In the late afternoon heat of August 3, 1898, a large crowd of family and friends gathered at the chapel in Alpine, Utah, to honor Joseph Wilford Booth, leaving the next day on a mission to the Ottoman Empire for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[1] Together they picnicked, listened to speeches, sang songs, and engaged in “spirited” dancing. Hand shaking, farewells, and kisses were abundant, and the customary collection to support a young missionary yielded a considerable sum of $150.

Joseph Wilford Booth and Mary Rebecca (Reba) Moyle Booth as a young married couple. Courtesy of the Booth family.

The next day, after settling some financial matters and enjoying a family dinner, Booth took time to be alone, finding comfort in a familiar habit and place of refuge:

Then came an hour of the sweetest sorrow I have experienced for many a day. I returned to a spot in the old field where I was want to roam in childhood and there in the shade of the willows and the oaks I bent my knees in humble supplication to the God of Heaven and dedicated my all to Him. . . . The parting with my loved ones was hard for a few moments and the sweet love of family and friends seemed more holy than ever before.[2]

At 3:00 pm, accompanied by his wife, Reba, and two other passengers, he boarded a horse-drawn buggy for the four-hour ride to Salt Lake City, the first leg of an eight-thousand-mile journey that would have repercussions far beyond his expectations. Booth’s subsequent travels took him across an ocean and two continents to Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and from there around the coastline of Anatolia (Asia Minor) and inland to the cities of Aleppo (in today’s Syria) and Aintab (in today’s Turkey).[3] Booth had no idea that Aleppo, an ancient center of Middle Eastern trade and culture and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, would become a second home to him and, thirty years later, his final resting place.

Booth eventually served three missions in the Middle East totaling seventeen years, during which he made the arduous trip across North America, the Atlantic Ocean, Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and the Levant five times.[4] His itinerant preaching took him to many parts of the Ottoman Empire—Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt—as he traveled by foot, horse, donkey, carriage, boat, train, car, and bicycle. Joseph and Reba played a key role in reestablishing the Church and saving the lives of many Armenian members following the depredations of World War I in the region. Over the span of nearly two decades, he consistently and meticulously recorded his experiences in journals, letters, magazine articles, and poems that would prove to be a rich repository of information about the Church’s history and Middle Eastern social history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In sum, his journey from Alpine to Aleppo turned out to be a watershed event that changed the course of his life. It also shaped the future of local Church members with whom he labored and, long after his death, acted as a catalyst in helping the Church and his alma mater, Brigham Young University, establish a long-term presence in various countries of the Middle East.

The idea of editing, annotating, and publishing the Booth missionary journals originated in the editors’ shared interest in bringing to light a remarkable primary source for studying modern Ottoman history and the Church’s first missionary initiative in the Middle East. We felt that the Booth journals, lying undisturbed in the Harold B. Lee Library’s L. Tom Perry Special Collections away from public view, were a buried historical treasure that needed to be more readily accessible and transparent to scholars and student researchers. In 1998, having visited Booth’s gravesite in Aleppo several times, James Toronto received permission and funding from Elder Charles Didier, then president of the Church’s Europe East Area, to conduct a restoration project for the gravesites of Booth and the missionary buried next to him, Emil Huber. In preparation for that project, he visited the archives in the Harold B. Lee Library to do research in the Booth journals and, to his surprise and delight, found they had been preserved in draft typescript and thoroughly cataloged by Dr. David Whitaker, then curator of nineteenth-century Western and Mormon Americana, just two months previously. This fortuitous confluence of events led to the Lee Library administration’s approval a few months later for Booth’s missionary journals to be edited, annotated, and published.

Both of the editors, Kent Schull and James Toronto, are specialists in Middle Eastern history and religion, and both have done research and publishing on Christian missions to the Ottoman Empire and the status of religious minorities under Islamic rule. We agreed that the voluminous and detailed Booth journals would provide important insights into related historical, social, and religious topics, including the Ottoman government’s views and interactions with the Church’s missionaries who represented a small, relatively unknown Christian religious movement; the policies adopted by national and local officials toward the Church in comparison to the major, legally recognized Christian denominations; the missionaries’ struggles with Middle Eastern cultural, social, and economic forces in their work of evangelization; and the relationship between the Church’s missionaries and their other Western Christian missionary counterparts with whom they were competing for converts in an extremely complicated, diverse religious landscape. These are just a few of the research topics we had in mind as we embarked on the Booth project, eagerly anticipating the historiographical benefits that would accrue in the process.

The Booth journals include eighteen volumes, beginning July 1, 1885, and ending on December 5, 1928. Thirteen of the journals cover his seventeen years of missionary service during three missions in the Middle East: 1898–1902, 1903–1909, and 1921–1928. In view of the purposes and size constraints of this monograph, we decided not to publish in book form all thirteen volumes of the missionary journals. Instead, we present here key selections from the journals that reflect major narratives and themes, and we provide introductory essays to contextualize these excerpts. In addition, frequent textual and explanatory footnotes give the reader more specific context and clarification. We have published the complete edited and annotated text of the thirteen missionary journals on the BYU Harold B. Lee Library website so that scholars and students have easy access to this resource. The focus of this monograph, then, is on the historical context and major themes of the journals. It is not a history of the Church in the Middle East, nor is it a biography of Joseph Wilford Booth; rather, it is a critical edition intended to reflect Booth’s original holographs accurately, to contextualize their content within the broader milieu that Booth and the Armenian members found themselves in, and to clarify and explain unfamiliar content in selected excerpts of the journals.

The editors believe that publishing this monograph makes a significant contribution to Church history and to the broader field of Christian missiology in the Ottoman Empire. Currently, there is a dearth of book-length publications that thoroughly document Church missionary outreach in the Middle East. We have attempted in this critical edition of the journals to pull together in our introductory essays, footnotes, and bibliography many of the major primary and secondary sources exploring the nexus between the Church’s missionary work, Protestant and Catholic missions, and late Ottoman and Middle Eastern politics, society, and culture. Our hope is that this volume proves to be a valuable asset for many researchers delving into the relatively uncultivated field of Church history and its mostly Armenian converts in the modern Middle East.

This introductory essay contextualizes the overall journal project and provides information about Booth’s early life, Christian missions in the late Ottoman Empire, the Church’s missionary work in the Middle East, and descriptions of the journals and editorial method. At the conclusion of the volume, we have included an appendix with supplementary materials, including maps and figures, a list of common abbreviations, a glossary of Turkish terms, and a roster of missionaries who served in the Turkish and Armenian missions. A bibliography lists the works cited and consulted in this monograph as well as other significant primary and secondary sources from Middle Eastern scholars, Armenian converts, and missionaries who lived in the Turkish and Armenian missions.

Booth’s Early Life in Utah

Joseph Wilford Booth was born in Alpine, Utah, on August 14, 1866, the ninth of ten children in his family. His parents, Richard Thornton and Elsie Edge Booth, had joined the Church in England and emigrated to Utah, settling in Alpine in 1858 when Church members were moving south of Salt Lake City to avoid the imminent invasion of Johnston’s Army.[5] Though living in a harsh frontier environment, and without the benefit of formal schooling themselves, Richard and Elsie emphasized the importance of education to their children. They taught at the first school in Alpine and owned the only unabridged dictionary and set of encyclopedias in town, and for thirty years Richard served Alpine as town doctor even though he had no formal training. He is reported to have said that his children “shall always have books even if they had to go without shoes or other necessities.”[6] All the Booth children, though heavily engaged in farm labor and other jobs to help meet family needs, were literate and learned to relish the life of the mind. Wilford, as he was called in his youth, spent his early years tending the fields and animals on the farm, going to school and Church activities, and earning money for his family and educational expenses by plying his expertise as a blacksmith and sheepshearer.

Wilford began keeping a daily journal on July 1, 1885. His early journals reflect a fascinating mix of the drudgery of manual labor—characteristic of life in late nineteenth-century rural Utah—and his delight in more cerebral interests. He was a “cowboy poet” if ever there was one, a rustic intellectual with an endlessly eager mind who wrote a prodigious number of poems and songs and newspaper articles, gave many public speeches, read voraciously, played chess, engaged in rough-and-tumble politics, and often out of curiosity attended the services of other Christian denominations. During the long summer evenings while tending animals high in the Wasatch Mountains, he studied the stars, organized debates on current issues, and devised number games and math problems to challenge his mind. Two entries from his journal reflect this interplay of rugged frontiersmanship and relentless inquisitiveness:

July 22, 1889, after shearing sheep all day: “At night we had a debate in the tent. Subject: Resolved the Negro has more cause of complaint than the Indian. There were 4 on a side. The result was 7 to 6 in favor of the affirmative. I was on the losing side.”

November 14, 1890: On the way home, “had a horse race with an Indian . . . and at night made a lot of bullets for my rifle. And a few hours were spent in the study of astronomy & theology.”

Religion played an important part in Booth’s life from a very young age. He felt strongly about the morals and doctrines taught in the Church and was a person of scrupulous honesty and integrity. As a young man he went to a New Year’s dance but did not have the nickel needed for admission. On January 1, 1886, he wrote in his journal that “George Boddision gave me five cents with a hole in it and told me to get a ticket with it. I did so, but felt afterwards that it was not a very good plan to begin an [sic] new years, and the next day I went and put another nickel in the box and took that one out that I had put in.” We learn that he was a compassionate person—his journals contain many accounts of him “sitting up” through the night with those that were sick and often administering blessings to them by the Christian practice of laying on of hands.

Brigham Young Academy (BYA) ca. 1866–1906. Photograph by Charles R. Savage.

