Bernard Jean Bettelheim (June 1811 – 9 February 1870) was a physician who served as the first Anglican missionary to Japan. Born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Pressburg (now known as Bratislava), Bettelheim was educated at a yeshiva in Trebitsch before studying medicine at various universities. He graduated from the University of Padua in 1836 and began to travel across the Mediterranean practicing medicine. While serving as a surgeon to an Ottoman military regiment in Manisa in 1840, he met a group of British missionaries and converted to Anglican Christianity. He traveled to London later that year and attempted to enter the Church Mission Society and preach to Jewish communities in the Mediterranean. He was rejected due to his recent conversion. After several years practicing medicine in London, he met Herbert Clifford, who had long sought to organize a Christian mission to the Ryukyu Kingdom. Bettelheim agreed to join his Loochoo Naval Mission and left with his family from England in 1845.
After several months studying Chinese in Hong Kong, Bettelheim arrived in Okinawa in April 1846. He was initially denied permission to land, but sneaked his way on to the island and refused to leave. Ryukyuan authorities had him and his family stay at the Gokoku-ji in Naha, where he lived under constant watch and pressure to leave. He began practicing medicine and preaching on the island, despite orders not to, in the process introducing the smallpox vaccine to the island. A talented linguist, Bettelheim produced a reference grammar and dictionary for the Okinawan language, as well as translations of the Gospels. The Ryukyuan government began to steadily crack down on his attempts to proselytize, although they avoided the use of force in order to forestall a diplomatic incident. Okinawan citizens were ordered to ignore Bettelheim and shut their doors when he approached. In response, he began to break into houses to preach, resulting in him being assaulted in several instances. The Loochoo Naval Mission grew upset with Bettelheim due to his tactics and his frequent appeals to the British government for military assistance.
In 1853, American admiral Matthew C. Perry visited Okinawa, seeking to open it, and eventually Japan, to American trade. Bettelheim became enamored with Perry, comparing him to Jesus in his sermons, and served as his translator during treaty negotiations. Bettelheim decided to leave Okinawa in 1854, disillusioned with the prospects of prostelyzing. Afterwards, he settled in the United States, where he continued his translation work and medical practice. He served as a surgeon in the Union Army during the American Civil War, before settling in Illinois and eventually Missouri. He died of pneumonia in 1870.
Early life and career In June 1811, Bernard Jean Bettelheim was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Pressburg (now known as Bratislava), then under the rule of the Austrian Empire. His father, Moses Bettelheim, was a merchant and devoutly religious. When he was very young, he began attending a yeshiva in Trebitsch operated by his uncle Moses Saper. Bettelheim was purportedly able to read Hebrew, French, and German by the age of nine. He left home when he was a little over thirteen and became a teacher, before returning school to study medicine at the University of Debrecen, the University of Budapest, and the University of Padua. He graduated from Padua with a medical degree in September 1836. He is purported by early biographers to have filed 36 dissertations with the Imperial Court Library in Vienna over the following three years.
After he obtained his degree, Bettelheim traveled around the Mediterranean in his medical work, focusing on cholera treatment. In the late 1830s, he became a surgeon on an Egyptian Navy man-of-war, and by 1840 became the chief surgeon of an Ottoman military regiment in Manisa. There, he became acquainted with a group of British missionaries, who supplied him with Christian religious texts. Convinced, he converted to Anglican Christianity and was baptized by a British chaplain in İzmir. After debating with local rabbis, he published a controversial pamphlet criticizing Judaism.
Bettelheim traveled to Constantinople and spent several months in a dispute over his salary while also studying the Gospels. In late 1840, he left for London and attempted to gain permission from the Church Mission Society to serve as a missionary to the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean. He stayed at the mission society offices alongside several other noted missionaries, including Karl Gützlaff, David Livingstone, and Peter Parker. He entered a protracted disagreement with a group of Church of England bishops, who required that he spend three years studying at the University of Oxford or Cambridge before he could become a minister, seeing his prior degrees as inadequate and pointing to the fact that he had so recently converted to Christianity. He left the Church of England and began attending an independent house church in London. He later rejoined the Church of England in rejection of the disestablishmentarian movement. He soon became a naturalized British citizen and in 1843 married Elizabeth Barwick, the daughter of a thread manufacturer. The following year, the couple had their first child, Victoria Rose Bettelheim.
Bettelheim affiliated with the London Jews' Society, an Anglican missionary society which focused on proselytizing for Christianity among Jewish communities. He claimed that the society had appointed him to travel to Tiberias in Ottoman Palestine to proselytize, while the society claimed that he had only been given a probationary appointment which was then canceled. He was unable to secure passage to Tiberias from Liverpool and attempted to get another appointment to travel to Salonika in northern Greece. However, the society cut ties with him, and he instead began a medical practice in London.
