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Welcome to the new books network podcast. I am Roberto Mancer, the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast. And today, for the Middle Eastern Studies series, my guests are Dr. Sara Yervin and Dr.
Shabel Naseif. They will introduce and discuss the new book that they edited together with Karen Summera, who is now today present for the recording of his podcast, The House of the Priest, a Palestinian Life 1885 1954, published by Braille in 2022 and available as Open Access. The link will be posted in the description of the episode. The House of the Priest presents and discusses the unpublished and untranslated memoirs of the New York City, which is a senior member of the Orthodox Church and Arab Nationalist Party in Palestine, in the late Ottoman and British Mandate era.
With Sara and Shabel, we will discuss the life of the New York City, the context into which sort of a developed is activity both as a priest and as a nationalist. We will look into some of the details about these memoirs, and particularly how to read and make good use of what he left with us. Before moving forward, let me briefly introduce my guest. So Sara Yervin is currently a lecturer in Middle Eastern History at Staffordshire University, an editor of the Journal of Contemporary Levant.
She has worked and traveled in Palestine, Jordan, and Israel for over 25 years, in fields including journalism and third trade, as well as academic research. Dr. Shabel Naseif is currently the chief archivist and librarian of the Melchide Greek Artorit Party Gate. He is also a researcher at the Center de Duchamentacion and Deresechs Arab Gritian at the St Joseph University in Beirut.
And previously between 2018 and 2019, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University, and it's in the context of a crossroad funded project. Europeans' cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine, 1918 and 1948, that this project took shape and it was eventually co-edited by Dr. Yervin Shabel Naseif. And as I said earlier, Professor Karan Sanchez.
Before moving forward and talking about the book, Sara and Shabel, welcome. Thank you very much. So my first question goes to each and one of you, and I'm probably going to start with Sara. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and also how did you come to work on this book?
And the same question will be for Shabel. If you can tell us after Sara, a little bit about your background and perhaps together, how did you get to work on the memoirs on Nicole Khooey and how you came to publish it? Thank you for that, Roberto. So, I mean, I suppose in terms of origins, my background is quite boring.
I'm a middle-cast British woman from South London, but I always had a wide range of political and activist interests from my early teens onwards. And at one point in my life, Palestine became one of them and for various reasons, that kind of segued from being something that I did as an activist to something that I started to research, and particularly, Mandate, Late Ottoman and Mandate history. So I kind of like to mention this because I know that it gives encouragement to some people who are worried about the idea of going back to university later in life, but I returned to university in my late 30s, did a PhD in my late 30s and early 40s, and after a number of other research and teaching jobs, as you mentioned, I now lecture at Staffordshire University in the History Department there. So I've worked and taught in a lot of different places in Britain and Europe and the Middle East, but that's where I am now.
And the book and I mean, Chabel will be able to talk a bit more about the origins of this, but one of the postdoctoral roles that I had very briefly was with the Crossroads Project in Leiden. And Chabel and Kaelin had already found this manuscript and started to work on it, but didn't have enough time in their own kind of roles to take it on. So she asked me, particularly in terms of the fact that from before my academic life, I had been involved in kind of editing and proofreading and copy editing, if I could kind of take this on as a project. So I kind of came in part way through a project that had been initiated by Chabel and Kaelin, which he can talk more about.
In fact, I'm more art historian and theologian, I'm not historian. When I finished my two PhDs, I was assigned an archivist of the Makeup et al. And I knew about the research of Crossroads, the project founded by the Netherlands National Research Agency. So when I was preparing my PhD, I worked a lot on archives in Rome, and it was a good experience for me.
After I worked also on archives in Lebanon and many of my histories. So when I had this post-doc, Kaelin came to Lebanon and we were planning to visit many institutions, so we went to the American University of Beirut, and we went also to institute of high-school studies in Beirut in Alberta. And there, I find many sheets like archives, like an index of archives, and there we find journal of Nicolas Groer. Kaelin had the intuition, oh, it seems interesting.
So, yes, to see this document, we saw it for maybe 10, 15 minutes. And after she taught me a journal, it will be more really important to publish this journal. I'm supposed to work on Mekai, Christiani and Greek Catholic. I wrote an article on Greek Catholic on Gores Hajare W, but it was me know we should work on this book.