On October 15, 1887, at the age of twenty-one, Booth began attending Brigham Young Academy in Provo, Utah. He loved his studies, once writing that the education offered at BYA was “more precious than Rubies.” His instructors included Abraham O. Smoot, Karl G. Maeser, and the brilliant young English scientist James E. Talmage, who later married May Booth, Wilford’s younger sister, and served as a senior Church leader (Apostle). The journals during this period reveal his enthusiasm for learning but also his painful awareness of being an unpolished farm boy who doubted whether he belonged at BYA and wondered if he could succeed. Majoring in pedagogy, he was a diligent, eager student who made many friends, developing along the way a reputation as an orator and comedian. He was selected by his classmates to give the “class humor” speech at graduation ceremonies for BYA. In 1896 he was elected to give the oration for his graduating class. But his sense of personal inadequacy still lingered. On March 26 of that year he drafted a letter to the BYA administration requesting that his application for graduation be canceled: “I have become convinced of my inability to bear the high honor in a manner that would reflect the credit due the Academy.” Some classmates found the letter before he sent it and dissuaded him from his decision. Despite his obvious talents and personal accomplishments, this tendency toward self-doubt and despondency continued to find regular expression in his writing throughout his adult life.[7]

At the time he started attending BYA, Joseph was courting Mary Rebecca Moyle, also from Alpine. Joseph had worked often for her father, Henry Moyle. Reba and Joseph corresponded while he attended school, and they traveled often to visit each other. After obtaining a marriage license for two dollars, Joseph and Reba were married on May 28, 1890, in the Church’s Logan Temple. For the next five years, Joseph and Reba lived and worked in Utah Valley, mostly farming and teaching school and struggling like most young couples to make ends meet. Eventually they built a small brick home and settled in their hometown of Alpine.

Joseph and Reba Booth (center) with other missionaries in the Turkish Mission, ca. 1909. Courtesy of Church History Library

In 1898, two years after his graduation from BYA, Joseph received a letter from the First Presidency calling him to serve in the Turkish Mission. It would turn out to be the first of three missions to the Middle East: from 1898 to 1902 as an itinerant preacher, from 1903 to 1909 as president of the Turkish Mission, and from 1921 to 1928 as president of the newly named Armenian Mission. Reba received a call to serve with him during both of his terms as mission president and was the only female missionary called to those missions.[8] As noted above, Booth bade farewell to his family and friends in Alpine in August 1898 and began his long journey eastward to Ottoman lands.

The Booth Legacy

In October 1928, just two months before his death, President Booth cleverly summarized the history of the Turkish and Armenian missions:

Our past and present status may be briefly told by counting up to ten; thus: One lady missionary, two workers in the field today, three cities have served as our headquarters, four elders have died in the field, five nationalities have been baptized, six languages are needed to teach them, seven apostles have been here, eight cities now claim one or more of our members, and nine out of ten are in poverty.[9]

But numbers alone cannot tell the whole story. Booth served three missions, a total of seventeen years over a period of three decades. In that long arc of time he acquired extensive knowledge of the region’s cultures, peoples, languages, and religious milieu that helped shape Church policy and, through his myriad lectures and publications, educate its leadership and members about the Middle East. Following World War I, Booth’s evacuation of the Armenian members from war-torn Aintab to a safe haven in Aleppo allowed the depleted Latter-day Saint community to survive and eventually flourish. He and Reba established a commune and economic enterprises that helped members rise out of indigence and become increasingly self-sufficient. For many descendants of the Armenian converts who immigrated from the Middle East to the United States, memories of the Booth legacy live on. Though only about eighty missionaries served in the mission between 1885 and 1950, and there were never more than three hundred members on the Church records at one time, the activities of Joseph and Reba Booth—together with the cumulative efforts of all the members and missionaries in the variously named Middle Eastern missions—established the first roots that have led to continued Church presence in the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Booth’s journals have proved to be an important chronicle and contributor in this long process in several ways. Research on the Booth journals has provided information on, and heightened interest in learning more about, individuals and families among whom the Booths served. Many of these converts emigrated to the United States from Syria, Turkey, and Palestine—families such as Grau, Hilt, Kezerian, Sherinian, Vizerian, Gagosian, Orullian, Hindoian, Piranian, Ouzounian, and Shil Hagopian—and have enriched the congregations and the communities in which they settled. They have added their Middle Eastern skills and perspectives to the diverse tapestry of the Latter-day Saints’ experience and in journals, autobiographies, correspondence, and family histories have recorded their experiences of conversion, loss and persecution, immigration, and resettlement in Utah and surrounding states.

Another benefit from the Booth journals project has been the opening of doors to dialogue and cooperation between BYU, the Church, and various Christian and Muslim religious organizations in the Middle East. When James Toronto commenced the project to restore the gravesites of Booth and Huber in Aleppo, one of the first matters of business was obtaining permission from the local church that owned the cemetery to undertake the project. (All cemeteries in the Middle East are controlled by religious groups rather than by government or municipal organizations.) The caretaker of the cemetery introduced James Toronto to his employer, the Reverend Harout Selimian of the Armenian Evangelical Church. Reverend Selimian, a dynamic, compassionate pastor who works among the poor of all faiths in Aleppo, turned out to be supportive of the proposal from the moment they met. He recognized immediately the importance of honoring the dead by maintaining a clean and dignified atmosphere in the cemetery, but lamented that his church budget did not allow for such expenses given other more pressing needs. The Church offered to provide funds to help him refurbish the cemetery, and Toronto proceeded to restore the Booth and Huber gravesites at the same time. Since then the Church has also collaborated with Reverend Selimian to support several of his church’s humanitarian projects, including a school for disabled children. Reverend Selimian has visited BYU twice to participate in conferences and has become a good friend and advocate for the Church in both Christian and Muslim circles in Syria and Lebanon. On one trip to Aleppo he took Toronto to the largest mosque in the city and introduced him to his good friend,Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, the Mufti of Aleppo, the highest-ranking Muslim official in northern Syria. A few years later, in 2005, he was appointed Grand Mufti of Syria.

For scholars specializing in Middle Eastern studies and in Church history, the Booth journals represent a mother lode of primary source material and have already fostered a number of scholarly research projects, publications, and academic contacts. Rao Lindsay’s 1958 master’s thesis on the Church’s history in the Middle East was a groundbreaking piece of scholarship that drew heavily on those journals and his own experience as a missionary in the Palestine-Syrian Mission. More recently, historical studies rooted in archival material produced by Booth and other missionaries and converts have appeared in various scholarly forums and journals: the annual Sidney B. Sperry Symposium at BYU, Mormon Historical Studies, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and BYU Studies Quarterly. Two BYU students, David Charles and Laura Ostler, have done original research using Joseph’s and Reba’s journals as primary source material for their theses in the honors program at BYU. James Toronto’s work with the journals has provided opportunities for mentored learning projects with BYU students, including collaboration with David Charles, Laura Ostler, Ryan Thomas, Josh Gubler, and Andrew Bonney in both the gravesite restoration and the publication of the journals. It has also made possible contacts and collaboration with faculty from the University of Aleppo and the University of Gaziantep in Turkey. All these scholarly projects and related academic contacts have strengthened the institutional presence of BYU and the Church in the Middle East.

Booth’s journals are invaluable to Armenian and missiology studies of the Middle East as well. Notwithstanding its small size in the late Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Syria, the Latter-day Saint Armenian community represents an important lens through which to understand the broader Armenian experience in the pre- and post-Genocide Middle East. This small subsection of the larger Ottoman Armenian population, which struggled to rebuild its community after the devastating effects of World War I and the Armenian Genocide, provides clear insights into the effects and consequences of being a marginalized community at this critical time of massive transformation within the broader Middle East. This is apparent in terms of political alliances between newly formed nation-states in the region (Turkey and Syria); imperial rivalries between the British, French, and the United States; the widespread use of forced migration to create homogenous states; and the dire existence of those who survived the Great War.[10] Kent Schull continues to research and publish on these topics and how the experiences of Armenian converts to the Church provide deeper insights into late Ottoman, Armenian, and modern Middle Eastern history.

Furthermore, the Latter-day Saint-Armenian community was doubly marginalized, because of its ethno-religious identity as well. Most Western Missionaries (Protestant and Catholic) viewed their Latter-day Saint counterparts with suspicion and contempt. Not only were Church missionaries their competitors for converts among the Christian populations in the Middle East, but they were also seen as heretics of Christianity who were peddling apostate and even dangerous teachings. Second, many Western missionaries were consciously working to further the imperialist interests of their home countries—be it Great Britain, France, or the United States—within the Middle East. The Latter-day Saint missionaries were extremely marginalized by the United States and therefore had very little extraterritorial support from their country of citizenship. Finally, when combined with the fact that Armenians were already extremely marginalized as a whole within broader Ottoman society, being Latter-day Saint Armenians exacerbated this already-tenuous situation, even within the broader Ottoman-Armenian community as confirmed by the numerous instances of outright hostility, violence, and discrimination that the Armenian converts to the Church experienced at the hands of the broader Armenian community. These include losing their housing, businesses, and jobs, their children being forbidden to attend Armenian schools, being attacked while attempting to worship or proselyte, and so forth. The autobiographies, oral histories, family histories, and journals of the Armenian members and missionaries attest to this harsh treatment from within their broader community. Even the missionaries were once stoned while preaching in Aintab to the Armenian community there.[11]

Booth was a keen observer and a skilled writer and speaker; his prose is lucid and rich and combines vivid description with opinionated social and political commentary. His missionary journals contain fascinating insights about daily life and customs in the Middle East, Ottoman history and governance, and Latter-day Saint missiology. In addition, they reflect the mind and heart of a complex, intelligent personality coming to grips with the world around him: scientific calculations, mind and word games, humorous anecdotes, and raw, soul-baring reflections on cross-cultural encounters, human nature, prejudice, life, love, faith, joy, doubt, and despondency.

