Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in The Middle East, 1850-1950

Front matter

Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850-1950

Ideologies, Rhetoric, and Practices

Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850-1950

PART 2 Advocacy

2 Liberated Bodies and Saved Souls: Freed African Slave Girls and Missionaries in Egypt 41 Beth Baron

3 Physical Expressions of Winning Hearts and Minds: Body Politics of the American Missionaries in “Asiatic Turkey” 62 Nazan Maksudyan

4 Spiritual Reformation and Engagement with the World: Scandinavian Mission, Humanitarianism, and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1905-1914 90

Inger Marie Okkenhaug

5 “A Strange Survival”: The Rev. WA. Wigram on the Assyrians before and after World WarI no Heleen Murre-van den Berg

VI

CONTENTS

PART 3 Best Practices 6 Missionary Hubris in Colonial Algeria? Founding and Governing Christian Arab Villages 1868-1930 133 Bertrand Taithe 7 Missionary Work, Secularization, and Donor Dependency: Rockefeller- Near East Colleges Cooperation after World War I (1920-1939) 155 Philippe Bourmaud 8 “Machine Age Humanitarianism”: American Humanitarianism in Early 2oth-Century Syria and Lebanon 183 Idir Ouahes 9 Scottish Presbyterian Churches and Humanitarianism in the Interwar

Middle East 209 Michael Marten

PART 4 Epilogue: Impact of the 1948 Crisis

Confined by Conflict, Run by Relief: Arabs, Jews, and the Finnish Mission in Jerusalem, 1940-1950 233 Seija Jalagin

Catholic Humanitarian Assistance for Palestinian Refugees: The Franciscan Casa Nova of Jerusalem during the 1948 War 253

Maria Chiara Rioli

Index 277

Acknowledgements

This volume is the result of a nwo (the Dutch Research Council) Internationalisation in the Humanities research project “Engaging Europe in the Arab World: European missionaries and humanitarianism in the Middle East (1850-1970), in cooperation with the 1EG Leibniz Institute of European History (Mainz, Germany) and the 11SMM, Institut d’études de l'Islam et des Sociétés du monde musulman (Paris, France).

We would like to thank the Dutch Research Council for financing this research project, as well as the 1EG Leibniz Institute of European History, the IISMM Institut d’études de l'Islam et des Sociétés du monde musulman and the Institut Universitaire de France for their financial and administrative support of the international workshops where some of the papers for this book were first presented and discussed. We would also like to thank Volda University College for their contribution to funding this publication.

We are grateful to many colleagues in Leiden, Mainz, Paris, and elsewhere who, through their contributions to conferences, workshops and through extended email conversations over the years, helped us to flesh out our questions, concerns, and approaches.

Figures

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3-5

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3-9

Postcard, Collection Gélébart, private collection. 33

Aram (before photograph). Reproduced from “For Young People: Orphans in Turkey,” Missionary Herald vol. 94 (May 1898): 204-208 70

Boys coming to Home (before photograph). Reproduced from “For Young People: Orphans in Turkey,” Missionary Herald vol. 94 (May 1898): 204-208 70 Orphans at Oorfa at dinner (after photograph). Reproduced from “For Young People: Orphans in Turkey,” Missionary Herald vol. 94 (May 1898): 204-208 71 A rescued orphan girl (after photograph). Reproduced from “For Young People: Orphans in Turkey,” Missionary Herald vol. 94 (May 1898): 204-208 72

Village Armenians (before photograph). Reproduced from Rev. George C. Reynolds, “For Young People: A Gospel Triumph in the Land of Ararat,” Missionary Herald vol. 91 (May 1896): 212-216 75

The family at Van (after photograph). Reproduced from Rev. George C. Reynolds, “For Young People: A Gospel Triumph in the Land of Ararat,” Missionary Herald vol. 91 (May 1895): 212-216 76

An Armenian family. Reproduced from J.E. Pierce, of Bardezag, “For Young People: Who are the Armenians,” Missionary Herald vol. 87 (April 1891):

175-178 77

A group of Alumni, Bithynia High School, Bardizag. SALT Archives, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions / Photographs / Bardizag, ABAHBARDOOQ 78

