European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948
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European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948 Between Contention and Connection Edited by Karène Sanchez Summerer · Sary Zananiri European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948 Karène Sanchez Summerer · Sary Zananiri Editors European Cultural Diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, 1918–1948 Between Contention and Connection Editors Karène Sanchez Summerer Sary Zananiri Faculty of Humanities Faculty of Humanities Leiden University Leiden University Leiden, The Netherlands Leiden, The Netherlands ISBN 978-3-030-55539-9 ISBN 978-3-030-55540-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55540-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations. Cover illustration: © Frank Scholten Collection, Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO); all rights reserved, used with permission This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This volume is one of the results of a NWO (the Dutch Research Council) research project CrossRoads. European Cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine (1918–1948). A connected History and a NWO Aspasia Grant. We would like to thank the Dutch Research Council for fnancing this research project, as well as the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) and the MisSMO (Christian missions and societies in the Middle East: organizations, identities, heritagization- XIXth–XXIth centuries) for their support of the international workshops where some of the papers for this book were frst presented and discussed. We are grateful to many colleagues in Leiden, Jerusalem, Paris, London, New York, Beirut and elsewhere who, through their contributions to the con- ference, the workshop and through extended email conversations and many coffees helped us to fesh out our questions and approaches. We would also like to thank Sarah Irving for her invaluable work within CrossRoads since September 2019, Lara van der Hammen for her constant and effcient support to the CrossRoads team, and Carolien van Zoest for helping to facilitate and coordinate NINO’s support. Other scholars took up our invitation to come and discuss our ideas and fndings with us. We heart- ily thank David Clarke, Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Lorenzo Medici and Anthony O’Mahony for their stimulating engagement with our project. We are grateful to some of our partners for their support and their scholar in residence programs we greatly benefted from in our way to this volume (EFR Ecole française de Rome, Al Ma’Amal Foundation Jerusalem, the Ecole biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem EBAF, the Australian Archeological Institute in Athens) and the Leiden University special col- lections. We would also like to thank the Rijksmuseum Oudheden (RMO) for hosting sections of the conference, the “Frank Scholten and Palestine” v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS exhibition and the public event “Cultural diplomacy and archeology during the British Mandate period”. Finally, we thank the colleagues who contributed to this volume in particu- lar, those who published, and those who for various reasons could not write but contributed to our discussions. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri Turning the Tables? Arab Appropriation and Production of Cultural Diplomacy Introduction Part I Indigenising Cultural Diplomacy? 31 Sarah Irving Orthodox Clubs and Associations: Cultural, Educational and Religious Networks Between Palestine and Transjordan, 1925–1950 37 Norig Neveu The Making Stage of the Modern Palestinian Arabic Novel in the Experiences of the udabāʾ Khalīl Baydas (1874–1949) and Iskandar al-Khūri al-BeitJāli (1890–1973) 63 Sadia Agsous Sound Power: Musical Diplomacy Within the Franciscan Custody in Mandate Jerusalem 79 Maria Chiara Rioli and Riccardo Castagnetti The Melkite Community, Educational Policy and French Cultural Diplomacy: Archbishop Grigorios Hajjar and Mandatory Galilee 105 Charbel Nassif vii viii CONTENTS Cultural Diplomacy in Mandatory Haifa: The Role of Christian Communities in the Cultural Transformation of the City 127 Maayan Hilel Showing and Telling: Cultural and Historical Entanglements under the Mandate Introduction Part II Colonial Hegemony, Arab Virtù and the Philosophy of History: Excavating, Exhibiting and Cultural Diplomacy in the Palestine Mandate 153 Philippe Bourmaud Palestinian Christians in the Mandate Department of Antiquities: History and Archaeology in a Colonial Space 161 Sarah Irving Between Diplomacy and Science: British Mandate Palestine and Its International Network of Archaeological Organisations, 1918–1938 187 Mathilde Sigalas Competition in the Cultural Sector: Handicrafts and the Rise of the Trade Fair in British Mandate Palestine 213 Nisa Ari Infuencing the Other: European Private and Governmental Actors Introduction Part III European Soft Power and Christian Cultures at the Crossroads in Mandate Palestine 249 Heather J. Sharkey Diaspora-Building and Cultural Diplomacy: The Greek Community of Jerusalem in Late Ottoman Times and the Mandate 255 Konstantinos Papastathis The Palestine Society: Cultural Diplomacy and Scholarship in Late Tsarist Russia and the Soviet State 273 Lora Gerd CONTENTS ix Continuities and Discontinuities in the Austrian Catholic Orient Mission to Palestine, 1915–1938 303 Barbara Haider-Wilson A Coherent Inconsistency: Italian Cultural Diplomacy in Palestine, 1918–1938 331 Roberto Mazza The International Centre for the Protection of Catholic Interests in Palestine: Cultural Diplomacy and Outreach in the British Mandate Period 353 Paolo Maggiolini A “Signifcant Swedish Outpost”: The Swedish School and Arab Christians in Jerusalem, 1920–1930 381 Inger Marie Okkenhaug French Cultural Efforts Towards Jerusalem’s Arab Population in the Late British Mandate in Palestine 411 Dominique Trimbur Conclusions Cultural Affliation and Identity Constructs Under the British Mandate for Palestine 431 Tamara van Kessel Epilogue 439 Idir Ouahes Index 453 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Sadia Agsous is a researcher in the feld of languages and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Her current research is funded by La Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (FMS) examining the Holocaust in the Arab cultural space. She received her doctorate in Literatures and Civilizations from INALCO-Paris. Her work focuses on the Palestinian cul- tural space in Israel and on Palestinian and Israeli cultures with a focus on Hebrew and Arabic and their encounters in the cultural feld (novel, trans- lation, theatre, cinema). Her other project on the Palestinian culture before its destruction in 1948 focuses on the pre-1948 archives about Palestinian cultural agents (Khalīl Baydas, Iskandar Khoury, Karimeh Abbud, Ishaq Musa al-Husayni) who gave meaning to a fourishing culture in that ssspace. Her book Le roman palestinien en hébreu (1966–2017): Langues, identités et histoire littéraire palestinienne en Israël (The Palestinian Novel in Hebrew (1966–2013): Languages, Identities and Palestinian Literary History in Israel) is expected in 2020 (collection Littérature, Histoire, Politique, Éditions Classiques Garnier). Nisa Ari is lecturer in art history at the Katherine G. McGovern College of the Arts, University of Houston. Her research explores the relationships between cultural politics and the development of art institutions, specifcally in Palestine and in Turkey. Her current book project, Cultural Mandates, Artistic Missions, and “The Welfare of Palestine”, 1876–1948, explores how radical political transformations from the last decades of Ottoman rule until the establishment of the State of Israel changed the nature of artistic pro- duction in Palestine. Her research has been published in Third Text, Arab Studies Journal, and Thresholds, and she has recently curated exhibitions at the Qalandiya International Art Biennial