Travelers on the Margins: Mobility of Arabic-Speaking Christians in the Ottoman Empire

Middle Eastern migration has always impacted European social and economic life. Yet, Eurocentrism overshadows discussions of current migration policies as well as scholarship on historical mobility.

While the mobility of Arabic-speaking Christians across the centuries to and within Europe has received some scholarly attention, their mobility beyond European borders is largely overlooked, leading to an incomplete view of those who migrated to Europe.

To fill in the missing pieces of the picture, my project Travelers on the Margins: Mobility of Arabic-Speaking Christians in the Ottoman Empire (MOBASC) investigates the travels of this minority on the fringes of Europe, in the lands held by the Ottoman Empire (1517-1922).

Those Christians who traveled to Europe began their journeys within that Empireindeed their mobility was often confined to its territoriesand St. Catherines Monastery, Sinai, served as a way-stop for many (as well as a destination for pilgrims).

This projects primary sources are notes written by these travelers on the margins of hundreds of the monasterys Arabic manuscripts, recently made available online.

These notes, mainly in Arabic but also in Greek and Syriac, offer rich insights into the writers and their origins and itineraries.

I will collect and reconstruct the travelers accounts through their notes using my expertise in Arabic manuscripts and digital cataloging and harnessing innovative approaches from micro and global history, as well as social history, Eastern Christian studies, and ego-document studies, and the skills I will acquire during the fellowship in digital humanities, document studies, and Greek and Syriac manuscript cultures.

This will enable their travels to be contextualized, analyzed, and compared with other mobility from the same era, in particular travels that continued to Europe.

In turn, motives, patterns, dynamics, and strategies of mobility will be revealed, which can be compared to current migration patterns.