A Greek peasant woman. Reproduced from Rev. James W. Selye, of Constantinople, “For Young People: A Greek Town in Turkey,” Missionary Herald vol. 85 (October 1889): 424-427 79

Girls in the orphanage in Musch with dolls from Scandinavian donors. Note: “Barn ved Musch barnehjem?” Wikimedia, made available by National Archives of Norway, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barn_ved_Musch _barnehjem%3F - fo30141712180050.jpg 105

Armenian women. Note: “Armenske kvinner,” Wikimedia, made available by National Archives of Norway, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Armenske_kvinner_-_fo30141712190013_1469.jpg 106

Bodil Biørn and teacher Maritza with 1st grade in Mush, ca. 1912. Note: “Bodil Biørn med skoleklasse,” Wikimedia, made available by National Archives of Norway, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bodil_Bi%C3%B8rn_med _skoleklasse_- fo30141712180005.jpg 107

A 1917 ACRNE poster depicting the compassionate, if Orientalist, efforts of American humanitarianism in the Middle East. Library of Congress collection, retrieved from https://lccn.loc.gov/2002711981 192

FIGURES IX

8.2 Another 1917 ACRNE poster asking for compassionate donations from American citizens. Library of Congress collection, retrieved from https://lccn.loc.gov/2002719422 193

8.3 A later poster dating from 1919 and printed by ACRNE’s successor organization; Near East Relief (NER). Library of Congress collection, retrieved from https://Iccn.loc.gov/2002708879 196

11.1 Jerusalem casa nova, early 20th century, ASCTS 270

Notes on Contributors

Beth Baron is Distinguished Professor of History at the City College and Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Director of the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the cuNy Graduate Center. From 2009 to 2014, she edited the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and from 2015 to 2017, served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. Her most recent book, The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, appeared with Stanford University Press in 2014. Earlier works include Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) and The Women’s Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). She co-edited Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) with Nikki Keddie and Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2000) with Rudi Matthee. She is currently working on a project on the history of medicine, disease, and reproductive health in colonial

Egypt.

Philippe Bourmaud

is Associate Professor in Modern and Contemporary History at the Université Jean Moulin-Lyon 3. His research focuses on the history of health professions in the late Ottoman and Mandatory Middle East, with a focus on Palestine; the history of expertise in the Middle Eastern mandates; and the history of alcohol in the modern Middle East. His publications include: “La invención de los indicadores internacionales: Salud, problemas sociales y cuantificación en el Cerccano Oriente bajo mandato (1919-1939),” in Mundos arabes en movimiento: Historia del presente, coll. ivestigacion e ideas, eds. Camila Pastor, Gilberto Conde, and Marta Tawil, 291-315 (Mexico: CIDE, 2016); “Turf Wars at the League of Nations: International Anti-Cannabis Policies and Oversight in Syria and Lebanon, 1919-1939,” in The League of Nations’ Work on Social Issues: Visions, Endeavours and Experiments, eds. Magaly Rodrigues Garcia, Davide Rodogno, and Liat Kozma, 75-87 (Geneva: United Nations, 2016); “Pipe-line, colonialisme et ligne claire: Tintin et la question des mandats du Proche-Orient,” in “La BD francophone et le tournant postcolonial,” ed. Philippe Delisle, special issue, Outre-mers: Revue d'histoire 392-393, no. 2 (2016): 39-68; With Karène Sanchez Summerer, eds., “Missions, Powers and Arabization,” special issue, Social Sciences and Missions 32, nos. 3-4 (2019).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS XI

Seija Jalagin

holds a PhD from the University of Oulu, Finland (2007) and has been a Docent at the University of Turku, Finland, since 2013. Jalagin works as a Senior Lecturer of History and Japanese Studies at the University of Oulu. She has published extensively on gender and cultural interaction in Christian mission, stereotypes and mental images. Currently, she researches transnational refugee history and is the leader of research project “Recognition and belonging: forced migrations, troubled histories and memory cultures’, funded by the Finnish Research Council (2017-2021).

