth of scholarly works both by the missionaries themselves, and by local clergy who were in one way or another affiliated with them.1 This symbiosis between Western and Eastern scholars is visible in the Middle East from at least the nineteenth century onward. In the light of the orientalism debate, it brings up questions about the nature and the degree of equality in which the groups of scholars collaborated, long before this debate took off. In the case of the Dominican mission of Mosul, which I examine in this contribution, the Syro-Chaldean seminary of Saint John was in the center of its scholarly activity. While this seminary never attained the status of a university, unlike Beirut’s Université Saint-Joseph,2 clergy and others affiliated to it produced a considerable number of books and other scholarly works that have remained in academic use until today.

2Within the Dominican mission in Mosul, Western and Eastern clergy had been active as scholars since the establishment of the seminary in 1878, therefore, the seminary can be seen as a shared space of scholarly activity. However, when comparing the periods before and after the First World War, the post-war era shows a decrease in integration between the two groups of scholars and no publication of important scholarly works by local clergy through the Dominican publishing network. In this chapter, I show that the contribution of the Dominican mission to knowledge production about Eastern Christianity was as important as that of the Jesuit missionary in Syria, which culminated in the Université Saint-Joseph. I also put forward the hypothesis that the decrease in integration between Dominican and local scholars after the First World War is related to a general change in the policy of the Dominican missionaries concerning language, with a shift in emphasis to the importance of French at the cost of Arabic.

3This chapter is mainly based on documents from the mission’s archive in the bibliothèque du Saulchoir in Paris and the publications by several scholars who were affiliated to the mission in Mosul. The final section, on the American Protestant missionaries, takes into consideration archival materials from the United Mission in Iraq located at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia. Starting by introducing the Syro-Chaldean seminary and the French mission’s archive in Paris, I go on to suggest that the language policy of the Dominican missionaries caused from the beginning an essential split between Eastern and Western parts of the mission, which it tried to overcome in the period before the First World War, but less so afterward. A discussion of some of the major scholars affiliated with the mission follows to show how the two groups of scholars related to each other. Finally, a short comparison with the American Protestant mission which was operating in Mosul at the same time demonstrates that their scholarly activities were limited to the learning of languages for their own practical use.

The Dominican mission and the Syro-Chaldean seminary

4The Dominican mission in Mosul was an important and long-lived Catholic mission in the Middle East that started officially when Pope Benedict XIV made the order henceforth responsible for the project to convert the non-Chalcedonian Christians (i.e., the adherents to the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church) to Catholicism. Until the nineteenth century, it was led by Italian missionaries and greatly contributed to the growth of the autocephalous Syriac Catholic and Chaldean Catholic churches.3 Together with the non-Catholic Syriac Orthodox Church and the Church of the East, these are together known as the Syriac churches and constituted the overwhelming majority of the Christian population of Iraq.4 When French Dominicans took over the mission in 1857 after a period of turbulence and political unrest in Italy, the mission stabilized and its concentration moved from conversion to consolidation of the ecclesial structures of the two local Catholic churches in the area, even though the missionaries’ official goal remained the conversion of non-Christians. The First World War was a turning point as all missionaries were forced to leave the country in 1915 and the mission was only reestablished in 1920, mostly with new missionaries and within the state of Iraq under British authority.5 Most of the mission’s activities were reinstated, including the Syro-Chaldean seminary, but what changed was the way in which they were executed. In addition, they had to share the field with the United Mission in Mesopotamia, an American Protestant mission that also had its headquarters in Mosul. After the First World War, the mission nevertheless quickly reinvented itself and underwent a stable period until the 1970s, when an increasingly nationalist tendency created difficulties. This was especially the case for the mission’s schools, some of which were nationalized.6 The period after 1950 is not treated in this chapter.

