Ziadie family

The Ziadie family is an upper-class family prominent in Jamaica.^[1] They are the descendants of half a dozen Greek Orthodox brothers who emigrated from Lebanon.^[2]

Lady Colin Campbell, previously Georgia Ziadie,^[3] is descended from this family through her father, Michael Ziadie.^[4] She says the Ziadies have gone from being "revered to reviled to now treasured as exotic national fruit"^[5] and are a wealthy family in Jamaica.^[6] The opera director Sir Peter Jonas is her cousin,^[7] the son of May Jonas (née Ziadie), the second of fifteen children of Tewfik Ziadie, Michael Ziadie's uncle. Another cousin was the best-selling author (of The Lunatic and The Annihilation of Fish, both of which were made into films, the latter starring James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, and Margot Kidder, and Bob Marley: My Son) Anthony Winkler, whose mother Myrtle was Michael Ziadie's sister.

The Ziadie family is the Jamaican branch of a prominent international family which orginated in the Keserwan district of Lebanon and traces its ancestry back to the fifth century. The family name has various spellings, all of which are regarded as correct, being transliterations from Arabic and Cyrillic script into the Latin alphabet. The Anglicised version is Ziadie; the French, Ziade (accent on the e); modern Arabic, Ziadeh; classical Arabic, Ziadah; as well as Ziyaddi, Tsiadeh, and Cziadeh. The family has had a profile in North and South America (the USA, Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil); Europe (the UK, France, Italy, Spain); Australia; the West Indies; the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt), and has played a part in the national life of the many countries in which it has settled. In Lebanon, it is known primarily for its religious and intellectual roots, while in the New World it became known as a mercantile and racing family, In both places, it has also gained a degree of political influence. During the Lebanese political crisis of 1958, when the Americans occupied part of Lebanon at the invitation of its pro-Western president, Camille Chamoun, Louis Ziadeh was an avid supporter of the rights of the Christians of Lebanon to determine their own fate without being subsumed by the Muslim world under the leadership of Colonel Gamal Nasser. The late Maronite Archbishop of Beirut was Ignace Ziadeh, who was partly responsible for allying the Christians with the Israelis. Camille Ziadeh represented Beirut in the Lebanese senate, while in Jamaica Arthur 'Turo' Ziadie was a senator for the centrist Jamaica Labour Party. The fabled Professor Nicholas Ziadeh, of the University of Beirut, who was one of the most eminent historians of the twentieth century (a professor at the American University in Beirut as well as a visiting professor at Cambridge and Harward), was avowedly apolitical, while trying to convince his Muslim compatriots that Chrstians were not only patriotic but that pan-Arabism had disappointed the hopes of the people for a more tolerant and democratic society.

The family traces its roots back to the fifth century, when the senior, originating, branch of the family became followers of St Maron. The Maronite branch still heads the family. Representatives include the late Archbishop of Beirut, Ignace Ziadeh, Senator Camille Ziadeh, and the most famous Middle Eastern authoress of the first half of the 20th century, May Ziadeh/Ziadah/Ziyaddi, who lived between Beirut and Egypt. Notoriously, she was enticed to return to the Ziadeh Palace in Beirut in the 1930s by her cousins, who succeeded in having her committed to an asylum. After she obtained her release, she severed ties with them and returned to Cairo, where she died in 1941.

Like many of the prominent Christian families in the Levant, the Ziadehs have intermarried over the centuries with various other Christian nationalities, and therefore many of them are partly French, Russian, Armenian, Syrian, Greek, Spanish or Palestinian, and more recently English and Irish (Lady Colin Campbell),English and Scottish (Sir Peter Jonas), or Hungarian (Anthony Winkler). As a family, they have been surprisingly flexible religiously, with some members of the family marrying Jews and becoming Jewish themselves, while junior branches are Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian. 

