Fifty Years of Faithfulness: Martin & Elizabeth Goldsmith

Feb 23

Martin Goldsmith's family endured antisemitism in Germany, America and England. His wife Elizabeth endured the hardship of a Communist Chinese internment camp for children. Yet both of them found purpose and joy in life together as cross-cultural ambassadors to various countries of Southeast Asia serving the God and Messiah of Israel.

"It’s an amazing thought that thousands of years ago, God chose Abraham, and through him, had this long-term plan to send a blessing to all people. For that reason, the Jews are very special people. Growing together with Martin has helped me appreciate this special heritage. His insights, that come from Jewish customs and his background have made our faith very special for me.

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The Goldsmith family with their grandkids

Interview Transcript

Tuvya: Martin and Elizabeth Goldsmith live in England, about 20 miles north of London, England. They both serve as visiting lecturers and associate staff at All Nations Christian College. That distinguished academy trains men and women for God’s ministry in a multicultural world. They understand very well the challenges of cross-cultural communication from their decades of international ministry and their own Jewish-Gentile marriage. I’m delighted for this opportunity where they are able to share from their literally life-long experiences. Martin, how long have you been at All Nations College?
Martin: Well, we’ve been involved a long time; 50 odd years. The college actually began long before that. So, it began in the late 1800’s, and we’re not that old!
Tuvya: (Laughter) And Martin, you are a speaker, a theologian, a teacher of missiology, that is how Christian faith is spread through the world. I also saw that you were a trained Russian interpreter. Where did you acquire that skill?
Martin: Well, in the 1950’s, all English young men had to do two years military service, and I spent those two years being trained as a Russian interpreter. Actually, I didn’t use it very much, and my Russian is now terribly rusty.
Tuvya: You have lived many places during your life’s work. How many languages have you picked up over time?
Martin: I haven’t counted, and it always depends on what you mean by “picked up.” I mean, obviously, English is my mother tongue. I have German quite adequately for preaching and lecturing and so on. In Asia, I have Indonesian and Malay. I could converse in those, but I didn’t like to preach in a local language. I also speak some French. That’s about it, aside from biblical languages, —Greek and Hebrew, —for teaching.
Tuvya: Elizabeth, you have served your faith and Lord internationally as a mission worker. You’ve done that throughout your lifetime in many places. Is it correct that you were raised in China?
Elizabeth: Yes, my parents were Christian missionaries there. My father was a skilled surgeon who helped the Chinese set up a hospital. He taught them nursing and medical skills throughout his 32 years in China. I was one of six siblings who were brought up in China. We were all educated at an English boarding school on the northeast coast of China. I arrived in 1940 as a six-year-old.
Tuvya: Did you become fluent in a Chinese dialect?
Elizabeth: Yes. Mandarin Chinese was spoken in the north, and I spoke that quite fluently as a child. Sadly, at school we didn’t use it. I’ve worked to keep up on my Chinese a little. My Indonesian is more fluent than my Chinese.

Tuvya: You both experienced some unusual cross-cultural challenges in your early years. Elizabeth, describe what happened when the Japanese came into China in the 1940s while your family lived there?
Elizabeth: Yes. In the beginning, when Japan attacked China, western foreigners were exempt from any enmity. But, after Pearl Harbor in 1941, overnight we were regarded as enemies. At the boarding school, one morning we looked out the window and saw Japanese soldiers marching into our school compound. They closed the gates, took our headmaster off for interrogation, and told us children that we were all prisoners of the Japanese. And from then on until August 1945, they held us as prisoners without seeing our parents.
Tuvya: How were you and the other foreign children treated during those five years?
Elizabeth: At first, they moved us from our very nice school buildings so they could use them for their purposes. Then they moved us to join all other foreigners, —American, Canadian, Australian, or whoever, —from areas like Beijing and Chengdu, Tientsin, northeast China to a central prison camp where 1,500 inmates were eventually housed. We were crowded into some buildings that were built to be a Presbyterian Bible school for 200 Chinese students. They put us, 1,500 children, crowded in there with a shortage of food and no new clothes. And, of course, all the children were getting bigger each year. So, we went barefoot all summer in order to save our shoes for when winter came. Of course, by then our feet had grown, and we didn’t fit in them anymore. So, we had to swap shoes with some larger child. It wasn’t altogether easy.
Tuvya: How did that period effect you and your parents when you were reunited?
Elizabeth: Sadly, my mother died during the wartime. That left my father to grieve while running a big mission hospital 5,000 miles inland. And it took him a long while to work his way back to the coast of China after the war. We finally met up in Hong Kong. All the hardship only deepened our commitment to serve the desperate need of the Chinese people. Those days were marked by widespread poverty. The country was underdeveloped, and their need was great both medically and physically. So, I felt called by God to join the mission group that my parents had been serving in with the aim of returning to Asia.
Tuvya: Elizabeth authored her life story in the book, God Can Be Trusted. We will include a link to that wonderful story with this podcast transcript. And Martin Goldsmith also wrote his spiritual biography, called Life’s Tapestry. We will include that link as well. Martin, you are an esteemed teacher at a wonderful Bible college and a lover of Messiah Jesus. You are also a child of the people from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Where does the story of your family’s Jewish background begin?
Martin: My grandparents were all Jewish, thus so were both of my parents. One set of my grandparents lived in Germany, and the other side came from England and Brazil. Interestingly, they were all atheistic Jews, so no religion. And that was how I was brought up, with no religion at all. However, in order to ensure I was accepted as properly English, my parents baptized me as a baby. It never had a religious significance. Somebody gave me a copy of the Old King James Bible, which I found and read as a young boy, after World War II.

