'The House of the Priest': A Palestinian Life (1885-1954)

Summary

Edited volume presenting the memoirs of the Palestinian Orthodox priest, educator and nationalist Niqula Khoury (1885–1964 as dated in the Introduction; the title gives his life as 1885-1954 — see Open questions), written in Arabic in Lebanon in the 1950s or early 1960s, found in the archives of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in summer 2018, and published here in English translation with a Foreword by Cyrus Schayegh, an Introduction by Sarah Irving and Karène Sanchez Summerer (with a closing intervention by Charbel Nassif), and a chapter by Konstantinos Papastathis on Khoury and the Arab Orthodox Movement (‘The House of the Priest’: A Palestinian Life (1885-1954), PDF p.19, p.22). Part 1 gives the front matter, the Foreword, the Introduction in full, and Chapter 1 through PDF p.58: Schayegh’s reading of the memoirs as a triple palimpsest of loss (the 1910 Karak Revolt, the First World War and the nakba) and determination; the Introduction’s account of the manuscript, of Palestinian memoir writing, of Christianity and nationalism in Mandate Palestine, of Khoury’s Antisemitism and his associations with Miron Cristea and Amin al-Hussaini, and of his exaggeration and ego; and Papastathis on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, the three stages of the Arab Orthodox controversy, and Khoury and his cousin Shehadeh Khoury’s A Survey of the History of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem (1925) with its account of “Rum”, Germanos and the 1875 Fundamental Law (PDF p.9-58). Part 3 continues the Memoirs (Chapter 3, §§23-43) through Khoury’s Jerusalem priesthood from 1928, the 1932 Conference of Orthodox Arab Priests, his brother Yaqub’s disappearance and his father’s death, the General Strike of 1936 and the Royal Commission, and the 1937 Balkan and Geneva delegation with Emile al-Ghouri — Istanbul, Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Geneva, Athens and Egypt — ending with his return to Palestine on 27th October 1937 and his rescue of Yaqub al-Hanna (PDF p.114-154). Part 4 completes the Memoirs (Chapter 3, §§44-65): the returned Cristea medal and non-commemoration of Timotheos, the missing manuscript pages 45-46 and the revolt’s end, the blocked 1943 Cairo priesthood, the January 1946 audience with Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the al-Aqsa minbar speech, testimony to the Anglo-American Committee, the partition decision and the Committee of the Christian Union, the unanswered March 1948 weapons mission to Damascus, the family’s flight to Lebanon on 28th April 1948 and Wadi Shahrour under Elia Karam, the deaths of Bulos, Issa and Salem, and the Silver Jubilee of February 1952 — followed by the volume Bibliography in full and the Index through its J entries (PDF p.155-201). Part 5 completes the Index (entries J through Z, PDF p.202-213), closing the volume at printed p.195 with the Zuaiter, Akram entry; the book is now read in full.

What the file is

Book, Brill, Leiden | Boston, 2022, in the series Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies (volume 7) (PDF p.2-3). Open access under CC BY 4.0 (access basis: open-license (CC BY 4.0)); the licence applies only to original material. ISSN 2212-5523; ISBN 978-90-04-51539-0 (hardback), 978-90-04-51688-5 (e-book); LC record 2022007672 (PDF p.4). Part of project 276-25-002 CrossRoads: European cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Palestine, vidi programme financed by the Dutch Research Council (nwo), with an nwo Open Access book subsidy (PDF p.4). Cover illustration: Jaffa, 1921, Palestine (Franck Scholten collection, nino) (PDF p.4). Dedicated “To Salim Tamari” (PDF p.5). 213 PDF pages; printed pagination runs to p.183 (Index from printed p.171, Bibliography from printed p.165) plus front matter in roman numerals to xvii. Text copy is clean with === PDF p.N === markers and a Brill download line on every page; PDF p.6, p.8 and p.18 are blank apart from that line; the two maps (PDF p.16-17) are images with captions only in the text copy. The memoirs themselves (Chapter 3 of the volume, printed p.68) are Niqula Khoury’s work, translated and annotated by Sarah Irving, Charbel Nassif, Vicky Moussaed, Konstantinos Papastathis and Karène Sanchez Summerer (PDF p.7); Chapters 1 and 2 and the Foreword and Introduction are separate authored works inside the volume and are credited to their own authors throughout this page. Chapter 2’s fourteen figures are images in the original; the text copy gives captions and NINO shelfmarks only. The Memoirs as published elide the Karak revolt narrative at PDF p.100: after “they reached Karak” the printed text gives an ellipsis and resumes with the army’s entry that night — verified against the original PDF, where the ellipsis is printed in the edition itself. At PDF p.90 the Memoirs text carries the editors’ bracketed note that a paragraph of 3 lines has probably been covered by another sheet and is not clear, deduced to be about a family conflict. Further as-printed slips byte-verified in part 2: “phographer” and “a few highlight” and “the 1920’s” (PDF p.72); “Sotoris Roussos” in the Chapter 1 references (PDF p.70); “to prison them” in the Memoirs (PDF p.110); “since the siege of Antioch since 1724” in the Memoirs’ note 16 (PDF p.93); the Survey cited as by “Shahada Khuri wa Niqula Khuri” in the Memoirs’ note 50 (PDF p.112) against “Nicola Khoury” in Chapter 1’s references (PDF p.68). Spelling variants are held as printed in each place: the subject appears as Niqula Khoury (title and most of the volume), Nikula Khoury (Foreword), Nicola Khoury (Papastathis’s citation of the Survey, PDF p.52) and Niqula Al-Khoury (Nassif’s Introduction §5). Further as-printed slips byte-verified in part 3: “Carlsberg” for the Metropolitan’s resort (PDF p.136); “the Balkan counties” (PDF p.145); and “among?” in §43 (PDF p.154, verified against the original PDF, where the question mark is printed). The Memoirs name Sofia’s king “Tsar Maurice” (PDF p.137), which the editors’ note identifies as Boris III, and Bucharest’s grandest hotel as the “Senvasaki” (PDF p.138), a name the editors could not locate. Further as-printed slips byte-verified in part 4: “Bishara Uur” in §62’s heading and the Index for Khoury’s father-in-law (PDF p.178, p.193); “Talka” for Takla (PDF p.179); “this county” for this country in the al-Aqsa speech as printed (PDF p.167); the Index locator “1590” in the Arab/Palestinian cause entry (PDF p.191); “Dardenelles” (PDF p.196), “Haga Sophia Mosque” and “Haggear, Gregorios” (PDF p.199), “facism” (PDF p.197), “‘Islamofacism’” (PDF p.201) and Christopher II as Patriarch of “Alexandra” (PDF p.194), all in the Index. Further as-printed slips byte-verified in part 5, all in the Index: “Kharmi, Ghada” for Ghada Karmi (PDF p.202); “teacher/principle” in the Tomeh al-Khoury entry (PDF p.202); “nk ordinated as priest at” in the Mar Yaqub entry (PDF p.204); “Dear Yassin” for Deir Yassin in the massacres entry (PDF p.204); the Montreux Convention dated “(1837)” (PDF p.205); “Nathan der Weise (Gotthold Ephraim)” with the author’s surname truncated (PDF p.206); “Nicodemis I” (PDF p.206); “Paisos” for Paisios (PDF p.207); and “Shafir Gershon” inverted in the Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel entry (PDF p.211). No replacement characters occur anywhere in PDF p.202-213 (byte-verified). The edition prints in §45 that manuscript pages 45–46 are missing, mid-sentence in Khoury’s account of a 400-pound loan at 15% (PDF p.156), and prints “[text obscured]” in §47 (PDF p.158). No replacement characters occur anywhere in PDF p.155-201 (byte-verified). No replacement characters occur anywhere in PDF p.114-154 (byte-verified). As-printed slips byte-verified in the text copy and held, not corrected, in part 1: “Arab Orthox” in the Contents for Chapter 2’s title (PDF p.7); “Khuory” in both map captions and “Europa” in the Map 2 caption (PDF p.16-17); “who was died” (PDF p.26); “the Capitulation” (PDF p.27); “Struggle and Society in Palestine/Israel” in the Introduction text against “Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel” in its own note 9 (PDF p.23-24); “A. Gorri memoirs” in note 46 against Father Alberto Gori in the text (PDF p.32-33); Gotthold Ephraim Schneller’s Nathan der Weise as printed (PDF p.38); “advocat” (PDF p.53); “Roma Empire” (PDF p.53); “Madava” for Madaba (PDF p.58); “Mosely Lesch” in the Introduction bibliography (PDF p.45).

Section by section

Foreword — Khoury’s Memoirs as a Palestinian Palimpsest (PDF p.9-12 / printed p.ix-xii)

Cyrus Schayegh opens with the memoirs’ opening: Khoury lost his memoir materials three times, through the 1910 Karak Revolt, the First World War and the nakba — “Here, I have returned yet again to collect these memories and to write them down for the fourth time” (PDF p.9). The nakba stands out as a singularity, “the terrible catastrophe”, at national-collective scale; it is in exile that Khoury writes for the fourth time. Looking backward from 1948 the nakba had roots in 1917 — the Balfour Declaration mentioned only Jews, not Arabs, by name, founding a pattern of presence-versus-absence paralleled in Israeli statehood versus Palestinian statelessness — without 1917 making the nakba the only possible future (PDF p.9). The memoirs are a virtual triple palimpsest: loss repeatedly, and dogged determination (PDF p.9-10). Education, politics and organised religion in Khoury’s life each shaped the others; his life centred on Palestine but extended to (what would become) Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon; his schooling was eclectic amid local and imperial governments, native Churches and missionaries (PDF p.10). On his dead children Khoury is quoted: “we planted a baby in every city we lived in, Karak, Ramla, Jerusalem, and Birzeit, as a result of all the calamities we went through, but we thank God in every circumstance” (PDF p.10) — “planted”, as in a tree, turning death into life and loss into belonging. Christian-Muslim relations carry a tension: Khoury, a follower of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, is a bona fide Palestinian nationalist who believes Christians and Muslims are both Palestinians and nationalists, yet multi-religious nationalism was not a fait accompli but a project in the making, negotiated daily; he headed off a Christian-Muslim clash in Ramla and orated at al-Aqsa mosque (PDF p.10-11). He headed a Christian Palestinian delegation to the Balkans to win Orthodox support at the League of Nations, in the context of the debates surrounding the British Peel Commission of 1938 (as printed; PDF p.11). In exile in Lebanon from 15 November 1948 he served the church of Wadi Shahrour without a fixed salary, dependent on Archbishop Elia Karam (PDF p.11); post-nakba Palestinianness is at once more unified and more diverse than other nations (PDF p.11-12).

Notes on Contributors; Notes on Transliteration; Maps (PDF p.13-17 / printed p.xiii-xvii)

Contributor biographies for Sarah Irving, Charbel Nassif, Konstantinos Papastathis, Karène Sanchez Summerer and Cyrus Schayegh; the maps were produced by Zain Al Sharaf Wahbeh (Cambridge) (PDF p.13-14). Transliteration generally follows the International Journal of Middle East Studies system, without diacritics except ayn and hamza (PDF p.15). Map 1 maps Khoury’s life and family trips (1885–1932); Map 2 his 1937 trip to Eastern and Western Europe and his trips in the region (1943–1948) (PDF p.16-17).

Introduction — opening (PDF p.19-21 / printed p.1-3)

Irving and Sanchez Summerer present the memoirs, written in the early 1950s but long ignored in a Beirut archive, of Niqula Khoury, born in 1885 in Bir Zeit near Ramallah: from the final Ottoman decades through the First World War and the Mandate into the first years of the Nakba, which drove over 700,000 from their homes (PDF p.19). Rare aspects include a minor regional actor’s narration of the Committee of Union and Progress, its uprising against Sultan Abdel Hamid ii and the counter-revolution attempts. Khoury, an Orthodox priest and son and grandson of Orthodox priests, was an energetic agitator against the Greek hierarchy’s domination of the Orthodox Church in Palestine; the Arab Orthodox movement, rooted in the nineteenth century and the Nahda, demanded Arabic-speaking churchmen, regional disbursement of church dues and a community say in decisions (PDF p.19). Other Orthodox churches became autocephalous in the 1800s, but Palestine as the Holy Land made Greek relinquishment unlikely; the tension is still alive in controversies over Greek hierarchy sales of Jerusalem church land to Israeli settlers (PDF p.20). The fight for an Arab voice in the Church is widely acknowledged as closely linked to the origins of Arab nationalist consciousness; Khoury is unusual as a priest and teacher of the largest Christian grouping who deployed religious contacts in the nationalist cause, confounding binary assumptions about Muslim-Christian or Orthodox-Catholic conflict, with personal envy and enmity also visible (PDF p.20-21). His Balkan journey to the League of Nations session debating partition — he was a vocal backer of the 1936–1939 uprising and deeply opposed to splitting Palestine between Jews and Arabs — shows church-state overlap in interwar Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria and links across the Orthodox world beyond Greece and Russia (PDF p.21).

