Summary
Cousin of Niqula Khoury, active in the Orthodox movement, and co-author with him of A Survey of the History of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Matba’at Bayt al Maqdis, 1925) (‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), PDF p.52).
Details
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The Introduction records that almost forty years before the memoirs were written, Niqula Khoury and his cousin Shehadeh had published a history of the Orthodox Church in Palestine which became an important document in the battle of representations within the war for control of the Greek Orthodox Church and its resources (PDF p.22-23).
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The Survey (cited by Papastathis as Shehadeh Khoury and Nicola Khoury, Khulasat tarikh kanisat urshalim al-urthuduksiyya, 1925; republished Amman: Dar Al-Shorouk, 2002) was based in part on the Bertram-Luke Report (1921), reflected the Arab Orthodox Congress in Haifa (1923), and aimed to prove Arab participation in administering church affairs throughout the institution’s existence, answering Chrysostomos Papadopoulos’s History of the Church of Jerusalem (PDF p.52).
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Its arguments, as reported by Papastathis: “Rum” denotes the multiethnic Byzantine Empire, not the Greeks; the Jerusalem Church was arabized to 1517; Germanos (1537–1579) established “racial sectarianism” and the Brotherhood’s patrimonial system; the 1875 Fundamental Law “is biased to the detriment of the rights of the nationals”; and the British should reject the Patriarchate’s supposed Greek character, block Athenian intervention, acknowledge indigenous rights through a mixed council and expand electoral participation (PDF p.53-55). Brotherhood opposition and community leaders’ passivity left the book poorly circulated at a financial loss of four hundred Egyptian pounds to the authors (PDF p.55).
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The Memoirs §21 give the collaboration’s personal account: Shehadeh (spelled Shahada Khuri in the editors’ note 50, PDF p.112) had already begun to write such a history when the Haifa conference decided on the work, so the cousins decided to collaborate and publish at their own expense; it cost them four hundred Egyptian pounds to print, on a loan at 30% interest — “That was the cause of our ruin” in Niqula’s telling, as the Brotherhood laid obstacles and community leaders gave up on them (PDF p.112-113).
Related pages
‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), Niqula Khoury, Arab Orthodox Movement, Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem