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Welcome to the new books network. Welcome to the new books network. I'm Roberta Matzabi, also the Jerusalem and Black Podcast. And today, for the Middle East and Starees series, my guest is a system professor at Unimora, University of the Modern and Regime, Italy, Marjaki Aarali.
Marjaki Aarali is the author of a liminal church, refugees, conversions, and Latin dioces of Jerusalem, 1946, 1956, published by Braille in 2020. And I just want to mention the fact that most of the volume is available as open access, and therefore there will be a link posted with the description of the book. First of all, Marjaki Aarali, welcome. Thank you.
Thank you, Roberta. Thank you very much for this invitation. I'm very delighted to talk with you today. And thank you to all those listening to this conversation.
Amongst the massive amount of books dedicated to Jerusalem, not many are in fact dedicated to the history of the Latin Patrickate. Certainly some are dedicated to the history of the Latin Church, in the medieval times, in the Crusader, Europe. But not much has been written about the 20th century. So, first of all, can you give us a little bit of a background about yourself, and how was this project conceived and developed?
Sure. I'm an historian. I was trained in the universities of Bologna, Italy, and Pisa, Paris, and France, for them in New York. They had postdoctoral fellowships in the university, in the Middle East, in Jerusalem, and in the United States.
And a liminal church began its path actually in 2010. At that time, I was not a scholar. I was a freelance journalist. I arrived in Jerusalem with an Italian program of civil service for conscientious objectors at the L.T.
of Information Center. The L.T. of Information Center was at that time, a policy in Israeli NGO engaging in dissemination and information, political advocacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Israeli occupation. The daily reality that I lived impressed me profoundly, and I felt that the only way was to try to give further historical complexity to what I experienced.
And before leaving for Palestine and Israel, I had a doctoral project on the history of the Catholic Church in South Africa during the apartheid. And when I arrived to Palestine and Israel, Palestinian-Krisel leaders had just signed a Palestine-Kairos document referring to the South African Kairos document. I translated this document and I surrealized that the Jerusalem Church was far more complex than this document, also of this reality. And I decided to devote my PhD to the study of this community in the 1940s and 1950s.
So this is the background of the project, of the book, that developed in the following decade. And the original church actually was meant to be published in 2019, but in March of 2019, Pope Francis announced the opening of the archives in Jerusalem and about Jerusalem around the world. But first, since the book is dedicated to the Latin Patrickites of Jerusalem, can you give us a short history, particularly of the modern Latin Patrickites, in how sort of a play the role in its local and broader context? Yes, the late infantry arc was re-established after the Crusader period in 1847 by the time the Pope at that time nominated the Giuseppe Valerge as the first Patrick in the contemporary history of the Jews and Diocese.
The Jerusalem Diocese extended to Palestine and transgirdle and to Cyprus, and it was made composed by Arab faithful and clergy, but also by a component of Western clergy from all around the world. Jerusalem is a global city, so it's also a global Diocese. In the decade of my study in 1946-1956, the Jerusalem Diocese, the Latin one, was split between Israel, Jordan, Egypt and Cyprus, and became a laboratory of different and sometimes divergent conceptions and tensions. Now, I'm interested in something about the title of the book.
You're talking about the Latin Patrickite as a liminal church. So I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about what does it mean to be a liminal church in Jerusalem for the Latin Patrickites? Yeah, it means to be across different borders, communities and actors. The subtitle of the book that you mentioned is, Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese.
So refugees and converts are liminal actors that move across communities and societies and identities also with cultural borrowings, social differentiation and transformations. And it's also not only a liminal institution, but it's also a liminal history itself that I would like to propose. It's an historical perspective that tries to be incapable of accommodating diverse histories and developments within the same liminal community. And this refers to Intercontinental History that aims to retrace diverse plot threads following the iterative of diverse actors, composing the social reality animated by tensions, dialectists and contradictions.
For this, theization of course, the connection between Intercontinental Reader and Liminality, the contribution by diverse reader is seminal and the application to social and religious history, the Palestinian social and religious history, particularly in the War for Palestine period. That's what I tried to do in my book. Now let's talk about the question of sources and methodology. As I said earlier, we certainly spent some time talking about sources in general, connected to the question of the open Jerusalem project, which sort of discovered archives and archival material and eventually published that for a specific website.
But I want to focus on your book in particular. And so I was wondering what are the sources used and what was your methodological approach looking at the church. And lastly, why the 1946-1956 periodization? Which is, I would say slightly unusual when looking at Palestine and the history of Palestine and Israel in general.
