Joseph Wolff - His Travels

His Travels

In 1821 he began his missionary wanderings in the East by visiting Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Mesopotamia, Persia, Georgia and the Crimea. He returned to England in 1826.

In 1828 Wolff set out to search for the Lost Tribes of Israel, travelling through Anatolia, Armenia, Turkestan and Afghanistan to Simla and Calcutta, suffering many hardships but preaching with enthusiasm. He visited Madras, Pondicherry, Tinnevelly, Goa and Bombay, travelling home by Egypt and Malta.

In 1836 he found Samuel Gobat in Ethiopia, took him to Jeddah, and himself visited Yemen and Bombay, going on to the United States, where he was ordained deacon on 26 September 1837 at Newark, New Jersey. Trinity College Dublin awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Laws. He was ordained priest in 1838 by Richard Mant, Bishop of Down and Connor. In the same year he was given the rectory of Linthwaite in Yorkshire.

In his travels in Bukhara he found the doctrine of the Lord’s soon coming held by a remote and isolated people. The Arabs of Yemen, he says, “are in possession of a book called ‘Seera,’ which gives notice of the coming of Christ and His reign in glory, and they expect great events to take place in the year 1840.” “In Yemen I spent six days with the Rechabites. They drink no wine, plant no vineyards, sow no seed, live in tents, and remember the words of Jonadab, the son of Rechab. With them were the children of Israel of the tribe of Dan, . . . who expect, in common with the children of Rechab, the speedy arrival of the Messiah in the clouds of heaven.”

In 1843 Wolff went to Bukhara (home of the Bukharan Jews) to seek two British officers, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly who had been captured by the Emir, Nasrullah Khan in June 1842. They had in fact been executed, and as Wolff later described, he was only spared death himself because the Emir laughed uncontrollably at Wolff's appearance in full canonical garb. His Narrative of this mission went through seven editions between 1845 and 1852. This trip was retraced in 1938 by Fitzroy Maclean, then a junior diplomat travelling incognito. He wrote of Wolff in his memoir Eastern Approaches and almost fifty years later contributed a foreword to a biography of the missionary.