We hope that publishing these excerpts from the edited and annotated journals allows even more students and scholars access to this invaluable resource—to buttress research and publication efforts about a time and a place in the Middle East and the Church’s history that are little known and deserving of greater attention. We are confident that the journals will also continue to play an important role beyond academic circles, as a source of understanding and insight for the Booth and Moyle families and for the descendants of both the Armenian converts and the missionaries who worked with them. Perhaps the most impressive contribution of the Booth journals is the manner in which they shed light on the daily lives and inner struggles of ordinary people. British politician and writer Arthur Ponsonby maintained that the best journals were not written by eminent people or those who participate in “occurrences of historical moment,” but by “those who live out of the beaten track in comparative obscurity.”[12] American writer Thomas Mallon believed that diaries have become “the principal historical record of the once disenfranchised. . . . But the diary’s endurance will still depend less on its ability to bring us the past than its capacity for bringing us into the future.”[13]

Latter-day Saint Journal Writing

The importance of careful recordkeeping has remained a cardinal tenet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from its inception. On the day he organized the Church in 1830, Joseph Smith taught, “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you” (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1)—a verse that is inscribed on the facade of the Church History Library in Salt Lake City. The Book of Mormon recounts that Jesus chided his disciples for failing to write down an important resurrection event, and “therefore it was written according as he commanded” (see 3 Nephi 23:6–13).

This principle of recordkeeping has motivated generations of missionaries and members to describe and document their activities, providing a rich primary resource for scholars who study the history and sociology of the Church’s missionary endeavors. One of the first missionaries called to the Ottoman realms, Ferdinand Hintze, was an avid journal writer who started a new volume as he departed for his first journey to Constantinople in 1886 (he would return there on another mission in 1898). On page 1 he explained his rationale for keeping a journal:

It is a duty devolving upon every elder in Israel to make a record of his travels and experiences in the servise of our Heavenly Father, that a faithful record might be found of the dealing and blessing of God upon His servants and those few that from time to time will listen and obey their humble message.[14]

Joseph Wilford Booth also embraced this duty and was remarkably disciplined in keeping a journal (which missionaries of the time often referred to as “journalyzing”). In August 1903, as he began volume 12 of his journals, he recorded: “I have kept a journal for nearly 18 years. With a few exceptions it has been daily.” His journal contains many entries that reveal his implacable commitment to record his life experiences, impressions, and surroundings: December 9, 1904. “The sun came pouring in thru my s. east window and I was soon seated at a table to write my journal from notes taken along the way.” September 23, 1924. “Bot a supply of Books, ink, paper, slates, pens etc. amounting to 17 mej, 340 sagh.” A telling episode occurred when Booth was an invited guest at a local wedding ceremony and became annoyed by other guests whose small talk threatened to distract him from remembering every detail of the experience:

February 6, 1905. In one end of the room sat the young bridegroom, surly and quiet and solomn. I was next to him taking silent notes. . . . During a cessation of hostilities upon our ears by the “band,” some curious fellow guest would query me for hints about the wedding customs of far off America, but I answered short, exceedingly short, for fear my hints would break into the order of the day and crowd some feature of their local proceedings from the program which I wished to see and note in full.[15]

By the time of his death in 1928, he had written eighteen volumes amounting to 4,270 pages of prose, poetry, and sketches that convey the interplay of a sentimental, introspective disposition and a curious, analytical mind.

It appears that Booth always carried with him his previous journals, since his entries include frequent precise, detailed references to past events. He often would go many days and weeks without writing formal journal entries. Instead, he made a habit of jotting down notes and partial entries on separate pieces of paper; then later when he had time, he copied these entries into his regular journal. His journal books were generally made to order, not purchased off the shelf. The modus operandi was to buy individual sheets of paper, write his daily or catch-up entries on them, then take them to a bookshop to have the pages bound in a volume: October 9, 1908. “Gave this book to a binder as I bought the loose papers and wrote till date, before having it bound.” Occasionally, however, he purchased either a ready-made diary with blank pages or ordered a custom-made one: February 9, 1906. “Bot the paper and ordered it bound to make this journal [vol. 14].” July 29, 1922. “Talked to callers and ordered a new Journal made.” The significance Booth attached to the journal-keeping enterprise is also evident in the detailed indexes that he painstakingly prepared and appended to his journals. It is clear from the original journals that someone, possibly his wife Reba, tore out pages of sensitive or offensive material after his death. Questions of what exactly was removed and why will probably never be completely resolved, but the existing journals provide some clues.

In addition to his own consistency in keeping a journal, Booth enthusiastically advocated that local Church members and missionaries do so as well: September 5, 1909. “Aintab. At night I talked to Elisa Nalbandian about keeping a daily journal.” September 24, 1922. “In the evening I listened to the reading of a Diary of Bro Artine Uzunian (deceased).” September 28, 1922. Settled a quarrel over some words found in a journal of Artine Uzunian.” His advocacy and practice of journal keeping influenced others to produce primary source materials that have proved invaluable to researchers studying Ottoman social and cultural life and the growth of the Church in the Middle East.

The container list in the register of the Booth Papers (MSS 155, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library) provides a physical description of each volume and a brief summary of its contents, as follows:

Volume 6 (August 4, 1898–January 5, 1899: damaged brown binding, paginated, 178 pages, loose pages, 2 pages blank, pages 105–106 torn out, dark ink. First mission to Turkey, traveling from Alpine to Aintab, Turkey.)

Volume 7 (January 6, 1899–June 30, 1899: damaged black binding, 168 pages, 6 pages blank, last pages torn out, dark ink. Missionary work and starting a school in Aintab, Turkey.)

Volume 8 (July 1, 1899–June 30, 1900: black binding, 172 pages, 19 pages blank, dark and red ink. Missionary in Turkey, president of Aintab Branch, teaching at school.)

Volume 9 (July 1, 1900–December 31, 1900: brown and blue damaged binding, loose pages, 164 pages, 4 pages blank, dark ink. Missionary work in Aintab, bicycle trip through Palestine.)

Volume 10 (January 1, 1901–December 31, 1901: brown textured binding, 196 pages, dark ink. Missionary in Aintab, travel throughout Turkey doing missionary work.)

Volume 11 (January 1, 1902–September 23, 1902: black damaged binding, paginated, 160 pages, 29 pages blank, dark ink. Missionary work, release and travel from Turkey to Alpine, mission in Sunshine, Utah (mining camp), teaching school in Alpine.)

Volume 12 (August 1, 1903–September 25, 1904: red binding, paginated, 180 pages, 4 pages blank, numbered pages blank 167–168, dark ink. Mission records; call to be president of Turkish Mission; traveling from Alpine to Aintab, Turkey; missionary work and mission affairs.)

Volume 13 (October 1, 1904–February 12, 1906: red binding, self-paginated, 392 pages, 6 pages blank, numbered pages blank 180, 346, 36-page index in back, dark ink. Two tours through Turkish mission; dedicating Greece to the preaching of the gospel; letter from Samuel Varijhabedian.)

Volume 14 (January 1, 1906–September 30, 1908: red binding, loose pages, 336 pages, 26 pages blank, dark ink. Mission records; president of Turkish Mission, mission affairs; figuring the curvature of the earth; traveling through mission.)

Volume 15 (October 1, 1908–July 31, 1922: blue binding, self-paginated, 378 pages, 24 pages blank, numbered pages blank: 206–219, pages 215–216 torn out, torn pages at end of book, dark ink and pencil. Break from April 1910 to August 19, 1921; mission president in Turkey; traveling through Palestine; release and journey back to Alpine; lecturing throughout Utah on Palestine and the Near East; storekeeper in Alpine; called as president of the Armenian (Turkish) Mission; “Form for Marriage Ceremony, with Preliminaries,” written in Turkish & inserted in book.)

Volume 16 (August 1, 1922–April 30, 1925: blue binding, 384 pages, 19 pages blank, dark ink. Church and mission records; mission work; activities of the Church; teaching English classes; arrival of wife, Reba, to mission; visit of David O. McKay.)

Volume 17 (May 1, 1925–December 31, 1927: yellow binding, 392 pages, 24 pages blank, dark and red ink. Mission work; Church activities; writing of pamphlet, “Come Listen to a Prophet’s Voice”; visit of Franklin S. Harris and James E. Talmage; moving of mission headquarters from Aleppo, Syria, to Haifa, Palestine; Church and mission records.)

Volume 18 (January 1, 1928–December 5, 1928: brown binding, paginated, 130 pages, 13 pages blank, dark ink. Mission work; moving to Haifa; traveling to different branches; entry made by wife, Reba, recording Booth’s death.)

Editorial Method

In an effort both to preserve the integrity of Booth’s original journals and to format them in a style conducive to reading and research, we have consulted Mary-Jo Kline’s volume on documentary editing and adopted the following protocols:

1. Standardize the journal format. This includes indenting each new paragraph (Booth himself did this sporadically) and replacing Booth’s own dating system with a standardized system, including the full date (month, day, year), followed by the day of the week (all in italics, with the day of the week placed in parentheses) before each entry. Additionally, we have chosen not to include Booth’s page numbers in this printed version.
2. Standardize ambiguous capitalization. Many of Booth’s handwritten letters can be interpreted as upper- or lowercase. The standard: When capitalization is ambiguous, and Booth has not previously set a precedent for capitalizing the word, we have chosen to type it according to modern standards. For instance, Booth consistently capitalizes Saints and Consulate. We will leave these as he writes them. However, it is often difficult to ascertain the difference between upper- and lowercase for some letters such as c, j, a, and p. In these instances, we will make an educated guess and adhere to modern standards.
3. Add, delete, or change a minimum of Booth’s original punctuation to facilitate clarity and readability. As needed, we have supplied sentence-beginning capitalization and sentence-ending periods. Additionally, we have changed some internal periods to commas and deleted others.
4. Italicize editorial insertions and enclose them in brackets. These include our educated guesses about unintelligible words and any other details about the original text itself that might be useful to the reader. For example: [written in the left margin] or [blank].
5. Identify Booth’s insertions of all kinds (asterisks included) with carets (< >).
6. Silently bring down all superscripted numbers and letters.
7. Silently omit inadvertent repetitions and material crossed out by Booth, except when the deleted material conveys useful information.
8. Leave all other spelling and grammar conventions as Booth originally wrote them. For example, true to the conventions of the time, Booth freely interchanged the words etc., et., and &c.—all of which mean the same thing. These, and other words and phrases, have been left unchanged. Where misspelled words could cause serious misunderstandings, we have placed the correct version of the word in brackets next to Booth’s original.[16]

Additionally, we use the symbol [..] to represent indecipherable letters in a word and the symbol [-] to represent indecipherable words.

