James Baruch Crighton-Ginsburg

James Baruch Crighton-Ginsburg (* 1826 in Kiev , Ukraine ; † March 4, 1898 in Constantinople , Ottoman Empire ) originally Baruch Ginsburg was an Anglican missionary in the British Jewish mission .

Life

From rabbi's son to Christian missionary 1826–1847

JB Crighton-Ginsburg was born in Kiev in 1826 as Baruch, son of Rabbi Saul Ginsburg, and received his first religious instruction from his father. After the early death of his father, he traveled through Europe in search of a spiritual home. Around 1846 he met the Jewish missionaries Carl Schwartz, Joachim Biesenthal and Robert Belson in Berlin . From them he received a translation of the New Testament into Hebrew . The missionaries of the "Berlin Israel Mission", founded in 1822 by the British Ambassador Sir George Rose as a Prussian branch of the oldest Christian Jewish missionary society in Europe, the " London Jews Society " (LJS), sent him to Strasbourg , where he worked with Johann Peter Goldberg and his pupil and son-in-law Jacob August Janitor received further instructions. Goldberg and caretaker, who was very much influenced by the Swabian pietism of Ludwig Hofacker and others, finally baptized Baruch Ginsburg on May 16, 1847 with the name " James " (Eng. "Jakob").

Education and activity in Algeria and Morocco 1847–1886

Ginsburg studied from 1849 to 1851 at the "London Missionary College", which was then headed by Benjamin Davidson. From 1851 to 1857 Ginsburg worked at the LJS mission station in Mulhouse (Alsace) and was sent to Constantine (Algeria) in 1857 . There he immediately began his missionary work, together with his first wife, who died shortly afterwards, he held church services, distributed LJS material and Bibles, and opened schools for boys and girls and a first orphanage for Jewish girls. In 1864 he was transferred to Algiers , in 1875 to Mogador (now Essaouira ) in Morocco. In Mogador there was strong resistance from the Jewish community to his missionary activities, which culminated in violence against British institutions in 1879. The British authorities made him responsible for the situation, whereupon the LJS brought him back to London. In 1880 he went to Marseille , where he took French citizenship , and in 1882 returned to Mogador.

Missionary in Constantinople 1886–1898

In 1886 the LJS sent him with his second wife Sarah Crighton (whose name he adopted) to Constantinople , where he again developed a lively missionary activity and founded several schools and mission stations. An orphanage was built in Ortakoy for Sephardic Jewish refugee girls who fled to Constantinople in the early 1880s after the anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russo-Turkish War , which was run by his wife Sarah. One of these girls was Fanny Goldstein, born in Bulgaria (baptismal name, born Bogoslow near Kjustendil (Bulgaria) in 1873, died in Constantinople in September 1919), later (from 1903) the wife of the well-known German-Turkish publicist and writer Friedrich Schrader .

Crighton-Ginsburg died on March 4, 1898 in Constantinople.

literature

Noam Sienna: "It's a Minhag - Algerian Judaism through the eyes of a Christian missionary": University of Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought, Volume 1, no. 5 (2015), p. 23–41 link: [1]

Individual evidence

1. ^ Joachim Biesenthal: in: Jewish Encyclopedia , 1906 Link
2. ↑ Ledderhose, Karl Friedrich, "Hausmeister, Jakob August" in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 11 (1880), pp. 99-100 online version
3. ↑ Rusin, 2016: Anti-Jewish excesses on Bulgarian territories of Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Link
4. ^ Fanny Christine Goldstein Schrader in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved January 6, 2019.
5. ↑ Friedrich Schrader speaks about Fanny ("Juana" in the text) in the first chapter of his book "Refugee Travel" (p. 9), but does not mention her origin. (FS: A refugee journey through the Ukraine. Diary sheets of my escape from Constantinople. JCB Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen 1919 online: Link )