Turkey, the Great Powers, and the Bagdad Railway: A study in imperialism

by Edward Mead Earle

Religious and Cultural Interests Reënforce Political and Economic Motives

Along with economic and political motives for imperialist ventures there frequently goes a religious motive. That such should be the case in the Near East was to be expected because of the religious appeal of the Ottoman Empire as the homeland of the Jews, the birthplace of Christianity, the cradle of Mohammedanism. It was small wonder, then, that the Bagdad Railway, which promised to link Central European cities with the holy places of Syria and Palestine, should have been supported enthusiastically by German missionaries and other German Christians.

German Protestant missions were represented in the Holy Land as early as 1860, when the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses established themselves in Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter the Jerusalems-Verein began work in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and about this same time, 1869, Lutheran missionaries calling themselves Templars settled near Jaffa. Under William II additional impetus was given to German religious activities in the Near East. The Jerusalems-Verein, which was taken under the special patronage of the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, supported a Lutheran clergyman in Jerusalem and was responsible for the erection in the Holy City of the Church of the Redeemer. This same society rapidly spread its activities throughout all of Palestine, and in 1910 it dedicated the famous Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Stiftung,[22] erected on the Mount of Olives by the Hohenzollern family at a cost in excess of half a million dollars. The Evangelical Union, organized in 1896, established a large orphanage in Jerusalem, together with schools and related institutions, and proved to be a very useful auxiliary to the work of the Deaconesses in maintaining schools, dispensaries, and hospitals. Also in 1896 there was founded the Deutsche Orient Mission, which rendered its services particularly in Cilicia, and which kept up the interest of its supporters at home by the publication in Berlin of a monthly periodical, Der Christliche Orient. It was estimated that, during the early years of the twentieth century, the German Protestant societies maintained in Turkey-in-Asia about 450 missionaries and several hundred native assistants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. By 1910 the Germans occupied a conspicuous position in evangelical missions in the Near East.[23]

The German Catholics were no less zealous than their Protestant compatriots. Although for centuries Italian and French members of the Franciscan order had been preëminent in Catholic missions in Turkey, there was a marked tendency during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth for German members of other religious orders to take an interest in the Near East. This may have been merely the result of a general increase in missionary activity connected with the increasing imperial activities of the German Government. It may have been due to the announced intention of the German Foreign Office to protect Christian missions and missionaries and to the vigorous fulfilment of that promise after the murder of two German Catholic priests in the Chinese province of Shantung. It may have been a natural consequence of the fact that the Prefect of the Propaganda from 1892–1902 was a famous German cardinal.[24] In any event, under the guiding ægis of the Palästinaverein, a society for the promotion of Catholic missions in the Holy Land, German Lazarists, Benedictines, and Carmelites established and maintained schools, hospitals, and dispensaries, as well as churches, in Syria and Palestine.[25]

Even Jewish religious interests in Palestine promoted Teutonic peaceful penetration in Turkey. As part of the Zionist activities of L’Alliance Israelite Universelle, agricultural colonies were founded by German Jews in the vicinity of Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa. These colonists appeared to be proud of their German nationality and were an integral part of the German community in the Holy Land.[26]

The German Government had no intention of overlooking the political possibilities of this religious penetration. Promotion of missionary activities might be made to serve a twofold purpose: first, to win the support, in domestic politics, of those interested in the propagation of their faith in foreign lands—more particularly to hold the loyalty of the Catholic Centre party; second, to further one other means of strengthening the bonds between Germany and the Ottoman Empire.

An excellent illustration of the inter-relation among economic, political, and religious aspects of modern imperialism is to be found in the visit of William II to Turkey in 1898. On the morning of October 31—the anniversary of the posting of Luther’s ninety-five theses at Wittenberg—the Emperor participated in the dedication of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. During the afternoon of the same day he presented the supposed site of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary to the German Catholics of the Holy City, for the construction thereon of a Catholic memorial church, and he telegraphed the Pope expressing his hope that this might be but one step in a steady progress of Catholic Christianity in the Near East. The Kaiser likewise might have visited the German Jewish communities in the vicinity of Jerusalem, but perhaps he felt, as a French writer put it, that such a visit “between his devotions at Gethsemane and at Calvary would have created a public scandal.”[27] Nevertheless he did not hesitate, a week later, at Damascus, to assure “three hundred million Mohammedans” that the German Emperor was their friend. Yet with all this pandering to religious interests—to the Protestants of Prussia, to the Catholics of South Germany, to his Moslem hosts—the Kaiser found time ostentatiously to promote the German Consul at Constantinople to the rank of Consul General. And upon his return home he justified all of these activities on the ground that his visit “would prove to be a lasting source of advantage to the German name and German national interests.”[28]

