Conrad Schick Library
About the Library
The Conrad Schick Library, located at Christ Church, was opened to the academic community on February 4, 2007. It has two purposes. It serves the students of Alexander College by providing them with books on Biblical subjects and the Jewish context of the New Testament. Further, the library focuses on the Christian contribution to the people of the Holy Land during the last two hundred years. Some of the works deal with Christian objections to and support of the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. The library has 3,000 volumes including a number of rare 19th century books.
Closely associated with the library is the Christ Church Jerusalem Archive. It holds original material connected with the history of Christ Church and some of the local activities of the London Jew's Society (CMJ).
The library and archive are open to scholars, students and those participating in the Alexander College study programs.
Thank you to those who have contributed to the opening of this library
Who was Conrad Schick?
Conrad Schick has been called the most important person who lived in Jerusalem during the second half of the 19th century. He was born in Württemburg in 1822 and was sent to Jerusalem in 1846 as a Protestant missionary by the well known Pilgermission of St. Chrischona in Basel. Not long after arriving in Jerusalem the mission closed and Schick soon began to work for CMJ training Jewish believers in various trades at the Christ Church House of Industry. He was thereafter associated with CMJ in Jerusalem in a number of capacities until he died in 1901. Schick became a self-taught scholar, architect and archaeologist and was also closely associated with the Palestine Exploration Fund. He was a city planner and he designed the Mea Shearim complex for the Turkish municipality of Jerusalem, now an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. His building projects not only included several buildings for CMJ, but also the Jerusalem leper hospital, the Talita Kumi girls orphanage and his family home, the Tabor House, one of the most beautiful buildings in Jerusalem. He was well known for making models depicting various aspects of Jerusalem's past and present, at times on directive from the Turkish authorities. Schick's most important model was of the Temple Mount as he was one of the few non-Muslims allowed to survey underneath the Dome of the Rock and the El Aksa mosque. At Christ Church we have two of Schick's models (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Protestant Quarter of Jerusalem) as well as a number of his papers.
The Conrad Schick Library is affiliated with Alexander College
The college is named after Michael Solomon Alexander, a rabbi, Hebrew scholar and the first Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. More significantly, he was the first Jewish bishop in the Holy City for almost 1900 years. During his short episcopate (1841-1845) he opened the first hospital in the Holy Land, a vocational school, and an enquirer's home. He was commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury to open a college in Jerusalem for Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus.