SESSION 1 – SEPTEMBER 5
PANEL 1
1. Ioana Feodorov, “18th Century Arabic printing for the Arab Christians: most roads lead to Istanbul”.
Istanbul is commonly known as the first city where books were printed in Arabic type in the East and within the confines of the Ottoman Empire. The opening panel of the TYPARABIC project first conference aims to correct this impression by bringing together specialists who will discuss a variety of elements allowing a deeper understanding of Ibrahim Müteferrika’s position on the map of Arabic-type printers to the East of the confessional divide between Catholics and Orthodox, between Europe and the Levant. This paper will present the elements that make Istanbul important for any discussion on printing in the East in the 18th century. It was here that a passionate discussion on the benefits and dangers of printing, for the readers and rulers of the Ottoman Empire, started and continued for a long time, similar to that in Western Europe, but with certain local particularities. It was in Istanbul that the learned circles ascertained the profit of having a wide distribution of printed materials, much later than in Europe. It was here also that Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch could have found Arabic type for his printing projects of Jassy in Moldavia. The diversity of the printing landscape of the Ottoman capital, with presses functioning by the 1700s in several languages (Greek, Hebrew, Armenian), is proof enough of the interest that the scholarly audience of this metropolis held for printing, education, and cultural progress in general. The interests of the Christians in this matter, although to be discussed in more depth in future reunions of the project team, will be outlined here as well.
2. Orlin Sabev, “The Müteferrika press and its output: obstacles, circumvention, and repercussions”.
The paper will elaborate on the possible obstacles that the founder of the first Ottoman Turkish printing press, the Transylvanian-born convert from Christianity to Islam İbrahim Müteferrika, had to overcome in order to set up and legalize his press in Istanbul in the first half of the 18th century. Although he enjoyed the unconditional support of the Ottoman ruling élite and some Muslim intellectuals, it is still unclear if his intention was really opposed by conservative circles representing the well-established Ottoman Turkish manuscript tradition. Bearing in mind that the latter was strongly connected with the Muslim theological education and learning, İbrahim Müteferrika’s application for a permission to print only secular texts might have been just a clever and convincing attempt to circumvent the possible – and likely really extant – negative attitude towards printing, which conservative Muslims considered an unacceptable Christian invention. This paper will outline İbrahim Müteferrika’s Christian background and Ottoman career, as well as the topic of the books he printed, considering the background of the traditional range of Muslim branches of knowledge. It will also address the immediate and long-term repercussions of his innovative enterprise in the Ottoman Turkish and Muslim context.
3. Radu Dipratu, “Ottoman endorsements of printing in 18th-century Istanbul.”
When discussing attitudes towards printing in the Ottoman capital, its prohibition is probably the first element that comes to one’s mind. The popular belief that the Sublime Porte was hostile to printing, not least because of religious concerns, was contested in recent years, with one of the main supporting points revolving around the non-existence of imperial edicts (ferman) invoked to have banned printing. This paper, however, will focus not on if and why the Ottomans banned print but on how and on what grounds did sultans and religious scholars (ulema) endorse printing with Arabic type in the early 18th century. The story is obviously linked with İbrahim Müteferrika’s printing press. In the preface of the first volume that he put out in 1729, Kitab-ı Lugat-ı Vankulu, Müteferrika included the copy of an imperial edict issued two years earlier, by which Sultan Ahmed III sanctioned this endeavor, novel by Ottoman standards. Even though the Sultan theoretically held indisputable authority, his decisions in more sensitive matters had to be grounded on legal opinions (fetva) issued by the Empire’s highest-ranking religious and legal authority, the Grand Mufti (şeyhülislam). The fact that Ahmed III included in his ferman the text of Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi’s favorable fetva, which, in turn, was printed again as a separate text below the sultan’s edict, indicates that Müteferrika’s endeavor was indeed a delicate one. Moreover, these two texts were followed by no less than 16 other shorter endorsements (takriz), written by the Porte’s most important religious and legal authorities. This paper will argue that since there were no endorsements of other secular officials (such as viziers), it appears that the opening of Müteferrika’s printing press was a delicate matter primarily from a religious point of view. The imperial edicts and especially the comments of the ulema prefacing Lugat-ı Vankulu may hold clues to describe these concerns better.
4. Hasan Çolak, “İbrahim Müteferrika and the Ottoman intellectual culture in the early 18th century: a transcultural perspective”.