So I visited many, many times the institute to copy all these manuscripts to Arabic, and then translated it in English with Ricky Musal. So both, she was, she was translating the work in English. I was correcting her work because, you know, we have some terms in theology and history and many things that not every translated could do it. And after that, if you all the work with all that correction, and we have many vievia to publish this book.
And of course, thanks to Sarim Tamayev from the Institute of High Science Studies. We have the authorization of the permission to publish this journal. I guess my next question is, let's start from scratch. Who was Nikole Hoori?
Yes. So, Nikole Hoori was born in Brazil in Palestine in July, 1885. He came from another Dux family from Italy. He was not rich and he was not poor.
He was a priest. He was ordained priest. It was a while in Czech school. After he moved to Pudjorden, he moved to Phukharak when he was 14 years old, because his father was assigned a priest there.
After they sent him to Jerusalem, to send him to Jerusalem for many years. And there he find in the journal that he was a very good student there. He was really intelligent, as he said. After he came back to Phukharak and he was assigned a teacher there.
We can consider that the beginning of the political commitment begins on Karak when he became a member of the Young Turks Association. We can say that his father may be forced him to marry and he had two children, Marianne Antagla. After the revolution in Karak in 1910, he returns to Palestine. And as you told us, it was a so difficult journey.
If you read page 84, for example, our journey from Sizal to Madaba was also at Paris 1. In the door of the night, we lost our way roaming in a rank, wetland sinking up to our knees in mud. If we were not for the kind of military or the cater, we would have succumbed. So in Palestine in 1911, he was assigned a teacher in the school in Ramla.
During the first world war, he was first assigned the position of clerk of the clothing and munitions were housed in Jerusalem. And then of the officer responsible for issuing stores. In 1922, he moved to Jerusalem. And after six years, he was ordained priest.
Maybe now, aside, I would like to continue the rest of the biography of Nicklal. Sarah, apologies. You need to open your microphone. So in the 1920s, I think we can say maybe that Nicholas's priorities and his involvement split into two main strands.
One is that he is a local priest. He is a man with a growing family. He moves around in his job on a number of occasions. He also has various family troubles that he talks about involving.
So the normal things that happen to any family of bereavements, one of his brothers becomes mentally ill and ends up disappearing, which is a very sad story. So there's kind of the complexities of everyday life that we get a little bit of a glimpse of in the book, but also more in terms of the kind of the public life. He's a priest, but he's very much part of the movement within the Greek Orthodox Church to Arabise the Church, to use the Arabic language instead of Greek, for Arabs to be ordained and promoted to higher positions in the Church instead of just Greek clergy. And this is something that there's quite an abundant literature about already, the relationship of this movement to Arab and to Palestinian nationalism more generally.
So he also becomes associated with the anti-colonial nationalist movement within Palestine. He's kind of of the faction of the Hossany family. So in some ways, the mainstream of Jerusalemite and Palestinian nationalist activity. And we'll talk about this later on, but he does, on a couple of occasions, have some fairly important roles within particular projects.
So this is kind of the sort of life he has up until the Necrovert in 1948, and then he moves for sort of the final years of his life to Lebanon after the Necrovert and goes back in some ways. I think we could say goes back to being a local priest who is mainly concerned with his family and his village. We will go back to the question of the Necrovert as a crucial period, but I'm curious a little bit about the general context for listeners that might not be entirely familiar with the role of a Greek Orthodox Church in Palestine. And given that the story takes place in the Greek Orthodox landscape or the region, can you tell us a little bit more about the question of Yara Blakie and clergy vis-a-vis the question of the Greek hierarchy?
So this sort of dichotomy between the larger group, obviously the faithful in the church, but the fact that the church was ruled by a minority coming from different places. Yeah, so this is something that is covered by a chapter in the book by another member of the Crossroads Project. So the project at Leiden that was funded by the Dutch Research Council with Kain as the PI. And that's Costas Papas.
That is from Aristotle University. And he's very much a specialist of this question of the role of the Greek Orthodox Church in Palestine at this point in time. And so there had been, and again, there's quite a substantial literature on this, but there had been, since much earlier in the 19th century, this kind of tension and indeed conflict in the Greek Orthodox Church over the fact that the hierarchy of the church was almost in Tyely Greek Orthodox. Some senior members maybe even came for senior roles in the church without speaking any Arabic, even though the majority of the huge majority of the actual congregations at this time are Arabs are Arabic speaking.
