Palestine in the Victorian Age: Colonial Encounters in the Holy Land 9780755643127, 9780755643134, 9780755643165, 9780755643141

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
Chapter 1 ‘Holy Land on the brain’: Introduction
Chapter 2 ‘The feelings of a Christian traveller’: Edward Robinson and the birth of Biblical Palestine
Chapter 3 ‘A Jerusalem of their own’: Victorian travellers in a holy city
Chapter 4 ‘Not precisely a Jewish institution’: The farm of Kerem Avraham
Chapter 5 ‘Down with the bell!’: The Nablus uprising of 1856
Chapter 6 ‘Prince of the Samaritans’: The unlikely story of Ya‘qub al-Shalabi
Chapter 7 ‘A firm hand upon the Arabs’: Laurence Oliphant’s blueprint for colonization
Chapter 8 ‘Palestine is thus brought home to England’: Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

PALESTINE IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

Travellers on the River Jordan, Palestine, 19th century, published by Strohmeyer & Wyman. Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ppmsca-10699).

PALESTINE IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

Colonial Encounters in the Holy Land

Gabriel Polley

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Gabriel Polley, 2022 Gabriel Polley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. viii–ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image by Louis Guerri (© Swim Ink 2 LLC/Corbis via Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-7556-4312-7 PB: 978-0-7556-4313-4 ePDF: 978-0-7556-4314-1 eBook: 978-0-7556-4315-8 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to Nadine, and her people, from Gaza to Shaykh Jarah

vi

CONTENTS Acknowledgementsviii Note on transliteration x C ­ hapter 1

‘HOLY LAND ON THE BRAIN’: INTRODUCTION

1

C ­ hapter 2

‘THE FEELINGS OF A CHRISTIAN TRAVELLER’: EDWARD ROBINSON AND THE BIRTH OF BIBLICAL PALESTINE

19

C ­­ hapter 3

‘A JERUSALEM OF THEIR OWN’: VICTORIAN TRAVELLERS IN A HOLY CITY

51

C ­ hapter 4

‘NOT PRECISELY A JEWISH INSTITUTION’: THE FARM OF KEREM AVRAHAM

C ­ hapter 5

‘DOWN WITH THE BELL!’: THE NABLUS UPRISING OF 1856

81 109

C ­ hapter 6

‘PRINCE OF THE SAMARITANS’: THE UNLIKELY STORY OF YA‘QUB AL-SHALABI

133

C ­ hapter 7

‘A FIRM HAND UPON THE ARABS’: LAURENCE OLIPHANT’S BLUEPRINT FOR COLONIZATION

C ­ hapter 8

‘PALESTINE IS THUS BROUGHT HOME TO ENGLAND’: CONCLUSION

157 189

Notes195 Bibliography229 Index246

­ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would never have been written without the assistance and support of many colleagues, friends and inspirations. I must begin by naming Ilan Pappe and Nadia Naser-Najjab. To them goes the credit for making the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter without a doubt one of the world’s leading locations for academically rigorous and politically engaged research on Palestine. Their guidance profoundly shaped my historical interests and doctoral research. Nadia and Ilan are exemplary models of what it means to bear the heavy responsibility of being scholars of Palestine’s tragic and heroic past, fragmented present and – thanks to the efforts of people like them – brighter future. A thousand thanks. An enormous debt of gratitude is owed to my editor at I. B. Tauris, Rory Gormley. Without his support for this book, his advocacy for it within Bloomsbury, and many hours of patient work from his first perusal of my initial proposal until the pages came off the press, Palestine in the Victorian Age would have remained merely the semi-coherent ramblings of a doctoral thesis. Thank you, Rory. My gratitude also to everyone else at Bloomsbury who worked with me, especially Yasmin Garcha; to Vishnu Muruganandham and Deepu Raghuthaman at Integra; and all who have helped to produce this book. Next deserving of mention are my many friends and colleagues at Exeter between 2016 and 2020, particularly but not only within the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, who turned a small, sleepy city in Devon into such an intellectually stimulating place to live and study. Over innumerable coffees in the Forum, lunches in the IAIS common room and – it must be said – pints in the Ram, discussions with the below-named individuals left an important mark on my lines of thought as I researched what would become this book. Many of those who were PhD students alongside me have already gone on to change for the better the way the world perceives the South-West Asia and North Africa region, and I have no doubt will go on to many more outstanding achievements. All of the following more than deserve my thanks for their friendship, support and inspiration. This list includes, though is far from limited to: Yunus Abakay, Shenah Abdullah, Dania Aburass, Mohammad Affan, Zubir Ahmed, Hussein AlAhmad, Clara Akiki, Aliya Ali, Asha Roda Ali, Arthur Dart, Francesco Amoruso, Nathan Anderson, Aliyah Arafeh, Bryar Bajalan, Claire Beaugrand, Christopher Burnham, Chris Burridge-Barney, Fred Breese, Joanne Cornish, Emma de Saram, Ildem Esin, Leah Fawaz, Irene Fernandez-Molina, Lara Fricke, William Gallois, Manami Goto, Niklas Haller, Ayat Hamdan, Kanwal Hameed, Allan Hassanian, Gertjan Hoetjes, Yara Hawari, Mishaal Javed, Mohammad Kareem, Charlotte Kelsted, Danyah Jaber, Nora Jaber, Layan Kayed, Shayna Lewis, Colter Louwerse, Alia Manshi, Jihad Mashamoun,

­Acknowledgement

ix

Rory McGuigan, Abdulla Moaswes, Carys Morgan, Katie Natanel, Cagkan Ozturk, Hannah Parsons, Ross Porter, Monica Ronchi, Roba Salibi, Shluva Sama, Malaka Shwaikh, Ross Tayler, Amira Toureche, Silvia Truini and Marc Valeri. Thanks are also due to members of the Palestine studies community elsewhere, both well-established and up-and-coming scholars, who have given me their support and assistance in various ways: Majed Abusalama, Shahd Abusalama, Sai Englert, Sarah Irving, Nur Masalha, Roberto Mazza, Falestin Naili, Issam Nassar, Zain Al Sharaf Wahbeh and the staff of Jerusalem Quarterly and judging panel of the 2021 round of the Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem. To this list also belong the names of the first anonymous reviewers of this book, without whose important insights Palestine in the Victorian Age would be a much poorer work. Many more dear friends have contributed to my journey from the very start of my fascination with Palestine to becoming the author of a scholarly work on the country. I must begin by paying tribute to Batool Al Akhras and Mohammad Alramahi, whose eye-opening presentations  – and delicious vegetarian maqluba – on the clifftops of Pembrokeshire all those years ago, first kindled the spark of interest in Palestine within me which has since grown to an all-consuming fire. Thank you too to my old comrades who first brought the Palestinian reality to my awareness. Hanan Ramahi, by offering me the opportunity of a lifetime at the American School of Palestine, did as much as anyone in setting me on this path, and continued by providing me with a most valuable reference for Exeter, as did the indomitable Sa’d Nimer of Birzeit University. Among the many beautiful friends who have given me their support, I must name Mostafa Abdelmeguid, and Fatima Niazy, Joshua Allen, Aleksandra Brokman, Hannah Carpendale, Anna Clayton, Zainah El-Haroun, Jane Howarth, Tom Hunt, Farah Koutteineh, Hannah Kenny, Helen Mallett, Julia Mallett, Katie Marsden, Omar Mofeed, Tony Moore, Rob and Cathy Robinson, Craig Rye, Kareem Samara, Marylise Schmid, Ashlie Simpson and Phoebe Taylor. The team at Makan Rights, in particular Salwa Abu-warda, Sarona Bedwan, Tamara Ben-Halim and Hussein Khalidi, have been nothing short of phenomenal in providing me with their unstinting support and opportunities to get involved in their wonderful work. Friendship and appreciation are due to my colleagues at Strategic Agenda. I must also pay tribute to all my friends in Ramallah, including many of my former students and of course the Aranki family Hanan, Issa, Manar and Sami, and in Amman, especially Abdullah Kisswane and Jannette Thalji. This book is for all of you. Grace, Ian and Julie Clark – so much is owed to you, and I will never be able to thank you enough for always being there for me. Every one of these pages is inscribed with my heartfelt appreciation for you. And last on this list, but first in importance, I must name the great women who have been behind me every step of the way, Mia Polley and Nadine Aranki. Your unstinting support and belief in me, at times when I did not always have belief in myself, and your love, have meant everything.

­NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION In transliterating Arabic words, I have adhered to the International Journal of Middle East Studies transliteration system, excluding placenames which have a common English spelling, such as Bethlehem and Jaffa. Proper nouns are transliterated with full diacritical marks on their first appearance, and without diacritics (but otherwise according to the IJMES spelling) thereafter for the purpose of readability. Italicized common nouns appear with diacritics throughout.

­Chapter 1 ‘HO LY L A N D O N T H E B R A I N ’ : I N T R O D U C T IO N

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of British travellers entered a Palestinian village. The village is unnamed in the travellers’ account of the incident, described only as ‘some distance off the usual route’, but it is not difficult to picture the sandstone, single-storey houses of vernacular Palestinian architecture, perhaps clinging to a terraced hillside strewn with olive trees in the Nablus region, or nestled among the wheatfields of a Galilee plain. Nor is it difficult to imagine the travellers: Victorian moustaches and sideburns immaculately trimmed and waxed, though slightly wilting in the Mediterranean sun; well dressed, but for Covent Garden rather than Palestine; sitting on dusty, tired horses. Alongside, atop a donkey, their local English-speaking guide, known in travellers’ parlance as a dragoman (from turjumān, Arabic: translator). Bringing up the rear, a battalion of local servants, hired Palestinian men with hungry mouths to feed back in their home villages, now exhausted after walking all day leading mules laden with canvas tents, dismantled beds, chests of provisions.1 And watching the progress of this strange army through their homeland, a group of curious filaḥīn (Arabic: peasants, farmers). The exchange that followed on this particular occasion between these colliding worlds was conducted with apparent civility, and yet today seems extraordinary for its brazen expression of colonial intent. According to the travellers’ later report, ‘we were surrounded with villagers who asked the dragoman why we had come. “To take away your country!” was the answer, and it was met with peals of laughter’.2 Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and would remain so until late in the First World War; there was most of two decades to go before other Englishmen, soldiers rather than tourists, would arrive to ‘take away’ Palestine. Yet long before this throwaway and yet deeply revealing remark had elicited ‘peals of laughter’ – bemused, polite, sarcastic, we do not know – from the indigenous locals, Western travellers in Palestine had already grown used to playing the role of the colonizer. As this book aims to show, the Palestinian people’s first experience of colonialism did not begin in 1967 with the Naksa (Arabic: setback) of the Six-Day War, leading to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and Syria’s Golan Heights. It did not begin in 1948 with the Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe), the creation of the

2

Palestine in the Victorian Age

State of Israel and the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Arab refugees from their homes. Nor did it begin with the Balfour Declaration in 1917, followed by a three-decade-long British occupation. The colonization of Palestine has its roots deep in the nineteenth century, with Western Evangelicals who first cast the Holy Land as an area to be possessed by empire, then began to devise schemes for its settler colonization, and finally started to implement them. This is one story that Palestine in the Victorian Age tells; but this book also tells some of the story of the Palestinians of the day who, realizing the West’s fascination with their ancestral land, started to react against, or accommodate themselves to, what was known as the Peaceful Crusade.

Contextualizing the Peaceful Crusade This book focuses primarily on the fifty years from 1838, when the American Bible scholar Edward Robinson and the Protestant missionary Eli Smith made their fateful journey around Palestine, to 1888, when Laurence Oliphant died after several years of assisting early Zionist settlers and planning the colonization of Palestine. References to ‘Western travellers’ below should be understood to refer specifically to mainly British, but also American, travellers who visited Palestine. In no small part because of the huge influence of Robinson – in many respects an ‘old’ Englishman transplanted to New England  – over all the English-speaking Holy Land travellers who followed him, much was shared in American and British Evangelicals’ considerations of Palestine. During the five decades from 1838 to 1888, Western travellers played a decisive role in Palestine’s history which became clear in the tragic events of later years. To understand how and why, it is necessary to look back a little further. Palestine has attracted European travel since the early centuries of Christianity, to say nothing of Jewish and Muslim pilgrimage. In the Christian tradition, the faithful have been drawn to make pilgrimages not only for a tangible experience of the Holy Land, but as an act of worship in itself, and of veneration of Palestine’s sacred sites. For as long as pilgrimage has taken place, so has the writing of pilgrimage accounts: as Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés note of the earliest surviving narratives from the fourth century, for these pilgrims Palestine was ‘only meaningful in relation to scripture, and its landmarks acquire their significance by being interpreted in the light of the Biblical text’.3 European travellers visiting Palestine under the Byzantines, the early Arab rulers and other Muslim dynasties culminating after 1516 in the Ottoman Empire, contributed to a large store of Western knowledge on the Holy Land, knowledge which the Victorians would ultimately decide was inadequate for their age’s demands of accurate mapping, precise measurements, and scientific understanding. Meanwhile, it should be remembered, the enormous number of Muslim, Jewish and non-Protestant Christian travellers to Palestine over 2000 years, discussed only cursorily in these pages, left behind their own texts which in a multiplicity of ways defy the Orientalism of the Western Protestant canon.4

Introduction

3

Other than the Crusaders, who turned pilgrimage into violent conquest until they were ousted from the port of ‘Akka in 1291, European pilgrims had a transitory impact on Palestine: they travelled to transform their souls, not the land. But a fundamental shift in Europe’s cultural relationship with Palestine started in the sixteenth century, with the Protestant Reformation. The progenitor of Protestantism, Martin Luther, strongly discouraged pilgrimages, describing them as ‘works of little merit’ and even as ‘evil and seductive’. While Protestants continued to visit Palestine, they approached holy sites as points of local interest rather than as markers of the divine.5 The Reformation also initiated a new way of reading the Bible: prophecies once taken to contain metaphorical or spiritual truths, were now reread in a literalist sense. In seventeenth-century Puritan England, undergoing what Regina Sharif identifies as a ‘Hebraic revival’, the doctrine of the Jewish Restoration was first articulated – the belief that, for the Bible’s prophecies to be fulfilled, the entirety of the Jewish people had to be ‘restored’ or ‘returned’ to Palestine, and embrace Christianity. In the 1650s, Britain’s Puritan, republican ruler Oliver Cromwell reacted favourably to the readmission of Jews into England after their expulsion in 1290, partially in order for their ‘ingathering’ before they ‘returned’ to Palestine.6 This era thus saw the origin of what is now known as Christian Zionism; while today most associated with American Evangelicals, it was in England that the ideology had its genesis and first achieved a level of social prominence in the next centuries.7 Teleological narratives of Zionism’s prehistory have presented protoZionist ideas as widely accepted among early Protestant theologians; Nabil Matar, however, has shown that significant debate existed and there was no consensus on these ideas.8 Nevertheless, seventeenth-century Britain formed a powerful base of Restorationism, exporting the idea to America with the first Puritan settlers. From this period onwards and throughout the nineteenth century, in Britain at least, this Christian proto-Zionism was much more widespread than were Jewish voices espousing the Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine. The imminent relocation of the world’s Jews to the Eastern Mediterranean neither figured highly as a point of Jewish religious doctrine, nor as an idea which could gain much headway as British Jews fought hard to achieve their political and civil rights in the face of the remains of Medieval anti-Semitic discrimination still extant in Victorian Britain. As Susan Meyer succinctly notes, ‘It was the English gentiles in this period, not the Jews, who were fascinated with the idea of the Jewish return’.9 Interest in Palestine waned during the eighteenth century, with the ebb of the Puritan impulse and the flow of the more sceptical Enlightenment. However, Palestine emerged explosively onto the stage with Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Egypt and Greater Syria in 1798–9. As Edward W. Said has noted, this event brought the Eastern Mediterranean to the forefront of European attentions and imaginations, and ‘set [processes] in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives’.10 Napoleon attempted to rouse the support of Jews by pledging to ‘to give them the Holy Land’ and ‘to restore ancient Jerusalem to its pristine splendour’ (emphasis in original). His declaration aroused little interest from the Jewish community in Palestine itself.11 While the British fleet helped drive Napoleon out and save the Ottoman

4

Palestine in the Victorian Age

Empire (and secure British dominance over India), Britain soon became closely associated with Restorationist schemes, driven not by any significant Jewish demand, but by Biblical belief and imperial instinct. In the nineteenth century, this formed part of a long European imperial struggle. The ‘Eastern Question’ opened by Napoleon’s attack on the Eastern Mediterranean saw Britain, France and Russia vie for influence over the ‘sick man of Europe’ – the Ottoman Empire, widely predicted to be approaching a total collapse that would leave the victors to pick over the spoils. In Palestine, these powers (in addition to Prussia) engaged in the ‘Peaceful Crusade’, which Alexander Schölch summarizes as ‘the gradual “reconquest” of the “Holy Land” for Christianity through religious, cultural, and philanthropical penetration’, especially through consular and missionary activity.12 This mission was given a boost when, in 1831, the upstart governor of Egypt Muḥammad ‘Ali and his son Ibrāhīm seized control of Egypt and Greater Syria. Their regime was marked by a greater openness to European influence, which Britain seized advantage of by appointing a consul to Jerusalem and building the first Protestant church in the city (and the entire Middle East), Christ Church, finally consecrated in 1849. While Britain again helped to secure Ottoman integrity by bringing the Egyptian occupation to an end with military and naval action in 1840–1, Britain was a clear beneficiary of the Egyptian interlude. Under the system of diplomatic ‘protection’ granted by the Ottomans in the Capitulations beginning in the eighteenth century, European powers nominally worked for the rights and well-being of non-Muslim minorities to gain greater influence for themselves. France and Russia were recognized protectors of Catholic and Orthodox Christians respectively. In the nineteenth century, Britain sought to be the protector of the very small number of Protestants and of the larger (though still a small urban minority) community of Jews. In many respects, the Anglican Church bore primary responsibility for defining the Anglo-Saxon world’s intervention in the Holy Land. Inflected with Restorationist enthusiasm, Anglican missionary organizations such as the Church Missionary Society and the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews or London Jews’ Society (founded in 1799 and 1809 respectively) set about trying to make converts to Protestantism among Jews, using Christ Church as their base. This project was an abject failure, and ceased to be missionaries’ priority after the 1840s; Isabel Burton, wife of the infamous Orientalist and British consul in Damascus Richard Burton, wryly noted of Evangelical missionaries that ‘it appears more likely the Jews will convert them’ than the other way around.13 Yet religious beliefs dovetailed with imperial realpolitik in the outlook of Henry John Temple or Lord Palmerston, mid-nineteenth century foreign secretary and later prime minister, who under the influence of Britain’s leading Christian Zionist Lord Shaftesbury (discussed more extensively in Chapter 4 of this work), began to turn Jewish Restorationism into British foreign policy regarding Palestine.14 The activities of Britain’s midnineteenth-century consul in Jerusalem, James Finn, reveal how this operated on the ground in Palestine, and are explored below in Chapter 4. As I use the term in this book, the Peaceful Crusade was not only a matter of official foreign policy, consular machinations and missionary efforts. It was also

Introduction

5

a vast cultural project in which every Victorian traveller to Palestine played a part. Eliot Warburton, an Irish traveller and writer who visited Palestine in 1845, perfectly summarized the British manifestation of the Peaceful Crusade, in which religious devotion met thinly veiled imperial expansionism: ­ is Holy Land, although no longer an object of bloody ambition, has lost none Th of the deep interest with which it once inspired the most vehement crusader. The first impressions of childhood are connected with that scenery; and infant lips in England’s prosperous homes pronounce with reverence the names of forlorn Jerusalem and Galilee. We still experience a sort of patriotism for Palestine, and feel that the scenes enacted here were performed for the whole family of man. Narrow as are its boundaries, we have all a share in the possession: what a church is to a city, Palestine is to the world.15

Couched in universalism, the true meaning of Warburton’s words was highly Eurocentric in their implications: ‘the whole family of man’ really meant the Christian West, and if ‘all’ had a ‘share in the possession’, where did that leave the indigenous people who called Palestine their home? *** Enabling the start of a wave of travel to Palestine, the Egyptian occupation improved conditions for Western travellers, and transportation networks eased journeys to the Eastern Mediterranean. After visiting Palestine and Egypt by steamship in 1844, English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray asserted that reaching the Eastern Mediterranean was ‘as easy as a journey to Paris or to Baden’.16 Thackeray’s words, no doubt appreciated by the steamship’s operators the Peninsula and Oriental Company who sponsored his travel account, were an exaggeration, particularly for the working class for whom – unless they accompanied wealthy employers as servants – Palestine was almost as distant as the moon. But after the late 1860s, the upper-middle and upper classes could be pampered during luxury guided tours to the Holy Land, with the beginning of modern tourism in the region. The most well-known tour provider was Baptist preacher Thomas Cook; from the first of his ‘Eastern Tours’ in 1868 to 1882, Cook brought around 4,200 Western (mainly British and American) tourists to Palestine.17 Cook and his staff arranged everything on behalf of their customers, including ‘all arrangements respecting contracts with dragomans, tents, and equipments, backsheesh, Bedouin escorts for unsafe districts, charges for visiting mosques and sacred places’; all the travellers had to do was follow an itinerary ranging from “A Ten Days’ Tour in Judea”, to “The Beaten Track of a Thirty Days” Tour in Palestine’.18 Typical Victorian travel in Palestine can be gauged from the 1876 Cook’s Tourists’ Handbook to Palestine and Syria, one of many guidebooks to the region published in Europe during the latter nineteenth century. ‘Travellers in Palestine pass through the land in the saddle, and by night sleep in the tent’, the volume began. Such tents were no mere canvas coverings. The Handbook’s author understatedly

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Palestine in the Victorian Age

described the standard traveller’s tent as ‘well furnished’, its features including ‘an inner lining of chintz’, ‘Turkey [sic] or Persian carpets’, ‘neat iron bedsteads, with the cleanest of clean linen, and good comfortable beds’ and ‘a table, with washingbasin’. Victorian voyagers did not need to overexert themselves while journeying through Palestine. ‘An hour and a half to two hours is generally allowed for luncheon time’, the Handbook author stated, ‘which can also include a “nap” if needed’.19 The greatest strain was on their wallets. In the early twentieth century one traveller paid £118 to join a Cook’s tour group, over £9,000 or almost $13,000 in current values, a year’s salary for a skilled tradesman at the time. There was a smaller number of more intrepid travellers for whom such touristic charades were not enough. To quote the subtitle of a text by a traveller who features throughout this book, these individuals saw Palestine as a place for ‘discovery and adventure’.20 They took it upon themselves to explore, to map, to survey, not only to illuminate the Bible, but also – whether consciously or not – for a more imperial purpose. This mission began in the early nineteenth century with the European Orientalists Ulrich Jasper Seetzen and Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (the Western ‘discoverer’ of Petra), continued in 1838 with Robinson and Smith, and reached its height with the Palestine Exploration Fund, established in Britain in 1865. Like all European ‘explorers’, these travellers ‘discovered’ regions already inhabited by an indigenous population who knew their homeland intimately. While some travellers relied upon and credited local knowledge, like Robinson as discussed in Chapter  2, others continued to present Palestine as a virtual terra incognita. The Scottish adventurer John MacGregor, who paddled down the River Jordan in 1865, asserted that he had ‘enter[ed] on territory absolutely unknown and yet world-wide in its interest, where new discoveries are possible and likely, but only to the traveller journeying alone in a canoe’.21 It mattered not that the terrain of the Jordan (in this example) was far from ‘absolutely unknown’ to those who lived their lives on its banks: only the knowledge on Palestine collected and generated by Westerners was held valid. Both tourists and ‘explorers’ contributed to a whole genre of Holy Land travel literature. Writing travel narratives became as integral a ritual as disembarking from a ship amidst ‘Oriental chaos’ at the port of Jaffa, making snide comments at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, being immersed in the buoyant waters of the Dead Sea – experiences shaped for each traveller by others’ accounts read before their own journeys. ‘The Holy Land is in no small danger of becoming the best (or worst) described country in the world’, a reviewer of Oliphant’s Haifa wrote in 1887. ‘What with explorers and tourists’, they complained, ‘scientific disputants of traditional topography, and “personally conducted” excursionists, there is no want of authors ready and anxious to give the public the perhaps questionable benefit of their ideas upon the past, present, and future history of the most interesting locality of the universe’.22 Simultaneously ‘best described’ and ‘worst described’, Palestine was the subject of a vast amount of writing, much of it of dubious quality, superfluous and expressing very little that had not been said before by many others – as Said, quoting Walter Benjamin, notes of Orientalist writing, there was little ‘overtaxing of the productive person in the name of … the

Introduction

7

principle of “creativity”’.23 Estimates indicate around 5,000 works on Palestine and Egypt were published in Europe from 1800 to 1877, with almost another thousand in English alone from 1877 to 1914; Eitan Bar-Yosef asserts that ‘the number of titles dealing with Palestine was probably much higher’. Bar-Yosef argues for a limited dissemination of these works, reflecting their small print runs and high prices – like Palestine travel, most Palestine books were only accessible to the wellto-do.24 Yet some of this literature did sell extremely well: in America, similarly afflicted by what Hilton Obenzinger calls ‘Holy Land mania’, only Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold Palestine travel narratives in the nineteenth century.25 The fascination which drew large numbers of Victorians to Palestine was a specifically Protestant phenomenon. While this included members of nonconformist sects and a wide range of Evangelical denominations in North America, Palestine had a particular resonance with Evangelical Christians from the Low Church, or Evangelical wing, of the Church of England or Anglican Church. The Evangelical Revival, beginning in England in the late eighteenth century, brought about a return of the values and doctrines of the Puritan age, including the Old Testament obsessions.26 It was to illustrate Jewish history for themselves, and to provide ideas about a possible Jewish future, that Evangelicals flocked to Palestine. Dominant attitudes permeated throughout Evangelical society, as churchmen ranging from metropolitan bishops to village vicars brought back their ideological impressions on Palestine for their own flocks and larger circles of the reading public. The condition of ‘Holy Land on the brain’, identified by the Catholic Isabel Burton, afflicted Evangelical Protestants of various stripes  – including Low Church Anglicans  – far more than it did Catholics.27 Francis Wegg-Prosser, a leading Catholic in Victorian Britain, indicated a general picture when he complained that among Palestine travellers ‘there were Anglican clergymen; there were Methodist missionaries; there were the inevitable American tourists; also a few Catholics from the Continent […] from England none’.28 Voices which were more marginal in Victorian society, not only Catholics but also Jews and early converts to Islam, had a symbolic relationship with and views of Palestine which differed from the Evangelical consensus in significant ways only touched upon lightly in this book. Protestant travellers viewed the Holy Land, as prominent Anglican clergyman and leading British Palestine traveller Arthur Penrhyn Stanley put it, ‘through the eyes of the Bible’.29 The foot soldiers of the Peaceful Crusade literally moved through the landscape with ‘a guide-book in one hand and a Bible in the other’.30 Even the authors of what Obenzinger calls ‘“infidel” books’, such as the very successful 1844 Eothen by the English historian Alexander Kinglake, and the American humourist Mark Twain’s 1869 The Innocents Abroad, evinced much the same attitudes as their contemporaries, which Lorenzo Kamel, drawing of course on Said, identifies as ‘Biblical Orientalism’.31 This ideology viewed Palestine as slumbering in a deep stasis, although uniquely among all ‘the Orient’, a continuous judgement was made against the living Palestine by comparison with a mental image of the long dead Holy Land of antiquity. Although Islam had for centuries been the religion of most of Palestine’s indigenous people, the faith was dismissed as a temporary occupier

