Klaus Wivel, the author of The Last Supper: The Plight of Christians in Arab Lands (New Vessel Press, 2016), spoke on April 29 as part of the International Institute for Humanitarian Affairs’ (IIHA) spring lecture series.

He detailed an exceedingly grim situation for Christians in four Middle Eastern countries—Egypt, Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon. In 1910, the entire region was only 10 percent Christian to begin with, but it’s now dropped to 4 percent, he said, offering some statistics:

-Palestine, as it was then known, was 10 percent Christian in 1922; the West Bank today (excluding East Jerusalem) is 2 percent Christian, and the Gaza Strip is 0.2 percent Christian;

-Egypt was 9 percent Christian in 1927; in 2000 it was 5.5 percent Christian;

-Lebanon was 54 percent Christian in 1932; today it’s around 37 percent Christian; and

-Iraq was 4 percent Christian before the 2003 war, now it’s below 1 percent.

Iraq’s Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, has been decimated the most, he said. Christians were seen as being allied with the American and European forces that ousted Saddam Hussein, so they were attacked, their churches were bombed, and their priests were killed in large numbers. By 2007, experts estimate that two-thirds of a population of 1.5 million had fled the country, he said.

“That was by far the largest group of people immigrating from Iraq,” said Wivel, a native of Denmark. “I thought this [would]be an enormous story, but it wasn’t.

He said the fact that more news outlets ignored the exodus baffled him, because “every major newspaper has a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem” and the Middle East.

Wahhabism’s Role

The biggest culprit in Christians’ dwindling numbers is the rise of Wahhabism, an intolerant strain of Sunni Islam that is practiced in Saudi Arabia, he said. Its influence can be felt in Egypt, where a 2010 survey found that 80 percent of the population said a Muslim who converts to another faith should be killed. In Iraq, ISIS has killed and enslaved Christians and Yazidis (members of an ancient monotheistic religion that believes in a god and seven protective angels) by the thousands.

Wivel said it’s clear these are violations of Article 18 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which all Mideast countries—but Saudi Arabia—have signed.

The U.S. State Department has known about this, but it doesn’t want to be seen as forcing Christianity on that part of the world, he said. The United States is also leery that calling attention to it will attract even more attacks.

While these are all valid points, the time for silence is over, he said.

“Even though we did not talk about this, the Christians became targets [so much that]in Iraq, there are hardly any left. So our silence didn’t really help them,” he said.

Focus on Iraq

On May 11, a second event held by the Center on Religion and Culture and the Orthodox Christian Studies Center put a particular focus on religious minorities and Iraq. While much of a panel conversation focused on Christians, it also touched on the fate of the Yazidis.

Two of the panelists brought firsthand experience of the crisis; they unflinchingly labeled the situation “genocide.”

Haider Elias, founder of Yazda: A Global Yazidi Organization, said that the Yazidi, who once numbered in the millions, are now less than a million in the world. He said many have migrated to Russia, Armenia, and Georgia. Iraq was once home to 90 percent of the Yazidi, but since 2014, 20 percent have migrated to refugee camps.

He traced long history of Yazidi massacres: from the Ottoman Empire in the late 19^th century to the Yazidi fight alongside Armenians in the 1920s to the current crisis.

“In 2014, ISIS kidnapped 10,000 Yazidi,” said Elias. “Five thousand women and children were taken for enslavement, and they killed 5,000 men. One was my brother.”

Through Yazda, Elias lobbies politicians from around the globe to bring attention to the killings. The group has helped more than 1,000 women who have escaped enslavement—some of which takes place in open markets, with the women chained to each other. Given the tumultuous history, many young Yazidis don’t want to return to the region.

“This is not the first, second, or third time,” said Elias. “Their fathers have been telling them the stories of attacks for centuries.”

Like the Yazidi, Assyrian Christians have been settled in Iraq for millennia. Father Gewargis Sulaiman, of the Assyrian Church of the East, said that his people were among the first to hear the message of Jesus from St. Peter. He said the Assyrians’ love of science, philosophy, and culture has left “an irrefutable mark on the Middle East.” Like the Yazidi, they too are being killed by the thousands and abandoning the area. Yet, Father Sulaiman has hope.

