Along with economic and political motives for imperialist ventures there frequently goes a religious motive. That such should be the case in the Near East was to be expected because of the religious appeal of the Ottoman Empire as the homeland of the Jews, the birthplace of Christianity, the cradle of Mohammedanism. It was small wonder, then, that the Bagdad Railway, which promised to link Central European cities with the holy places of Syria and Palestine, should have been supported enthusiastically by German missionaries and other German Christians. German Protestant missions were represented in the Holy Land as early as 1860, when the Kaiserswerth Deaconesses established themselves in Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter the _Jerusalems-Verein_ began work in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and about this same time, 1869, Lutheran missionaries calling themselves Templars settled near Jaffa. Under William II additional impetus was given to German religious activities in the Near East. The _Jerusalems-Verein_, which was taken under the special patronage of the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, supported a Lutheran clergyman in Jerusalem and was responsible for the erection in the Holy City of the Church of the Redeemer. This same society rapidly spread its activities throughout all of Palestine, and in 1910 it dedicated the famous Kaiserin Auguste Victoria _Stiftung_,[22] erected on the Mount of Olives by the Hohenzollern family at a cost in excess of half a million dollars. The Evangelical Union, organized in 1896, established a large orphanage in Jerusalem, together with schools and related institutions, and proved to be a very useful auxiliary to the work of the Deaconesses in maintaining schools, dispensaries, and hospitals. Also in 1896 there was founded the _Deutsche Orient Mission_, which rendered its services particularly in Cilicia, and which kept up the interest of its supporters at home by the publication in Berlin of a monthly periodical, _Der Christliche Orient_. It was estimated that, during the early years of the twentieth century, the German Protestant societies maintained in Turkey-in-Asia about 450 missionaries and several hundred native assistants at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. By 1910 the Germans occupied a conspicuous position in evangelical missions in the Near East.[23]