8

Palestine in the Victorian Age

of a Judeo-Christian space. Unable to speak Arabic, and viewing non-Europeans as inferior, most Westerners considered the average inhabitant of Palestine, as one traveller described a farmer they briefly encountered near ‘Akka, as akin to ‘some stealthy, dumb being from another planet’.32 As Chapters  2 and 3 will explore in more detail, there were also key factors dividing Victorian Evangelicals from Christians of other denominations, pilgrims and indigenous Christians they encountered in Palestine. Evangelicals were scornful of the traditions of Holy Land pilgrimage practiced over centuries. Kinglake wrote of these Victorians that ‘many Protestants are wont to treat these traditions contemptuously, and those who distinguish themselves from their brethren by the appellation of “Bible Christians” are almost fierce in their denunciation of these supposed errors’.33 Rather than the sacred sites of the New Testament, Protestant travellers were drawn to anything and everything that seemed to them reminiscent of the ancient Hebrews. This led them to thoughts of what they considered the future of the Jewish people, and more concrete plans for settler colonization.34 The most well-known cultural manifestation of this attitude was George Eliot’s 1876 Daniel Deronda, in which the novel’s eponymous Jewish hero eventually emigrates to Palestine.35 Eliot’s fictional character followed where many flesh-and-blood Victorians had led. *** In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European Peaceful Crusade was paralleled by another movement on a much more modest scale: the settler colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement. During the First ‘Aliya (Hebrew: rising, referring to waves of Zionist immigration) between 1881 and 1903, around 5,000 Jews emigrated primarily from Eastern Europe, to work in the agricultural settlements dotted around Palestine founded in these years. Before Zionism coalesced into a political movement around the turn of the twentieth century, this movement of people was unplanned and indefinite in purpose. While anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe and religious sentiments were both factors in the phenomenon, far greater numbers of Jewish refugees went elsewhere than Palestine, particularly America.36 From 1903 to 1914, in the Second ‘Aliya, around 3,000 more ideologically driven settlers arrived.37 During this whole period, the Old Yishuv (Hebrew: community, referring to Jews living in Palestine) of Jews living a traditional, non-settler-colonial lifestyle in cities holy to Judaism with a religiously mixed population, vastly outnumbered the New Yishuv of Zionist settlers; the total number of Jews remained a small minority in Palestine’s population, by comparison with the Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian majority. With the settlers in Palestine facing some limitations on their plans imposed by the Ottomans, the Zionist movement’s leadership turned to Britain as an ally in the early twentieth century. After abortive plans for Zionist settlement at al-‘Arīsh in the British-occupied Sinai Peninsula, and in the East African British Protectorate of Uganda, Zionist leaders concluded that large-scale settlement could only

Introduction

9

occur in a Palestine removed from Ottoman control, and under the patronage of an imperial power sympathetic to their aims.38 Concerted lobbying by the likes of the Zionist leader (later Israel’s first president) Chaim Weizmann, deeply desirous of British protection for the Jewish settler-colonial enterprise, would eventually lead to the British government’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration on 2 November 1917, announcing that ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’.39 ‘By the beginning of the twentieth century’, Schölch notes, ‘the idea of the “Peaceful Crusade” had faded’, though Western ‘nationalistic and imperialistic enthusiasm’ towards Palestine was growing.40 Evangelicals continued to flock to Palestine, one writing in 1912 of Jaffa that ‘no less than 8000 tourists land at this port during the very brief Palestine season’, in addition to 20,000 ‘pilgrims’.41 Yet with the outbreak of the First World War pitting Britain and its allies against the Central Powers including the Ottoman Empire, everything ‘peaceful’ about the Peaceful Crusade ceased. The British military made a concerted attempt to drive out the Ottomans and occupy Palestine during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, finally obtaining Jerusalem’s surrender on 9  December 1917. The ensuing three decades of British occupation, formalized as the British Mandate for Palestine in 1923, are beyond the scope of this book, but should be borne in mind while reading it. The disastrous history and results of the Mandate bear out Tom Segev’s assertion that ‘the British kept their promise to the Zionists. They opened up the country to mass Jewish immigration; by 1948, the Jewish population had increased by more than tenfold. […] Contrary to the widely held belief of Britain’s pro-Arabism, British actions considerably favoured the Zionist enterprise’.42

Late Ottoman Palestine, Christian Zionism and the academic debate The nineteenth century in Palestine has been a historiographical battlefield. The state of the region preceding the arrival of the early Zionist settlers has become a highly politicized subject. Persistent myths have presented nineteenth-century Palestine as particularly – uniquely more so than any other part of the surrounding region, or comparable patch of the planet  – underdeveloped, underpopulated and ripe for a European colonial endeavour. What Bar-Yosef identifies as ‘the “Historical Geography” school of Israeli academia’ that has flourished since the 1970s, has produced research ‘More descriptive than analytical […] and shaped by an explicitly Zionist–Eurocentric agenda’, and has ‘seldom taken serious notice of the recent interest in the discursive constructions of the Orient’.43 As an example, Yehoshua Ben-Arieh’s The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century – the title itself betraying the work’s Eurocentric outlook – begins with a passage which could almost have been lifted from a nineteenth-century text: At the beginning of the nineteenth century Palestine was but a derelict province of the decaying Ottoman Empire. […] The country was badly governed, having

10

Palestine in the Victorian Age no political importance of its own, its economy was primitive, the sparse, ethnically mixed population subsisted on a dismally low standard; the few towns were small and miserable; the roads few and neglected. In short, Palestine was but a sad backwater of a crumbling empire – a far cry from the fertile, thriving land it had been in ancient times.44

Partially in response to Zionist narratives of Palestine’s nineteenth century, Beshara Doumani has called for a project of ‘writing Palestinians into history’. In ‘Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine’, he notes that it was nineteenth-century European travellers who began the discursive erasure of Palestinians. ‘The amazing ability to discover the land without discovering the people’, he writes of the selectivity of Western travellers’ gaze, ‘dovetailed neatly with early Zionist visions’.45 Doumani has made Palestinian indigenous society the centre of attention, showing how Western involvement was only one among many forces shaping a complex environment.46 The history of Christian Zionism has also generated a profusion of literature. Pro-Zionist accounts have highlighted the role of Anglican Protestantism in England in laying the groundwork over centuries for Britain’s twentieth-century support for Jewish settler colonialism in Palestine.47 Works like Sharif ’s NonJewish Zionism and Nur Masalha’s The Bible and Zionism present an alternative portrait of Christian Zionism, highly critical of the ideology.48 Of the British figures who devised colonization plans, Sharif writes ‘they were much more than mere forerunners of a future movement. They were already true Zionists in the same sense as [later Zionist leaders] Weizmann or [Theodor] Herzl or [Max] Nordau’.49 One of the most illuminating research on Zionism and the role of Victorian Evangelicals in forming it, is one of the earliest published works on the subject. Nahum Sokolow’s History of Zionism 1600–1918, published in 1919, accords pride of place to some of the British figures discussed in this book. Born in 1859 in present-day Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), Sokolow translated Oliphant’s The Land of Gilead into Hebrew, acting as a direct link between British travellers and the Zionist movement. During the First World War he moved to Britain and worked closely with Weizmann, lobbying for the Balfour Declaration. Passages in History of Zionism clearly shows Sokolow’s Anglophile orientation: No people has been so devotedly attached to the Bible as the English, and the effect may be traced in all the great movements of English history. The Bible has dominated the whole domestic and political life of the English people for some centuries, and has provided the basis of the English conception of personal and political liberty.50

Completed shortly after the commencement of the British occupation of Palestine, and before Sokolow’s participation in the Zionist movement’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the pro-British tone of History of Zionism has an unambiguous political purpose. Yet it also provides insight into how leading

Introduction

11

Zionists (Sokolow served as president of the World Zionist Organisation from 1931 to 1935) acknowledged the debt they owed to the Victorians. More recently there has been strong critical scholarship on Western travellers’ views of Palestine. Bar-Yosef ’s The Holy Land in English Culture critically engages with Said’s Orientalism. Bar-Yosef asserts that ‘although he dwells extensively on the nature of Zionist colonialism […] Said very rarely stops to think about the distinct nature of Western interests in the Holy Land, which might distinguish it from other Orientalist encounters’, and argues that ‘English stakes in the Holy Land were shaped by traditions and articulated in ways which cannot be accommodated by Said’s model of Orientalism’.51 Bar-Yosef explores the myriad ways Palestine featured in the English psyche, producing a work of considerable depth. Nevertheless, in his desire to challenge ‘the conventional Zionist interpretation’ of a steady growth of sentiment favouring Palestine’s colonization, he characterizes overly crudely the assumption […] that nineteenth-century ideas about the restoration of the Jews to Palestine somehow paved the way towards Britain’s wartime policy. Consequently, accounts of Christian Zionism often read like a dot-to-dot drawing, connecting Lord Shaftesbury, George Eliot, and Laurence Oliphant with some of their lesser-known contemporaries, only to reveal, in due course, a neatly sketched draft of the Balfour Declaration.52

In this work, I alternately propose that the encounter between Western travellers and Palestine – an encounter Bar-Yosef does not extensively explore – did create a body of thought and practice presaging not only Britain’s colonial rule, but also Israel’s actions to the present. Issam Nassar’s European Portrayals of Jerusalem touches upon the colonial imaginations surrounding Palestine through travellers’ written accounts and photography of that city. He writes that the importance of travel texts lies […] in the fact that they contributed significantly to the construction of certain historical imaginations. By including and highlighting certain historical events, while excluding others, nineteenth century travel writers were actively producing and reproducing certain discourses on Jerusalem. Travel narratives can tell the critical reader quite a bit about their authors and can reveal the reasons why authors chose to leave out certain events related to the history they narrate.53

Valuable contributions on Britain’s historic role in Palestine have also been made by Kamel. In his paper ‘The Impact of “Biblical Orientalism” in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, he identifies the legacy of the nineteenth-century Western Holy Land obsession, arguing that ‘it is necessary to unlearn in order to relearn, to deconstruct in order to reconstruct’, in order to ‘create the conditions for a more respectful coexistence: a coexistence that will pay proper attention to the process through which the local universe

12

Palestine in the Victorian Age

has been essentialized and denied in its continuity’.54 The present work, I hope, will in some small way, through a closer investigation of the colonial activities of the Victorians in Palestine, contribute to this un/relearning, and the ultimate positive results which may be hoped from it.

­Theory and methodology Key to my approach has been the work of Said, especially his seminal Orientalism of 1978, which provides a prism through which the Peaceful Crusade can be at least partially interpreted. Said presents Orientalism as a form of knowledge inseparably linked to power, ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’, inscribed with ‘the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures’.55 Said dates the development of modern Orientalism in Europe, particularly Britain and France, to the impetus of Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. Napoleon’s reliance upon the ‘experts’ who accompanied his campaign opened an era of scholarship’s subservience to imperial projects: [Napoleon’s] plans for Egypt therefore became the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist’s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use; for at the crucial instant when an Orientalist had to decide whether his loyalties and sympathies lay with the Orient or with the conquering West, he always chose the latter, from Napoleon’s time on.56

The world seen through the Orientalist lens (which, Said notes, ‘has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world’ of the West) is one in which ‘there are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power’. Said indicates the use of Orientalism to justify new colonial ventures, arguing that ‘to say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact’.57 This will be seen clearly throughout this book: Victorian travellers planned and predicted a colonial exercise of power in Palestine which would only be actualized, by Britain and then the Zionist movement, in the decades ahead. Said’s ideas represent not an overarching political theory, but rather an investigation into the deeply flawed and inaccurate Western view of the East. One strength of his theoretical model of Orientalism is that it is flexible, can be expanded and modified in its details; he did not present his work as the last word on the subject, but rather as a prompt for us to closely interrogate anything that presents itself as wisdom on the non-European world. It has been left to

Introduction

13

subsequent scholars with the same commitment to what Ella Shohat identifies as ‘adversarial scholarship’ aimed at a ‘decolonisation of the academy’, to follow where Said led.58 *** An additional perspective is contributed by settler-colonial theory, which guides my analysis of the way in which mainly British thought and action in the mid-nineteenth century fed into the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury praxis of Zionism. Zionism is a hotly contested subject, perhaps never more so than in today’s polarized political and academic battles, and one on which readers of this book will hold a range of opinions. Ideologically, Zionism has never been an entirely homogenous movement, beyond the shared goal of building a Jewish society in Palestine. In addition to the well-known division between self-described ‘socialist’ Labour Zionism which dominated Jewish politics in Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel until the 1970s and the right-wing currents which dominate Israel today, there is the older division between Herzl’s political Zionism which echoed nineteenth-century European nationalism and the cultural Zionism of the Hebrew poet Ahad Ha‘am which emphasized Jewish cultural rebirth.59 While it should be borne in mind that such debates, or their precursors, were occurring in the nineteenth century in Central and Eastern Europe, these questions lie beyond the scope of this work. Rather, it centres on the role of non-Jewish Westerners in formulating positions towards the main challenge facing Zionism throughout the movement’s history: the presence of an indigenous Palestinian population on the land, predating and existing throughout the waves of Jewish immigration to the region. As a result, throughout this book I refer to the colonizing dreams and schemes of Victorian travellers, the Zionist movement’s early efforts to settle Jews in Palestine, and finally the State of Israel’s occupation of the entirety of Palestine from 1948 to 1967 and after, as settler-colonial endeavours. To describe Zionism and Israel as settler colonial is not, I believe, to make a strongly political point, but to draw upon a legitimate theoretical perspective bring attention to key aspects of the social and political structure(s) which have existed for decades in Palestine/Israel. The early leadership of the Zionist movement fully recognized that their mission to increase the population of Jews in Palestine from a small minority was to proceed through a process of colonization. The Basel Programme adopted at the first Zionist congress in 1897 listed the first point towards the ‘establish[ment] for the Jewish people [of] a home in Palestine secured by public law’, as ‘The promotion, on suitable lines, of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers’.60 This settler colonization occurred slowly under the Ottomans from the 1880s onwards, much more rapidly under the British, and more rapidly still after 1948, when most of Palestine’s land was left vacant and available to the Jewish population by the flight of Palestinian refugees, subsequently denied the right to return by successive Israeli governments; after 1967, it has also occurred in the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula

14

Palestine in the Victorian Age

until 1982 and the Gaza Strip until 2005. Since, as the late leading scholar of settler colonialism Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘invasion is a structure not an event’, it can also be considered to define current events in Palestine/Israel.61 In a grim illustration of this, as I write in June 2021, around 1,500 residents of the East Jerusalem Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwān shortly face being made homeless, as an Israeli settler organization seeks their eviction and the destruction of their homes to create an archaeological tourist attraction.62 In one of Palestine’s innumerable past-present synergies, many of the future visitors to this ‘Biblical theme park’ on ethnically cleansed ground will undoubtedly be Western Christian Zionists seeking the ‘Holy Land experience’. In brief, to draw from Wolfe’s articulation of settler colonialism, the theoretical paradigm argues that white settlers, in whatever part of the world they have sought to colonize beyond their European homeland, have followed a ‘logic of the elimination of the native’. Wolfe quotes Herzl’s recognition, made in his 1902 Zionist manifesto-novel Altneuland, that ‘I must demolish before I construct’. All instances of settler colonialism, not only Zionism, have thus been presaged on the destruction of a previously existing indigenous society, to create a society for immigrants and their descendants that resembles the Europe from which they departed. With access to land especially for agriculture crucial to the success of the endeavour, settlers have been driven by the need to acquire as much land as possible, consequently minimizing the land under the use and sovereignty of indigenous people. Settler structures have adopted strategies ranging from outright genocide, to dispossession and containment (such as the Native American reservation, the South African Bantustan, or the ‘Area A’ enclaves of the Palestinian Authority), to assimilation, in order to achieve the effective erasure of the indigenous people over much or all of the land. This conflict with the indigenous population gives settler societies many of their defining features.63 In his analysis of the early years of Zionist colonization in Palestine, Gershon Shafir argues that far more than any ideology such as the ‘socialism’ of the Second ‘Aliya, it was the struggle for land between the settlers and Palestinians that defined the practices and aims of Zionism.64 As many scholars have noted, the application of settler-colonial theory to Israel was initially a response to Palestinians’ own narratives of the regime under which they have lived. The settler-colonial frame as an interpretation of the facts of Palestine/Israel has subsequently, in recent decades, grown in academic acceptance everywhere that pursues the disciplines of history, politics and sociology with objectivity and without undue emotive attachment to Israeli nationalism.65 There has, of course, been a fierce pushback from some academic quarters, which has sometimes spilled over into other institutional and even governmental spheres.66 Among the many strengths of settler-colonial theory are the comparisons (inclusive, of course, of differences as well as similarities) it allows to be drawn between different cases of colonization in North America, Africa and Australasia.67 This book, with its historical perspective, aims to show that from Victorian Britain, which organized the colonization of so much of the world, plans for Palestine’s colonization also emanated in a remarkably full form. Victorian Britons devised

Introduction

15

intricate schemes for Jewish settler-colonization in Palestine, began to carry out these plans on a small scale and brought their experiences from the British Empire’s own settler colonies to the aid of the incipient Zionist movement. My argument should not be misinterpreted as a claim that Zionism was first and foremost a Victorian, nonJewish plot, with the movement’s own ideologues reduced to passive reproducers of preordained plans and the settlers to foot soldiers carrying out a vision designed in London. Rather, I argue that the colonial attitudes of the Victorians are indisputably one ingredient among many in Zionism as it evolved from the late nineteenth century onwards. Without ignoring the divergences, I present the parallels between Victorian thought and action in Palestine and later Zionist and Israeli practices, parallels which I believe to be compelling; the reader may draw their own conclusions. *** The following six chapters move chronologically, geographically and thematically through a discussion of Palestine in the Victorian age. I have sought to retell six standalone but interconnected episodes from the Peaceful Crusade, primarily using the written accounts left by Victorians who travelled to Palestine. Excavating through this body of sources requires discernment: the Victorians were practically incapable of expressing any idea or describing any occurrence succinctly, and while the preponderance of Biblical allusions in the Holy Land texts is itself of significance, to plough through four chapters of Biblical discussion of Bethlehem before the traveller describes the town of their present, can be testing of patience.68 Drawing upon texts by a cast of traveller-writers, including some well-known figures of their day and others comparatively obscure, demonstrates how the ideas of the Peaceful Crusade became infused throughout Victorian society. I have dissected these texts with particular attention to their Biblical Orientalist discourse, colonial sentiments and articulation of a settler-colonial future for Palestine. Particularly in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I also draw heavily upon Victorian newspapers to reconstruct stories from the Peaceful Crusade which have attracted very little – or no – prior research. Newspapers represent a massively rich source for discerning the attitudes, concerns and prejudices of the Victorian age. The digitization of vast quantities of national and regional newspapers for today’s scholars opens the door onto a huge store of Western perspectives on Palestine accessed by different, and wider, circles of the public than pricey books of travel and elite literary journals. It is remarkable to see how news of the 1856 Nablus uprising was brought into Victorian parlours and reading rooms with the morning papers, how the Syrian Colonisation Fund’s proto-Zionist appeals filled columns of newsprint, how sectarian debates about Ya‘qūb al-Shalabi gripped the Irish press. It seems unlikely that these hitherto obscure episodes could be reconstructed in such detail and colour using any other source material. In Chapter 2, we begin our journey with the American Bible scholars Robinson and Smith, who with their extensive travels around Palestine in 1838, and again in 1852, formed the prototype Evangelical voyagers in the Holy Land for the rest of

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Palestine in the Victorian Age

the nineteenth century. While Robinson’s hugely influential, near 2,000-page work Biblical Researches in Palestine came in essence to define the Protestant attitude towards Palestine  – conceptualizing the land primarily as a Biblical relic, while demystifying it by performing acts of iconoclasm with the measuring tape  – a careful reading of the text in fact challenges Orientalist and settler-colonial narratives. By contrast, the last part of the chapter considers two British travellers with a debt of influence to Robinson, the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Charles Warren and Claude Reignier Conder, who became leading advocates of Palestine’s settler colonization in the late nineteenth century. Chapters  3 and 4 focus specifically on Jerusalem. While the city was the pinnacle of sacred space for non-Protestant denominations, Evangelical travellers viewed it very differently, their texts discursively laying the ground for its colonial remaking. Chapter 3 centres on Jerusalem’s most sacred sites, revered by the city’s three main faith communities – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre of Christianity, the Ḥaram al-Sharīf of Islam and the Western Wall of Judaism – to consider how each featured in the collective imagination of the Peaceful Crusade. Chapter 4 presents an investigation of an early settler-colonial project just outside Jerusalem’s walls, the farm of Kerem Avraham established in the 1850s by the consul Finn and his wife Elizabeth, consummate Evangelicals who during their seventeen-year posting in Palestine attempted to materialize their fantasies of the transformation of the Jewish community. This chapter constitutes the first comprehensive history and analysis in English of Kerem Avraham and the Syrian Colonisation Fund, the body which administered the site until the 1920s. Attention then moves northwards to Nablus for the next two chapters, which consider more the reactions of indigenous Palestinian society to the Peaceful Crusade, as gauged through Western source material. Chapter 5 is a reconstruction of an uprising which occurred in the city in April 1856 in response to the killing of a local Palestinian man by a British missionary. The uprising was limited in scope and duration, but an analysis of the event is nonetheless greatly revealing of the dynamics of Nabulsi concerns regarding Western travel to Palestine and the imperial politics of the Tanẓīmāt reform era. Chapter 6 provides a biography of an individual whose life became intimately intertwined with the West’s Holy Land obsession from the 1840s to the 1880s, a member of Nablus’s Samaritan minority by the name of Ya‘qub al-Shalabi. The chapter traces Ya‘qub’s eventful journey from Nablus to England, Ireland and back, and his many contacts with Western travellers along the way, in the first detailed account of his colourful life to be published. Chapter 7 turns to the individual whose travel to Palestine may have ultimately been the most momentous event of the Peaceful Crusade, given the region’s later history: Laurence Oliphant. The traveller-writer’s journey to the Eastern Mediterranean in 1879, searching for an area to establish a large Jewish settler colony, and followed by Oliphant’s own settlement in northern Palestine near Haifa, deserves to be regarded as a momentous (and ominous) moment in Palestine’s modern history. While previous literature has presented Oliphant

Introduction

17

either kindly as a benefactor of the Zionist project, or as an eccentric whose ideas were too marginal to have a real impact, this chapter presents a full analysis of Oliphant’s settler-colonial ideas and activities, and argues that contained in his writings are the traces of many of the State of Israel’s later practices which have had such a detrimental impact on the lives of the Palestinians and Arabs of the region. As the last part of the chapter shows, Israel has long acknowledged the debt it owes to Oliphant, though presents this in rosy and sanitized terms. Finally, Chapter  8’s conclusion considers how we can evaluate the Victorians’ legacy in Palestine/Israel today.

18

­Chapter 2 ‘ T H E F E E L I N G S O F A C H R I ST IA N T R AV E L L E R’ : E DWA R D R O B I N S O N A N D T H E B I RT H O F B I B L IC A L   PA L E ST I N E

More than any other individual, Edward Robinson lies at the root of the nineteenthcentury Western obsession with Palestine that had such a profound impact on later history. His three-volume magnum opus Biblical Researches in Palestine, following his 1838 journey, caused a revolution in Western thought about Palestine. If, as Robinson’s biographer stated, Palestine had previously been ‘afloat like an island in the sea, almost like a cloud in the sky of fable’ in the Western consciousness, after his minutely detailed account of the land, he ‘left it a part of Asia’: no longer a distant Holy Land of purely spiritual significance, but a region that could be traversed, surveyed and ultimately possessed.1 Literature on Robinson has proclaimed him as a ‘great pioneer’, ‘the prototype biblical archaeologist’ and ‘the father of modern Holy Land studies’.2 Representing a nadir of scholarship, Silberman has presented Robinson as a veritable ‘white saviour’ for Palestine, attempting to ‘retrieve for the world the lovely vision of the Holy Land […], snatching it, if he must, from its present filth, degradation, and poverty’, and its ‘present inhabitants […] hopelessly enslaved in either ignorance or barbarism’.3 The scholarship focusing on his contribution to Biblical archaeology often overlooks the galvanizing effect of his work in the Peaceful Crusade’s colonial dynamics. Yet more critical appraisals, such as Obenzinger’s understanding that American travellers like Robinson ‘viewed Palestinian reality […] through the “window” of the New World experience of the rawest, most extreme, most violent settler-colonial expansion in the world’, also risk obscuring the nuances of Robinson’s views of Palestine.4 This chapter uses Robinson’s Palestinian journeys as an introduction to broader attitudes during the Peaceful Crusade. His views were sometimes at variance with those of other travellers, challenging Orientalist discourses propagated about Palestine. First considering the background to Robinson’s relationship to the Holy Land, the chapter then investigates his representation of the Palestinian people, before considering how his texts, and those of later travellers he influenced, contributed to discussions on colonization in Palestine.

