Sarkis Rizzi

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Sarkis Rizzi ( Sarkis el-Rizzi Arabic سركيس الرزي, Serge, lat .: Sergius Risius; * 1572 in Bkoufa; † June 1638 in Rome ) was a Lebanese bishop of the Maronites . On his initiative, the first book was printed in an Arab country.

biography

The family provided three Maronite patriarchs at that time : his two uncles Mikhayil (Michel, Arabic ميخائيل الأول الرزي, 1567-1581) and the eponymous Sarkis (Serge, Arabic سركيس الرزي1581-1596) and his younger brother Youssef (Joseph, Arabic يوسف الثالث الرزيOctober 3, 1596 - March 26, 1608). Youssef was abbot of the Antony Monastery of Quzhaya in Wadi Qadisha after the election of his uncle Sarkis as patriarch and was appointed bishop in 1595.

The young Sarkis was one of the first group of students at the Pontificio Collegio dei Maroniti in Rome in 1584 . Rizzi was ordained a deacon and priest in Rome before returning to Lebanon in 1596. In September – October of that year he was active in the Second Synod of Qannoubine . The synod was presided over by the papal legate Jérôme Dandini . At this synod his brother Youssef was elected patriarch. He then took over his post as head of the Quzhaya Convention. He was ordained bishop in 1600 by his brother (as Metropolitan of Damascus), but remained in the monastery.

In 1606 the Patriarch sent him to Rome as head of an embassy, ​​which brought his congratulations to the new Pope Paul V. He left Tripoli in October 1606 and reached Rome on April 19, 1607. Patriarch Youssef died on March 26, 1608. Due to difficulties the Ottoman authorities made, the choice of his successor John VIII Machlouf (يوحنا التاسع مخلوف) could not before the beginning of 1609. The new patriarch actually had to flee to Chouf for some time . Rizzi then returned to Lebanon. He arrived there sometime between 1609 and 1610. But the new patriarch initiated a policy of reaction against the Rizzi family, who had ruled the Church for 40 years. The Quzhaya monastery was also returned to the local bishop and Youssef Rizzi was excommunicated.

Sarkis Rizzi finally returned to Rome, which he reached sometime before 1621. There he worked on many editing projects: The edition of the Maronite Breviary in 1624, the printing of the Syriac Grammar by Abraham Ecchellensis in 1628, the Thesaurus of the Franciscan Orientalist Tommaso Obizzino (Tommaso da Novaria) in 1636. He also worked on the project of the Arabic Bible, the completion of which should take until 1671.

The Psalter of Quzhaya

His name is particularly associated with the publication of the Psalter of Quzhaya , an edition of the Book of Psalms in Syriac and Garschuni (written in Arabic with the Syriac alphabet ). This was the first book ever printed in Lebanon and the entire Levant region . This pressure remained the only one for almost a century.

Before that, the only printed books in circulation in Lebanon were the Catechisms in Garschuni and the Arabic version of Professio fidei Tridentina , which were also written in Garschuni. The Jesuit Giovanni Battista Eliano had brought them from Rome in 1580. Another book of Maronite prayers had been printed in Rome in 1584, and in the following years more prints were made in various Italian cities.

The Psalter of Quzhaya has 268 pages (eight without numbering, then 260 pages with numbering in Syrian letters). The headers of the pages have the Syriac title Ktobo d-mazmuré (Book of Psalms) in red . There are 150 canonical psalms as well as an apocryphal, which obviously comes from the Syrian tradition, four biblical cantici and another from Ephrem the Syrian (only in Syrian). The texts are arranged in two columns on the sides, Syriac on the right and Garschuni on the left. As the Arabic text is longer, the letters have different sizes to maintain parallelism. On the first page there is the signature of Sarkis ( Sergius Risius Archiepiscopus Damascenus ) with his coat of arms and the following information: «In the venerated hermitage of the sacred valley of Quzhaya in the mountains of Lebanon, work of the master Pasquale Eli and the minor Youssef ibn Amimeh de Karmsaddé, called Deacon, in 1610 of the Lord ». On the third page there is the foreword to the reader, written in Garschuni by Sarkis Rizzi. On page 258 there is the imprimatur by the bishop of Ehden , Girgis ibn Amira (no mention of Patriarch Jean Makhlouf, probably out of revenge). The last two pages are occupied by the colophon , which is written in the first person by deacon Youssef ibn Amimeh , who declares that through his mother he is the nephew of the initiator Sarkis Rizzi. He thanks all employees of the company. The date of the signature is precise: November 10, 1610.

Sarkis had a master printer come from Italy: Pasquale Eli from Camerino to guide the work. However, it is not known whether the bishop himself was in Lebanon during that year, or whether he was in Rome and his nephew alone carried out the operation. The origin of the printing types (two types in different sizes) is also unknown : were they also brought from Italy, or were they produced locally? They are not known from any other edition. The filigree design speaks for the production in Italy.

The edition was little known for a long time. Gabriel Sionita (Jibrā'īl aṣ-Ṣahyūnī) claims in his preface to his bilingual Psalter (Syriac-Latin, Paris, 1625) that he produced the first printed edition of this text in Syrian. The patriarch Estephane Douaihy (1630–1704) does not mention the work in any of his numerous writings on the community and culture of the Maronites. dans ses nombreux écrits sur la communauté et la culture maronites, ne la mentionne jamais. However, it is certain that this print took place in 1610. In the copy, which is preserved in the Nuremberg City Library , it is noted that it was acquired in 1611 for two piastres from the Bishop of Ehden by the German scholar Tobias Adami. Leone Allacci invokes Sarkis Rizzi in his Apes Urbanæ, sive de viris illustribus (Rome, 1633) and confirms the edition. However, the first bibliography to be mentioned in the edition is the Bibliotheca sacra by Jacques Lelong in 1709.

Only a few copies are known: one each in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (A-495); in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Fol A58 Inv. 62 Res.); in the Nuremberg City Library (Solg. Ms. 21 2); in the Herzog August library in Wolfenbüttel (Bible p. 4 ° 227); and in Lebanon in the Bibliothèque orientale of the Université Saint-Joseph (USJ-BO 26C2) and in the Bibliothèque centrale of the University of St. Esprit , Kaslik (USEK Pat. 291).

heritage

There is no information about the whereabouts of the printing house's materials after the book was made. There was another attempt to set up a printing press in the Lebanon Mountains (1627) and apparently the one that had been set up in the Quzhaya Monastery had already been lost. When the Lebanese Maronite Order got the building back in 1708, there were no more furnishings and a printing shop was not set up again until the beginning of the 19th century. After the one-off production of Psalter of Quzhaya, printing was only reintroduced in the Levant at the end of the 18th century by the Melkite patriarch Athanasius IV (1720–1724): he acquired a printing press from Bucharest and set up a printing press in Aleppo in 1704 ; some editions of biblical and liturgical texts appeared there between 1706 and 1711, before this activity was discontinued again. It was not until 1733 that the Melkite deacon Abdallah Zakher set up a permanent printing press in the monastery of Saint-Jean de Choueir .

Works

  • Bible arabe, Ancien et Nouveau Testament. January 1, 1671 Soc. bibl. brit. et étr.
  • Kitāb al-ʻahd al-Jadīd, yaʻna, Injīl al-Muqqas li-Rabbinā Yesūʻ al-Masīh. Sergius Risius, January 1, 1850 Wilyam Wāṭs-Verlag.