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to express gratitude to a number of people who have contributed much to the ongoing effort to bring the Booth journals and legacy to light. The Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University provided invaluable support—research rooms, archival resources, and personnel who have been unfailingly professional, knowledgeable, and patient. We wish to thank, in particular, Dr. David Whitaker and other staff in Special Collections for preserving and cataloging the Booth journals; Connie Lamb, Middle East librarian, for encouragement and expert advice; Religious Education, especially the Religious Studies Center, for providing funding and editorial support; and the College of Humanities for generous funding. Additionally, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to the staff of the Church History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, particularly Brian Passantino, Steven Hepworth, and Ben Whisenant.

The families of Joseph Wilford and Reba Moyle Booth and the descendants of the Armenian converts have been extremely generous in donating their family treasures to the BYU and the Church History Library archives and in giving their enthusiastic support and time for interviews for this research project. The following people deserve special recognition in this regard: from the Booth family, Elsie D. Florence and Monroe and Shirley Paxman; from the Moyle family, Leon and Bonnie Stubbs, Wendy Tippetts, and Rosalie Kirkland; and from the Hagopian (Jacobs) family, Maxine Garrett and Elaine Bons. Kathleen Rasmussen gave us an informative guided tour of Moyle and Booth sites in Alpine, Utah, and provided photos and memorabilia of Reba’s family. Melva Hindoian Emrazian and Vahan Hindoian of Salt Lake City, Utah, and Melva’s sons Sarkis and Vahe Emrazian provided a treasure trove of photographs, documents, books, and tracts, as well as assistance with several Turkish and Armenian language segments in the journals.

The Reverend Harout Selimian of the Armenian Evangelical Church in Aleppo, Syria, enthusiastically supported our efforts to research and restore the gravesites of two Latter-day Saint missionaries, Joseph Booth and Emil Huber, who are buried in his church’s cemetery. For his understanding, empathy, and friendship, we express our deepest gratitude.

Ottoman Empire in 1683. Courtesy of Atilim Gunes Baydin, Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, we express appreciation to our research assistants, David and Liz Charles, Anne and Aaron Schofied, Ryan Thomas, Laura Ostler, Joshua Gubler, Kendra Wohlgemuth Hernandez, Anne Marie McDonald, and Andrew Bonney, for their indefatigable efforts in proofreading the typescript against the holograph, formatting the dates, ferreting out historical materials, editing journal transcriptions, and writing draft language for some footnotes and portions of the introductory essay. We also would like to thank Jonathan McCollum for his translations of some of Booth’s journal passages written in Armeno-Turkish (Turkish written using the Armenian alphabet).

The keeping of a journal is, as Thomas Mallon said, a means of bringing future generations to the past and of preserving and carrying forward a life well lived and carefully recorded. Our profound thanks to Joseph and Reba Booth, to their families, and to the Harold B. Lee Library for safeguarding this literary and historical treasure.

Religion and Politics in the Ottoman Empire

Often referred to as the “Terrible Turks” by their European rivals because of their military prowess, the Ottomans were also the adversary, ally, or trading partner of a variety of political entities ranging from empires to city-states that existed during the pre-, early, and modern eras in world history.[17] These included Ming and Qing China, Czarist Russia, and the Mughal and Safavid Empires; the polities of East Africa, such as Zanzibar; and the various Mediterranean and Atlantic powers, including the Italian city-states and the Hapsburgs, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British. The territorial limits of the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Red and Arabian Seas in the south to the Crimea, Hungary, and the eastern gates of Vienna in the north and from the borders of Iran in the east and Morocco in the west. At its zenith, the empire’s naval forces held sway throughout the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the Mediterranean, Black, Aegean, Red, and Arabian Seas, and they also dominated much of the Indian Ocean.

Best known for their military might through the effective and extensive harnessing of gunpowder weaponry, the Ottomans also held enormous “soft power” influence throughout the Old World by virtue of their claim to lead all Muslims through the Islamic office of the Caliphate and their control over the three holiest cities of Islam: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. These possessions allowed the Ottomans to control the prestigious and lucrative land and sea routes of the annual holy hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, which brought hundreds of thousands of Muslim worshippers from across the Eastern Hemisphere to the Ottoman Empire each year.

The Ottomans ruled, at various times, many of the holiest religious sites of Shiʿi Islam as well, thus bolstering the empire’s authority to rule over its own Shiʿi population at the expense of its Safavid and Qajar rivals to the east. Additionally, Ottoman control over Jerusalem gave the empire important religious, economic, and political prestige for Christians and Jews worldwide. The Ottomans further exercised their “soft” power through diplomacy, alliances, trade, patronage of the arts and sciences, and the movements of large numbers of peoples during the empire’s existence. These alliances and trade relations facilitated the transfer of technologies, knowledge, ideas, industry, and the arts, thus contributing to an incredible diversity of peoples, languages, and religions within the empire’s own borders that formed and contributed to networks of material and intellectual exchange around the world. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire was both the figurative and literal crossroads of the world, physically, culturally, and economically linking Africa, Europe, and Asia together. Because of its longevity, territorial expanse, power, and diversity, the Ottoman Empire acts as an insightful example of historical continuity and change from the premodern to the modern periods in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeastern Europe. Much of what constitutes contemporary Europe, the Mediterranean Basin, Caucasus, and the Middle East is a direct result of the rise, dominance, and influence of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans, an Islamic dynasty that reached the zenith of its territorial expansion in the sixteenth century and made Constantinople its capital in 1453, continued the Islamic practice of granting “Peoples of the Book” (Christians and Jews) dhimmi status. This status provided Christian and Jewish communities within the empire a certain degree of autonomy to practice their religion and govern their own communal affairs so long as they accepted Ottoman political authority. This religious, social, cultural, and educational autonomy allowed these non-Muslim communities, which were made up of the various sects of Eastern Christianity and Judaism, to mostly thrive within the empire, notwithstanding their second-class status behind the ruling elite and heterogeneous Muslim populations. These non-Muslim communities contributed substantially to the growth, stability, and prosperity of the empire throughout its existence. In fact, these various communities played critical roles in trade, industry, agricultural production, state administration, and the military on both the imperial and local levels.

Eventually, the dhimmi status of rights and regulations under Ottoman rule was codified during the nineteenth century into the millet system. This system recognized specific religious groups in the empire and extended rights and protections to them under the law to practice their religion, distribute religious literature, and regulate internal communal affairs. Only recognized sects held these privileges, which is why missionaries such as Hintze and Booth exerted such effort attempting to get official Ottoman millet status for the Church. Unfortunately, they were unsuccessful, and this caused them and their converts a great deal of legal problems and persecution by Ottoman officials, other Western missionaries, local clergy, and the broader Armenian community.

Similar to all empires throughout history, the Ottomans built up their power through the exploitation of others through conquest, oppression, resource extraction, slavery, mass atrocity, and forced migration.[18] Slavery in all its forms and forced migration were central to trade, industry, agricultural production, military power, domestic life, and dynastic reproduction. The empire’s imperial households, military, and bureaucracy were built on enslavement, particularly from among Christian populations in the Balkans and Caucasus through its so-called child tax (devșirme). Utilizing this system from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, the Ottomans took promising boys and girls from predominantly Christian villages in the Balkans, forced them to convert to Islam, and trained them to staff the military, administration, and households of the empire’s elite in addition to providing labor for agricultural production throughout the empire.[19] These forms of mass atrocity are important to understand in the context of Joseph Booth’s work among the Ottoman Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, since they were victims of genocide and forced migration at the hands of the Ottomans and their allies. Without these forms of mass atrocity and exploitation, the empire would have never reached the heights of power it did. Any assessment of the Ottoman Empire’s impact on the world around it must also consider the violence it did to its own peoples and neighboring states.[20]

Western Christianity’s fixation with the Holy Land of the Near East dates back to the Great Schism of the Christian Church in 1053 that caused a permanent split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, with the former centered in Constantinople and the latter in Rome. Only a generation later the Western Church commenced the first of many Crusades in an attempt to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule and to subjugate the Eastern Church in preparation for the anticipated second coming of Jesus Christ. With the fall of the ephemeral Crusader kingdoms, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the subsequent collapse of the Byzantine Empire, and the commencement of the Protestant Reformation and Wars of Religion, Western Christianity turned inward and its ambitions toward Jerusalem diminished only to return during the nineteenth century with the rise of European imperialist hegemony across the globe.

The so-called long nineteenth century (1770–1918) brought massive transformations to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East as a whole. This era is epitomized by almost continuous warfare between various European states and the Ottomans that resulted in extensive transformations of the empire’s territorial holdings and demography. As various European states such as Russia, the Hapsburgs, Britain, and France expanded their power, their territorial ambitions turned toward Ottoman-ruled lands in southeastern Europe, the Crimea, Caucasus, and North Africa. Two very important events dramatically changed the balance of power between the Ottomans and their European rivals: the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–74 and Napoleon’s invasion and conquest of Ottoman Egypt in 1798. Combined, these two events exposed the weakness of the Ottoman Empire in comparison to its European rivals and led to a series of unequal treaties that provided its rivals the means and pretext to penetrate and expand their power within the Ottoman Empire. These treaties gave favored status to various European powers in terms of trade, diplomacy, territorial conquest, and the right to meddle in Ottoman internal affairs by claiming sovereignty over various Ottoman Christian populations.