Recent scholarship on İbrahim Müteferrika has shed light on many aspects of this Ottoman printer’s life, career, and scholarly and printing activities in the Ottoman Empire, aspects that had been simply unknown until recent decades. Accordingly, thanks to the recent revisionist historiography, the once caricature image of an intellectual fighting for progressive values against a rather rigid intelligentsia and society gradually gave way to a more realistic understanding of İbrahim Müteferrika and his scholarly and printing endeavors. Despite such depth and breadth of scholarship, there is a need to delve further into İbrahim Müteferrika’s intellectual entanglements with the broader Ottoman intellectual society, one that mirrors the diversity of the Ottoman world. For this purpose, this paper focuses on some illustrative examples in which a transcultural perspective could help a better understanding of both İbrahim Müteferrika and the Ottoman intellectual culture at large. Focusing on Müteferrika as an Ottoman intellectual who was born and raised as a non-Muslim, beyond the direct influence of the Ottoman scholarly currents, and on his own contributions to the larger Ottoman intellectual culture, a broader aim of this presentation is to point out the crucial importance of the transcultural aspects of İbrahim Müteferrika and the intellectual culture surrounding him.
PANEL 2
1. Nil Palabıyık, “A battle of books in 17th-century Constantinople”.
On a September afternoon in 1627, a Jesuit father and a Greek convert to Roman Catholicism were engaged in a heated dispute over the views of Cyril of Alexandria on the Procession of the Holy Spirit, an issue that divided the Catholic and Eastern Churches for centuries. What made the arguments of a 5th century Church Father the topic of a hot debate that packed a roomful of audience in a local library was the recent publication of a collection of treatises that summarized the Greek Orthodox perspective on the matter. Nikodemus Metaxas, founder of the first Greek printing press in the Ottoman capital, had begun circulating this volume and printing other treatises. The Pope soon decided that he had to be stopped at all costs. The paper scrutinizes the war of books that was waged between the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and the Pope through polemical treatises printed in Constantinople and Rome. The antagonism between the two Churches not only created tensions that affected the Greek Orthodox and the Catholic communities, European diplomats, the clergy and missionaries, but also brought a premature end to the activities of the first Greek printing house of Istanbul.
2. Taisyia Leber, “Hebrew printing in Early Modern Istanbul between mobility and stability”.
It is known that Jews were the pioneers of printing in the Ottoman Empire, as their first printing press started its activity around 1493 in Istanbul. Hebrew printing remained the most stable and successful in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike the Christian and, later, the Ottoman Muslim presses, Jewish presses were active in Istanbul during the whole Ottoman period almost without interruption. What was the secret of their success? Which role did the mobility (of printers, presses, and books) in the Ottoman Empire and beyond play for the success of Hebrew printing? What was the main purpose of book printing by the Jews? Who were the beneficiaries of this extensive book production? What do we know about the languages and scripts used by the Jews in their book printing? Was there any cooperation between various Jewish communities, or between Jews and other religious groups? The paper addresses these questions and presents the current state of research on Hebrew printing in early modern Istanbul.
3. Ovidiu Olar, “A license to print thousands of heresies and schisms. Rome and the Greek printing press at Constantinople (1627-1628).”
The opening of the first Greek press at Constantinople in 1627 has generated great interest among scholars. Important studies have been dedicated to its founder, Nikodemus Metaxas, to its patron, the Patriarch of Constantinople Kyrillos Loukaris, to its supporters, and to its adversaries. In spite of the sustained interest, however, earlier research struggled to untangle the complicated web of truths, half-truths, lies, and deceit surrounding the failed “adventure”. The aim of the present paper is to fill in one of the gaps by analyzing several unpublished documents kept in Roman repositories. Focusing on the reports sent to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), the author argues that the Papacy’s attitude towards this issue was not homogenous. The actors interested in the event had their own agency and thus cannot, and should not, be grouped under generic labels.
4. Mihai Țipău, “Arabic printed books in Wallachia and their Phanariot readers.”
In the early and mid-18th century, a number of Arabic books were printed in Wallachia and Moldavia. As these were mainly liturgical books and no significant Arabic-speaking communities were living in the Romanian Principalities, it is obvious that most of the copies were to be shipped to the Orthodox communities in present-day Syria and Lebanon. However, the study of some of the few surviving copies in Romanian and other European libraries reveal an unexpected use and/or ownership of these books. They belonged to well-known figures of the Romanian and Phanariot élite, and even future princes such as Constantine Mavrocordatos. The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of the Arabic and Greek-Arabic books printed in Bucharest and Jassy as auxiliaries for the study of the Arabic language. As interpreters for the Ottoman Court, good knowledge of Arabic was essential for the Phanariots to be accepted at the top of Ottoman society. The recent identification of the previously unknown author of a Greek grammar of the Arabic language is even more revealing in this regard.