And there's something called the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, which is a specific kind of subgroup within the hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem. And this was almost entirely closed to Arab clergy, but also it was extremely necessary to be a member or very close to this in order to be promoted to some of the most senior positions, including the Patriarchate. So, Khori is very much part of this movement that I said has been growing since the 19th century to we might say kind of indigenize the Greek Orthodox Church. And this was something that was very much contested by the leaders of the church in Istanbul and then in Greece because of obviously the kind of status of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
And the fact that there's a lot of prestige and a lot of importance attached to who gets to maintain control of these elements of kind of Greek Orthodox Church practice. It's obviously it's a major site for pilgrimage. So there's large numbers of Orthodox pilgrims visit Palestine, not just from the Ottoman Empire and former Ottoman Empire places like Greece, but also especially from Russia. And it's very much a kind of subject which gets tied up with also European colonialism, Russian politics, Russian relationships between Zari's Russia and the Ottoman Empire and these kind of things.
So, there's the level of somebody like Nicholas Khori in terms of kind of trying to push upwards as an ordinary member of the church. And then there are kind of other pressures and conflicts going on that are really on the level of sort of international diplomacy and international conflicts. I'm also curious a little bit about the question of the role of Christianity in Palestine. And perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about the role of Christians in Palestinian society and politics, just at large and not just focusing on the Greek Orthodox Church.
Shor-Al? Yes, maybe before I would like to add one more element to what Sara said. For the Greek Orthodox education, password work and charity was not really important for them. That's why when you read all that Jordan, we see how much the education is important for the Khori, the schools.
They always say that the schools in Jerusalem was not very good, et cetera, et cetera. The school here is very good. So it's a very important education. That's why in the 20th century, many Greek Orthodox were converted to be Greek Catholic because we got to have a school.
And if you read the correspondences and the address between the Greek Orthodox and the Orthodox and they were asking for two things. Hooray, please, what can speak Arabic? We can preach and for schools. So that's why always we see in this journal that Nicola Furey was a very good priest, a lot of persons like his hominis.
And he was trying always to give a better equality for teaching. To answer a question Roberta in general about Palestine, the Christian world like Mosaic. So we have Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox. We have also Latins, Samborinites, and also we serve Anglicans.
We have Armenian, we have Ethiopian. So we have many traditions, many cultures implanted in Palestine. And of course, because it's the whole end, it will be most important to be present, to venerate the holy places that are at the temple, et cetera, the holy city of Al-Kur. Maybe Sada, you would like to add something?
Yeah, so I mean, as Chobel says, in some ways, Christianity in Palestine is very complex. There's lots of different communities. Sometimes they can work together. Sometimes they are in competition.
But in terms also of especially the mandate period. And in terms of the wider politics that are going on in mandate Palestine, the rise of the Zionist movement and especially political Zionism and the increasing amount of Jewish immigration that's happening during the mandate period. We also see Christians, for instance, are extremely active in Palestinian nationalism, in anti-colonial movements within Palestine. So for instance, we see that quite often the editors of the major newspapers, such as Philistine, are from Christian communities.
We see a lot of Palestinian Christians involved in the various kind of nationalist, political or social or cultural movements. And there's this kind of stereotype, I think, nowadays in the 21st century of Palestinian nationalism as something that is kind of very heavily dominated by Islam and Muslims. And actually, during this period, it's very diverse. And there are Palestinian Christians, whether they are protestant, whether they are latins, whether they are Greek Orthodox, whether they are Greek Catholic involved in many different strands of trying to kind of defend the idea of Palestinian identity and the kind of Palestinian right to national self-determination.
In the face of the British Mandate administration. Well, we call it the context. And I really want to go back to the memoirs in Obsidian, Nicole Hoori. I was just wondering, Nicole Hoori lived through a number of different eras, I would say, through the late Ottoman period, the British Mandate, including the end of the British Mandate and the creation of the State of Israel and also obviously the division of Palestine, with Gaza under Egyptians and the West Bank under the Jordanians.
How did he experience these various changes? Oh, OK. So, I mean, there are huge changes that go on in Hoori's life. He sees the Young Turk Revolution.