So I found it fascinating and I was curious about this particular periodization. Yes, in terms of sources, I tried to refer to a wide range of sources overlapping and cross-referencing these sources along with them. I refer to ecclesiastical, diplomatic, private papers, correspondences, petitions, family papers, forms of collective, political, economic, religious agency. My aim actually was to try to unfold different forms of agency in this particular, for example, concerning Palestinian refugees.
And the analysis of these sources can actually open a new phase of geography from below on the Palestinian refugees and on other actors. So my contribution aims to analyze a variety of actions that matured within the Latin Church of Jerusalem in the unusual periodization that you were mentioning. Actually, it's a decade marked by the resumption of discussion concerning the partition of Palestine after the Second World War, the Palestine War in 1947, 1949 with the seismic year of 1948, Jordanianization of the West Bank, the consolidation of the Jordanian Kingdom up to the Suez Crisis in 1956. In this changing scenario, the Latin Patriarchy of Jerusalem was engaged and involved in multiple and sometimes contrasting pastoral initiatives.
And I decided to focus on specific events because also to analyze the history of these dices, particularly the elements to approach a new way to conceive a social history of Palestine and Israel in this tragic and changing scenario. I want to expand a little bit about the question of sources, asking you about the question of the city divided. Given that in 1948 Jerusalem was divided in two, essentially, so to the western part and the Israeli rule and the eastern part which also includes the city, and therefore the Latin Patriarchy itself under Jordanian rule, I was just wondering if you can give us a sense of the difficulties of merging material that had been divided at some point in 1948. Yes, so there are actually divided archives.
So the Jordanian period of Jerusalem history, it's still underexplored. Of course, there are seminal studies in this field by different authors like Kim Liket and other authors, but still this period is not well, I mean, the archives itself, it's a problem in terms of the posility of a circular appraisal. But looking closer, there are archives all around the world dealing with this period. And this is why also the perspective of religious communities that actually are composed by women, men, children, was like beyond religious identities can contribute to provide new sources, narratives and arguments to analyze these phase imperios.
For the Jordanian institution, there is a problem in terms of access to the Jordanian archives, and let's say in this sense, the possibility to have access to normally labeled ecclesiastical archives is very early on because they were active, I mean, and they worked in the West Bank and in Transjordan. So this was a way to overcome the difficulty of getting access to the Jordanian Kingdom archives. So of course, this is very important at the same time, new sources are opening for scholars, the archives, the Jerusalem municipality for the 1948-1967 period is now open to researchers and to the possibility of new research. And so there's a new interest in this phase and also this phase as a positive possibility, not only in age of possibilities concluded.
Maybe we'll explore that later, but it's a particular interest period, not of course marked by the Nakuba, and it goes until the next, but there is something between that and analyzing these kind of records helps us in understanding this complexity. Now, you introduced already a couple of questions that are going to be part of this interview and basically focusing on the first part of your book. And I want to mention here that the book is divided essentially in two parts, one exploring sort of the question of refugees and the role of the Latina, the Patricate and the Latin Church, and then the second part which is focusing on a number of different areas which we will talk about later. So let me start talking about 1948.
1948 is a key year in the history of Israel and Palestine, it marks the beginning of the birth of the state of Israel, but also the beginning of the plight of the Palestinians through the Palestinian refugee issues and of course the division of the land. Now, I was wondering what does the history of the Latin particle, what does your work help us to understand about this very controversial period in both Palestine and Israel? I try to follow different strengths to unpack the evolution of political, social, religious behaviors during and since the 1947-1949 war. Also following the liturgies, popular and ordinary forms of worship, pity and opening up perspective capable of hybridizing religious political social histories.
This helps to unveil in some way the social history of 1948. We usually deal with works concerning the military history of 1948 or the history of place neurofiches but also mainly through military records. In the contrary, to deal with other kinds of institutions and sources produced by these institutions or received by these institutions, this allowed to have a much more complex picture of these years and to go beyond sectarian and ideological appraisal of this controversial period. So to retrace the complexity of this phase, to go into details of the personal itineraries of Palestinian refugees, I was actually one of the most important results of my work for me was being contacted by Palestinian refugees at fun relatives in my book, in my articles, because following these threats is some way impossible through other archives, especially due to the closure of some essential archives like the archives of Arua and other institutions.
So that's why archives that are usually considered as sectarian. They reveal the potentiative, not at all sectarian history. I found it fascinating that actually you had people getting in touch with you and that shows the fact that academic research is not just for scholars but it has an impact on the general public audience, particularly they're interested in trying to find out more as in this particular case about their own history. And that brings me to the question of the Palestinian refugees, which you look through the lenses of a Latin church.
