Archiving Faith: Record-Keeping and Catholic Community Formation in Eighteenth-Century Mesopotamia

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the archiving practices of a little-known group of Catholics in the Ottoman Empire, the Diyarbakır Chaldeans, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues for a flexible definition of archives, based not on traditional characteristics such as links to a defined institutional repository, but on their purpose of community formation. The loose institutional structure of the Chaldean Church resulted in an unconventional archive, which never had one physical centre and consisted largely of liturgical manuscripts; nonetheless, it recorded recognizably archival material and gained cohesion from the overlapping circles of families, scribes and churches involved in its production, as well as from systematic innovations in scribal practices. The Diyarbakır Chaldean archive not only reflected the distinctive form of the community but also contributed to creating and reshaping it. By recording social ties, it kept these obligations alive for decades and generated ongoing commitments. It also imagined the community on an illusory level, occluding tensions and troubles in order to preserve an idealized image of a church united under pious leadership. This dispersed, mobile archive thus was intimately connected to community formation and contributed to the survival of the Chaldean Church in a time of immense difficulty.