Gaston Zananiri

Gaston Zananiri (Arabic: جاستون زنانيري, 1904 – 1996) was an eminent scholar, historian,[1] and poet of Alexandria, Egypt.

Gaston Zananiri
Gaston Zananiri, writer and historian from Alexandria, Egypt.
Gaston Zananiri, writer and historian from Alexandria, Egypt.
Born1904
Alexandria, Egypt Province, Ottoman Empire
Died1996
France
OccupationHistorian, poet, journalist, civil servant

Life

Gaston Zananiri was born in 1904 in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. His father Georges Zananiri Pasha (1863–1956) was Secretary General of the Sanitary Maritime and Quarantine Board of Egypt.[2] He belonged to a Syrian Melkite family which had migrated to Egypt from Syria centuries earlier.[2][3] Gaston's mother was Marie Ines Bauer, of Hungarian Jewish extraction on her father's side and Italian on her mother's side.[2] She converted to Christianity and moved in Zionist circles in Egypt and Palestine in the early 20th century,[4] Gaston would also follow in his mothers footsteps and associate himself with Zionist movements in Palestine.[3] In his youth Gaston attended Victoria College, Alexandria, where he received his education.[2] Gaston worked for the Egyptian Foreign Office from 1940 to 1950. In 1948 Gaston founded the 'Alexandrian center of studies and in 1951 he moved to Paris in France and became a Dominican priest.

Works

In 1939 Gaston published L'Esprit Méditerranéen dans le Proche Orient. Gaston's life work was entitled Dictionnaire général de la francophonie. He completed his memoirs in 1982.[2]

References
  1. Cahiers du sud, Volume 17, Issues 201–206. Pennsylvania State University. 1938. p. 476. M. Gaston Zananiri, historien et poète, a largement contribué à nous faire connaître le rôle joué par l'Egypte chrétienne et musulmane dans l'évolution de la civilisation méditerranéenne
  2. Mansel, Philip (2010). Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. Hachette UK. ISBN 9781848544628.
  3. Haag, Michael (2004). Alexandria: City of Memory. Yale University Press. p. 154. ISBN 9780300104158. As for Zananiri, 'my idea has always been the world, ecumenism'. On his father's side his family were Syrian Greek Catholics who had settled in Alexandria in 1610, while 'my mother was a Jewess, a Hungarian, a beautiful woman. I'm a mixture, as Alexandria was a Jewish, Greek and Syrian city. In 1931 he had gone to Palestine, in Jerusalem meeting Madame Ben Yahuda, the widow of the man who, by compiling his great dictionary, almost single-handedly renovated the Hebrew language, transforming the word of the Prophets into the tongue of everyday life. Zananiri was inspired to write an account of Ben Yahuda's life and work, but in doing so would hardly have seen himself as promoting a divisive cause
  4. Halim, Hala (2013). Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive. Fordham Univ Press. p. 375. ISBN 9780823251766. Gaston Zananiri, a Greek Catholic on his father's side—his mother, of Jewish freethinking background, converted to Christianity—wrote about Semitism and moved in Zionist circles in Egypt and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century
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