SESSION 2 – SEPTEMBER 6
PANEL 1
1. Doru Bădără, “The beginnings of printing and print culture in the Romanian Principalities”.
The printing activity of the Romanian Principalities accounts for a good part of the incentive that Patriarchs of the Church of Antioch found in traveling to Wallachia and Moldavia in the 17th and 18th centuries. Treasuring a rich experience in printing, the presses of Târgoviște, Snagov, Râmnic, Buzău, Jassy, and Bucharest held the priceless knowhow that would allow Arabic-speaking Christians to print their own church books, and polemical texts later, in their own cities of the Ottoman-ruled provinces. Antim Ivireanu, most particularly, played a salient role in this endeavor, not only by helping the Antiochian clergy acquire printing skills, but also by providing textual and literary expertise in choosing versions and ornamentation for the first books that were printed in Arabic for the Syrian Christians. This paper outlines the situation of printing in the Romanian Principalities, with a focus on the technologies and book art elements that held a major role in the 18th-century beginnings of printing in Syria and, almost half a century later, in Beirut, Lebanon.
2. Carsten-Michael, “The collection, perception, and study of Arabic incunabula from the Near East in Europe (16th – early 19th c.)”.
The products of the early printing presses established in the Arab world also quickly made their way to Europe. Thus, already one year after their publication, the first works published in the printing presses of Quzḥayyā (1610) and Al-Shuwayr (1734) could be found in European collections. And these works did also not escape the attention of Western scholars – mainly those engaged in Biblical studies. In an index of all the available editions of the Bible published in Paris in 1709, reference is made to two works which had been printed in Aleppo only three years earlier. The work that was met with the greatest interest by Western scholars was the Psalter printed in 1610 at the monastery of St Anthony at Quzḥayyā, on Mount Lebanon. Little is known on the ways these specimens of Oriental typography came to Europe. The first explicit efforts to collect printed books seem to have been the purchasing mission of the German traveler Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (d. 1811), who collected all kinds of artefacts of Near Eastern culture, including printed material. Seetzen was also the first who dedicated an article to the history and bibliographic description of the printing presses in the Levant. Another German, Christian Friedrich von Schnurrer, published in 1811 a comprehensive bibliography of all works printed in Arabic by then, which has to be regarded as the starting point for a scholarly and systematic treatment of the subject. Schnurrer’s work, which contains also ample information on the products of the presses in the Arab lands, has been a source of great importance until today.
3.Igumen Andrew Wade, “A preliminary comparison of the Horologion in MS Sinai Arabic 232 (13th c.) with the 1702 edition of Athanasios Dabbās and the earlier version of Meletios Karme.”
The Arabic Horologion of Athanasios Dabbās, the Patriarch of Antioch, printed in Wallachia in 1702 by Antim the Iberian, is quite well known to scholars. However, no studies have examined the Arabic translation used in this publication or investigated its provenance. This paper is ground-breaking in this area, thereby shedding light on a completely neglected area of Christian Arabic studies: the Orthodox Arabic Horologion. A comparison will be made of several passages in the Horologion of Dabbās with the earlier text found in MS Vatican Borgia 178, which was submitted for publication to Propaganda Fide by Meletios Karme but was never actually printed, becoming bogged down in the Vatican procedures of the time. The research focuses on finding out whether the two texts are identical, and if not, what the differences are. A further comparison will be made with the Melkite Arabic Horologion of Egyptian provenance contained in MS Sinai Arabic 232 (13th c.).
4. Samuel Noble, “The Development of the Akathist Hymn in Arabic.”
Originally a 6th- or 7th-century composition, the Akathist Hymn in praise of the Theotokos is one of the most popular expressions of Marian piety in the Orthodox Church. Although its canonical use in the liturgy came to be on the Fifth Saturday of Great Lent, the earliest attestations of the hymn in Arabic and (closely-related) Syriac translations, both dating to the 13th century, are found in a variety of liturgical and non-liturgical manuscripts and in both monolingual and bilingual Arabic-Greek and Arabic-Syriac formats. Moreover, in some manuscripts, the hymn is accompanied by original, paraliturgical prayers to the Theotokos composed in Arabic rhyming prose (saj’) in language echoing the original Akathist, demonstrating the impact that the hymn’s translation had on the piety of Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians. This contribution will trace the development of the Arabic version of the Akathist Hymn from the earliest manuscripts to the earliest printed versions in the 18th century, with special attention to both its placement in manuscripts and the evolution of its language, to understand its place both in liturgical practice and private devotion.
PANEL 2
1. Vera Tchentsova, “Birth of the portrait in the Orthodox realm: representations of the individual in Greek books printed in Bucharest and Venice in the early 18th century.”