He sees World War I. He experiences kind of all of the things that go on during the British Mandate in terms of the politics of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. And then, of course, World War II and the Nakba. So he plays some very interesting roles in some of these.
So, for instance, if we look at his experiences of World War I, as Chabell mentioned earlier, he gets this quite responsible position in terms of looking after stores. And he very openly, and I think in a sort of quite anti-Ottoman way, perhaps admits that then he also puts his brother in charge of some other stores and they're able to, in some ways, survive parts of the war and the famine, because they have access to these military warehouses. So sometimes he's quite a skilled operator at taking opportunities. And then during the Mandate period, I think he spends a lot of time, it feels like he spends a lot of time being quite angry and quite frustrated, whether it's by the British authorities, whether it's because of the Greek hierarchy in the church.
And you kind of get the feeling from the way that he writes that he sort of always wanted to have power and to have influence and to be able to push events and that this never really kind of happened in the way that he hoped. And I think we maybe see this also in terms of how he experiences the Nakba. And he manages kind of through his relationships with some of the members of the of the church in Lebanon to get a parish in Lebanon and to, you know, so to be able to at least have somewhere to live and an income in the way that many refugees, Palestinian refugees from the Nakba didn't. But he goes to, you know, he ends up, you know, really quite low status.
You know, it's a village that he has. He's not in the kind of position that he aspired to or that he had had at times within Jerusalem. So he, I guess he very much has an experience in the final years of his life of going from feeling that maybe he's quite a lot at the center of events to being quite marginalized. And, you know, we were talking about it earlier in Shabbal did comment that perhaps even in some ways maybe getting the parish that he's given in Lebanon that perhaps that it was maybe on, you know, kind of on the condition that he didn't say anything too controversial that he didn't speak out and these kind of things.
So, you know, I think he's, I mean, obviously, you know, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians suffered in different ways during the Nakba, but in terms of his kind of experience of the way in which the first half of the 20th century plays out for Palestinians, I think he's somebody who sort of rose and then very much kind of lost a lot of his position in contrast, for instance, to sort of some of the nationalist leaders that we see who, you know, continue to be an influential role, somebody like, say, Arafel Ara, who's becoming mayor of Jerusalem and, you know, these people who find other political niches, he very much becomes somebody who is quite marginal for the final years of his life. Thank you. I don't want to add a lot of things, but as we, when we read the Journal of Nuclear, we could imagine that he want us to know that he played a crucial role to avoid the partition of Palestine when he traveled to Geneva and he visited many countries, Serbia, Greece, Romania, to inform the government of these countries, people leaders about the danger of threatening the holy places since the Caesar of the country by the Jews. And either when he talked about Nakba, and we say that he spoke a little bit about Nakba, because after that he traveled to Lebanon.
He tried to form a committee among the Christian clergymen including all the communities to protest against these attacks. We have the impression who he wants to say that he did all his best to prevent Jerusalem or Palestine from the visualization of the holy land, but all what it is, what he didn't, he couldn't, I think it didn't work, it didn't work. And actually this makes me wonder about one question, about how do we read these memoirs? In other words, how do you think this narrative has been mediated?
And are there any sort of parts that we should be skeptical of? I mean, this is like, it's always a problem of reading diaries and memoirs and trying to understand what kind of things of sort we need in order to make sure that we have a correct understanding and also understanding the context behind the memoirs in this case. Should I take the first part of the question and you take the second part? So in terms of kind of how these memoirs have been mediated, I think firstly, we know from his own account that Hori says that he kept diaries or journals in some ways from quite early in his life, but that they are destroyed at several points in his life.
So he writes things and then they're lost. So we kind of know that this is, we know that this is sort of a final version as it were. So it's something that is written largely after the NACWA. He's probably framing elements of what he wants to say according to historical events and according to a certain amount of sort of looking back over things.
As Chabell has mentioned, you know, you get the sense that he very much wants to indicate that he did all that he possibly could. And I think as Chabell will discuss a bit more, maybe even overstates that quite often to put it mildly. I think there's some interesting aspects of that whole question because we do think that probably this manuscript was written towards the end of his life. So in the early 1950s and that does raise issues around the fact that for instance, when he's traveling through the Balkans to Geneva, when we talk about this, we might talk about this in a bit, but he is asking for support from people who then a few years later are very probably involved in the Holocaust of the Jewish communities of the Balkans in Romania and other parts of the Balkans.