5Education was one of the key activities of the mission, and the subject of a large share of the materials in the mission’s archive in Paris. Non-educational undertakings included a printing press, which was confiscated in 1914,7 and initiatives to establish a hospital and an eye clinic.8 Educational activities included a primary school in Mosul in the period before the First World War and between 1935 and 1940 – that had to close its doors because of regulation against foreign schools9 – and a secondary school in Mosul from 1944 onward.10 The schools were attended by both Christians and Muslims.11 Furthermore, there was a network of primary schools in the Christian villages of northern Iraq, providing the most elementary education in reading, writing, and religious instruction. The creation of a Catholic university in Baghdad was proposed in 1925, drawing on the example of the Université Saint-Joseph, but after this proposal there is no sign that this project was actually carried out, for unknown reasons.12 By far, the most important educational activity of the mission was, however, the Syro-Chaldean seminary of Mosul.

6This seminary was established in 1878 in Mosul and was devoted to Saint John. Its establishment is attributed to Father Pietro-Gonzalez Duval, the leader of the Dominican mission from 1873-1896.13 Its goal was to educate “indigenous” (indigènes) priests for the Chaldean Catholic and Syriac Catholic churches in Mesopotamia.14 The students were to come from the villages surrounding Mosul. The original plan was to locate the seminary in the countryside of northern Mesopotamia to make sure that the students would not get used to the “easy” life of the cities as they were supposed to serve in the village churches after graduation. Eventually, the seminary was located in Mosul.15 Serving the needs of both churches, the liturgical components of the program were adapted to the differences in language and liturgy of the East and West Syriac churches. By far the largest share of the students were Chaldeans, mainly from villages throughout northern Mesopotamia.16 The seminary came in addition to the already-existing one devoted to Saint Peter, that was administered by the Chaldean Patriarchate and known in Arabic as al-madrasa al-kahnūtiyya al-paṭriyarkiyya (Priestly School of the Patriarchate).17 Initially, the Dominicans did not have a high opinion of this seminary, and in one document it was described as “une simple école épiscopale qui procurait à la cathédrale les enfants dont elle avait besoin pour les chants et les cérémonies” (a simple episcopal school that provided the cathedral with the children it needed for the chants and ceremonies).18 With the establishment of their own seminary, the Dominicans sought to improve the quality of the priests, which, to a great extent, was looked down upon at the time.19

7The seminary’s program, like that of European Catholic seminaries, was divided into six years of petit séminaire and another six years of grand séminaire. The students would enter the seminary at age twelve. The petit séminaire was mainly devoted to languages and some science, history and geography, and was a preparation for the grand séminaire, in which the actual training to priesthood took place, and where all subjects were philosophical or theological. The seminary was certainly a very successful institution; it not only succeeded in educating new priests, but it also offered the formation of clergy who eventually obtained much higher positions in the Chaldean and Syriac Catholic churches. It is one of the few institutions of the Dominicans in Mosul that is regularly referred to in other literature. While the petit séminaire also offered solid general education to its students, including languages and general subjects like history, geography and mathematics,20 nothing in the Dominican missionary archive suggests that the order saw this as a function of the seminary in its own right. There was always a limited number of students, and only those who were believed to have an aptitude to become priests were admitted. The yearly reports of the mission occasionally mention cases of students who had completed some years of the program but who had to quit because of apparent problems with their faith.21 A document written in 1931, eight years after the reopening of the seminary following the war, gives an overview of the total number of students up to that moment. In the period before the war, of the 171 students who spent more than two years at the seminary, ninety-five had become priests, six had become bishops, and one had become a patriarch. In the period after the war, of the thirty-five students who spent more than two years there, twenty-three had already become priests.22