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Palestine in the Victorian Age

‘The Places So Remarkable’: Robinson’s Palestine Edward Robinson was born in the rural Connecticut town of Southington in 1794, son of the church minister and successful agriculturalist William Robinson.5 Edward was clearly moulded by the deeply religious community in which he grew up. As he wrote in Biblical Researches in Palestine: ­ s in the case of most of my countrymen, especially in New England, the scenes A of the Bible had made a deep impression upon my mind from the earliest childhood; and afterwards in riper years this feeling had grown into a strong desire to visit in person the places so remarkable in the history of the human race. Indeed in no country of the world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diffused than in New England; in no country are the Scriptures better known, or more highly prized. From his earliest years the child is there accustomed not only to read the Bible for himself; but he also reads or listens to it in the morning and evening devotions of the family, in the daily village-school, in the Sundayschool and Bible-class, and in the weekly ministrations of the sanctuary. Hence, as he grows up, the names of Sinai, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Promised Land, become associated with his earliest recollections and holiest feelings.6

Though Robinson boasted of the devoutness of his fellow New Englanders, many Evangelicals in old England could have made the same claim. While Obenzinger intelligently argues the importance of the American settler-colonial project on American travellers’ views of the Holy Land, in his attitude towards Palestine, Robinson differed little from Evangelicals in Victorian Britain. Robinson’s own Puritanism was an import from western England, from which his ancestors had emigrated to New England in the seventeenth century.7 Rejecting the provincial settler lifestyle as is discussed below, Robinson was drawn to a classical education. He studied ancient Greek, a key language for Biblical studies, at Hamilton College in New York State; he was the ‘star pupil’, and in addition to being appointed instructor of Greek upon his graduation, he married the college president’s daughter, who died within a year. In the early 1820s, he threw himself further into scholarship, authoring translations of texts such as the Iliad. In 1822, however, he turned his attention to Hebrew. At the time, with Classics all the rage  – a by-product of the Enlightenment ethos and the political liberalism of the age – the study of Hebrew in the United States was at a low ebb. As Goldman notes, ‘Robinson would revive [the] Hebraist stratum in American intellectual life’, and ‘transform [Hebrew] from a purely academic subject – Hebrew as an aid to understanding the Bible – to a practical one – Hebrew as key to unlocking the physical, actual remains of ancient Israel’.8 Robinson chose to pursue Hebrew at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, home to scholars sharing a conservative theological outlook. The seminary had a strong connection with American missionary efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean: Makdisi notes that ‘Every missionary who would work in Ottoman Lebanon in the first American Board [of Commissioners for Foreign Missions] missions […] was

The Birth of Biblical Palestine

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educated at Andover’.9 Robinson came under the influence of the prominent Bible scholar Moses Stuart, who quickly recognized his student’s talents and appointed him his assistant. But it was in Europe, where Robinson studied from 1826 to 1830, that he was intellectually prepared for his travel to Palestine. In Berlin, he attended the lectures of the continent’s leading intellectuals like Hegel and Schopenhauer; in Paris, he studied Arabic with the leading French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, although Robinson never mastered Palestine’s contemporary language as he did Biblical Greek and Hebrew.10 Germany was a leading centre for both the scientific study of geography, and a more cutting-edge form of theology than anything Robinson had previously been exposed to. The two came together in what one of Robinson’s teachers, the German geographer Karl Ritter, called ‘geopiety’. Palestine’s physical landscape, referred to as ‘the Fifth Gospel’ or ‘Third Testament’, was considered a priority for accurate geographical study by ‘geopious’ Protestants.11 They mounted a defence of a literalist interpretation of the Bible against the nineteenth century’s assaults of science and reason, such as Darwinism. Robinson gained more than just a mission and methodology in Europe, marrying German writer Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob in 1828. In 1830, Robinson returned with his wife to Andover, to be appointed professor of sacred literature. Two years later, a key meeting took place between Robinson and his former student (and distant relative), Eli Smith. After graduating from Andover, Smith had been a missionary in Beirut, became fluent in Arabic and had travelled extensively in Greater Syria, Turkey, Iran and Armenia. In Robinson’s account, ‘a visit to the Holy Land naturally became a topic of conversation between us’ during their meeting.12 Six years later, Robinson and Smith’s desire became reality. Appointed to New York’s Union Theological Seminary, Robinson accepted on the proviso that he could first make the journey to Palestine and write up his findings. Sailing from New York to England in July 1837 where he stayed for several weeks in London and Oxford to consult ‘some veterans in oriental travel’, then Germany where he left his wife and young family, Robinson then crossed the Mediterranean, making several stops before arriving in Alexandria on the last day of 1837.13 After two months of largely touristic excursions in Egypt, on 28 February 1838 Robinson was reunited with Smith in Cairo, and they spent the next twelve days planning their expedition. Robinson and Smith were hardly pioneering explorers; they found a region where foreign travellers were expected, and respected, by the indigenous population. As Robinson wrote, while earlier travellers had disguised themselves in Arab clothing, in 1838 this ‘only excites the ridicule of the natives’; Westerners now travelled ‘with the same degree of safety as in many parts of civilized Europe’, and were ‘everywhere received with courtesy, and usually with kindness’ by local people. Yet the Americans did purchase ‘two old muskets and a pair of old pistols’ to protect themselves ‘from annoyance and vexations’, though Robinson noted ‘we never had a thought of actually using these weapons for personal defence’. He also warned that in many parts of the Eastern Mediterranean there were ‘neither roads, nor public conveyances, nor public houses’.14 There was none

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of the infrastructure of what Obenzinger calls ‘bourgeois tourism’, which soon developed following the explosion of interest in Palestine.15 Robinson and Smith travelled relatively simply compared to many Westerners who followed them. With an average daily expenditure of $5 (around $170 in present values) in 1852, they were accompanied by a cook, a servant, three horses and four mules, in addition to their local guides.16 By contrast, by the early twentieth century, a journey of eleven British tourists around Palestine organized by Thomas Cook could include three cooks and twenty-two other servants in addition to local guides, which – along with supplies of European food and the travellers’ tents and beds – necessitated forty-five horses, mules and donkeys.17 Setting out from Cairo on 12 March with their Bedouin escorts and camels, Robinson and Smith reached Suez on 15 March, and continued across the Sinai Peninsula for a week to Saint Catherine’s Monastery, where they explored nearby Biblical sites of which Robinson was deeply sceptical. The Americans departed for ‘Aqaba on 29 March, reached after another gruelling week of desert travel and then turned northwards for Palestine through a maze of dry valleys or wādis, finally reaching Beersheba on 12 April. Evidencing Robinson and Smith’s perseverance, on the 14th they set off at two o’clock in the morning and journeyed around thirty miles from al-Ẓāhiriya, south of Hebron, to Jerusalem in a single day – thirteen hours by camel. ‘And yet at nine o’clock the next day’, wrote Bliss, Robinson ‘was in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, witnessing the Easter ceremonies’.18 Consummate Evangelicals, they almost always halted their journeys on Sundays, often to the impatience of their guides. The travellers remained based in Jerusalem for several weeks, branching out to the villages northeast of Jerusalem, including Baytīn; ‘Aīn Jidi and Jericho on the shores of the Dead Sea; and Gaza, returning to Hebron. From there, they rounded the Dead Sea in an attempt to visit Wādi Mūsā and Petra, which they were prevented from closely inspecting by unusually unfriendly Bedouin, and returned to Jerusalem via Ramla, Lydda, and numerous villages. On 13 June, they departed northwards via Nablus to Nazareth, Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee. Leaving Safad on 22 June, they traversed northern Palestine to Bint Jibayl in present-day Lebanon, passing through Tyre, Sidon and finally reaching Beirut. Robinson boarded a ship on 8 July and returned to Europe. He was soon joined again by Smith, in Berlin to commission the creation of some Arabic type for his missionary printing press. The two collaborated on Robinson’s manuscript, completed in August 1840. In 1841, as Bliss describes, The simultaneous publication in English and German aroused unbounded enthusiasm in scientific quarters, while it provoked hostile criticism on the part of the traditionalists whom Robinson had antagonized with such severity. Friend and foe, however, recognized in it an epoch-making work. It obtained for him the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London.19

Biblical Researches became one of the best-selling books of nineteenth-century America.20 It was the first truly canonical Evangelical text on Palestine, no mere

The Birth of Biblical Palestine

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pilgrimage or adventure narrative, but a compendium of Protestant lore. An article of 1871 summarized a prevalent opinion: ‘All subsequent writers upon the Holy Land who are entitled to any consideration have profited by Dr. Robinson’s “Biblical Researches”’.21 Robinson himself, however, considered his work incomplete. ‘Questions not unfrequently arose’, as he explained, ‘which personal inquiry on the spot might have solved in half an hour; but to which no amount of reading or investigation at a distance could ever afford an answer’.22 He planned an ambitious series of works to be the definitive word in Biblical geography, but this would remain incomplete, with only a fraction edited from his notes and published after his death. Yet before then, Robinson was able to return to Palestine in 1852, a journey he recorded in his 1856 Later Biblical Researches in Palestine. For most of this expedition, Robinson was again accompanied by Smith. Leaving Beirut in early April, they trekked southwards to Palestine, seeing regions they previously missed, including ‘Akka, villages northwest of Jerusalem and the surroundings of Baysān south of the Sea of Galilee; with other Protestant missionaries, Robinson visited Bānyās in the Golan Heights, Damascus and Baalbek in Lebanon, before departing from Beirut in late June. During his travels in 1838 and 1852, Robinson thus covered a sizable swathe of the Eastern Mediterranean in a relatively short time. In less than eight months, travelling by horse and camel, he had traversed the twentieth-century borders of Egypt, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, before these political divisions had ever been imagined. The rest of this chapter considers his representation of Palestine’s land and people more closely. *** Robinson and Smith were the prototype Evangelical travellers to Palestine. Their way of seeing the Holy Land, the sites they avoided and those they sought out, their emotional or impassive reactions at different points in the landscape, defined how Western Protestants thought and acted in Palestine for generations. Their travels marked the birth of a new Biblical Palestine – a Protestant Palestine. There was certainly some continuity with traditions of travel that preceded them. Robinson and Smith experienced some of the euphoria and wonder that pilgrims throughout the ages have felt in the Holy Land. According to his own words ‘not given to the melting mood’, Robinson nevertheless ‘could not refrain from bursting into tears’ when he and Smith reached Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai, about which he had ‘from the earliest childhood […] thought and read with so much wonder’.23 ‘It is impossible to approach the place, without a feeling of deep emotion’, he wrote similarly of Bethlehem. ‘The legends and puerilities of monastic tradition may safely be disregarded; it is enough to know that this is Bethlehem, where Jesus the Redeemer was born’.24 Robinson sang the praises of ‘that venerated stream’, the River Jordan; he and Smith ‘bathed in its waters, and felt ourselves surrounded by hallowed associations’.25 On a hilltop overlooking Nazareth, Robinson ‘remained for some hours upon this spot, lost in the contemplation of the wide prospect,

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and of the events connected with the scenes around’, and the thought that ‘there are certain features of nature which meet our eyes now’ which Christ may have seen.26 On such occasions, Robinson and other Evangelicals could lose themselves in intense Biblical reveries, ignoring the passage of millennia, mentally transported to the age of the Old or the New Testament. Yet what most excited the two Americans, and many who followed them, were not the traditional pilgrimage spots. Indeed, Robinson set out to debunk many of these, with his cold, hard rationalism. ‘It is hardly necessary to remark’, he wrote of the tomb of Lazarus in the village of Bethany or al-‘Aīzariya east of Jerusalem, ‘that there is not the slightest probability of its ever having been the tomb of Lazarus’.27 Similarly, he lambasted the ‘intrinsic absurdity’ of the site near Nazareth identified by non-Protestant denominations as the Mount of the Precipitation. ‘Among all the legends that have been fastened on the Holy Land’, he asserted, ‘I know of no one more clumsy than this’.28 Even at the incontestable natural sites which formed the backdrop to the Biblical narrative, Robinson urged a coolheaded rationality. ‘Who can look without interest upon that lake, on whose shores the Saviour lived so long, and where he performed so many of his mighty works?’ he asked of the Sea of Galilee; however, he continued with a warning that ‘Whoever looks here for the magnificence of the Swiss lakes, or the softer beauty of those of England and the United States, will be disappointed’.29 No site was too sacred for Robinson and Smith’s iconoclasm; as discussed in the next chapter, most infamously they turned their scepticism against the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Rather than looking for what was in Palestine in the way of religious sites, they sought out what was not – the lacunae in the existing Palestinian landscape compared to the map of the Biblical era, the scattering of stones on a hilltop possibly signifying a vanished town, the contemporary Arabic placename perhaps containing a trace of an ancient settlement. In addition to inspecting Palestine’s ‘inhabited towns and villages’, Robinson’s ‘attention was directed in at least as great a degree to the deserted sites and ruined places of which the country is so full’.30 The representation which Robinson began of Palestine as an archaeological site waiting to give up its secrets to Western investigators, emphasized that Palestine’s importance lay in the distant past. ‘Above all other countries in the world, it is a Land of Ruins’ (emphasis in original) wrote one of the many who followed Robinson and Smith, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley: there is no [other] country in which they are so numerous, none in which they bear so large a proportion to the villages and towns still in existence. In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that whilst for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goat-herd on the hillside, or gathering of women at the wells, there is yet hardly a hill-top of the many within sight, which is not covered by the vestiges of some fortress or city of former ages.31

A fascination with Palestine’s ruins, rather than the living communities that surrounded them, fed Orientalist notions of a fall from an imagined past exuberance

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to an equally imaginary present desolation. As Robinson wrote of the ruins at Sabasṭiya, north of Nablus, ‘these columns now stand solitary and mournful in the midst of ploughed fields, the skeletons as it were of departed glory’.32 Identifying lost ancient locations, and claiming their discovery for Western knowledge, became an obsession for the Americans. Robinson vividly described his feelings as he and Smith journeyed on the morning of 23 May 1838 between the villages of Bayt Jibrīn, which they believed marked the ancient Byzantine town of Eleutheropolis, and Idhnā, west of Hebron. ‘I know not when I have felt more the excitement of suspense, than while traversing this short distance’, he wrote.33 If the journey could be accomplished in two hours, Robinson believed that early Christian sources supported his hypothesis; this was an activity which was unparalleled among earlier travellers, and belonged to the imperial West’s mission to first explore, then categorize, and then possess, parts of the globe. Believing his theory to have been vindicated, Robinson discussed the matter with some Orthodox clergy in Jerusalem in 1852, and was scathing in his verdict when he ascertained they knew ‘nothing at all’ of the Eleutheropolis vanished many centuries before.34 Robinson and Smith were aware that they were merely the latest in a long line of Western travellers to have visited and described Palestine. They took with them a small library of hefty tomes of existing accounts of Palestine, and studied more such texts in the collections of European expatriates in Jerusalem.35 However, they viewed all preceding works as basically inferior to that which they were planning. Robinson complained that the authors of many previous accounts ‘professedly give a description of the various parts of the Holy Land; but in such a way, that it is usually difficult and often impossible to distinguish what they have actually visited and seen, from that which they have only heard or read of, or relate perhaps merely from conjecture’.36 Illustrating the gulf that divided Robinson and Smith from travellers of a more adventurous or romantic disposition, in 1839 and 1840 Smith engaged in a polemical debate with James Silk Buckingham, an English radical politician and society figure as well as prolific traveller who had visited Palestine in the 1820s. Travelling in the United States in the late 1830s, Buckingham had delivered lectures on Palestine, subsequently published in the New York Observer; writing from Leipzig and signing himself ‘Palestinensis’, Smith had replied to the factual mistakes he believed Buckingham had made. ‘I found the reports of your Lectures in the New York Observer, containing so many errors, that I thought duty required me to correct them’, Smith cattily wrote to Buckingham. ‘In doing this, I took it for granted, that they were fair reports of what you had actually said; though I confess this sometimes required an effort, their errors were so great’.37 The time of the dashing adventurer, awash with romantic and mystical sentiments, had ended; the era of a more hard-headed approach to Palestine had arrived. While Robinson and Smith clearly venerated Palestine, they also sought to demystify it. The Holy Land was to be categorized according to the Western knowledge of the post-Enlightenment age. This set Robinson and other Evangelicals, in their own minds, apart from their non-Protestant predecessors

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and contemporaries who made religious pilgrimages to Palestine. ‘We had not come to Nazareth as pilgrims to the holy places, pointed out in legendary tradition’, Robinson wrote; he could have written the same of his attitude towards Palestine in general.38 ‘Purblind children of the Dark Ages’, as Bliss wrote of preProtestant pilgrims, ‘they knew how to pray fervently; see clearly they could not’.39 By contrast, Robinson and Smith travelled not only with their Bibles, but also with ‘an ordinary surveyor’s and two pocket compasses, a thermometer, telescopes, and measuring-tapes’, to subject Palestine to their analysis. This aroused the ire of their Catholic and High Church opponents, one of whom scathingly attacked ‘acute and ingenious persons who now for the first and only time in their lives traverse Jerusalem with their measuring tape’.40 While Robinson held the Bible as the ‘best guide-book’ to Palestine, he was nevertheless aware of the vagueness of many of its descriptions, which he attributed to ‘the language of the Orient’.41 Imaginatively filling the lacunae in the Biblical text was where his German training came in. Occasionally, his semi-scientific scruples led him to reject beliefs previously prevalent among Protestants. After observing the landscape around the Dead Sea, Robinson had to admit that the belief ‘that this sea has existed only since the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, as recorded in the book of Genesis […] could not have been the case’, as the geographical features were ‘coeval with the present condition of the surface of the earth in general; and not the effect of any local catastrophe at a subsequent period’.42 Yet by and large, Robinson’s analysis served to lend (pseudo-)scientific and rational credence to Evangelicals’ interpretation of the Bible, asserting Protestant supremacy over nonProtestant Christian denominations and other religions, and the growing threat from atheism, agnosticism and secularism. The Biblical text also pushed Western Evangelicals towards the Old rather than the New Testament, deepening their obsession with the ancient Hebrews. Evangelical Protestants prided themselves on their sect’s interpretation of the New Testament’s inner spiritual truths. In Palestine, however, it was the much more physically descriptive Old Testament that captured their imaginations. On one occasion after reading their Bibles – a frequent pastime during many travellers’ journeys – Robinson and Smith ‘could not but remark, how much fewer, as well as more general and indefinite, are the topographical notices contained in the Gospels, than those preserved to us in the Old Testament’.43 ‘It is worthy of remark’, Robinson similarly wrote after his second trip, ‘how rarely the Evangelists connect the narrative of our Lord’s life and actions with the mention of any definite place’.44 These sentiments were echoed by Stanley, who stated of the New Testament that ‘the events and truths are too spiritual to be touched by the local and natural position of mountain and valley, of building and vegetation’, by contrast to ‘the Old Testament, where the name of every plain is significant, where the formation of every glen has wrought itself into a picture, where every stream, spring, and well has intertwined itself with some sacred history’.45 This attitude pushed Western travellers away from Palestine’s Christian sites and towards other locations where Evangelicals saw inscribed the story of the ancient Hebrews, erasing the marks left by all other peoples in Palestine’s palimpsest of history.

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This mindset strongly influenced the discipline of Biblical archaeology which Robinson set in motion, with ramifications extending to the present. Correctly approaching ‘the discourse of biblical studies’ as part of the Orientalism identified and critiqued by Said, Whitelam notes how the discipline has elevated the ancient Hebrew period – ‘a moment in the vast expanse of Palestinian history’ – to the exclusion of other cultures and periods. ‘The history of ancient Palestine’, Whitelam writes, ‘has been ignored and silenced by biblical studies because its object of interest has been an ancient Israel conceived and presented as the taproot of Western civilization’.46 This representation of Palestine’s past, which has extended beyond academic history and theology as the State of Israel has tried to justify its actions through reference to the Hebrew presence on the land in antiquity, is one result of Robinson’s research.47 The mechanics of how Robinson’s focus contributed to obscuring Palestine’s non-Biblical history can be clearly seen in instances in which he misidentified Arab or Islamic sites. This erased the contributions of more recent or existing cultures to the Palestinian landscape, giving the impression that only the Biblical age had left traces worthy of mention. In Jerusalem, for instance, Robinson asserted that the sculpted lions on the Lions’ Gate in the eastern wall of the Old City ‘shows at least that it was not originally the work of Muhammedans’, leaving his readers to speculate that the figurative masonry had been appropriated from some nameless structure built under Palestine’s previous Christian rulers.48 This incorrect assertion, which removed the sixteenth-century Ottoman gate from Muslim architectural authorship, was based on the unfounded belief that all Islamic art was nonfigurative. Similarly, regarding the Qal‘at al-Subayba or Nimrod Fortress in the Golan Heights, Robinson wrote of the ruined castle’s ‘deep impression of antiquity’, describing it as ‘one of the most perfect specimens of the military architecture of the Phenicians’.49 This classification was well wide of the mark; Qal‘at al-Subayba was not a Phoenician stronghold of antiquity, but a thirteenth-century fortress built by the Muslim Ayyubid Dynasty. These examples demonstrate the perils of Robinson’s methods of identification, conducted in ignorance of much of the Eastern Mediterranean’s non-Biblical and more recent heritage. Unlike many other Western travellers, however, Robinson gave Palestine’s present a relatively thorough appraisal, as discussed next. *** A distinctive feature of Biblical Researches, which strongly influenced subsequent Palestine literature in the West, was how Robinson’s narrative continually moved not only through space, but also through time: one moment caught in a Biblical dream, the next in a reminiscence of the Crusades, and then in the nineteenthcentury present, sometimes all in a few sentences. When Robinson turned his attention to the present, his text frequently departs from the Biblical Orientalist script which Robinson himself did much to create. Robinson’s depiction of the landscape as he found it touches upon an issue which has since become highly politicized. Throughout the nineteenth and

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early twentieth centuries, scores of Western travellers castigated indigenous land usage and agriculture in Palestine in their accounts. They asserted that vast fertile areas were laying waste, with insufficient population to cultivate the land, and indigenous farming methods too inefficient to make any improvement. ‘It was melancholy to see thousands of acres lying waste, and the country lonely and depopulated’, wrote Ridley Haim Herschell, a Polish Jewish-born convert to Evangelical Protestantism and London church minister who visited Palestine in 1843.50 Claude Reignier Conder quoted from a psalm to condemn Palestine’s inhabitants when he described their homeland as ‘a good country running to waste for want of cultivation: truly may it be said, “a fruitful land maketh He barren for the wickedness of them that dwell therein”’.51 Frederick Treves, a London doctor who achieved prominence in the 1880s through his work with the ‘Elephant Man’ Joseph Merrick before authoring numerous Orientalist accounts of his world travels, compared the luxuriance of ancient Palestine asserted Biblical quotations with his view of the present in his The Land That Is Desolate: Looking across this featureless country, so poverty stricken, so miserly, and so threadbare, one cannot but ask: Is this the ‘glorious land,’ the land ‘that floweth with milk and honey,’ ‘the good land, the land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills’?52

To Evangelicals, this asserted situation was redolent of a Biblical curse they considered placed on the land following the Israelites’ misdeeds, culminating in the rejection of Christ. Even the irreverent Mark Twain wrote that ‘Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies’.53 These claims were used increasingly as an argument in favour of schemes for Jewish settlement in Palestine, through which its adherents asserted the ‘curse’ could be negated. Western travellers applied to Palestine a claim which had been articulated by supporters of settler colonialism since the seventeenth century (argued, for example, by the English philosopher John Locke), that moral ownership of land lay not with its indigenous custodians who resided there before Western imperialism turned its attention on their territory, but rather with whoever could make the most economically productive use of it.54 This view invariably denigrated indigenous practices and advocated European farming methods. Palestine has been no exception: supporters of Zionism and the State of Israel have long claimed that Jewish settlers ‘made the desert bloom’.55 Until the arrival of settler projects such as the German Templars and the Zionist pioneers of the First ‘Aliya, the narrative runs, Palestine’s agricultural potential was being squandered by the filaḥīn; it was the immigrants’ superior European farming techniques that rescued the land from desolation. More than the later Biblical archaeologists whose careers Robinson set in motion, he executed a relatively objective review of Palestine’s contemporary conditions, without – as the chapter will later demonstrate – an ideological axe to grind. Robinson’s texts thus present an important record of indigenous land use in

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Palestine in the early and mid-nineteenth century. In 1838, Robinson and Smith entered Palestine near Beersheba, then a small Bedouin encampment, before the Ottomans’ urbanization of the locale of Bi’r al-Saba‘ in the early twentieth century. In Palestine’s far south, this was an arid and generally agriculturally unsuited region. Robinson’s immediate impression was one of disappointment, and he drew a negative comparison with the Biblical past. ‘Over these swelling hills the flocks of the patriarchs once roved by thousands; where now we found only a few camels, asses, and goats!’ he lamented. However, shortly northwards, he reported ‘a wide open grassy plain, suffering greatly indeed from drought, but in which many fields of wheat were scattered, looking beautifully in their vesture of bright green’. As his journey continued towards Hebron, he reported passing ‘fields of grain’, and witnessed ‘a man ploughing with two heifers in order to sow millet’. Commenting that the traditional plough of the filaḥīn ‘was very simple, and by English and American farmers would he called rude’, Robinson nevertheless noted that ‘it did its work well’. Closer to Hebron, Robinson and Smith passed through a ‘little valley with many olive-trees and enclosed vineyards, indicating our approach to a land of higher cultivation’; Robinson reported that ‘the grapes are the finest in Palestine’, and that ‘every thing looked thrifty; and round about were large flocks of sheep and goats, all in good condition’.56 Within a short distance, his impressions had changed from disappointment to appreciation, which would remain more or less consistent throughout his journey as he observed rural communities during the spring harvest. Arriving in Jerusalem on 14 April, Robinson reported a lesser state of fertility and cultivation. The surroundings of Jerusalem, continuously traversed by Westerners, gained a reputation as particularly afflicted. In the early 1840s William Thackeray described Jerusalem’s environs as ‘dark, lonely, and sad’ and ‘the most solemn and forlorn I have ever seen’, while two decades later the parson-naturalist Henry Baker Tristram presented the landscape as ‘neither grand, desolate, nor wild, but utter barrenness’.57 Robinson similarly portrayed the region as ‘barren and dreary’, but also noted that ‘the olive thrives here abundantly; and fields of grain are seen in the vallies and level places’.58 Indeed, he frequently noted that even in areas where soil was poor and farming was difficult, indigenous agriculture thrived. Between Bayt Ḥanīnā and Lifṭā, for instance, he observed that the valley joining the two Jerusalem-area villages was ‘narrow and very stony, but planted with fine vineyards and orchards of fig and olive-trees’.59 Near the village of Ḥuwwāra south of Nablus, he reported that while ‘the soil seemed less fertile than that of most of the plains we had visited’, nevertheless the countryside ‘presented a beautiful appearance; it is everywhere cultivated, and was now covered with the rich green of millet, mingled with the yellow of the ripe grain’.60 Robinson generally praised the agricultural production he observed all over Palestine. He sang hymns to the grapes of Hebron, recording that from May to November ‘Jerusalem is abundantly supplied with this delicious fruit’, and to the ‘ripe apricots’ of Gaza and ‘fine oranges of Yâfa’.61 Upon arriving at almost every village, town and city, he noted the state of its surrounding farmland: the ‘orchards of pears, apples, figs, and olives, and also vineyards’ of al-Jīb, northwest