Nazan Maksudyan

is a Research Associate at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin). She was a EUME Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2009-2010 and an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the zMo in 2010- 2011. She worked as an Associate Professor of History at Istanbul Kemerburgaz University (2013-2016). Her research mainly focuses on the history of children and youth in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and 2oth centuries, with special interest in gender, sexuality, education, humanitarianism, and non- Muslims. Her Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014) treats those who are farthest removed from power as the lead actors in history. She edited Women and the City, Women in the City (New York: Berghahn, 2014). On the history of children, she published “Orphans, Cities, and the State: Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and ‘Reform’ in the Late Ottoman Urban Space,’ IJMES 43 (201): 493-511, and “Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 21 (2008): 488-512. Currently, she works on the lives of children in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War on which she has published “Agents or Pawns? Nationalism and Ottoman Children during the Great War,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) 3 (2016): 147-172.

Michael Marten Having previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of Pavia, and the University of Stirling, Michael Marten has published widely on Scottish missionary efforts in the Middle East. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2015 in recognition of his contribution to this field.

Heleen Murre-van den Berg (PhD Leiden, 1995) is director of the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies and Professor of Eastern Christian Studies at Radboud University. She is the

XII NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

PI of the ERC Advanced Project “Rewriting Global Orthodoxy: Oriental Christianity in Europe between 1970 and 2020” (2019-2024). Earlier, she held the chair of professor of World Christianity, especially in the Middle East, at Leiden University, where she also served as vice-dean of the Faculty of Humanities. She published extensively on Christianity in the Middle East, especially on the Syriac/Assyrian traditions. Recent publications include (with S.R. Goldstein- Sabbah, eds.) Modernity, Minority, and the Public Sphere: Jews and Christians in the Middle East (Leiden: Brill, 2016) and Scribes and Scriptures: The Church of the East in the Eastern Ottoman Provinces (1500-1850) (Louvain: Peeters, 2015). In 2017, she was elected a member of the KNAW (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) and she received the Hans Sigrist Prize of the University of Bern.

Inger Marie Okkenhaug

(PhD University of Bergen, 1999) is a Professor of History at Volda University College, Norway. From 2000 until 2009 Okkenhaug was a researcher at the University of Bergen. She has published a number of chapters and articles on mission, gender, relief and welfare in the Middle East. Among her most recent publications is “Religion, Relief, and Humanitarian Work among Armenian Women Refugees in Mandatory Syria, 1927-1934,” Scandinavian Journal of History 40, no. 3 (2015): 432-454; “Scandinavian Missionaries in Palestine: The Swedish Jerusalem Society, Medical Mission and Education in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, 1900-1948,” in Tracing the Jerusalem Code: Christian Cultures in Scandinavia vol. 3., ed. Ragnhild J. Zorgati (De Gruyter, 2020) and “Orphans, Refugees and Relief in the Armenian Republic, 1922-1925,” in Aid to Armenia, eds. Joanne Laycock and Francesca Piana, (Manchester University Press, 2020). Okkenhaug’s latest book, “En norsk filantrop”: Bodil Biørn og armenerne, 1905-1934 (2016) deals with Norwegian mission and humanitarian work among the Armenians in the years from 1905 to 1940.

Idir Ouahes obtained his PhD degree in History from the University of Exeter in 2016. Previously, he studied at Exeter (MRes Middle East Studies) and at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (BA History). Idir published his thesis in 2018 via I.B. Tauris as Syria and Lebanon at the Outset of the French Mandate: Workings of Cultural Imperialism. He has published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. Among these are: “Agricultural Experimentation in French Mandate Syria,” in Ecological Networks in Colonial Contexts, c. 1850-1920, eds. Ulrike Kirchberger and Brett Bennett (Durham, Nc: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); “Situating the Syrian State: Education & Citizenship 1914-2014 in Citizenship, Identity & Nation-States in the 21st Cen-

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS XIII tury, eds. Nicole Stokes DuPass and Ramona Fruja, 195-220 (New York: Palgrave, 2016); “Catholic Missionary Education in early French Mandate Syria & Lebanon,” Social Sciences and Missions 30, nos. 3—4 (2017): 225-253; “Une ceinture d’ espace étatique: Le contrôle des bédouins au début du Mandat Francais en Syrie; L’Espace Politique 28 (2015).