Introduction §1 — The Origins of This Book (PDF p.22-23 / printed p.4-5)

The manuscript was found in the archives of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in summer 2018 by Sanchez Summerer and Nassif; it is in formal Arabic with locally specific terms and occasional Ottoman Turkish words, and was translated, annotated and analysed with the permission of Professor Salim Tamari (PDF p.22). The manuscript was apparently written in Lebanon in the 1950s or early 1960s, shortly before Khoury’s death in 1964; there is no explicit autobiographical pact; written late in life, it nonetheless justifies his actions and foregrounds his role, and its family history and emotional openness suggest he also wrote for descendants (PDF p.22-23). Almost forty years earlier Khoury and his cousin Shehadeh published a history of the Orthodox Church in Palestine. A two-page section (original pages 45–46, edition page 138) was removed before donation, apparently dealing with family finances or debts and with Palestinian collaborators with the British or the Zionist movement (PDF p.23).

Introduction §2 — Palestine and Memoirs (PDF p.23-28 / printed p.5-10)

Palestinian autobiographies and diaries have reshaped history writing on the Arab and Islamicate worlds; the editors of Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel are quoted: “Just as ordinary people live in the shadows, so their life stories commonly remain obscure. Yet their lives frequently reveal a great deal of humanity and wisdom, as well as the harshness and brutality of everyday life, which rarely take center stage within conventional historical narratives” (PDF p.24). Autobiography has been prominent in Arabic writing for a millennium and more, from the sira onward; published Palestinian memoirs since the 1970s are surveyed in three groups — Arabic memoirs by national-movement figures mainly from notable families (al-Sakakini, ʿAwnī ʿAbd al-Hādī, al-Barghouti, Zuaiter, Tuqan, Jabra, al-Khalidi); recently edited subaltern diaries (Turjman, Sami ʿAmr, Jawhariyyeh); and English-language diaspora memoirs (Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi, Karmi, Abu Sitta, Yusif Sayigh, Mansour, Chacour), the last with a disproportionate number of Christians (PDF p.24-27). Khoury belongs largely with the middle group — a peasant background, an Arabic memoir unread for decades — but his defiant personality and organisational talents carried him to work and clash with patriarchs and metropolitans and to attend League of Nations conferences; his two consuming causes were independence of the Orthodox Church from Greek domination and the freedom of Palestine (PDF p.27-28).

Introduction §3 — Christianity and Nationalism in Mandate Palestine (PDF p.28-33 / printed p.10-15)

Christians constituted between 20% (c. 1920) and 11% (1949) of Palestine’s population, in a dozen denominations, each struggling as Arabs vis-à-vis foreign hierarchies, but sharing common ground with Muslim fellows (PDF p.28). The Mandate’s incorporation of the Balfour Declaration placed Christian and Muslim Arabs alike on the defensive (PDF p.29). Orthodox and Catholic Arabs gathered in the Muslim-Christian Associations, protested, joined the 1936–1939 rebellion and sat in all delegations to London; national schools such as Sakakini’s Dusturiyyah School transmitted “the love of the homeland” (PDF p.29). Khoury insists the Orthodox community was the main if not sole source of Palestinian nationalism, yet underlines the papacy’s support for Palestinian Catholics against the Orthodox Patriarchate’s failure to defend the Arab Orthodox; Catholic participation is documented through Grigorios Hajjar’s activism, the Catholic Committee for the National Defence in Palestine (August 1923), Melkite Bishop George Hakim’s mobilisation for the Arab Higher Committee, and Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s appeals to the Holy See (PDF p.30-31). Christian newspaper editors pressed for an Arab Orthodox and an Arab Latin Patriarch; Sawt al-Shaab, founded by ‘Isa Bandak, carried the permanent motto “The holiest struggle [Jihad] is that which places man’s liberty under the nation’s banner and the nation’s liberty under the banner of God” and publicised the Islah party’s programme in 1935 (PDF p.31). The Committee of the Christian Union first issued a statement from all Christian communities; in August 1947 the leaders of the eleven most important Christian denominations declared that dividing the Holy Land violated its sanctity and infringed the natural rights of the Arabs, the “only true people of Palestine” (PDF p.32-33). Christians also faced challenges within the national movement — resentment at their over-representation in British administration jobs, and from the mid-1930s more religion-based Muslim initiatives — but, the Introduction argues following Haiduc-Dale, most actors ensured Christian representation and cooperation, and Christians “remained unabashedly nationalistic” (PDF p.33).

Introduction §4 — Niqula Khoury and Anti-Semitism (PDF p.34-40 / printed p.16-22)

Khoury’s anti-Jewish comments largely fall into Orthodox Christian Antisemitism: a doctrinal, ecclesiological strand embedded in hymns and liturgies, dating from the Byzantine origins of the Orthodox Church, centred on Jews as the community who rejected and executed Christ; on Bauman’s account this model rests on the idea of sin, with salvation possible through conversion (PDF p.34-35). That differentiation is questioned: medieval converts remained suspected of “crypto-Judaism”, implying a racial, inherited notion of Jewishness in pre-modern thought (PDF p.35). Khoury’s associations include holders of modern, racialised anti-Semitism: Miron Cristea, Romanian Orthodox Patriarch and Prime Minister, under whose prime ministership c. 225,000 Romanian Jews were stripped of their citizenship (PDF p.35-36). Khoury, who cannot plausibly have been unaware of Cristea’s policies and who wrote in the 1950s when Romanian Jewry’s fate was well known, is quoted from the Memoirs kissing Cristea’s hand: “I, in the name of hundred thousand Arab Orthodox in Palestine, kiss this pure hand, asking on their behalf that you would prevent the Judaisation of the Holy Land, preventing those who crucified Christ from taking the opportunity to profane the pure places that He sanctified” (PDF p.36-37), and proudly circulating Cristea’s signed statement that “Palestine should remain Arab for its Arab people” to the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestinian delegation in Geneva and the press (PDF p.37). On Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Introduction holds both that his figure has been used to build a language of “Islamofascism” denying Palestinian self-determination, and that Arab and Muslim rejection of fascism and resistance to Nazism was widespread among Palestinians, and that al-Husayni himself was a virulent anti-Semite who knowingly participated in the Nazi project, lived in Berlin on a German stipend, met Hitler and recruited Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia for the German army (PDF p.37-39). Even on Bauman’s differentiation, Khoury steps into the racialised category in his Balkan-travel comments; but his anti-Jewish ideas were a political choice and a religious prejudice rooted in a specific historical moment, not representative of Palestinian thought in general or Palestinian Christians in particular (PDF p.39-40). The editors state at the section’s outset of the wider discussion that Khoury’s anti-Semitic remarks must be neither ignored nor excused, particularly as his writing postdates World War ii and knowledge of the Holocaust, and that accusations of anti-Semitism must not be weaponised to deny Palestinian rights (PDF p.21-22).

Introduction §5 — Exaggeration, Ego and Truth (PDF p.40-42 / printed p.22-24)

Charbel Nassif (the section is his, per the Introduction’s note 74) reads the memoirs against the memoirist’s usual self-favouring: Khoury has an oversized ego and a desire for self-aggrandisement, bringing every event back to himself, yet excelled in teaching and pastoral services and believed he played a crucial role in the national struggle (PDF p.40). Examples: students befriending him in hope of being chosen as Cathedral cantors; the expression “we had a shining place among them”; the governor and mutasarrif attending his classes; former priests as “worthless” after his and Khalil Hakim’s ordination; his claimed equality with Archbishop Grigorios Hajjar and his claim that the Arab Higher Committee proposed his name to the Peel Commission before Yaqub Farraj insisted on Hajjar (PDF p.41). Editorial-team searches of Balkan newspaper databases found his claimed 1927 (as printed) press stardom imprecise; his leaving Jerusalem to serve in Cairo without the Patriarch’s permission cannot be justified under canon law, and omitting the patriarch’s name in a wedding litany in his presence was an excess of audacity (PDF p.41-42). The memoirs should be taken with a grain of salt: their imprecision is that of an amateurish spirit rather than a real documenter, and Khoury may have written to cope with upheaval, not expecting publication (PDF p.42).

Introduction §6 — Bibliography (PDF p.42-47 / printed p.24-29)

The Introduction’s bibliography lists the works cited in its notes, from Abbasi on Palestinian volunteers against Nazism to Zuaiter’s diaries; citation conflicts between the notes and this list are held under Open questions.

Chapter 1 — opening and §1 Context (PDF p.48-52 / printed p.30-34)

Konstantinos Papastathis presents Khoury as at once a conservative religious man holding to family ethics, social hierarchies and communal dividing lines, and a homo politicus: a local supporter of the Young Turk Revolution (1908), later an Arab Palestinian nationalist and a charismatic leader of the Arab Orthodox congregation against the authoritarian administration of the Church by the “foreign” Greek establishment (PDF p.48). His imprint falls in three fields — the political (a fervent anti-Zionist with close ties to Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini), the intra-communal (a leading representative of the parish clergy), and the intra-religious (at the forefront of the Arab Orthodox movement) — and the chapter pursues the third, asking what Khoury’s involvement in religious politics was and how the Greek hierarchy responded to his claims (PDF p.49). The Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, considered the oldest Christian institution in Palestine, was linked from the Ottoman conquest (1517) to the mid-nineteenth century to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre was its ruling authority on a monastic model — the Patriarch had almost absolute power, monks bequeathed their properties to the Brotherhood, it could acquire only vakf real estate, and parish priests were not Brotherhood members — allowing the Patriarchate’s gradual hellenization in parallel to Greek nation-building (PDF p.50). The Greek-Arab controversy is divided into three stages: after the Young Turk Revolution, when the indigenous Orthodox demanded a mixed council and the Turkish Order partially fulfilled some demands without affecting Greek control; the Mandate’s formative years, when the congregation demanded reforms and the exclusion of any Greek protective right, the British Commissions recommended inquiry, and the Administration implemented no structural reform (its refusal to acknowledge Greece as protectrice followed its strategy of ending the capitulation regime, ratified at San Remo in 1920, not Arab Orthodox protests); and the 1930s patriarchal election, where the struggle for a new Fundamental Law failed amid the Arab Revolt, the Husseini-Nashashibi division of the Arab Orthodox camp and British hesitancy (PDF p.51-52).