The first Greek presses, founded to provide churches with liturgical texts and disseminate anti-Latin polemical writings among the Orthodox, emerged in the West, primarily in Venice, with its considerable Orthodox Greek population. Towards the end of the 17th century, presses printing with Greek type opened also in the Romanian Principalities, due to the support of local princes. The long Western tradition of publishing in Greek influenced book-printing in Eastern Europe in a significant way. Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem and his successor Chrysant Notaras, who were the most important promoters of Greek book-printing in the Romanian Principalities, were closely connected with the Western circles of intellectuals, especially with those who were active in printing. The Orthodox hierarchs used all opportunities for the dissemination of Orthodox texts, collaborating in book editing with Western printers and trying to introduce new editing practices in their own presses. One such invention was the introduction of modern Western-style figurative portraits of the authors or patrons, previously represented in the editions only by their coat of arms. The first example of such an illustration is present in a book published in Bucharest: this is the famous portrait of the Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem enclosed in the History of the Patriarchs of Jerusalem (Bucharest, 1715-1722). Soon, other portraits represented Chrysant Notaras and the Wallachian voivode Constantin Brâncoveanu. The present paper focuses on the “invention of the portraits” of individuals that spread in the Orthodox world from the beginning of the 18th century, their stylistic particularities, and the collaboration of Dositheus and Chrysant of Jerusalem with Paris and Venice engravers in order to embellish the books printed under their auspices for the Orthodox readers.
2. Archim. Policarp Chițulescu, “The text of the Greek and Arabic Liturgikon of 1701. A comparative analysis.”
The mystery of the Eucharist is the center of Christian life, because through it, Christ the Redeemer offers Himself to the believers. The forms of the Liturgies to be served in the Orthodox Church have been in use for over 1600 years. In time, they suffered certain developments of the prayers and received clear explanations of the ritual, with the aim of embellishing them. Even if Christian peoples each have their own cultural traditions, the Liturgy provided unity to them, all the while leaving the possibility of specific influences in the performance of the rites. The invention of the printing press contributed to the unifying of the Byzantine liturgical texts for peoples speaking Greek, Romanian, Arabic, Georgian, and Slavic languages. The printing, in 1701, at the Snagov monastery near Bucharest, of the Greek and Arab Liturgikon, by the initiative of the master printer Antim the Iberian, with the substantial financial support of Constantin Brâncoveanu, great Maecenas and voivode of Wallachia, opened a new era in the history of the Arabic Liturgy. The Greek text of the bilingual Liturgikon of 1701 was prepared by Antim the Iberian (a future Metropolitan of Wallachia), who would publish a few years later the entire Liturgy in Romanian. A comparative analysis of the texts printed by Antim in Greek, Arabic, and Romanian led to the detection of unexpected similitudes. This fact helps us understand to what extent the text of the Arabic Liturgy was influenced by the Greek version that Antim the Iberian prepared and used in Wallachia, including the translation of the service in Romanian, printed in 1706. This paper also addresses the question to what extent the Liturgical text prepared and printed in Arabic in Wallachia became predominant until today for the Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians.
3.Yulia Petrova, “The Forewords of the Christian Arabic books printed in Wallachia, Moldavia, and Greater Syria in the 18th century.”
As customary in books printed in the presses of Eastern Europe, the books that Athanasios Dabbas and Sylvester of Antioch prepared and printed in Arabic type contain Forewords in Arabic (some, also in Greek) and other introductory and closing elements that are worth studying. They offer information on the persons and facts contributing to the printing project: who composed, translated, or adapted the Arabic text; who supervised its printing; the historical circumstances; the situation of the Antiochian Church at the time the book was printed; what difficulties the hierarchs of the Antiochian Church faced in this endeavor; who helped them in their aspiration to print Christian texts in Arabic – rulers, Church scholars, and local printers. This contribution outlines the main elements of this research, as an early report on themes and issues to be surveyed during the TYPARABIC project.
4. Fr Rami Wakim, “Athanasios Dabbās’s Gospel books. A comparative study of his 1706 versions of the Tetraevangelion.”
This paper addresses the main differences between the Gospel books printed by Athanasius III Dabbās in 1706 in two versions – a standard one (the Tetraevangelion) and one enclosing comments whose author is not named (the “Lectionary”). The author is currently conducting, for the TYPARABIC project, a research on the sources of Dabbās’s second, and most peculiar, version of the Tetraevangelion, in which he surveys medieval and modern Patristic and Scriptural commentaries, Orthodox and Catholic, seeking to find the sources of the commentaries printed in 1706 and the particularities of Dabbās’s editing work. The main purpose is to understand Dabbās’ intention when printing a commented text of the Tetraevangelion: was it solely to educate his clergy, or to help them withstand the influence of Catholic missionaries? The two books dated in 1708 are also taken into account, as the paper presents the preliminary results of this research.