bibliography

  • Johann Christian Döderlein : Repertory for Biblical and Oriental Literature. Parts 3-4. Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1778, p. 84.
  • Johann Heinrich Zedler , Carl Günther Ludovici : Large complete universal dictionary of all sciences and arts. Volume 37: Send-Si. Hall 1706-1751, Sp. 374.
  • Johann Salomo Semler : An attempt at a fruitful excerpt from church history. 17th century first section. Volume 3, Hemmerde 1778, p. 141.
  • PB Dirksen: The Transmission of the Text in the Peshitta Manuscripts of the Book of Judges. Brill, Leiden 1972, p. 15
  • Joseph Moukarzel: Le psautier syriaque-garchouni édité à Qozhaya en 1610. Enjeux historiques et présentation du livre. In: Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph. Volume 63, 2010-2011, pp. 511-566.
  • Joseph Nasrallah: L'imprimerie au Liban. Imprimerie de Saint-Paul, Harissa (Liban) 1949.

Individual evidence

  1. The Antonius Monastery is one of the oldest institutions in the Maronite Church. The date of establishment is unknown; the first documentary mention can be found in a marginal note in Garschuni in the Rabbula Gospels of 1154 .
  2. The Jesuits had already brought two young Maronites to Rome in 1579 and four more in 1581. In 1584 there were about 20. Gregory XIII. created the Pontifical Maronite College , which he handed over to the care of the Jesuits with the Bull Humana sic ferunt of July 5, 1584.
  3. The general of the Jesuits, Claudio Acquaviva , announced his ordination and his early return in a letter to his uncle, the Patriarch, in a letter dated July 14, 1596.
  4. Girgis ibn Maroun from Ehden was also traveling with him , who was later from 1611 to 1633 as envoy of the Emir Fakhr-al-Din II to the papal see and to the Duke of Tuscany , and in 1614 was appointed Bishop of Cyprus († in Ehden on July 24, 1637).
  5. ^ Officium simplex septem dierum hebdomadæ ad usum Ecclesiæ Maronitarum , in Collegio Maronitarum, Rome, Étienne Paulin , 1624.
  6. collegium Maronitarum alumni linguæ Syriacæ immersive Chaldaicæ perbrevis institutio ad ejusdem nationis studiosus adulescentes , Rome, guy. Sacr. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1628.
  7. Thesaurus Arabico-Syro-Latinus , Rome, type. Sacr. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1636.
  8. Biblia Sacra Arabica, SACRAE Congregationis de Propaganda Fide jussu edita, ad usum Ecclesiarum orientalium; additis e regione Bibliis Latinis Vulgatis , Rome, type. Sacr. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1671.
  9. In the catalog of the oriental manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Laurentienne ( Florence ) from 1742, Étienne-Évode Assemani affirmed that the print Orient. 411 of the collection (n ° 30 of his catalog), a psalter in Garschuni, copied in 1528, printed in the monastery of Quzhaya in 1585, on the initiative of Sarkis Rizzi and Youssef Khater Assemani. However, most specialists doubt the existence of this edition, from which there are no traces. Jérôme Dandini , who was the papal legate in Lebanon in 1596, confirms that there has not yet been a printer in the region. ( Voyage au Mont-Liban , traduction française par Richard Simon , Paris, Louis Billaine, 1685, p. 86; rééd. Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik , 2005).
  10. Giovanni Battista Eliano (1530-1589) was a converted Jew and grandson of Elijah Levita , who from 1578 to 1580 two mission trips to Lebanon had undertaken.
  11. ^ Nasser Gemayel , "Les imprimeries libanaises de Rome", dans Camille Aboussouan (dir.), Le Livre et le Liban jusqu'à 1900 , UNESCO, 1982, pp. 190–193.
  12. This means that his maternal grandfather, Gabriel, is the brother of the Patriarchs Mikhayil, Sarkis, and Moussa, the father of Patriarch Youssef and Bishop Sarkis. He was ordained Metropolitan of Damascus in 1644.
  13. ^ Tobias Adami (1581-1643), pupil of Tommaso Campanella , member of the Fruitful Society , who made a trip to the Near East in 1611 .
  14. The two French copies were acquired in the 17th century, that of Sainte-Geneviève undoubtedly from Jean Fronteau, librarian from 1648 to 1662.