The first international student in Princeton Seminary’s records is John Ross, born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 23, 1783. He was born of Roman Catholic parents, but was orphaned when quite young. At nineteen he went to sea to see the world. On his way to Liverpool, he was seized by a pressgang and put aboard a British man-of-war. He eventually escaped, but afterward in Barbadoes and again elsewhere he was seized and pressed into British naval service. On his final escape he boarded a vessel bound for America and worked for his passage. He landed at New London, Connecticut, with no hat, no shoes, and no money.

While in Ireland Ross had learned shoemaking and set about finding work as a shoemaker in New London. Eventually, he joined a local Protestant church, and after a time felt a call to ministry. He received some support from a women’s aid society for studies at Middlebury College in Vermont and, after preparation there, came to Princeton Theological Seminary. He is recorded as being a member of the Class of 1816, the second class at the Seminary.

When Ross arrived, Archibald Alexander was the only professor, with eleven students. Samuel Miller arrived soon afterward. Ross studied at Princeton Seminary from 1813 to 1816. He began doing mission and evangelization work in Philadelphia and applied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions for service as a missionary abroad. The board was not able to provide funds to send him overseas, so they encouraged him to serve as a missionary to the American frontier. He was ordained by the Presbytery of Redstone and traveled by horseback preaching and serving churches in western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana as those areas were being settled. He preached at the old fort at Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the days when houses were the exception rather than the rule in that place, and founded the First Presbyterian Church there. He eventually settled in the Richmond, Indiana, area, where he supported himself by farming and served as pastor of Beulah Presbyterian Church in Richmond.

Ross was also a colporteur for the American Tract Society throughout eastern Indiana and western Ohio. He is considered one of the pioneers of the Presbyterian Church in Indiana. It is said that he “was fond of preaching as long as he was able to stand in the pulpit,” and he is recorded as still preaching with vigor long after the age of eighty. When he died in 1876, going on ninety-three, he was the oldest member of the Muncie (Indiana) Presbytery, the oldest surviving member of his seminary class, and one of the oldest (if not the oldest) ministers in the Presbyterian Church.

John Burtt, a member of the Class of 1824, was born in Scotland in 1789. He had served as a teacher in Scotland before coming to America and was already in his thirties when he joined the Sixth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and decided to study for ordination to the ministry at Princeton Seminary. Besides serving several pastorates in this country, he edited magazines and two large-circulation church newspapers, and published a volume of poetry.

Also listed with the Class of 1824, although he only attended Princeton Seminary from February until October of 1822, is Gilbert Crawford of Scotland. It is uncertain when he came to this country, but after studying at Princeton Seminary he served a series of churches in upstate New York, and for a few years in Wisconsin. Likewise, James Kerr of the Class of 1824 was born in Scotland, attended Princeton Seminary from 1821 to 1823, and spent the rest of his ministerial career as a missionary in the American South, especially rural Virginia and North Carolina.

Another Class of 1824 member from abroad was John Mitchelmore, born in England in 1793. He came to America in 1816 when he was twenty-three, joined a Presbyterian church, and by 1819 felt a call to the ministry. The presbytery arranged for him to do preparatory studies at the classical academy in Lawrenceville, from which he graduated in 1822. He then came to study at Princeton Seminary and after graduation served several united churches in rural Delaware until his untimely death in 1834, when he perished in the burning of the steamboat William Penn, on which he was a passenger traveling to Philadelphia. It is recorded that he died while trying to calm and assist his terror-stricken fellow passengers. Among his last acts was to take off the large cloak he was wearing, wrap it around a little child, and throw it ashore, where the child was saved. When he could do no more on the ship and the heat had become unbearable, he jumped from the burning deck into the cold waters of the river and swam for shore. However, the shock from the extremes of heat on the burning deck to the chill of the water was too much, and though he was able to reach the shore, he perished before anyone could come to his aid.

Each of these students, though born and raised abroad, chose to stay and follow their pastoral vocation in the young America. It should be remembered that at this time the areas from which they came—England, Scotland, and Ireland—were the “old country,” and it was America, particularly rural America and the American frontier, that was one of the important mission fields of the day. Even today some of our international students stay to work in this country, especially among the immigrant groups and first- and second-generation Americans from the countries of their own origins.