Maria Chiara Rioli

is a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at Fordham University and Ca’ Foscari Venice University. She was a research associate at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée and scientific secretary at “Open Jerusalem”, an ERC-funded project. Among her publications are “The ‘New Nazis’ or the ‘People of our God’? Jews and Zionism in the Latin Church of Jerusalem, 1948-1962,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2017): 81-107; and Ritornare a Israele: Giorgio La Pira, gli ebrei, la Terra Santa (ed., Pisa: Edizione della Normale, 2015).

Karène Sanchez Summerer is Associate Professor at Leiden University. She obtained her PhDs from Leiden University and EPHE (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, Sorbonne). Her research considers the European linguistic and cultural policies and the Arab communities (1860-1948) in Palestine. She is the P1 of the research project “CrossRoads—A connected history between Europeans’ cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine” (2018-2022, project funded by the Dutch Research Council Nwo). She is the co-editor of the series Languages and Culture in History with Em. Prof. W. Frijhoff, Amsterdam University Press. From 2015 until 2019, she was the PI of the international project NWO/IEG Mainz/11SMM Paris research project “Engaging Europe in the Middle East: European missionaries and humanitarianism in the Middle East (1850-1970).” Since 2017, she has been one of the coordinators of the MisSMO research program about Christian missions in the Middle East since the late 19th century, https://missmo.hypotheses.org/ (“Missions, Powers and Arabization,” eds. with Philippe Bourmaud, special issue, Social Sciences and missions 32, nos. 3— 4 (2019), https://brill.com/view/journals/ssm/32/3-4/article-p229_1.xml). From 2012 until 2017, she researched the role of language among the Palestinian Catholic communities in Palestine, within the Dutch Research Council project “Arabic and its Alternatives”, and published: Heleen Murre-van den Berg, Karène Sanchez Summerer, and Tijmen Baarda (eds.), Arabic and its Alternatives: Religious Minorities and their Languages in the Emerging Nation States of the Middle East (1920-1950), Christians and Jews in Muslim Societies 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), https://brill.com/view/title/39181; “Linguistic Diversity and Ideologies among the Catholic Minority in Mandate Palestine: Fear of Confusion or

XIV NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Powerful Tool?” in “The Fragments Imagine the Nation? Minorities in the Modern Middle East and North Africa” eds. Jordi T. Gorgas and Benjamin T. White, special issue, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 2 (2016): 191-205.

Bertrand Taithe

is Professor of History at the University of Manchester and executive director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute. He researches the history of humanitarian aid and of missionary activities in the field of relief work. He is currently working on a monograph entitled: The Humanitarians a history. His most recent works include: “The Cradle of the New Humanitarian System? International Work and European Volunteers at the Cambodian Border Camps, 1979-1993, Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (2016): 335- 358; “The Charity-Mongers of Modern Babylon: Bureaucracy, Scandal, and the Transformation of the Philanthropic Marketplace, c. 1870-1912,” Journal of British Studies 54, no. 1 (2015): 18-137, with Sarah Roddy and Julie-Marie Strange; and a monograph with Bloomsbury, Missionary Developmentalism in Secular and Colonial Context: Humanitarian Arab Villages of Algeria and the Legacy of Lavigerie.

Chantal Verdeil

graduated from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Paris). She also graduated in Arabic and History. She is currently Professor at INALCO. She published La mission jésuite du Mont-Liban et de Syrie (1830-1864) (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2011) and, with Anne-Laure Dupont and Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Le Moyen-Orient par les textes (Paris: A. Colin, 201) and Histoire du Moyen-Orient XIxe-XxIe siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 2016). She just finished a book on the Saint-Joseph University (Beirut, 1875-1923).

