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Christianity amongst the Jews) and on local members of other Chris-
tian denominations (such as Greek Orthodox and Catholics).^57
the presence of these missionary groups in Late Ottoman Jerusa-
lem has a number of important implications for this book. First, given
the intensive and sustained missionary activities in Jerusalem in the
nineteenth century, palestine during this period cannot be seen in iso-
lation from europe. That european powers exercised political influence
through these Christian missions is widely acknowledged, as is the fact
that the missions themselves reflected this political influence. More im-
portant for our purposes, though, because the missionaries were tech-
nically limited in their permitted targets of proselytization, they were
by necessity conscious of and invested in religious difference among
Palestine’s population. This institutionalized sensitivity to religious dis-
tinctions for a powerful group in palestine was clearly recognized by
Palestine’s various religious communities and, as a result, played its
own role in sustaining, or even magnifying, such distinctions. More-
over, owing to the threat (and also the promised educational, cultural,
economic, and of course religious rewards) of proselytization by euro-
pean Christians, religion in Late Ottoman palestine was a highly sen-
sitive subject. this, too, suggests that for all communities in palestine,
far beyond the missionaries themselves, religion was a central concern.
We must also keep in mind that these foreigners, whether diplomats
or missionaries, brought with them contemporary european ideas about
how to define and categorize people, including the developing notions
of race. these were, after all, part and parcel of the ideology of the civi-
lizing (i.e., Christianizing) duty that drove the missionaries out into the
distant frontiers of the Ottoman empire.^58 the european presence in pal-
estine, then, only accentuated concerns with both religion and race that
were already prominent there from other more “indigenous” sources.
Finally, many european Jewish intellectuals and scientists were in-
fluenced by and even involved in the development of race- thinking in
european science and anthropology. In fact, there was a strong element
of race- thinking among certain european Zionists, including some who
(^57) Ben- arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century— the Old City, 250– 64; perry, British Mis-
sion to the Jews in Nineteenth- Century Palestine.
(^58) On the issue of race in the ideology of American Christian missionaries in the Mid-
dle east, see Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 262. Of the Syrian protestant College in Beirut,
Makdisi writes, “The college’s christian idealism and missionary character were never-
theless refracted through a mid- century american racialist reading of the world. as its
first president, Daniel Bliss, put it so succinctly: ‘We open its doors to the members of
the most advanced and most backward of races. as for me, I would admit the pigmies of
Central africa in the hope that after a lapse of a few thousand years some of them might
become leaders of church and State.’ ” Ibid., 209.