“Eastern Christians” thus confirms that, contrary to the clash-of-civilization palaver spouted by both the Islamic State and the European far right, Christians lived peacefully as a minority in the Middle East for nearly 1,000 years. The accelerated violence of the 20th century has political roots, above all in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the nationalist movements that arose in its wake. This exhibition relies on contemporary artists to illustrate these modern problems. Dor Guez, an Israeli artist of Jewish and Christian heritage, presents an archive of images of his grandmother’s expulsion from Jaffa in 1948. The photographer Katharine Cooper depicts the ruined churches of Aleppo, Syria, in stark black-and-white prints, sapped of hope.

The fate of Christians in the Middle East has become a heated political topic in France — which, despite the country’s official secularism, has lately wrestled with the place of both Christianity and Islam in public life. In 2014, amid horrible violence in Syria and Iraq, a number of right-wing politicians began adding the Arabic letter “nun” to their Twitter account handles, in solidarity with Christians under threat from the Islamic State. They were not the only ones; the symbol appeared on the accounts of hard-right activists, like the leader of Génération Identitaire, an extremist movement calling for a “reconquest” of Europe from a supposed Muslim takeover.

This year’s presidential election also saw the defeated candidates of the French right and far right invoke eastern Christians, often in the same breath as they disparaged Muslims at home. François Fillon, the former prime minister and Republican candidate, attended a Coptic Easter service and expressed his “affection” for eastern Christians — just hours after deploring that in a secular country “we no longer say the words identity, France, nation, homeland, roots, culture.” The far-right leader Marine Le Pen, during last year’s election, went further, raising the prospect of French intervention. She insisted on “France’s absolutely essential role in protecting eastern Christians,” which she went on to call a “historic role.”