Abstract
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) was founded in 1917 by the Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers. The Quaker movement arose during the mid-seventeenth century in England as one of the Nonconformist movements. The Nonconformists included Dissenters such as Puritans and Presbyterians, along with Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, and Quakers.1 These stood in violation of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which prescribed the Church of England’s rites, prayers and doctrines, as well as membership in the church as prerequisite for public office.
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Notes
Thomas Alexander Lacey, The Acts of Uniformity: Their Scope and Effect (London: Rivingtons, 1900).
George Fox, Journal of George Fox (Glasgow: W.G. Mackie & Co. 1852), 54.
Thomas Evans, A Concise Account of the Religious Society of Friends (Philadelphia: Religious Society of Friends, 1856).
David Yount, How the Quakers Invented America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
Thomas D. Hamm, The Quakers in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 37–63, 120–155;
Pink Dandelion, The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19–36.
Rufus M. Jones, A Service of Love in War Time, American Friends Relief Work in Europe, 1917–1919 (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 4.
Sonja Wentling, “The Engineer and the Shtadlanim: Herbert Hoover and American Jewish Non-Zionists, 1917–28,” American Jewish History 88 (2000): 377–406.
Allan W. Austin, “‘Let’s do away with walls!’: The American Friends Service Committee’s Interracial Section and the 1920s United States,” Quaker History 98, no. 1 (2009): 1–34;
Mary Hoxie Jones, Swords into Ploughshares; An Account of the American Friends Service Committee, 1917–1937 (New York: Macmillan, 1937).
Howard Haines Brinton, A Religious Solution to the Social Problem (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1934).
Frank Fox, “Quaker, Shaker, Rabbi: Warder Cresson, the Story of a Philadelphia Mystic,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 95 (1971): 146–193.
Ela Greenberg, Preparing the Mothers of Tomorrow: Education and Islam in Mandate Palestine (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009): 22–24.
See also Christina Jones, Friends in Palestine (Richmond, IN: American Friends Board of Missions, 1944);
Catherine C. B. Baylin, Quaker Activity in Ramallah: 1869–1914 (Masters Thesis, American University of Cairo, 2010).
Theophilus Waldmeier, The Autobiography of Theophilus Waldmeier, Missionary: Being Ten Years’ Life in Abyssinia; and Sixteen Years in Syria (London: S.W. Partridge & Co., 1886), 253, 277, 280.
See generally Abdul Latif Tibawi, American Interests in Syria, 1800–1901: A Study of Educational, Literary and Religious Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966);
Bayard Dodge, “American Educational and Missionary Efforts in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 401 (1972): 15–22;
Ghada Yusuf Khoury, The Founding Fathers of the American University of Beirut (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992);
Fruma Zachs, “From the Mission to the Missionary: The Bliss Family and the Syrian Protestant College, 1866–1920,” Die Welt des Islams 45, no. 2(2005): 255–291;
Fruma Zachs, “Toward a Proto-Nationalist Concept of Syria Revisiting the American Presbyterian Missionaries in the Levant,” Die Welt des Islams 41, no. 2 (2001): 1–29;
Betty S. Anderson, The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011).
See generally Gershon Greenberg, The Holy Land in American Religious Thought, 1620–1948: The Symbiosis of American Religious Approaches to Scripture’s Sacred Territory (Lanham, MD and Jerusalem: University Press of America and the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1994);
Lester Vogel, To See A Promised Land, Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 1995);
Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine, Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Joseph L. Grabill, Protestant Diplomacy and the Near East; Missionary Influence on American Policy, 1810–1927 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).
Suzanne E. Moranian, “The Armenian Genocide and American Missionary Relief Efforts,” in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, ed., J. M. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 185–213;
Merrill D. Peterson, “Starving Armenians”: American and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1930 and After (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004).
William Ernest Hocking, ed. Re-ThingMissions, a Layman’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932).
Thomas M. Ricks, “Khalil Totah, The Unknown Years,” Jerusalem Quarterly 34 (2008): 51–77.
Khalil Totah, “Education in Palestine,” in Palestine: A Decade of Development, eds. Harry Viteles and Khalil Totah (Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1932), 155–166.
Great Britain, Palestine Royal Commission. Palestine Royal Commission Report, Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, July 1937 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1937), 351.
Edgar B. Castle, Palestine Pamphlets: A Constitution for Palestine; Reconciliation in Palestine (London: Friends’ Book Centre, 1945).
Farah Mendlesohn, “Denominational Difference in Quaker Relief Work During the Spanish Civil War: The Operation of Corporate Concern and Liberal Theologies,” Journal of Religious History 24, no. 2 (2000): 180–96.
Allen Smith, “The Renewal Movement: The Peace Testimony and Modern Quakerism,” Quaker History 85, no. 2 (1996): 1–23.
See also Allen Smith, “The Peace Movement at the Local Level: The Syracuse Peace Council, 1936–1973,” Peace & Change 23, no. 1 (1998): 1–26.
Robert H. Abzug, America Views the Holocaust, 1933–1945: A Brief Documentary History (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 28–33.
For another account of the meeting see Elizabeth Gray Vining, Friend of Life: The Biography of Rufus M. Jones (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1958): 280–293.
See generally Hans A. Schmitt, Quakers and Nazis: Inner Light in Outer Darkness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997); Gallagher, Quakers in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 13–17.
Melanie J. Wright, “The Nature and Significance of Relations Between the Historic Peace Churches and Jews During and After the Shoah,” in Christian-Jewish Relations Through the Centuries, eds., Stanley E. Porter and Brook W. R. Pearson (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 400–425.
For the activities of British Friends in post-war relief with the UNRRA see Fiona Reid and Sharif Gemie, “The Friends Relief Service and Displaced People in Europe after the Second World War, 1945–48,” Quaker Studies 7, no. 2 (2013): 223–43.
Cadbury was a prominent New Testament scholar at Harvard Divinity School and brother-in-law of Rufus Jones. See Mary Hoxie Jones, “Henry Joel Cadbury: A Biographical Sketch,” in Then and Now, Quaker Essays: Historical and Contemporary, ed., Anna Cox Brinton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 11–70. Cadbury’s book The Peril of Modernizing Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1937) was an extended argument to “demodernize” Jesus and see him as a Galilean Jew rather than a twentieth-century liberal or an American icon. As such it is an important indication of American Quaker attitudes toward Jews and presages arguments that reemerged decades later in Biblical studies, even as Quakers have moved toward supersessionism.
H. Larry Ingle, “The American Friends Service Committee, 1947–49: The Cold War’s Effect,” Peace & Change 23, no. 1 (1998): 27–48.
Compare Allen Smith, “Comments on Ingle,” Peace & Change 29, no. 3 (1998): 399–401.
American Friends Service Committee, The United States and the Soviet Union: Some Quaker Proposals for Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).
American Friends Service Committee, Steps to Peace: A Quaker View of U.S. Foreign Policy, (Philadelphia, 1951).
American Friends Service Committee, Toward Security through Disarmament (Philadelphia, 1952).
American Friends, Service Committee, Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence (Philadelphia, 1955).
See also Elizabeth Walker Mechling and Jay Mechling, “Hot Pacifism and Cold War: The American Friends Service Committee’s Witness for Peace in 1950s America,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78, no. 2 (1992): 173–196;
H. Larry Ingle, “‘Speak Truth to Power’: A Thirty Years’ Retrospective,” Christian Century 102 (1985): 383–385.
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© 2013 Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe
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Romirowsky, A., Joffe, A.H. (2013). The Quakers and the American Friends Service Committee: Origins of the Quakers and Quaker Ideology. In: Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378170_3
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