This paper looks at interactions between Syriac Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire and American missionaries with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The last decade has seen a resurgence in scholarly interest in foreign missionaries to the Middle East. This paper continues and moves beyond that trend by extending the scope of analysis to the Syriac Orthodox community and to the understudied region known to contemporary missionaries as "Eastern Turkey," stretching approximately from Diyarbakir to Mosul. It furthermore relies as much on local sources as it does missionary sources. Using documents written in Garshuni (Arabic and Ottoman Turkish written in the Syriac script) from the Patriarchal archive of the Syriac Church in Mardin, I center the Syriac perspective in a field thus far dominated by the missionary perspective. A geographical concentration on Mardin also blurs the conventional historiographical boundary between Anatolia and the Arab world. I supplement these sources with the personal papers of missionary William Frederic Williams, held in the archive of the Divinity School at Yale University. The untold story that emerges is that of American missionaries in the backwaters of the empire (from the perspective of the ABCFM, which was more concerned with the Holy Land) struggling with limited financial resources to meet the demands of evangelizing in an area as ethnically, religiously, and, most importantly, linguistically diverse as Eastern Turkey. Their uniquely challenging evangelical work required they depart from traditional missionary methods and rely more heavily on the expertise—social and political as well as linguistic—of the locals. The unexpected alliances that developed demonstrate the fluidity of local-foreigner relations in this diverse landscape while calling into question the cohesiveness of the American missionary enterprise itself. Making use of local documents that reveal the quotidian life of the Syriac Christians, this paper furthermore contributes to scholarship on Ottoman religious communities. It does so by illuminating and giving texture to a widely dispersed but tight-knit community simultaneously advocating for itself and negotiating its boundaries amidst constant interactions not only with other local communities—Christian and Muslim, Armenian and Kurdish, and otherwise—but with American and British missionaries as well.

Mary Mills Patrick, president of the American College for Girls in Istanbul from 1889 to 1924, weathered extraordinary political change and stubbornly resisted all threats to her school, including missionary detractors who deplored her “non-sectarian” education; the Sultan’s spies who reported on Muslim students; German, Ottoman, and British troops who sought to occupy college grounds during and after the First World War; and, finally, the new nation whose rallying cry of “Turkey for the Turks” would leave little room for a multi-ethnic American woman’s college. Patrick was well aware of missionary reports of Armenian massacres and deportations before and during the war, but she was most concerned about the danger of losing the College. This paper argues that Patrick’s deep dedication to the college prompted her to create a strategic description of the new Turkey that elided the Armenian massacres and deportations, and skimmed over the Greek-Turkish population exchanges. By 1924, Patrick had assumed a firmly pro-Turkey stance and created a historical narrative that blamed the Germans for wartime atrocities and barely acknowledged the information from American witnesses of massacres in Anatolia. Two unpublished manuscripts, “Transformations” and “Constantinople College During the War” (at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford), demonstrate Patrick’s personal conflict between supporting the Armenians and defending the Turks. Her conclusion that “the igniting spark that touched off the ever smoldering race hatred was unquestionably furnished by the Germans” (“Transformations,” 7) allowed her to credit Muslims for maintaining centuries of religious tolerance in the Ottoman Empire. Such arguments would appease Turkish critics and thus allow for the continued existence of the American College, which still included many Christian students. Patrick’s efforts to preserve good relations with Turkey were successful; her attempts to sway American public opinion in favor of Muslims less so. Her decision to promote the college rather than defend the Armenian cause was a fraught one. In writing against the grain of America opinion, Patrick deliberately suppressed her own views on Armenian and other minority groups in the dying Ottoman state. Patrick wrote passionately about Ottoman “race hatred,” but chose not to publish this manuscript, preferring instead to promote an optimistic image of the modern, civilized Turk.

American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) educator Edith Parsons’ anti-war views in the context of World War II provides an interesting case study of “renegade” missionaries. Parsons’ career in Turkey (1912-1945) spanned multiple wars including the Balkan Wars, World War I, and the Turkish War of Liberation; she was principal of the American Collegiate Institute when World War II began in 1939. Given Parsons’ experiences and her role as a missionary, her opposition to America’s entry into the war may not be surprising. That her opposition continued into 1942 and beyond, however, was relatively uncommon among U.S.-based Protestant groups. This paper explores the development of Parsons’ pacifism against the backdrop of neutral Turkey, which nonetheless experienced the privations of war and the mobilization of Turkish men and resources to prepare for invasion that never came. It situates Parsons’ experiences and anti-war views into the broader scope of perspectives among her missionary colleagues, the ABCFM’s Boston-based leadership, and American Protestant denominational responses within the U.S. This study expands the scholarship on missionaries in Turkey by focusing on the Second World War period rather than the much-studied First World War era and by connecting missionaries in Turkey with the national debates within American Protestant community. Parsons did not self-identify as a pacifist but her views paralleled the “peace-minded” Quakers and Mennonites until after the attack on Pearl Harbor when some of their adherents joined the fighting. Her ideas aligned Charles Clayton Morrison’s pacifist-leaning weekly publication, The Christian Century, and she found comity with Harold E. Fey and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Parsons had little in common with Protestant leader Reinhold Niebuhr’s interventionist-advocating publication, Christianity and Crisis. After the U.S. entered the war, views similar to Parsons’ were, in small measure, influential in shaping the resolutions of the Delaware Conference, the gathering of ecumenical Protestant leadership in 1942. Drawing on Parsons’ letters describing Turkey in wartime, records of the Boston-based ABCFM Board, and The Christian Century and Christianity in Crisis, as well as secondary sources describing the Protestant debates before and during World War II such as Martin Marty, Modern American Religion, Carpenter and Shenk, Earthen Vessels, and Putney and Burlin, eds., The Role of the American Board in the World, this paper will demonstrate how Parsons’ anti-war views made her a renegade missionary within the context of the ABCFM and debates within American Protestantism.