Introduction

Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Karène Sanchez Summerer

During the Israeli-Palestinian War of 1947-1948, relief to Palestinian refugees was not only given by international agencies and non-governmental organizations. Aid also involved Christian mission institutions already historically present and active in the region. This humanitarian reaction of the Christian missions towards people in need was, however, not a new phenomenon. The German Protestant Syrian Orphanage in Jerusalem for example, was founded in 1860 as a response to the civil war in Syria the same year. During the following decades, the orphanage developed into the largest missionary institution in the country. As shown by Roland Löffler, the Syrian Orphanage underwent a “silent metamorphosis” from a Protestant pietistic mission institution into a major undertaking of social service.! This was a typical development in the Middle East, where many Christian missionaries supported welfare activities that involved ideas and practices of improving people's lives, mostly presented as subservient to the preaching of Christianity. Facing major obstacles in their attempt to convert locals, mission organizations increasingly shifted their focus from evangelization to health and education, frequently changing their vocation according to local demands.” Furthermore, some ethnolinguistic minorities from the Middle East who had suffered displacement during World War 1 (particularly Assyrian and Armenian populations) saw the European sectarianization process of minorities? as opportunities for some sort of local autonomy.

1 Roland Löffler, “The Metamorphosis of a Pietistic Missionary and Educational Institution into a Social Services Enterprise: The Case of the Syrian Orphanage (1860-1945), in New Faith in Ancient Lands: Western Missions in the Middle East and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Heleen Murre-van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 151-174.

2 Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East, 1831-1908 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 104; Ellen Fleischmann, “Evangelization or Education: American Protestant Missionaries, the American Board, and the Girls and Women of Syria (1830-1910),” in New Faith in Ancient Lands: Western Missions in the Middle East in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Heleen Murre-van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 263-280; Inger Marie Okkenhaug, The Quality of Heroic Living, of High Endeavour and Adventure: Anglican Mission, Women, and Education in Palestine, 1888-1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

3 Laura Robson, Minorities and the Modern Arab World, New Perspectives (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 7. For minorities in the Middle East, Benjamin White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the cc BY-NC 4.0 license.

Linked to large diaspora, they appealed to international Christian opinion and together with the emerging humanitarian organizations, like the Near East Relief and the Red Cross, their message was received by a Western audience who donated money to their cause.

This volume intends to trace the historical links between Christian missionaries, the roots of humanitarianism, its different modalities, their use of “humanitarian diplomacy” and local encounters in a Middle Eastern context, considered as fundamental in the history of religious and social politics in a Muslim environment, this particular field being “so connected with the present-day concerns”. The century considered, between 1850 and 1950, represents moments of colonization, war, and conflicts, all formative settings for humanitarian actions.® During this time, Christian missions were seeking new ways to translate their understanding of Christianity, as seen at the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, which put forward a civilizing mission that sought to modernize the world.’

The social dimensions of Christian missions in the Middle East have been revisited in several important studies in the last ten to fifteen years. These works, representing a profound change in approach, methodology, and sources, include Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise

4 Dzovinar Kevonian, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire: Les acteurs européens et la scène proche-orientale pendant l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004).

5 Johannes Paulmann, “Humanity—Humanitarian Reason—Imperial Humanitarianism: European Concepts in Practice,” in Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, eds. Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 288.

6 For the role of missionaries during crises in the Middle East, see Johannes Paulmann and Esther Moeller, eds., “Crisis in the Middle East: Religion, Diplomacy and Humanitarianism” special issue, British Journal of Middle East Studies (forthcoming)—part of the same NWO/IEG/11SMM project; Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds., In the name of Humanity: The Governance of Threat and Care (Durham, Nc: Duke University Press Books, 2010), 4; Andrew Thompson, “Humanitarian Interventions, Past and Present,” in The Emergence of Humanitarian intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Fabian Klose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 331-356; Kevin O’Sullivan, Matthew Hilton, and Juliano Fiori, “Humanitarianism in Context,’ European Review of History 23, nos. 1-2 (2016): 1-15.

7 The World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh in 1910 put forward a civilizing mission that sought to modernize the world, as well as discussions around missionary-state relations. See Brian Stanley, “Church, State and the Hierarchy of ‘Civilisation’: The Making of the “Missions and Governments’, Report at the World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910,” in The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914, ed. Andrew Porter (Cambridge: Eerdmans, Routledge, 2010), 58-84.

of the Muslim Brotherhood, Barbara Reeves-Ellington’s Domestic Frontiers: Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East, 1831-1908, and Paul Sedra’s From Mission to Modernity: Evangelicals, Reformers and Education in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.$ Even so, the humanitarian actions of Christian missionaries in the Middle East have not yet been studied thoroughly.’