Loochoo Naval Mission
The British naval officer Herbert Clifford attempted to organize a Christian mission to Ryukyu Kingdom from 1831 to the 1840s. He visited Okinawa as a young sailor in 1816 aboard HMS Lyra and found the Okinawans to be extremely hospitable, but felt immense guilt for not attempting to introduce them to Christianity. He contacted the Church Mission Society, the London Missionary Society, and the Moravian Church missionary society, but none had any interest in his proposal.
A number of friendly European visits to Ryukyu in the 1830s and early 1840s sparked interest in the region among some sailors; it had no formal status as a treaty port, but was used informally as a port of call for naval vessels traveling through the region. Inspired by the British opening of Qing China after the First Opium War, Clifford began fundraising for a private Christian mission to Ryukyu, the Loochoo Naval Mission, in early 1843. The London Mission Society in Hong Kong refused to help him with the project, but he was able to reach out to other naval officers and acquire significant private support from figures such as the 6th Duke of Manchester.
It is unknown how Bettelheim joined the naval mission. Clifford did not know him well, and collected a number of written testimonials to ascertain his suitability for the mission, which he described as "unsurpassed by any missionary who has gone forth from this land to the heathen". Clifford wrote that the mission had a favorable opinion "as far as the Committee can form an opinion of their acquaintance with him". A poor economy and the unexpected difficulties faced by missionaries in China may have limited the number of possible candidates for the mission. Clifford was upset that Bettelheim was not ordained; he reached an agreement with Charles James Blomfield, the Bishop of London, that Bettelheim would be given dimissorial letters after a yearlong probation, upon which he could be ordained by a bishop; however, this never materialized. Bettelheim wrote that he accepted the opportunity to travel to Okinawa due to his desire to "delight my soul in the results of Protestantism on a virgin soil".
Arrival in Okinawa Bettelheim quickly closed his medical practice and set off to sea with his family from Portsmouth to Hong Kong in September 1845. A month into their departure, their son was born; Bettelheim named the child Bernard James Gutzlaff after Karl Gützlaff. Upon his arrival in Hong Kong in January 1846, Bettelheim met with Gützlaff and various other resident missionaries. He wrote to Clifford favorably about the prospects of the mission, conveying promising but inaccurate information he had learned about Ryukyu; he claimed that the Japanese had recently lost all power in the islands, that the Chinese suzerains allowed religious freedom on the island, and that the Okinawans had begged previous groups of European visitors to stay on the islands.
The family stayed in Hong Kong throughout early 1846, attempting to find a ship which would bring them to Okinawa; this was a difficult task, as the island was outside normal trade routes. Bettelheim spent his time in the colony studying the Chinese language. He was able to secure passage on an American ship, the Starling, as the American owner Henry Fessenden was sympathetic to their missionary goals. Fessenden promised that he would return in six months to deliver mail. Bettleheim departed with his family and Ms. James, a nursemaid and tutor. Bettelheim had previously found a Chinese interpreter, but he had decided not to accompany him the day prior to his departure. Bettelheim was left with Clifford's Vocabulary of the Loo-Choo Language, compiled after his 1816 visit, as his only linguistic material.
Upon the ship's arrival on April 30, Bettelheim was greeted by a French Catholic missionary stationed on Okinawa, Théodore-Augustin Forcade. Unbeknownst to the Loochoo Naval Mission, Forcade had become the first European to reside in the islands in 1844; another Catholic missionary, Pierre-Marie le Turdu, would arrive the day after Bettelheim's arrival. The Ryukyuan authorities denied Bettelheim permission to disembark, and the Starlings captain was unwilling to disobey this order. The following day, Bettelheim offered alcohol to a group of Okinawan boatmen and sneaked his baggage into their boats before they left. After he claimed they had stolen his property, the captain agreed to take him and his family to shore. Upon disembarking, Bettelheim refused to leave.
The Ryukyuan authorities escorted Bettelheim and his family to a nearby temple. He spent the rest of the afternoon arguing with a group of officials, who reiterated that he was violating the law. A resident minister (the ) from the Satsuma Domain, under which Ryukyu was a protectorate, noted that he had brought a bathtub, six chairs, a mirror, a quilt, closets, and two dogs. His appearance and the presence of the dogs caused him to gain the monikers "Inu-Ganchō" (literally 'spectacled dog man') and "Nanmin-nu-ganchō" ('spectacled man at the Gokoku-ji bluff'), which became the main names he was known as to locals. Ryukyuan authorities referred to him as "Po-te-ling".