Though
Syriac Christianity is one of the oldest Christian cultures, many people in the
West are unaware of its existence and unfamiliar with its traditions.
If
we recognize, however, that some of Syriac Christianity’s most important
ancient centers—Nineveh, Babylon, and Beroea—are today’s Mosul, Baghdad, and
Aleppo, we get a better understanding of how it is imperiled by today’s violent
conflicts.
Now,
some of the most beautiful and sophisticated Syriac manuscripts of the ancient
world are at risk of being lost forever, said one of the world’s leading
experts on Syriac texts.
Columba
Stewart, O.S.B., professor of theology at St. John’s University in
Collegeville, Minnesota has spent the last decade in a passionate quest to
locate and preserve the vast textual heritage of the Syriac Christian world. On
Feb. 6, he shared stories about this work with a capacity audience at the
Lincoln Center campus in a lecture titled “Out of the Flames: Preserving the
Manuscript Heritage of Endangered Syriac Christianity in the Middle East.”
Father
Stewart, a Benedictine monk, is the executive director of the Hill Museum and
Manuscript Library (HMML) at St. John’s, which began photographing manuscript
collections for microfilm in the 1960s, focusing mainly on Europe.
“In
2003,” said Father Stewart, “we made two important decisions—number one, we
decided to turn toward Eastern Christian collections in the Middle East, and
number two, we went digital.”
As
of today, the project has digitized approximately 21,000 manuscripts from the
Middle East, about 12,000 of which can be viewed online through the Hill
Museum’s digital library, vHMML.
Father Stewart sees the online collection eventually growing to 100,000
manuscripts.
“So
this, we hope, is going to launch a new era of Syriac scholarship, opening up
these collections which were off the radar of Western scholars,” he said.
A
Semitic language that was the Aramaic dialect of ancient Edessa, Syriac came to
be an essential language for the transmission of writings throughout
Mesopotamia and Asia, Father Stewart said. His team was able to digitize an
invaluable 14th-century Syriac world chronicle, which contains an account of
the Crusades from the perspective of indigenous Middle Eastern Christians.
A
Lost Manuscript
However,
the fate of the original manuscript is now less certain, as it had resided in
Aleppo since 1923, when an entire Syriac Christian community from Edessa was
forced to flee there with only their manuscripts and the key to their church.
“What’s
the present state of the manuscript, its present location in Aleppo? Who
knows,” said Father Stewart.
To
raise awareness about the rich history of Syriac Christianity and the need for
its safeguarding in the present, Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center
has created the Syriac Studies Series, launched with Father Stewart’s lecture.
The Department of Theology has also begun to feature Syriac studies in its
curriculum.