Arab Orthodoxy Under Ottoman Rule

The Orthodox of Antioch in the nineteenth century were an Arab, Arabic-speaking Christian minority living under the Ottoman millet system, within a Patriarchate whose upper hierarchy was long dominated by Greeks. This file describes that legal and ecclesial situation — the millet order, the Greek–Arab tension, and the trajectory that runs from Joseph’s century toward the Arabization of the Patriarchate in 1899.

Tradition: Antiochian Orthodox (Arab New-Martyr of the Patriarchate of Antioch)

The Millet System

The Christians among whom Joseph lived were governed, in their communal life, by the Ottoman millet system — the arrangement by which the empire organized its non-Muslim subjects into legally recognized religious communities, each under its own ecclesiastical hierarchy, responsible for the personal-status law, taxation, and internal order of its people (the classic account is in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, New York, 1982; for the Arab lands specifically, Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism, Cambridge, 2001). Under this system the Orthodox belonged to the Rūm milleti — the “Roman” (i.e., Byzantine, Chalcedonian Orthodox) community — whose supreme head, in Ottoman eyes, was the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, and whose local affairs in the Arab lands fell under the Patriarch of Antioch.

The millet order gave the Christian communities a real internal autonomy and a real protection, but it also fixed their subordinate status. As dhimmī — protected non-Muslim subjects — Christians enjoyed the free exercise of their religion and the governance of their own communal life, but under legal and social disabilities: distinctions of dress and public conduct, restrictions on the building and repair of churches, the payment of a special tax, and an inferior standing in law and in the daily hierarchy of an Islamic society (Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, 2001, on the dhimma and its practice in the Arab provinces). For most of the Ottoman centuries this order was stable; what destabilized it in the nineteenth century — the reforms that promised legal equality, and the resentments that promise provoked — is a central strand of the causes of 1860 (see Causes and the Historical Debate).

The Greek–Arab Tension in the Patriarchate

Within the Orthodox community itself, the Patriarchate of Antioch carried a long internal strain that shapes Joseph’s whole world and his later memory. Antioch is an Arab Church — its faithful and most of its clergy Arabic-speaking natives of Syria and Lebanon — but from the eighteenth century onward its highest offices, and above all the patriarchal throne, came to be held predominantly by Greeks, often men connected to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek ecclesiastical establishment of Constantinople (the “Greek period” of the Antiochian patriarchate is standard church history; see Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, 2001, and the treatment of the Antiochian question in the histories of the modern Orthodox East). The Arab faithful thus found themselves a native majority under a hierarchy in whose leadership they had little share — a source of grievance that grew across the nineteenth century into an explicit movement for the Arabization of the Patriarchate.

That movement reached its resolution only in 1899, when, after a protracted struggle, an Arab, Meletius (Doumani), was elected Patriarch of Antioch, restoring the patriarchal throne to a native son and inaugurating the continuous line of Arab patriarchs that governs the Church of Antioch to this day (the 1899 election of Meletios II Doumani as the first Arab patriarch of the modern era is a fixed point in Antiochian history; see the standard accounts of the Arabization, and Joseph and the Antiochian Revival). Joseph did not live to see it — he died in 1860, four decades before — but he belongs to the generation and the milieu whose learning, preaching, and self-consciousness prepared it. As Great Economos and as director of the Patriarchal School, an Arab scholar-priest of the first rank, he is part of the story of the Arab Orthodox awakening whose political fruit was 1899 (see Priest, Scholar, and Preacher).

It is important not to overstate this. The sources do not present Joseph as a partisan of an ecclesiastical-national program; they present him as a churchman, a scholar, and a pastor. The connection to the Arabization is one of milieu and trajectory, not of documented activism — a point the assessment section presses (see Assessment). But that milieu is real, and it is part of why the modern Antiochian Church, itself the fruit of that Arabization, venerates Joseph so warmly: he is one of its own, an Arab teacher and martyr of the Arab Church.

The Later Chapter: Raphael of Brooklyn

The Arab Orthodox world of Ottoman Syria did not stay in Syria. The upheavals of the nineteenth century — including the very massacres of 1860 — set in motion a displacement and eventually a great emigration of Arab Christians, first within the Levant and then across the world, that carried the Antiochian Church to the Americas and beyond. The sibling collection on St. Raphael of Brooklyn (Raphael Hawaweeny, 1860–1915) tells the next chapter directly: Raphael’s own family was displaced from Damascus by the 1860 massacres, and he was born in Beirut in that year of catastrophe — the child of the exile that Joseph’s death marks (see St. Raphael of Brooklyn, whose master account opens with “the Hawaweeny family displaced from Damascus by the 1860 massacres”). Raphael would become the first Orthodox bishop consecrated in America, the shepherd of the Arab Orthodox diaspora in the New World. The line runs straight: the same Arab Orthodox community, struck in Damascus in 1860, scattered, and planted its Church across the seas.

Joseph and Raphael thus stand at the two ends of a single hinge in Antiochian history — the martyr who died in the old Christian quarter, and the bishop of the generation displaced by that death, carrying the Church into exile and mission. To read them together is to see the Antiochian nineteenth century whole: its rootedness and its suffering, its ancient faith under Ottoman rule and its scattering into a wider world.

See Also

References

  • Masters, Bruce. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (The millet system and the dhimma in the Arab provinces; the Rūm Orthodox community; the Greek–Arab tension in the Patriarchate of Antioch.)
  • Braude, Benjamin, and Bernard Lewis, eds. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982. (The classic account of the millet system.)
  • Fawaz, Leila Tarazi. An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. (The situation of the Christian communities of Syria and Lebanon on the eve of 1860.)
  • Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America and the Patriarchate of Antioch, biographical tradition on St. Joseph and on the Arabization of the Patriarchate (the 1899 election of Patriarch Meletios Doumani).