Depending on the areas where they intervened, missionaries were frequently consulted on repeated forced migrations. Some were gatekeepers of colonial states, some also distanced themselves from them. The missionaries considered in this volume are not a homogeneous group (some well connected, others more isolated, some international protagonists, some local workers, some obsessed by the nation-state idea, others not). The case studies present various missionaries’ networks that, at times, acted simultaneously and on various scales, within a competitive landscape of charities. Examining institutional and individual strategies within national and local contexts will clarify the motives and effects of Christian missions in delivering aid and thus contribute to a new understanding of the history of humanitarianism in the Middle East.

1 Christian Missions and Humanitarian Work and Practice

Some studies tackling humanitarianism define it in ways that reflect the present!° (“assistance that occurs in the context of disasters [...] applied to emer-

8 These, in addition to Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), Norbert Friedrich, Uwe Kaminsky, and Roland Löffler, eds., The Social Dimensions of Christian Missions in the Middle East, Historical Studies of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Missionsgeschichtliches Archiv 16 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010); and Ussama S. Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

9 Silvia Salvatici, A History of Humanitarianism, 1755-1989: In the Name of the Others (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). The author mentions that the missionary experience contributed to the archaeology of international humanitarianism, highlighting the links between faith and compassion, through the anti-slavery movement, and the intertwining of secular and religious agendas, in her chapter 2; Matthew Hilton et al, “History and Humanitarianism: A Conversation,” Past and Present 241, no. 1 (2018): 1- 38.

10 Michael Barnett, The International Humanitarian Order (London: Routledge, 2010), 2; Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); O’Sullivan, Hilton, and Fiori “Humanitarianisms gency relief and post-conflict recovery”) but the term can also be used historically. Many Christian missions discussed the notion of “humanity” in the Arab world, their socially oriented engagement being based on their engagement in local areas in Europe." Catholic and Protestant missionaries, aiming at regaining the Holy Land by religious, cultural, and philanthropic influence, often ending up producing “unexpected” effects,!* established and circulated competing collective narratives in which the notion of humanity was central As noted by Johannes Paulmann, “the evolution of modern humanitarianism overlapped with the transformation of philanthropy, which turned toward ‘strangers’ at home and abroad and became increasingly concerned with efficiency and professionalism’”.!4 in Context,” 1-15; Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

11 See for example the Swedish and British local engagement of missionaries in Palestine, Karéne Sanchez Summerer and Inger Marie Okkenhaug, “The Role of Protestant Missionaries during the Great Arab Revolt in Jerusalem and South Palestine (1936-1939)— Towards Humanity?” in BJMES special issue, Crisis in the Middle East: Religion, Diplomacy and Humanitarianism, eds. Johannes Paulmann and Esther Moeller (forthcoming). For the Catholic case, 19th century, see for example Katharina Stornig, “Between Christian Solidarity and Human Solidarity: Humanity and the Mobilisation of Aid for Distant Children in Catholic Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Humanity, A History of European Concepts in Practice from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, eds. Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 265. For the Protestant case, Judith Becker, “Conceptions of Humanity in the Nineteenth-Century German Protestant Missions,” in Humanity, A History of European Concepts in Practice from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, eds. Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); Dzovinar, Réfugiés et diplomatie humanitaire, 561; and Roland Léffler, Protestanten in Paldstina—Religionspolitik, Sozialer Protestantismus und Mission in den deutschen evangelischen und anglikanischen Institutionen des Heiligen Landes, 1917-1939 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2008).

12 Heather J. Sharkey, “Introduction: The Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters,” in Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, ed. Heather J. Sharkey (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013), 1-26; Friedrich, Kaminsky, and Léffler, The Social Dimensions of Christian Missions in the Middle East; and Löffler, Protestanten in Palästina.

13 On the Christian missionaries’ activities among Christian minorities, Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians, see for example Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914: The Emergence of a Concept and International Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 28-31; Derek Hopwood, The Russian Presence in Syria and Palestine, 1843-1914: Church and Politics in the Near East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); and publications of Nikolay Lisovoy (in Russian). The first American Protestants from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions arrived in Lebanon in 1819. Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven.