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Palestine in the Victorian Age

of Jerusalem; the ‘many olive and fig-orchards and vineyards’ around Bethlehem, ‘marks of industry and thrift’; Tal al-Ṣāfi northeast of Gaza with its millet ‘yielding a delightful refreshment to the eye by its beautiful green’; Gaza’s own ‘immense olive-groves’ and ‘fertile soil’ which ‘produces, in abundance, grains and fruits of every kind and of the finest quality’; the ‘well tilled’ fields ‘of grain, olive-groves and vineyards’ around Dūrā southwest of Hebron; Ramla’s ‘gardens of vegetables and delicious fruits’; the ‘very fully cultivated’ and ‘rich’ hills around Jifnā, north of Ramallah; the ‘rich fertility and beauty’ north of Jenin, where fields of different crops ‘checkered [sic] the landscape like a carpet’; and the ‘exceedingly fertile and well watered’ environs of al-Majdal near the Sea of Galilee, where ‘all kinds of grain and vegetables are produced in abundance, including rice’.62 Robinson continued to note effective agrarian production when he returned to Palestine in 1852, for instance the ‘fine fields, fine vineyards, and many cattle and goats’ at Ḥalḥūl north of Hebron, and the fields at Ṭūbās northeast of Nablus which, ‘covered with wheat, and having many olive trees’, formed ‘one of the prettiest tracts we had seen’.63 Like other nineteenth-century travellers, Robinson claimed to have observed an apparent dearth of population in Palestine’s lowland plains, and underutilization of fertile land, compared with the hill areas. Robinson attributed this to different systems of land ownership, with land in the hills belonging by freehold to the villagers, while land in the plains was government owned. Other travellers blamed the Bedouin, whom Tristram claimed were ‘very rapidly […] encroaching wherever horse can be ridden’, for destroying arable land; James Finn vividly described ‘the devastation wrought in a few hours by these wild hordes’, asserting that Bedouin tribes left ‘bare brown desolation where years of toil had made smiling fields and vineyards’.64 In Robinson’s words, these factors created a situation in which while the rocky and apparently almost desert mountains teem with an active, thrifty, and comparatively independent population, and the hand of industry is everywhere visible; the rich and fertile plains, deserted of inhabitants or sprinkled here and there with straggling villages, are left to run to waste, or are at the most half tilled by the unwilling labours of a race of serfs.65

Yet this evaluation is contradicted by many passages in Robinson’s own writing. Even in remote areas, Robinson recorded finding life at harvest time. During Robinson and Smith’s journey to Gaza, Robinson reported that, although in one region there was not ‘a single village […] in sight’, it was ‘not wanting the charm of busy life’, with ‘Arab encampments […] surrounded by flocks and herds and troops of camels and asses’, and ‘multitudes of reapers and gleaners scattered over the [wheat] fields’.66 Near the village of ‘Āqir, on Palestine’s central plain south of Ramla, he reported that the countryside was ‘entirely given up to the cultivation of grain, chiefly wheat and barley; and the crops were very fine’. In Ramla itself, viewing the surroundings from the town’s White Tower, Robinson exclaimed that ‘as far as the eye could reach, the beautiful plain was spread out like a carpet at our feet, variegated with tracts of brown from which the crops had just been taken, and with fields still rich with the yellow of the ripe corn, or green with the

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springing millet’.67 In 1852, after passing through the Mārj ibn ‘Āmir region of northern Palestine, Robinson remarked on the area’s “heavy crops of wheat and barley”, which had reminded him “of the rich harvest I had seen a year before in Lincolnshire, in passing from London to Scotland”. Including this region, he stated that he and Smith “were greatly struck with the richness and productiveness of the splendid plains especially of Lower Galilee”.68 Even around Jericho, which Robinson presented as a fertile region lying “almost desert” as a result of – here he lapsed into Orientalist cliché – the “indolence, misery, and filth” of “the present race of Jericho”, he nevertheless noted a “beautiful” crop of wheat.69 If nothing else, this shows how unreliable the whole genre of Orientalist Holy Land literature really was. Such contradictions between nineteenth-century texts, and even within texts, demonstrate why Western sources cannot be cited uncritically in support of one argument or another. Robinson’s account of Palestinian agriculture generally accords with the reality of a largely agrarian society sufficiently productive to support a largely natural population growth from around 300,000 people in 1850 to almost 700,000 in 1914, and also, as Schölch points out, ‘produced relatively extensive agricultural surpluses that were exported to neighboring lands such as Egypt and Lebanon, and increasingly to Europe’.70 Reading Robinson’s account against the Orientalist grain helps, in the words of Seligman, to ‘engender greater empathy for the traditional farmers and graziers who, from generation to generation and despite severe limitations, earned their livelihood from a difficult land’.71 In the words of a contemporary Palestinian’s narrative of her ancestors, for centuries they had known ‘how to farm soil that seemed infertile and dry to the foreign eye’.72 Robinson’s appreciation of other aspects of Palestinians’ lives will be explored next.

‘The Guest of the Village’: Robinson and the Palestinians Previous scholarship on Robinson has overlooked the extent to which the existing indigenous population of Palestine was an indispensable part of his work. One otherwise perceptive account of Robinson and Smith’s efforts has claimed that ‘very little material’ on indigenous Palestinian society was included in Biblical Researches, being ‘of little interest to Robinson’s readers’ who rather ‘wanted to read of the ancient denizens – the Hebrews’.73 Robinson was far from negligent in recording his impressions of contemporary Palestinian society and, as this section will show, was an appreciative observer of Palestinians. Two aspects of Robinson’s relationship with Palestinians have been noted by previous scholars. One is the centrality to his mission of Smith, a fluent Arabic speaker and resident of the Eastern Mediterranean for over twelve years by 1838. Robinson stressed the significance of Smith’s linguistic ability, emphasizing ‘the importance of a familiar acquaintance with the language and habits of the people, as the only means of holding direct and satisfactory intercourse with them’.74 Robinson believed that previous travellers in Palestine had missed many of the ‘lost’ Biblical sites because they ‘have in general been ignorant of the Arabic

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language’, were rendered reliant on untrustworthy dragoman guides – usually local or Levantine Christians – influenced by ‘monkish traditions’, and were unable to seek ‘information among the Arab peasantry’.75 On their own journey, on the other hand, Smith was busy noting ‘Arabic names and their orthography, and […] all information derived orally from the Arabs’.76 Smith’s Arabic ability did not preclude his holding Orientalist views; as Makdisi notes, ‘for all their detailed accounts of the manners and customs of the local peoples, and for all their efforts to master Arabic’, American missionaries like Smith ‘faithfully adhered to the pedagogical hierarchy evoked by the original seal of the [American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions]: a seminaked native kneeling down before, and accepting a Bible from, a white male missionary who is pointing to a heavenly dove’.77 Yet Smith’s presence at Robinson’s side undeniably opened the door to more meaningful relationships with the local indigenous people than would otherwise have been possible. The other factor was Robinson’s use of the information the local people provided, particularly placenames, in his identification of Biblical sites. While careful to ensure local informants’ information matched his interpretation of the Bible, Robinson accorded huge importance to the storehouse of knowledge on Palestine held by its indigenous people. He evocatively described ‘the preservation of the ancient names of places among the common people’ as ‘a truly national and native tradition; not derived in any degree from the influence of foreign convents or masters; but drawn in by the peasant with his mother’s milk’. The names of Biblical locales, he asserted, had ‘lived on upon the lips of the Arabs, whether Christian or Muslim, townsmen or Bedawin, even unto our own day, almost in the same form in which they have also been transmitted to us in the Hebrew Scriptures’.78 Robinson’s journey represented the extension of what Pratt calls ‘planetary consciousness’ – the surge in European global ‘exploration’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries  – into Palestine. Yet while elsewhere this involved the displacement of ‘vernacular peasant knowledges’ by Eurocentric ‘classificatory schemes of natural history’, the growth in Western knowledge of Palestine paradoxically heavily relied on indigenous knowledge.79 While Robinson championed one body of Palestinian knowledge, he disregarded and fiercely attacked another: the identification of sacred sites by non-Protestant Christian churches. Whilst this corpus of tradition had, over centuries, been heavily influenced by outside forces – the Byzantines, Crusaders and subsequent monastic communities and pilgrims – it had nevertheless become fully accepted and revered by indigenous Palestinian Christians. Yet Robinson dismissed out of hand ‘the mass of topographical tradition, long since fastened upon the Holy Land by foreign ecclesiastics and monks, in distinction from the ordinary tradition or preservation of ancient names among the native population’.80 Robinson proudly announced that he and Smith had ‘avoid[ed] as far as possible all contact with the convents and the authority of the monks’; in Jerusalem, he ‘never entered the Latin convent, nor spoke with a monk’, and ‘Once only […] visited […] the great convent of the Armenians’, where he sneered at ‘the richly decorated, but tawdry church of St. James’.81 The decision to ignore the existing Christian knowledge on Palestine

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derived partly from Robinson’s Evangelical sensibilities; as R.A.S. Macalister, a Dublin-born Biblical archaeologist and admirer of Robinson, admitted, ‘he carried with him, from the rigid New-England puritanism of his upbringing, a strong anti“popery” prejudice’.82 Smith, too, had a strong dislike of non-Protestant Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean.83 These attitudes led Robinson and Smith to avoid, deprecate and sometimes entirely deny established Christian sites. Robinson’s methodology for interpreting Palestine’s landscape, drawing on the indigenous people, was highly influential. Victorian Evangelicals eagerly seized the notion that there was an unassailable knowledge of the Holy Land to be gleaned from Arabic placenames. A few years after Robinson, Scottish missionary John Wilson recorded that he was ‘guided in the identification of Scripture sites, principally by the coincidence of the ancient Hebrew and the modern Arabic names’; many others followed suit.84 It took several decades for conscientious scholars to understand that this method was not as watertight as Robinson had presented it, and that not only should the Bible ‘be subjected to the same standards of criticism that are applied to other ancient works’, but also that placenames could change over time.85 Robinson’s literary creation of a Hebrew map of ancient Palestine  – closely resembling and yet obscuring the map of existing Arab Palestine – later influenced the actual renaming of Arab locales with equivalent Hebrew monikers. This process originated with James Finn who, inspired by Robinson’s method, renamed an area outside Jerusalem, Karm al-Khalīl, into its Hebrew translation Kerem Avraham, for his proto-settler-colonial Jewish farm in the 1850s, as discussed in Chapter 4. The project continued in earnest after 1948, with the Israeli state’s renaming of dozens of depopulated Arab locales.86 Ra’ad insightfully notes that ‘The paradigms and complexes at work’ in settler-colonial practices in Palestine are ‘encapsulated’ in the issue of the Zionist renaming project. However, his claim that this denies ‘native status to the indigenous inhabitants who originally coined the names or continued them’, obscures the dialectic that, by relying on indigenous toponyms, first Biblical geographers like Robinson, and later the post-1948 Israeli Naming Committee, tacitly acknowledged the continuity of Palestinian native tradition.87 *** Robinson and Smith forged close connections with the Bedouin guides who accompanied them for long periods of their journey in 1838. They travelled with one group of Bedouin for an entire month, from their departure from Cairo, to Suez, Mount Sinai, ‘Aqaba, and finally Jerusalem; they hired Bedouin again for the shorter excursions to the Dead Sea and to Wadi Musa. Contracting Bedouin as guides and guards was a common practice for Western travellers traversing remote areas of the Eastern Mediterranean, landscapes which Bedouin tribes knew intimately. Many Orientalist travellers romanticized the Bedouin as ‘noble savages’. Irish Presbyterian missionary and guidebook author Josias Leslie Porter (who hosted Robinson in Damascus in 1852) praised the ‘principle of honour in the breast of the wild “son of the desert”’; Conder,

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describing the Bedouin as ‘mere unlettered and ignorant savages’, also extolled their ‘code of laws, morals, and habits of hospitality and courtesy, which represents a rude kind of civilisation’.88 Simultaneously, Bedouin were seen as a threat, one traveller warning that anyone neglecting to engage protection in Bedouininhabited regions ‘runs the risk of losing his property, and probably his life’, despite such attacks being extremely rare.89 Travellers viewed the Bedouin as little better than bandits. Scottish Protestant clergyman Norman Macleod described his guards as ‘concentrating scoundrel in every feature’, and pointedly wondered about ‘the feelings of any decorous parson, or sensitive lady, who might fall into such hands on the lonely and bituminous shores of the Dead Sea’; in a moment of overt racism, he identified one Afro-Arab Bedouin as ‘the personification of animal ugliness’.90 As Palestine became progressively more secure throughout the nineteenth century, Westerners became sceptical of the requirement to hire Bedouin as protection. Twain characteristically complained of an excursion from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea when, during which his group ‘saw no Bedouins, and had no more use for an Arab guard than we could have had for patent leather boots and white kid gloves’.91 By the early twentieth century Haskett Smith, an English clergyman, Thomas Cook guide and one-time member of Laurence Oliphant’s cultlike community near Haifa (see Chapter 7), was presenting Bedouin escorts as a protection racket. He resentfully claimed that while ‘no European travellers are allowed to undertake the journey [to the Dead Sea] except under the escort of a duly qualified guide, for whose services they have, of course, to pay pretty dearly’, these guides were ‘the very Bedouin Arabs themselves who infest the district’.92 As Chapter 7 explores, the forced sedentarization or ethnic cleansing of Bedouin to make way for settler-colonial projects was recommended by Oliphant and others. Robinson and Smith, however, took a kinder view of their Bedouin companions. With little actual danger to be encountered – Robinson wrote that around the Dead Sea, ‘considered the worst and most dangerous part of all Palestine’, he had not ‘felt the slightest degree of insecurity, more than in Jerusalem itself ’ – the American travellers considered their Bedouin escorts more as guides than guards.93 They took care to cultivate good relations with the Bedouin, Robinson expressing ‘our wish and endeavour in all things to deal with them kindly, and treat them as men; and in this way we won their confidence and received from them kindness in return’.94 They were also aware of the difficulties which a poor relationship with the guides could create. Robinson recorded a meeting in Jerusalem with the French traveller Jules de Bertou; while the Frenchman ‘complained bitterly of his guides – of their obstinacy, rapacity, and disobliging conduct’, Robinson and Smith subsequently travelled with the very same guides ‘and found that they complained of the traveller in equally bitter terms’. Robinson discounted de Bertou’s claims to have identified Biblical sites near Petra because he was unable to speak Arabic, and thus ‘was not in a situation to converse freely with his guides, so as to draw them out, and win their confidence’.95 By contrast, the bonds which Robinson and Smith forged with their Bedouin guides appear to have been genuine and reciprocated, if transitory. Robinson

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recorded some of the considerate acts through which the Americans built their relationships with the Bedouin, such as the purchase of a sheep at a remote village south of the Dead Sea, ‘to provide a good supper for our Arabs’.96 In return, Robinson felt that his guides ‘would probably have laid down their lives at any moment in our defence’, and was also invited to stay in a tribal camp, though not feeling themselves bound by Arab codes of conduct, he and Smith desired to ‘escape the annoyance of the Bedawîn hospitality’.97 More touchingly, he elegiacally paid tribute to his elderly guide across the Sinai to Hebron, named Tuweileb, as ‘uniformly kind, patient, accommodating, and faithful’, and noted that the other Bedouin in their retinue ‘had done all in their power to lighten the toils of our journey, and protect us from discomforts by the way’.98 Of another guide named Muḥammad, an Islamic preacher or khaṭīb, Robinson wrote that he and Smith ‘parted from him not without feelings of respect, and also of regret, at the idea of meeting him no more’.99 While Robinson was clearly fond of his Bedouin guides, he also evinced an Orientalist and missionary desire to see them brought into the folds of the Eurocentric conception of ‘civilization’. Unsurprisingly given his American settler background (although British travellers also drew the comparison), Robinson ‘could not but be struck with the likeness which the Bedawîn bear to the American Indians in many of their habits’. This claim not only revealed travellers’ belief that Arab Bedouin and Native Americans shared a low rung on the Europeandefined ladder of civilization. It also implicitly expressed Westerners’ belief of the destiny of the Bedouin, which ominously resembled the fate forced upon Native Americans. This was most clearly expressed by Oliphant, who served as superintendent of Indian affairs in Quebec in the 1850s, as discussed in Chapter 7. Robinson, meanwhile, expressed of the Sinai Bedouin that no very permanent impression can well be hoped for upon them, so long as they retain their wandering and half-savage life […]. To introduce civilization among them, their inveterate predilection for the desert and its wild fascinations must first be overcome; and they then be transplanted to a kindlier soil, where they may become wonted to fixed abodes, and to the occupations of a more regular life.100

Robinson also indulged in a fantasy common among Victorian voyagers: viewing the Bedouin as models for the Biblical patriarchs. Observing Bedouin herders in the Sinai, Robinson mused that ‘Moses doubtless […] had often wandered over these mountains, and was well acquainted with their vallies and deep recesses, like the Arabs of the present day’. This outlook saw Palestine as frozen in Biblical stasis and reduced Bedouin society to an illustration for the Bible.101 Decades later, Conder not only asserted that ‘it is from the Bedawîn that we learn most that can throw light on the Patriarchal times’, but added that ‘Except in the use of tobacco and gunpowder, these people seem unchanged since the days of Abraham’.102 Robinson, more factual than florid, did not go so far. Yet he paved the way for Biblical archaeology’s claim that Palestine’s people,

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as well as land, formed a kind of archaeology, a fragment of the ancient past. The Bedouin were fetishized as a Biblical relic by Robinson’s followers, while simultaneously cast as an utterly backward social group and an impediment to ‘progress’ in Palestine. *** A careful reading of Robinson’s representation of settled communities, especially the filaḥīn, reveals a remarkably humanistic picture that confounds the Orientalism of his day and later Zionist views of Palestine’s people. He was as capable of making racist and Orientalist generalizations as most of his contemporaries. However, he also expressed evaluations of the Eastern Mediterranean’s people which widely diverged from those of other travellers. This positive discrepancy is clear in this passage on the region east of Nablus: ­ e last two days had brought us through a tract of country hitherto in a great Th measure unexplored, and which has usually been regarded as one of the wildest and most lawless portions of the Holy Land. We had been agreeably surprised, to find so much fertile and cultivated soil, thriving villages, and the people kind and courteous.103

Robinson’s views of the filaḥīn partly derived from his ability to talk with and gain insight into ordinary people’s lives through Smith’s Arabic ability. But Robinson also seems to have been genuinely interested in their lives, not merely as Biblical illustrations; as discussed above, he conscientiously depicted the filaḥīn’s ability to sustain themselves through raising bountiful harvests, unlike many Western travellers’ blindness to indigenous agriculture because of their ideological adherence to the trope of a desolate Holy Land. The extent to which Robinson’s project of extensive travel and the identification of Biblical sites in Palestine totally relied on the local people becomes clear over dozens of anecdotes in Biblical Researches. Robinson and Smith adopted a methodology that put them entirely into the hands of local villagers: we obtained a guide at ’Anâta to conduct us to Taiyibeh [i.e. the villages of ‘Anātā and Ṭayba north and northeast of Jerusalem]. Our object in this was not so much to learn the way; for that was tolerably plain; but rather to have a person always at hand, of whom we could inquire respecting the various villages and features of the country as they came into view. We continued this practice during our future journies, so far as possible; and found it generally necessary to obtain a new guide at the end of every few miles […]104

In this way, Robinson and Smith came into close contact with indigenous Palestinians, and benefitted from their deep, if somewhat localized, knowledge of the land. They found Palestinians to be ‘much interested in our proceedings’; villagers were commonly ‘ready to give us information, so far as they could; and seemed not to distrust us’.105

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The travellers rarely had trouble finding villagers willing to accompany them, on several occasions even the village leader or shaykh: the shaykh of Bayt Jibrin, for example, ‘of his own accord proposed to show us several antiquities in the vicinity’, and ‘led the way to several places of no little interest, which certainly deserve the further attention of travellers and antiquarians’, while in 1852 (when Robinson and Smith replicated their 1838 method) the shaykh of Lūbiyā west of Tiberias, noted by Robinson as ‘An elderly intelligent man, of grave deportment’, similarly ‘offered to accompany us, and be our guide to various places of interest’.106 Robinson usually expressed his satisfaction with the service they received. For instance, he described a man from Galilee village of Sakhnīn who guided him and Smith towards ‘Akka as ‘intelligent and faithful’, and another from Bayt Jālā in the same terms, adding ‘I trust he retains a pleasant remembrance of his excursion with us’.107 Robinson and Smith’s guides were almost exclusively men, although the mother of a Samaritan boy who took them up Jabal Jirzīm near Nablus, after initially trying to whisk her son away, subsequently ‘became quite reconciled and communicative’, while at Bayt Ummar northwest of Hebron the travellers met a local woman ‘who answered our inquiries intelligently’.108 It was not only as guides that villagers conscientiously served Robinson and Smith, but also as hosts. With Robinson’s stated desire ‘to leave as much as possible the beaten track, and direct our journies and researches to those portions of the country which had been least visited’, their road often lay through regions where few Europeans had previously travelled.109 They encountered hostility remarkably rarely. For instance, in Dayr Dibwān close to Tayba, Robinson reports that ‘we were welcomed by a company of twenty or thirty men, who conducted us to the flat roof of a house, and treated us with great civility’, even though ‘They had never before seen a Frank [European] among them’. The greatest danger they faced was losing sleep when villagers crowded around their tent by night, or losing time in their tight schedule. In Tayba, Robinson recounted how curious locals came to pay their respects until ‘the tent was completely full’, and ‘It was only by ordering the people away that we could get room to eat; and it was quite late before we could even think of sleep’.110 To ensure their guests’ safety, villagers often sat guard all night around the travellers’ tent. In Bayt Nattīf southwest of Jerusalem, where Robinson found the people ‘very civil and hospitable’, he reported that ‘the Sheikh himself and two men had kept guard during the night of their own accord, and without expecting any remuneration’.111 Robinson and Smith, as well as their porters and guides, also depended on villagers for their sustenance during the journey. They frequently obtained their supplies at no cost, from the goodwill of the people. Travelling between Jerusalem and Gaza, Robinson recounted that we came in contact here with oriental hospitality in its primitive and genuine form. The villagers supplied us with every thing we desired; regarding it as an honour, and without expecting a recompense. Such is the custom of all these mountains. The Fellâhîn never sell food to one another; but every stranger is the guest of the village.112

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As with the Bedouin, if Robinson had anything to complain of, it was an excess of Palestinian generosity. At Idhna, the Americans’ departure from the village in the morning was delayed by the villagers’ promise of an honorary breakfast for the travellers; annoyed by this ‘well-meant though ill-timed hospitality’, Robinson and Smith waited only a few minutes, and set off. They were soon pursued by Idhna’s shaykh ‘running with his bosom full of bread’, and the Americans’ locally hired servants understandably ‘complained long afterwards, that we had taken them away from a savoury breakfast’. Ultimately, Robinson reported that ‘from Gaza to Hebron we did not pay a para [the smallest denomination of Ottoman currency], nothing being expected’, a revelation starkly contrasting with other travellers’ accusations of Oriental greed and continual demand for bakshīsh (see Chapter  5).113 Robinson bemoaned that ‘the Franks have broken in upon this custom; and the people have learned to receive pay from foreigners’.114 However, fourteen years later on his second visit to Palestine, he recounted that in the Shāghūr region of the Galilee ‘we had found the peasants refusing to sell bread; regarding it as a disgrace to do so’, instead providing bread for free, and that in Rāmīn northwest of Nablus the inhabitants ‘would take no pay for wood, which they gave us; and they lent us a jar, that we might fetch water for ourselves, instead of paying them for bringing it’.115 Smith’s fluency in Arabic also gave the two Americans insights into Palestinian society which few others enjoyed. Robinson’s records of Smith’s conversations present fascinating snapshots into Palestinians’ lives in the nineteenth century. Many tales Smith’s interlocutors related in 1838 concerned the repressive rule of the Egyptians. The shaykh of Bayt Jibrin, identified by Robinson as ‘Muhammed Sellim […] a young fine-looking man, of prepossessing manners and quite intelligent’, revealed how ‘they having taken part in the rebellion of 1834, his uncle and brother were beheaded’.116 Near Dura, the Americans encountered a ‘poor fellow’ who, after the authorities demanded a quota of guns to be collected from the Palestinian peasantry, ‘had been searching after one for three days in the plain, and had finally purchased a miserable old thing for sixty Piastres. He was now returning home in order to surrender it to the governors’.117 Between Jimzū near Lydda and Bayt ‘Ūr in today’s West Bank, Robinson and Smith accompanied ‘two or three females travelling the same way’, including a mother whose son had been conscripted, and ‘had been down to Yâfa to visit him, and was returning in sadness, never expecting to see him again’.118 In northern Palestine, Robinson and Smith found towns and villages still recovering from the devastating 1837 Galilee earthquake. Smith was told by a Muslim resident of Tiberias that he and four others were returning down the mountain west of the city in the afternoon, when the earthquake occurred. All at once the earth opened and closed again, and two of his companions disappeared. He ran home affrighted; and found that his wife, mother, and two others in the family, had perished.119

These often-touching details were only accessible through Arabic conversations in which Palestinians were approached with respect, and are conspicuously absent from most literature of the Peaceful Crusade.

