Children in war time: the first pupils of the Syrian (Schneller) orphanage in Jerusalem 1860–1863

Abstract

Abstract Greater Syria experienced several civil wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affecting women and children, the most vulnerable segments of the population whose history is rarely told. This article deals with Syrian children orphaned as a result of the 1860 Civil War in Mount Lebanon and Damascus and from other parts of Ottoman Palestine who were brought to the Syrian orphanage in Jerusalem founded by the German Protestant missionary Johann Ludwig Schneller. His annual reports (1861–3) provide much needed data on the emotional and physical condition of orphans from agrarian regions in Greater Syria and contribute to a better understanding of the historiography of childhood in the region.