Christian Communities in Jerusalem and the West Bank Since 1948: An Historical, Social and Political Study.

• Author: Kreutz, Andre

Reviewed by Andrej Kreutz

While the conflicts in the Middle East and some other general problems of the area have attracted a great deal of attention from English language scholars, and even from the public at large, the situation of the Christian communities in the countries of the region, with the possible single exception of Lebanon, has received very little attention. There are several causes for this, such as the comparatively small number of indigenous Christians in the region, the still lingering positivist underestimation of the religious factors on the one hand, and the fascination with Islam which has captivated the Western mind since the late 1970s, on the other, and last but not least the tremendous political sensitivity of the issues involved. These have frightened many otherwise interested people, with largely negative results both for our understanding of the region and for chances of a more efficient policy in the area.

The long history and complex socio-political problems of the indigenous Christian communities in the Holy Land of Israel/Palestine have been particularly neglected in Western scholarship, and their existence has usually barely been noticed.

The heirs of the oldest Christian churches have for centuries been almost unseen or have been perceived as mere appendices to the historical site and religious monuments. Both the book by the Israeli scholar Daphne Tsimhoni and the one edited by M. Prior and W. Taylor, which is the collective effort of many Palestinian-Christian scholars and clergymen and their sympathizers, are thus very timely and both make substantial contributions to these generally little known aspects of Middle Eastern politics and history. Although obviously written from widely different academic and political standpoints, they are nevertheless in some ways complementary to each other and reading both of them seems necessary in order to gain a better grasp of the complex and volatile topics.

Tsimhoni's work, with the exceptions of the first two chapters, which are relatively short and focus on legal and demographic problems, and the last one which focuses on the Christians' reactions towards the Intifada, concentrates on an historical and institutional analysis of the more than fifteen local Christian communities which are perceived as separate and relatively closed entities, distinct from the larger socio-economic and political context and life of the country. Although Tsimhoni admits that "The...