As European power and influence expanded across the globe during the nineteenth century, the objects of European predation attempted extensive military, bureaucratic, social, and economic reforms in an effort to stave off European imperialist expansion. The Ottomans engaged in massive internal transformations in an attempt to centralize, standardize, and modernize their economy, military, and bureaucracy. Simultaneously, the empire’s heterogeneous population adopted new concepts of identity and sovereignty and agitated for various types of reform and autonomy, particularly along nationalist lines. These transformations led to the adoption of representative forms of government within the empire and the promulgation of two constitutions in 1876 and 1908. The Ottoman government adopted both constitutions with widespread popular support and proclaimed equality of all subjects before the law regardless of religious identity.[21]

While these reforms had a centrifugal effect on some Ottoman subjects, they also had an equally centripetal effect on other groups—such as Greeks, Serbs, and Romanians—seeking to preserve their autonomy under the millet system or to gain complete independence from the Ottomans along the lines of ethno-religious nationalist movements. Eager to exacerbate these factions within the empire, some European powers supported these separatist movements among the empire’s various ethno-religious groups, particularly in Greece and the Balkans. These phenomena extensively transformed the empire’s demographic complexion. Until the mid-nineteenth century, non-Muslims made up the majority of the empire’s population. The widespread hemorrhaging of Ottoman territories in the Balkans, Caucasus, and Crimea at the hands of European imperialism and independence movements during the nineteenth century led to the expulsion of much of the Muslim populations in these regions to the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, a large portion of the Ottoman Christian populations lived in the Balkans; therefore the loss of much of the empire’s Christian population to separatist movements and the absorption of Muslims from former Ottoman territories made Muslims the majority population for the first time within the empire’s existence. These separatist movements, forced migrations, and mass atrocities raised greater suspicion against the empire’s Christian populations by the Ottoman government and led, in part, to Ottoman mass atrocities against its Greek Orthodox, Assyrian, and Armenian populations.

As various European powers gained access to and leverage over Ottoman territories and populations, Western Protestant missionaries began to arrive in the Ottoman Empire as early as 1820 in an attempt to gain converts, further European interests, and prepare for their Messiah’s second coming. As stated above, Western Christianity’s obsession with the Holy Land has deep roots, but with the ease of international travel thanks to the steamship and the expansion of European and American power across the globe, Protestant missionaries took advantage of these favorable conditions to proselytize among the various peoples of the Middle East.

Obviously, the Ottomans were no strangers to Christianity, and they viewed these missionary zealots with equal parts disdain, suspicion, and opportunism. Because of prejudice and recent events of separatism, revolt, and collaboration with European imperialists in carrying out mass atrocities against Muslims, the empire’s Christian populations came to be viewed with suspicion by many Ottoman elites. Additionally, the Ottoman government still garnered legitimacy through its Islamic credentials discussed above and feared that Western missionaries would attempt to convert Muslims, which Islamic law forbids. Members of the Ottoman elite, however, also viewed Protestant missionaries as harbingers of modernization. Many set up schools with modern curricula and hospitals with advanced medical practices and introduced new technologies for agricultural and industrial production within the empire. Consequently, Ottoman authorities allowed Western missionaries to proselytize among the empire’s non-Muslim populations and to establish schools, factories, agricultural communes, and hospitals in the local communities where they lived, all while keeping a close eye on them. Thus, during the nineteenth century, often referred to as the “Great Century” of Western Christian missionary proselytizing, the Ottoman Middle East became a focus of intense missionary activity.[22]

It is within this general context that Joseph Booth and other Latter-day Saint missionaries found themselves as they attempted to win converts and establish a foothold for the Church in the Ottoman Middle East. More specifically, the thirty-year period (1898–1928) during which Booth served his three proselytizing missions arguably witnessed the greatest upheaval and dramatic change within the long history of the Middle East. During this time the Ottoman Middle East experienced the crushing financial burden of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, the loss of the rest of its North African and European territories except for Eastern Thrace, numerous internal revolts and uprisings, and eight wars (the Greek-Ottoman Wars of 1897–98 and 1909, the Iran-Ottoman War of 1906, the Italian-Ottoman War of 1911–12, two Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913, World War I in 1914–18, and the Turkish War of Independence in 1919–22). These numerous wars and revolts were punctuated by the aftermath of the 1894–97 mass atrocity against Ottoman Armenians; the attempted assassination of Sultan Abdulhamid II in 1905; the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and repromulgation of the Ottoman Constitution; a failed coup d'état in 1909 that resulted in the deposing of Sultan Abdulhamid II (who was the longest reigning sultan in Ottoman history at thirty-three years); the extensive interethnic violence of the Adana Massacre in 1909; the independence of Bulgaria (1908) and Albania (1912) from Ottoman rule; the enormous demographic, economic, social, and political devastation wrought by World War I; the dismemberment and end of the Ottoman Empire by the Entente Powers (Great Britain, France, Italy, and Greece); and the creation of the eventual Middle East nation-state system of today in the aftermath of World War I. This all happened during the span of Joseph Booth’s three missions to the region (1898–1902, 1903–9, and 1921–28).

The most devastating and critical events to both the Middle East in general and the Latter-day Saint Armenian community specifically took place during the twelve-year gap between Booth’s second and third missions, 1909–21, particularly World War I. Church authorities closed down the Turkish Mission in 1909 in the wake of the political and social upheavals mentioned above, massive strikes and protests against the Ottoman government resulting in the 1908 Constitutional (Young Turk) Revolution, the attempted countercoup against the Young Turks in 1909, and the subsequent deposing of Sultan Abdulhamid II shortly after the failed countercoup. Additionally, there was an episode of intense violence in the city of Adana and its surroundings in south-central Anatolian wherein an estimated twenty to twenty-five thousand people were killed, mostly Armenians, in interethnic violence.[23] These events prompted Church leaders to withdraw their missionaries from the region. While some of the Armenian members immigrated to Utah before the outbreak of World War I, the rest of the community was left on its own for the next twelve years of unbelievable hardship, violence, deprivation, and destruction brought on mainly by the war, the Armenian Genocide, and the dismantling and collapse of the Ottoman Empire that directly affected the small Latter-day Saint Armenian community.

During this twelve-year gap, Booth continued to correspond with the Church members in the Ottoman Empire, but that correspondence did not prepare him for the devastation he found upon his return in late 1921. World War I, along with its immediate aftermath, was the single most important event to shape the Middle East as we know it today. It completely transformed the demographics, politics, power dynamics, economies, societies, and cultures of the region. An estimated 25 percent of the region’s population died as a result of the war through military actions, mass atrocities, disease, and famine. The mass atrocities and multiple genocides alone accounted for an estimated 3 to 3.5 million Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, and Muslim deaths. Millions more people became internally displaced persons (IDP) and refugees as a result of military mobilization, battles, mass violence, uprisings, and the destruction of local infrastructure and economies. The Ottoman Empire collapsed and was dismantled by European imperial ambitions and nationalist separatist movements that together established the nation-state system of today’s Middle East.[24] The region was devastated as a whole, and the remnants of the Church’s Armenian community that survived the horrors of war and genocide were in tatters.

Postcard from Joseph and Reba Booth, with folding panoramic view of Jerusalem under Ottoman rule at the end of the nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Moyle family.

Notwithstanding the Armistice of Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, and marking the official surrender of the Ottoman Empire to the Entente Powers and the end of World War I in the Middle East, the violence and fighting continued across the former territories of the Ottoman Empire well into the early 1920s between various ethno-religious nationalist movements, the Entente occupying armies, former Ottoman troops, and Turkish nationalists. This was the world to which Booth returned in 1921. The remnants of the Armenian members were caught in the midst of Greek and Turkish nationalist forces fighting a fierce war across Western Anatolia/Asia Minor and France attempting to implement its imperialist ambitions to create a Syrian and Lebanese Mandate in these former Ottoman territories. This was also a very different bureaucratic and administrative world complicated by a collapsing Ottoman state and competing Entente Powers’ imperialist claims over the region, particularly British, French, Italian, and Greek, not to mention the aspirations of local Turkish, Armenian, Arab, and Kurdish nationalists. Territorial borders, citizenship, local power brokers, and routine bureaucratic administration that included the issuing of travel permits and visas, were all in doubt and constantly changing.

More specifically, Booth and the surviving Armenian membership had to navigate the perils of living in a war zone between Turkish nationalist forces fighting with the French colonial and Armenian nationalist forces over the region of Cilicia (Adana, Marash, Aintab) for their respective territories (French Syria or Ottoman/Turkish Republic). Booth and the Armenian Saints made a self-proclaimed “exodus” from Aintab to Aleppo, then located in French Mandate Syria, where the community lived until 1950, when the remaining members immigrated to the United States, Lebanon, and Soviet Armenia. The excerpts in part 3 from Booth’s journals pertaining to these events in the post–World War I Middle East provide revealing insights into the hardships, sufferings, and triumphs of this doubly marginalized community in the post-Ottoman Middle East.

ap courtesy of David Charles and Mark Loertscher.

