Arab Orthodox Christians under the Ottomans by Constantin Panchenko, the Russian scholar and historian of Middle Eastern Christianity, was first published in Russian in Moscow in 2012. Brittany Pheiffer Noble and Samuel Noble have done readers a great service by making it available to us in English. Panchenko's study offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the history of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire stretching over four centuries, the first of its kind for the early modern period. In doing so, Panchenko aspires to nothing less than a histoire totale of Eastern Christianity, one that extends far beyond the well-worn trails of religious history in order to present an all-encompassing (“maximally complete” in his words) study of the “entire way of life” for one community of Middle Eastern Christians. The first two chapters set out the relevant historical (6th–15th centuries) and political (Ottoman) contexts. Each of the successive chapters excavates various layers of the history of Orthodox Christianity: geography and demographics in Chapter 3, social and religious authority in Chapter 4, monasticism in Chapter 5, connections with other empires beyond the Ottoman world in Chapter 6, the holy places in Jerusalem in Chapter 7, foreign relations in Chapter 8, the conversion of some members of the community to Catholicism in Chapter 9, and the literary and cultural production of Orthodoxy in Chapter 10.
This book is important for several reasons. Although ostensibly a study of the Orthodox Christians of Syria and Palestine—the Arabic-speaking communities of the Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople—Panchenko's approach is not constrained by the dogged focus on doctrine or theology that too often muddles our understanding of the social history of Middle Eastern Christians. Instead, he explores the relations that connected Orthodox Christians in everyday life to a wide range of other communities, non-Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, to be sure, but also Christians in the Mediterranean world, the Latin West, and further afield in central and eastern Europe as well as the Muslim neighbors, friends, and patrons that surrounded them at home. The book also offers readers a firsthand glimpse of the invaluable and precious sources for the study of Eastern Christianity that are preserved today in Russia, along with a taste of the debates and insights of the scholarship of Russian Orientalists. Of particular interest is Panchenko's use of a corpus of travelogues, pilgrimage narratives, and the writings of other contemporary observers of Orthodox Christianity originally written in Russian, much of which will be unknown and otherwise inaccessible to most readers of IJMES. This is a testament to the impressive array of sources brought together in Panchenko's work: in addition to local Arabic chronicles—Paul of Aleppo's account of his father the Patriarch of Antioch's travels to Russia in the late 17th century looms large—correspondence (both private and official), and other ecclesiastical and personal sources, the book draws extensively on an array of Arabic manuscripts and documentation preserved in Russian archives. The existence of such documents is itself a testament to a series of historical exchanges between Russia and the Arab world that remains unknown to American and European scholars, specialists aside. Perhaps the most revealing section in this context is the book's chapter on “foreign relations” where Panchenko describes Russia's rise to power and the place of the Christian East in reinforcing the claims of Russian tsars to spiritual and political authority. Yet in some ways, the book's greatest asset also contributes to one of its main limitations. At times, Panchenko's analysis is unfulfilled and not adequately in conversation with the wider body of scholarship on Middle Eastern Christians that has been published more recently and outside of Russia. The consequence is that he sometimes uncritically accepts conventional ideas from an earlier generation of scholarship that are less persuasive today than they perhaps once were. His breezy account of the workings of the millet system in the early modern period is a prime example (pp. 72–80).
At least three important points emerge from this book. Firstly, while recognizing how the Ottoman conquest enabled the consolidation of important connections across the Orthodox world, Panchenko is keen to dispel any lingering ideas of a uniform dhimmī experience across the Ottoman Empire. Instead, his is a story of diversity and the importance of local contexts between and within Christian communities that were scattered across a vast and varied geography. Secondly, Panchenko's book—unlike any other I have read before—most effectively captures the extent to which Syria and Palestine in this period were connected to Central and Eastern Europe, for example the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia as well as Georgia, Ukraine, Serbia, and Russia. An entire world of exchanges comes alive: Orthodox patriarchs with immense landholdings and estates in central Europe (p. 129); Syrian alms-collectors seeking financial assistance in Moscow (p. 232), Georgian bishops and members of the royal family on pilgrimage to Jerusalem (p. 227), and Romanian voivodes in Moldavia and Wallachia contributing in important ways to the economies of the patriarchates in Syria and Palestine (p. 240). All of this is known to scholars of Eastern Christianity at a basic level, but Panchenko's book gathers the details in such a way as to recover the expansive personal networks that linked Orthodox Christianity to other parts of the world. And he manages to do this without the triumphalism or fanfare of global history, an important reminder that the discipline of Oriental studies still has something important to offer towards current scholarly interests in the study of connectedness. But perhaps the most important contribution in this book is the skill with which Panchenko unearths traces of ecumenism in Eastern Christianity that have only received limited attention in the past. He has an eye for important details: he writes, for example, about the shared use of a church by Orthodox Christians and Maronites (p. 98), or an unrealized proposal for union between the Maronites and the Orthodox in the 16th century (p. 253). No doubt these are complicated episodes yet they speak to a sort of intra-Christian religious interaction in the Middle East that has until now been difficult to grasp, not least given the focus of a previous generation of scholars on doctrine and theology. For this reason, one wishes that he had turned his talents to writing a specific chapter on religious practice and belief, a topic that, strangely enough, seems absent in Panchenko's otherwise-encyclopedic study.