8The best-known student of the seminary was the scholar Alphonse Mingana (around 1880-1937). Mingana was born in a village close to Zakho (now Iraq) into a Chaldean family, but eventually became a scholar specializing in Syriac and Arabic literature in the United Kingdom, famous for his Mingana collection of manuscripts.23 After finishing his studies at the seminary with the intention of becoming a priest, he taught there for a number of years and published in Mosul several books related to the Syriac language and literature. After a conflict with the Chaldean Patriarchate, which was related to one of his publications in which he suggested that Saint Mari may not have existed but about which not much else is known,24 he went to Great Britain using a connection with the Quaker missionary Rendel Harris. There, his scholarly career took off as he began working for the John Rylands Library in Manchester, where he was responsible for Arabic and Syriac manuscripts, and later for Woodbrooke College – now part of the University of Birmingham – as a curator of his own manuscripts. There seem to be no traces of Mingana’s conflict with the church in the mission’s archive in Paris, but it appears that after his departure to Britain the Catholic missionaries had developed a love-hate relationship with him. On the one hand they resented his departure from the Catholic faith – one document says in this respect that he “s’attira une triste célébrité en passant à l’anglicanisme” (became sadly famous for switching to Anglicanism) –.25 On the other hand, they continued to recognize his importance and from the seminary’s curriculum of 1946-1947, which I discuss in more detail in the next section, we even know that they used Mingana’s Syriac grammar in class.26

A split between Eastern and Western languages

9Missionary work in Iraq, especially in the north, involved overcoming many language difficulties. The archives of the Dominican mission in Mosul located at the bibliothèque du Saulchoir in Paris surprisingly contains little information about the way the missionaries coped with this. Nowhere in the archive documents do we find any suggestion of struggles with Arabic, Aramaic or Kurdish, and with few exceptions there are no indications that language skills were considered useful or necessary for the missionaries.27 At the same time, ironically, the archives abound with information about the languages themselves: both Western (especially French, but also Latin and English) and local languages (Arabic, Syriac and Aramaic, and Turkish for the period before the war) are frequently discussed in the archives. As I show in this section, it seems that while both Western and Eastern languages were considered very important by the missionaries, in practice there was a clear distinction between the two groups in terms of use.

10This split is evident in the seminary’s language policy from the start of its operations. When the seminary was founded, it was intended that there be a strict separation between the mornings and afternoons: in the morning all classes were to be taught in French and the afternoon was reserved for the Eastern languages.28 This idea was quickly abandoned, and in 1904 a document shows that the only language of instruction was French and that the students were not allowed to speak any other language even outside the classroom.29 The distinction was also reflected in those teaching in the seminary: all subjects were taught by the missionaries themselves, except for the Eastern languages. It is worth noting, though, that the original idea of the missionaries was to assign a much greater role to the local clergy in both the teaching and the organization of the seminary, as seen in Père Duval’s comments of 1879: “Notre intention dernière est donc de nous associer, dans la mesure du possible, l’élément indigène surtout les anciens élèves de la Propaganda” (Our last intention is therefore to associate ourselves with the indigenous element, especially with former students of the Propaganda).30 Apparently, co-organizing the seminary as a whole, together with the local priests, proved more difficult in practice than in theory.

11Language education constituted a large share of the seminary’s curriculum both before and after the war. Pre-war, the languages taught in the seminary were Arabic, Turkish, French, Aramaic, and Latin. The most comprehensive information about the seminary’s language policy can be found in a detailed overview of its curriculum from the year 1946-1947.31 The languages mentioned in this program are the same as those in the earlier years of the seminary, with the exception of Turkish that was no longer mentioned and was obviously much less important since the ascription of Mosul and its surroundings to Iraq. English was not part of the program at all.

12Aramaic (“araméen”) occupied a special position. Alone amongst the languages, it was not included in the category “langages,” but in that of “religion”. Of all the languages that were being taught, it was the only one that spanned the years of the program, except for the final year, when no language was taught at all. While Aramaic could theoretically stand for both Classical Syriac and Neo-Aramaic, the textbooks and the inclusion of translation as part of the program suggest that it only referred to Classical Syriac. The 1946-1947 curriculum mentions a division of Aramaic into “syrien” and “chaldéen,” for respectively the Syriac Catholic and Chaldean students. Most probably this was to distinguish the two pronunciation traditions of Classical Syriac and the different scripts.32 The fact that it was considered part of the religious subjects explains why it was the only language being taught until the eleventh grade. Arabic was taught during the first eight years, and it was the language on which the largest total number of hours were spent: from eight and a half hours per week in the first grade to one hour in the eighth grade.

