Bernát Bettelheim or Bernard Jean Bettelheim ( or ; 1811, Pozsony, Hungary - February 9, 1870 Brookfield, Missouri, USA) was a Hungarian-born Christian missionary to Okinawa, the first Protestant missionary to be active there.
Biography
Bettelheim was born into a noted Hungarian-Jewish family in Pressburg (Pozsony), Kingdom of Hungary, (today Bratislava, 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.
Bettelheim became a naturalized British subject sometime later, married the daughter of a prominent thread producer, and, in 1844, his first child was born; she was named Victoria Rose. Following further disputes with various Christian organizations, including the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (a Jewish Christian missionary society now known as the Church's Ministry Among Jewish People or CMJ), he accepted an appointment as medical missionary to Naha with the Loochoo Naval Mission. Leaving from Portsmouth on 9 September 1845, the Bettelheims arrived in Hong Kong in January the following year; their second child, Bernard James Gutzlaff Bettelheim, was born en route, at sea. After several months in Hong Kong, studying Chinese and mingling with British missionary society there, Bettelheim departed for Okinawa with his family in April 1846.
In Okinawa
Bettelheim arrived in Okinawa from Hong Kong on April 30, 1846, accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth M., their infant daughter, Victoria Rose (born 1844), their infant son, Bernard James (born November 1845), "Miss Jane", a tutor and schoolmistress, and Liu Yu-Kan, a Cantonese translator, on board the British ship Starling. The ship was welcomed at Naha by the local port master, who objected to the missionary's disembarking; the Starling's captain did not challenge him, and aimed to keep the Bettelheims on board. However, Dr. Bettelheim had other ideas. He bribed several members of the crew to help him in transporting his possessions into the Okinawan ships, while the doctor invited a number of Okinawan dockhands below decks, and entertained them with drink. Intoxicated, the Okinawans were persuaded to take the Bettelheims, and their possessions ashore; when they arrived it had already grown dark and was too late to turn back. The local officials offered the family shelter in the Gokoku-ji temple for the night, and the priests in residence there left, out of respect for the women's privacy. The following morning, the Bettelheims refused to leave. They would remain in the Gokoku-ji for seven years.
Bettelheim kept the rightful residents of the temple, and lay worshipers, away in part by accusing them of seeking importune glimpses of his wife. He threw out a number of objects he deemed to be "the heathen furniture of idolatry", and considered his occupation of the temple, against the wishes of the local officials, a small victory for Christianity, over this heathen nation.