Gaston Zananiri
{{Short description|Egyptian scholar, historian, and poet}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=March 2025}}
{{Infobox writer
|name = Gaston Zananiri
|image = Gaston Zananiri.jpg
|caption = Gaston Zananiri, writer and historian from Alexandria, Egypt.
| birth_date = 1904
| birth_place = Alexandria, Egypt Province, Ottoman Empire
| death_date = 1996
| death_place = France
| occupation = Historian, poet, journalist, civil servant
}}
Gaston Zananiri ({{langx|ar|جاستون زنانيري}}, 1904 – 1996) was an eminent scholar, historian,{{cite book |title= Cahiers du sud, Volume 17, Issues 201–206|year= 1938|publisher= Pennsylvania State University| quote= M. Gaston Zananiri, historien et poète, a largement contribué à nous faire connaître le rôle joué par l'Egypte chrétienne et musulmane dans l'évolution de la civilisation méditerranéenne |page= 476 }} and poet of Alexandria, Egypt.
Life
Gaston Zananiri was born in 1904 in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. His father Georges Zananiri Pasha (1863–1956) was Secretary General of the Sanitary Maritime and Quarantine Board of Egypt.{{cite book |title=Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean |last= Mansel |first= Philip |year= 2010 |publisher= Hachette UK |isbn=9781848544628 }} He belonged to a Syrian Melkite family which had migrated to Egypt from Syria centuries earlier.{{cite book |title=Alexandria: City of Memory |last= Haag |first= Michael |year= 2004 |publisher= Yale University Press |isbn= 9780300104158|quote=As for Zananiri, 'my idea has always been the world, ecumenism'. On his father's side his family were Syrian Greek Catholics who had settled in Alexandria in 1610, while 'my mother was a Jewess, a Hungarian, a beautiful woman. I'm a mixture, as Alexandria was a Jewish, Greek and Syrian city. In 1931 he had gone to Palestine, in Jerusalem meeting Madame Ben Yahuda, the widow of the man who, by compiling his great dictionary, almost single-handedly renovated the Hebrew language, transforming the word of the Prophets into the tongue of everyday life. Zananiri was inspired to write an account of Ben Yahuda's life and work, but in doing so would hardly have seen himself as promoting a divisive cause |page=154 }} Gaston's mother was Marie Ines Bauer, of Hungarian Jewish extraction on her father's side and Italian on her mother's side. She converted to Christianity and moved in Zionist circles in Egypt and Palestine in the early 20th century,{{cite book |title= Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive |last= Halim |first= Hala |year= 2013 |publisher= Fordham Univ Press |isbn=9780823251766 |quote= Gaston Zananiri, a Greek Catholic on his father's side—his mother, of Jewish freethinking background, converted to Christianity—wrote about Semitism and moved in Zionist circles in Egypt and Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century|page=375}}{{Verify source|date=June 2021}} Gaston would also follow in his mothers footsteps and associate himself with Zionist movements in Palestine. In his youth Gaston attended Victoria College, Alexandria, where he received his education. Gaston worked for the Egyptian Foreign Office from 1940 to 1950. In 1948 Gaston founded the 'Alexandrian center of studies and in 1951 he moved to Paris in France and became a Dominican priest.
Works
References
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Category:20th-century Eastern Catholics
Category:Writers from Alexandria
Category:20th-century Egyptian poets
Category:Eastern Catholic writers
Category:Egyptian Melkite Greek Catholics
Category:Egyptian people of Syrian descent
Category:20th-century Syrian poets