So, you know, there are aspects of this that are very problematic in terms of what hasn't been mediated in different ways. And then of course, there's just the basic fact that this is translated. It was a manuscript and then it was transliterated by Chabell in order to give us a version to use and then it's been translated. That was very much a collaborative process between three, four, five people and the annotations.
Again, there's work there from Kavan, from Chabell, from Kostas, from myself. So, we've kind of tried, I guess, to do as much justice as possible to the original version, but translation, as many people have discussed and written about is, can be seen as a colonial act, can be seen as an aggressive act. So, we tried to be as close as we could to what he was writing and having people like Kostas and Chabell, I think was very, very important because of their specialisms in the, particularly, the religious side of things, which is something that I don't particularly have. And the fact that this is something that's incredibly important to him.
And so, I think, in some ways, there's a lot of language in there that is very, very specialist because it's about the practices of Christianity in a particular environment. And that many of us from outside that won't understand. And so, having Chabell and Kostas there to really sort of contribute how to engage with some of the terminology and the feeling behind that as well, I think is really important. My turn.
Thank you. In fact, compared to every time Nicholas who shows us as a hero, we should be skeptical. Skeptical doesn't mean that he is a liar, but we should be a little bit more attentive for what you think. Nicholas who considers his person more important and very important than all others and bring everything, everything back to himself.
Thanks to me, we could do that. Thanks to me, we avoid these problems as much. Thanks to me, et cetera, et cetera. And even when Hoori was at the King of Jordan Abdullah, he mentions that the King proposed him to became the patriarch of the Arab and said he was ready to make this happen.
So a King, a Muslim King proposed to a married priest to became a patriarch. It's a real illusion. It's not normal, it's not normal. I think King Abdullah and even any simple person would not propose this thing.
So we can say that Nicholas has a big ego and he wants always to, I feel that of course, Nicholas excels in teaching and password services, but for his political engagement, it's clear that he played a crucial role in the national struggle, but in fact, we don't know a lot of things about him. When you open an encyclopedia of about Nicholas, about Palestine, the 18th century, for his 20th century, the neck bar, everything, he will see many articles or many mentions about Hajjal, Grus Hajjal, but we will not see anything talking about Nicole Ahoor, and if we talk about Nicole Ahoor, he was in this committee, in this committee only this. So I think, for example, also when he said when visit Romania, Serbia, many Jordan take pictures of him, cases her hand, et cetera, et cetera, and our team tried to search in these corners in this period, we didn't find anything. So it was really interesting to say that he was not always honest in what's saying.
He would try to keep, let us say, he's a star, he's a star like Hajjal or other person, but I don't feel that it's true. I don't feel that it's true. Sometimes he do some wrong, ecclesiastical things, for example, when he tries to interrupt without the permission of the best password. It's forbidden, it's not normal to travel and to serve in a church without the permission of your best right.
And all for example, when he participate to a marriage and the better I go as president, then he didn't mention him. It's not normal. So I think that sometimes, an equal of who didn't say all things, all he taught us a part of the reality. Thank you.
And I think to add to that, I mean, I would stress we spent a lot of time looking at Arabic newspapers, urban newspapers, Romanian newspapers. There's been many people, including the PI of Shabes, a new project, you wanna further over? In Romania, tried to find, in various orthodox archives as well. And if we find mentions of him, they are really small.
And again, in the question of mediation and the fact that this is mainly written in the 1950s, when he is very much outside, you kinda start to wonder if this is a bit like your uncle, whose war stories have him as the great hero of something rather than one of the followers. And you know, Hoorie's been sidelined and been marginalized, but he wants to see himself as Superman. I would absolutely like that. Please go ahead.
Yes, if I may, I want to read one paragraph from the introduction, talking about this method. The use of the Arabic expression, we had a shining place among them, among other priests, underline the degree to which Nicola was seemingly obsessed with his own importance. Details such as the story of the highest governor and the Muhsarif, coming to school to attend his class classes are unlikely to be totally brutal. His megalomania strikes again, when he considers that no of the former priests would be found worthy, indeed, were worthless after he and Khayl Hakeem were ordained and took up their position in the residence.