Chapter 1 §2 — Niqula Khoury: The Communal Activist and Religious Historian (PDF p.52-58 / printed p.34-40)

Khoury held that the Arab Orthodox struggle should be grounded in “hidden historical facts”, deconstructing the Greek establishment’s historiographical monopoly, and written in the indigenous language (PDF p.52). With his cousin Shehadeh Khoury he published A Survey of the History of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem (1925), based in part on the Bertram-Luke Report (1921), reflecting the Arab Orthodox Congress in Haifa (1923), and answering Chrysostomos Papadopoulos’s History of the Church of Jerusalem: the Greek establishment as the hostile foreign Other that usurped the local religious patrimony, oppressing laity and parish clergy in communal justice, education, financial management and real estate (PDF p.52-53). On “Rum”: the Pact of Omar’s “Royal Nation” denotes the multiethnic Byzantine Empire, not the Greeks; “Rum” is citizenship (tabaiya), state loyalties and a sense of historical community, and the period to 1517 was the arabization of the Jerusalem Church, its working language Arabic and its clergy largely indigenous Arabs (PDF p.53-54). The turning point was Patriarch Germanos (1537–1579), who ordained a Greek bishop whenever an Arab bishop died, established “racial sectarianism”, founded the Brotherhood’s monastic structure and engineered his successor Sophronius (1579–1608); Paisios (1645–1660) limited Brotherhood membership to monks of Greek origin and Dositheos (1669–1707) excluded non-members from election as bishop or patriarch, leaving election of an Arab patriarch possible only from outside Palestine (PDF p.54). The Fundamental Law of 1875 “is biased to the detriment of the rights of the nationals” (haqq al-wataniin), Hierotheos’s promises and the post-1908 mixed-council agreement were never applied, and the Khourys called on the British to reject the Patriarchate’s supposed Greek character, block Athenian intervention, acknowledge indigenous rights through a mixed council and expand electoral participation, ending Greek cultural imperialism (PDF p.55). The Survey seems to have influenced the Bertram-Young Commission, but Brotherhood opposition and community leaders’ passivity left it poorly circulated at a loss of four hundred Egyptian pounds; in the Memoirs Khoury presents the controversy mainly in religious terms — religious elites v. parishioner underdogs (PDF p.55). The Memoirs also show a congregational layer with real autonomy: parishes traditionally had a say in, if not the nomination of, their own priest or preacher, and the Patriarchate normally ordained the community’s choice, even in Khoury’s case (PDF p.56). Khoury describes the Orthodox schools network negatively — his village school was “more as homely gathering than a proper school”, from which he “did not benefit in any way” — while community-funded schools enjoyed a degree of autonomy, as with his headship of the National Orthodox School (PDF p.56-57). His alignment with the Mufti made him a representative of the Palestine cause at home and abroad but set him against the lay leader Yaqub Farraj, a Nashashibi ally, letting the Greek hierarchy divide and rule; Khoury believed the camp’s party division was a major factor in Timotheos’s election (1935–1955) after Damianos (1897–1931), the Ramallah parish priests’ Clerical Committee (with Khoury as secretary) being opposed by both the Patriarchate and Farraj’s lay Executive Committee (PDF p.57). Papastathis holds Khoury’s accusation that the lay leaders “were the direct reason behind his (i.e. Timotheos’) election” to be unsubstantiated and better explained by his dislike of Farraj; Farraj then blocked Khoury’s selection as Arab Christian clergy representative to the Peel Commission in favour of Bishop Gregorius Hajjar and opposed his delegation to the Orthodox countries (PDF p.58). The ecclesiastical justice system lay under the Greek hierarchy’s absolute power; Khoury, a court member who became head clerk and consultant, recounts his effort against its bribery and corruption, while Arab Orthodox priests and laymen in fact formed the majority in the Spiritual and Mixed Ecclesiastical Courts without overstepping the local bishop’s authority as president (PDF p.58; the section continues in part 2).

Chapter 1 §3 — The Greek Narrative and Niqula Khoury (PDF p.59-66 / printed p.41-48)

Papastathis first closes §2: no substantial evidence supports any assumption that Khoury took advantage of his ecclesiastical-court position, corruption being a structural problem not attributable stereotypically to either side; and Khoury’s narration of the Mandate’s beginning and of the 1908–1920 attempt by monks with Athens’ backing to depose Damianos is distorted — it was not Greece against a Patriarchate refusing foreign control but a struggle for patriarchal power as such, its outcome settled by the British tenet of avoiding foreign interference in the prospective colony (PDF p.59). §3 then reconstructs the Greek elites’ two-fold response — deconstructing Khoury’s discourse and impeding him personally — from the Patriarchate’s Refutation of the Allegations put forward by Sir Anton Bertram (1937) and Kallistos Miliaras’s The Holy Places of Palestine and his note in the Bertram-Luke report. The hierarchy’s authority rests on the confraternity’s monastic centralization and on the Greek national character given institutional validity by the decrees defining it as ‘Rum’: ‘Rum’ meant those of Greek national consciousness and cultural belonging, and ‘Rum Millet’ “is restricted to the Greek nation” (PDF p.60-61). Jerusalem’s status rests on its sanctuaries, giving the Church not a pastoral character but that of a place of pilgrimage, and the shrines’ owner is the Hellenic race in its totality acting through the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre (PDF p.60-61). The local Orthodox are thus arabophones of Greek ethnic origin, not Arabs; their Arab self-identification is Russian-lit phyletism, and Khoury’s Arab patriarchs a Russian-constructed distortion — Arab patriarchs are conceded as possible only in 1460–1530, without historical evidence, and even they, Miliaras reports, were fluent in Greek (PDF p.61-62). The effects: exclusion of the indigenous clergy and laity from governance and finance, secondary importance for pastoral care, charity and education, and practical refusal of Brotherhood admission under Helleno-Orthodoxia, the essentialist equation of Orthodoxy with the Greek nation, which cast the Arab congregation as an institutional out-group whose claims corrupted religious purity (PDF p.62-63). The establishment was not cohesive but divided into antagonistic power networks, with six external actors in play (the Arab laity and parish clergy, the Ottoman and British authorities, Athens, Russia, the other Churches, local political developments), and Khoury, connected to the administrations and the Orthodox Commonwealth, could not be discounted (PDF p.63). His relations with Damianos were volatile — shelter and a hundred and twenty gold francs in 1910, when Damianos, accused by the Greek nationalist block of being pro-Arab and pro-Russian, had Russian-consular and Arab backing; exclusion from the Monastery of the Cross seminary; an ordination blocked until the British High Commissioner pressured Damianos, who sent Bishop Meliton in his place in 1928 (PDF p.63-64). With Timotheos relations were bad from the start — Greek nationalist, Damianos affiliate, and the man Khoury opposed by backing Bishop Keladion, for which alignment the Greek consulate in Jerusalem paid Khoury five pounds in each of 1931 and 1932; the Matari book commission, the withheld Cristea medal and its allegedly offensive return note, Khoury’s resignation and non-commemoration, the blocked Cairo appointment and supervised return to Jerusalem follow (PDF p.64-65). Khoury’s Cairo loyalty declaration to King Abdalaziz Al-Saud — “that the Muslims and Christians in Palestine place their sacred sanctuaries under your custody and trust them to your poignant sword” — alienated King Abdullah, who had proposed making him the “Arabs’ Patriarch” and who then told the Patriarchate the holy places “belong to the Greeks;” Papastathis reads Abdullah’s stance as diplomatic — Status Quo protection and good relations with a pro-Arab Greece that did not recognize Israel — not as Khoury explains it (PDF p.65-66).

Chapter 1 §4 — Conclusions (PDF p.66-67 / printed p.48-49)

The Greek establishment viewed Arab Orthodox claims as a threat, but its counter-strategy was structured, at least officially, on the institutional/legal aspect — the institution’s monastic character and the supposed legally binding Greek custodianship rights over the holy places — not on the national criterion. The dividing line blurs with the balance of power: Khoury enjoyed Damianos’s support when Damianos was under Russian protection and on good terms with the Arabs, and in the 1930s supported the opposite camp and Keladion — which may explain the condemned author on the Greek consulate’s hidden payroll, and Timotheos’s dislike driving his attempts to settle in Egypt or Syria. Papastathis asks why the Memoirs never mention the Arab Orthodox demand for new communal regulations in place of the Fundamental Law, so closely related to Timotheos’s election. The paradoxically non-exclusionary Khoury-hierarchy relationship is the first finding; the second is the Memoirs’ detail on Mandate power games missing from official accounts — as with Abdullah I’s protection of the Greek establishment after East Jerusalem’s incorporation into Jordan, explained by Status Quo foreign-policy priorities and, the Memoirs add, by Abdullah’s suspicion of Arab Orthodox leadership as serving his opponents’ ends. The Survey, republished in 2002, remains a pool of information and a tool for rights still unfulfilled more than a century after their articulation (PDF p.66-67).

Chapter 1 §5-6 — References and Archives (PDF p.67-71 / printed p.49-53)

Chapter 1’s bibliography in full (Astafieva to Zander), including the works cited in the notes throughout part 2 — among them Miliaras (1921, 2002), Metaxakis (1909), Karolides (1909), the Patriarchate’s Refutation (1937), Papastathis’s own articles (2013–2019) and Papastathis and Kark (2014, 2016) — and its archive list: the Greek Foreign Ministry archive files B/36/1, B/35 (8) and B/36 iii; the Public Record Office’s Colonial Office file CO 733/258/11; and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem Archives’ High Commission file (PDF p.67-71).

Chapter 2 — Eastern Orthodoxy: Snapshots on Arab Orthodox in Palestine and Jordan from the Franck Scholten Photographic Collection, 1921–1923 (PDF p.72-85 / printed p.54-67)

A photographic chapter entire. Franck Scholten (1881–1942), the amateur Dutch photographer (“phographer” as printed) of La Palestine illustrée (1929), travelled to Palestine at the beginning of the 1920s and died before completing further volumes; the majority of his photos were never published, and his collection, held at NINO, Leiden University, was undisclosed and being digitised (PDF p.72). Fourteen figures follow, each an image with caption and shelfmark only in the text copy: 2.1 Arab Orthodox Vendors in the Old City of Jerusalem; 2.2 Old City of Jerusalem; 2.3 Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem; 2.4 Greek Orthodox Priests at the entrance of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Thursday; 2.5 Greek priests; 2.6 Villa Arabe; 2.7 Orthodox Easter, with candles decorated for Palm Sunday, Jaffa; 2.8 Young Palestinian Orthodox girl celebrating Easter, Jaffa; 2.9 Greek Pilgrims at the River Jordan on Epiphany (the white marks Scholten’s cropping); 2.10 Tour guides, dragomans and Greek Orthodox priests, Jordan River; 2.11 Orthodox Pilgrims’ camp, River Jordan; 2.12 Orthodox Priests in the Jordan Valley; 2.13 Greek Orthodox Priest in Anjara, Jordan; 2.14 A Greek Orthodox Hermit and His House, Beit Hogla (east of Jericho) — all 1921–1923 (PDF p.72-85).

Chapter 3 (the Memoirs) — Note and §1 Birth and Early Life; §2 The Ordination of My Father (PDF p.86-88 / printed p.68-70)

The Memoirs open with Khoury’s Note on the four writings (quoted in full in the Foreword entry above): composed first as a child, destroyed by the 1910 Karak revolt, by the First World War and by the terrible catastrophe of Palestine, and written down for the fourth time in hope its luck will differ (PDF p.86). §1: born in Birzeit, in the governorate of Ramallah in Jerusalem, Palestine, in mid-July 1885 (Eastern Calendar) on a Thursday, and named Niqula for Saint Nikolaos, the day’s saint in the Greek Orthodox Church (PDF p.86). The family was Dar al-Qassis, the house of the priest, three forefathers having been priests; his father was the eldest of five brothers (Issa, Salem, Moussa, Mitri) and a sister Hanne, and married Nusra, daughter of Suleiman Mazid, the whole household living with the grandfather, priest of BirZeit’s Orthodox community; Khoury was the third child, after Rafqa (died aged seven) and Khalil (died an infant); the family’s moderate livelihood was agriculture and livestock — vineyards, fig and olive orchards, arable land, sheep, oxen, cattle, donkeys — and his grandfather arbitrated village disputes, known for integrity and courage in speaking the truth even at his own cost (PDF p.87). §2: when great-grandfather Father Moussa could no longer serve, the community agreed to ordain Khoury’s father in his grandfather’s place, the grandfather having refused; ordained 8th November 1891 under Patriarch Gerasimus, he served although two priests had been ordained before him — Father Ibrahim Daoud, not much loved, and Father Ibrahim Abu Helwe, paralyzed in his hands; Khoury was six, Yaqub three, and Khalil was born that year during the Jerusalem ordination trip (PDF p.87-88).

Chapter 3 §§3-4 — In the Village School; Our Life in the Village (PDF p.88-90 / printed p.70-72)

§3: the Greek Orthodox village school in the mukhtar Salame Abu Khalil al-Kila’s attic, taught by his brother Suleiman al-Kila, later priest of Gaza — a homely gathering whose teacher was more of a concierge, spinning wool or sleeping and leaving the children to teach one another; “It is very obvious that I did not benefit in any way throughout that year.” Successive Tayba teachers followed: Daoud al-Khoury (reading, writing, calculus), Hanna Musa al-Khoury (grammar, geography, religious history, catechism, basics of Greek), then the drunkard Salim Zaghloul from Ramallah, who hit Khoury in the face with a truncheon, almost knocking out his eye; his angry father moved him to the Protestant school, whose teacher Butros Nasser, preparing for a deacon’s exam, likewise left the children to teach one another — seven years in village schools without benefit worth mentioning, his only real training his father’s pre-dawn church readings of psalms and canons (PDF p.88-89). §4: grandfather Musa the priest died in 1893 aged 85, after sixty years of service, refusing Patriarch Nicodemus’s persuasion to exchange his black turban and everyday abaya for the kalimavkion and outer cassock; siblings Bulos (born 6th September 1894), Hanna (died an infant) and Aziza (born 1898) and the cousins’ births follow; the crowded joint house’s quarrels — children, then mothers, then men — made life hell, until his father rented an old house of the Obeid family: the family’s first feeling of being a real family, sleeping on one mat under a single quilt with hay pillows, barefoot, on bread, oil, onions, olives and sometimes lentils; then the father, helped by the mother, built a house facing the old home, Khoury hauling cut stone and lime by donkey alongside the farm work (the passage on the building breaks off at the editors’ bracketed note that a paragraph of 3 lines has probably been covered by another sheet, deduced to concern a family conflict) (PDF p.89-90).

