A library lost in translation: Paul Sbath’s correspondence with Eugène Tisserant

At the beginning of the 20th century, Syrian Catholic priest Paul Sbath (Aleppo, 1887 – Aleppo, 20 October 1946) obtained and consolidated a collection of 1,325 manuscripts, mainly acquired between Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Cairo. In 1927, Sbath sold part of his collection to the Vatican Library. His long transaction with the Vatican is attested by 85 documents – mostly letters in French – written between 1913 and 1945, that are currently held at the Vatican library. They mostly concern the exchange of offers, refusals, and change of terms between Paul Sbath and the librarian and orientalist Eugène Tisserant (24 March 1884 – 21 February 1972) for the purchase of Sbath’s manuscripts. This paper will retrace and discuss Sbath and Tisserant’s apparently impossible grasp of each other’s vision of a manuscript library that caused a series of misunderstandings and delays to reunite Sbath’s complete library at the Vatican.

Scholarly Correspondences Among Orientalists during the Early and Late Modern Period as a Historical Source: A Series of Lectures. The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship@IAS). For additional information on this event and the lecture series visit: https://albert.ias.edu/20.500.12111/8044.