Karl Wilhelm Isenberg
Karl Wilhelm Isenberg, spelt or known by names Carl Wilhelm Isenberg, Charles William Isenberg, C. W. Isenberg, Carl W. Isenberg or Charles Isenberg, was a German Church Missionary Society missionary and linguist to East Africa and Western India.
Isenberg compiled a dictionary and comprehensive grammar of the Amharic language, including several vocabularies in the Afar and Oromo languages. He also translated the Anglican Book of Common Prayer into Marathi and Amharic and assisted revisions of Bible translations into those languages. He was related to Hermann Hesse.
Early life
Karl Wilhelm Isenberg was born 5 September 1806 in Barmen.Coming from a tinsmith background, he joined the Basel Mission in 1824. After finishing his education, he worked for some time as a teacher of Biblical Greek. Having trained at the Basel Mission seminary in Switzerland and received Anglican orders, he was transferred to Church Missionary Society in 1830. Initially he worked in Cairo with Samuel Gobat and studied Aramaic and Arabic. Later on, he was ordained by the Church of England.
Career
East Africa
CMS already sent his first missionaries Samuel Gobat, a Swiss Lutheran, and Christian Kugler to Abyssinia, East Africa in 1829. As Kugler died in Tigre in 1830, his place was supplied by Isenberg as a CMS recruit. Isenberg joined Samuel Gobat, a Swiss Lutheran, in Cairo, Egypt, and studied Amharic and Arabic language.In 1834, he joined the mission station at Adowa, Ethiopia where they stayed until 1838; however, Gobat was compelled to quit the mission from ill-health at Tigre, also spelt Tigray. After the departure of Gobat, he was joined by his fiancée Henrietta Geerling, Charles Henry Blumhardt, another missionary, and Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German Lutheran and missionary to East Africa, in 1837. They taught and converted a few boys, who were in-turn expelled by the Ethiopian Orthodoxy clergy. He spent his years between 1834 and 1838 at Adowa and Tigray. Unlike Gobat with whom he initially served in Ethiopia, he kept a social and cultural distance from Ethiopians.
From 1838, he and fellow missionaries faced resistance from the native priesthood, especially due to the different beliefs and practices of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that were described in blunt terms that the Orthodox Christian clergymen found offensive. In March 1838, unwilling to accept Gobat's advice over the location of the mission, Isenberg was expelled from the country due to his inability to reach any accommodation with Ethiopian Orthodoxy clergymen. In 1839, he along with his new fellow missionaries Johann Ludwig, Krapf, and Carl Heinrich Blumhardt removed the mission station to Shoa, Ethiopia, where he spent for four months before leaving for London; later, he was responsible for the mission's expulsion from Ethiopia in 1843 forever—In 1842, when Isenberg returned to Shoa, his mission was refused entry, forcing him to turn his attention to Tigray again. However, his expulsion in June 1843, effectively ended CMS activities in Ethiopia.