Chapter 3 §§5-8 — My Father Moves to Karak; In the Seminary in Jerusalem; My Appointment as a Teacher at Karak; Marriage and Family Life in Karak (PDF p.90-95 / printed p.72-77)

§5: the father was appointed priest for Karak in Transjordan and went alone; Aziza was born soon after he left, the family left without a penny until his remittances came; after a year testing the ground he sent for them, and the family travelled to Karak in autumn 1899 — Khoury 14, Yaqub 11, Khalil eight, Bulos five, Aziza six months — arriving exhausted after four days on the backs of beasts to a prepared house and welcoming gifts of wheat, flour, margarine, ghee and bulgur (PDF p.90-91). §6: Karak’s well-organized school, where Qustandi Salah of Ramallah privately tutored Khoury for the Jerusalem seminary; the Patriarchate’s seminary high school at the monastery of Saint Demetrios, its one-student-per-town law, the rejection of the higher-scoring Khoury for Isaac al-Kila and the Gaza-place slight by Archimandrite Yusif, the father’s fury — and the Karak people’s mobilization, which forced the Patriarchate to accept Khoury for Karak’s reserved place: entry in mid-September 1901 aged 16, rapid distinction in Arabic and Greek, appointment as cantor of the Mar Yaqub cathedral with power to choose his helpers, the Easter robbery that delivered him home naked but for undershirt and underpants, and the early-1905 exclusion of Khoury and nine others when the Synod converted the school to commercial subjects and moved it to Jaffa, fearing graduates would enter the Greek Order’s Theological School of the Cross (PDF p.91-92). §7: back in Karak thirsting for learning, he wrote secretly to Patriarch of Antioch Gregorios Haddad for a Balamand place; Haddad’s accepting reply fell into his father’s hands, who, fearing the monastic order, alerted the Greek official, who had Khoury appointed Karak teacher at one and a half French francs a month and instructed the father to marry him off for ordination; from mid-September 1905 he taught as second schoolmaster under Tomeh al-Khoury, and reorganized the girls’ school (PDF p.93-94). §8: the engagement, arranged lest he marry in Karak and stay, to Sara, daughter of his uncle Salame Yusif al-Qassis; the simple wedding on 1st November 1906 at Saint George’s, Birzeit, blessed by his father and the village priest Issa Musa with neither mother nor siblings present; the shared Karak household’s bounty; Yaqub and Bulos sent to the Jaffa commercial school, Khalil studying at home; and the brothers’ joint tenure of the Karak school — Khoury principal at three French francs, Yaqub at two liras, Khalil at one and a half, his father at two liras plus wheat-sale income — in cheap, abundant Karak, the school raised above anything the town had seen, its choir formed, the family guests of honour at every banquet, Khoury speaking for the Christians at official celebrations: “We had a shining place among them” (PDF p.94-95).

Chapter 3 §§9-10 — The Secret Party; Our Family Life in the Meantime (PDF p.95-98 / printed p.77-80)

§9: Karak’s secret branch of the Young Turks — the Committee of Union and Progress — aiming to replace the autocratic regime with constitutional parliamentary government despite Abdulhamid’s annihilation of accused members; Khoury, befriending its highly ranked employee and officer members, joined, swore allegiance and soon became associate secretary and right hand of its president, the Mufti, concealing it all from his father, whose late-night rebukes he silently bore; his baffling eminence followed — membership of the government schools’ examining committee (a position never given to a Christian under Ottoman rule), a Serail speech the Mutasarrıf asked to publish, classroom visits of hours — culminating in General Isma’il Fazıl Pasha’s post-constitution tour (freedom and the constitution declared 11th July 1908), at which Fazıl publicly announced the party, hugged Khoury and praised his loyalty and dedication to loud applause, his father’s tears, and the Christians’ manifold-raised esteem (PDF p.95-97). Party belonging, Khoury writes, benefited him as the highest academies could not: Karak was almost an exile place for freedom-supporting Arab and Turkish officials, whose principles, ethics, knowledge and social manoeuvre he absorbed (PDF p.97). §10: family contentment — hunting and fishing with young men at the river; the first child, Mariam, now Marie, born 5th March 1908, and the congratulatory flood of gifts (sugared almonds of 16 pounds offered; five tanks of margarine, 70 chickens and poultry, flour, bulgur, kishk, rice, sugar received); the Ghawr vegetable supplier and his fortnightly boars of over fifteen pounds at half a riyal (ten piasters); Yaqub’s weekly insistence on leaving Karak for Palestine; and his mother’s first symptoms of mental imbalance, most likely from a harmful head blow struck by uncle Issa (PDF p.98).

Chapter 3 §§11-13 — On the Causes of the Revolt of the Year 1910; The Return to Palestine; Memories of Karak (PDF p.99-104 / printed p.81-86)

§11 (with §10’s close: Martha’s death as a child and Takla’s birth on 4th September 1910, before she was three months old the counter-revolution broke out): Khoury’s causal chain — freedom and constitutional rights granted 11th July 1908, then rescinded by Abdul Hamid for rule by Mohammedan Law, with instructions that Christians be eliminated to make the nation purely Islamic; the party’s persuasion of the free officers, who under Lieutenant Mahmud Shawkat Pasha marched on Istanbul, dethroned and captured the Sultan and installed his brother Mohammad Rashid Khalifa; command falling to the army and the party men; and the deposed Sultan’s followers kindling counter-revolution — Balkans, Anatolia, Armenia, Yemen, Jabal al-Druze — until it reached Karak (PDF p.99-100). The published text then elides the revolt itself (ellipsis as printed) and resumes with the rebels gone that night, the army’s entry, and the family’s return on 4th December 1910 to an echoing, owl-haunted empty house and nights in the girls’ school, helping families with mattresses, sheets and food; the army leader’s agreement that Khoury’s father mark Christians with the sign of the cross on clothes and doors against the coming decimation of the Muslims; the reprisals — streets filled with unburied dead, houses looted and burned, the city a ruin in one night — from which many Muslims too were saved by the cross mark; and the recovery of only one bed cover of the family’s belongings (PDF p.100-101). The editors’ notes dissent throughout: most researchers locate the causes locally (tax increases, reduced tribal stipends, the Damascus tax rise, the breech-loading-rifle ban and arms ban in Karak, the male census), Gubser rejecting any wider nationalist or counter-revolutionary background; the cross-marking role belongs in other sources to ‘Awda al-Qasus, a more probable candidate; and the reprisals were more random than Khoury paints, though bloody (PDF p.100-101). §12: a month’s wait, then the flight — pack animals to Qatrana station, the Hejaz railway to Ziza, the night walk sinking knee-deep in mud to Madaba, his mother’s fall from her mule near El-Qatrana holding Marie, which with her older concussion and the terror cost her her mind until her death; a five-day blizzard in an army tent with about 18 souls at El-Qatrana; two weeks snowbound in Madaba on uncles Eid and Daoud’s hospitality; Jerusalem, the Saint Nicholas monastery night, Damianos’s moved reception and the 120 gold French francs, the paid service exemption for the year in Birzeit, and his father’s arrival three months later, the family building two rooms and an iwan near Dar Nasser al-Suleiman (PDF p.101-103). §13: twelve years at Karak, the happiest days of the family’s life; the miraculous healing at Karak church of Khalil al-Qaymari of Yatta, chained to a column, freed and healed by Saint George before more than seventy witnesses including Khoury; and the dream three days before the revolt — the eastern sky-door, three angels (“you will be refined like gold in the furnace”; “do not be afraid my little flock”; “those who endure till the end will be saved”), his father’s verdict that it was a vision, and the revolt’s outbreak exactly three days later, on 21st November 1910, the feast of the Entry of the Virgin Mary to the Temple (PDF p.103-104).

Chapter 3 §§14-17 — From Karak to Ramla; World War I; Our Family Life during the War; Our Situation after the War (opening) (PDF p.104-108 / printed p.86-90)

§14: headmaster Aftimus’s move to Ramla drew the father after him (the community’s dislike of priest Suleiman al-Deir), leaving for Ramla in early July 1911; Khoury followed as teacher on 15th September 1911 with his mother and Aziza, Yaqub and Khalil returning to Karak; the Italian attack on Tripoli, Burka and Benghazi provoked mob assaults on Ramla’s Christians, who took refuge in the Latin monastery, Khoury removing his family to Birzeit and staying two months with his father until consular interference calmed matters; a year as second teacher under Amin Massad, then headmaster from 15th September 1912, the school made the talk of the town and its choir — the diocese’s first of its kind — drawing listeners from Jaffa; the Balkan War’s dark days for Ottoman Christians, calmed, Khoury holds, by Christian enrolment alongside Muslims; the family’s Salame killed and Hanna returned; his mother’s worsening sickness; and Ibrahim, named for his father, dead before six months and buried in Ramla — the first child whose death they truly grieved, Martha having died days after birth (PDF p.104-106). §15: the war of 4th August 1914 — Russia, England and France against Germany, Austria and Turkey; men of 18 to 45 conscripted, crops and animals seized, hunger, the locust plague, cholera, the country almost emptied (the editors’ note gives around 300,000 deaths in Greater Syria); Khoury first of the brothers summoned, clerk at Jerusalem’s clothing and munitions warehouse then officer responsible for issuing stores, a post through which Yaqub (Ramla clothing warehouse), Khalil (rations store), Boulos (fodder stores), Hanna (warehouse guard) and many others obtained safe postings; three years in Jerusalem, seven days jailed at the war’s end on jealous denunciation before the truth cleared him; the British advance — Gaza, Ramla, Lydda, Wadi al-Sirar, Qastal — and his flight to Birzeit and Ramla as his father, Aziza, Sara, Marie and Takla were left in shelled Birzeit; the long roll of wartime family deaths (mother, uncle Salame, grandfather Hanna, grandmother Aziza, uncle Musa, uncle Ghattas and family, aunt Hanne, uncle Abdullah’s family, and others), and Sara’s sister Zarifa, killed by a Turkish soldier stealing her jewellery; Yaqub’s rescue of the family from Birzeit, the Turks having looted the rubble, the family emerging as from Karak, almost naked and glad to be alive (PDF p.106-108). §16: Sara’s war — both man and woman of the household, harvesting Birzeit’s olives, grapes and figs, helping in Ramla and Jerusalem — and the three war babies who died, Olga in Jerusalem, Ibrahim in Jerusalem, Musa in Birzeit: “In this way, we planted a baby in every city we lived in, Karak, Ramla, Jerusalem, and Birzeit, as a result of all the calamities we went through, but we thank God in every circumstance” (PDF p.108). §17 opens: post-war suffering worse than war suffering — the father’s Karak wheat, then the Ramla army-stores head’s provisions for Khalil’s sake, then rising wheat prices, worklessness and an emptied house, and Khoury’s village wheat-buying for resale in Ramla (PDF p.108; continued in the next entry).

Chapter 3 §§17 (continued)-19 — Our Situation after the War; Muslim-Christian Relations in Ramla; Among the Community (PDF p.109-111 / printed p.91-93)

§17 continued: army work refused by his brothers, government wheat sales undercutting their trade, Khoury’s own school and his army-newspaper columns at half an Egyptian pound each; Khalil’s Tayba hostel venture with Jiryis al-Khoury — huge profit unseen, then bankruptcy; and mid-September 1918’s reopening of the Patriarchal schools, paid for by the Greek state, Khoury back as Ramla headmaster at 10 Egyptian pounds a month, reviving the school, its choir and his new alumni Economic Charitable Society (PDF p.109). §18: Ramla’s post-occupation Christian hooligans, emboldened by rule by a Christian country, assaulted Muslim fellow-citizens, insulted Islam and the Quran and threw garbage at the Muezzin in the minaret; Khoury fought the spirit like blowing ash until the Easter Monday procession (note 46 on ba’th), when a young drunkard’s shouted insults at Islam and Mohammed’s religion before Muslim onlookers brought stones, batons, switchblades and pistols on the churchyard crowd; with the community’s wise men, Salim Ibrahim Zabana in the forefront, Khoury cancelled the prayers, stripped the priests of vestments into the church and drove the young men apart until calm returned; the Muslim leaders’ home visit half an hour later to congratulate his firmness; his Allenby-dinner speech in the Ramla Orthodox monastery; the Christians’ recognition, on Muslim testimony — “if it was not for the strong stand that Master Niqula took on that day, there would be no Christian surviving in Ramla today” — that he had saved them from massacre; the troublemakers handed over to prison; the ornate chandelier bought by the Christians and presented to the Great Mosque on a Friday, destroying every spark of discord and drawing a reciprocal Muslim gesture; and the joint youth club, first of its kind in all Palestine, with Khoury elected president (PDF p.109-111). §19: the Greek state’s one year of school funding and its plan — debt relief in exchange for control of the Patriarchate’s waqfs, schools and churches — rejected by a rallied community, the Mandate authorities stopping Greek state interference; the schools back with the Brotherhood, teachers’ salaries halved and the old corrupt ways resumed, driving Khoury’s resignation into the government education system (PDF p.111).

