This book begins and ends with clergy in the USA finding themselves arousing controversy over their actions and statements about the Middle East. The opening pages describe bishops in full vestments taking part in a demonstration against the Israeli incursion into Bethlehem in 2001 and then on the last page another bishop makes a statement about Israeli troops abusing the rights of Palestinian children in a debate in the House of Bishops in 2012. In both cases the bishops were criticised for antisemitic behaviour and had to explain their actions and issue apologies. The two moral imperatives of rejecting all forms of antisemitism and of upholding the rights of displaced and oppressed Palestinian Arabs, especially Arab Christians, confronted the American bishops with difficult and conflicting moral and practical dilemmas. The book tells the story of how they arrived at this position, tracing the involvement of American Episcopalians in the Church and so, inevitably, the political life of the region. As the Ottoman Empire was defeated, as the western powers took on mandates to administer the areas and as new nations emerged, amidst the competing claims of three great religious traditions, the Episcopalian missionaries tried to find effective ways of witnessing to the love of God and truth of the Gospel.
The lives and work of this group of mainly High Church Episcopalians belongs within a much wider story. The Church of England appointed its first bishop in Jerusalem in 1841. American Congregational and Presbyterian missions also had extensive involvement in the Middle East, seeking conversions to their Evangelical form of Christianity. This story is that of representatives of the Episcopal Church of the USA which worked with and supported the ancient eastern Churches, and then, arising out of that, the Arab Christians of the region.
Among these American churchmen in the Middle East, we meet two main characters. An early missionary was Horatio Southgate, who travelled to Constantinople – as Christians preferred to call Istanbul – in 1836 and then went further east to Mosul. After a short return visit to the USA he retrained, now as missionary bishop for the Turkish Empire, and lived in Constantinople from 1845 to 1850 when he finally returned to the USA to look after his family. He developed good relations with the eastern Churches, especially the Armenians and Assyrians. He hoped that through the sharing of the Anglican reformation faith there would be a spiritual revival which in turn would lead to the conversion of Muslims.
These relationships grew further and in new directions as a result of the massacres of Armenians first between 1894 and 1896, called the Hamidian massacres after Sultan Abdulhamid ii, then the later and more prolonged attacks on both Armenians and Syrians in 1915–16, events which led to the word genocide to describe them. The result of this was the flight of Christians from Turkey and so immigration to the USA. Anglican bishops helped to arrange for their immigration, then ecumenical discussion led to shared pastoral care in Anglican parishes. Alongside this went humanitarian intervention as aid was sent to struggling communities in the Middle East. These ecumenical relations became a distinctive part of church life since at this time growing numbers of Americans, over a third, had been born abroad or had at least one parent born outside the USA. The courts had defined arrivals from the Middle East as white because of their shared Christian faith and so arrivals from the Middle East, which included many Christians, became part of American society and the life of the Church. The hopes for an independent Armenian nation in eastern Turkey, which had been proposed at the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, was frustrated by the rise of a nationalist Turkey and a further treaty at Lausanne in 1923.
As well as living in Turkey, Episcopalian missionaries went to Jerusalem. This followed the arrival in Jerusalem of British forces under General Allenby in December 1917, which led to the British being given a mandate to administer the territory in 1920. Into this new situation Charles Bridgeman, a priest from New York, was sent as an American member of the staff of the cathedral. To begin with he continued the work with the Armenian community, and was especially concerned with education.
But he could not avoid being caught up in the Zionist movement and the reaction to it. The beginnings of Zionism in the mid-nineteenth century lie outside the scope of this book, with its roots in British hopes that Jews could be settled in Palestine with the dual outcome of settling Jews outside Britan itself and working with them in developing Palestine as part of imperial ambitions. But shortly before Bridgeman arrived the Balfour declaration in 1917 had called for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Like the Anglican bishop, Rennie MacInnes, Bridgeman dreamed of a Palestine in which Jews and Muslims had been converted to Christianity, Jerusalem was home to thriving Christian communities and the religious groups of the region were united in peaceful co-existence under Christian guidance. They saw Zionism, with its political and economic ambitions, as the main threat to this vision. As immigration by Jews to Israel grew after 1948, they argued that Palestine should not have to resolve the tricky question of Europe's ’unhappy Jews’. This led to a programme of humanitarian concern for displaced Palestinians. Bridgeman returned to the USA in 1945, and joined the staff of Trinity Church Wall Street where he remained a tireless advocate for the Christians of Palestine.
The hoped-for outcomes did not materialise. The state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948. This was followed by the Nakba, or Catastrophe, in which Christians were forced from their homes and church property was occupied. Meanwhile, in the USA, President Truman called for further admission of Jews to Israel and recognised the new state. The passionate support of Episcopalian missionaries for Palestinian Christians and rhetoric such as language about a racial war by Zionists against Christians now sounded disturbingly antisemitic. Instead of a picture of Jews as those who rejected the Messiah and crucified God's son, now more liberal theologians affirmed a shared Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Church moved on to other priorities such as civil rights. Visits by Episcopalians kept the contacts alive but now that the state of Israel was recognised interest in the situation of Arab Christians faded. This was demonstrated when a major history of the Episcopal Church and its work, published in several volumes between 1950 and 1955, did not mention the involvement of American missionaries in the Middle East or the concern for immigrants from that region. The last chapter of the book reviewed here is sadly entitled ‘Extinction in the land of its birth’.
While it does not seek to be a comprehensive history of the Middle East in this period, the lives of the missionaries in the Middle East and of the Churches in the USA show the development of a distinctive style of mission. It is a strand in a complex and tragic period in the history of the region which the Episcopalian missionaries consistently followed. They recognised the long historical presence of the ancient Churches of the East in the region and worked to build links between the institutions as a united Christian witness. They advocated for the support of these persecuted minorities in the series of treaties after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s and in the establishment of the new state of Israel. They helped to open the eyes of American Churches to the faithful, and often heroic, witness of these ancient Churches of the East. They advocated for the recognition and support of these often persecuted and hard-pressed communities. This book provides a clear and valuable record of an important voice in a complex and controversial discussion.
