Nationalism versus Internationalism: Russian Orthodoxy in Nineteenth-Century Palestine

Abstract

Anxious to advertise Orthodoxy’s global reach, the influential Synodal official Andrei Nikolaevich Murav’ev (1806–74) opened his History of the Church of Russia in 1838 by boasting that the Eastern Church could ‘count her children’ from the Adriatic to the Pacific and ‘from the icefields which grind against the Solovetsky Monastery on its savage islet in the North to the heart of the Arabian and Egyptian deserts, on the verge of which stands the Lavra of Sinai’.1 Later in the century, changing international borders made the diaspora seem even wider. After the Alaska Purchase in 1867 opened up a new episode in the Russian missionary presence established on Kodiak Island in 1794, the Orthodox community stretched from Abyssinia to the North American Arctic.2