And I was wondering how did the, how did the patricate and Catholics in general experience this period? And perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about who are the Catholics in Palestine by 1948. Yes, but the same Catholics were among the Palestinians who were expelled by their villages, cities, homes. And at the same time they were among those who remain or were able to return in the immediate years after 1948.
And there were also those who were involved in the humanitarian assistance and relief to refugees. So they are part of different strands of the Palestinian society in the middle of the Bourgeoisie, but also in other sectors and parts of the Palestinian society. It's important to note that after during and after actually the battles, the fighting, one of the first priorities of the Late in Petriarchy was securing aid for the humanitarian emergency, but also to intervene politically on behalf of Catholic refugees to secure the release of confiscated property, the return to villages, and also the humanitarian assistance through the foundation of the Pontificonation for Palestine and by the mediation of the local and central authorities of the Church, so both in Jerusalem and in Rome. And this action puts the Church in relation with international actors, they are at cross, the United Nations, relief in the works agency for Palestine refugees, religious institutions, and also originated conflicts on the distribution of aid, the ideas and strategies of humanitarian assistance.
And there is also a micro-history of this event and phenomena, and it's linked to what you were mentioning about the impact of this history on people nowadays. For example, through this history, people were able to find the number of the rooms where they were ousted in the auspices or other ecclesiastical institutions in 1948 and after, because some convents, emonocities, and churches, officials opened their doors to refugees, and in a very problematic way also, because this generated conflict in the years after 1948, for example, for instance, for institutions wanted to, I mean, to add back pilgrims and to have other destinations for the Palestinian refugees, and so I found the petitions of Palestinian refugees posted, for example, in the Casanova in Jerusalem, with the name of the refugees and the number of the rooms against the friars, so it's complicated relationship, so it's not at all easy to unpack and to deal, and this shows also the interest of humanitarianism and humanitarianism and history of humanitarianism in the Palestinian dealing with the Palestinian refugees, complicated by the ecclesiastical actors. Well, definitely 1948 is not just a very controversial year and period of time, but also complex one to analyze, and as many other scholars had mentioned, there's also a gap in the sources available, one that you actually filled partially, but there's still a lot of material out there that is not available, whether it's diagonally, more confiscated material by the various authorities, and certainly official documents that are not yet available. So let's move to the post-1948, which also corresponds very much to the second part of your book, and here there are at least three areas that I would like to explore with you.
Now, the first one is in relation to the creation of the Association of St. James, which in other words is the Hebrew speaking church in Israel. Can you tell us the history of this institution, and actually also how does it fit into the larger context of the Latin church in Israel Palestine? Yes, this is one of the chapters that encountered much attention and the interest in the book, probably because it crosses and challenges assumptions about religious, cultural, and political identities.
This community, as you were mentioning, the Association of St. James, that now is known as the Hebrew speaking church by Kerry in Israel, was established in the early 1950s by a group of religious, lay men and women, mainly with Jewish origins converted to Christianity and particulate Catholicism, who aimed at devoting a new form of preaching and postulating the Jews within the new state of Israel, and within a church mainly composed by art of faithful and clergy. And this chapter of the book explores the first years of meetings, knowledge production, and circulation about new possible relations among Catholics and Jews. And it's very controversial also because these founders perceive themselves in some way as pioneering figures.
They try to build up Christian tibutes, they had clothes links with Israeli politicians, and with Jewish and Christian organizations in Europe and the United States, they promoted relations between the relations between the Holy See and Israel, especially in the decades involving the gates in the 60s and later. And we were also involved with this another phase of the history of this community, in Israeli Palestinian peace movement, but at the same time some of them developed a sort of Catholic philo or Catholic Zionism. So it's a very complicated community, but this is also part of its interest. And the records and the archives of this community are not only related to the archives themselves, but the community, but you can find sources of this history in the Vatican archives, but also in the Israel state archives, and then multiple Jewish organizational archives in the United States and in Europe and in other contexts.
So it's really connected history and in some way global history. I'm aware of that is not really part of your book, but I was wondering if you can also give us a sense of the trajectory of this Hebrew speaking church. In other words, what happened after, so the 1956 after the period that you're discussing, what is the relevance of the association of some genes in Israel currently? Yes, during the 60s they played a role in the Second Vatican Council.
Some members were active in drafting documents at the Vatican, and this created also problems and divisions and conflicts with the church and church. They were also at the center actually of the Israeli political debate and the political opinion debates, because one of the members was the protagonist of the brother Daniel, who fights in case, which is the symbol of the Jew question and debate in Israel. Then they were active. I was mentioning the Israeli politicalist movement because one of the founders of the community, Fadebrono Sar, the Dominican monk was the founder of the Noveshalam village, which exists today.
