The Romanian Presence in the Holy Land

The wider setting of John Jacob’s life and cult: the long tradition of Romanian pilgrimage and monastic settlement in the Holy Land, the Romanian foundations near the Jordan and in Jerusalem, and the place of the Judean desert monasteries — St. Sabbas and St. George of Choziba — within Romanian Orthodox devotion, the world in which a Romanian hermit could live, die, and be venerated in Palestine.

Tradition: Romanian Orthodox (20th-c. hermit of the Judean desert; glorified 1992)

A Long Tradition of Pilgrimage

John Jacob’s Palestinian life was not an isolated adventure but the intensification of a long Romanian tradition. Romanian Orthodox Christians — princes, monks, and ordinary pilgrims — had for centuries made their way to the Holy Land, venerating the holy places and, in many cases, remaining to live the monastic life in the desert of the Fathers. The Romanian lands had also been, from the late medieval period, among the great benefactors of the Orthodox holy places and of the desert monasteries, so that a Romanian presence and a Romanian devotion to the Holy Land were well established long before the twentieth century (general history of Romanian devotion to the Holy Land; and see St. Sabbas the Sanctified for the desert monasteries that drew them). When the orphan monk of Neamț set out in 1936, he was following a path his people had long trodden (see pilgrim-to-palestine.md).

Romanian Foundations Near the Jordan and in Jerusalem

By the twentieth century this presence had taken institutional form. There were Romanian monastic settlements and hermitages in the Holy Land, including the hermitage of St. John the Baptist near the Jordan of which John Jacob was made superior in 1947, and a Romanian ecclesiastical presence in Jerusalem itself, serving the growing numbers of Romanian pilgrims and providing a Romanian-speaking liturgical and pastoral home in the holy places (Romanian synodal Life, Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț; and see st-george-hozeva-and-the-romanian-community.md). It was to serve exactly this community that John Jacob’s priesthood was employed in the years 1947–1952; his pastoral labor by the Jordan is intelligible only against this background of an organized Romanian presence with its own needs for clergy and its own houses of prayer. [Disputed: the institutional history and the precise status of the several Romanian foundations in the Holy Land in the mid-twentieth century are given with some variation in the sources, and were affected by the upheavals of 1948 and after; the collection reports the general fact of an established Romanian monastic and pilgrim presence, and John Jacob’s service within it, without reconstructing the full institutional detail.]

The Desert Monasteries in Romanian Devotion

Two ancient Judean desert monasteries stand at the center of John Jacob’s story, and both held a place in the wider Orthodox and Romanian devotion to the Holy Land. The Great Lavra of St. Sabbas (Mar Saba), the fifth-century foundation of St. Sabbas the Sanctified, was the greatest of the desert houses and a magnet for monks and pilgrims of all the Orthodox nations, Romanians among them (Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism, Dumbarton Oaks, 1995; and see The Monastery of St. Sabbas). The Monastery of St. George of Choziba in the Wadi Qelt, where John Jacob died and where his relics now rest, has through his cult become especially dear to Romanian devotion — so that a Romanian saint has, in effect, given the Romanian faithful a particular claim upon an ancient Judean desert shrine (parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro; and see veneration-in-romania-and-the-holy-land.md). John Jacob’s life thus both drew upon and enriched the Romanian relationship to the Holy Land: he came as an heir of a long Romanian devotion to the desert, and he left, in his relics and his cult, a new Romanian holy place within it.

The Meaning of the Setting

The wider Romanian presence in the Holy Land is not merely background but interpretation. It explains how a Romanian monk could find, in Palestine, both the eremitic solitude he sought and a community of his own people to serve; it explains the shape of his middle years as pastor to the Romanian pilgrims; and it explains the readiness with which his memory was preserved and his cult received, for he died among a people who knew him and who kept his memory alive in the Holy Land and carried it home to Romania. The saint of the Judean desert was, throughout, a saint of the Romanian Church abroad — a hermit hidden in the wilderness, yet held in the memory and love of a whole community of his countrymen in the holy places. In him the two things the Romanian presence in the Holy Land had always joined — pilgrimage to the desert of the Fathers and devotion to the homeland’s faith — were united in a single life and a single, twofold cult.

See Also

References

  • Viața Sfântului Cuvios Ioan Iacob de la Neamț (Hozevitul) — the Romanian synodal Life, in Viețile Sfinților for August. (The Romanian hermitage of St. John the Baptist by the Jordan; John Jacob’s service to the Romanian pilgrims.)
  • “Viața Sfântului Ioan Iacob Hozevitul.” parohia-sf-ioan-iacob-hozevitul.ro. (St. George of Choziba and Romanian devotion; the Jordan hermitage.)
  • Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995. (The Great Lavra and the desert monasteries that drew the Orthodox nations.)