Chapter 3 §§20-23 (opening) — The First Orthodox Conference in Haifa; The History of the Church of Jerusalem; Our Life in Ramla after the War; Our Move from Ramla to Jerusalem (PDF p.111-113 / printed p.93-95)

§20: the post-1908 reform movement, its mixed board with an annual budget of 30,000 French francs, embarked on in 1910 and dissolved at the war’s declaration in 1914; the Patriarchate’s post-war refusal, pleading war debts, to re-establish it; and the Haifa conference — dated July 1920 in the Memoirs, the editors’ note holding this likely a typographical error for 1923 — of all the Orthodox in Palestine and Transjordan, Khoury representing Ramla alongside Jiryis al-Dahdala, electing an executive committee (PDF p.111-112). §21: the conference’s decision to write the Church of Jerusalem’s history; Shehadeh having already begun, the cousins’ collaboration, published at their own expense for four hundred Egyptian pounds on a loan at 30% interest — “That was the cause of our ruin” — as the Brotherhood obstructed and the leaders gave up, leaving piles of unsold books (PDF p.112-113). §22: Ramla, 1918 to autumn 1926 — five children born, George, Julia and Toufic dead, the current George (born 3rd May 1921 amid the Jaffa revolt fires) and the current Olga (born April 1923) surviving; the four-year-old George’s month in Jerusalem’s French Hospital and miraculous recovery (PDF p.113). §23 opens: government-school teaching in Ramla from October 1922 to July 1926; the Jerusalem community’s invitation to administer its national school preparatory to ordination; three delegations’ persistence; the three-year contract at 15 Egyptian pounds a month plus 30 pounds a year for housing; and the family’s move to Jerusalem at the beginning of October 1926 — Sara, Marie, Takla, George, Olga — leaving his father with Aziza in Ramla, Bulos gone to Egypt as cantor of the Syrian Dormition church (PDF p.113; the section continues in part 3).

Chapter 3 §§23 (continued)-24 — The National Orthodox School and My Ordination (PDF p.114-117 / printed p.96-99)

§23 concluded: Khoury restructured the National Orthodox School in Jerusalem — the editors’ note 52 holds he again exaggerates his role, the school having been acquired in 1900 and enrolling 320 pupils with a good reputation in 1905 — formed the first Mar Yaqub choir, Scout, Cubs and Rover groups, and taught Orthodox students in foreign schools; Issa Boullata’s memoir, quoted in note 55, recalls “Father Nicola Khoury” at Mar Yaqub giving “very good homilies that were simple and quite effective” (PDF p.114-115). §24: the municipal-election split between the Mufti’s candidate Nakhle Kattan and the Nashashibi candidate Yaqub Farraj starved the school; the community elected Khoury, Khalil Hakim and Jiryis Yaqub as priests, the Patriarch and synod refused Khoury on salary grounds, and community insistence and High Commissioner pressure obliged consent; Khoury was ordained by Archbishop Meliton at Mar Yaqub on, as printed, Sunday 7th February 1928, the Patriarch going to Jericho (PDF p.116-117; the dating conflicts are held under Open questions).

Chapter 3 §§25-28 — Family Life in Jerusalem; the Priests’ Conference; Yaqub’s Disappearance; the Father’s Death (PDF p.119-125 / printed p.101-107)

§25 dates the family’s Jerusalem life: Mary’s wedding to Bishara Yusif Barghout (September 1927), Hanna’s birth (January 1928) and Bulos’s Alexandria marriage (PDF p.119). §26: after Damianos’s death — dated by the Memoirs to spring 1932 — and Keladion’s election as locum tenens, more than sixty priests held the Conference of Orthodox Arab Priests at Ramallah on 30th August 1932 despite Brotherhood and lay-committee opposition, elected an executive committee with Khoury as unanimous secretary, and saw their unity broken by promotions and the clerical-lay dispute; the editors’ note 66 holds Khoury’s account of the priests’ electoral role to be highly disputed and exaggerated. In the same section Khoury recounts his Euchologion revision under Keladion and his refusal to print it under Timotheos (PDF p.119-122). §27: his brother Yaqub, a teacher in Ajloun, lost his mind after a 1929 highway robbery attempt on the Damascus-Irbid road, fasted and read Revelation for two years of treatment, and disappeared in summer 1932 near Ein Siniya, never found despite searches and a 20 pound reward (PDF p.122-123). §28: his father died in Birzeit on 11th July 1934 (Eastern calendar) aged 79 after 43 years of priestly service; Khoury and Khalil Hakim vested the body, Archbishop Aristarkhus and delegations attended, the Mufti sent condolence representatives, and Mira’t Al-Sharq published Bulos Shehada’s obituary and Shehadeh Khoury’s article (PDF p.124-125).

Chapter 3 §§29-34 — The General Strike of 1936; the Royal Commission; the Balkan Delegation opens (PDF p.125-131 / printed p.107-113)

§29 narrates the General Strike of 1936 from 1st May 1936 under the Arab Higher Committee, Khoury’s protection by the Mufti’s guards, and his blame of Fakhri al-Nashashibi for the loss of Jaffa port — a version the editors’ note 74 identifies as a Husseini partisan’s, against Lockman’s account of the port workers’ grievances and factional conflict; §29 also accuses Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani of paid flyer forgery against Christian-Muslim relations, against which note 76 sets Cohen’s record of Dajani’s 1931 joint drivers’ strike, Jewish Agency contacts, 1936 strike leadership and 1938 killing (PDF p.125-128). §§30-31: Takla’s wedding (4th October 1936, Eastern Calendar) and the strike’s ending on the Arab kings’ intervention, the loss of Jaffa port counted by Khoury a main element allowing the nakba (PDF p.128). §32: the Royal Commission, the Committee’s boycott and eventual contact, “Mister Rekz“‘s bribery approach to Khoury (note 78 identifies him as likely Alfred William Riggs), Farraj’s insistence on Grigorios Hajjar as Christian spokesman, and the partition report (PDF p.128-129). §33: general disorder, armed groups and British collective punishment (PDF p.130). §34 opens the Balkan delegation: Adel Arslan’s letters, Farraj’s alleged sabotage, and the departure of Khoury and Emile al-Ghouri on 1st September 1937 with only 70 pounds, through Damascus (the Bludan gathering) and Aleppo (PDF p.130-132).

Chapter 3 §§35-40 — Constantinople, Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Geneva (PDF p.133-148 / printed p.115-130)

§35: Istanbul and Benjamin I in the Phanar, who blamed the Jerusalem Patriarchate, pleaded his own unfreedom — “the prisoner of this place, robbed of all freedom and autonomy” — and promised a report to the League and Greek help; the Hagia Sophia visit follows (PDF p.133-136). §36: Sofia, where ministers, the acting archbishop’s secretary and “Tsar Maurice” (note 93: Boris III) promised Geneva support (PDF p.136-137). §§37-38: Bucharest and Miron Cristea, who promised schools, university places, a telegram and memorandum to the League and letters, signed the statement that “Palestine should remain Arab for its Arab people”, offered the medal of the Holy Cross and named Khoury his agent in the Holy Land; note 98 qualifies the claimed press coverage as only very brief and oblique in the editors’ survey (PDF p.137-142). §39: Belgrade, Mehmed Spaho’s commendations and the locum tenens Irfiyaous’s declaration and Balfour anecdote, for which note 107 states there is no corroborating evidence (PDF p.143-144). §40: Geneva, the Palestinian delegation, the round of delegations, Ghali’s speech, De Valera’s statement and the postponement of the partition discussion for six months, counted by Khoury a marvellous success; the Andrews assassination telegrams, the Mufti’s flight and the Seychelles deportations then overturned the delegation’s onward plans (PDF p.145-148).

Chapter 3 §§41-43 — Athens; Egypt; the Return to Palestine (PDF p.149-154 / printed p.131-136)

§41: Athens, Chrysostomos I’s honouring of the delegation and astonishment at the Jerusalem Patriarchate’s idleness, tepid ministers, newspaper interviews blaming the Patriarchate, and Archimandrite Benedictos’s hospitality in hope of silence on the Brotherhood’s scandals (PDF p.149-150). §42: Egypt — Alexandria, thanks to Nahas Pasha and Makram Abid Pasha and to Patriarch Nicholas V, then Cairo, where diaspora, Young Men’s Muslim Association and Muslim Brotherhood crowds honoured the delegation, Mohammed Ali al-Taher, Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Elia Karam, Abdul Qader al-Husayni, Committee of the Christian Union, Jamal al-Husayni, Arab League, UNRWA, Deir Yassin, Haganah, Bishop Hakim, Raghib al-Nashashibi hosted them, and Khoury’s lunch speech warned that the Jews would “eat Palestine for breakfast and Egypt for lunch”; he celebrated liturgy at the Church of the Archangels, refused Prince Michel Lutfallah’s payment, and stayed about two weeks before returning alone, al-Ghouri remaining with his family (PDF p.150-153). §43 opens: the return on 27th October 1937, newspaper welcome, greater Muslim than Christian gratitude, government spies, continued rebel contacts and prison visits, and the rescue of Yaqub al-Hanna from the rebels’ pit of water, with a mediation journey to the Mufti in Lebanon following — §43 ends on this page (PDF p.154).

Chapter 3 §§44-47 — The Romanian Decoration; Personal Circumstances; the Cairo Nomination; Life after Cairo (PDF p.155-158 / printed p.137-140)

§44: Miron Cristea’s pledged medal, sent by way of Timotheos of Jerusalem — Emile Marqada was the friend who informed Khoury of its sending by letter, not the medal’s conduit — was returned by Timotheos’s Patriarchate to Bucharest with the message quoted in Key passages below; Khoury resigned all his roles, withdrew the resignation under Bishop Kiladhion’s and “the translator“‘s intervention, and thereafter did not recognize the Patriarch’s authority or mention his name in the liturgy — nor did the eparchy’s other priests dare to — publicly omitting it at a Greek wedding at which the Patriarch himself stood beside him; the bride was the sister of Mr Antippa, the High Commissioner’s secretary, and those present were the High Commissioner’s deputy, the Greek consul, the Romanian consul and many bishops, Antippa himself not being listed among those present (PDF p.155). §45 opens on a loan from Salim Khalil Al-Salfiti of four hundred Palestinian Pounds at 15% and breaks off: the edition prints that manuscript pages 45–46 are missing — the removed pages noted in Introduction §1 — and the text resumes on the revolt’s end-phase: rebel trials and highway displays, the government’s planted fake-defector policemen, kidnap-for-ransom by traitors, chaos passing control to “the nation’s rabble”, and the revolution bringing itself to an end as WWII ignited in autumn 1939, leaving the country impoverished while British-created work enriched opportunists (PDF p.156). §46: on Father Jiryis Yaqub Al-Sahouri’s death the Syrian Orthodox community of Cairo’s Church of the Archangels asked Khoury to serve with Archimandrite Malatios Al-Sawiti; he went on 6th September 1943, worked in unusual accord for three months, and was forced back when the Patriarch of Alexandria, arranged with Timotheos, required Timotheos’s permission letter — the editors’ note 127 holding Alexandria within his rights — and designated Father Nicolas Al-Hreish, whose wife was his niece, as replacement (PDF p.157-158). §47: back in Jerusalem on 8th December 1943, Khoury lived “horrors” of Patriarch-fuelled propaganda (with a “[text obscured]” passage as printed), a Lenten exile to Haifa, recall for Holy Week 1944, and two military investigations of his Mufti contacts that ended in friendship with the commander-in-chief (PDF p.158).