And during the Second Native Father, some of the members criticized the attitude of other members supporting Israeli government. So this was another very difficult passage of the Eastern Committee. Nowadays, the Eastern Committee is more linked to different forms of migration to Israel, so it's more related to Hebrew speaking of people. So that's why the name of the by character changed.
And this reflects also the drawing complexity of Israeli society and also the interests itself of the community bringing together Asian faithful within, for example, for example, within historically Arab community within the Late Infantry Archit. This is a fascinating story indeed. Now, the second area I would like to explore is about the relationship between Rome and Jerusalem, particularly the question of the holy places, because obviously when we talk about Christian institutions in Jerusalem and in Palestine, all the places are a key feature. And so I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about this particular area that you explored in your book.
So this is a subject that you already approached. It was already, I mean, the issue of the holy places is central in the history of Jerusalem. What I tried to do was not to limit the research on the issue of holy places, the intervention of the Holy See and the Vatican in the debates on the future of Palestine and the assets of the holy places. But to go beyond that, especially, it's trying to explore rittles, liturgies, devotional practices around these holy places.
And the role they played in the world for Palestine and its aftermath. So for example, it was not known. And explored that in 1948, the Catholic Church organized rittles of consecrations during the war. Or for example, the construction of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth was conceived also as an anti-communist tool by the Church in the 50s in Nazareth in Gallium.
This is I think a very important and promising field of study. Other authors are working on that on the rittles in the mandate period. And also the 1940s and 1950s are relevant in this sense. This is another key to unpack the relationship with the holy places and the in some way the invention of all the places or the appropriation of the holy places after 1948.
The last area or the second part of your book that I would like to discuss with you is a post-1956 era. And I found this particular part complex because it's taking into account two events that are occurring in different places. One is the Second Vatican Council and the other one is the War of 1967. So I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about both of them in relation to the Latin Party.
And also if perhaps there is any connection between the two and if any, how the two have interacted with each other. Yes, of course these are crucial events for the Catholic communities in the Middle East and specifically in Eastern Palestine. The Second Vatican Council, 1962, 1965, these councils see some members, the Jews in church, involved in opposite positions. I was mentioning the members of the Sanjins community contributed to the drafting of the declaration of Stretati.
While some leaders in Jerusalem opposed and were against the opening of a new act to the Jews fearing for political consequences in the Middle East. The first section of the tradition, 1967, 1967, the war is of course after 1948, seismic and shadowed here as was defined by scholars like the Shadow of the Mania and Alexander Alexander, and with the Eastern occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sine region and the Golan Heights. And this is an axa originating a second wave of polysina refugees and the reaction after these events, but it's used in some way the divisions that occurred during the Second Vatican Council. Again, with different stances within the Patrick, toward the new reality on the ground.
In June 1967, we see members of the Sanjins community celebrating what was called by them as the unification of Jerusalem, while other members are dealing with the refugees and with the tragedy of the consequences of the Israeli occupation of the territories. So these are moments unified by momentous events and the transformations and also by different approaches to the reality on the ground. I was wondering, coming to the end of your book, but also I just want to remind listeners that I have questions then about again the archives which we'll discuss later, if you have to think about conclusion about your work. Are there any specific conclusions that you want to highlight in relation, particularly to the Latin Patrick Church, the question of refugees, the question of conversions in the specific period of time under review and perhaps expanding also looking at later periods?
Yes, I think that's actually one of the importance of these kind of approaches is the possibility to deal with the lack of social history for this period. And so this is why also the importance for me to go beyond simply 1948. This is why I decided to extend the periodization of my book. I know that in some way the book could have been completed after chapter four, limiting my study to the end of 1940s, but I think it's important to deal with 1948 trying to analyze its aftermath and following actors whose lives actually continue after 1948 is a way to do that, especially going beyond narratives where mainly based on military records.
I like this by the beginning of our conversation about I like it now as well because I really think that despite the lack of sources, the fact that archives were looted and confiscated as you were describing, there are still possibilities of approaching this history and to re-approach the protagonists of these phases through unknown records archives and narratives too, because of course the power of archive can be also a disruptive power, a complex power of occupation. So to see all the possibilities of the potential of archives, it's relevant when dealing with 1948, it's crucial for life support, but also for reclaiming rights, which is also something that is itself linked to the action of archiving. You just mentioned a key word, reclaiming archives, which is part of the work, part of the work of other scholars, and I can think of it briefly, Ms. Nacato and others.