This observation is far from any Christian spirit that Father Nicola should have shown towards his colleagues. Thanks. Well, it sounds that it was some sort of a self-proclaimed larger-than-life character, and then obviously maybe history will tell us that in fact he was like this very important historical figure. I have a question about a trip that you already mentioned several times.
So in 1937, he co-trivalled the Twister Neuro and also to the legal nation in Geneva in Switzerland. Can you tell us a little bit more about what was the purpose of the trip and also its outcome? So in 1937, the League of Nations debated the idea of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews for the first time as a kind of formal proposal. Up until then, the idea was of the mandate structure was that Palestine would be a land that, at some point in the future, under the mandate system, would be ruled by Jews and Arabs together in some way.
No one really knows what vision the British had, and if indeed they actually had a vision for it. But as the situation became more and more difficult, especially during the Palestinian uprising of 36 to 39, people started to say, okay, maybe instead of trying to create a single, what would now be turned to single-state solution? We need to partition the land, and there was the first of the debates about this in 1937 at the League of Nations in Geneva. Now, obviously the Zionist movement has a delegation, and also there is not really a Palestinian delegation, it's more of an Arab nationalist delegation.
It's actually, to some extent, headed up by, and I think it's Adal Aslan, not Shakybaslan, it's one of the Aslan brothers, I always get it wrong. And then you have Palestinian figures like Alni Abil-Hadi, who go, and some of those go direct to Geneva, they are a delegation who are in Geneva for all of the proceedings, and there's various different stages, what Hooray is asked to do instead of this is to go over land, so he gets the train, and this is a fascinating account in its own right, but he gets the train from Palestine up through Syria, and through Istanbul, and then through the Balkans, and as we've mentioned before, he visits leaders of the Orthodox churches in some of these countries, and he visits politicians who are of Orthodox faith, and asks them to support the Palestinian side in this debate, so he goes to Serbia and Greece and Romania and I think Bulgaria, and visits a number of politicians and church leaders, and he has varying experiences, some of them seem to be very positive, others less so, he then goes to Geneva for the actual debate and vote, and there he is, as we've described, possibly he overstates his own kind of prominence during the debate, but he's there as part of the Palestinian delegation during it, and also comments on the fact that the Zionist organization have also have a presence there, and it's very interesting in terms of his description of the actual events there, and he talks about people like Ayman de Valera, the Irish nationalist leader making a speech in support of the Palestinians as well, which did happen, he was very supportive of the Palestinian position at various times, so it's a really interesting kind of glimpse of quite a pivotal moment in Palestinian history there. I have a couple more questions, and one is about chapter two of this book, chapter two looks at Arab Orthodox in Palestine and Jordan, through the lenses of the Frank Schulten Photographic Collection of 1921, 1923. Can you tell us a little bit more about this particular photographic collection, why it's included in the book, and what does tell us?
OK, so this chapter was prepared by Sarizan and Eri, who is another member of the Crossroads Project, and he's been working very much on this Frank Schulten archive, which is held by the Dutch Near East Institute. And the reason we wanted to include this is that despite his statement that there were lots of photographs published in the newspapers of him in the Balkans, we actually couldn't find any image of Nikolap Hooray. We don't really know what he looked like, but what we do have from various places, but particularly from Schulten, is a sense of the Greek Orthodox presence in Palestinian life in a very day-to-day way. So Schulten was in Palestine for these two years, as you said, 21 to 23.
And as various scholars have commented, including people like Selim Tamari and Yaya O'Allach, more than really any other photographer of the period, he gives a really kind of day-to-day, almost sort of intimate sense of just what a street looks like, what normal life looks like in this particular moment. And the fact that he is taking these photos in Jaffa, in Jerusalem, in other parts of Mandate Palestine, and we see the presence of Greek Orthodox priests, Greek Orthodox precessions, just the everyday life of Greek Orthodoxy within the wider Palestinian society. I think it's quite important in terms of getting across the fact that although Khori kind of very much talks about himself in this very prominent role, we also have to remember that he is absolutely a part of society, a part of culture, a part of politics. And even if none of these photos are of Khori, we don't know that.
