A Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Mechitarist Monastery of St. Lazarus in Venice, Italy

During the spring of 2004, I had the opportunity to uncover and index a collection of Arabic manuscripts in the library of the Armenian monastery of St. Lazarus in Venice, Italy.

History of St. Lazarus Monastery

The monastery of St. Lazarus is built on a Venetian island that was once home to a Benedictine monastery and then a leper colony for several centuries during the Middle Ages. St. Lazarus was eventually abandoned and since 1717 has been a monastic residency to the Catholic Armenian order known as the Mekhitarists.

The first Mekhitarist fathers to arrive on the island numbered seventeen monks, including their founder Mekhitar. These monks fled from the Turks in Morea in Southern Greece and took refuge in the monastery of St. Lazarus in 1715. In Venice, at that time there was a small wealthy community of Armenians.

The island became a cultural center for the language, literature, and traditions of the Armenian culture. The construction of a printing press and internal library sealed the island’s purpose and added more than 170,000 volumes to their collection (4,000 manuscripts) and many other original Armenian, Arabic, and Egyptian artifacts [1].

Library of St. Lazarus

Today this monastery is one of the three principal centers of Armenian culture in the world, the others being the monasteries of the Mekhitarists in Vienna and of Echmiadzin near Yerevan in Armenia.

The Library is open to scholars by appointment. Among the documents, there is a collection of Arabic manuscripts that were collected over time. These manuscripts are mainly from Syria and Egypt, especially during the time of Boghos Bey Yusufian (1775-1844), the Minister of both Commerce and Foreign Affairs in Egypt during the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805-1848).

The Library of St. Lazarus holds a collection of 35 Arabic manuscripts dating from the 14^th and 19^th centuries. This collection covers Qur’an, Hadith, Islamic legislative matters; Islamic history; Islamic philosophy and logic; and Arabic dictionaries and lexicon. Moreover, the collection contains few Christian Catholic dogmatic and devotional Arabic manuscripts.

Special Arabic Manuscripts

The collection of Arabic manuscripts in St. Lazarus contains several Qur’anic leaves in Kufic script on vellums, from north Africa or near East, which probably belong to the 9^th century AD.

Among the important historical Arabic manuscripts at St. Lazarus are Nuzhat an-nadhirin fi tarikh man tawala Masr min al-khulafa’ wa al-salatin by Zayn al-Din Mur’i Ibn Yusif al-Maqdisi al-hunbuli and The history of the Ottoman Sultans from sultan Othman up to Sultan Othman son of Ahmad 1031 A.H (1651A.D) by Muhammad Abu al-Sharaf al-Malawi.

In addition, the collection contains works in Islamic philosophy and logic. These include the book of al-Maqamat by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (1054-1122); a commentary on al-Risalah al-Shamsiyah by Muhammad ibn Muhammad Qutub al-Tahtani (1294-1364); Collection of Forty Traditions by Abu Zakariya Yahya b. Saraf Al-Nawawi (1233-1278 AD); and Isāghūjī fi al-Manṭiq, or A Commentary on the Compendium of Logic by Athir al-Din al-Bahri (D. 1265).

Footnote

[1] “The Venetian Island of St. Lazarus: Where Armenian Culture Survived the Diaspora”, in Inside the Vatican Staff, http://insidethevatican.com/news/the-venetian-island-of-st-lazarus-where-armenian-culture-survived-the-diaspora.