Chapter 3 §§48-52 — The Visit to King Abdulaziz; Abdullah’s Reaction; the Arab League Celebration; Normal Politics; the Mufti in Egypt (PDF p.159-169 / printed p.141-151)

§48: after WWII and the return of the Seychelles exiles, Jamal al-Husayni among them, the Second Arab Orthodox Conference’s executive committee sent Khoury, ‘Isa Bandak and Yaqub Joumai’an to greet King Abdulaziz Al-Saud in Cairo in January 1946, bearing the shell-engraved gift of al-Aqsa and the Church of the Resurrection; the King sent his car, seated Khoury at his right, disclaimed being “the King of Arabs” for “the brother of Arabs and the servant of Arabs”, pledged himself and his children as a ransom to Palestine, kept them forty-five minutes against the Lebanese delegation’s six standing minutes, and promised to meet Palestine’s urgent request — the Mufti’s return, the country without him being “like a body without a soul” (PDF p.159-164). Front-page and four-station radio coverage followed; al-Ghouri, excluded, had the Mukhtar Issa Al-Toubbeh telegram Khoury home; an entourage member wrote to the Mufti in Paris that only “this honourable elder, Father Niqula” had moved Ibn Saud to tears (PDF p.164-165). §49: King Abdullah, who had proposed making Khoury “the Patriarch of the Arabs”, on hearing of the visit denounced the delegation, accepted Bandaq’s and Joumai’an’s repentance blaming Khoury alone, swore vengeance, and entrusted the sanctuaries to the Greeks at the Patriarchate (PDF p.165-166). §50: at Jamal al-Husayni’s 1st May 1946 gathering in al-Aqsa for the League of Arab Nations’ establishment, Khoury was led to the minbar — the first Christian priest seen on such a stand, he writes — and recounted the Ibn Saud audience to some six thousand people (PDF p.166-168). §51: the Sheikh Jarrah meeting of about seven thousand and the end-of-July 1946 Haifa General Arab Conference, Khoury speaking for arming at both (PDF p.168). §52: the Mufti’s arrival in Egypt in late August 1946, his Alexandria reception of Khoury, and his Cairo meetings, where Khoury proposed evacuating the vulnerable and arming men of 18–50, wrote it to the Arab Higher Committee at the Mufti’s request, and saw the League prevent its execution (PDF p.168-169).

Chapter 3 §§53-58 — The Anglo-American Committee; Partition and War; the Christian Union Committee; Damascus; Beirut; the Final Migration (PDF p.169-175 / printed p.151-157)

§53: the twelve-member Anglo-American Committee arrived at the beginning of 1947; Bishop Georgios Hakim — the editors’ note 142: later Patriarch Maximos V — Pastor Najib Qubain and Khoury met it for the Christian communities, Khoury testifying for the Orthodox; Khoury presents the Committee as recommending partition to the United Nations and the General Assembly as endorsing it (PDF p.169; held under Open questions). §54: the General Assembly decided partition on 29 November 1947; fighting, the Haganah’s taking of Montefiore, and the family’s move from al-Tor to the Girls’ Orthodox School (PDF p.170). §55: the AHC instructed Khoury to form the Committee of the Christian Union of all the communities’ heads, which protested to the League of Nations, the UN Security Council and the churches’ heads and donated to the national movement; the impediment throughout was weapons — “if the people of Palestine had had sufficient weapons and ammunition, the Jews would not have been able to hold one inch of Palestine” (PDF p.170-171). §56: on 1st March 1948 Khoury went to Damascus to the Mufti, put in writing to the High Arab Commission his offer of “two thousand Christian men” ready for battle with himself at their head asking only weapons, received Shehadeh Khoury of Safad’s and Abdul Qader al-Husayni’s visits, and two days later heard of Husayni’s death and Deir Yassin; the League answered no one (PDF p.171-173). §57: in Beirut the Patriarch of Antioch Alexandros III and Archbishop al-Salibi successively withheld the Beirut post for fear of Timotheos, until Elia Karam accepted Khoury on his own responsibility with the Sawfar house (PDF p.173-174). §58: resistance collapsed after Husayni’s death and Deir Yassin; George brought the family to Beirut on Wednesday 28th April 1948, and Karam sent Khoury to Gharzouz for Easter (2nd May, Western Calendar as printed) while the family opened the flooded Sawfar house (PDF p.174-175).

Chapter 3 §§59-65 — 15 May; George’s Marriage; Wadi Shahrour; Deaths; the Silver Jubilee; End of the Memoirs (PDF p.176-181 / printed p.158-163)

§59: 15th May 1948 — the Mandate’s end at midnight, Israel’s declaration minutes later, Haifa and Jaffa taken two days before as Khoury dates it, the Arab armies’ invasion under Abdullah, the ten-days proclamations, the truce, and Ramla and Lydda’s fall “without even a fight”; Khoury’s verdict is that the armies’ advance was to expel the legitimate Arab landlords and hand the country to the Jews, a lesson “to rely only on themselves and to trust no one else” (PDF p.176-177). §60: George’s wedding to Aida, daughter of Daoud Nino of Ramla, at Amman on 28th July 1948 with only Marie and Khoury present, and George’s and Hanna’s American University jobs (PDF p.177). §61: Sawfar (1st July–15th October 1948, 150 Lebanese Liras a month), then Wadi Shahrour, where after a month’s local opposition Khoury took care of the church as its legitimate priest from 15th November 1948 without a fixed salary, moving into a rent-free waqf house on 10th February 1950 (PDF p.178). §62: his father-in-law Abu Yusif’s move to Wadi Shahrour in March 1949 and his work as an UNRWA driver, Yusif’s and Hanna’s American University posts, Olga’s Sidon teaching, and the household’s thinning to Khoury and the presbytera; Talka’s summer 1950 visit and Aziza’s move to Poland (PDF p.178-179). §§63-64: the deaths of Nassib Nasser, of Bulos in Alexandria on 29th December 1950 — unvisited, to Khoury’s lasting grief — of uncle Issa, whom “the government of Amman was pursuing me” kept Khoury from seeing, and of uncle Salem (PDF p.179-180). §65: the Silver Jubilee of 1st–2nd February 1952, the Wadi Shahrour Orthodox youth movement’s double feast, promotion to Protopapas by Patriarch Alexandros’s order, Elia Karam’s prayer and historic crucifix, and Yaqub Al-Hanna’s speech — closing with “The end of the memories” (PDF p.180-181). PDF p.182 is blank.

Bibliography (PDF p.183-188 / printed p.165-170)

The volume Bibliography in full, Aboultaif to Zander: the works cited across the Foreword, Introduction, chapters and Memoirs notes, including Bertram and Luke (1921) and Bertram and Young (1926), Lockman (1996 in this list, against the 1994 date in a part 3 note — held under Open questions), Haiduc-Dale’s Arab Christians dated 2013 here against 2015 in the Introduction Bibliography, Pappe’s Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty (2017), and the editors’ own works.

Index (PDF p.189-213 / printed p.171-195)

The Index opens with its Notes: Khoury has no main entry, his life’s themes being indexed directly with the abbreviation ‘nk’, and family members entered under first names with cross-references. Entries A through the opening J entries are given in this part: among the largest are Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Abdullah I, anti-Semitism, the Arab general strike, the Arab Higher Committee, Arab Orthodox Christians, the Arab/Palestinian cause, the Arab Revolt, Birzeit, the British Mandate government, the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, Cairo, nk’s career, Christian-Muslim relations, Cristea, Damianos, the Balkan delegation, Deir Yassin, Egypt, exile, family life of nk, Yaqub Farraj, the First World War, Greek church hierarchy, Haifa, Hajjar, the Holy Places, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Istanbul/Constantinople, Jerusalem, the Jewish Agency and Jews/Jewish community (PDF p.189-201).

Index (continued) — J through Z (PDF p.202-213 / printed p.184-195)

The Index concludes: Jumia’an, Karak and the Karak Revolt, Karam, Keladion, the League of Nations session on partition of Palestine (1937, Geneva) with its twenty-one listed delegations, Lebanon and Khoury’s exile and priesthood there, the Memoirs and the editors’ ‘megalomania of nk’ entry, the Nakba, the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Partition, the Peel Commission, Ramallah and Ramla, Romania and Miron Cristea, the Survey, Timotheos, Wadi Shahrour, Yaqub’s disappearance, the Young Turk Revolution, and Zionism — ending with Zuaiter, Akram (PDF p.202-213). The Index and the volume end at printed p.195; no colophon or further matter follows.

Key passages

• “Here, I have returned yet again to collect these memories and to write them down for the fourth time” (Khoury, quoted in the Foreword, PDF p.9).

• “we planted a baby in every city we lived in, Karak, Ramla, Jerusalem, and Birzeit, as a result of all the calamities we went through, but we thank God in every circumstance” (Khoury, quoted in the Foreword, PDF p.10).

• “I was allowed to take care of the church [of Wadi Shahrour] as the legitimate priest of the village from 15th November 1948, without a fixed salary, relying on what I received from the offertory basket, the feast day gifts and other spiritual services” (Khoury, quoted in the Foreword, PDF p.11).

• “Just as ordinary people live in the shadows, so their life stories commonly remain obscure. Yet their lives frequently reveal a great deal of humanity and wisdom, as well as the harshness and brutality of everyday life, which rarely take center stage within conventional historical narratives” (LeVine and Shafir, quoted in the Introduction, PDF p.24).

• “The holiest struggle [Jihad] is that which places man’s liberty under the nation’s banner and the nation’s liberty under the banner of God” (Sawt al-Shaab’s permanent motto, quoted in the Introduction, PDF p.31).

• “I, in the name of hundred thousand Arab Orthodox in Palestine, kiss this pure hand, asking on their behalf that you would prevent the Judaisation of the Holy Land, preventing those who crucified Christ from taking the opportunity to profane the pure places that He sanctified” (Khoury to Cristea, in the Memoirs as quoted in the Introduction, PDF p.36-37).

• “hidden historical facts” (Khoury and Khoury, A Survey, as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.52).

• “is biased to the detriment of the rights of the nationals” (Khoury and Khoury on the 1875 Fundamental Law, as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.55).

• “more as homely gathering than a proper school” (Khoury, Memoirs, as quoted by Papastathis, PDF p.57).

• “were the direct reason behind his (i.e. Timotheos’) election” (Khoury, Memoirs, as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.58).

• “is restricted to the Greek nation” (the Patriarchate’s Refutation on ‘Rum Millet’, as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.61).

• “Hellenic race in its totality, having as its agent and representative therein the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre” (Miliaras, as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.61).

• “this was a cause to expand the dispute between me and the Patriarch” (Khoury, Memoirs, on the Matari book, as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.65).

• “This man does not deserve this medal because he is a rebel, wandering through the mountains with other insurgent, rebelling against the government and the spiritual authorities” (Timotheos’s alleged return note on the Cristea medal, in the Memoirs as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.65).

• “that the Muslims and Christians in Palestine place their sacred sanctuaries under your custody and trust them to your poignant sword” (Khoury to King Abdalaziz Al-Saud in Cairo, in the Memoirs as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.65).

• “belong to the Greeks;” (King Abdullah at the Patriarchate, in the Memoirs as cited by Papastathis, PDF p.66).

• “It is very obvious that I did not benefit in any way throughout that year.” (Khoury, Memoirs §3, PDF p.88).

• “We had a shining place among them.” (Khoury, Memoirs §8, PDF p.95).

• “In this way, we planted a baby in every city we lived in, Karak, Ramla, Jerusalem, and Birzeit, as a result of all the calamities we went through, but we thank God in every circumstance” (Khoury, Memoirs §16, PDF p.108; the same passage as quoted in the Foreword, PDF p.10).

• “if it was not for the strong stand that Master Niqula took on that day, there would be no Christian surviving in Ramla today” (Muslim testimony as reported in the Memoirs §18, PDF p.110).

• “That was the cause of our ruin” (Khoury, Memoirs §21, on the History’s printing loan, PDF p.112).

• “when the Pope speaks he has those who would back him up, when the Archbishop of Canterbury does he has his supporters, but as for me, the prisoner of this place, robbed of all freedom and autonomy, who shall stand by me or back me up if I speak?” (Ecumenical Patriarch Benjamin I to Khoury, in the Memoirs §35, PDF p.134).

• “Take this statement from me and publish it under my name; Palestine should remain Arab for its Arab people. We must not allow its partition or the Judaisation of any part of it for it is one Holy Land and the whole of it is precious to us, and we must not permit the Jews to profane our sanctuaries.” (Cristea’s signed statement, in the Memoirs §38, PDF p.140).

• “Will you be a father to us, we the orphans?” (Khoury to Cristea, in the Memoirs §38, PDF p.140).