13French was part of the program for all six grades of the petit séminaire, with normally three to four hours per week, except for the second grade where it took up eight hours. With all classes being taught in French from the beginning of the grand séminaire, knowledge of French could be taken for granted after six years of instruction.33 Finally, the students learned Latin with four hours a week during the upper four years, from the fifth to the eighth grades. Knowledge of this language was probably deepened thereafter with theological readings for the other subjects. English was not usually taught at the seminary. While a yearly report from 1933 mentions the existence of a teacher for English, this is the only evidence in the archives of English being taught at the seminary.34 This refusal to teach English, even though its importance was only increasing after the First World War due to the British presence, can be seen in relation to a report from the consulate of Mosul to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1920. Not long after the mission was reestablished following the war, the report laments that « [l]’enseignement du français a totalement disparu au profit de l’anglais » (the teaching of French has completely disappeared to the benefit of English).35

14The stress, post-war, on teaching French may have been due to with a general colonial policy to promote it as the language of choice in government and education, as was the case in Lebanon.36 However, like Palestine, Iraq was a British-administred mandate where French could not be so easily imposed, as the citation above already suggests. In both cases the language remained strongly connected to Catholicism. As Karène Sanchez Summerer has shown for the case of mandatory Palestine, this continued connection, in an environment where Arabic was seen as the language of the future in both countries, may also simply be seen as a practical choice given the linguistic identities of these communities, which was Arabic for the Catholics of Palestine, and a combination of Arabic and Aramaic for the Chaldeans and Syriac Catholics of Iraq.37 In the case of the Syro-Chaldean seminary in Mosul, we may interpret the shift to French as a practical decision for the sake, perhaps, of an easier administration of education, but we should certainly not forget that throughout the history of the seminary Arabic (and Syriac) always had a very important place.

Scholarship at the Syro-Chaldean seminary

15The literary activity of two main scholars associated at some point or another with the Dominican mission – Alphonse Mingana and Thomas Audo –, and the scholarship by Dominican priests from France, reveal the extent that the scholarship of the Dominican missionaries on the one hand, and that of the Chaldeans and Syriac Catholics related to the mission or its seminary on the other, were similar.

16Alphonse Mingana was educated by the mission’s seminary and taught there for several years. Most of his biographical accounts indicate or suggest that he received all of his education in Mosul, where he attended the Dominican seminary from age twelve.38 His archive in Birmingham, shows no indication that he ever went abroad before he left for Britain.39 Of his many publications, Mingana wrote at least three in Iraq before his departure including an edition of homilies by Narsai, a short response to an article by J.-B. Chabot, and a Syriac grammar.40 The first two caused great uproar and troubled his later career, but all three works certainly show his great talent for linguistics and philology. The front pages of the edition and the grammar mention that Mingana was a teacher of Syriac in the Dominican seminary in Mosul. All three works were printed at the Dominican printing press.

17Mingana’s edition of homilies by Narsai consist of two volumes.41 It starts with a lengthy introduction in Latin and Syriac and continues with the edition of the Syriac text. It is considered good and is still in use, but it was the introduction that caused problems later in his career: it contains a text by Barḥadhbshabba including a part of which the provenance is unknown and which some assume was forged by Mingana.42 Doubts about this part of the introduction do not, however, affect the quality of the edition. Apart from the introduction and the title page in Latin – in addition to a Syriac title page and introduction – the two volumes are completely in Syriac, including the page numbers and the extensive footnotes. All numbers are according to the traditional Syriac numeral system.43 These factors, in combination with the use of traditional Syriac punctuation, give the book an Eastern appearance that is different from the French-language books from the Dominican printing press.

18Mingana’s grammar of Syriac, entitled Clef de la langue araméenne, ou grammaire complète et pratique des deux dialectes syriaques occidental et oriental (Key to the Aramaic language, or complete and practical grammar of the two Western and Eastern Syriac dialects), is one of these French-language books. It is a concise but comprehensive work treating the Syriac grammar of both the Western and Eastern pronunciation and writing traditions.44 It was meant to satisfy a direct need for a grammar to be used in the Dominican seminary, where students of both branches of Syriac Christianity needed to learn the classical language properly and according to their own traditions. In the school year 1946-1947 (see above), the grammar was indeed in use – in spite of Mingana’s departure from the Catholic Church – in the seminary from the fifth year onward, and it is similar in structure to other Western grammars of Semitic languages of the time.