This religious flexibility appears to have its roots in the eighteenth century. Throughout the preceding millenium, the Maronites had been persecuted by the Ottomans with a rigour that was spared the Greek Orthodox. During the first half of the eighteenth century, members of the cadet branch of the family left Keserwan, abandoned their Maronite faith and converted to the Greek Orthodox Church prior to moving to Choueifat, which at that time was one of the central sites of Orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire. There they became pillars of the Greek Orthodox community, a role they would maintain throughout the succeeding centuries until the time of the Lebanese Civil War. The significance of this switch in religions was that the Ziadeh family came to occupy a position vis-a-vis the Russian state similar to that occupied by the El Khazen family and the French. Each of the main European powers used their religious affiliates in the Ottoman Empire to further their own national interests. In the case of the Russians, their ambition was to have a sea port on the Mediterranean. Choueifat is a hill town and a part of Ras Beirut. In the process, each of the affiliates prospered. The El Khazen family were acknowledged as Sheikhs by the French and the Ziadehs of Choueifat were created Russian counts. The result was twofold. While all Ziadehs of Choueifat became counts and countesses in their own right, and enjoyed a degree of prestige as long as the Russian and the Ottoman Empires were in accord - Tsarina Elisabeth Petrovna had obtained a concession from the Ottoman Sultan that the Tsars of Russia would be the perpetual protectors of the Orthodox subjects of the Ottomans - when the Ottomans and the Russians found themselves on opposing sides of the Crimean War in the 1850s, and Russia lost it, the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire were persecuted for the first time as avidly as the Maronites had been for centuries by their Ottoman masters.

Choueifat was not only the centre of Orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire. It was also the fiefdom of the Arslan princes, the premier Druze family in Lebanon, some of whom are now cousins of the Ziadies, the two families having intermarried in the twentieth century, though in the nineteenth century, the Druzes were responsible for the extermination of some 100,0000 Christians. 

The Crimean War would prove disastrous not only for the Ziadehs of Choueifat, but for all Christians in Lebanon. Although there were intemittent wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire which Russia won throughout the closing years of the nineteenth century, these victories in no way alleviated the persecution of the Christians, whom the Ottomans regarded as Fifth Columnists to be rooted out. When the 'Sick Man of Europe', as the Ottoman Empire was known, refused to keel over and die the way forecasters were often predicting it would, the Christians of Lebanon began fleeing in droves. The first of the Ziadehs of Choueifat to depart in the 1890s was Tewfik, father of the former Hartnell model May Ziadie and grandfather of Sir Peter Jonas, the celebrated opera director. Tewfik's son Millard Ziadie would become, in the second half of the twentieth century, Venezuela's leading race horse trainer, who lived for most of his long life at the Hotel Tamanaco, where he occupied a suite while his mistresses, then his wife, occupied houses nearby.

Family legend has it that Tewfik had intended to emigrate to the United States, but stopped off in Jamaica, where he chose to remain, the two countries sharing many similarities topographically. He was soon followed by five of his brothers, including George, whose son Michael is the father of the royal biographer Lady Colin Campbell. She has recounted with pride how her grandfather used to peddle goods on the back of a donkey to the native population when he first arrived in Jamaica, and how her own father made her and her brother and sisters work from the age of eight in the family department stores so that they would learn where their money came from. Like many refugees, her father distrusted governments and frequently told his children how important it was to remember that fortune is fickle and education more important than anything, as 'governments can and will steal your land, your houses, your property, but the one thing they can't steal is what is in your head.' By the time of her birth in 1949, the Ziadies of Jamaica were a household name, owners of a chain of stores and the country's leading racing family, a position they held, on and off, for some forty years.

Lady C, as the authoress became popularly known following her stint in the jungle on I'm a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here in 2015, is rumoured to be related to the Romanov dynasty, the former rulers of Imperial Russia. She is on record denying any kinship between her family and the Romanovs, though she, like many of the German princesses successive Tsars married, are descended from the Emperor Charlemagne and William the Conqueror. Her father is acknowledged to be a descendant of William the Conqueror, as are many though not all of the Ziadies of Choueifat. She is known to be friendly with some of the exiled Romanovs, and has often been photographed with them. A possible cause for the confusion regarding her kinship with the family could be from when she was a young woman living in New York. She was often seen at events organised by Prince Serge Obolensky, the doyen of New York WASP society and himself a son-in-law of the Emperor Alexander II. He is credited with resurrecting the use of the family title. and always introduced her as countess. Prior to that, the family had ceased using their Russian title at the end of the Crimean War (she has been quoted as saying that being a Russian count in Lebanon after the Crimean War was like having the surname Hitler or Himmler after the Second World War), and the Ziadies of Jamaica have never used it in the West Indies, where they moved at the turn of the last century. Following the collapse of Communism and the renewed interest in the lost heritages of the former European monarchies, some members of the family do occasonally use it socially, but few if any of them use it on a daily basis. In that, they are like many other members of the Russian and European nobility, who use their monarchic titles socially but seldom professionally or on a daily basis.

Two of the younger generation of the Ziadies feature on MTV's new reality show, The Royal World. They are Lady C's 25 year old sons, Dima (Dmitri Ziadie Campbell) and Misha (Michael Ziadie Campbell).

References