• “I, during this night, was very busy taking the role of Judas Iscariot, with the sole difference that he sold Christ himself to the Jews and I Christ’s Country to them!” (Balfour, as quoted by Monsignor Irfiyaous in the Memoirs §39, PDF p.144; the editors state there is no corroborating evidence).

• “If we go on like this, the Jews will eat Palestine for breakfast and Egypt for lunch, followed by the rest of the Arab world as successive meals!” (Khoury, Cairo lunch speech, in the Memoirs §42, PDF p.153).

• “And yet, the Muslims of the country showed more gratitude and appreciation for my endeavours than most of the Christians.” (Khoury, Memoirs §43, PDF p.154).

• “This man does not deserve this medal because he is a rebel, wandering through the mountains with the insurgents, rebelling against the government and the spiritual authorities!” (the Patriarchate’s return message on Cristea’s medal, in the Memoirs §44, PDF p.155).

• “I am not the King of Arabs, neither the father of the Arabs nor the master of Arabs, but I am the brother of Arabs and the servant of Arabs” (King Abdulaziz Al-Saud to Khoury, in the Memoirs §48, PDF p.162).

• “Palestine is Arab and will remain Arab for its Arab people, God willing” (King Abdulaziz, in the Memoirs §48, PDF p.162).

• “I have two thousand Christian men who are ready to go into battle and defend the country with myself at their head; we do not ask for money, clothing, or food, we only ask for weapons and ammunition” (Khoury’s written request to the High Arab Commission, in the Memoirs §56, PDF p.172).

• “I was allowed to take care of the church as the legitimate priest of the village from 15th November 1948, without a fixed salary, relying on what I received from the offertory basket, the feast day gifts and other spiritual services” (Khoury, Memoirs §61, PDF p.178; the same passage as quoted in the Foreword, PDF p.11).

Evidence the work relies on

• Khoury’s Arabic manuscript itself, held by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, with its removed two-page section noted (PDF p.22-23).

• Khoury and Khoury, A Survey of the History of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, 1925), cited throughout Chapter 1 §2 by page (PDF p.52-55), and Khoury’s Memoirs cited by edition page in Chapter 1’s notes (PDF p.55-58).

• The Bertram-Luke Report (1921) and the Bertram and Young Commission report on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem (1926) (PDF p.50, p.51, p.55).

• State archives as used by Papastathis: the British National Archives, the Historical and Diplomatic Archive of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Public Record Office / Colonial Office files, and the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem Archives (PDF p.49, p.58).

• Vatican and church archives as used in the Introduction §3: the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, the archives of the Congregazione per le Chiese Orientali, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem archives, the White Fathers (Rome) and the Custodia di Terra Santa, including Father Alberto Gori’s memoirs (PDF p.31-33).

• The Palestinian and Bethlehem press as cited: Sawt Ashaab (1922–1939, with 1927 and 1935 issues cited) and Al-Ghad (Bethlehem, 1938) (PDF p.31-32).

• Secondary scholarship cited throughout, among it Mack (2015) and Papastathis and Kark (2014) on the Orthodox controversy, Haiduc-Dale on Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine, Robson (2011) and Tsimhoni (1978) on communalism and the national movement, Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), on anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and Mattar (1988) and Sells (2015) on al-Husayni (PDF p.19-20, p.33-39, p.56).

• The Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Refutation of the Allegations put forward by Sir Anton Bertram against the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Greek Convent Printing Press, 1937), and Kallistos Miliaras, The Holy Places of Palestine (first pub. 1928–1933 Nea Sion) with his “Character and Composition of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem” in the Bertram-Luke report (1921), 284–291 — Chapter 1 §3’s basic sources for the Greek narrative, the Refutation itself answering a commission report that had used Khoury’s work as its source (PDF p.60).

• The Franck Scholten Photographic Collection (NINO, Leiden University), fourteen photographs of 1921–1923 reproduced as Chapter 2’s Figures 2.1–2.14 with their shelfmarks (PDF p.72-85).

• The Memoirs’ own first-person narrative (Chapter 3, §§1–23 in this part) for Khoury’s life from his 1885 birth to the October 1926 move to Jerusalem, with the editors’ notes citing, among others, Gubser, Politics and Change in Al-Karak, and Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire, against Khoury on the Karak revolt, Burckhardt (1822) on Muslim participation at Karak’s St George church, and the Haycraft Report (1921) on the May 1921 Jaffa unrest (PDF p.86-113).

• The Memoirs’ own first-person narrative (Chapter 3, §§23-43 in this part) for Khoury’s Jerusalem priesthood, the 1932 priests’ conference, his family losses, the 1936 strike and Royal Commission, and the September-October 1937 delegation itinerary, with the editors’ notes citing, among others, Lockman, Comrades and Enemies (1994), Cohen, Army of Shadows (2008), Hughes on Riggs and on the Peace Bands, Papastathis and Kark (2014) and Papastathis (2016) on the electoral regulations, Massad, Colonial Effects (2001), and Burgess, The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany (2016), and recording their own survey of several hundred digitally available Romanian newspapers of the visit period (PDF p.114-154).

• The Memoirs’ own first-person narrative (Chapter 3, §§43-65 in this part) for the medal affair, the revolt’s end, the 1943 Cairo priesthood, the 1946 Ibn Saud audience and its Jordanian fallout, the 1946-47 political meetings and committee testimony, the partition war in Jerusalem, the March 1948 Damascus mission, and the family’s Lebanese exile to February 1952, with the editors’ notes citing, among others, Pappe, Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty, on Jamal al-Husayni’s exile, Forte’s thesis on the al-Khazen killing, Morris and Abowd on Deir Yassin, Farah on UNRWA’s refugee employees, and Philip Khoury on the Lutfallahs (PDF p.155-181).

• The volume Bibliography (printed p.165-170) and Index (printed p.171-195), the Index’s own Notes explaining its ‘nk’ convention for the Memoirs’ subject (PDF p.183-213).

Analysis

The volume is an edited scholarly presentation of a single memoir, framed by three different critical apparatuses that do not always agree in emphasis: Schayegh’s Foreword reads the memoirs through loss, palimpsest and multi-religious nationalism as a project in the making; Irving and Sanchez Summerer’s Introduction places Khoury in the Palestinian memoir field and in the history of Christian nationalism, and confronts his anti-Semitism directly, distinguishing its Orthodox theological strand from modern racialised anti-Semitism while refusing both excuse and the weaponisation of the charge; Nassif’s closing Introduction section discounts the memoirs’ reliability on grounds of the author’s ego; and Papastathis uses the memoirs alongside state and church archives, at several points holding Khoury’s claims — the lay leaders’ responsibility for Timotheos’s election, his presentation of the ecclesiastical courts — to be unsubstantiated or one-sided (PDF p.40-42, p.58). Chapter 1’s own framing is explicit that its evidence includes the Survey’s constructed historical narrative, whose “Rum” argument and periodization are reported as the Khourys’ claims, with the Pact of Omar’s disputed authenticity noted in the apparatus (PDF p.53). Coverage in part 1 is the framing matter and the opening of Chapter 1. Part 2 completes Chapter 1 (the Greek narrative, the conclusions, the references and archives), gives Chapter 2 entire — the Scholten photographs — and opens Chapter 3, the Memoirs themselves, through Khoury’s move to Jerusalem in October 1926; Papastathis corrects Khoury at several points (the Damianos deposition crisis as a power struggle rather than a Greece-versus-Patriarchate dispute, Abdullah’s pro-Greek stance as diplomacy), and the Memoirs’ own editors’ notes correct him at others (the Karak revolt’s local causes, the cross-marking attribution to ‘Awda al-Qasus, the Haifa conference date). Part 3 is the Memoirs at their most political: Khoury’s Husseini partisanship is explicit (the editors flag it on the Jaffa port workers and on Dajani), his self-presentation as indispensable recurs (the ordination forced by community pressure, the Geneva success claimed for ‘us in the Orthodox delegation in particular’), and the editors’ notes supply counter-records at the points of highest claim — the school’s earlier reputation, the priests’ secondary electoral role, the Romanian press survey, the uncorroborated Balfour anecdote.

Part 4 is the Memoirs’ arc from Mandate to exile: the self-presentation peaks documented in Introduction §5 reach their highest claims here — a king’s car, a minbar, a written offer of two thousand Christian men — while the editors’ notes stay comparatively quiet, intervening on rights (the Alexandria permission, note 127), on identification (note 142, note 146) and on Deir Yassin’s historiography (note 149), and leaving Khoury’s Anglo-American Committee account and his 15 May narrative uncorrected in the apparatus. The missing manuscript pages 45-46 fall exactly where §45 turns from a family loan to the revolt’s end, so the Memoirs’ account of 1938-39 opens mid-sentence by the edition’s own design.

Part 5 is Index only and adds no new argument. Read whole, the volume’s centre is the Memoirs themselves — a parish priest’s first-person record of Ottoman, Mandate and early-exile Palestine, from the 1910 Karak revolt to the Wadi Shahrour priesthood of 1948-1952 — held inside apparatuses that repeatedly qualify the author’s self-presentation: the Index itself gathers the editors’ locators under ‘megalomania of nk’ (PDF p.204), and indexes its subject under the abbreviation ‘nk’ with no main entry, so the Index is also a map of the editors’ reading of the life. The conflicts the volume prints against itself — the title’s 1885-1954 against the Introduction’s death in 1964, the ordination and 1937-journey datings, the Anglo-American Committee account, and the run of Bibliography and Index slips — are held side by side under Open questions, not reconciled.

People, organizations, places and events

Niqula Khoury, Sarah Irving, Charbel Nassif, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Konstantinos Papastathis, Cyrus Schayegh, Salim Tamari, Shehadeh Khoury, Miron Cristea, Grigorios Hajjar, Yaqub Farraj, ‘Isa Bandak, Amin al-Hussaini, Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre, Institute for Palestine Studies, Arab Higher Committee, Supreme Muslim Council, Peel Commission, League of Nations, Damianos, Timotheos, Keladion, Kallistos Miliaras, Franck Scholten, Karak, Karak Revolt (1910), Committee of Union and Progress, Amir Abdullah, Muslim-Christian Association, Emile al-Ghouri, Adel Arslan, Mehmed Spaho, Benjamin I, Chrysostomos I, Yaqub al-Hanna, General Strike of 1936, Euchologion, Fakhri al-Nashashibi, Hasan Sidqi al-Dajani, Andrews, Awni Abd al-Hadi, Mohammed Ali al-Taher, Abdulaziz Al-Saud, Elia Karam, Abdul Qader al-Husayni, Committee of the Christian Union, Jamal al-Husayni, Arab League, UNRWA, Deir Yassin, Haganah, Bishop Hakim, Raghib al-Nashashibi

Concepts

Arab Orthodox Movement, Antisemitism, Nakba, Exile, Balfour Declaration, Helleno-Orthodoxia, Status Quo (Holy Places), Partition

How it relates to other sources

• The volume’s account of ‘Isa Bandak and Sawt al-Sha’b extends the treatment in The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947, where Bandak appears as the Bethlehem editor lobbying over the 1925 Citizenship Order and testifying before the Peel Commission; here he is the paper’s founder, a figure in the campaigns for Arab Orthodox and Arab Latin patriarchs, and a member of the Islah party’s executive secretariat (PDF p.31).

• Its presentation of Hajj Amin al-Husayni — a British-promoted Grand Mufti who led a main faction, fled in 1937 and collaborated openly with Nazi Germany — sits alongside the leadership accounts in The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine on the Amin al-Hussaini page, with the Introduction adding the Cristea parallel and the warning against “Islamofascism” framing (PDF p.37-39).

• The Foreword’s structural reading — the Balfour Declaration’s naming of Jews alone founding a presence-versus-absence pattern realised in 1948 — is a further account of the Declaration’s terms alongside those collected on the Balfour Declaration page (PDF p.9).

• The editors’ note on Khoury’s Ramla youth club dates the Muslim-Christian Associations’ founding to Raghib al-Dajani in Jaffa in May 1918 with a first national conference in January–February 1919 (PDF p.111), alongside The Invention of Palestinian Citizenship, 1918–1947’s account of the Muslim-Christian Association as established in 1918 in Jaffa and Jerusalem and organising the first Palestinian Arab Congress in early 1919.

• The Memoirs’ and editors’ accounts of Andrews’s assassination (26 September 1937, by the Black Hand Qassemites, in the editors’ note, PDF p.148) and of the strike and revolt sit alongside The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, where Andrews’s assassination is the spark that restarted the revolt after the strike’s end and the Peel report; Khoury, in Geneva when the news arrived, treats it as the event that overturned his delegation’s plans.

