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Reverend Easson’s Burden: A Nineteenth-Century Nusayri Manuscript between Ottoman Reform and an American Missionary’s Enthusiasm
In a letter dated December 13, 1907, the Philadelphia based physician Dr. S.A. Sterrett Metheny (1869-1921) provided information on an Arabic manuscript he was intending to sell to Joseph Rosengarten (1835-1921), a patron of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Metheny reported that he had acquired the manuscript in Syria from the Presbyterian missionary M.J. Easson (1841-1907) in the mountains around Latakia (Lādhiqīya), Syria. Easson had purchased the manuscript for thirty dollars from a Turkish soldier. He had told Easson that twenty years prior “he had captured the manuscript in the house of a sheik, during a punitive expedition to the Ansyri mountains which lie to the east of Latakia.” Metheny’s letter was addressed to Morris Jastrow (1861-1921), professor of Semitic languages and librarian of the University of Pennsylvania, and the physician questioned Jastrow’s judgment that the manuscript was not of great importance. “I rather am inclined to think the Ansyri MSS are much rarer and harder to obtain than you […] think. I tried repeatedly to get them when I was out among them, and I do not know that my father ever saw any but Mr. Easson’s, and he labored as a missionary to them for thirty three years.”
Over a century later, it is now clear that Jastrow was mistaken and the physician’s assessment quite correct. The text in question is Manhaj al-ʿilm wa’l-bayān wa-nuzhat al-samʿ wa’l-ʿiyān (“The path of knowledge and clarification and the bliss of hearing and witnessing”), a doctrinal treatise ascribed to the Nusayri sage Muḥammad b. ʿAlī ʿIṣmat al-Dawla (d. c.1050). Modern Nusayri bio-bibliographers in Syria have written that the work is lost, and it is not mentioned in recent scholarly treatments of Nusayri doctrine and ritual. It is likely that, at present, Easson’s manuscript (UPenn Oversize Ms. Codex 43; http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0002/html/mscodex43.html) is the Manhaj‘s only extant copy; it is now available in a critical edition by David Hollenberg and Mushegh Asatryan (The Nusayri Path of Knowledge, Leiden 2024).
This paper will consider the codicological and paratextual evidence pertaining to Ms. Codex 43. There is strong evidence that Ms. Codex 43 was produced as a group effort by a community facing difficult circumstances in the village of Makhus in Latakia in the middle of the nineteenth century. This presentation demonstrates how evidence within a manuscript can provide social-historical evidence for the period of its assembly and first readers.