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Robinson and Smith continued their work in Palestine’s towns and cities with the help of their indigenous residents. The visitors were often hosted by a network of missionary associates and American agents who were local Christians. Robinson was appreciative of their hospitality, praising for instance ‘a dinner of many dishes […] the most abundant indeed which we anywhere met with in Palestine’ which he and Smith were served by the American agent in Ramla.120 But his hosts could also try his patience. ‘The attentions of Abu Nâsir towards us proceeded from the most entire kindness and respect’, Robinson complained after being forced to listen to the daughter of his host in Nazareth recite her prayers in Arabic, ‘but they deprived us of the greater portion of our time’.121 He clearly would rather have been searching for archaeological traces or recording his notes; dropping off to sleep in ‘the largest and best parlour’ which he and Smith had been given in the house of a local Christian in Tyre, Robinson ‘wished myself most heartily back again upon the ground beneath our tent’.122 The most fruitful urban encounters were often serendipitous meetings with friendly Muslims. In Jerusalem, they turned for information to ‘intelligent [Muslim] Sheikhs and other persons from the towns and villages in that and other districts’, who ‘were in general ready to communicate all they knew respecting the places in their own neighbourhood’.123 In 1838, Robinson and Smith stayed in a house in the Muslim Quarter, and received one hour-long visit from Jerusalem’s mufti or Islamic spiritual leader, ‘a fine looking man between sixty and seventy years of age, with a long white beard neatly trimmed, intelligent eyes, and great vivacity’. Robinson appreciatively noted that the mufti ‘was prompt in offering us all the facilities we might need in prosecuting our researches’.124 The Americans encountered the same cooperative spirit in 1852, when for instance at the Church of Saint Anne (then an Islamic school or madrasa) they encountered ‘a descendant of the prophet [Muḥammad] in a green turban, who courteously gave us information on various points’. Robinson and Smith also cunningly accompanied a European doctor on his rounds, giving them access to domestic spaces. One home, where they were welcomed ‘with great friendliness’ by its Muslim residents, was ‘the house of Abu Sa’ûd’; this building straddled the Western Wall of the Haram al-Sharif, allowing Robinson to inspect the wall up close, and also adjoining a mosque which the Americans visited in the now-demolished Mughāriba or Moroccan Quarter. In another home, the travellers ‘called upon an intelligent Mussulman’, who read to them from an Arabic manuscript.125 Jerusalem was not the only city where Robinson and Smith encountered such helpfulness. In Gaza, Robinson reported a warm welcome from ‘an Arab Greek [i.e. Orthodox] Christian […], named Suleimân el-Hashwy, a merchant who acts in some sort as a Frank agent’. At his market stall, the merchant ‘received us with great kindness; ordered coffee; and introduced us to his neighbours’, including ‘a very intelligent Mussulman, who seemed quite interested in seeing strangers from the new world, and made many inquiries respecting America’. During their conversation, the man offered to guide them around Gaza’s Great Mosque, an unexpected invitation which the travellers ‘were not slow to accept’.126

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Robinson was a rarity among Western travellers in his understanding that the people of the region, while divided between different religious communities, nonetheless formed a unitary and essentially cohesive society. The opposite perspective was summarized by the American missionary in Lebanon William McClure Thomson (who accompanied Robinson for a portion of his travels in 1852 after Smith returned to Beirut) in his 1859 bestseller The Land and the Book: No other country in the world [than Greater Syria], I presume, has such a multiplicity of antagonistic races […]. They can never form one united people, never combine for any important religious or political purpose, and will therefore remain weak, incapable of self-government, and exposed to the invasions and oppressions of foreigners. Thus it has been, is now, and must long continue to be – a, people divided, meted out, and trodden down.127

­ ese sentiments, which turned diversity into a principle negating the possibility Th of nationhood and implied the necessity of a colonizing force in the region, were asserted in defiance of facts such as the 1834 revolt which united Palestinians of different communities against the Egyptian occupation, and the development of national consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean from the mid- to late nineteenth century.128 Perhaps as he had journeyed in Palestine while memories of 1834 were still fresh, Robinson disagreed with other travellers in this regard. In a lengthy article he wrote on the Druze community in 1843, Robinson asserted that All these various classes of population, like all the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine, use the Arabic as their vernacular tongue. They are indeed all Arabs; and exhibit the striking features which everywhere mark the character of Arabs; their hospitality, their fidelity, their quickness of perception, their untamed passions and proneness to revenge. […] In dress, in manners and customs, in social and political forms, in respect to honesty and integrity of character, they are all one people; and their main difference consists in the institutions and practices arising out of their different religious tenets.129

While his expression remained couched in Orientalist terms, Robinson nevertheless articulated an idea which later animated Greater Syrian nationalism in the early twentieth century. In Robinson and Smith, the Palestinian filaḥīn, and the people of the Eastern Mediterranean more generally, found appreciative and insightful Western observers. Few other foreigners in the nineteenth century would pay them such attention as a living community. Many of those who followed Robinson to Palestine expressed overtly racist opinions. ‘The “Fellahheen,” or common peasantry of Palestine’, James Finn claimed, ‘are human beings existing in a very low social condition approaching nearly to barbarism’, and were ‘deplorably ignorant, and in some places even brutish’.130 In contrast to Robinson’s recognition of a shared national identity among the Arabic-speaking people of the Eastern

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Mediterranean, Finn dismissively asserted that ‘the word “patriotism” does not exist in their language’, and that local attachment to the land was the characteristic of an untravelled peasant, whether in Yorkshire or in Galilee; it has no reference to external countries in their relation with one’s own. It is the virtue of a cat or a dog, but not the great sentiment that animated the ancient Israelites, the sentiment whose office it is to uphold the honour of one’s own land against all comers; that which makes a man righteously jealous of the distinction of being a Frenchman, an American, a Russian, or a Briton […]131

In Finn’s mind, nationalist consciousness was reserved for the West (and, in Biblical terms, the ancient Israelites), and held as a marker of civilization which set Occident and Orient firmly apart. In similarly prejudiced terms, Conder similarly opined of the filaḥīn that ‘even the least ignorant know scarcely anything, while the cow-herds and goatherds are very little better than brute beasts’.132 Other visitors viewed Palestinian villagers, as one traveller put it, as merely ‘a crowd of brownskinned simpletons’, without the humanity and individuation which Robinson had attributed to them.133 These dismissive views would ultimately prepare the possibility of the dispossession of Palestine’s people in favour of another.

‘Coming to Take Possession’: The colonization question On multiple occasions, Robinson reported an apparent desire of the people he and Smith encountered for a European occupation of their land. For instance, he recounted how, in the South Hebron Hills, ‘many of the peasants gathered around us, and seemed gratified to hold our telescopes and render other little services’. Apparently through Smith’s understanding of their speech, the Americans gathered that there seems to be a current impression, that ever since the country was in the hands of the Franks [i.e. the Crusaders], their descendants still have deeds of all the land […]. These poor people, however, seemed well-pleased at the idea of our coming to take possession; hoping in this way to be themselves freed from the oppression of Muslim [i.e. Ottoman and Egyptian] misrule.134

Robinson’s presentation of the people as awaiting a European saviour is jarring, given his generally perceptive representation of Palestinian society. Robinson nevertheless repeated very similar anecdotes in other locations in Palestine. In Bayt Jibrin, he recounted that a man called out to us: “Do not be long,” that is, in coming to take possession of the country. […] Such expressions we often heard; and this desire for a Frank government or Frank protection we found to be universal in Syria, among both Christians and Muhammedans; not excepting even the Bedawîn. On this ground we were everywhere well received.135

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In the village of Ṣummīl, west of Hebron, Robinson claimed to hear the same words, and reflected that the inhabitants everywhere appeared, for the most part, to desire that the Franks should send a force among them. They were formerly tired of the Turks; they were now still more heartily tired of the Egyptians; and were ready to welcome any Frank nation which should come, not to subdue, (for that would not be necessary,) but to take possession of the land.136

This passage reveals Robinson’s expectation that ‘taking possession’ of the Eastern Mediterranean would be a simple affair, requiring little military force as the indigenous population would welcome their colonizers with open arms. These notions were repeated by other Victorian travellers after Britain had displayed its naval power at ‘Akka in 1840, helping the Ottomans regain control of Greater Syria. Eliot Warburton, for instance, claimed that ‘every traveller, at all capable of conversing with the natives, constantly meets the question, “When are the English coming?”’137 It is impossible to know how much travellers, including Robinson, exaggerated Palestinians’ words, to what extent Western travellers placed such ideas in locals’ heads themselves, whether such calls were frequently repeated but essentially idle talk and so on. At a time when Western involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean was rapidly increasing, some of the region’s people may have hoped for European aid in loosening the hold of the repressive systems ruling over them, without desiring an imperial occupation to follow. Robinson himself acknowledged this, noting that Palestine’s people were ‘not […] drawn by any positive attachment’ to European powers, but were rather ‘forced by a desire to escape from suffering’.138 That significant pro-British sentiment did not exist in Palestine later in the nineteenth century has been noted by Schölch, who highlights the staunch Palestinian support for Aḥmad ‘Urābi’s anti-British revolt in Egypt in 1882.139 Nevertheless, anti-Ottoman spirit eventually resulted in initial celebrations of Palestinians on the streets of Jerusalem when the city fell to the British in December 1917. As the Jerusalemite memoirist and musician Wasif Jawhariyyeh noted, the city’s inhabitants ‘were dancing on the pavement and congratulating each other’ at the end of Ottoman rule, before the nature of Britain’s project in Palestine became clear.140 But nineteenth-century travellers were deeply mistaken in their expectation that a European occupation would be a simple enterprise for the colonizers, still less a painless one for Palestinians. Robinson did not explicitly advocate an occupation of the Eastern Mediterranean. Instead, he saw increased Protestant missionary activity as the surest way to spread Western power. In 1838, he predicted that, were Britain ‘to obtain, for native Protestants, the same acknowledgment and rights, that are granted to other acknowledged Christian sects’ in the Ottoman Empire, ‘but few years would probably elapse, before many in Syria would bear the Protestant name’, and form a strong basis for British influence.141 Like others (see Chapter 7), he also wondered whether the Druze community could also be cultivated as a

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bulwark of sympathy for Britain and America.142 During his 1852 return visit to Palestine (two years after the Ottomans had officially recognized Protestants in the empire as a minority), Robinson was confronted with the fruits of the increasing Protestant missionary activity during the interim: in Jerusalem, he was assailed with Orthodox Christians’ complaints about ‘the incoming of the English’, whose incessant missionary activity among non-Protestant Christians his interlocutors likened to ‘a big bass-drum […] with its unceasing bum, bum, bum!’143 *** Noticeably lacking from Robinson’s conception is any notion of settler colonization in Palestine. This significant absence, conspicuous given the protoZionist sentiments of Robinson’s successors, is partially explained by Robinson’s equivocal attitude towards settler colonization in North America. While Robinson was a product of the United States’ settler society, the lifestyle of agricultural colonization on land which indigenous dispossession had rendered available to the European immigrant population left him cold. His father exemplified the ideal of New England settler-farmer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, buying ‘fields and pastures, cows and oxen’, operating wood and grain mills, and becoming ‘the wealthiest man in town’ in Southington.144 The young Edward had rebelled against this lifestyle in his desire to become a scholar. The academic institutions of New England and New York also proved too provincial for him, leading him to the universities of continental Europe in the 1830s. While Robinson was born and raised in the settler society of the New World, he was drawn irresistibly to the Old World. Robinson expounded his views on American settler colonialism in an article of 1844, a rare piece by him on a secular subject. Robinson lauded what he considered the achievements of the settler project, writing that Little more than two centuries have passed away, since the white man’s foot was first planted on our soil; or since the forest ceased to wave over the fair scenes on every side, where now rise so thickly the habitations of wealth and taste, the halls of science, and the temples of the living God.

Robinson praised America’s early settlers as ‘men of no common minds, nor common training’, who worked for ‘a great and noble cause’; in patriotic discourse, he lauded them as having ‘swept away at once the ancient forest of deep-rooted prejudice and despotic institutions’ and ‘planted their vineyard of freedom’, creating a society in which ‘the labourer at his plough, and the smith at his forge, are as free, and may become as noble as the dukes and princes of other lands’. Yet Robinson also expressed his dissatisfaction with settlers’ subsequent dispersal across the continent, thinning the population of New England where settlement had first taken root. ‘But suppose’, he asked, all this mass of population, instead of thus seeking out new scenes of active life and national development, had from the force of circumstances, remained

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Palestine in the Victorian Age pent up within the limits of New England? Would not her less fertile soil have been more richly tilled? Would not her fleets have spread out still more canvass upon every sea? And especially, […] would not some portion of this surplus population naturally have turned its attention to arts and sciences; and the class of literary and scientific men have become far greater than at present?145

Robinson envisaged a United States that would not pursue its ‘manifest destiny’ through settlers’ unstoppable westward expansion, but would rather concentrate its population in the continent’s north-east, creating a society which he thought would be better able to compete with European powers in production, global influence and education. Robinson’s ideal America sheds light on his desires for the future of the Eastern Mediterranean. Bemoaning the oppressive nature of Muhammad ‘Ali’s regime, he expressed his wish to see instead ‘an agricultural nation’ where the people enjoyed ‘the blessings of personal freedom and education’. He expressed no desire to see a settler enterprise implanted in the region. Even when he asserted the underpopulation of land by comparison with its agricultural potential – writing, for example, of the east banks of the Nile that ‘another million at least might be sustained in the district’ – he did not explicitly advocate the importation of foreign settlers.146 His reports of Palestine, after all, expressed a sympathy for the filaḥīn and an appreciation of their agrarian abilities, that rendered a settler enterprise superfluous. Not only was Robinson lukewarm on the frontier instincts of settler colonialism, but he was also uninterested in the ideological and theological premises of Zionism. As Goldman correctly notes, Robinson ‘was a Hebraist, but not a protoZionist’.147 Not given to the overinterpretation of vague Biblical prophesies, he seems to have been unconcerned with the idea of the Jewish Restoration which so animated other Evangelicals. While he obsessively hunted for the traces of the ancient Hebrews, he barely gave thought to the idea that modern Jews might create a new Hebrew society in Palestine. He stated dismissively of small settlercolonial projects which he observed or heard of in 1852, driven primarily by millenarian Evangelicals who wished to bring about the Jewish Restoration, that ‘It is hardly necessary to remark, that the idea of speedily converting the Jews, living as strangers in Palestine, into an agricultural people, is altogether visionary’.148 Robinson’s limited usefulness to the Zionist movement is reflected in Sokolow’s History of Zionism. His portrait is reproduced in the book, the only American on a page mainly of photographs of British Palestinian Exploration Fund figures. However, in the text itself ‘the eminent American scholar’ is only quoted in a short paragraph on Britain’s imperial rivalry with other European powers, with no mention of Robinson’s journey anywhere.149 The early Zionist movement would find much more inspiration in the works of two travellers who were pictured alongside him in Sokolow’s book: Charles Warren and Claude Conder. ***

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The massive interest in Palestine which Robinson’s bestselling publications produced was a major contributing factor to the establishment of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in 1865, two years after his death. In Jerusalem in 1852, he had attended one of Finn’s Biblical-themed soirées for European expatriates, which Finn christened the Jerusalem Literary Society; Finn praised the American guest of honour as ‘the great pioneer in Palestine exploration’. As president of the small group (for which he achieved patronage from several Anglican bishops and even the Archbishop of Canterbury), the British consul ‘lost no opportunity of impressing upon the members […] the necessity for more exact topographical research, and for excavations’. Finn’s circle, in the words of his wife Elizabeth – later herself a member of the PEF  – ‘in a quiet way made preparation for the work afterwards undertaken by the Palestine Exploration Fund’.150 More generally, Robinson’s ‘scientific’ approach sparked Evangelical desires in Britain to continue this work, not only for theological purposes, but also to further imperial objectives by gaining an intimate knowledge of the lay of Palestine’s land.151 ‘To cultivate aright the particular field of historical topography, would require a residence of several years, and a visit to every town and village, to every mountain and valley, to every trace of antiquity and ruin’, Robinson had recognized; to the PEF, this sounded like a challenge.152 The PEF’s leading figures understood that they were essentially Robinson’s imitators, although they believed they could improve on his findings; in 1875, Conder described Robinson’s journeys as ‘the groundwork of modern research’, and humbly acknowledged that ‘It is in his steps that we have trod’, although he boasted that ‘With greater advantages, more time and more money, we have been able to more than double the number of his discoveries’.153 Warren and Conder were the two PEF figures who became most concerned with Palestine’s colonization by Britain and/or by Jewish settlers. The two men, both born in the 1840s, shared upper-middle-class backgrounds, were both lieutenants in the Royal Engineers, and were both selected by the PEF to undertake its first major surveying work in Palestine in the late 1860s and 1870s. Both would also be devoted servants of the British Empire throughout their lives, with Warren later appointed to Sudan, Singapore and South Africa during the Boer War, as well as (incompetently) serving as chief of London’s Metropolitan Police in the 1880s, and Conder serving across the empire, including in Egypt against the revolt of ‘Urabi Pasha, and in India. Warren expounded his thoughts on what he believed was Palestine’s destiny in two works of the mid-1870s. In Underground Jerusalem, his 1876 account of his surveys of Jerusalem and travels in Palestine from 1867 to 1870, Warren devoted two chapters to ‘Resources of Palestine’, putting his colonial sensibilities on record.154 Like Robinson, Warren asserted Palestinians’ desire for colonization, asserting that ‘Many a time have the Arab Moslems said to me, “When will you take this country and rid us of our oppressors; anything is better than their rule”’. While the Egyptians had been the ‘oppressors’ during Robinson’s first journey, it was now against ‘the barbarous Turk’, that is, the Ottomans, that Warren directed his ire. ‘The Turk can never govern Palestine well’, he asserted, ‘and until he departs, the country must remain half desert, half prison’.

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‘But supposing the Turk goes, how is he to he replaced?’ Warren next asked. His answer referenced the central ideological pillar of all imperialism and colonialism, that it was the ‘white man’s burden’ to take on responsibility for the non-white peoples of the world: ‘On one point we may be certain. The Arabs of [Greater] Syria cannot govern themselves. Centuries of mismanagement and ill-treatment have made them incapable of knowing what self-government means; but they understand justice, and with a tight rule the country might be made prosperous and happy’. While he stopped short of explicitly advocating a British takeover of Palestine, Warren unsubtly called for ‘a good rule similar to that which holds up our Indian Empire’. Warren had no doubt that the Muslim filaḥīn would be compliant subjects. He cited his archaeological excavations in Palestine, in which ‘our workmen were drawn from two villages, two of the most turbulent in the country, whose people enjoyed the worst of reputations, and yet they were soon reduced to order’; he boasted that they ‘would, at a few minutes’ notice, march off twenty or thirty miles away, without question on their part’. However, with Palestine’s Christian community,  of whom he stated that ‘a more arrogant, insolent, conceited people do not exist’, Warren admitted he could ‘see some difficulty’. Describing Palestinian Christians as ‘at present a disagreeable people’, he predicted that ‘the native Christians must be kept very tightly in hand at first’ during an occupation.155 Warren’s prejudice against Christian Palestinians derived partly from Evangelicals’ strongly hostile reaction towards non-Protestant Christianity, as explored in the next chapter. Yet ultimately, Warren predicted that neither Muslim and Christian Palestinians would have ‘strong feelings of attraction with regard to their nominal religions’, as he argued they had basically retained the pagan ‘ancient traditions’ and ‘ancient observances’ of their ancestors, the Biblical Canaanites. Quoting from the Book of Joshua, he asserted that ‘we must recognise in them the lineal descendants of the Canaanites, the ancient inhabitants of the land, the hewers of wood and drawers of water’ for the Hebrews – in other words, they were Biblically designated as the ideal subservient and docile labourers for a colonizing population. The analogy of modern Palestinians with ancient Canaanites had another, more sinister undertone. In the Biblical narrative the Canaanites were not only the servants of the Israelites, but their society was suppressed and replaced, at least partially, by the Hebrew settlers.156 Warren advocated a similar process in the modern age. Unlike Robinson, he asserted the proto-Zionist view the desolation and agricultural barrenness of Palestine in the hands of the indigenous filaḥīn. ‘The land once flowing with milk and honey still remains accursed’, he claimed. His remedy for this was simple. ‘There is not sufficient population for the proper cultivation of the land’, he wrote. ‘The country requires a great influx of people’. Warren ambitiously believed that ‘a population of fifteen millions may be accommodated’ in Palestine. In his mind, this would not occur through natural population growth, as ‘the present people do not increase, and […] are totally insufficient for the cultivation’. Whilst admitting that ‘a good sprinkling’ of colonial administrators from Britain and Germany might be advantageous, he

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argued that North African Jews who ‘love the northern Europeans’ would make the best agricultural colonists, if they were protected by the imperial powers. There was a glaring contradiction in Warren’s argument; while he proclaimed that Palestine’s ‘land lies fallow and uncared for’, he also, in trying to prove that Palestine was ‘a country where money may be made if proper measures are taken’, acknowledged that it is essentially a land of wheat, and yearly exports a portion of its products to Europe, just as it did to Tyre in the days of Solomon. The wheat grows in great luxuriance, in the lowland plains, on the swelling hills, in the highland valleys and table-lands, in the Jordan valley and plateaus of Gilead and Moab.

He also noted that Palestine was already, under its cultivation by the filaḥīn, ‘rich in corn, oil, wine, honey, sesame, raisins, figs, oranges, lemons, apricots, tobacco, cotton, castor-oil, lentiles, sheep, goats, oxen, camels, horses, and mules’. Yet this inconsistency did not get in the way of Warren’s ideological vision for Palestine’s settler colonization. ‘Will not those who love Palestine, love freedom, justice, the Bible, learn to look upon the country as one which may shortly be in the market? Will not they look about and make preparations, and discuss the question?’ he expostulated on the final page of Underground Jerusalem. ‘Let us then be on the alert and watch’.157 The year before Underground Jerusalem’s publication, Warren had already expounded many of these ideas in a pamphlet entitled The Land of Promise. Its subtitle, Turkey’s Guarantee, reflected Ottoman indebtedness to Europe; here, Warren couched his arguments in economic terms, as advocates of settler colonialism elsewhere had also frequently done, and as Laurence Oliphant and Theodor Herzl would later do for their schemes in Palestine.158 Drawing inspiration from France’s occupation of Lebanon in 1860, Warren envisaged the replacement of the Ottomans by a European colonial entity ‘similar to the old East India Company’ which, with an initial investment of capital, would recoup enough profits over twenty years to satisfy the Ottomans’ creditors. Yet this was only part of Warren’s plan, as he explained: Let this be done with the avowed intention of gradually introducing the Jew, pure and simple, who is eventually to occupy and govern this country. Let the Jew find his way into its army, its law, its diplomatic service. Let him superintend the farming operations, and work himself on the farms.

Warren’s plans, authored over forty years before the Balfour Declaration, almost uncannily resemble what would happen during the British rule of Palestine. Yet his notion of a harmonious triangle in colonized Palestine – benevolent European governors, a welcoming and docile filaḥīn, and Jewish settlers who would peaceably work the land – would prove to be deeply naive over the course of the Arab revolts of the 1920s and 1930s against British rule and settler colonialism, the Zionist insurgency against the British in the 1940s, and the ethnic cleansing

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campaign in 1948. Warren painted a rosy picture in which there were only winners and no losers in Palestine’s colonization: ‘Let the coming of the Frank be but the means to a great and glorious ending, the regeneration of Palestine – the return of the Jews’.159 The ideas of Conder, following his engagement from 1872 to 1875 in the PEF’s Survey of Western Palestine, initially differed significantly from Warren’s. Conder concurred with his colleague that ‘The happiest future which could befall Palestine seems to me to be its occupation by some strong European power’; but here their opinions diverged. While Conder shared none of Robinson’s respect for the filaḥīn, he nonetheless initially acknowledged them as sufficient for cultivating the land, under the guiding hand of a European occupation. ‘Those who have advocated the colonisation of Palestine by Englishmen, Germans, or Jews’, he added in his Tent Work in Palestine, ‘seem to forget that a native Moslem population still exists, or to consider them only fit for the fate of the Red Indian and the Australian, as savages who must disappear before the advance of a superior race’.160 In an article of spring 1879, he again stated that ‘English occupation, or protection, would be an assistance to colonization, or rather to farming by means of native labour’, not settler labour.161 Yet Conder’s position changed markedly in subsequent years. In January 1881, he warmly reviewed Oliphant’s lengthy manifesto for settler colonization, The Land of Gilead, as discussed in Chapter  7. In the decade ahead, Conder transformed from a sceptic into a strong advocate of settler colonialism. As the later British Mandate immigration official and commentator on early Zionism Albert Montefiore Hyamson would write, ‘by his pen and on the lecture platform he did his utmost to further the cause’.162 Conder’s about-turn is evident in ‘Jewish Colonies in Palestine’, an article published in 1891 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a prestigious literary periodical which became, through its frequent publication of the articles of Conder and Oliphant, an influential forum for proto-Zionist opinions (its publisher, William Blackwood and Sons, also published Oliphant’s key proto-Zionist text, The Land of Gilead). In the article, Conder asserted that ‘we may perhaps be destined to witness a very remarkable historic event – the return of the Jews to their native land – and a change in the condition of Palestine without precedent in modern times’. Whereas in Tent Work he had noted the indigenous population as a factor which would hamper settler colonization, now he argued that ‘the country is empty, compared with its capability of supporting a population’. He denied the presence of indigenous people would pose a problem, drawing an analogy with white settlement in South Africa in his defence. Using a racially charged term for black Africans, Conder argued that To say that the country [Palestine] is already populated is to make a statement applicable to any other part of the world. The new colonies in South Africa already contain so large a Kaffir population that it seems impossible in many parts to find room for white men, without grievous injustice to a law-abiding and peaceful race of original owners; yet we never hear this urged as a reason against colonisation in Africa.