19Thomas Audo (1853-1918) was born in Alqosh, about fifty km from Mosul, and like Mingana was a student at the Dominican seminary for some years. In 1869, however, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, he went to Rome to study at the collegium de Propaganda fide. After his return in 1880, he became priest and head of the seminary of the Chaldean Patriarchate devoted to Saint Peter, a separate seminary not affiliated to the Dominican mission (see above).45 In 1892 he became archbishop of Urmia. Audo is known for his works in and about Neo-Aramaic – for this reason Rudolf Macuch calls him “Vater der neusyrischen Literatur” (father of Neo-Syriac literature).46 Nevertheless, in Mosul he published two books in Classical Syriac. This includes a Syriac simplified translation of the famous Arabic text Kalīla wa-Dimna (Kalīlā w-Dimnā in Neo-Aramaic), published in 1895,47 and a Syriac-Syriac dictionary.48 Both works are entirely written and typeset in Syriac script and, despite their publication after his departure to Urmia, were printed at the Dominican press in Mosul. The Syriac-Syriac dictionary contains a title page in both French and Syriac (Fig. 1). Like Mingana’s edition of Narsai’s homilies, all numerals follow the traditional Syriac system. But contrary to Mingana’s Syriac grammar, rooted in the Western grammatical tradition, the dictionary does not depend on Western lexicography, as seen in the style of the entries.49 Later Audo went to Urmia, where he became bishop and published in Neo-Aramaic as well, including a grammar of Neo-Aramaic.50 There, he also contributed to the beginnings of Assyrian nationalism.51

Fig. 1 – Syriac title page of Audo 1897.

20The Dominican missionaries in Mosul who were active as scholars – of whom Jacques Rhétoré and Jean Maurice Fiey are among the most important examples – were interested in theology, philology, and history. By combining their traditional scholarly interests with knowledge of contemporary Christianity, their works offer unique features.

21Jacques Rhétoré (1841-1921)52 used his long stay in Iraq to publish his grammar of Sureth, a local name of the variety of Neo-Aramaic that was spoken around Mosul.53 He also wrote compositions of his own in Neo-Aramaic, some of which were published with the Dominican press in Mosul. His grammar was also published with this printing press and written in French. Generally, the Dominicans were more interested in Classical Syriac than in the vernacular, but there are some exceptions. It is known that the nineteenth-century French Dominican painter and priest Hyacinthe Besson (1816-1861), who travelled to Iraq twice during the final years of his life as an apostolic visitor in 1856-1858 and 1859-1861, had started to learn Neo-Aramaic to be able to communicate with adherents to the Church of the East. According to J.F. Coakley and David G.K. Taylor, the Dominicans also started to print their own books in Neo-Aramaic from 1885 onward “[i]n response to the use of neo-Aramaic in religious publications by the Presbyterian and Anglican missionaries in Urmia”, although this was considered to be less valued by the intended audience than Classical Syriac.54

22Jean-Maurice Fiey (1914-1995) joined the Dominican mission in Iraq in 1939 and remained there until 1974, when he went to Beirut.55 He published an impressive list of works about Eastern Christianity while attached to the mission and wrote an often-cited historical book on Christian Mosul.56 He later developed three volumes on the history of ‘Christian Assyria,’ or northern Iraq, in general.57 These books hold a special interest for the archeological traces of Christian history in Iraq, which are shown in detailed maps, including the old churches that still existed. His works were facilitated to a great extent by his long stay in the region, because he based them on his own fieldwork in addition to a large number of primary written sources. While his interests were historical, he occasionally cited contemporary informants, a significant contribution to the history of tweentieth-century Iraq.58 Writing after the First World War, his works were no longer published at the Dominican printing press in Mosul, but at the Jesuit printing press in Beirut and with European publishers.