“I am not of the opinion that all the Christians will die out in Iraq,” he said. “This isn’t our first genocide. We have a mission. We are people of that land, and God put us there to be the light.

“These are human beings, … not museum pieces,” he said, paraphrasing a fellow priest in Iraq. “And when the world stands by and watches any peaceful people disappear, we all suffer.”

Tom Stoelker contributed to this article. 

Magda Teter, PhD, the Shvidler Chair in Judaic Studies, mounted the exhibition, her second this year, with Fordham Libraries in the O’Hare Special Collections Library at the Rose Hill campus.

In the exhibition, however, she said the sacred is counterbalanced by the profane, as it captures both the meaning the holidays have had for Jews and Christians, and displays their painful convergence through several items that depict nearly 600 years’ worth of anti-Jewish imagery.

Teter said that she didn’t want to gloss over the reality of the violence and hatred that Christians subjected Jews to during Easter and Passover festivals. Some of the materials in the show served as propaganda to stoke hatred of the Jews.

Some of the images are disturbing.

There are several depictions of a child being bled by Jews. A frequent anti-Semitic accusation against Jews was that they murdered Christians for their blood and used it in Passover rituals, an accusation known as the blood libel. Some of the images were inspired by the cult of Simon of Trent, a boy whose disappearance around Easter in 1475 was blamed on the Jews of this northern Italian town. Many Catholics venerated Simon, until in the aftermath of the Church’s Vatican II the cult of the boy was abolished.

Among the items on display are:

• engravings from two editions of the famous 15^th century world chronicle that portray the bleeding of a child, with images of Jews as grotesque characters
• the Easter issue of an Italian magazine, La difesa della razza (The Defense of Race), from 1940 that once again return to the theme of blood libel;
• German currency from 1922 that celebrates burning Jews;
• an 1884 parody of the Haggadah by German artist Carl Maria Seyppel.

Teter noted that Fordham is an appropriate setting for the exhibition, as the Jesuits are not known for shying away from difficult issues.

What is disturbing is balanced by beauty, however, as precious facsimiles of the famous 14th-century Barcelona Haggadah, the Gradual of Gisela, and the magnificent 13th-century Biblia de San Luis are also on display. All are gifts of longtime library patron James Leach, MD. The books use contemporary color printing methods to achieve exacting color replications. The gold leaf, however, is applied by hand and can be found throughout both texts.

Although not an alumnus, Dr. Leach has developed a relationship with Fordham based on his love for the Church and for lifelong knowledge, he said. He remembers the first time he heard Mass in Latin at Holy Trinity Church in Passaic, New Jersey. From there his interest in medieval texts and manuscripts grew, he said.

“I think people say you see God in church architecture, and in the stained glass, but God is also in the illuminations alongside the printed word,” he said.

The aesthetic and intellectual intensity of the exhibit’s three main showcases are complemented with a display of ephemera as well. Some ephemera alongside the back wall of the special collections gallery includes Haggadot in many languages, including in Arabic and Amharic. There are also a few printed as commercial promotions for Streit’s Matzos and Maxwell House Coffee—which are ubiquitous to American Jewish households, said Teter, and which often became household keepsakes.

Father Ryan and Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, will team-teach a new course this spring that aims to create a literal as well as scholarly conversation between Judaism and Christianity.

The course, “Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” will examine the historical contexts of the two faiths to uncover areas of overlap and sources of difference.

“This course is good for Fordham students because it will help them reflect on the links that bind Jews and Christians in one of the major urban centers in the United States, where so many Jews and Christians live and work together,” Father Ryan said.

The course stands as part of Father Ryan’s larger mission to develop what he calls a “trialogue” among the three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Father Ryan was appointed the McGinley Professor in 2009 after serving as Fordham’s vice president for University Mission and Ministry since 2005. For nearly half of his life as a priest, he held academic and administrative positions in Nigeria and Ghana.

Rabbi Polish is the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Chadash of the Hudson Valley in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. An eminent scholar in interreligious affairs, Rabbi Polish has published widely in the field and served as director of education for Inter-Met, an interfaith seminary in Washington D.C.

— Joanna Klimaski