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The transformation in Conder’s ideas was near absolute. However, he still stated that Palestine’s colonization would be for Britain’s benefit: ‘if such colonisation, and such opening up of the country, be effected’, he wrote, ‘Palestine may become a very important source of corn-supply for England’. He expected this could be accomplished under formal Ottoman sovereignty, though he insisted that sweeping reforms ensuring ‘that the colonists should receive valid titles under Turkish law to their holdings’ were required.163 In the early twentieth century, Conder acted as an advisor to Zionists in Britain, part of the Hibbat or Hovevei Zion (Hebrew: Lovers of Zion) network of Zionist activists across Europe. As the Jewish Chronicle stated in its obituary of him in February 1910, he became ‘a frequent speaker at Zionist meetings, and showed unbounded interest in the regeneration of Palestine and Zionist effort in that direction’.164 In speeches he gave to the London Zionist League in 1905 and 1906, Conder not only provided his advice to Palestine’s would-be colonizers, but also revealed his own generous conception of himself in Zionism’s history. In his first talk, Conder claimed to have been the inspirer of the First ‘Aliya in the late 1870s: after reading articles he had written in the Jewish Chronicle, he boasted, ‘the first Zionist came to the conclusion that he would attempt to carry into practice what I was writing about’.165 Similarly – and inaccurately, given his early opposition to settler colonialism in Palestine – in 1906, he asserted that he had ‘always been in favor of the Zionist movement’.166 In his last years, Conder’s new vision was of a Palestine removed from Ottoman control and yet not dominated by any one European power, an idea which may have grown out of the system of multiple European empires’ ‘protections’ of sections of the Ottoman population from the system of Capitulations, and also bears similarity to the never-implemented ‘international administration’ for Palestine in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.167 Conder described his plan for Palestine as a ‘West Asian Switzerland’, but he pointedly asked ‘a West Asian Switzerland must have a population; and who have more right to the country than the ancient race to which it belonged?’168 Drawing on the Biblical archaeologist imagination which constructed sprawling ancient cities out of the sparse ruins of Palestine, Conder asserted – with a likely vastly inflated figure – that ‘in its prosperous days [Palestine] must have had a population of at least 10,000,000 more than at present’, implying that Palestine in the present could also support millions of Jewish settlers.169 He gave little thought to the indigenous Palestinians whose presence on the land, he had once noted, would pose a fundamental challenge to any settlercolonial venture. *** The pro-colonization writings of Warren and Conder did not go unnoticed by the nascent Zionist movement’s ideologues. ‘They have shown that Palestine is capable of supporting a nation such as the Jews’, wrote Sokolow, namechecking Conder and Warren. ‘In brief, all these English Christian authorities put forward in the most definite and clearest terms what we know as political Zionism’.170

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Their views were in some ways the fruits of Robinson’s Biblical Researches. Robinson himself was too much a conscientious and dispassionate observer of landscape to fall prey to a Biblical ideology that inaccurately condemned Palestine to a verdict of barrenness and desolation. He had sufficient respect for Palestine’s people, particularly the filaḥīn, and was too indebted to them for their knowledge and services to his project, to harshly denigrate their lifestyle and farming. He was not so strongly wedded to Restorationist theology, nor to settler-colonial projects in general, as to enthusiastically support the Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine. But his new way of seeing Palestine, combining a ‘scientific’ appraisal with an ever-present comparison against a Biblical image, transformed the Holy Land into a physical territory that could be possessed as a piece of real estate. This not only appealed to Evangelicals who passionately held Restorationist beliefs, but also chimed with patriotic British imperialists who desired a greater role for their country in Palestine. Warren and Conder, given a status of influential ‘experts’ for their work with the PEF, fell into both these categories. Robinson, more than any other individual, initiated the specifically Western, Protestant manifestation of the Peaceful Crusade. Unlike the Crusaders of the Middle Ages, Evangelicals were essentially uninterested in the traditional holy sites of Christianity, and more concerned with traversing, surveying and experiencing the land as a prelude to possessing it. This becomes especially clear when considering Western travellers’ attitudes to the holiest site of all: Jerusalem.

­­Chapter 3 ‘A J E RU S A L E M O F T H E I R OW N ’ : V IC T O R IA N T R AV E L L E R S I N A HO LY C I T Y

‘To enter modern Jerusalem is to be disenchanted’. So wrote the prominent Anglican priest, Thomas Bell, of his visit to Palestine’s most holy city in the 1880s. Bell complained of the ‘narrow, dirty, ill-paved’ streets, the most ‘inferior’ shops he claimed to have ever seen, and the city’s smell, writing that ‘Were it possible, it would be pleasant to leave our noses in the tents’. Bell capped his scathing review of Jerusalem by asserting that ‘It is impossible to conceive what it must have been in the days of its glory’ – two millennia before.1 Bell’s complaints about Jerusalem were virtually interchangeable with many Victorian texts on Palestine. As Elsner and Rubiés have noted, ‘Modern travel writing is a literature of disappointment’.2 Victorian voyagers relished the opportunity to disparage the cities they visited beyond Europe’s borders which did not conform to the Eurocentric model of urban environment, and offered the opportunity for an implicit or explicit comparison with the metropoles of the West. One traveller warned that anyone following him to Palestine ‘will be disappointed if he expects to see beautiful cities, like Edinburgh or Florence’, because The cities of Palestine proper are not beautiful, though some of them can boast of a picturesque situation. They have no fine gardens or squares, no spacious streets or handsome shops, and whatever may be their attractions, neither cleanliness nor airiness is amongst the number. The lover of the “Row,” [London’s Savile Row] or of the Paris boulevard, will feel ill at ease in the David Street of Jerusalem or the bazaars of Nablous.3

It was, in part, the mindset of the colonial administrator which made Westerners feel so ‘ill at ease’ in the maze-like streets of Palestine’s cities; as Fanon epitomized the attitude of the European colonizer, The town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. […] It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other.4

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Jerusalem, because of its prominence in the imaginations of all Evangelical travellers, received particularly scathing criticism. ‘People often say they are disappointed in Jerusalem’, stated Charles Biggs, a frequently insightful Anglican clergyman who lived in the city for six months in the late nineteenth century: ‘they are disappointed, not because Jerusalem is what it is, as because it does not correspond with what they had trained themselves to expect’.5 The cliché of ‘disappointing Jerusalem’ was already so ingrained by Edward Robinson’s time that he reported being ‘in many respects agreeably disappointed’ with Jerusalem in 1838; expecting from the reports of preceding decades ‘to find the houses of the city miserable, the streets filthy, and the population squalid’, he instead described the city as one of ‘the cleanest and most solidly built’ he visited on his travels.6 But relatively open-minded travellers like Robinson were the exception. More commonly, when faced with the existing Jerusalem, travellers mentally fled from the city and retreated into what Norman Macleod described as ‘a Jerusalem of their own – full of the beautiful, the sacred, the holy, and the good’.7 This was an idealized model of the city in antiquity, based on mental images drawn from the Bible and the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, who was not then recognized as in many respects unreliable. This chapter centres on Victorian travellers’ perceptions of Jerusalem’s major holy sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Christian structure covering the traditionally accepted locations of Christ’s crucifixion (Golgotha or Calvary) and tomb; the Haram al-Sharif, the compound including the Islamic shrines of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqṣā Mosque; and the Haram’s Western Wall, sacred to Judaism. This follows travellers’ own selective gaze, which largely focused on Jerusalem’s religious aspects. ‘Jerusalem’, it was emphatically though inaccurately asserted, ‘lives upon religion. In respect of art and science, literature and philosophy, civil life and commerce, it is nowhere […] Religion is in the atmosphere’.8 Even Robinson, usually observant of indigenous Palestinian life, admitted that ‘The object of my journey to Jerusalem was not […] to inquire into the character of the present population, nor to investigate their political or moral state’, but only to explore ‘every thing connected with it that could have a bearing upon the illustration of the Scriptures’.9 While not totally blind to social developments in Jerusalem, Western visitors tended to dwell in their texts on the religious sites, described ad nauseam by Victorian Evangelicals. In most accounts, there is little sense of the everyday lives of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Jerusalemites, or what the title of a recent anthology of research identifies as ‘ordinary Jerusalem’.10 However, travellers’ seemingly obscure debates about the Holy Sepulchre and the Haram reveal much about their mentality and views towards Palestine’s different faith communities. As Nassar states, Westerners’ ‘historical imagination pave[d] the way toward actual colonisation’.11 In their complex of attitudes towards the holy city, Victorian travellers were planning how Jerusalem could be reshaped to their desire.

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‘The Least Sacred Spot about Jerusalem’: Victorians and the Holy Sepulchre Western travellers approached Palestine, and Jerusalem specifically, not primarily as part of an Islamic Orient, but as the Judeo-Christian Holy Land. While Said asserts that in ‘the Near East […] Islam was supposed to define cultural and racial characteristics’, Victorian travellers’ views of Jerusalem cannot easily be conceptualized in this model of Orientalism.12 For Evangelicals, like their non-Protestant predecessors and contemporaries who embarked on religious pilgrimages to Palestine, Jerusalem was the centre of the universe. As Robinson stated, only from Jerusalem ‘has gone forth, to other nations and to modern times, all the true knowledge which exists of God, of his Revelation, of a Future State, and of Man’s Redemption through Jesus Christ’; only from Palestine, compared to which ‘the splendor and learning and fame of Egypt, Greece, and Rome fade away’. It was inconsequential that Palestine and Jerusalem were also sacred in other religious traditions and had long been part of the Islamic world: in Evangelical minds, they remained ‘the central point and nucleus of all Biblical Geography’.13 This explains some of the extreme reverence with which many travellers approached Jerusalem. While Evangelicals decried the concept of pilgrimage, scoffing at non-Protestant Christians who undertook physical journeys to holy sites as acts of devotion  – Robinson accused non-Protestants of believing ‘that a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, instead of being resorted to merely as a means of elevating and purifying the religious feelings, and quickening the flame of devotion, should come to be regarded as having in itself a sanctifying and saving power’ – Westerners were just as susceptible to surrendering to irrational feelings of awe when catching sight of the city.14 ‘The feelings of a Christian traveller on approaching Jerusalem, can be better conceived than described’, Robinson wrote of sentiments that he shared with many others: From the earliest childhood I had read of and studied the localities of this sacred spot; now I beheld them with my own eyes; and they all seemed familiar to me, as if the realization of a former dream. I seemed to be again among cherished scenes of childhood, long unvisited, indeed, but distinctly recollected.15

Even a traveller as otherwise irreverent as Mark Twain recorded how, upon first sight of Jerusalem, the members of his tour group dismounted from their horses ‘and looked, without speaking a dozen sentences, across the wide intervening valley for an hour or more’, adding that ‘The thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry, sublimity, and more than all, dignity’.16 Yet this attitude transformed into its opposite when travellers set foot inside Jerusalem. Here, they were exposed to an alien (to them) ‘Christian Orient’, a multitude of Christian communities, practices and traditions, which resembled nothing with which Victorian Evangelicals were familiar. Evangelicals heaped

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scorn on the multitude of Christian sacred sites within and outside the Old City’s walls, such as the Garden of Gethsemane, the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Ascension, venerated by Palestinian Christians and drawing Christian pilgrims from around Asia, northern Africa and Europe to Jerusalem for centuries. Robinson declared that ‘all ecclesiastical tradition respecting the ancient places in and around Jerusalem and throughout Palestine, is of NO VALUE’ (emphasis in original), a judgement with which subsequent Victorian travellers wholeheartedly concurred.17 Laurence Oliphant summarized their sentiments when he sneered that Jerusalem contained ‘within its walls more sacred shams and impostures than any other city in the world’.18 Travellers’ observance of Christian Jerusalemites’ respect for these sites illustrated the gulf between Victorian Evangelicals and those who were, in theory, their fellow Christians. The Scottish missionary John Wilson, who in his travelogue repeatedly made disparaging remarks about what he called ‘the so-called Christian part of the population’ of Palestine, complained that ‘our Christian guides cared most for what we least valued, the monkish traditions, which our own reading had previously almost uniformly taught us to discard’.19 Some travellers felt such discomfort with the indigenous Christianity they encountered that they disclaimed any shared faith with Christian communities in Palestine. Ridley Haim Herschell proclaimed that non-Western Christian denominations were not ‘churches of Christ at all; they are heathenism, mixed up with certain Christian dogmas, that become completely neutralized by the mixture’.20 In a short story of 1863 which mimicked many of the clichés of the Palestine travelogue, the English novelist Anthony Trollope demonstrated that the Orientalist pen could be turned just as damningly against non-Western Christians as Muslims, in a description of the worshippers at Jerusalem’s Tomb of the Virgin Mary: It must be remembered that Eastern worshippers are not like the churchgoers of London, or even of Rome or Cologne. They are wild men of various nations and races,  – Maronites from Lebanon, Roumelians [i.e. Balkan], Candiotes [Cretan], Copts from Upper Egypt, Russians from the Crimea, Armenians and Abyssinians. They savour strongly of Oriental life and of Oriental dirt. […] They are silent mostly, looking out of their eyes ferociously, as though murder were in their thoughts, and rapine.21

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (henceforth ‘the Church’), travellers were most starkly confronted with non-Western Christian tradition. By the nineteenth century, the Church had been the destination of pilgrimages of all Christian denominations for fifteen centuries, since its establishment under the first Byzantine Roman emperor, Constantine I.22 However, Victorian Evangelicals launched a vicious iconoclastic attack on nearly every aspect of the Church, and with it, indigenous Palestinian Christian beliefs. As with the traditional Christian pilgrimage, a Protestant visit to Jerusalem was incomplete without the experience of the Church. Twain reported that during his several days’ stay in the city he visited the building every day, ‘and have not grown

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tired of it’.23 But unlike other pilgrims, Victorian Evangelicals saw their role in the building as to observe and critique, not to worship. Protestant travellers prided themselves on the cold, sceptical attitude they maintained, by contrast to the emotional reactions of the faithful of other denominations. Harriet Martineau, the Norwich-born traveller and social and political commentator who visited Palestine in 1847, experienced embarrassment when she witnessed ‘an English lady, now a Russian Countess’, praying before the Calvary site, and rapidly hastened off to ‘the one truly interesting thing in the church’  – the tombs of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Crusader kings Godfrey and Baldwin.24 Over fifty years later, the missionary and clergyman Francis Gell wrote that the ‘passionate devotion’ at the Church of ‘group after group of frowsy pilgrims from the farthest corners of Russia’, contrasted with his own ‘cold heart, because they believed, what I knew was a fable’.25 To this non-Protestant Christian worship, travellers explicitly or implicitly contrasted the spartan ideal of the Evangelical church service, characterized in Robinson’s words by ‘quiet and devout attention’.26 Not only did the modes of worship at the Holy Sepulchre offend Victorian visitors, but they were repulsed by the building’s visual presentation. There was an irresolvable mismatch between Protestantism’s austere aesthetic and holy sites in Palestine, which non-Protestant Christians displayed their respect and veneration towards through adorning them with rich ornamentation. In Evangelical discourse, the Church became the most maligned site not only in Jerusalem, but in all Palestine; Victorian travellers competed to describe the ‘grim and wicked old building, as Claude Reignier Conder put it, in the most abject terms.27 The artist and traveller William Henry Bartlett, after visiting Jerusalem in 1842, complained of the ‘palpable absurdities’ which ‘disgust and repel us’ such as the Stone of Unction inside the Church’s entrance, and slammed the Church’s lavish decoration as ‘tawdriness and bad painting, redolent of vulgar superstition’.28 A few years later, William Thackeray vividly described the Church’s blaring candles, reeking incense, savage pictures of Scripture story, or portraits of kings who have been benefactors to the various chapels; a din and clatter of strange people, – these weeping, bowing, kissing, – those utterly indifferent; and the priests clad in outlandish robes […] the English stranger looks on the scene, for the first time, with a feeling of scorn, bewilderment, and shame at that grovelling credulity, those strange rites and ceremonies, that almost confessed imposture.

Ultimately, Thackeray claimed, ‘the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for some time, seems to an Englishman the least sacred spot about Jerusalem’.29 Martineau denied entirely the site’s Christian status, and compared the Church instead to ‘the Joss-house in China, or the exhibition of Medicine-Mystery at the Falls of the Mississippi’.30 Elizabeth Rundle Charles, a popular Evangelical author, spoke for many when she expressed her desire ‘to sweep away this heavy roof, and this wretched gold, and these marbles, and look up from this very spot to the sky’.31 These reactions to the Church are replicated by the attitudes of many contemporary

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American Evangelical visitors to Jerusalem, whose Christian Zionist outlook is bolstered by Israeli tour guides.32 Yet even Victorians’ polemics against the Church paled beside their attitudes towards the most important religious ceremony which was held there: Jerusalem’s Easter celebrations. *** Observing – but not actively participating in – the Easter festivities in Jerusalem, often formed a part of travellers’ itinerary. In particular, the ceremony of the Holy Fire the day before Easter Sunday, when Palestinian Christians and pilgrims thronged into the Church, and the Greek Orthodox patriarch retrieved a ‘miraculous’ flame from Christ’s tomb, provided a memorable spectacle for travellers. The most well-known depiction of the occasion was the painting The Miracle of the Holy Fire by the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, who made ‘rapid mementoes of the moving mass’ on the last of his several visits to Palestine in 1892.33 Hunt emphasized the (to Victorian eyes) chaos of the scene, a metaphor for generalized Oriental pandemonium which required the firm hand of Western imperialism or a colonial project such as Zionism (of which Hunt was enthusiastically supportive) to impose order. Where Hunt put his paintbrushes to work, many more travellers put their pens, and the Easter Holy Fire provided the occasion for the most derogatory descriptions of the Church and Palestinian Christianity of all. While for Palestinian Christians and pilgrims the Holy Fire ceremony was the crowning moment of the year’s most important festival, to Victorian Evangelicals it epitomized everything they failed to understand about the Christian world beyond Europe’s borders. More even than the Church’s decor, what Robinson dismissed as ‘the annual mockery of the Greek [Orthodox] holy fire’, determined travellers’ negative reactions. Robinson himself, after observing the Catholic (not the Orthodox or other non-Western Christian) service for Easter, expressed that ‘The whole scene indeed was to a Protestant painful and revolting’, and ‘excited in my mind a feeling too painful to be borne’; he admitted that after the service, he ‘never visited the place again’.34 Even Robinson’s admirers had to admit that here he spoke as ‘the Puritan, not the Scholar’, and that ‘such an attitude is just as reprehensibly unscientific as that of the modern globe-trotter, who swallows at a gulp everything that his guide chooses to tell him’.35 Most Western observers shared Robinson’s feeling. Herschell, who did not personally witness the ceremony, nevertheless denounced it as having ‘no parallel except in the rites of the heathen’, and quoted from the letter of an English eyewitness describing the service as ‘one continuation of shameless madness and rioting, which would have been a disgrace to Greenwich and Smithfield fairs’.36 Mary Eliza Rogers, sister of the British vice-consul at Haifa who recorded her experiences in the 1850s in her Domestic Life in Palestine, depicted ‘wild-looking men’ performing a ‘frantic dance, that would have suited some Indian festival’ around the tomb.37 Conder similarly portrayed ‘the Greek Christians, mostly Syrians by birth’ as becoming ‘worked up into a state of hysterical frenzy which

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would not allow them to be quiet for a moment’.38 Oliphant expressed sympathy from the Muslim Ottoman soldiers present at the scene, whom he imagined must have felt ‘contempt and disgust which one felt compelled to share’, at the ‘degrading rites and superstitions’ of the ceremony.39 Some travellers made a virtue of not attending the ceremony, even when present in Jerusalem at the time. Martineau preferred to sit gazing at ‘Olivet [the Mount of Olives] and the rising moon’ rather than ‘witness mummeries done in the name of Christianity, compared with which the lowest Fetishism on the banks of an African river would have been inoffensive’; she nevertheless quoted the judgement of a travelling companion who did brave the ceremony and likened it to ‘a holiday in hell’.40 Looking down upon the ceremony from the Church’s upper galleries, few of these voyeuristic Victorians ever paused to consider the spiritual meaning of the ceremony for those who participated in it. Biggs acridly castigated ‘Protestant travellers, who would never dream of denying themselves a single half-meal even on Good Friday’, watching the ‘crowd of enthusiastic pilgrims, who have taken nothing but vegetables for six weeks [i.e. fasted for Lent], welcome the symbol of their Saviour’s Resurrection’, only to ‘report to their friends at home on the extravagance they mistake for irreverence’.41 Particularly irking Western travellers was the appearance of the flame from the tomb, held by non-Western churches to be miraculous proof of Christ’s resurrection. Victorians saw the belief in present-day miracles as setting nonProtestant Christians definitively apart from themselves, dividing the irrational Oriental mind from the scientific reasoning of the nineteenth-century West; their own Christian faith, they considered, was all the greater as it rested on internal reflection rather than belief in an annual miracle. With a strong hint of old-fashioned Protestant anticlericalism, travellers lambasted the clergy of the churches which participated in the ceremony, especially the Greek Orthodox to whom Herschell awarded ‘the palm of superiority of evil’.42 Travellers conjectured about what could really cause the ‘miracle’. Isabel Burton, who as a Catholic was somewhat less damning about the Church than Evangelicals and recognized that without the Holy Fire ceremony Jerusalem ‘would lose half its wealthiest pilgrims, and […] be very much impoverished’, noted one theory among sceptical Westerners that a continuously burning lamp was secreted behind a ‘sliding panel’ in the tomb, while her husband Richard was ‘assured by educated Greeks that a lucifer box does the whole work’.43 A tragedy occurring at the Holy Fire ceremony of 1834, held on Saturday 4th May, quickly became apocryphal among travellers as epitomizing the Oriental chaos of the Holy Fire ceremony, and even as a sign of the Almighty’s displeasure with non-Protestant practices. As one later traveller, receiving reports of the events from eyewitnesses, unsympathetically wrote, the ‘mockery’ of the Holy Fire ‘was visited with a signal instance of the wrath of the Almighty’.44 The drama was heightened by the presence of Ibrahim Pasha, governor of Palestine and Syria during the Egyptian occupation. The fullest eyewitness account was authored by Robert Curzon, an aristocratic Orientalist who toured the Mediterranean obtaining historic Christian manuscripts for the British Museum; his unscrupulous collecting practices included liberally plying monks, who were unaware of the

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value of their monasteries’ manuscript collections, with alcoholic spirits in order to obtain a ‘discount’ in the transactions that followed.45 According to Curzon’s blood-curdling account published fifteen years after the tragic event, once the Holy Fire was distributed with  – in Orientalists’ eyes  – the customary lack of dignity (Curzon described the pilgrims as ‘riotous in the extreme’), smoke from the pilgrims’ candles ‘obscured everything in the place’. Overpowered by ‘heat and bad air’, ‘three unhappy wretches […] fell from the upper range of galleries, and were dashed to pieces on the heads of the people below’, while a ‘poor Armenian lady, seventeen years of age, died where she sat, of heat, thirst, and fatigue’. This led to panic and a crush when worshippers were unable to exit the Church. Curzon luridly described his escape over ‘a great heap of bodies’, and accused Ibrahim’s guards of killing ‘numbers of fainting wretches’ as they cleared the governor’s path, leaving ‘the walls […] spattered with blood and brains of men who had been felled, like oxen, with the butt-ends of the soldiers’ muskets’. To Ibrahim’s credit, Curzon attributed him with organizing the survivors’ evacuation from the Church; some, however, were not so lucky, crushed in such large numbers that ‘many were discovered standing upright, quite dead’.46 Casting some uncertainty over the precise figures, contemporary British newspapers reported that anywhere from ‘several persons’ to ‘nearly 400’ lost their lives.47 Yet when Curzon obtained a private audience with Ibrahim soon afterwards, he lobbied the governor not for improved safety measures or limitations on numbers of attendees, but for the wholesale cancellation of the ceremony. Curzon seems to have been just as (if not more) concerned with preventing ‘the blasphemous impositions of the Greek and Armenian patriarchs’ in perpetuating what he called ‘so barefaced a trick […] in these enlightened times’, as with averting another humanitarian disaster. Almost ruefully, Curzon informed his readers that ‘the miracle of the holy fire has continued to be exhibited every year with great applause, and luckily without the unfortunate results which accompanied it on this occasion’.48 *** Given this extreme antagonism to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it is no surprise that Biblical scholars embarked on a quest to delegitimize the Church’s location. This story, which culminated in British Protestants’ purchase in 1893 of today’s Garden Tomb site just north of the Old City which they believed contained the ‘true’ Calvary and tomb, has been discussed by several historians before; however, it deserves further consideration in light of the colonial dynamics of the Peaceful Crusade.49 Robinson was not the first traveller to express his doubt over the veracity of the Church site. Protestant antagonists of the Church dubiously tried to assert a long tradition of doubt, one writing that ‘For more than 1,100 years past intelligent visitors to Jerusalem’ had railed against it.50 More verifiably than these asserted eleven centuries of scepticism, there were the eighteenth-century German traveller Jonas Korte, and the early nineteenth-century Englishman Edward Daniel Clarke, who recorded their doubts in their travel accounts. However, Robinson provided

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the most influential exposition of the idea in his Biblical Researches in Palestine. Robinson based his reasoning on the Bible’s specification that Christ’s crucifixion occurred ‘without the gate’, that is, outside Jerusalem’s first-century walls. While he had no firm evidence of the precise route of the key second wall in the first century (still undetermined today), he asserted that for any wall to exclude the Church site from the city was ‘on topographical grounds untenable and impossible’; the Church’s site, he averred, had to have lain within ancient Jerusalem, and therefore could not have marked the crucifixion’s location.51 Robinson’s claims fell on receptive ears among his Evangelical audience. As Macalister stated, Robinson’s attack on the Church ‘opened the flood-gates, and admitted a rush of controversial printers’ ink’ advocating divergent theories as to the ‘true’ location, ink which Macalister wished ‘might just as well have remained stored in its reservoir, awaiting some purpose less dismally futile’.52 What appeared, in Robinson’s presentation of the matter, to be scientifically reasoned and virtually irrefutable, in fact rested on several unverifiable conjectures, including the presumption of the second wall’s route and a belief in the absolute veracity of the Bible as a historical source. In reality, as Scottish architect James Fergusson – a central figure in the debate around Jerusalem’s holy sites, as shall be seen – accurately asserted, Biblical texts were ‘deficient, in as much as they do not contain any such description of Jerusalem, or the places around it, as could enable us to understand the topography of the places they refer to’.53 Nevertheless, scepticism towards the Church’s location gained widespread traction, though not total dominance, among Evangelical commentators: from 1873 to 1892, nineteen articles on the location of the crucifixion and tomb sites appeared in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, each with its own argument and methodology.54 The issue did not only animate ‘experts’. Despite his expressed antagonism to Christian traditions, and his dislike of everything about the Church itself, Robinson claimed that he conducted his research ‘without prejudice or prepossession’.55 If this claim was rather dubious in his case, it was still more so for numerous Victorian travellers who were only too happy to accept Robinson’s judgements without pondering the matter very deeply for themselves. Evangelicals had a rigid expectation of what the Calvary site should look like: in the words of a popular English hymn of the day, ‘a green hill far away/Without a city wall’.56 Popular visual stimuli, such as illustrated Bibles, prints on the walls of Sunday school classrooms and stained-glass windows in parish churches, cemented these strong mental images. Western travellers’ preferences for Palestine’s open landscapes over urban environments, and Protestants’ distaste for non-Protestant Christianity, further laid the ground for an essentially emotionally driven rejection of the Church site. Many travellers seem to have relished their pretence of shock when observing the location of the Church site, and its methods of veneration of the crucifixion and tomb sites, for this fuelled their sense of righteousness in the search for a ‘true’, Protestant-friendly site. In the 1840s, Alexander Kinglake reported that ‘A Protestant, familiar with the Holy Scriptures but ignorant of tradition [i.e. the established Christian sites], and the geography of Modern Jerusalem, finds himself