This curious admixture of religion and diplomacy was made the more complicated when the Imperial Chancellor informed the Reichstag, on December 7, 1898, that one of the purposes of the Emperor’s visit to His Ottoman Majesty was to make it plain that the German Government did not propose to recognize anywhere “a foreign protectorate over German subjects.” This served notice to France that Germany would not respect the French claim to exclusive protection of Catholic missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. “We do not lay claim,” said Prince von Bülow, “to a protectorate over all Christians in the East. But only the German Emperor can protect German subjects, be they Catholics or Protestants.”[29] This pronouncement was received in France with undisguisedly poor grace. One writer in a prominent fortnightly magazine frankly expressed his disgust: “Germany possesses military power; she possesses economic power; she proposes to acquire maritime power. But she needs the support of moral power. On the world’s stage she aspires to play the part of Principle. To base her world-wide prestige upon the protection of Christianity, Protestant and Catholic; to centralize the divergent sources of German influence; to have all over the globe a band of followers, at once religious and economic in their interests, who will propagate the German idea, consume German products, and, while professing the gospel of Christ, will preach the gospel of the sacred person of the Emperor—these are the ultimate ends of the world policy of William II.”[30]

Closely allied with the spread of German missions was the propagation of das Deutschtum—that is, the spread of the German language, instruction in German history and ideals, appreciation of the character of German civilization. German religious schools in the Near East were dynamos of German cultural influence. The Jerusalems-Verein alone, for example, maintained, in 1902, eight schools with more than 430 pupils. In these schools German was taught. This also was the case with the Catholic schools, under German influence. Even the Jews—a large number of whom had emigrated from Germany because of anti-Semitic feeling there—carried with them their German patriotism. The Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden, the German section of L’Alliance Israélite Universelle, not only taught German in its own schools, but made a strenuous effort to have German adopted as the official language of all Zionist schools in the Near East.[31]

It should be pointed out that this injection of nationalism into religious education was an obvious imitation of the French method of spreading imperial influence in Syria and Palestine. And it was frankly admitted to be an imitation. “A policy of German-Turkish culture,” wrote Dr. Rohrbach, “deserves to be pressed with renewed ardor. We must endeavor to make the German language, and German science, and all the great positive values of our energetic civilization, duties faithfully fulfilled—active forces for the regeneration of Turkey by transplanting them into Turkey. To do this we need above everything else a system of German schools, which need not rival the French in magnitude, but which must be planned on a larger scale than that of the now existing schools. No lasting and secure cultural influences are possible without the connecting link of language. The intelligent and progressive young men of Turkey should have an abundant opportunity to learn German.... We can give the Turks an impression of our civilization and a desire to become familiar with it only when we teach them our language and thus open the door for them to all of our spiritual possessions. In doing this we are not aiming to Germanize Turkey politically or economically or to colonize it, but to introduce the German spirit into the great national process of development through which that nation, which has a great future, happens to be passing.”[32] French methods were to be paid the compliment of imitation.

The sentimental appeal of the Bagdad Railway was more than a religious and cultural appeal alone. The Great Plan was assiduously promoted by a patriotic and Pan-German press. It caught the interest of the ordinary workaday citizen, whose imagination was fired by the sweeping references to “our” trade, “our” investments, “our” religious interests in the Near East; the Bagdad Railway was the very heart of all these interests. Here was a railway which was to revive a medieval trade route to the East, which was to traverse the route of the Crusades. Here was a country which had been the much-sought-after empire of the great nations of antiquity, Assyria, Chaldea, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Here had risen and fallen the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon, and Hit. To these regions had turned the longing of the great conquerors, Sargon, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Saladin. With such materials some German Kipling might evolve phrases far more alluring than Fuzzy Wuzzy, and Tommy Atkins, and the White Man’s Burden.[33]