As usual they began with the idea, not of making converts, but of educating and spiritualizing, then quarrelled with the hierarchy, and now have small sects of ex- Jacobite Protestants.[1]
3. Organization and Hierarchy
The name Jacobite, known to us in England in a more honourable connection,[2] is since about the 8th century the usual one for the Monophysite Church of Syria.[3] It has been explained in other ways, for instance, as derived from St. James the Less (whose rite they use); but there is no doubt that it comes really from James[4] Baradai (p. 324).
The total number of Jacobites is now estimated at about eighty thousand.[5] Most of them live in the district of Ṭur 'Abdīn by the upper Tigris, between Diyārbakr and Mardīn. Here are about one hundred and fifty Jacobite villages. They have smaller colonies at Diyārbakr, Edessa, Mosul, very few families at Bagdad, Damascus, Aleppo,[6] hardly any in Palestine, except a small colony at Jerusalem. They are now a poor and backward people, neglected by the more advanced parts of Christendom, suffering still from centuries of oppression and isolation, generally despised by their neighbours. All who know them admit that the Monophysite Jacobites stand far behind their brothers who have returned to union with Rome.[7] All talk Arabic, except thirty or forty villages in Ṭur 'Abdīn, who still speak Syriac.[8]
- ↑ Parry: ib. 306-310.
- ↑ It is interesting to note that Eusèbe Renaudot, the great authority for all Eastern Churches († 1720), was employed by Lewis XIV to assist the English refugees at St. Germain (Villien: L'abbé Eusèbe Renaudot, Paris, 1904, pp. 48-55). So he had to do with Jacobites in both senses of the word.
- ↑ It occurs among the anathemas of the Second Council of Nicæa (787): "To all Eutychians and Monotheletes and Jacobites anathema thrice." Of course the Jacobites always call themselves orthodox.
- ↑ Ya'ḳūb, Jacobus. "Jacobite" is in Syriac Ya'kubâyâ, or Ya'kubīthâ; Arabic: Ya'ḳūbīyah.
- ↑ Etheridge in 1846 gives their number as one hundred and fifty thousand (op. cit. p. 149); Socin (Der neu-aramäische Dialekt des Tūr 'Abdīn, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1881, pp. iv-v) says there are only forty thousand; Badger (op. cit. i. 62) says about one hundred thousand (in 1842). Parry says one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand (Six Months, p. 345).
- ↑ Bagdad, Damascus, and Aleppo have large Syrian Uniate communities. There are Uniates throughout the Jacobite country.
- ↑ E.g. Badger: op. cit. i. 63-64.
- ↑ Cf. Socin: op. cit. p. vi.