Maybe some of them are, which would be very exciting, but I don't think we have a way of knowing that. But it kind of shows the sort of setting that he was part of and that he's in, so it at least gives us a sort of sense visually of the environment that at least part of these diaries are set in. I'm curious, and this is a question for both of you. What are the most remarkable stories to be found in the memoirs?
Anyone? That is your favorite? I'm gonna jump in here because my example is quite boring and historical, whereas I think Shabell's is really beautiful. So my one is his account of life in Karak, because I think that's really quite unusual in terms of a first person narrative of Lake Tautoman Karak from a Greek Orthodox position.
Yes, maybe he is overstating his role in the Committee of Union and Progress there and his relationship with the Mutasaref and things, but I think it gives a really interesting moment that you wouldn't find in, I think, any other Palestinian memoir. And also when his family have to flee because of the counter-revolutionary uprising that's happened in Karak at this point. So I think there's lots that's fascinating in here, but for me that sort of stands out just as a really unusual bit of history that it would be very, very hard to find anywhere else. So for me, in fact, in this period, we, when we read the journal of Nicola Hu, you know that he has two children, Maria and Takla, but in fact, his wife also was pregnant for four times and always the baby was born and then he was dead for many reasons.
So at some point Nicola Hu said, we planted as such a baby and every city we lived in. Karak, but I'm loud, Jerusalem and Brazil. I felt very sorry for him when I read the sentence, especially in Arabic, we planted. So it was really, I paid a lot of compassion for him when he was talking about you know, in this period, no many comments went away.
So it was not the same situation like our days. And I want to add something. I'm really a little bit tired or a little bit, I don't know why. Sometimes with that, Nicola Hu was in very good economic situation and suddenly he's poor.
And then he is in very good situation, suddenly he's poor. I couldn't really understand the reasons. I was not fully, totally convinced. Maybe this make the ego and exaggeration and all that made me more skeptical about his biography.
But when I was talking to Sala, we had the same idea. Sometimes he's very rich and sometimes he's very poor. But one of the most important, in both cases, he was always okay, he was always thanking God for what he lives in. That's a fascinating story.
I guess it's also a life experience of many, how you feel about your own personal wealth. I have a question about legacy. Can we talk about a legacy of Nicola Hurie? And you saw what that may be?
Yes. So when we talk about Nicola Hurie, in fact, I don't think that we know a lot of things about him. When you talk in Lebanon or Palestine about the girl's hajjar, you will know him. In fact, Nicola Hurie, when we read his journal, he said that he edited an book of prayers.
In fact, until now, we are using his book in all those churches for marriage, baptism, et cetera. So the legacy of Nicola Hurie is present in his book. He was published many times. But also, I should, I think, that it's important also to mention that a part of this journal was translated, was published in Arabic in a book entitled Insaneet Malik or the humanity of a king.
It's a book about the life or the biography of the Sultan Abdu'a is an Abdu'a human assault, the founder of the Arab without it. And it seems that maybe the political feast saw the author somewhere in Washington. And he gave him all this journal. So the author can put in his book some passages to speak more about the Abdu'a's, how he was open to other religions.
But in fact, I don't know, we don't have a real legacy of Nicola Hurie. I don't know, sort of, if you have something to add. No, I think that your point about the prayer book is something really interesting, because Hurie does talk about it in his memoir, but not for very long. He has, he published several books.
There's this Arabic edition that he edits. And then he also, with his cousin, wrote a history of the Orthodox Church in Palestine, which is referenced quite often. But again, he only actually writes about this sort of maybe one or two paragraphs at most. And I think this is sort of interesting in that he has a legacy.
He has a legacy in that there are churches where he's part of people's lives every day or every week. But that's not the legacy he wanted, which is kind of sad. But he also tells us about something, I think, about the human condition generally, in terms of how we want to see ourselves and our own legacy. But that's in some ways what his legacy is.
It's his vision of the Arabic and Arabic language presence in the Orthodox Church. So he's there, but people don't tend to recognize him as a name for doing those things. And they're not the things that he wanted to succeed in and be seen as important for. These were Sarah Yavin and Sherbel Naseif.
That together with current Sanchez, edited The House of the Priest, a Palestinian Life, 1885, 1954, published by Braille and available in open access online. Sarah and Sherbel, thank you so much. Thank you.