Photo exhibition
1. Palestine in Transition
Scholten’s sole exhibition during his life time was called Palestine in Transition. While motivations for photo project were religious, Scholten was well aware of the changing life of Palestine. He found bustling cities that were changing rapidly, motivating much of his documentary approach to the region. Despite the religious focus of his project, the collection tells us much about modernity in Palestine, particularly processes of urbanisation, population movements and class and communal dynamics in the years that the British Mandate over Palestine was being formalised.
2. Christianity and the Manifesting of National Presence in Palestine
Through the course of the 19th century, many European nations opened new institutions as well as building churches and other infrastructure that supported both the pilgrimage of their nationals and created spheres of cultural influence within Arab Palestinian communities. These relations were often along communal lines, for instance Russians addressing Orthodox Palestinians, or French and Italians addressing Arab Catholic Palestinians.
Scholten was, on some level at least, aware of such relations. In the two-volume set of photographic books that he published in French (1929), English (1930), German (1931) and Dutch (1935), the references change slightly in each language reflecting lingual relations and colonial affinities that had developed within each community.
3. Catering to Christians: Making the ‘Holy Land’
Pilgrimage to Palestine had a long history dating back to the time of Constantine the Great. However, with the technological and cultural shifts of modern life, pilgrimage gave way to a broader industry of tourism. Multinational tourism operators such Lloyd Triestino and Thomas Cook ran tours through Palestine, which sat alongside nationalist-religious infrastructure such as the Russian Compound, the Austrian Hospice and Notre Dame. By the 1850s diaries talk of Jerusalem as a modern tourism centre, with some preferring less commercial location like the Jordan that were seen as more authentic. The transnational cultural affinities that had shaped the political subtext of Palestinian communalism were visible in the ways Arab Christians responded to discrete markets of tourists.
4. Orthodox Communities in Palestine
The Orthodox community in Palestine was primarily Arab, though there were smaller communities of ethnic Greeks and Russians. Despite conflicts on an institutional level, on a community level there was much cordiality and intermarriage. Added to these communities were other branches of Orthodoxy, such as Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox, with their own distinct traditions.
5. Between Communalism and Nationalism
The 1920s were a time of much political change. The confluence of the Nahda (Arab Awakening or Renaissance), Jewish and Zionist immigration, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the British Mandate galvanised Arab identity in new ways. For Orthodox Palestinians, this meant a cultural shift in focusing on Arab identity over communal identity. The significant participation of Arab Orthodox in the broader nationalist movement, particularly in the cultural arena like the press, literature and the arts, saw the building of durable alliances between Christians and Muslims, in stark contrast to the situation of population exchanges between Greece and Turkey.
Last modified: | 17 October 2023 1.42 p.m. |