The first student from overseas to come to Princeton Theological Seminary who did not have English as a first language was likely David Christian Bernard Jadownicky (as his name reads in the records of the First—now Nassau—Presbyterian Church of Princeton.) The “David Christian” part of this name was likely a later addition, taken at the time of his baptism, for the early catalog records of the Seminary simply read “Bernard Jadownicky,” and a published letter by him in Ashbel Green’s Christian Advocate from June 1823 is simply signed “B. Jadownicky.”

This unlikely Princeton Theological Seminary student was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1799. At thirteen he was sent to a Jewish Talmudical School in Berlin to study to become a rabbi. In Berlin Jadownicky learned to write and speak fluent German, and after graduating in 1818 served as a rabbi in the German town of Solingen, famous to this day for its manufacture of swords, knives, and cutlery. After a few years he came across a copy of a Hebrew New Testament that had been lately published in London.

Jadownicky found this reading compelling, and this led to his further reading of Hebrew language tracts and pamphlets designed to explain Christian beliefs to Jews. Finding himself religiously perplexed, he went to speak with a Jewish convert who was now a Protestant minister in Frankfort. The result of the conversations and instruction he received was his own conversion and baptism into the Christian faith in April 1821. Taking the advice of some of his new Christian friends, he decided to pursue Christian theological studies and prepare himself as a Christian missionary to the Jewish people. On his way to Berlin to take up these new studies he met a pious German nobleman, Adelberdt, Count von der Recke, who had set up a settlement for converted Jews (who after their conversion usually lost their previous means of making a living in the Jewish communities in which they had lived) on a forty-acre farm near Dusseldorf. The Count asked Jadownicky to spend some time at his residence and help with the project.

About this time the Count became aware of the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews in New York, which had a similar idea for setting up a colony for Christian Jews in North America. They envisioned the Count’s farm as a staging ground for sending converted European Jews on to their projected larger community, which they hoped to establish somewhere in upstate New York. The Count asked Jadownicky to go as his agent and give further particulars about the situation in Europe to a meeting of the North American group. The group was favorably impressed with Jadownicky, asked him to work with them, and arranged for him to continue his studies in Princeton.

Since Greek and Latin were not part of the usual rabbinic training, Jadownicky first took the necessary language classes at Princeton University (known in those days as the College of New Jersey) before proceeding to theological studies at the Seminary from 1823 until 1825. It would appear that he lived, at least for some time, in the home of Charles Hodge. In a letter written in December 1822, Hodge writes: “I am studying German again: having a teacher in the house I hope to make more progress than I did before. We find Mr. Jadownisky [sic—the ‘c’ in Jadownicky is pronounced soft, as an ‘s’, so it would be natural for Hodge to spell it this way] a pleasant and intelligent young man.” In December 1823, he joined the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton.

Jadownicky continued his studies and his work with the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews for several years, but appears to have left that work around 1826. A further mention is made of him in the Life of John Kitto compiled after Kitto’s death by the noted Glasgow Presbyterian leader and scholar John Eadie. Kitto had lost his hearing at age twelve, after falling from a ladder, but by his early twenties felt called to full-time Christian service. Since his deafness would be a hindrance to his becoming an evangelist, he was trained as a printer and sent by the British Church Missionary Society to Malta, where they had printing presses turning out books and tracts in Greek, Arabic, Maltese, and Italian for circulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean. In connection with his deafness, Kitto had developed a growing reluctance to speak, and carried around pencil and paper to conduct his conversations with others by writing. Not using his vocal organs nearly led to the inability to use them altogether. It was on the voyage to Malta in early summer 1827 that Kitto met Jadownicky (who was perhaps on his way to Palestine) and who, together with another traveling companion, did him a singular favor that was to make a major difference for the rest of his life. Kitto tells the story as follows:

