Selling Holy Land: Palestinian Christian activism in the Old City of Jerusalem

我的奖学金项目的第一个目标是发展和传播我关于耶路撒冷东正教牧首的博士论文的发现，这是一个古老的教堂，今天在它的墙内外都饱受冲突的折磨。宗主教区分为巴勒斯坦的世俗人口和希腊僧侣控制的等级制度。这种分裂是一个多世纪以来斗争的根源，它可以追溯到巴勒斯坦/以色列的政治史和更深层次的东方教会历史。几十年来，研究人员、记者、活动家和神职人员一直在努力理解和解决这一冲突，但收效甚微。因此，我的博士研究试图从一个不同的角度来探讨这个问题。我的研究表明，理解教会冲突的困难与一个更广泛的分析问题有关。一方面是希腊等级制度，另一方面是巴勒斯坦社会，经常被认为是相互对立和独立的，在管理教会遗产方面，每一方都试图取代另一方- -包括其相当大的房地产。但我发现这个假设是不正确的。事实证明，在奥斯曼帝国统治的几个世纪中，这些机构在重要方面发生了变化，有效地将教会和巴勒斯坦家庭合并为一个统一的整体。根据这些观察，我的博士论文在许多不同的背景下研究了家庭和教会的合并，包括教会法，财产法规，仪式经验和款待关系。在这样做的过程中，我能够开始建立一个更有效的框架来理解俗人与高级神职人员之间的冲突。然而，我的论文没有将这个新框架应用到正在进行的政治争端中。在我实地考察的过程中，公共领域爆发了冲突的新阶段：以色列报纸公布了泄露的文件，概述了向以色列定居点组织、开发商和政府出售和租赁几大片教堂土地的情况。多年未见的大规模抗议活动在全国蔓延，巴勒斯坦活动人士发起了一场新的运动，要求罢免这位大牧首。我收集了法律文件，采访了活动人士和律师，参加了许多会议、抗议活动和新闻发布会，以宣传该运动的目标，并激发巴勒斯坦公众采取行动。既然我已经为理解宗主教区的结构建立了坚实的经验基础，我准备开始更明确地阐述教会的政治动态。因此，我的奖学金不仅将巩固我的博士研究，而且将转向更大的政治问题。我计划通过研究有关中东和东正教世界的宗教激进运动的文献，以及宗教财产的文献来做到这一点。我将与我的部门导师合作，将我对宗主教区结构的更大的研究方法应用于活动家、神职人员和国家的政治话语和行为。在奖学金期即将结束时，我将把我的奖学金年的不同部分结合在一起，组织一个研讨会，由少数在不同学科的宗主教区工作的专家参加，他们都对解决当前的危机感兴趣。这将成为一个新的实地项目的基础，我将在奖学金年度结束后返回耶路撒冷，更深入地调查财产问题。总之，奖学金将为我提供一个关键的过渡期，在此期间，我可以分享我的博士研究成果，并确立自己作为一名研究人员的地位，同时为我的职业生涯的下一阶段做准备，使我能够从事一个长期的项目，这将对学院和宗主教区本身产生影响。

The first aim of my fellowship project is to develop and disseminate the findings of my doctoral dissertation on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, an ancient church that is today racked with conflict, both inside and outside its walls. The patriarchate is divided between a lay population of Palestinians and a hierarchy controlled by Greek monks. This division has been a source of struggle for over a century, and it can be traced both through the political history of Palestine/Israel and the deeper history of the Eastern church.For decades now, researchers, journalists, activists, and clergy have struggled to understand this conflict and to resolve it, with little success. My doctoral research thus attempted to approach the subject from a different angle. My research suggests that the difficulties in understanding the church conflict are related to a broader analytical problem. The institutions of the Greek hierarchy on the one hand and Palestinian society on the other are frequently assumed to be opposed and independent, each always seeking to supplant the other in administration of the church patrimony - including its considerable real estate holdings. But I found this assumption to be incorrect. As it turns out, over the course of centuries of Ottoman rule, these institutions transformed in important ways, effectively merging the church and the Palestinian family into a single, unified whole. Following from these observations, my doctoral dissertation examines the merger of the family and the church in a number of different contexts, including canon law, property regulations, ritual experience, and hospitality relations. In doing so, I was able to begin establishing a more effective framework for understanding the conflict between the laity and the higher clergy. My thesis, however, stops short of applying this new framework to ongoing political disputes. In the middle of my fieldwork, a new phase of the conflict erupted into the public sphere: Israeli newspapers published leaked documents outlining the sale and lease of several large tracts of church land to Israeli settlement organisations, developers, and the state. Protests of a scale not seen in years spread across the country and Palestinian activists launched a renewed campaign to depose the patriarch. I collected legal documents, interviewed activists and lawyers, and attended numerous conferences, protests, and press events to publicize the movement's aims and provoke the Palestinian public into action. Now that I have established a solid empirical basis for understanding the patriarchate's structure, I am prepared to begin addressing the political dynamics of the church more explicitly. My fellowship will thus not only consolidate my PhD research but also pivot towards larger political questions. I plan to do this by studying the literature on religious activist movements in the Middle East and the Orthodox Christian world, as well as on the religious property. I will work with my departmental mentor to apply my larger approach to the patriarchate's structure to the political discourses and behaviour of the activists, the clergy, and the state. Towards the end of the fellowship period, I will bring the different strands of my fellowship year together by organizing a workshop with a small number of specialists working on the patriarchate in different disciplines who all share an interest in addressing the current crisis. This will form the basis for a new field project in which I will return to Jerusalem after the fellowship year to investigate the property issue in more depth.In sum, the fellowship would provide me with a crucial transition period in which to share the findings of my PhD and establish myself as a researcher while also preparing for the next phase of my career, setting me up to pursue a long-term project that will make an impact both in the academy and the patriarchate itself.