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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
165957
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay explores a complex, changing encounter between the Ottoman state and an influential community of American Congregationalist and Presbyterian missionaries who worked in Syria over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 The missionaries’ own accounts present the history of their relationship with the world’s most powerful Islamic empire, where they lived and worked, as a saga of struggle and unmitigated hostility. In 1921, Charles Dana, a managerial missionary who took care of finances for the American Mission Press in Beirut, recapitulated decades of his colleagues’ anti-Ottoman rhetoric when he wrote that “The American Press has in its century of service been forced to fight its way up through countless discouraging reverses, through wars, massacres, pestilence, and famine, and the vicissitudes of the Turkish Empire. Its buildings and grounds have … been the only shelter for the thousands of refugees, fleeing from the fire and sword of the despotic Turk.”2 His phrases echo a century of American Protestant missionaries’ writings about their work under Ottoman rule.
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| 2 |
ID:
115293
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper is a study of cultural interaction and diffusion in colonial Bombay. Focusing on Hebrew language instruction, it examines the encounter between India's little-known Bene Israel Jewish community and Protestant missionaries. Whilst eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cochin Jews were responsible for teaching the Bene Israel Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, the Bene Israel acquired Hebrew and Biblical knowledge primarily from nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Bene Israel community was a Konkan jati with limited knowledge of Judaism. However, by the end of the century the community had become an Indian-Jewish community roughly analogous to other Jewish communities. This paper explores how this transformation occurred, detailing the content, motivation, and means by which British and American missionaries and, to a lesser extent, Cochin Jews instructed the Bene Israel in Jewish knowledge. Through a critical examination of neglected English and Marathi sources, it reconstructs the Bene Israel perspective in these encounters and their attitude towards the Christian missionaries who laboured amongst them. It demonstrates that the Bene Israel were active participants and selective consumers in their interaction with the missionaries, taking what they wanted most from the encounter: knowledge of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. Ultimately, the instruction the Bene Israel received from Protestant missionaries did not convert them to Christianity but strengthened and transformed their Judaism.
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