Tuvya: How did your family end up in England?
Martin: Well, during the last quarter of the 19thth century, my grandparents were definitely among upper crust German Jewry, with money and status and education. So, they were okay. But my grandfather is famous for having said under German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, there was “no place left in Germany for sophisticated people,” and Germany was too militaristic. He believed there was no longer a place for the family there, so they moved to England.
Tuvya: Your parents met and were married in England. I understand that, even in a new country, anti-Semitism found them.
Martin: Yes, they were married in England. Then they went to New York for their honeymoon. Yes, and on their first night in New York, they were staying in a smart hotel. After they went to bed, there was a knock on the door. It was the manager of this big hotel. He apologized profusely, and then asked them, “Do you happen to be Jewish?” And they said, “Well, yes.” And he said, “Well, I’m so sorry, but we can’t have Jews in the hotel here. Would you mind getting out of bed, repacking, and go find somewhere else to sleep.”
Tuvya: Not many people understand the context of anti-Semitism that existed even prior to the Holocaust. Jewish people often went to extreme lengths seeking social acceptance. My parents, born to European refugees in Canada and America, both bore altered surnames to protect their Jewish identities.
Martin: Yes, that honeymoon experience horrified my parents. Our family changed their name, back in England in the 1930s. Jews had a hard time finding jobs, so my family anglicized our name from Goldschmidt to Goldsmith. And my mother actually got herself baptized in England at age 17, just to be properly English in the hope of being more accepted. It had nothing to do with church or religion in her mind. So, it was very natural for her to get all of us baptized wanting all their children to fit into England naturally.
Tuvya: Martin, as a boy, you spent the World War years in Bermuda. How did you happen to be there?
Martin: Until the Second World War, we lived on the south coast of England. By 1940, of course, Hitler had conquered France. On a really clear day, we could see the French coast in the distance. It looked very much as if the German army would invade England. That was not a good prospect for Jewish people. My father had died by then. So, it was just my mother with three small boys. She couldn’t do anything to help England in the war. So, we left, moving to Bermuda.

Tuvya: Diaspora and anti-Semitism have shaped much of the Jewish experience in modern times, haven’t they?
Martin: Yes, my Jewishness was underlined by that sort of experience. After the Second World War, we returned to England. As a boy, I remember the first person who showed me around London was a Jewish survivor. He was a wreck of a man, so troubled as a result of his experiences. It took us time to discover what had happened under Hitler in Germany in the Third Reich. I remember the shock of learning about that and gradually finding out what happened to our family in Europe. And that made a big impression on me, too. Later, I went to a private boarding school in England where I was badly bullied in my early teenage years because of my Jewishness.
Tuvya: Elizabeth, did you know much of Martin’s Jewish heritage when the two of you met?
Elizabeth: No. I just found him an attractive young man that I enjoyed talking with very much. We had the same interests in life. We were both fully committed to serving our Lord and Messiah Jesus. We’d both done our field training, then went to a language school to learn how to communicate cross- culturally more effectively. And on the first night, we happened to be sitting at the same table, and things happened between us from then.
Tuvya: And you have travelled the world together, spending years in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Thailand. Martin, in your travels have you made it to Israel?
Martin: Yes. Up to a time, I didn’t want to see Israel if it had become very touristy. Yet, when I was speaking at a conference in Thailand, and somebody asked me about Israel. I said, “Well, you’re asking the wrong person. I’ve never been there.” A former student of mine at All Nations, was shocked that I, a Jew, had never been to Israel. She was a German Gentile and had been to Israel many times. Unknown to me, she began to pray that God would give her money
to send our family to Israel. Soon after, she received some money from the estate of a distant relative who died. She sent us a check with a note, “Please go to Israel and take your family with you.” So, we went, and of course, made many contacts with all sorts of people, including opportunities for ministry among Messianic Jews in Israel since then several times.
Tuvya: Elizabeth, so, you’ve both been in Israel together?
Elizabeth: Yes. We quite often went together, and there was always an invitation for Martin to speak. Sometimes, I got the sense that I was welcome because I was married to a Jew. I know God loves everybody, and we are all welcome as His children whatever our background, whatever our nationality.
Martin: Yes, that’s right. And a Jew going to Israel, brought up in the dDiaspora, it’s quite an amazing experience at first. And Elizabeth had to tolerate the fact that I was adjusting to Israel.

Tuvya: Lots of couples will wonder what it was like for the two of you, from different cultures, to find a real relationship with the living God. What would you tell a couple where one is Jewish and the other is a Christian, and they’re struggling to find spiritual harmony?
Martin: I feel the closer you both get to the Lord God, the closer you will be drawn to each other. So, I think that is the key. It really begins with your relationship with the Lord.
Elizabeth: It’s an amazing thought that thousands of years ago, God chose Abraham, and through him, had this long-term plan to send a blessing to all people. For that reason, the Jews are very special people. Growing together with Martin has helped me appreciate this special heritage. His insights, that come from Jewish customs and his background have made our faith very special for me.
Martin: I would urge a Jewish partner to try and discover the faith of your Christian partner through Jewish eyes. One doesn’t lose Jewishness in the embrace of the Christian message.
Tuvya: Martin, you have authored a few books about the Jewishness of that message. What would you recommend?
Martin: Yes, well, there is Matthew and Mission: The Gospel Through Jewish Eyes. And I’ve also done one on an Old Testament book: Habakkuk. It’s called Any Complaints? Blame God! Of course, that’s what Habakkuk did.
Tuvya: Well, thank you both for being part of our podcast series. Our listeners might be interested in those books, along with Martin’s story, Life’s Tapestry, and experiences in God Can Be Trusted. They are available through the link below.