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a good deal “[a]mazed” when he first looks for the sacred sites’. He lampooned travellers’ astonishment upon realizing that Christ’s tomb was ‘not in a field without the walls, but in the midst, and in the best part of the town under the roof of the great Church’, while the Calvary site was ‘upstairs – on the first floor’ (emphasis in original).57 Six decades later, despite the masses of information on the Holy Land published in the interim, and the arguments of Robinson and his imitators of which no well-informed Evangelical even moderately interested in Palestine could have been unaware, the prominent Palestine Exploration Fund archaeologist Charles Wilson could still write Educated [i.e. Western Protestant] pilgrims to the Holy City are often sorely perplexed when they visit the “holy places” for the first time. The know that Christ suffered without the gate. They find Golgotha within the walls of a small Oriental city and in close proximity to its thronged bazârs. […] They see little in the church that seem to be in complete harmony with the familiar Gospel narrative. The features of the ground have been so altered, there has been so much building, and the “holy places” obscured by decorative and votive offerings, that effort of the imagination is required to restore the form of ground as it existed […]

Accurately noting that ‘Many [Protestant] pilgrims, either from indolence or from want of knowledge, never attempt to make that effort’, Wilson lamented that ‘they form a hasty and unfavourable opinion upon a difficult and obscure question, and seek some spot which appeals more directly to the eve and to their preconceived ideas of the character and appearance of Golgotha’.58 The stakes were high. To most non-Protestant Christians, the Church marked the most sacred location in the world. Its fallacy would mean the invalidation of their pilgrimages and religious practices at the site, including the Easter ceremonies. To deny the truth of the Church’s location was also to cast aspersions over some of the most revered figures in Christian history, particularly the emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, both venerated as saints by Eastern Christian denominations. Scorning a legend of Helena’s discovery of the true cross in Jerusalem in 326 CE, when construction first began on an incarnation of the Church, Robinson accused Helena of ‘pious fraud’, and identified her visit to Jerusalem as the moment when ‘multitudes of priests and monks’ began to ‘to trace out and assign the site of every event, however trivial or legendary’, which so offended Victorian travellers’ sensibilities fifteen centuries later.59 Robinson’s broadside against the Church attracted controversy as well as support. Robinson tried to present the issue not as a sectarian matter – he claimed that ‘the voices of powerful assailants and defenders [of the Church’s location] are heard among both Catholics and Protestants’  – but one of scientific truth.60 However, it is telling that his most prominent critics were Catholics or Catholic sympathizers, for whom Evangelicals’ uncompromising iconoclasm was a step too far. According to an article by Robinson, the Catholic Austrian Empire actually banned the advertisement of the German translation of his Biblical Researches over the issue, giving his scholarly tomes a quasi-illegal status within its territory. In

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1843, Robinson entered into a polemical debate with one of the most prominent clergymen in Victorian Britain, John Henry Newman, at the time a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Newman was then known for his High Church affinities within Anglicanism, but would scandalize Victorian society in 1845 by converting to Catholicism. While Newman pointedly inquired ‘Which is more likely, that the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the fourth century, or of New-York in the nineteenth, should be able rightly to determine Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre?’, Robinson countered with an appeal to like-minded Evangelicals in Britain that ‘plain oldfashioned English common sense, and especially that of Protestants, will probably prefer the evidence of the measuring tape to that […] even of St. Helena’.61 Decades later, standing in the Church itself, Isabel Burton acerbically expressed in terms similar to her fellow Catholic Newman, ‘how strange that all Christendom should have been mistaken for 1841 years, and that a handful should arise of late years to show us how wrong we have been’.62 Evangelicals’ rejection of the Church site led some to identify more palatable (to them) alternatives. This search for the ‘true’ tomb of Christ was less about relocating the sacred scenes using incontrovertible evidence (which did not exist), and more about establishing a place where Western Protestants could give full reign to their Biblical imaginations without the presence of non-Protestant Christianity and Christians. Several theories were advanced by Victorian travellers, all identifying wide, open spaces where non-Protestant churches had no presence. The most prominent theories included Fergusson’s conflation of the Dome of the Rock with Christ’s tomb, as discussed below, and several travellers’ advocacy of the hill of Jeremiah’s Grotto, just north of the Old City, as Calvary, and an ancient tomb in the adjacent site which would become the Garden Tomb. While the traveller whose name became most closely associated with the latter site, the doomed imperial hero Charles George Gordon who was killed fighting the Mahdist Revolt in Sudan in 1885, expressed views more esoteric than others in his strange tract Reflections in Palestine, 1883, like other Victorians his search was driven by fierce antipathy towards the Church, which he dismissed as ‘the slaughter-house’.63 With the purchase of the Garden Tomb, carefully cultivated to exclude any indigenous presence, Evangelical travellers were finally free to let loose their Biblical imaginations on an ‘untouched’ Palestinian landscape, however small, that was free of Palestinians. Haskett Smith became, as one commentator remarked, the ‘great protagonist of the site’ in the 1890s and early 1900s.64 While Smith claimed that the Garden Tomb site had been identified through ‘a coldly calculating, strictly scientific, investigation’ in keeping with the Victorian era’s ‘period of investigation and discovery’, he also betrayed his emotional preference for the Garden Tomb site. ‘If sentiment be allowed to enter into the question’, he wrote, I must confess that I never climb that skull-shaped hill [Jeremiah’s Grotto], and survey the scene from its rounded crest, without being moved by the deepest feelings of reverence, devotion, and solemnity. It seems a theatre so appropriate for the Drama of Earth’s Redemption, a very ideal spot for the Crucifixion of the Son of God!

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Swept up in millenarian enthusiasm, Smith even wondered whether the tomb’s discovery by the West could be among the ‘signs of the times’ heralding prophesied Biblical events.65 In dramatic language, he described the reactions to the tomb of the British visitors to whom he showed the site as a Thomas Cook guide, in distinction to ‘all the humbug which was shown us in that Church of the Holy Sepulchre’: A solemn hush fell on all assembled within that tomb […] and for some minutes no one spoke. The whole theme was so inexpressibly sacred, and the new light which had been thrown upon the historical proof of the Resurrection was so startling and convincing, that comments seemed superfluous and almost profane in that very tomb where, in all probability, the scene itself had actually occurred. […] The place whereon they were standing was indeed holy ground.66

S­ome Victorians began to exhibit behaviour not unlike the non-Protestant worshippers whose attitudes at the Church they had disparaged. A Welsh clergyman admitted to readers of the London Gazette that, visiting the site, ‘I could not resist the desire to place my poor body on the very spot on which the Sacred Body once rested’.67 The Garden Tomb site never attained the level of consensus as the general denial of the Church. In reaction to the ‘inclination to make a fetish’ of the Garden Tomb by ‘a good many Protestant tourists’, some even defended the traditional Church site, though not its presentation and ceremonies.68 Claiming that the case for the Church’s traditional location was ‘not a case of strong evidence against weak, but a case of overwhelming evidence against none’, Scottish clergyman Malcolm MacColl expressed his belief that the purchasers of the Garden Tomb site had been conned into paying ‘£2,000 for a plot of ground which is intrinsically not worth £20’.69 Many travellers thus followed Robinson’s judgement that ‘probably all search’ for the ‘true’ crucifixion and tomb sites, ‘can only be in vain’. This, Evangelicals believed, was truly the most fitting outcome, as Robinson  – taking an implicit kick at non-Western Christian practices – ‘the whole tenor of our Lord’s teaching […] was directed to draw off the minds of men from an attachment to particular times and places, and to lead the true worshippers to worship God, not merely at Jerusalem […], but everywhere “in spirit and in truth”’.70 This agnostic position removed the focus on the specific localities traditionally considered sacred, such as the Church, and rather brought the wider landscape into view as an object of veneration, but also desire for imperial possession. If Protestantism would never possess the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley wrote, it could ‘have still the Mount of Olives and the Sea of Galilee; the sky, the flowers, the trees, the fields, which suggested the Parables; the holy hills, which cannot be removed, but stand fast for ever’.71 This attitude baffled travellers’ dragoman guides, especially those who were Christians from the Eastern Mediterranean. Henry Baker Tristram recorded his dragoman’s comments at the village of Baytin, north of Jerusalem: ‘No holy places here, and no pilgrims ever visit them. I have

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been dragoman to scores of Russians and Frenchmen, but it is only you English who come here. Perhaps you only care for places where there are no saints, as you do not adore them?’ While Tristram tried to explain the village’s importance as somewhere Protestants could ‘feel our nearness to a watchful Providence’, his guide apparently remained uncomprehending as ‘there were no saints of the calendar here, and beyond them his veneration could not stretch’.72 Of course, the Palestinian countryside did not exist for its Biblical associations for Western Protestant Christians, but was a landscape shaped by the Muslim and Christian population living there and drawing survival from it. It was not always possible to ignore them, even at the Garden Tomb. In words which could have been lifted from one of his popular imperial-themed novels, H. Rider Haggard related an incident which occurred during his visit to Palestine in 1900. Rider Haggard numbered himself among those convinced by the Garden Tomb, writing ‘standing in that quiet garden with the rock-hewn sepulchre before me, it was easy to imagine that here and not elsewhere’ Christ’s resurrection occurred. However, he was rudely interrupted from his Biblical musings when, straying into the neighbouring Islamic cemetery, inadvertently I stepped upon the pillar of an old Mahommedan tomb. Thereon a Moslem lady, one of a group who were seated in the sun basking and gossiping among the graves, hurled a lump of rock at me with considerable accuracy and force, helping it upon its flight with a volley of abuse.73

Like the rock that Rider Haggard claimed was hurled at him, Westerners’ encounter with Palestine’s existing, majority-Islamic society could prove an eyeopening experience. It is to travellers’ encounter with Islam at its most sacred site in Palestine that we now turn.

‘An Air of Paradise’: Travellers and the Haram al-Sharif Travellers frequently expressed their preference for pondering Jerusalem from a distance, over venturing through the city’s streets. Yet even the vista of Jerusalem failed to meet some travellers’ Biblical expectations. Stanley, for instance, described Jerusalem from afar as a ‘mass of gray ruin and white stones’, which was ‘for the most part unattractive’. Yet there was one exception: What, however, these [buildings] fail to effect, is in one instant effected by a glance at the Mosque of Omar. From whatever point that graceful dome with its beautiful precinct emerges to view, it at once dignifies the whole city […] it is a scene hardly to be surpassed. A dome graceful as that of St. Peter’s […] rising from an elaborately finished circular edifice […]  – platform and enclosure diversified by lesser domes and fountains, by cypresses, and olives, and planes, and palms – the whole as secluded and quiet as the interior of some college or cathedral garden […]74

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He asserted that only this building was able ‘to raise up to the mind’s eye from the ruins of the present Jerusalem the magnificent sight which, in the times both of the Davidic and the Herodian monarchy, must have presented itself to any spectator’.75 The Dome of the Rock (henceforth ‘the Dome’), misidentified by Stanley and many other nineteenth-century travellers as ‘the Mosque of Omar’ – the building is neither a mosque, nor was it built during the reign of the early Muslim caliph ‘Umar – and the Haram al-Sharif compound in the southeast of Jerusalem’s walled city in which it stands, defined visitors’ encounter with Islam in Jerusalem.76 As much as Victorians conceptualized Palestine as the Judeo-Christian Holy Land, it was impossible to ignore that the region had, over centuries, come to be inhabited by a sizable Islamic majority. As one writer acknowledged, ‘one is never out of sight of Mohammedan religion for an hour of travel in Syria’.77 Imbibed with Orientalist discourse pitting the Christian West against the Islamic world, many Westerners reacted negatively to Islam in Palestine. ‘How wonderful, that in the mysterious providence of God the religion of Mahomet, the false prophet, has been permitted to spread far more widely than the religion of His well-beloved Son!’ exclaimed Herschell bitterly. ‘And the followers of the false prophet now rule in the land that God gave to his chosen people; the land where Jesus dwelt and communicated the light of truth’.78 As Chapter  5 below will demonstrate, Muslims were often cast as fanatical, potentially violent and a threat to Western interests in the Holy Land, despite most travellers’ experience of civility and assistance from Palestinian Muslims. Some travellers’ views of the Islamic faith were, however, more nuanced than their damning evaluations of non-Protestant Christianity. Tristram, for instance, contrasted ‘the lowest and most corrupt form of Christianity’, the ‘childish and ridiculous’ practices of non-Protestant Christians, to ‘the worship of Islam […] simple and noble in idea and in form’.79 Some even saw in Islam a faith only one step removed from their own Evangelical Protestantism. Biggs asserted that ‘Mahometanism is, in one of its aspects, a Puritan revolt’, and claimed that Islam ‘represents a return from the corruptions of Eastern Christianity […] to the simple religion from which it and Judaism had alike been developed – the creed and worship of the Patriarchs’.80 The ambivalent attitudes towards Islam and Muslims in Palestine were exemplified in Victorian views of the Haram al-Sharif. On the one hand it was a reminder of Muslim supremacy in Palestine, a fact distressing to some Evangelicals, and made particularly acute in Protestants’ minds by the Haram’s location on the Temple Mount of antiquity. Herschell lamented ‘it is painful to the child of God to behold the mosque of the false prophet stand where the Temple once stood’; similarly, the Orientalist traveller and Bible scholar Agnes Smith dramatically asserted that ‘the abomination of desolation, the symbol of the destroying Turkish power, stands now where stood the glorious Temple’; ‘the high home of God has become a chief tabernacle of the false prophet’, complained Rider Haggard.81 Some travellers simply superimposed their mental image of the ancient Jewish temples over the Haram’s existing Islamic buildings. While Martineau described the Dome

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as ‘very beautiful’, and the scene of Muslim worshippers in the surroundings of the Haram as ‘proud and joyous’, she revealed that with all this before my eyes, my mind was with the past. It seemed as if the past were more truly before me than what I saw. […] I seemed to see [the Second Temple, destroyed in the first century CE] now as it was then, with its glittering roof, whose plates of gold were too dazzling to look upon in the morning sun […]82

Victorian travellers’ intensive focus on the Haram, and their visualization of the Jewish temples over the contemporary Islamic structures, predated by over a century the post-1967 efforts of right-wing Israeli settler organizations to rouse support for the construction of a third temple in the Haram, backed by some American Evangelicals.83 *** Alternately, many Victorians could not help but praise the site’s elegant architecture, placid atmosphere and sweeping vista. Bartlett commented that the Haram’s ‘beautiful area, with its groves and fountains’, created ‘an air of paradise’. Yet until the mid-nineteenth century, travellers faced difficulty in gaining access to the site, usually closed to non-Muslims. British travellers in particular, with their globe-spanning empire behind them, were unused to and disturbed by their being unable to access any location they pleased. Bartlett exoticized the site with an aura of Oriental mystery with his claim that it had never been ‘profaned by the foot of the unbeliever’, that is, non-Muslim;84 Stanley similarly wrote of the additional interest which the sight [of the Haram] derives from the knowledge that no European foot, except by stealth or favour, had ever trodden within these precincts since the Crusaders were driven out, and that their deep seclusion was as real as it appeared. It needed no sight of the daggers of the black Dervishes who stand at the gates [i.e. the Haram’s guards], to tell you that the Mosque was undisturbed and inviolably sacred.85

The quest to violate this sanctity posed an irresistible challenge to Western travellers. Until the 1850s, the closest most non-Muslim travellers got to the Haram was to look down upon the enclosure from a neighbouring rooftop, or to approach one of its entrances. This latter option, according to some travellers, was itself hazardous. John Wilson warned of ‘threats and vociferations, if not […] dangerous missiles, from the bigoted custodiers of the mosk’, while Martineau asserted that ‘It requires some little resolution, for those who dislike being hated, to approach this threshold, so abominable are the insults offered to strangers’ and cautioned that ‘certain and immediate death by stoning or beating’ lay in store for any traveller who ventured over the threshold.86 Alternately, Robinson recorded that he ‘found no difficulty at any time in approaching the

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entrances, and looking in upon the area, as long as we pleased’.87 Writing after the area became more accessible, Charles Warren recorded that the site’s guards, ‘certain Africans or Nubian men, of the most bigoted nature’ whose ‘fanaticism knows no bounds’, nonetheless became friendly with him and even assisted his archaeological excavations he conducted near the Haram in the late 1860s.88 Efforts to penetrate the Islamic space began in October 1833 when three Englishmen, Francis Arundale, Joseph Bonomi and Frederick Catherwood, arrived in Jerusalem during their tour of the Egyptian-ruled Eastern Mediterranean. Bonomi and Catherwood were determined to gain access to the Haram, through subterfuge if required. After entertaining the mufti with his camera lucida – and claiming to truly be a British-born Muslim convert – Bonomi obtained permission to enter the compound. He took his adopted persona to such lengths that he avoided being seen in the company of his travelling companions while staying in Jerusalem; according to his diary, he ‘passed for such a good Mussulman, that an old man asked him to stay there [in Jerusalem] and marry his daughter’. He made the most of his time in the Haram, spending weeks making sketches under the pretence of planning repairs for the buildings. Twice, his subterfuge was almost discovered. On one occasion, Bonomi inexpertly attempted to perform Islamic prayer, and was observed by a Muslim worshipper; Bonomi completed his unconvincing sham ritual only to find ‘this witness of my errors staring at me’. On another occasion, Bonomi added human figures to one of his on-site sketches, a fact leading to suspicion from one of the Muslim guides to pilgrims in the Haram, which Bonomi believed was because of an Islamic prohibition on representing figures. Recounting that one ‘good-natured’ worshipper in the Haram also noticed the detail, Bonomi made the typically Orientalist remark that ‘it shows considerable penetration and judgment on the part of a Turk [i.e. Muslim] to have discovered them to be figures at all’.89 Catherwood had even closer scrapes during his trespass into the Haram, as he related in a letter to Bartlett. While claiming that ‘several unfortunate Franks have been put to death’ for entering the space, Catherwood admitted that he felt ‘irresistibly urged to make an attempt to explore’ the Haram, something he himself recognized as ‘somewhat rash’. In Egypt, he had obtained a firmān or edict from the ruler Muhammad ‘Ali as an engineer, which he exploited to claim, like Bonomi, that he was surveying for repairs in the Haram. On his second day in the site, the traveller ‘perceived the Mussulmen, from time to time, mark me with doubtful looks’; the situation escalated drastically, until he ‘was completely surrounded by a mob of two hundred people, who seemed screwing up their courage for a sudden rush upon me – I need not tell you what would have been my fate’. With the situation exacerbated by his Egyptian servant, who ‘raising his whip, actually commenced a summary attack upon them, and knocked off the cap of one of the holy dervishes’, the fortunate Catherwood was rescued by the passing governor, who threatened heavy punishment for anyone who harmed the Englishman. He continued his drawings in the Haram daily for six weeks undisturbed. Catherwood appreciated the Haram’s features – describing, for instance, the Dome’s interior as ‘airy, light, and elegant’, and noting how ‘the sun, streaming through the richly-stained glass

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windows, casts a thousand varied dyes upon the highly-decorated walls and marble pavement’  – and engaged in conversations with Muslim worshippers, including one ‘native of British India, [who] had walked from Calcutta, across Persia and Arabia, employing in the journey three long years’. Ultimately, however, Catherwood hastily left Jerusalem upon the arrival of Ibrahim Pasha, in whose name Catherwood had fraudulently been making his drawings.90 After the fall of Egyptian rule, only privileged visitors, including European aristocrats and the Anglo-Jewish financier with a keen interest in Palestine Sir Moses Montefiore, obtained permission to venture into the space from the Ottoman authorities. It was not by chance that it was the dedicated Evangelical and enthusiast for Jewish Restoration to Palestine, James Finn, who obtained entry into the Muslim space for Western Evangelicals. As recounted in greater detail in Chapter 5, during a banquet in the French consulate in Jerusalem on 1st April 1856, the canny Finn took advantage of Ottoman good feeling towards the Western powers during the Crimean War to obtain the governor’s permission for the entry of British visitors into the Haram. Early on the morning of Friday 4th April, in Finn’s words ‘an immense crowd of British travellers’ invaded the space. Spreading across ‘the immense area and the beautiful green grass at their own pleasure’, the travellers ventured into the Haram’s underground vaults (known as Solomon’s Stables, today’s al-Marwāni Prayer Hall), and helped themselves to ‘flowers and sprays of olive and cypress, and other relics’. Meanwhile, as Finn wrote, ‘the Moslems stood gravely aside, or sat and talked with each other, and noted the decorous reverence with which these Christians passed from point to point, and began to understand that to us, too, it is indeed holy ground – the noble Sanctuary’. This marked the invention of a new Christian tradition specifically for Evangelicals around the Haram, which had no comparable significance for non-Protestant Christians. Finn described Victorians’ actions at the Dome, which clearly illustrate the growing Evangelical desire to possess the space: A very few of the English visitors had agreed beforehand to assemble in silent prayer around the Great Rock […] and they were able to do so undisturbed by anyone in the great concourse, or by any uncourteous act or gesture on the part of the Moslem guardians or frequenters of the Sanctuary. To these few the day seemed to mark an epoch in the history of Jerusalem. All came and went again in peace.91

Typically for Victorian Evangelicals, they much preferred the opportunity to pray at a site which they associated with the Old Testament, rather than share New Testament-linked spaces with non-Protestant sects. This was the first occasion on which non-Islamic prayer openly took place within the Haram since the Crusaders’ expulsion from Jerusalem in the twelfth century.92 Subsequently, Western travellers were able to access the Haram comparatively easily, through coordination with one of the Western consuls in Jerusalem and the payment of a fee. Incursions into the Haram became a standard part of

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Evangelicals’ ‘pilgrimage’ to Palestine. While they treasured this long-soughtfor access, travellers did not always behave reverently within the space, or respectfully vis-à-vis Muslim worshippers. Praising the Dome as ‘exquisite in its proportions, beautiful in its mosaics’, Tristram – a typically Victorian naturalist – and his group nevertheless risked Muslims’ anger by shooting at birds returning to roost in the compound’s walls at sunset, aiming to collect specimens for their zoological survey of Palestine. After ‘hastily gathering up the spoils’, Tristram and his companions ‘retreated out of reach, and were hurrying to the tents before an alarm could be raised’.93 Warren similarly risked the wrath of the authorities and ordinary worshippers in the Haram by using a crowbar to attempt to pry up a small flagstone he had noticed on the large rock or ṣakhra under the Dome, with a small army of Western travellers to distract Muslims in the space to enable him to accomplish his task.94 Within the Haram’s walls, Victorians gave rein to their mental fantasies of a Biblical era. ‘Standing here’, wrote Macleod, ‘one loves to linger on earlier days and to recall the holy men and women, the kings, priests, and prophets, who came up to this spot to pray […] We seem to hear the majestic psalms of David which have ascended from this spot’. Hinting at messianic visions, he pondered ominously that ‘Jerusalem and the site of the Temple are to be still connected somehow with the future of the Church [i.e. Protestant Christianity] and of the world’.95 Visitors were not, of course, immune to the visual beauty of the existing site, although this was often expressed in terms that showed Evangelicals’ desirous gaze falling over the Islamic structures. Multiple travellers expressed their appreciation for the Dome’s presentation of the ṣakhra inside, which they began to surround with Old Testament legends. Agnes Smith, who ‘felt to be certain’ (without, of course, any firm quantifiable evidence) that the rock was ‘probably the spot where Abraham offered up Isaac’, expressed gratitude ‘that these hallowed spots are in the possession of the Moslems, who treat them with more real respect than do the priest-ridden Christians’.96 Like the Church, however, Western travellers developed their own theories around the buildings in the Haram which, in their different ways, tried to appropriate the Arab-built Islamic structures for the history of Christianity in the Holy Land, as illustrated below. *** While fierce controversy surrounded the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the minds of Western travellers, around the Haram al-Sharif there was comparative consensus. Most Evangelicals could not imagine the site as anything other than the location of the ancient Jewish temples. However, the Haram nevertheless became the subject of one of the oddest debates of Biblical archaeology. The protagonist was James Fergusson, who made his name with a study of Hindu temple architecture in the mid-1840s after working for several years for his family’s business in Britishcolonized India. Without visiting Palestine, Fergusson then turned his attention to Jerusalem and, with the aid of Bonomi’s and Catherwood’s drawings, to the Dome of the Rock.

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In his 200-page  1847 An Essay on the Ancient Topography of Jerusalem, Fergusson combined the Western denial of the Church, with the simultaneous admiration for and attraction to the Haram, to make a startling claim: the Dome of the Rock covered the true tomb of Christ, and the Dome itself was the original fourth-century church of Helena and Constantine. In the eleventh century, Fergusson argued, Muslims had taken over the site, while Christians had built the Church in its existing location, to which collective memory had gradually transferred the positions of the crucifixion and tomb. While Fergusson was dogmatically convinced of his own argument, describing rival theories as ‘utterly unintelligible’, he was also aware of the apparent eccentricity of his claim. ‘The proposition which I have undertaken to prove’, he wrote, is one that has never, that I am aware of, been broached by any traveller or speculator up to this day; and is, consequently, at first sight, so manifestly absurd and improbable, that many will, no doubt, on the simple announcement of such an hypothesis, throw down the book at once, and rest perfectly satisfied that they have, at best, got hold of a piece of ingenious mystification, or the dream of some visionary speculator […]

­ sking his readers for ‘a fair and patient hearing’, Fergusson presented his argument A based on the same mixture of imaginative interpretation of ancient texts, and outright leaps of logic, common to all nineteenth-century Biblical archaeology.97 To this, Fergusson added his claim that the Dome was Byzantine Christian, and not Arab Islamic, architecture. Stating later that he had become ‘perfectly familiar with the mosques of Agra and Delhi’ in India, had visited mosques in Egypt and had familiarized himself with mosque architecture elsewhere ‘in so far as was possible from the books then published’, Fergusson partly based his argument on Westerners’ common fallacy of referring to the Dome as the ‘Mosque of Omar’. Arguing that the Dome ‘transgressed the fundamental principles of mosque architecture’, for example with its lack of a miḥrāb prayer niche facing Mecca, Fergusson was ignorant of the fact that the Dome had never served as a mosque, but was rather built as a shrine to the ṣakhra.98 Many authoritative voices in Biblical archaeology quickly rejected Fergusson’s ideas. Fergusson admitted that Arundale, Bonomi and Catherwood, whom he gathered together in London in 1846 to drop his bizarre bombshell, ‘scarcely knew whether I was serious or in joke in proposing so startling an hypothesis’. Others responded with ‘contempt’, ‘sneers’ and even ‘abuse’.99 Robinson belittlingly commented that ‘probably no one at the present day, except Mr Fergusson and his followers’, believed that the traditional location of the Church had changed since its foundation under Constantine. While crediting Fergusson’s arguments as ‘very ingeniously elaborated and sustained’, Robinson nevertheless verbally demolished them as ‘directly contradicted […] by the historical evidence’.100 Yet Fergusson also had his supporters. He was a co-founder of the PEF and a member of its committee, the majority of which initially backed his ideas.

