Asahel Grant's The Nestorians or the Lost Tribes (1841) By H.L. Murre-van den Berg

Less than six years after the establishment of a Protestant mission station in (northwest ) in November 1835, the physician of the mission, Asahel Grant, published the first western monograph devoted entirely to the . This people, then known to the western public as the "Nestorians", had only recently been rediscovered in the west, among other things by a publication of two other American , Eli Smith and H. G. O. Dwight, who had visited the Urmia region as part of a exploration tour around 1830. The establishment of the mission station in Urmia by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) was one of the policy decisions that arose out of the advice of these two travelers. Grant (born in 1807) and his wife Judith Campbell (born in 1814) had arrived in Urmia together with Rev. Justin Perkins (1805-1869) and his wife Charlotte Bass (1808-1897), and these four had been responsible for the initial successes of the "Nestorian Mission". During the first years of this mission, the activities had been limited to the Assyrians of the Urmia plain, but after a few years Grant had started to look for opportunities to extend the work to the Assyrians living in the Hakkari mountains. After his wife died in 1839, he took off for his first journey into the mountains and visited the head of the , Mar Shimun XVII Auraham (in office from 1820 to 1860), in Qodshanis. He returned for a second visit the next year, after which he traveled on to the United States to entrust his motherless children into the care to family members. Two other important issues were settled during this furlough: Grant succeeded in acquiring permission from the Mission Board to establish a mission station in the Hakkari mountains and he saw his book through the press. After his return late in 1841, Grant immediately resumed his travels in the mountains, whereupon in the summer of 1842, he obtained permission from the patriarch and the Kurdish chief of Julamerik, Nurullah Bey, to settle in Ashita. In the meantime,

H however, relationships between Kurds and , somewhat tense already in 1840, had deteriorated considerably, culminating in the Kurdish attacks on Assyrians in the summer of 1843, and scattering all plans for Protestant mission work in the mountains. Grant, whose mission building in Ashita was later seen as one of the factors that had fuelled Kurdish suspicions of western support for the Assyrians, died the next year in Mosul, where he was involved in relief work for Assyrian refugees who had fled the mountains in the wake of the massacres. In his book, Grant makes clear that his strong attachment to the Assyrian people was based on a deep conviction that this people occupied a special place in God's divine economy. Naturally, Grant agreed with the reasons that other missionaries before him had given for this special place of the Assyrians among the mission work of the American protestants — their comparative purity as compared to other Eastern Christians (the "Protestants of Asia"), their opposition to Roman Catholic ("Papal") influences, and the glorious history of their missionary activities into Eastern Asia — like them, he was convinced that the Assyrians, once they had been sufficiently enlightened by Protestant missionaries, would prove a great help in the re-christianization of the "Bible Lands". However, for Grant, the Assyrians were even more special. Perhaps not surprisingly in view of the great attention that some of his contemporaries paid to the quest for the ten tribes — variously situated in Ethiopia, Afghanistan, India, and the United States — Grant became convinced that the Assyrians, together with the Jewish communities of the same region, were the true descendents of the ten tribes of . This view firmly placed the Protestant mission among the Assyrians in a strong millennial setting in which the reawakening of the Assyrians could be equated with definite conversion of the whole of Israel, which then would be a sure sign of the approaching end of time, ushering in "the final and more glorious harvest of the Church" (p. 312). Many of Grant's arguments in favor of the identification of the Assyrians with the ten tribes are either not very convincing, e.g., his belief that the Modern- language shared by Jews and Assyrians of this region is ultimately of a western, i.e. Palestinian, origin, or have not been confirmed by his contemporaries, in particular his assertion that both Jews and Assyrians of his day believed in their common ancestry as "Beni Israel". Other

[ii] arguments, concerning the original region of settlement of the ten tribes, the mutually understandable language between Jews and Assyrians, and Assyrian manners and customs that are remarkably similar to Old Testament prescriptions might support theories of a Jewish origin of at least part of the early Assyrian converts, but, of course, do not inform us whether these "Jews" were from the ten or the two tribes. Luckily, the book is informative also in ways not directly related to his theory of the Israelite descent of the Assyrians. Grant's detailed descriptions of the Assyrian tribal communities in the mountains, his visits to chiefs, maliks, bishops, and the patriarch, his travels to and from Constantinople (once via Diyarbakir and ), and Yezidi communities make interesting reading. Grant supplies us with a unique eye-witness account of the situation in the mountains on the eve of growing western and Ottoman influence, being the first westerner ever to travel into the heart of the Hakkari mountains who lived to write about it. Perhaps even more important, Grant also enables us to taste something of the life and thoughts of the early Protestant missionaries in the , some aspects of it sympathetic to modern-day readers, others not so much: the missionaries' strong biases against Eastern , Roman Catholicism and Islam and their naivete in dealing with the intricate political developments in the Middle-East, but also their strong attachment to the people they were working among, to the point of romanticizing their lives and origins, their commitment to the betterment of all peoples of the Middle-East, and their perseverance in adverse circumstances. Grant, who perhaps was more outspoken and romantic than many of his contemporaries, embodied these ideals as much as any one else.

Leiden, March 13, 2002

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