• Khoury’s March-April 1948 sequence — the Damascus weapons mission, Abdul Qader al-Husayni’s hotel visit two days before his death and Deir Yassin, and the family’s 28th April departure — sits alongside Nakba and Survival and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine on the Deir Yassin and Bishop Hakim pages, Hakim appearing in both the Memoirs (the 1947 committee testimony) and Manna (the 1949 Galilee returns).

• The Memoirs’ verdict on the Arab armies and the Arab League in 1948 — invasion as delivery of the country to the Jews, and a League that answered no weapons request — is a participant’s version of the betrayal accounts collected on the Arab League page from Palestine: A Socialist Introduction and Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace.

Open questions

• The title gives Khoury’s life as 1885-1954 (PDF p.3), and the Introduction’s opening dates the memoirs’ writing to “the early 1950s” (PDF p.19), but Introduction §1 dates the manuscript to “the 1950s or the early 1960s, shortly before Niqula Khoury’s death in 1964” (PDF p.22). Both datings are held as printed.

• The Foreword places Khoury’s Balkan delegation in the context of the debates surrounding “the British Peel Commission of 1938” (PDF p.11), while the Introduction dates Hajjar’s interlocution with the Peel Commission to 1937 (PDF p.30) and Papastathis dates Farraj’s blocking of Khoury for the Commission without a year (PDF p.58); Nassif dates Khoury’s Balkan press stardom to “his visit in 1927” (PDF p.41), against Map 2’s dating of the European trip to 1937 (PDF p.17). Held as printed in each place.

• Chapter 1 dates the Bertram-Young Commission’s report to 1926 in its note 6 (PDF p.50) and cites Bertram and Luke (1921) and Bertram and Young as the commissions of note 10 (PDF p.51), but its narration says the Survey (1925) “seems to have influenced the report of the Bertram-Young Commission of Inquiry the following year (1925)” (PDF p.55) — a year that is neither the following year after 1925 nor 1926. Held as printed.

• Hajjar’s see is given as “the Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee” in the Introduction (PDF p.30), “the Melkite (Greek Catholic) Archbishop Grigorios Hajjar” by Nassif (PDF p.41), and “the Greek Catholic bishop of Haifa Gregorius Hajjar” by Papastathis (PDF p.58). Held as printed in each place.

• Introduction §3 calls the Melkites and Arab Latin Catholics “the two most numerous Christian communities of Palestine” (PDF p.30), in a volume whose Introduction also calls the Orthodox “the largest Christian grouping” (PDF p.21). Held as printed in each place.

• Citation conflicts between the Introduction’s notes and its Bibliography, each held as printed: Bordewich’s article at pages 122–123 in note 12 (PDF p.24) against 112–134 in the Bibliography (PDF p.42); Haiduc-Dale’s Arab Christians dated 2013 in note 5 (PDF p.20) against 2015 in the Bibliography (PDF p.44); Mack’s article at 385–393 in note 1 (PDF p.19) against 384–400 in the Bibliography (PDF p.45); Zuaiter’s diaries subtitled 1935–1939 in note 16 (PDF p.25) against 1935–1938 in the Bibliography (PDF p.47); Byford’s and Ioniță’s articles cited by short page ranges in note 51 (PDF p.34) against full ranges in the Bibliography (PDF p.43-44).

• The Introduction attributes Nathan der Weise to Gotthold Ephraim Schneller (PDF p.38, byte-verified), in a passage stating only that Elias Nasrallah Haddad, “a teacher and translator at the German-run Syrian Orphanage in Jerusalem”, in 1932 published the first Arabic translation of the play under that attribution. The attribution is held as printed. Open question: whether the attribution conflates the play’s author with the Schneller name of the Syrian Orphanage’s founder, which the volume gives later.

• The Haifa conference of the Orthodox community is dated July 1920 in the Memoirs’ text (PDF p.112), while the editors’ note 48 holds this likely a typographical error for 1923, when a major gathering fitting the description took place (Bertram and Young (1926), 273–278), and Chapter 1 dates the Survey as reflecting the Arab Orthodox Congress in Haifa (1923) (PDF p.52). Held as printed in each place.

• The Memoirs attribute the cross-marking that saved Karak’s Christians in December 1910 to the army leader’s request to Khoury’s father (PDF p.100), while the editors’ note 28 attributes the role in other sources to ‘Awda al-Qasus and calls him the more probable candidate (PDF p.100). Held side by side.

• The Memoirs’ revolt narrative is elided in the published text at PDF p.100 (ellipsis as printed, verified against the original PDF): nothing in the printed Memoirs narrates the family’s experience between the revolt’s reaching Karak and the army’s entry, beyond the dream recounted in §13 and the return on 4th December 1910.

• Isma’il Fazıl Pasha’s Karak visit is placed by Khoury after freedom and the constitution were declared on 11th July 1908 (PDF p.96), while the editors’ note 21 dates his governorship of Syria to 1909–1911 and places the tour some time after the revolution (PDF p.96-97). Held as printed in each place.

• Memoirs §22 counts five Ramla children born between the end of the war in 1918 and autumn 1926, three of whom — George, Julia and Toufic — died, the survivors being “the current George” born 3rd May 1921 and “the current Olga” born April 1923 (PDF p.113); §16 separately records an Olga born in Jerusalem at the beginning of the war who died soon after and was buried there (PDF p.108). The repeated names are held as printed in each place.

• Khoury’s death date also bears on the maps: Map 2 covers his trips in the region to 1948 (PDF p.17), and the Foreword’s last dated service is 15 November 1948 (PDF p.11); the memoirs’ own text (Chapter 3, a later part) is the volume’s evidence for his final years.

• The Memoirs date Damianos’s death to “the spring of the year 1932” (PDF p.119), while the same volume dates his patriarchate 1897-1931 in Chapter 1 (PDF p.50) and in the editors’ note 31 (PDF p.102). Held as printed in each place.

• The Memoirs’ ordination sequence in §24 is out of order as printed: Khalil Hakim is ordained deacon “on the night of the feast of the Three Doctors, on 30 November 1928 (Eastern calendar)”, then priest on 2 February 1928, with Khoury ordained deacon at the same time and priest on “Sunday 7 February 1928” (PDF p.117); 7 February 1928 was a Tuesday (computed from the calendar), and §25 separately gives the ordination as February 7th (Eastern Calendar), 20th (Western Calendar) 1928 (PDF p.119). Held as printed in each place.

• Weekday and date mismatches cluster in the Memoirs’ 1937 journey narrative (computed against the calendar): departure from Belgrade “Saturday 19th September” and Geneva arrival “Monday 21st” 1937 (both one weekday earlier than the dates), the partition vote on “Thursday 24th” September, sailing from Venice “Friday 2nd October” and Athens arrival “Monday 5th October”, Cairo arrival “Tuesday 13th October 1937” followed by “Wednesday 14th” and then “Tuesday 15th” — internally inconsistent in sequence as well — liturgy on “Sunday 18th October”, and the return on “Tuesday 27th October 1937” (PDF p.144, p.147, p.149, p.151-154). The earlier legs of the same journey (2, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 16 September) match their weekdays. Held as printed.

• The Belgrade locum tenens who received the delegation is named Monsignor Irfiyaous in the Memoirs (PDF p.144), while the editors’ note 106 identifies the Serbian church’s interim head after Varnava Rosić’s death in July 1937 as Dositej Vasić and suggests Irfiyaous may have been another regional clergyman acting officially in Belgrade. Held side by side.

• The Memoirs name Fawzi Beik Al-Azma head of the group for the Defence of Palestine in Syria (PDF p.131), while the editors’ note 81 holds Nabih al-Azma was head of the Palestine Defence Committee and that Fawzi may be a typographical error; and they name Abdel Rahim Beik Al-Husseini a son of Musa Kazim Pasha Al-Husseini (PDF p.132), while note 82 holds Musa Kazim had no son of that name and Abd al-Qadir may be meant. Held as printed in each place.

• The Memoirs style the Bucharest celebrant “Archbishop Benjamin, Metropolitan of Bucharest” (PDF p.141), while the editors’ note 100 holds Benjamin was the patriarchal vicar, the Archbishop of Bucharest style belonging to the Patriarch, Miron Cristea. Held as printed in each place.

• The Memoirs §53 present the Anglo-American Committee as arriving at the beginning of 1947, reporting to the United Nations in New York and recommending “the partition of Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish”, the General Assembly endorsing its recommendations (PDF p.169). The volume’s apparatus gives the committee no note beyond identifying Hakim and Qubain, and no other part of the volume dates the partition recommendation to this committee. Held as printed.

• The Memoirs date Abdullah’s proclamation as King of Jordan to the night before the delegation’s discussion of it in Cairo in mid-January 1946 (PDF p.162), and §49 places his proclamation “while I was in Egypt” on that visit (PDF p.165), while the editors’ note 136 dates Jordan’s full independence and his formal kingship to May 1946 (PDF p.163). Held as printed in each place.

• Khoury dates the Jews’ taking of Haifa and Jaffa to two days before 15th May 1948 (PDF p.176), without an editors’ note; his §59 also gives the Arab armies’ commander-in-chief’s proclamations without naming him beyond Abdullah’s leadership. Held as printed.

• §65 dates Khoury’s diaconal ordination to 2nd February 1928 (PDF p.180), a further date in the §24/§25 ordination sequence already held above (deacon on 30 November 1928 as printed, priest on 2 and on 7 February 1928, and §25’s 7th/20th February). Held as printed.

• The Bibliography dates Haiduc-Dale’s Arab Christians 2013 (PDF p.185) against 2015 in the Introduction Bibliography (PDF p.44), and Lockman, Comrades and Enemies, 1996 in the Bibliography (PDF p.186) against the 1994 date in the editors’ note in part 3 (PDF p.128 as cited there). Held as printed in each place.

• Index slips held as printed and byte-verified: the Arab/Palestinian cause entry’s locator “1590” (PDF p.191); “CUP see Committee of the Christian Union” against the volume’s own use of CUP for the Committee of Union and Progress (PDF p.195); “First Arab Congress (Paris, 1933)” (PDF p.197); “Gershon, Shafir” for Gershon Shafir (PDF p.198); and “Ephraim, Gotthold” (PDF p.197), repeating the Introduction’s Schneller attribution problem in inverted form.

• The Memoirs say the nationalist leaders recalled after the war had been exiled to the Seychelles: “Among them was Jamal Al-Husseini” (PDF p.159), while the editors’ note 130 says Jamal was exiled to Southern Rhodesia and allowed to return in 1946 (PDF p.159). Held as printed in each place.

• Memoirs §58 says the Jews took Deir Yassin “On the same day” as Abdul Qadir Al-Husseini’s death (PDF p.174), while the editors’ note 146 dates his death to the early hours of 8 April 1948 (PDF p.172) and note 149 dates the Deir Yassin massacre to 9 April 1948 (PDF p.174). Held as printed in each place.

• Index slips in part 5 held as printed and byte-verified: “Kharmi, Ghada” (PDF p.202); “teacher/principle” for Tomeh al-Khoury (PDF p.202); “nk ordinated as priest at” (PDF p.204); “Dear Yassin” in the massacres entry (PDF p.204); the Montreux Convention Regarding the Abolition of the Capitulations in Egypt dated “(1837)” (PDF p.205); “Nathan der Weise (Gotthold Ephraim)” with the surname truncated (PDF p.206), repeating the Introduction’s attribution problem in truncated form; “Nicodemis I” (PDF p.206); “Paisos” for Paisios (PDF p.207); “Valera, Éamon de (President League Nations, later Taoiseach of Ireland, r. 1959–1973)” as printed (PDF p.212); “UN Resolution 181 15n46” with the locator run into the headword (PDF p.212); and “Shafir Gershon” inverted in the Struggle and Survival in Palestine/Israel entry (PDF p.211), as in the Gershon entry in part 4; the locator “109n109” in the Nashashibi family/party entry’s collaboration-with-British sub-entry (PDF p.205); “Mukthtar Café” (PDF p.205) against “Mukhtar Café” in the editors’ note 140 (PDF p.165); “Miliarus, Kallistos” (PDF p.204) against “Kallistos Miliaras” in the Index’s own The Holy Places of Palestine entry (PDF p.200); and “Nasser, Issam” (PDF p.205) against “Issam Nassar” in the Bibliography (PDF p.188).

• The Index enters Mariam (daughter of nk) and Marie (daughter of nk, previously known as Mariam) as two headwords with identical locators (PDF p.204). Held as printed.

Coverage

PDF p.1-213 of 213, read in full in parts 1-5 of 5.