“When I first went to the Mediterranean, the companions of my outward voyage were Dr. Korch, a German physician, who had lately taken orders in the Anglican church, and Mr. Jadownicky, a converted Polish Jew, lately arrived from America, where he had been completing his Christian education. These well-informed and kind-hearted men, being always with me, soon perceived how the matter really stood; and after much reasoning with me on the matter, they entered into a conspiracy in which the captain of the ship joined, not to understand a word I said, otherwise than orally, throughout the voyage. In this they persevered to a marvel; and as I had much to ask, since I had not before been at sea, I made very great progress with my tongue during the six weeks’ voyage, and, by the time we reached our destination, had almost overcome the habit of clutching a pen or pencil, to answer every question that was asked me.”

This proved to be an important turning point for Kitto. He began using his voice more, first with close friends, then with acquaintances, and finally even with strangers. Later in life he was able to write that “under the improvement which practice gave, my voice was so much bettered, that the instances in which it was not readily understood, gradually diminished; and, at the present day, I rarely find even a foreigner to whom my language is not clear.” Kitto also relates how on the voyage to Malta he wished one night to sleep out under the stars and awake to view the sunrise, and how Jadownicky had loaned him his “thick cloak” to use as bedding on the deck.

Kitto went on to travel extensively in Bible lands, and returned home to England to write accounts of his travels. Eventually he brought his knowledge of the Near East and its peoples and customs to bear in helping bring the Bible to life for lay readers in a series of lavishly illustrated, multi-volume aids for biblical study. These included a four-volume pictorial Bible, giving the full text of the Bible, illustrated with steel engravings and hundreds of woodcuts representing landscape scenes, natural history, costumes, and archaeological finds, together with explanatory notes throughout giving historical and geographic background, describing in greater detail the plants and animals mentioned in the text, and providing literary and other illustrative materials. He also produced an illustrated Encyclopedia of Biblical Literature and an eight-volume guide through the entire Bible giving suggested texts and informative background readings, one for each day of the year, called Daily Bible Illustrations. These eight volumes were especially designed for personal study or for reading aloud in the family, and the noted Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon said of them that they were “more interesting than any novel that was ever written and as instructive as the heaviest theology.”

After the Malta voyage with Kitto, we have little record of Jadownicky and his travels. However a few years before Jadownicky’s death at age sixty-three, Archibald Alexander Hodge mentioned to an inquiring colleague that he had a “rather shaky personal recollection” from his childhood of his father speaking of a Jewish student named “Jadownisky” who had studied at the Seminary in 1823–1824, about the time of his own birth, and that he thought he remembered sometime when he was a teenager that Jadownicky had returned to Princeton Seminary for a visit and worshipped with the Hodge family in their pew at Miller Chapel. His memory was that Jadownicky had mentioned to Charles Hodge at that time that he was supporting himself by engaging in trade, especially in the West Indies and Cuba, but that he had never abandoned his Christian profession. A further note in PTS records suggests that Jadownicky may have returned to his native Poland sometime before his death, which is recorded there as probably about 1853.

A final story worth telling here is the story of Guy Chew, a Native American of the Mohawk tribe. Converted to Christianity at age eighteen, he attended the Mission School at Cornwall, Connecticut. This school had been set up by the Congregationalists with the help of a young Hawaiian, Henry Obookiah, who had been brought to America at his own request by a sea captain and was studying to be a missionary back to his own people when he contracted typhus fever and died in early 1818. Shortly after his death a book appeared in which Henry tells in his own words the story of his life and to which others added a few particulars, including an account of his death. His plea for a mission to his people inspired the beginnings of Christian missions to Hawaii in which a number of our own early Princeton Theological Seminary graduates would participate. Also attending this school were Native Americans who wished to spread the gospel among their people. Guy Chew studied at this school for three years “and became eminent for his benevolence, piety, and desire to proclaim the gospel to his countrymen.” He came to Princeton Seminary in 1826, but as his gravestone (which may still be seen in Princeton Cemetery) reads, he that same year “was by a Mysterious Providence called away in the morning of his days,” the first Native American to attend Princeton Theological Seminary.

Kenneth W. Henke is the Seminary’s reference archivist.

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