Michael Marten's Attempting to bring the Gospel home courageously and carefully addresses the sensitive issue of Scottish missions to the Jews during the nineteenth century. The author rightly points out that ‘mission activity may be a taboo, but mission history is not’ (p. 2). His historical investigation seeks to provide a well-balanced and multi-faceted picture of the motivation and relationship between Christians and Jews. His pioneering work fits into a chain of recently published works on similar missionary endeavours in the USA and Hungary during the same period. The title of the book grasps brilliantly the intention of the key protagonists: the Scottish missionaries' desire to spread the good news to the Jews in Palestine. The volume consists of two major parts. Chapters on the mission and the missionaries comprise the major portion of the book. The former is discussed in ninety-one pages, the latter in fifty-six. The main body of the material, together with a lucid introduction and a short conclusion, makes up 184 pages out of 262 pages in hardcover.

The author vigilantly designates the boundaries of his research by underlining that his chief aim is to try to understand what the Scots were trying to do as missionaries. Following the theories and conclusions of Hobsbawn and the views of Ogilvie and Thomson (p. 161) he presents superbly typical examples of contemporary missionary attitudes as they seek to justify their work. It is a fair assumption that at the same time Marten wishes to include the perspective of the targets of the mission, the Jewish people of Palestine: he argues that the views of those being proselytised is often ignored when writing history. Marten writes about Jewish perspectives but most of his data comes from sources (reports, articles, diaries etc) produced by the missionaries. He provides little information on how the mission to the Jews was perceived by the local Jews, Arabs and others. There are no materials listed from the indigenous setting at all. This is rather puzzling when the importance of the local perspective is stressed (p. 116). Perhaps the lack of such materials is accountable for this one-sidedness.

Yet this volume is an excellent piece of ecclesiastical and social history, in the guise of what is usually categorised as mission history. After a concise introduction which considers the reasons why the Scots began to undertake mission to the Jews, the relationship between mission and imperialism and the Levantine context, the work proceeds to explore how this remarkable and romantic enterprise (‘highly preposterous’ as Gavin White said of it) came into being in Scotland and took root in Damascus and Aleppo. The author then focuses upon the geopious land of Palestine. The foundation and development of mission stations at Tiberias, Safad, Hebron and Jaffa are described from various aspects. Marten explains the means of evangelisation (medical care and education) and how the missionaries operated (for example pp. 149ff, 153ff). His treatment of the missionaries' backgrounds demonstrates an intimate knowledge of social history and a clear understanding of how detrimental it was to the mission that they were not able to move beyond Scottish middle-class concerns. There he relies upon Andrew Ross's observations which he convincingly supports by pointing to the inability of pre-millenarian evangelicals to enthuse working-class people (pp. 125ff). Marten also addresses several other sensitive issues. First, he demonstrates the extent to which missionaries lacked any degree of inculturation. He argues that they failed to understand the self-perception and differences of ‘Eastern Churches’, and had a negative and often inadequate view of Islam. The missionaries exhibited little interest in, or willingness to master the local language(s). They were reluctant to accept and adapt to the ‘host’ culture. The subchapter on the reculturation of the missionaries, another exciting topic, demonstrates the author's concern to give as full a picture as possible of the participants in the arena of mission work.

Marten's critical position is conspicuous when he describes brilliantly the perception of missionaries as, in their accounts, they presented Palestine through the lens of their own reading of the Bible. Thus, the people of Holy Land were appropriated to the ‘idea’ of what Palestine ought to be like, according to pious Scottish evangelicals, not what it was like in reality. The author's penetrating observations on the positions taken by the missionaries on political power is well argued and supported by the evidence. His clear-sighted discussion is seasoned with entertaining perceptions, such as the claim that a ‘Jewish tyranny’ would replace a Turkish one if the Balfour declaration were acted upon. Owing to such a style the book, a published version of Marten's doctoral dissertation, is a pleasure to read. Throughout the volume the author repeatedly underlines the fact that the Scottish mission to the Jews in the Levant was a failure. He argues this convincingly, yet it is a bit odd that the premiss upon which one of his key observations rests is not the missionaries' own but a general, although widely accepted, statement by Courbage and Fargues that is put into their mouths (p. 22). Marten demonstrates superbly that it was only in Aleppo that the missionaries developed a critical, self-reflective voice; elsewhere this was not considered desirable. It is highly illuminating to read Marten's convincing argument as to why this was so. The book demonstrates by means of many case studies that securing Jewish converts in Palestine was unsuccessful. His apt remark that the missionaries ‘contributed to the losses suffered by the Orthodox communities’ (p. 175) clearly shows how carefully he has read his research material. Doubtless he is also aware that modern missionary enterprises have the same experience.

Marten is keen to be objective. Hence he attempts to avoid the language and terminologies used by the missionaries. He has replaced them with others. Thus the author seldom talks about mission to the Jews, but rather ‘conversion to their worldview’ or to ‘Protestant Christianity’ (p. 147). He refers to the ‘Christian Christ as their messiah’ (p. 18) and speaks of the ‘myth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam’ (p. 114). Marten is undoubtedly aware of the insider's view and tries to explain how conversion was understood by the missionaries. The chapter on ‘Missionary methods’ is a fine treatment of the topic. The Scots' deep religious conviction that conversion is to Jesus, not to a religion, is essential to an understanding of their methods and of the various Jewish responses to the missionary enterprise. To some degree, a more detailed and well-argued section on the theological positions of evangelicals and Jews could have given the less informed reader crucial aids to an understanding of the extremely complex and exciting nature of perceiving the ‘other’. Here we are conscious of the absence of Jewish, Arab and local Christian materials for illuminating the various backgrounds of these groups; contrasting these with Scottish Evangelical proselytising would have been revealing.

The author's concern carefully to fill in the background to his material is to be commended. It was certainly worth the work involved. The reader is provided with excellent charts which demonstrate how the Scottish Presbyterian Churches evolved: how they united, separated and again reunited, developments which certainly had an impact on mission and missionary thinking. Figures on the income of the Free Church of Scotland as well as a family tree of the Torrance missionary family show that the author intended to give a complete picture of his research material. The publication of three texts from the minutes of Jewish committees draws attention to the eagerness of the author to offer first-hand insight into the nature, background and organisational structure of the mission to the Jews.

The notes, bibliographies and the index offer an aid for further research into the vast realm of Scottish mission. As Marten has said, ‘very little had been written on Scottish missions in 19th and 20th century Palestine’ (p. 1). This observation is true of many missionary enterprises carried out by the Scots and one can only agree that many ‘gold mines’ within the archives of Scottish missionary societies await further research by diligent students and scholars. Marten's meticulously referenced work provides a superb guidance to the archival sources. His study of Scottish missionary enthusiasm for the conversion of the Jews is a joy to read; while relaxing, his analysis is illuminating and his comments are brilliant. This multi-faceted research into the mission to the Jews in a land attracting geopious feeling deserves the attention of a wide range of readers.