Acknowledgments

We have never been alone in our investigation. Thus, we wish to express our gratitude to the individuals and institutions that have enabled us the progress of this study.

First of all, we thank the Ethiopian Orthodox Patriarchate in Addis Ababa, especially Patriarch Matthias and his representative in Jerusalem, Archbishop Enbakom, for granting us access to the archives of the Ethiopian community in the city. We would like to thank very warmly the staff of the Ethiopian archbishopric of Jerusalem and especially ato Getachew, who was the very first to tell us about the text here edited.

We also thank the former directors of the French Research Center in Jerusalem, Olivier Tourny and Julien Loiseau, as well as the general secretary Lyse Baer and the staff of the center for their unfailing support during our multiple trips into the city. Our gratitude also goes to the former director of the French Center in Addis Ababa, David Ambrosetti, and to the staff of the center who welcomed and supported us in approaching the Ethiopian patriarchate. Likewise, we would like to thank the director of the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies in Hamburg, Alessandro Bausi, who provided us with a space to meet.

Our gratitude goes to Professor Orin Gensler, our eminent colleague, who contributed enormously to the faithful rendering of the Amharic text, with all its roughness, into English. We are also indebted to Hiruye Ermias and Solomon Gebreyes Beyene, both researchers attached to the Hiob-Ludolf Centre, whose knowledge and insights enabled us to better understand challenging passages of the text. Our research has also benefited from the support and help of our colleagues participating in the ERC Open Jerusalem project. Our warmest thanks go to Maria Chiara Rioli (Ca’ Foscari University Venice) for her help with Italian sources and Angelos Dalachanis (CNRS, IHMC) with Greek sources. Similarly, the contribution and support of our colleagues Yasemin Avci (Pamukkale Üniversitesi) with Ottoman sources, and Falestin Naili and Abdul-Hameed Al-Kayyali (Institut français du Proche-Orient, Amman) with Arabic sources, were decisive. Finally, our knowledge of archival data would not have been the same without the support and insight of Yann Potin (French National Archives). We warmly thank him here.

Access to the Italian archives would not have been possible without the inventory work carried out by our colleagues, the archivists Antonella Di Domenico and Costanza Lisi (Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Esteri, Rome). We also owe access to Russian sources to our colleague Lora Gerd (Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg). Finally, we would like to thank George Hintlian (Christian Heritage Institute, Jerusalem) for providing us with material from the Armenian archives in Jerusalem. We would also like to thank our colleagues Denis Nosnitsin (Universität Hamburg), Wolbert Smidt (FZG Universität Erfurt) and Simon Dorso (Lyon 2 University) for providing us respectively with the photographic material from the ERC Ethio-SPaRe project, the photograph of Mashashā Warqē and the photographs of the Ethiopian Easter ceremony in Jerusalem in 2012.

As this investigation is as much the fruit of research and travel as of long intellectual development, we would like to thank our colleagues with whom the exchanges were a source of inspiration: Leyla Dakhli (CNRS, Centre Marc-Bloch), Marie-Laure Derat (CNRS, Orient et Méditerranée), Bernard Heyberger (EHESS), Éloi Ficquet (EHESS), Marc Dugas (EPHE). Since no scientific research is possible without supporting institutions, ours should of course be mentioned here: the CNRS and the members of the Centre d’ études en sciences sociales du religieux, the Hiob Ludolf Centre for Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies of the Universität Hamburg, the University Paris-Est Marne-la-vallée, and finally the European Research Council that financed the Open Jerusalem project within which this study was carried out.

Finally, we would like to pay posthumous tribute to Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen (1932–2017), historian, without whom knowledge of the history of the Ethiopian community in Jerusalem would not have been the same, and with whom we were able to talk during a meeting organized by our colleague Merav Mack (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) in 2014.