Latter-day Saint Evangelization in Ottoman Realms

The Middle East attracted the interest of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the earliest days of their history because of the region’s prominent place in Christian history and eschatology.[25] Soon after its establishment in 1830, the Church began exploring ways to establish a presence in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. During this period, millenarianism and philosemitism gained momentum as themes in Church discourse. These perspectives derived from scriptural interpretations, based on Bible and Book of Mormon prophecies, concerning the return of the Jews to Palestine to inherit their promised ancient homeland as a sign portending the end-times and beginning of the Millennium. In this regard, Church attitudes reflect a number of themes in nineteenth-century Protestant missiological literature that also sees the Jews as a chosen people divinely ordained to reclaim the Holy Land as a precursor to the second coming of Christ.[26] Missionary journals from the Turkish and Armenian Mission often refer to the imminence of the Millennium.[27]

Church founder Joseph Smith sent Orson Hyde, one of the Church’s Twelve Apostles, to Jerusalem to dedicate the land for the ingathering of Abraham’s children, especially the Jews, and for the commencement of missionary work.[28] Hyde offered his dedicatory prayer on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem in 1841, but it was not until more than forty years later that missionary labor officially began. In 1872–73 George A. Smith, Lorenzo Snow, Eliza R. Snow, and several other prominent Church members traveled to the Middle East. Their letters record impressions of the Ottoman Empire, Muslims, Jews, and Christians and were later published in a volume entitled Correspondence of Palestine Tourists.[29]

The first missionary efforts of the Church in the modern Middle East were initiated in Anatolia, the heartland of the Ottoman Empire. On December 31, 1884, Jacob Spori, the first full-time missionary in the Middle East, arrived in Constantinople to open the Turkish Mission. He had been sent from the European Mission in response to a letter written by an Armenian man, Hagop Vartooguian, who suggested that Latter-day Saint missionaries would find a fertile field in Turkey. Less than a week later, on January 4, Spori baptized Vartooguian and his family, the first converts in the new mission. In subsequent years, finding little success among Turkish Muslims or European Christians in the capital city, the missionaries decided to move inland and began gradually to establish branches of the Church in Armenian areas of central Anatolia and northern Syria: Zara, Aintab, Marash, and Aleppo.

<Map 3: Map of the Eastern Mediterranean showing all the cities that had Latter-day Saint converts during the Turkish and Armenian Missions (1884–1928). Courtesy of David Charles and James Toronto.>

The sixty-six years of mission history (1885–1951) were marked by constant interruptions and by the suffering of members and missionaries as the fledgling Church attempted to cope with the turbulence of the times. These years were among the most chaotic in modern Middle Eastern history, witnessing much warfare, political upheaval, mass migrations, and economic deprivation, and the various changes in the name of the mission—Turkish, Armenian, Palestine-Syrian, and finally Near East—reflected these shifting geopolitical realities.

One of the early missionaries was Ferdinand F. Hintze, occasionally referred to as the “father of the Armenian Mission” because of his efforts over many years to solidify the Church’s presence among the Armenian people, arguably the oldest Christian community in the Middle East.[30] Aintab eventually became the largest branch in the mission and—until 1907, when the mission headquarters was moved to Aleppo, Syria—a center of Church activity and administration. In February 1890 Elder Edgar D. Simmons died of smallpox and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Aintab, the first of five Latter-day Saint missionaries who passed away during missionary service and were buried in Middle Eastern soil. The membership of the Turkish Mission was composed mainly of Armenians from eastern Anatolia (Turkey) and northern Syria, but also some converts of other nationalities and ethnicities.

A series of advances and retreats precipitated by local and international conflicts characterized the history of the mission. It closed in 1896 when political conflict in the Ottoman Empire threatened the members and missionaries but reopened in 1897. After more than a decade of fruitless attempts, Hintze finally received permission from the Ottoman government in 1899 to publish the first Latter-day Saint literature: twenty-seven thousand tracts and twenty-eight sections of the Doctrine and Covenants printed in several languages.[31] Another milestone was achieved in 1906 when Hintze succeeded in having the first Turkish-language/Armenian-script (Armeno-Turkish) Book of Mormon published in Boston. The mission closed again in 1909 owing to increasing political turmoil in the empire, and the members remained without missionary leadership and assistance for twelve years until after the end of World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

In 1921 the mission was reopened by Joseph Booth, serving a second time as president of the mission, and renamed the Armenian Mission, with headquarters in Aleppo, Syria. For the next seven years, President Booth, joined by his wife Reba in 1924, sought primarily to deal with the aftermath of a devastating war and mass atrocity, helping to alleviate the suffering of Church members and rebuild their lives. In December 1928 Booth died of cardiac arrest and overexertion while working with the members in Aleppo. With Booth’s death the mission closed and did not reopen until August 1933, when Badwagan Piranian and his wife Berta arrived to preside over the newly named Palestine-Syrian Mission. In 1937 Joseph Jacobs replaced Piranian as president, and in 1939 the mission closed again with the outbreak of World War II. It was reopened by the Piranians in 1947 after the end of the war and renamed the Near East Mission in 1950. The mission was permanently discontinued in January 1951.[32]

The first twenty-five years of the Turkish Mission, 1884–1909, coincided with a period of extraordinary turmoil and stress for the Church—a transitional phase during which its very existence was threatened; its theological, political, and economic underpinnings reevaluated and restructured; and the foundations of its survival and growth in the modern era laid.[33] Intense public controversy surrounding a core tenet of early Church theology—the doctrine of plural marriage—came to a head when a series of court cases and new laws exerted government pressure on Church leaders to conform to the socioreligious identity of Protestant America or face disestablishment of the Church. This effort officially commenced in 1862 when Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, making plural marriage illegal, levying fines against those who practiced it, disincorporating the Church, and severely limiting the value of its real estate holdings.

The decade beginning in 1877, the year of President Brigham Young’s death, witnessed a renewed campaign of legal and political challenges to the Church’s viability. An 1879 Supreme Court case brought by the Church to test the Morrill Act’s constitutionality upheld the previous decision, calling polygamy “an offense against society” and dismissing the religious freedom arguments presented by Church attorneys. This outcome came as “a shattering blow to [the Church’s] confidence in the ultimate protection of the law” and set the stage for a bitter, thirty-year struggle between the Church and the federal government that would profoundly shape the future and identity of the Church and its members.[34] As a response to the Utah Territory’s strategy of civil disobedience—deliberate noncompliance with previous anti-bigamy legislation—Congress passed the Edmunds Act in 1882, which added more comprehensive penalties for violators: heavier fines, prison sentences, and loss of civil rights such as jury service, voting, and holding public office. Latter-day Saint election officials were dismissed and voting procedures transferred to the jurisdiction of a board of commissioners appointed by the US president. Federal officers began raiding Church meetings and settlements to take polygamists into custody, and many prominent Church leaders went into hiding or were imprisoned. Even Church president John Taylor was forced into exile for more than two years, moving surreptitiously from place to place outside Salt Lake City to avoid arrest.

When it became clear that Church leaders planned to continue their defiance of federal law, the government administered the coup de grâce: enacting in 1887 the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which “seemed designed to destroy the Church itself.”[35] Provisions of this legislation included dissolution of the Church as a legal corporation, forfeiture of all property over fifty thousand dollars to the government, elimination of the Perpetual Emigrating Fund supporting immigration of converts to Utah, and disbanding the Church militia, the Nauvoo Legion. Women’s voting rights in Utah were suspended and territorial schools placed under federal supervision. Any person desiring to participate in civic elections and jury service was first required to sign a test oath supporting anti-bigamy laws.

The government’s political, economic, educational, and military measures took a heavy toll on the Church and soon achieved the desired capitulation. On October 6, 1890, President Wilford Woodruff issued an official declaration, called the Manifesto, renouncing the practice of plural marriage and expressing his intention to submit to the laws of the land.[36] It marked a watershed moment in Church history, opening the door to greater participation and integration in American life. In January 1896 Utah achieved the long-sought goal of statehood that, together with the issuance of the Manifesto, symbolized “the end of an important [pioneer] era and foreshadowing the adjustment of the Church to new challenges in the political and economic milieu of the twentieth century.”[37] Operating under the principle articulated by Joseph Smith and other early Church leaders that new circumstances and times require different application of core teachings, Church leaders sought to retain distinctive doctrine and identity while seeking integration, acceptance, and respect in the surrounding socioreligious landscape. Early Latter-day Saint life in Utah had sought to build a new kingdom of God in preparation for Christ’s imminent return and millennial reign and emphasized geographical separatism, social and economic isolation, and the political sovereignty of God. After 1890, and for the next thirty years, the Church gradually transitioned to a starkly contrasting vision of building the kingdom, characterized by a full embrace of secular civic life during the Progressive Era of American life: social integration and reform, economic assimilation, political participation, interfaith respect, and patriotic support of the US government and military.

This turbulent era of conflict and change in Church history provided the backdrop for the first quarter century of the Turkish Mission, and the challenges, issues, and adjustments experienced by the Church naturally affected the lives of the missionaries and local members in significant ways. Primary source materials provide ample evidence of how this process of doctrinal and organizational reassessing, clarifying, and revising played out in efforts to plant the Church in Middle Eastern soil.

Even after the 1890 Manifesto, for example, confusion and disagreement about polygamy persisted in the Church and in American society. Many Latter-day Saints continued to believe that the Church’s prohibition was only a temporary measure to appease the government and that having plural wives was tacitly approved by Church leaders. The issue of polygamy also continued to stir up controversy and opposition among American citizens, especially Protestant clergy and activists who challenged the Church’s avowed loyalty to the government and adherence to anti-bigamy laws. In the early 1900s two elected politicians in Utah, B. H. Roberts and Reed Smoot, became the subjects of internationally publicized congressional hearings challenging their right to hold high government office on grounds that the Church was still secretly endorsing and performing plural marriages.[38] In response, President Lorenzo Snow issued a statement in 1900 reaffirming the original Manifesto, and in 1904 President Joseph F. Smith felt compelled to publish an even bolder clarification, or Second Manifesto, in an attempt to remove any doubts—among both Church members and the rest of the world—about the Church’s official position.

