Biography of the Rev. Henry Aaron Stern, D.D.

This 1866 hagiography of a Christian convert and foreign missionary among Jews remains a valuable source on Victorian Britain's orientalism.

A Jewish Christian convert, Stern was a lifelong missionary among Jews in Asia Minor, Africa and the Middle East, and was imprisoned in Ethiopia for five years. Published in 1886, Isaacs's tendentious biography is nonetheless informative on foreign missions to Jews, and remains a valuable source on Victorian Britain's orientalism.Henry Aaron Stern (1820–85), of German Jewish birth, moved to London in 1839, converted to Christianity and became a lifelong missionary for the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews. With his wife he preached in Palestine, Babylon, Constantinople, Baghdad, Persia, and to the Karaite Jews of the Crimea. Famously, in 1863, he was caught in a diplomatic dispute in Ethiopia that led to his imprisonment and eventual rescue, five years later, by a British military force. Stern was made a doctor of divinity in 1881. He wrote three memoirs, which were drawn on by Albert Augustus Isaacs (1826–1903), a vicar at Leicester who knew Stern personally. Isaacs's biography, first published in 1886, is hagiographic and written with religiosity. Nonetheless, it includes informative accounts of missionary work among Jewish communities, and remains a valuable source on the orientalism of Victorian Britain.