LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

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society. however one should ask a question: why so long period passed
between the ottoman conquest of Syria (1516) and the first translation
projects of Meletius Karma (1612)?
however, there is information about a group of Melkite intellectuals who
lived in the late 16 th century, one generation before Karma. Biographies of
these interesting and mostly neglected persons allow us to revise radically
certain traditional theories and opinions concerning the Nahda. the key
figure among them was Metropolitan uwakim of Bethlehem.
originally this person attracted my attention not because of the “Melkite
renaissance” but in connection with another problem. It was an ethnocultural
situation in the Jerusalem patriarchate after the ottoman conquest.
It is known that in the 16 th century the Jerusalem Church was hellenized
and Greeks occupied all important positions in its ecclesiastical hierarchy.
the Greek phanariot hegemony caused a lot of conflicts between the Greek
clergy and Arabic Christians in the 19 th and 20 th centuries; this problem is
not solved till now.
our ideas about the process of the hellenization of the Jerusalem
Church are based on a chronicle, written by the Jerusalem patriarch
Dosipheus notaras in the late 17 th century. According to this source, after
the ottoman conquest of the Middle east, Greek monks in large numbers
became to penetrate into the ranks of the palestinian clergy. In 1534 a Greek
Germanus of peloponnesus was elected patriarch of Jerusalem. During his
long reign (1534–1579) Germanus replaced all Arab bishops in palestine
by Greeks. It allowed him to organize easy succession of the patriarchal
see to his nephew Sophronius and to consolidate the Greek power in the
patriarchate. 2
Despite the fact that the chronicle of Dositheus is often incorrect and
politically motivated, the information about the gradual replacement of
Arabic bishops by Greeks looks convincing. It was not a serious problem
for the patriarch Germanus because in the 16 th century there were only two
2 Maxim SIMSKIy, Istoriya ierusalimskih patriarhov ot vremen 6 Vselenskogo
sobora do 1810 g. (A History of Jerusalem Patriarchs since the Sixth Ecumenical
Council till the Year 1810)/Materiali dlia istorii Ierusalimskoy patriarhii XVI–XIX vv.
(Materials on a History of the Jerusalem Patriarchate in the 16 th and 19 th Centuries). Т.
2. St.-petersburg. 1904. p. 41; KAptereV n.F., Gospodstvo Grekov v Ierusalimskom
patriarhate s pervoy polovini XVI do polovini XVIII veka (A Greek Hegemony in the
Jerusalem Patriarchate since the 1 st half of the 16 th Century till the middle 19 th Century)/
Bogoslovskiy Vestnik (Theologian Journal). 1897. May. III. p. 198-200; MurAVIeV
A.n., Istoriya sviatogo grada Ierusalima ot vremen apostolskih I do nashih (A History
of the Holy City Jerusalem since the Apostolic Time till the Modern Period). Т. 2. st.petersburg.
1844. p. 269-270.