23For the publication of works by the scholars related to the Dominican mission, the Dominican printing press was very important before the war. This printing press, for which J.F. Coakley and David Taylor have created a detailed catalogue, started working in the 1880s, and was able to print the Latin, Arabic, and both West and East Syriac scripts. It was the sole printing press in the country that could efficiently work with the Syriac scripts. Seized by the Ottomans during the war, it was never returned to the Dominicans who, despite several attempts, never managed to establish a new one.59 In the first decades after the war, the only press in Iraq capable of printing Syriac script efficiently appears to have been the Syriac printing press of the Assyrian priest Joseph de Kelaita (1880-1952, belonging to the Church of the East),60 but it was not used by the Dominicans.61

24The scholarly situation of the Dominicans in Mosul, especially before the First World War, was to a certain degree comparable to that of the Jesuits in Lebanon, who had also created a center for the academic study of Eastern Christianity and of oriental studies in general. Their scholarly production was centered at the Jesuit Maronite seminary of Ghazīr, which later became Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut,62 and was of a larger scale than that in Mosul. According to Rafael Herzstein, who studied this case in detail, the university had an active role in providing a place for Western orientalists, both religious and secular, to visit the Middle East for some time.63 The Jesuits also had an elaborate printing press, established in 1852.64 From 1902, the university had a separate faculty for oriental studies. The first vice chancellor was the famous scholar Louis Cheikho (1859-1927), a Chaldean from Mardin who was educated at the seminary of Ghazīr and who founded the well-known Jesuit scholarly journal al-Mashriq in 1898.65 Like the Syro-Chaldean seminary in Mosul, the language in use at the university in Beirut was primarily French, though Arabic had a major role, especially in the oriental studies faculty.66

The First World War as a turning point?

25Centered around the Dominican Syro-Chaldean seminary, the missionaries and several local scholars educated there shared a common space of scholarly activity. Before the First World War, both used the missionary printing press to publish their works that reached all the important libraries in Europe and other parts of the world.

26During that time, there is evidence that the Dominicans actively tried to include the local clergy and the Eastern languages as fundamental parts of the seminary’s work. As previously mentioned, major efforts were made to include local clergy in the seminary’s organization, although their role was quickly limited to teaching Arabic, Syriac and Turkish. Similarly, the the pre-war separation between morning and afternoon sessions for teaching, respectively, in Western and Eastern languages – a practice that sets apart the Western languages, like French and Latin, from the Eastern languages of Arabic and Syriac – shows a serious commitment to teaching in the local languages.

27Genuine appreciation of the importance of Arabic on the part of the Dominican clergy is evident in an article by a Dominican priest referred to as Hyacinthe, praising this written language.67 It was published in 1935 in the Chaldean Patriarchate’s journal al-Najm, and like the rest of the journal was written in Arabic. In the article titled “Nutqin lughatanā bi-juhd al-istiṭāʿa” (Let us master our language as well as possible), the author urges the readers to do their very best to perfect their knowledge of Arabic: “Oh youth of Iraq, your language is Arabic, which is old, widely known and one of the most important, far-reaching in terms of speakers and abundant in terms of vocabulary…”.68 The French priest had presumably learned to write in Arabic and tried to convince the local Catholic population to learn it well.69 A similar image of commitment appears when looking at the languages that were taught as part of the seminary’s curriculum. Before the war, these were French, Latin, Arabic, Syriac and Turkish. A document in the Dominican mission archive shows that, in 1890 the Chaldean Patriarch was dissatisfied with the students’ abilities to read Arabic, Syriac and Turkish, and suggested that Latin be dropped to allow more time for the other languages. He especially remarked that Arabic should be taught as seriously as French, or even more so. The Dominicans did not change their curriculum, because according to them Arabic was already being given equal priority to French and because Latin was deemed necessary to study philosophy besides being a Roman institution. However, the response to these demands was genuinely very serious and guaranteed the importance given to Arabic and Syriac.70

28After the war, it seems that the Dominican seminary lost part of its function as a shared platform of scholarship about Eastern Christianity. With the initiation of the Chaldean journal al-Najm (The Star), which ran from 1928 to 1938, a considerable number of Chaldean scholars started working in closer cooperation with the Chaldean patriarchate by publishing directly with them. In addition, the Arabic language greatly gained importance for the Chaldean Church.71 The French identity of the Dominican seminary, on the other hand, became more pronounced, and its interest in Arabic and Syriac was to a large extent reduced to language teaching. The loss of the Dominican printing press removed a major publishing opportunity, and scholarship was henceforth to be published in French in Europe, or in Arabic, in al-Mashriq (Beirut) or locally with the Chaldean Patriarchate in al-Najm. Yet, interest in Eastern Christian philology and archaeology continued to exist within the Dominican mission, as the example of Fiey illustrates.