There are also some misfires, occurring mainly when Panchenko's meticulous attention to the evidence is distracted by wayward commentary on social and political structures. One example will suffice here, and this relates to an argument he makes about the “tribalism” of some Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire. In Chapter 4, he argues that some Christians “in remote and isolated areas” experienced a process of “social archaization and the revival of tribal relations” (p. 122), a theme to which he returns in the conclusion when he argues that these Christians experienced a “loss of many cultural traditions, the revival of tribal relations, and primordial belligerence” (p. 493). The consequence of this—in Palestine, for example—was the emergence of “a semiwild Arab Christian hinterland side by side with the relatively educated monastic and senior clergy of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, consisting of foreigners” (p. 494). Here, and in other cases, the foreigners that infused new life into the local Christians appear to be, at various points, Greeks, Western Catholics, individuals from Central or Eastern Europe, and so on. On scrutiny, these ideas appear to owe something to the author's reading in the work of scholars writing about the 20th century, for example anthropologists working on Christians in Iraq. But his deployment of social theory in this way is distracting and accomplishes little, and the frequent mention of tribalism is not sustained by any real evidence from the sources. This is not to say that kinship and clan alliances do not matter—indeed, Panchenko is right to point to the importance of such forms of association alongside (and in some cases, in place of) religious identity—only that he might have offered better evidence for these sweeping generalizations. This is one of a few places where a bit of editorial pruning would have improved the book. The same goes for his allusion to Lev Gumilev's idea of a “dying ethnos” in the final pages of the book. Here, Panchenko's rigorous empiricism is replaced by speculation: the “best representatives” of the Orthodox Christian community, we are told, were “totally devoid of inner fortitude and firmness of belief or some inner core,” “willing to trade their beliefs and identity,” and suffered from “an inability to sacrifice personal ambitions for the sake of abstract goals and values.” Admittedly, this may be an instance of something having been lost in translation, but how can Panchenko really know any of this? At such moments, this reader at least wished that the author had stuck to his sources and left the speculation to the psychoanalysts.
It should proceed from the above that Arab Orthodox Christians under the Ottomans, highly informed and successful as it is, is a somewhat idiosyncratic book. Even so, it is clear that it is also an excellent work that offers a first-rate introduction to the main themes and sources of Orthodox Christianity in the early modern period. It should be read, and read closely, by anyone interested in the history of Christianity in the Middle East. Without a doubt, Panchenko has written a masterful, exhaustive study of the life of Arab Orthodox Christians that complements what other scholars have taught us about the experience of Christians in the Ottoman Empire. His account of the importance of lay elites resonates with what Febe Armanios has written about the Coptic community in Egypt; his vivid depiction of the dynamism of the “culture of the Orthodox Orient” makes us think again about what Bruce Masters and Bernard Heyberger have written about the lure of Catholicism in this period; and his account of the conversion of Orthodox Christians to Catholicism should be read with a copy of Ussama Makdisi's study of sectarianism nearby. His focus on internal migration provides some context with which to better understand the subsequent global migrations of Ottoman subjects studied for a later period by Andrew Arsan and Akram Khater; and his description of rivalry between Greeks and Arabs offers another way of making sense of the 19th-century developments studied by Christine Philliou. Ottomanists too will have much to gain from what Panchenko has extracted from the Arabic sources, for example a particularly rich anecdote describing how one patriarch of Antioch sought in 1659 to reduce the tax payments owed by the Christians of Damascus (p. 92).