Bernard Jean Bettelheim

Bernát Bettelheim (or Bernard Jean Bettelheim) (1811, Pozsony - February 9, 1870 Brookfield, Missouri) was a Hungarian born Christian missionary to Okinawa, the first Protestant missionary to be active there.

Bettelheim was born into a noted Jewish family of Hungarian nationality in Pozsony, the Kingdom of Hungary, (today Slovakia), in 1811. He studied, from a very early age, towards the goal of becoming a rabbi. He considered himself Hungarian. It is said that by the age of ten beside Hungarian he could read and write in French, German, and Hebrew, though if his biographies are to be believed, he left home at 12 to become a teacher and continued his studies at five different schools. Bettelheim earned a degree in medicine from a school in Padua, Italy in 1836, and is said to have gone on to file no fewer than 47 "scientific dissertations" within the following three years. He traveled much in these years, practicing medicine in a number of Italian cities, aboard an Egyptian naval vessel, and in a Turkish town called Magnesia, where, in 1840, he began studying Christianity. He converted to Christianity, and was baptized a short time later, in Smyrna.

During his time in the Ottoman Empire, he held theological debates with local rabbis and published pamphlets on the matter in French; after facing salary disputes in Constantinople and resigning his post, Bettelheim made his way to London, where he hoped to gain authorization from the Church of England to preach to the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean. During this time, he became associated with a number of other prominent missionaries to the Far East, including Dr. Peter Parker, Karl Gützlaff, and missionary to Africa David Livingstone. Following several months of disputes with the Church of England, who refused to recognize his European degrees, insisted he study at Oxford or Cambridge, and were suspicious of someone who had so recently converted from Judaism, Bettelheim abandoned that particular quest, though he remained in London.

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