The sensational claims and counterclaims of this debate, covered widely in newspapers around the world, ultimately affected the relations of missionaries and converts with neighbors, religious leaders, and government officials in the Ottoman Empire. These issues swirling around the “Mormon Question” fostered resistance to convert immigration to Utah from Europe and the Middle East, becoming an international cause célèbre and a major diplomatic dispute over immigration.[39] These controversies, according to Lindsay,

generated a growing resentment against Mormon immigration. Commencing extensive emigration from the Near East, where polygamy had been a traditional practice among the Muslims, would certainly not have improved the position of the harassed Church in the opinion of the race-conscious American people at that time.[40]

The acrimonious debates reported by the press and the Church’s already-negative image in the nineteenth century also plagued the missionaries’ efforts to achieve a greater degree of rapprochement with Protestants and Catholics in the region. This fact in turn contributed to the missionaries’ unsuccessful attempts to garner Christian support for the Church’s campaign to achieve legal recognition from the Ottoman government, acquire the benefits of the millet system governing other religious minorities, and help Armenian converts emigrate to the United States.

Polygamy turned out to be a major challenge in Booth’s personal life as well. After returning from his first mission in 1902, he fell in love with a young woman who was a fellow teacher at the same school in Utah. Over the next several years he struggled with the ambiguities of evolving Church doctrine on plural marriage,[41] and his relationship with his wife Reba became strained because he desired ardently to marry a second wife.[42]

The Booth journals document other doctrinal modifications that began to affect Church life in the Turkish Mission and that contrast with today’s established norms. Observance of the Church’s health code, or Word of Wisdom, did not become a requirement for temple attendance until 1921; until then members had only been encouraged to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee. Around the turn of the century, Church leaders began to emphasize the need for stricter adherence to these dietary restrictions.[43] However, Booth’s journals reveal that missionaries and Church members generally were loathe to forgo use of these substances, for personal and cultural reasons, a fact that caused conflict at times in local branches.

The practice of rebaptism is another example of doctrinal flux in this period that shows up in primary source material. After arriving in Salt Lake Valley in 1847, Latter-day Saint pioneers began to perform rebaptisms as a symbol of repentance and recommitment to the Church, but also as a means of physical healing and spiritual preparation for major events like going to the temple and getting married. The Church officially discontinued rebaptism in 1897 because it had become, for too many members, “an easy way to obtain constant forgiveness of their sins,” but it was still routinely recorded on report forms until 1900 and remained a fairly common practice for several years after the turn of the century.[44] Other modifications to doctrine included affirming the impropriety of charismatic spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues and women’s role in faith healing; reconciling teachings about naturalism, evolution, and creationism; downplaying the imminence of the Millennium; and redefining the concept of the kingdom of God as spiritual rather than political in nature.[45]

In addition to these doctrinal changes, the period from 1890 to 1930 also saw extensive restructuring of the organization and administration of the Church, some aspects of which influenced missionary work in the Turkish Mission. In the late 1890s senior Church leaders decided to assign the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles a central role in overseeing the Church’s affairs worldwide. Booth’s journals reflect the impact of that change in organizational policy, recording the visits of several Apostles to the Turkish Mission during his three missions: Anthon H. Lund (1898), Francis M. Lyman (1902), David O. McKay (1921), and James E. Talmage (1927). Until late in the nineteenth century, missionaries generally were older married men, and in some cases poorly educated. Beginning in 1900 the Church established educational programs to prepare missionaries for their service, including training in foreign languages, proselytizing techniques, and oratory. Increasing numbers of young single men received calls to serve missions, and in 1898 the first sister missionaries were called. The Turkish Mission’s first and only sister missionary, Reba Booth, arrived in 1903 with her husband Joseph, who was starting his second mission, this time as the newly appointed president. Methods of proselytizing changed as well: traveling without purse or scrip and preaching in the streets, popular and necessary in earlier days of missionary work, were phased out when governments began outlawing these activities. Instead, missionaries were expected to pay their own way, with help from family and friends. Missionary journals from the Turkish Mission indicate that meetings in private homes, discreet distribution of religious literature, and writing newspaper articles became the primary means for seeking converts among the local population.

The Church passed through dire financial straits and struggled to pay its debts during Booth’s first two missions. Several factors contributed to this financial crisis at the turn of the century. The draconian fiscal penalties exacted by the Edmunds-Tucker Act caused enormous financial losses that took years to recoup even when, following the Manifesto, government sanctions were lifted. Costs incurred in protecting polygamist families, assisting with their legal defense, and completing construction of the Salt Lake Temple had also placed a heavy strain on the Church’s budget. To make matters worse, the United States suffered a yearlong depression—called the Panic of 1893—that severely crippled the national economy. It is not surprising, then, that we see in Booth’s journal and other primary sources many references to the Church’s insolvency during this time and its debilitating impact on mission life.

Perhaps the most profound effect of this crisis was the Church’s diminished capacity to provide support for poverty relief and immigration of converts to Utah. Immigration assistance became untenable because terms of the Edmunds-Tucker Act had dissolved the Perpetual Emigrating Fund (P.E.F.) and decimated other Church financial assets. As a result, the number of convert immigrants to Utah declined sharply in the 1890s—only half as many as the previous decade. Subsequently, Church leaders altered immigration policy and began to deemphasize, even discourage, gathering in Utah to build the American Zion. Instead, the message to converts outside the United States, beginning in the mid-1890s, was that there are not enough economic opportunities in Utah and that they should stay and build Zion in their home countries and in their hearts.[46] Booth and other missionaries in the Turkish and then Armenian Mission continued to encourage and assist Armenian converts to immigrate to Utah after 1890, as Booth’s journal entries and Armenian converts’ family histories attest. Much of this continued encouragement to immigrate was a result of the dire, dangerous, and violent circumstances that Armenians faced in the late Ottoman Empire, culminating in the mass atrocities of World War I.

In the Turkish Mission, a bold initiative to buy farmland and establish a “Mormon Colony” in Palestine to protect and sustain the Armenian converts was scuttled in 1898 because, despite years of missionary effort and planning, the First Presidency felt “very much worked upon by their burden of debt.” At that time, for a variety of reasons cited above, they concluded that it was “out of their power to raise means to make purchases of land and meet the other expenses that would be necessary to incur” in building a “Mormon Colony” in the Middle East.[47]

By 1928, when Booth passed away in Aleppo, Syria, the transition of the Church from the pioneer era to the modern era was, as Alexander notes, largely completed: “From a persecuted, apocalyptic, polygamous sect in the nineteenth century, the Latter-day Saints had become an increasingly respected church. . . . They fit in well and were increasingly accepted by the society which had worked so hard a generation before to destroy them.”[48] Booth’s journals provide fascinating insight into the challenges, conflicts, and accommodations that missionaries and local converts experienced in a distant Islamic empire during this time of social, doctrinal, and organizational change in Church history.

Major Themes

The Booth journals reflect a number of narrative themes that are characteristic of the history of the Turkish Mission (1884–1909) and Armenian Mission (1921–1928). Primary source materials produced by Armenian converts and missionaries during this era provide a revealing portrait of Ottoman society and the political and religious dynamics of evangelizing among Middle Eastern populations. We have identified three salient topics from the Booth journals to examine in this volume:

• Everyday missionary life
• Views of local culture, politics, and religion
• Latter-day Saint community Life in Aleppo, Aintab, and Zara

For each of these topics we provide a brief introduction for clarity and context and then excerpts from Booth’s journals and correspondence that highlight the challenges, complexities, and realities of mission experience in the Middle East. Occasionally we include excerpts from the journals of Reba Booth and other missionaries to provide added insight and detail about key events, people, and issues.[49]

Notes

[1] The paraphrased and quoted material comes from Joseph W. Booth diaries and poems, 1885–1916, MSS 155, 19th Century Mormon and Western Manuscripts Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter “Booth Journals”). Subsequent mentions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will often be abbreviated to “the Church.” As a modifier, Church is capitalized in reference to the same for clarity since some contexts refer to other churches. Other names for the Church, such as “LDS” or “Mormon,” are avoided herein except when they appear in quoted sources.

[2] Quoted from Booth Journals, vol. 6, August 4, 1898.

[3] In this book the geographic terms Asia Minor and Anatolia are used interchangeably since both generally refer to the region that makes up the territory of the Republic of Turkey today.

[4] The Levant is the region of the Middle East along the Eastern Mediterranean that generally corresponds with today’s Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan.

[5] In 1857, US president James Buchanan dispatched an army, commanded by Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, to occupy Utah and deal with the “Mormon problem”—a perceived state of rebellion against the sovereignty of the US government. Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience,164–70; Bennett, “Utah War,” 1282–84.

[6] Paxman, “Diaries of Joseph Wilford Booth,” 6.

[7] For example, on July 1, 1909, in Aleppo, Syria, he recorded the following melancholy reflection: “Twenty four years ago today I be[g]an to keep a Daily Journal in Alpine, Utah, U.S.A. My work to day consisted of reading, preparing reports, attending meeting, Testimony, and visiting a family of prospective converts with Elder Newman at night. With these duties was a mixture of joy and sadness, of love and longing of <open> merryment and silent heartache and almost unendurable trial of one of the weakest points in my nature. May the Lord guide me aright.”

[8] While many sister missionaries served in various Church mission capacities in the late nineteenth century, Inez Knight and Lucy Jane (Jennie) Brimhall were “the first single, official, proselyting lady missionaries in the Church,” beginning their service in April 1898. Lyon and McFarland, “Not Invited, but Welcome,” 71–101; and Diane L. Mangum, “The First Sister Missionaries,” Ensign, July 1980, 672–65. Booth records in his journal that while visiting England on his way to Turkey, he had a surprise and happy meeting with these two women who had been his classmates at Brigham Young Academy in Provo (Journal, September 6, 1898).