Comparison with the American Protestant missionaries in Mosul

29In 1924, the Dominicans lost their missionary monopoly in Mosul because of the establishment of the United Mission in Mesopotamia (later United Mission in Iraq), which was a collaboration between three American Protestant churches.72 While the Dominicans and the Protestants had roughly the same goals, their approaches were very different, including their attitudes to scholarship. While the Protestant missionaries, much like the Dominicans, were certainly intellectually engaged, their mission did not offer an academic environment in the way the Dominican mission did. In fact, though they were not engaged in scholarship, they did not shy away from intellectual activities as is demonstrated by their endeavors to learn the local languages of northern Iraq.73 From the beginning, the individual missionaries spent a large proportion of their time learning Arabic, Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic. Their struggles are clearly visible, but so are their successes: according to various reports and letters, several missionaries were able to lead Bible classes and church services in Arabic and the other languages.74 These linguistic interests did not, however, translate into scholarly publications about these languages, as we saw for example in the case of Father Rhétoré.

30Contrary to the traditional Dominican scholarly theological interest in Eastern Christianity, the Protestant missionaries were much more concerned with the people they encountered in terms of nations. The Assyrian issue – not even mentioned in the Dominican archive – was the personal concern of Rev. E.W. McDowell. The American missionaries’ descriptions of the peoples they encountered are also telling. Letters abound from the early years of the mission concerning the population of northern Iraq. Descriptions are given in essentialist terms of groups such as the Assyrians, who are “[c]ompared with the other peoples of the country […] unquestionably the best,”75 the Kurds, and also the Arabic-speaking Christians from the cities. Philological and archaeological interests do not appear here.

31This apparent lack of scholarly interests seems to be in sharp contrast with the great educational endeavors of the related American Protestant missions in Beirut and in Cairo, that were, like the mission in Iraq, connected to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM): these resulted in the creation of the famous American University of Beirut established in 1866 as the Syrian Protestant College, and the American University in Cairo in 1920. However, these two institutions were immediately set up as ones of higher education and did not start as theological seminaries. The American University in Cairo even operated independently from the mission from the start,76 and while the Syrian Protestant College was more tightly connected to its evangelical purpose, it had a general educational program with a focus on the sciences.77

Conclusion

32Centered around the Syro-Chaldean seminary and the printing press in Mosul, the Dominican missionaries and a number of local scholars educated at the seminary shared a common space of scholarly activity. Before the First World War, this integration of missionaries and local scholars is most clearly visible. Both used the missionary printing press for publishing their works in the period before the First World War, and in doing so they reached important libraries in Europe and other parts of the world.

33After the war, this integrated scholarly arena is less evident. It is eminently possible that, in addition to the loss of the printing press, this shift was partly caused by a changing language policy. The French Dominicans’ initial wish to integrate the local clergy into the seminary’s curriculum and administration shows through the opportunities they provided for local scholarship, as well as its success. Over time, with the First World War as the main turning point, this initial integration was, however, abandoned and the seminary became more focused on the French language. After the great works by scholars such as Thomas Audo, Alphonse Mingana and Jacques Rhétoré, the shared field of scholarship from before the war was not restored.

34Overall, however, the contribution of the Dominican mission to the production of knowledge about Eastern Christianity, which involved the scholarly efforts of the missionaries themselves, their high-quality education of future Chaldean and Syriac Catholic priests, and facilitation of scholarship through the printing press, is impressive and comparable to the efforts by the Jesuit missionaries in Beirut.