And so I was wondering if you can actually place your book within the larger context of this ERC-funded project, that was Open Jerusalem. Yes, Open Jerusalem was and still is a project aiming at unlocking archives for the period of the periodization in 1940s, from 1840 to 1940. And now, as you were saying, the project was founded by the European Research Council, the ERC, until 2019. And now we are continuing this work, pushing up its privatization.
So this is why my book was published part of this, part of the Open Jerusalem book series with Brin, and other books will come out on 1967 and the period after 1940s. Open Jerusalem was part of a larger, stereotypical term that you contributed to, that you contributed to Roberto. And determined by new studies on late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, and the history of Christian communities in Palestine, also within this term has attracted new interests. And this was part of the interest of unlocking, analyzing, preserving, digitizing, publishing archives.
And this is why also it's important to continue to apply all the important work done on the late Ottoman and Mandate period to 1948, to 1967 and other years and phases of Palestinian history. So this helps to go beyond a biography, more oriented to military campaigns, confessional conflicts, and mobilizing sources and archives that are previously selected and used according to ideological goals. And this is part of the importance to consider the archives as active and interactive tools, and reflecting not only the intention to narrate the past, but also to consider the future. I want to ask you a couple more questions about your work.
You already mentioned some of the criticism that you have received, but also some of the praises. And I was wondering among the criticism, if there's anything that you want to address, any comments that you received and you feel like this could be a good tool to actually address that criticism? So criticism is crucial for me because in this moment of my academic path, of course, this was my first monography, so every kind of criticism is really relevant to me. I received, in some way, opposing forms of criticism.
Some authors, I liked that the book could have been limited to the end of 1940s, and I tried to explain why I made this choice during our conversation with Bertho, why others wrote that I could have extended the narrative to other aspects. So this is, of course, important for other works that I'm, and other publications I'm working on. I'm writing a book about the history of the Cinjevs community, but also I'm writing, I'm starting to conceive a book on the history of disability in Palestine, Israel, and the humanitarian action towards and about disability and people with disability in Palestine before 1948, and after. So to cross migration history, humanitarianism, humanitarianism, history of the churches in Palestine, Israel is a key for me to continue my work, and in this sense, it's important also to receive criticism on that.
So journals more devoted to ecclesiastical history, highlighted the importance of the book on certain aspects, while authors were attentive to social history and other disciplines focused on other elements of the book, and this is for me very important because the possibility to have open readings, and to have also different forms of reading, it's crucial. And so not to limit my work to, not at all, to limit to enabel the things that we refuse, ecclesiastical history, and that I contrast, I try to mobilize resources and records and archives from this traditionally considered ecclesiastical sources to go beyond that. And this is a way for me to also to deal with the events of future elements raised in reviews or in public debates. If anything about your book, it would be very difficult to label it.
It certainly is ecclesiastical history to a point, but it's also Middle Eastern history given the broader context, and it's also social history as you mentioned, and history of your archives, and probably even more. So I would agree with you that it would be not enough to just label your work as ecclesiastical history. One last question is very much about your book. Is there anything that I didn't ask about the various chapters, but that you feel like you want to highlight and making it a very important point?
Your question where Alice in the Late in the Baptist, so I think you touched all the relevant points of my book. I would like to highlight the importance of, not the importance, I mean I hope to continue to work on some strengths of this work, particularly on the petitions of Palestinian refugees, because I found several documents and collections dealing with the requests and the forms of agency of Palestinian refugees when appealing to Catholic authorities, but not only Catholic authorities when dealing to all and other institutions. So the construction of the subjectivity of Palestinian refugees, this is I hope one of the contribution of the book. And you were mentioning archival history, which is something that I think it's always more important to think about when working on the Palestine Easter, and it's not for me, of course, there are crucial contributions that are continuing being published also in 2022 on that.
I like in the point that archives are not only the products of states or communities and their machines and administrations, but they are really epistemological experiments. And this transit space of archives between memory and desire between the past and its narration, this is something that I try to explore in my book and something that I want to continue to explore. And these are kind of space in the Palestinian context, which is of course tragically a historic and colonized context may reveal counter narrative and glimpses of untold stories and phrases. And this is what I hope to contribute with my book and with other publications that I'm currently publishing.
This was Maria Chiara-Riole, Assistant Professor at Unimora, University of Modern and Regime in Italy, and author of Elimina Church, Refugees, Conversions, and the Latin dioces of Jerusalem 1946, 1956, published by Brelian 2020 and also available as Open Access Online. Maria Chiara, thank you so much. Thank you Roberto, thank you so much.