[9] Booth, “Armenian Mission,” 1048–49.

[10] For an excellent discussion of minorities and marginalized communities in French-controlled Syria, see White, Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East.

[11] See journal excerpt in part 2 below, “The ‘Brave Sons of Mohamed’ Rescue the Mormons.”

[12] Ponsonby, English Diaries, 34.

[13] Mallon, Book of One’s Own, xv.

[14] Hintze, journal of missionary labors in Turkey, commencing November 1, 1886, F. F. Hintze Papers, MSS 2262, box 2, folder 1 (part of Journal 2), 1.

[15] Booth Journals, vol. 13, February 6, 1905.

[16] Kline, Guide to Documentary Editing.

[17] For excellent introductory surveys of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, see Gelvin, Modern Middle East; Howard, History of the Ottoman Empire; and Quataert, Ottoman Empire.

[18] All major empires, kingdoms, and dynasties from the ancient world to the present utilized the various forms of “unfreedom” or slavery to amass their wealth and fortunes. Examples of unfreedom include serfdom, indentured servitude, domestic and sexual slavery, plantation and other forms of agricultural labor, and military slave labor. The various Chinese dynasties, the Greeks and Romans, the Incas and Aztecs, the Islamic empires and sultanates, and the Japanese, British, French, and American empires are just a few concrete examples from the past. See Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History.

[19] Yılmaz, “Body Politics and the Devșirmes” and “Becoming a Devshirme.”

[20] For important discussions regarding forced migration in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East, particularly related to Muslims and Armenians and other Christians, see Kasaba, Moveable Empire; Blumi, Ottoman Refugees; Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession; McCarthy, Death and Exile; Robson, States of Separation; Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement; and Üngör, Making of Modern Turkey.

[21] For an insightful comparative constitutional discussion involving the Ottomans, see Sohrabi, Revolution and Constitutionalism; and Kurzman, Democracy Denied.

[22] Regarding the term Great Century, see Latourette, History of Christianity; and Jongeneel, Philosophy, Science, and Theology, 227. For further reading on the history and politics of Christian missions in the Middle East, see Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East; Laderman, Armenian Question; Oren, America in the Middle East; Richter, Protestant Missions in the Near East; Salt, Imperialism, Evangelism, and the Ottoman Armenians; Sedra, From Mission to Modernity; Stanley, Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire; Strong, Story of the American Board; and Tejirian and Simon, Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion.

[23] For the most recent authoritative study on the 1909 Adana Massacre see, Der Matossian, Horrors of Adana.

[24] For excellent recent works on the origins, course, and effects of World War I on the Middle East, see Aksakal, Ottoman Road to War; Gingeras, Fall of the Sultanate; McMeekin, Ottoman Endgame; Reynolds, Shattering Empires; and Rogan, Fall of the Ottomans.

[25] Portions of this historical overview of Latter-day Saint missiology in the Ottoman Empire were previously published in Toronto, “Interreligious Discourse” and “LDS Church in the Middle East.”

[26] See, for example, Barkun, Crucible of the Millennium; Marr, ‘“Drying Up the Euphrates’; and Underwood, Millenarian World of Early Mormonism.

[27] On January 15, 1922, for example, Booth made the following journal entry after visiting an Armenian orphanage in Aleppo: “I attended the meeting at the Orphanage & spoke to about 600 people, mostly children from 8 to 15 years. I talked on The Coming of the Savior and the signs preceeding that great event. In the opening of my remarks I spoke of the nearness of the Second Coming & was led to promise that many there would live to see it.”

[28] Hyde’s record of this experience is found in A Voice from Jerusalem. See also Galbraith, “Orson Hyde’s 1841 Mission,” 16–19.

[29] Smith et al, Correspondence of Palestine Tourists.

[30] Hintze’s collected papers can be found in the 19th Century Mormon and Western Manuscripts Collection, Harold B. Lee Library, MSS 2262. On Armenian history and religion, see Hovannisian, Armenian People.

[31] Under the rule of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II (reigned 1876–1909), censorship laws were very strict, and he personally viewed foreign missionaries with suspicion as agents of imperialist powers. See Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, chaps. 6–7.

[32] Sources detailing these events include Berrett and Van Dyke, Holy Lands; and Lindsay, “History of the Missionary Activities.”

[33] The discussion that follows draws primarily from three studies that provide detailed analysis of this era in Latter-day Saint history: Alexander, Mormonism in Transition; Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints; and Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience.

[34] Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints, 365, 399.

[35] Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints, 412.

[36] See Official Declaration 1 in the Doctrine and Covenants and the Gospel Topics essay “The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage, at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/the-manifesto-and-the-end-of-plural-marriage.

[37] Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints, 409.

[38] On polygamy issues, see Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, chap. 4, 60–73; and Arrington and Bitton, Mormon Experience, 244–46. Van Wagoner provides a comprehensive treatment of the subject in Mormon Polygamy.

[39] In 1879, for example, the US Department of State issued the Evert Circular, which attempted to persuade other countries, particularly in Europe to stop the flow of converts to the Church immigrating to Utah because they were “potential violators” of US polygamy laws (Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints, 397–98; and Parshall, “‘Gathering’ Storm”). Anti-Mormon propaganda of the time commonly played on negative stereotypes and public fear of both Church members and “Orientals,” conflating the two to make a case that allowing Mormon immigration was tantamount to allowing Turkey (as a metaphor for Islam, polygamy, despotism, and moral debauchery) to infiltrate into the United States (Talbot, “Turkey Is in Our Midst,” 377–78 and footnote 72).

[40] Lindsay, “Dream of a Mormon Colony,” 52.

[41] It is well documented that even after the Manifesto was issued in 1890, Church leaders continued to practice polygamy (Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, chap. 4; and Fluhman, “Peculiar People,” 140–45). Some even sanctioned and performed ceremonies constituting new plural marriages, even while publicly stating that plural marriage was no longer sanctioned by the Church. For example, Ferdinand Hintze, “the father of the Turkish Mission,” practiced polygamy and married his fourth wife, Nora Mikkelsen, in 1898, notwithstanding this being against official Church doctrine. He was subsequently called to serve again as president of the Turkish Mission in 1899, translated the Book of Mormon into Armeno-Turkish, and served in various Church callings and capacities. He never received any disciplinary action from the Church for continuing to practice polygamy. See Hintze journals, family histories, and papers, located in the Church History Library and BYU Special Collections. These contradictory actions caused confusion among the Latter-day Saints as the Church was transitioning into a mainstream US Christian religion. It appears that Booth was one of those who believed that polygamy was still a privately sanctioned Church practice. Obviously, he had worked closely with Hintze during almost his entire time as a missionary in the Middle East, and this conviviality may have had some impact on his willingness to practice plural marriage.

[42] Booth met and fell in love with Caroline Victoria Jensen (1880–1967), a new teacher at the school in Utah where he also taught (August 1903 journal entry). There are a number of poems in BYU Special Collections that Booth most likely wrote to her. He corresponded with her while on his second mission and hoped to eventually marry her after returning, but doubts within her about their relationship (March 27, 1910, journal entry) and discord with his wife, Reba, about this issue (April 5, 1910, journal entry) prevented that from ever becoming a reality.

Although Booth and Reba authentically loved each other and remained essentially faithful until death, both at times were hostile toward the other, sometimes for petty reasons. In general, Booth was frustrated with the companionship, Reba’s lack of understanding, her stubbornness, and her constant suspicion of his motives. In his poem “Some Flowers” he writes of being friendless when he met Caroline Jensen. Reba, on the other hand, somewhat reminiscent of Emma Smith, was dead set against her husband’s having relations with another woman.

It is conceivable that Booth’s desire to marry another woman was partly a result of their inability to have children. Although less pronounced in his journal, it is evident that both wanted a family but had been unsuccessful in producing children. Booth writes that one of the neighbors in Aleppo “called and chatted and offered her services—semi Proffessional, to assist us in the case of our childless condition” (August 10, 1905, journal entry). Dr. Armenag Hagopian, who had lost his wife and the means of taking care of his children, offered three of them to the Booths, “as it would be such a ‘great comfort to Sister Booth’” (March 2, 1909, journal entry).

It is important to note that Booth was coming out of an era of Church history when polygamy was ordained of God and marriage an institution primarily for the raising of children. It is only in this context that one can understand his overt attempts to court Caroline Jensen and his deep sadness when Reba rejected them (April 5, 1910, journal entry). Wayne C. Booth (1921–2005), a grand-nephew of Joseph Wilford Booth, claims that the latter had received a “promise from one church authority that a polygamous marriage could still be performed (this was about 1910 or 1911!) (sic.) and about how crushed he felt when, fully expecting the marriage, he was finally told that the Church had at last banned even secret polygamous marriages” (email from Wayne Booth to David Charles, March 18, 2002, copy in possession of James Toronto).

[43] Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 264. Chapter 13 therein examines in depth the Word of Wisdom’s evolving interpretation in Latter-day Saint thought.

[44] Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints, 430–31; and Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 290–91.

[45] Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, chap. 14.

[46] Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 198–200; and Allen and Leonard, Story of the Latter-day Saints, 426–27. Regarding the P.E.F., see https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/blog/perpetual-emigrating-fund-company.

[47] Anthon H. Lund Journals, August 1, 1898; cited in Berrett and Van Dyke, Holy Lands, 253.

[48] Alexander, Mormonism in Transition, 305–6.

[49] An introductory essay and transcript of Reba’s important journals, representing the viewpoint and experiences of the first and only full-time female missionary in the Turkish and Armenian missions, can be found in BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library. See Ostler, “Journals of Reba Booth.” The original journals are part of the Mary R. Moyle Booth Papers, CHL.