Talk:Bernard Jean Bettelheim

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What's the reason for this person being categorized as a Hungarian Jew? There's nothing in the article about him being either Hungarian or Jewish. --Mairi 01:20, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Bernard Jean Bettelheim
To take some points of omission arising from this very welcome Wikipedia article, first: Bettelheim was a brilliant linguist, commanding, or having a substantial proficiency in about 15 languages. From the 1840s they included Chinese and Ryukyuan. Of the latter, he compiled a vocabulary and a grammar, both of which he later gave to the British Museum (now held at the British Library). Those accomplishments are one of his major claims. Following from that, Bettelheim's translations (and publication) of several books from the New Testament (Luke, John, Acts and Romans) among other translations (e.g. parts of the Book of Common Prayer) into the "Loochooan Japanese" are another of his major claims. A third claim is his medical work, initially during the southern European cholera epidemics of the 1830s. It was as a lay medical missionary that he was posted to Ryukyu, and despite official rejection of Western medicine, he was consulted very widely by the mandarins about their various ailments, though lesser folk were punished for doing the same, sometimes savagely (e.g. exile and/or demolition of their houses). He worked conscientiously and constructively during the smallpox epidemic of 1851 and early 1852, and the typhus epidemic of late 1851 and 1852. Moreover and very importantly, he is credited with the introduction of vaccination in cooperation with the Ryukyuan physician Kijin Nakachi. On a minor point in the article, the teacher who accompanied the Bettelheims was named Sarah Speight James of the Home and Colonial Schools Society, rather than "Miss Jane." She was also employed to act as nurse to the Bettelheim children. She refused to disembark on their their arrival at Naha on account of Bettelheim’s "tyrannical conduct" towards her during the voyage. The article could indeed have been more informative about Bettelheim's Jewish origins in what is today called Bratislava, but then Presburg, Pressburg and Pozsony, his medical education, and his conversion to Christianity in Smyrna, Turkey, in 1840. His mentors were British and American Anglican missionaries, and that remained his denomination (very much on the Evangelical and anti-Tractarian wing of the Church of England) until he became a Presbyterian in the US toward the end of his life. (For a period in the early 1840s, it should, though, be noted, he broke away from the C. of E. and became pastor to an independent London congregation.) One of Bettelheim's great disappointments in life was his ultimate inability to get the C. of E. to ordain him deacon, despite its conditional undertakings. His worsening relations with his sponsoring body, the Loochoo Naval Mission (LNM), seem to me to have been at the heart of his growing chagrin. The principal source for Bettelheim’s time in Ryukyu is undoubtedly his own extensive journal. Although there is an emormous gap from 1847 to 1850, the original carbon copy MSS are held at the library of the University of Birmingham among the papers of the Loochoo Naval Mission in the Church Missionary Society Archive. Bettelheim’s own top copy survives only in a few fragments. The earliest known surviving parts of that are held at the library of the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, but their condition is fragile and thus access to them is limited. Very recently Mr. John Swearingen, an inhabitant of Brookfield, Missouri, the town where Bettelheim died of pneumonia, has deposited one more section of the journal in Okinawa along with two letter copybooks. It is the great hope of Bettelheim scholars that more of the original MSS will turn up as a result of the growth of interest in Bettelheim. Those parts of the journal which were published by the LNM are highly selective, sufficiently selective to be misleading. The mission’s aim was to encourage the public to continue to support its work and thus to conceal the bitter rift that had opened up between itself and Bettelheim. The original journal, by contrast, records, blow by blow, the deterioration in relations. Bettelheim's extensive missionary journal has been partly published by the Okinawa Prefectural Board of Education as The Journal and Official Correspondence of Bernard Jean Bettelheim, 1845-54 (Part I, 1845-51) edited by A.P. Jenkins, xxx+640pp. 2005. Part II (1852-54) is under active preparation. To return to another and minor aspect of the article, today it is called Okinawa, but at the time that Bettelheim resided in that supposedly independent country, he called it "Loo-Choo," (and variants), i.e. Ryukyu. It seems to me to be anachronistic and inaccurate to speak of the kingdom and its government as Okinawa and Okinawan. In Bettelheim’s time the main island of Ryukyu was called Uchinaa (i.e. Okinawa) though as a user-friendly approach it seems that Okinawa has been used.

--User:Jenkins 6 January 2006


 * He was born Jewish (Judaist) nobility at Pressburg, later converted to Christianism at England. --Sheynhertzגעשׁ״ך 15:28, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Bettelheim himself, not a man of notable modesty, never makes the claim to nobility. His explicit claim as to ancestry was that he belonged to the tribe of Levi, Bethlehem being his family's ancient place of origin in Palestine, prior to today's Bratislava. Abundant evidence indicates that he was converted to Christianity at Smyrna, Turkey.