14 Johannes Paulmann, “Conjunctures in the History of International Humanitarian Aid dur-

Missions were also influenced and transformed in encounters with other mission societies and local actors.!5 In her study of the German Kaiserswerth Deaconesses in Beirut, Julia Hauser has, for example, shown how the missionary agenda, in being fundamentally impacted by local factors, underwent considerable transformation in practice.! In addition to the impact of other missions and local demands, the political framework of state and local authorities shaped mission practice and ways of thinking about their mission. During times of war, mission work was transformed to supply immediate relief. During World War 1, for example, Scandinavian and Swiss missionaries, representing neutral nations, turned relief workers during the persecutions of Armenians and other minorities in the Ottoman Empire! After the war and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations’ mandate system provided a new framework for Catholic and Protestant missions. Humanitarianism in the Middle East was then brought under the ambit of the League of Nations, though humanitarian efforts continued through volunteer and relief organizations.!® The Mandate powers in the Middle East, France and Great Britain, both welcomed mission societies as contributors to the development of health and education in the Mandates.!9 ing the Twentieth Century” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 215, 217. Available via http://humanity journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/4.2-Conjunctures-in-the-History-of-Internatio

nal-Humanitarian-Aid-during-the-Twentieth-Century.pdf.

15 This volume focuses on the spread of Christian missionaries’ humanitarian actions, through their advocacy and practices. The reactions to their actions have been at the centre of several analyses; for the Muslim populations’ reactions, see for example Umar Ryad, “A Muslim Response to Missionary Activities in Egypt: With a Special Reference to the Al-Azhar High Corps of ‘Ulamä’ (1925-1935), in New Faith in Ancient Lands: Western Missions in the Middle East in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Heleen Murre-van den Berg (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 281-307; Stefan Reichmuth, Jörn Riisen, and Aladdin Sarhan, eds., Humanism and Muslim Culture: Historical Heritage and Contemporary Challenges (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2012).

16 Julia Hauser, “From Transformation to Negation: A Female Mission in a ‘City of Schools” Journal of World History 27, no. 3 (September 2016): 476-477.

17 Inger Marie Okkenhaug, “Scandinavian Missionaries, Gender and Armenian Refugees during World War One: Crisis and Reshaping of Vocation,” Social Sciences and Missions 23, no.1 (2010): 63-93.

18 For the Armenians, see Keith David Watenpaugh, “The League of the Nations Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927,” American Historical Review 1 (2010): 1315-1339.

19 Elizabeth Thompson, “Neither Conspiracy nor Hypocrisy: The Jesuits and the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon,” in Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East, eds. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon (New York: Middle East Institute, 2002), 66-87.

The Interwar period was a time of transition and reorientation in the missions. The bloodshed of the war years had a global impact, and it was no longer possible to argue that Christianity and civilization were one and the same.?° Changing orientation, the humanitarian aspect increasingly came to the forefront of Christian missions.?! Regarding missionaries in the Middle East during and after World War 1, Keith David Watenpaugh has argued that “while many of the individuals in the theatre of humanitarian action had their origins in the region as missionaries, as did most of the organizers of the humanitarian project of NER, collectively they stood at the culmination of a secular movement in the missionary project, in which the goals and methods of evangelism gave way almost entirely to addressing the suffering of human beings and developing institutions for their care, social development and higher education’. However, the transition from religious to secular forms of Western humanitarianism was not necessarily a one-way phenomenon.# Scandinavian welfare among Armenian refugees and orphans in the 1920s and -30s exemplifies the complexity of faith-based relief work and modern relief.2* Another example can be found in Palestine, where British and Swedish missions in Mandatory Palestine continued and in some instances expanded pre-war schools and hospitals, in addition to contributing crucial relief to the poorer segments of the Muslim population in the country. Thus, redefining and accommodating their mission in relation to the interwar scene, but also answering to new international trends regarding how to interpret their agency as Christian missionaries.?5 The humanitarian actions of Chris-