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George Grove, the prominent music writer and one of the PEF’s co-founders, ensured the inclusion of Fergusson’s theory in a popular Bible dictionary. Believing his own findings around the Haram in the 1860s conclusively disproved Fergusson’s theories, Warren bitterly complained that Fergusson had ‘shut his eyes’ to anything that contradicted him, and had persuaded Grove and the rest of the committee to ignore Warren’s work.101 Yet it is not difficult to understand why Fergusson’s theory was so attractive for many Victorian Evangelicals, removing the site of Christ’s tomb from the detested Church to the (to them) much more palatable Haram, a space also with Old Testament associations. Despite the attacks he faced, Fergusson clung tightly to his theory over three decades. He continued to deliver lectures and publish polemics in favour of his ideas, at considerable expense to himself: as Bar-Yosef has shown, most of Fergusson’s works on Palestine sold poorly and made a financial loss, though his theory did achieve a substantial circulation through other ways.102 In the early 1860s, he finally travelled to Palestine for the first time, after which he predictably claimed to have ‘seen nothing on the spot to induce me to alter, in any essential respect, the views’ he had earlier articulated, but had instead witnessed ‘a great deal to confirm them’.103 In his last major exposition of the subject in 1878, The Temples of the Jews, Fergusson clearly revealed his racist conception of Arabs underlying his theory. Contrasting the Dome of the Rock with the al-Aqsa Mosque, Fergusson wrote Everything in the Dome is elegant and well-proportioned, and everything suitable to the place where it is found. I do not indeed know of any tomb or tomblike building in the whole world so beautiful, or so entirely satisfactory, as the Dome of the Rock […]. The Aksa, on the other hand, is badly designed, worse proportioned, and its details detestable. It betrays in every feature the efforts of a rude unskilful people, attempting to imitate the work of a superior race, which they were incapable either of understanding or appreciating.104

In Fergusson’s conception, the Dome had to be of European origin because it was beautiful; al-Aqsa had to have been built by Arabs because he considered it unattractive. Fergusson’s theory exerted such influence that Warren was still engaging in polemics against him in 1880. In The Temple or the Tomb, Warren set out to disprove Fergusson, forensically dissecting each one of the Scotsman’s arguments. Warren unhesitatingly denounced Fergusson’s views as ‘entirely chimerical and illusory’, and expressed his opinion of his opponent’s tenacity in colourful terms: ‘with truly British characteristics, unable to realise that his cause is hopeless, that he has been signally vanquished by facts, he nails his colours to the mast, and crying “No surrender!” pours out a broadside, even while in the act of sinking’. Warren could only lament that Fergusson’s ‘teaching is being industriously scattered over the land in atlases, in Biblical dictionaries, and in architectural text-books, and our youths are growing accustomed to the extraordinary errors he propounds

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before they are sufficiently experienced to judge for themselves’.105 Yet Fergusson apparently stuck by his pet theory until his death in 1886.106 A more accepted, though equally incorrect, theory concerned the al-Aqsa Mosque. The building had not, many Western travellers asserted, been built by Arab Muslim hands in the early Islamic era, but had in fact been a Byzantine church erected by the sixth-century emperor Justinian and dedicated to the Virgin Mary, appropriated and repurposed when Jerusalem came under Muslim rule. During his furtive incursions into the Haram, Bonomi believed he could observe architectural similarities between al-Aqsa and Byzantine styles, writing ‘the structure is similar in appearance to those raised in the early ages of Christianity’. No less than Robinson then unhesitatingly propagated this notion. Admitting that the ancient descriptions of the precise location of Justinian’s church in Jerusalem were ‘not very clear’, he nonetheless stridently argued that there was ‘nothing in the subsequent history nor in the modern topography of Jerusalem’ that could be the church other than al-Aqsa. In his desire to assert a Christian origin for al-Aqsa, Robinson ignored his self-imposed cardinal rule of disregarding non-Protestant Christian traditions around holy sites in Palestine, and proudly cited what he claimed was a local Christian belief around the building. ‘This mosk’, Robinson wrote triumphally, ‘is universally regarded by Oriental Christians, and also by the Frank Catholics [i.e. European Catholic monastic communities in Palestine], as an ancient Christian church, once dedicated to the Virgin’.107 The notion gained widespread traction among Victorian visitors to Palestine. John Wilson wrote that ‘there can be but one opinion that the Mosk el-Aksa is the church of Justinian’; Conder asserted that ‘a practised architect’ could distinguish ‘the peculiarity of Byzantine vaulting’ in al-Aqsa; Warren more circumspectly stated that the building had ‘been rebuilt at various periods, and stands on the site of the church built by Justinian’.108 To the more casual travellers, tourist handbooks of the 1870s expressed that ‘The Aḳṣa affords an example of an ancient basilica which the Arabs have restored in the original style and converted into a mosque’, or that al-Aqsa was ‘generally supposed to be identical (in site, at least) with the magnificent Basilica founded by the Emperor Justinian’.109 These claims discursively removed one of Islam’s holiest sites from Islamic authorship and moral ownership. They portrayed Muslims and Arab-Islamic civilization not as builders, creators, a legitimate part of Jerusalem’s and Palestine’s history and existing society, but rather as appropriators or occupiers of what was by rights a Judeo-Christian space. Early Islamic chronicles which clearly described construction work on al-Aqsa beginning under the early Muslim caliphs were not unknown in the West  – one was even published in the PEF’s journal  – but this was to no avail for both Biblical archaeologist ‘experts’, and in the wider popular Evangelical imagination.110 Even the 1894 discovery of the sixth-century mosaic map of the Eastern Mediterranean in a Byzantine church in Mādabā east of the Jordan River, depicting a significant church entirely outside what would become the Haram area (it also clearly showed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in its existing location, conclusively disproving Fergusson’s theories a

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few years after his death), did not stop travellers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continuing to refer to al-Aqsa as Justinian’s church.111 Only in 1973, Israeli archaeologists in occupied Jerusalem uncovered the foundations of Justinian’s church in an entirely different location, underneath the Jewish Quarter and extending beyond the Old City’s walls, in concord with the Madaba map, and conclusively proving Western travellers’ al-Aqsa theory just as mistaken as Fergusson’s beliefs.112 Like the Dome of the Rock, the first incarnation of al-Aqsa was an entirely original Islamic construction of the Umayyad era. Western travellers erroneously conjectured European Christian origins for both major structures within the Haram, removing the buildings from Arab Muslim authorship. Islamic civilization and Muslim society were relegated to the role of usurper in the Judeo-Christian Holy Land. However, as shown in this chapter’s final section, travellers’ attitudes towards the Jewish communities they encountered in Jerusalem were also far from straightforward.

‘The Humiliation of Israel’: Encounters with Jerusalem’s Jews Since the seventeenth-century ‘Hebraic revival’, English (and by extension, American) Protestantism had been strongly marked by a powerful affinity with the Israelites of the Old Testament. The intense fascination of Evangelical Protestants with Palestine was inseparable from their beliefs in the past and future of the Jewish people. Evidencing a politicized and nationalistic interpretation of the Jewish religious attachment to the Holy Land, the authors of an 1842 missionary report stated that ‘anything that may invest that land [Palestine] with interest, will almost necessarily lead the reader to care for the peculiar people who once possessed it, and who still claim it as their own’.113 After arriving in Palestine, however, one writer dryly noted that ‘every traveller is impressed by the very meagre remains of a material kind which [ancient] Israel has left for curious eyes’.114 On the other hand, existing Jewish communities of the Old Yishuv  – the pre-Zionist Jewish minority in Palestine – could be encountered in Judaism’s four holy cities, Hebron, Ṣafad and Tiberias, and above all Jerusalem. Members of these communities did not resemble the Western European, largely culturally assimilated Jews, who constituted most upper-class Victorians’ only prior experience of Jewish communities (if they had any experience of Jewish communities at all). As this section will demonstrate, Jerusalem’s Jews could appear just as alien in Victorian eyes as any part of Palestinian society. A defining feature of Evangelical thought in the Peaceful Crusade was the way in which an intense obsession with the Biblical Hebrews sat alongside outright anti-Semitism.115 The Victorian era witnessed major gains for British Jews, with the Jews Relief Act of 1858 granting full civil rights and legal equality. Yet the act was opposed by none other than Anthony Ashley-Cooper or Lord Shaftesbury, the most prominent Victorian Christian Zionist and advocate for the Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine. Decades later another Englishman indelibly associated with Zionist colonization in Palestine, Arthur Balfour, sponsored the Aliens Act seeking to bar

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Jewish immigration into Britain, in 1905 during his tenure as Conservative prime minister.116 Nor were Victorian travellers to Palestine immune from subscribing to the most ingrained anti-Semitic ideas of the Christian West; Kinglake, for instance, confessed that he ‘could not help looking upon the Jews of Jerusalem, as being in some sort the representatives, if not the actual descendants of the rascals who crucified our Saviour’.117 As discussed in subsequent chapters, those most intimately concerned with Jewish colonization schemes, James Finn and Laurence Oliphant, not only subscribed to anti-Semitic prejudices common in their day, but also expressed active hostility to many aspects of the traditional religious Jewish lifestyle in Palestine. Travellers’ encounter with Palestine’s Jewish minority was nowhere as intense as at Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall of the Haram, a sacred site for Jewish prayer and reflection. Travellers almost universally heaped opprobrium on the Jewish Quarter, the heart of the society of the Old Yishuv in Palestine. As one writer claimed, ‘the Jewish quarters are famous for their excessive dirt’ – this became a major trope in Victorian travellers’ textual reports of their journeys, and was extended to Jews themselves with the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish uncleanliness. While recognizing the poverty in which Jews in Palestine lived, most travellers described the people in derogatory terms that left little room for empathy: the same writer asserted that ‘the Jew of Palestine is generally repulsive’.118 Evangelical travellers extended sympathy to Jews only to the extent that they believed they were capable of reforming themselves in accordance with a Western European, Protestant ideal: initially (Evangelicals hoped) by converting to Protestant Christianity, then, increasingly in the latter half of the nineteenth century, through involvement in settler-colonial endeavours like the Finns’ farm of Kerem Avraham, and the early Zionist settlements. Travellers rarely went beyond their surface impressions of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter, basing their damning judgements on a brief stroll through its streets, without any meaningful engagement with its residents. ‘If the traveller have the courage to inhale the infected air of its close alleys’, Bartlett evinced, ‘reeking with putrid filth, he will soon hasten out of them, with the deepest impression of the misery and social degradation of their unhappy occupants’. Bartlett dismissed the Jews’ ‘deep poverty, and the oppressions to which they have been subject’ as merely an ‘excuse’, claiming that ‘the lower class of Jews is everywhere squalid and negligent’.119 William Hepworth Dixon, an author who served for some years as the secretary of the PEF – and who moonlighted, in 1872, as the author of an anticommunist and anti-Semitic tract castigating Karl Marx, noted as ‘a Hebrew by his blood’ – luridly portrayed ‘the Jewish quarter, which a man may smell afar off; a quarter goodly in itself, once covered with the palaces of priests and kings, but now the danger and opprobium [sic] of the Holy Land’.120 Dixon complained of the Jewish Quarter’s alleys that ‘reek with decaying fruit, dead animals, and human filth, offensive alike to eye and nostril, in the midst of which fertilizing garbage innumerable armies of rats and lizards race and fight’. Demonstrating the everpresent judgement of contemporary Jews against their Biblical forebears, Dixon asserted that Jerusalem’s Jews were ‘living in a state of filth as unlike the condition

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of their clean, bright ancestors as the life of an English gentleman under Victoria is unlike that of a British serf under Boadicea’.121 In a similar vein, Frederick Treves castigated Jerusalem’s Jews as ‘miserable representatives of those fierce, sturdy, hard-fighting Hebrews who cut their way into this mountain fastness and held for so long the stronghold of Zion’.122 Interestingly given the later social dynamics in the State of Israel, in which Eastern or Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews have formed an underclass compared to the European or Ashkenazi Jewish elite, Victorian travellers often drew a contrast between the Eastern and European Jews they encountered in Jerusalem.123 Travellers often expressed their antagonism towards European Jews in particular. Conder, for instance, asserted that ‘if one half the stories which have been related to me by trustworthy witnesses were admitted, the Ashkenazim must be the dirtiest people on the face of the earth’, while Ada Goodrich-Freer, a spiritualist fraud who settled in Jerusalem in the early twentieth century, wrote that European Jews were ‘perhaps the most unsatisfactory members of the Jewish population [of Jerusalem], certainly the most dirty and unattractive’.124 ‘Nothing can be more striking than the marked difference in appearance and costume between the Sephardim and Ashkenazim’, wrote Charles Wilson; he praised the former’s ‘far superior […] culture and manners’, their ‘fairly industrious and honest’ qualities, their ‘Oriental costume’ and ‘certain dignity’.125 Observing Jews at the Western Wall, Treves similarly drew a contrast between one ‘very ancient ragged Jew in the crowd who is the embodiment of hopelessness’, a European Jew with a ‘white and lined’ face and ‘two thready side-locks’, and ‘a younger man, a Spanish [i.e. Sephardi] Jew, well clad, tall and upright, with a face of great refinement – the face of a visionary’. Treves expressed of the latter man that ‘it is he, and such as he, who keep alive the spark of hope among the grey and scattered ashes’.126 The crown for most egregious anti-Semitism when faced with the Jewish Quarter goes to Thackeray, who attacked Jerusalem’s Jews even more viciously than he lambasted non-Protestant Christians. This began in Thackeray’s narrative even before he set foot in Jerusalem, as he turned his pen against some Jewish pilgrims to Palestine, who were his fellow passengers on a ship from Istanbul to Jaffa. Writing that ‘the dirt of these children of captivity exceeds all possibility of description’, he complained of ‘the profusion of stinks which they raised, the grease of their venerable garments and faces, the horrible messes cooked in the filthy pots, and devoured with the nasty fingers, the squalor of mats, pots, old bedding, and foul carpets of our Hebrew friends’.127 In deeply unpleasant language, he penned a verse in a dreadful poem about the journey: Strange company we harboured; We’d a hundred Jews to larboard, Unwashed, uncombed, unbarbered, Jews black, and brown, and grey; With terror it would seize ye, And make your souls uneasy,

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To see those Rabbis greasy, Who did nought but scratch and pray: Their dirty children puking, Their dirty saucepans cooking, Their dirty fingers hooking Their swarming fleas away.128 Thackeray continued this attack in Jerusalem, describing an ‘old Polish Patriarch, venerable in filth, stalking among the stinking ruins of the Jewish quarter’; for good measure, he threw in another age-old anti-Semitic slur, claiming that ‘you may track one of the people, and be sure to hear mention of that silver calf that they worship’. Yet he described a Jewish convert to Protestantism whom he encountered at the Jerusalem mission of the London Jews’ Society in starkly contrasting terms, writing ‘I never saw a man whose outward conduct was more touching, whose sincerity was more evident, and whose religious feeling seemed more deep, real, and reasonable’.129 The implication could not be clearer: in order for Jews in Palestine to be represented in a positive light, they needed to abandon their faith and traditional lifestyle, and mimic the religion and bourgeois gentility of Victorian Englishmen. The use of this kind of language by Thackeray and other travellers deprived Jerusalem’s Jews of any of the dignity afforded in Evangelicals’ minds to the Biblical Hebrews. The living Jews of the nineteenth century could not escape, in Bibleobsessed Protestants’ minds, the shadow cast by those whom they considered the Jews’ ancestors of an ancient, heroic era.130 Yet there was one place where a Jewish presence did inspire Western travellers with grandiose thoughts: the Haram’s Western Wall. *** The Western Wall (henceforth ‘the Wall’) became another essential stop on Western travellers’ visits to Jerusalem. Whilst the Church was a place for Victorian voyagers to sneer and congratulate themselves on their own ‘superior’ practice of Christianity, and the Haram provided an opportunity to cast the mind back to the Biblical era, the Wall – the sole visible remnant from the time of the ancient Jewish temples – prompted thoughts of the epic sweep of the Jewish people’s history and the future which Evangelicals prophesied for them. ‘Ages upon ages have since rolled away; yet these foundations still endure, and are immoveable as at the beginning’, gushed Robinson, who predicted that the stones would continue to stand ‘as long as the world shall last’.131 While Western travellers conceived of Jewish religious practice at the Wall as a bridge between the present and the Biblical past, worship at the site was in fact a relatively new tradition dating back only a few centuries, and it was only earlier in the nineteenth century that the Wall became an important symbol for Jews of their presence in Jerusalem.132 In the nineteenth century (and until 1948), Jewish prayer at the Wall took place in a fairly narrow area between the Haram and the

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Mughariba Quarter, bulldozed by Israeli forces days after the commencement of the military occupation of Jerusalem in June 1967. At the start of the Jewish Sabbath, on Friday nights, Jewish worshippers were often joined by voyeuristic onlookers, Western travellers intent on observing Jews at prayer. That this robbed Jews of their privacy and dignity in worship is evident from Treves’s early twentieth-century description of ‘the crowd of tourists who gather here each Friday afternoon, who giggle and chaff and punctuate the solemn litany by the clicking of their kodaks’.133 Most travellers, including Treves himself, apparently lacked the awareness that their own presence on the scene reduced it to a tourist attraction. Only when observing worship at the Wall could travellers picture a connection between living Jews and the ancient Israelites. Watching Jews pray provided Macleod with a link to an otherwise Biblical past, as he pondered ‘that this sort of devotion has probably been going on since the Temple was destroyed’. He hyperbolically exclaimed ‘what light amidst darkness, what darkness amidst light; what undying hopes in the future, what passionate attachment to the past; what touching superstition, what belief and unbelief!’134 Yet for many, these feelings mingled with a patronizing pity, deriving from what they viewed as the abject conditions of the existing Jews of Jerusalem compared with their mental image of the Biblical Hebrews. ‘Nothing could give a more vivid picture of the humiliation of Israel than these poor Jews, strangers and outcasts in what used to be their own city’, claimed Herschell, while another traveller rhetorically asked ‘who can behold the scene before us, and not recognize the city which was for the people, and the people who were for the city? But now strangers inhabit their inheritance, and their houses are turned to aliens’.135 Such evaluations not only denied agency and dignity to Jerusalem’s Jews, but also discursively de-indigenized Jerusalem’s Arab Muslim and Christian inhabitants. One Baptist clergyman expressed in no uncertain terms what he considered as the cause for Jews’ humble position in Jerusalem: ‘the self-invoked curse of eighteen hundred years ago’ that Evangelicals believed had afflicted the entire Jewish people since their ancestors’ rejection of Christ and supposed culpability in his death.136 Seeing worship at Judaism’s holiest site continued to prompt thoughts of Jewish conversion to Christianity, even when it was clear that no amount of missionary activity could persuade Palestine’s Jews to break with their faith. One of Agnes Smith’s travelling companions expressed her hope that ‘the Lord would soon reveal Himself to them as one greater than the temple’, while another traveller took it upon herself to explain to a Jewish woman at the site ‘that as a Christian I also loved the Jewish Temple and all that its history meant’.137 Appropriating Jewish veneration for the remains of their ancient holy sites, Evangelicals simultaneously hoped for the negation of actual worship at the Wall through Jewish conversion to Christianity. To multiple travellers, Jewish worshippers at the Wall seemed like the epitome of vulnerability and weakness, compared to the muscular Israelite warriors of their imaginations. James Finn’s wife, Elizabeth Anne Finn, asked Where were the warriors and the heroes? Alas! alas! could there be a Joshua or a Judas Maccabeus in disguise among these poor creatures of the timid glance,

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shrinking frightened before the Arab peasant who came along with a donkey load of water for sale, and asking him its price with bated breath and almost servile aspect?138

This view dovetailed with James Finn’s own responsibility, as British consul, as the official protector of Jews in Palestine, as will be explored in Chapter 4. But these thoughts also led some travellers in the direction of the Zionist movement’s own vision of an assertive form of Jewish self-defence. Rider Haggard described the scene at the Wall as ‘grotesque, even to sadness’. He emphasized the ‘motley crowd’ which gathered around the worshippers: Beggars […] maimed, and disease-stricken; boys, who drew down their eyelids within six inches of your face to reveal the shrivelled balls beneath; men with tins the size of a half-gallon pot, which they shook before you, howling and vociferating for baksheesh […]. Then, to complete the picture, in the background a small crowd of European and American sightseers, with their dragomen, some seated on boxes or rough benches, others standing in groups, laughing, smoking, and photographing the more noteworthy characters. Imagine men who will submit to it all! Imagine, also, what those fierce old heroes who held that wall for so long against the might of Rome would think and say of these descendants if they could see them thus mocked and humiliated at its foot!

Dismissing the Jewish religious belief in the appearance of the Messiah or what he mockingly called ‘a Jewish Napoleon’, Rider Haggard proposed two more practicable options to improve the Jews’ social position in Palestine. Firstly, he wrote, ‘they might persuade their wealthier brethren to buy out the Turk’. Playing up to the anti-Semitic cliché of Jewish wealth, and equating both Islamic and Jewish religious attachment to Jerusalem with a financial transaction, Rider Haggard argued that ‘There are a dozen gentlemen on the London Stock Exchange who could do this [i.e. purchase Jerusalem from the Ottomans] without much individual inconvenience. Why do not the Hebrew family put to this purpose a portion of the riches which certain of them possess in such abundance?’ Secondly, he suggested that Jews ‘might drill, buy arms, and make an insurrection’ to take the city by force.139 Rider Haggard’s second suggestion chimed with the thought of the New Yishuv at the time, which came to the conclusion that the Zionist strategy of land purchase and gradual colonization of Palestine’s land would have to be accompanied by a militaristic culture of ‘defence’. A key pillar of Zionist ideology and praxis thus became the formation of armed units of settlers, initially to protect Jewish colonies. As Silver notes, these units – which included the predecessors of the Labour Zionist militia the Hagana (Hebrew: Defence) which became the Israeli military upon the creation of the state – were formed in the shadows of the antiSemitic pogroms which Jewish emigrants had survived in Eastern Europe, though in Palestine their rifles were pointed against the local indigenous inhabitants who had lost land to the new colonists, rather than against racist mobs.140 Believing that Jews in Eastern Europe had been rendered helpless due to their social

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structure and passive attitude, Zionist activists sought the transformation of Jews into militants. The Revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Hagana’s rival militia the Irgun, outlined the transformative impact he believed participating in these armed organizations would have on Jews in Palestine: Our starting point is to take the typical Yid of today and to imagine his diametrical opposite […] because the Yid is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty. The Yid is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. […] The Yid has accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command.141

Zionist leaders were replicating the attitudes that Victorian travellers had already reached years before, watching worshippers at the Western Wall. As noted by Katz, this was an explicitly gendered vision, in which the New Yishuv which Zionist ideologues wished to see was associated with masculinity and belligerence, while Jews not only of the diaspora but also the Old Yishuv in Palestine were considered as effeminate, weak and passive.142 Ultimately, as Rider Haggard had suggested, it was through military action that the Zionist movement most quickly expanded its sovereignty over Palestine. Before 1948, decades of Zionist land purchases had secured just under 6 per cent of Palestine’s land for settlers.143 During the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, known by Palestinians as the Nakba, the Hagana and other Zionist militias not only repelled Arab regular armies and armed local volunteers, but also gave and acted upon orders such as ‘to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered’ in some civilian areas which were ethnically cleansed, eventually bringing 78 per cent of Mandate-area Palestine (significantly more than the 55 per cent allotted for a Jewish state in the 1947 UN partition plan) under Israeli sovereignty, minus the Palestinians who had resided in the area now made stateless refugees.144 *** The Old City of Jerusalem was essentially written off by Western travellers as, in the words of Palestine-born Anglican priest of European and Jewish ancestry J. E. Hanauer, ‘a museum of fossilized forms of religious profession’.145 Towards most of the religious sites in this ‘museum’, venerated by Christians, Jews and Muslims, Westerners expressed their strong antipathy. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was maligned, stripped of any Christian status, and delegitimated by Biblical archaeologists, ‘expert’ and amateur alike. The Western Wall, while throwing Evangelicals’ minds back to the Biblical age, also aroused their worst anti-Semitic attitudes when they observed the Jews who worshipped there. The Haram al-Sharif alone became the site of Evangelical desire, not because of its Islamic structures (however much their architecture was praised), but in spite of them. In travellers’ damning indictments of Jerusalem’s sacred locales, there was little room for concern, or even curiosity, about the everyday lives of ordinary Jerusalemites of all communities.

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In late October 1898, an Austrian Jewish traveller, largely secular and assimilated into his home society, visited Jerusalem during a nine-day journey to Palestine. Like his Victorian contemporaries from Britain and America, he had much criticism to make of the city, writing in his diary that ‘the musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance, and uncleanness lie in the foul-smelling alleys’. Like non-Jewish Western travellers, his harshest judgements were saved for Jews: dismissingly comparing Jerusalem’s Jewish community with the diaspora in Central and Eastern Europe, he wrote ‘the local Jewish community is like the rest of them’, and described the Western Wall as ‘pervaded by a hideous, wretched, speculative beggary’, and a Jewish hospital as ‘misery and uncleanliness’. The traveller was the founder of political Zionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Theodor Herzl. He envisaged a complete reordering of Jerusalem, should the city ever come under the control of the Zionist movement: he would ‘begin by cleaning it up’ and even ‘empty the nests [the residential quarters] of filth and tear them down’. Rather than Jerusalem as it existed, he mentally pictured ‘a very pretty, elegant town’ inhabited by European Jews, outside the Old City’s walls.146 Zionist visions for Jerusalem’s development were enthusiastically adopted by the British Mandate, because earlier Western visitors to Palestine during the Peaceful Crusade had reached identical conclusions. Colonial urban planners sought to confine Arab Muslim and Christian existence within the walls, while development of mostly Jewish neighbourhoods outside to the west was encouraged.147 Palestinian existence in West Jerusalem ceased entirely when the area’s Arab residents were forced from their homes in 1948. Less than two decades later, with the occupation of 1967, Israel similarly began reshaping the Old City, ‘emptying the nests’ like the Mughariba Quarter, gentrifying the Jewish Quarter, and systematically facilitating creeping illegal settler expansion in the Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters. Palestinian presence in other neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem, such as Shaykh Jarāḥ and Silwan, has been similarly confined and threatened. As the next chapter will show, key British figures of the Peaceful Crusade began the process of increasing Jewish presence around Jerusalem in the mid-nineteenth century.

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­Chapter 4 ‘N O T P R E C I SE LY A J EW I SH I N ST I T U T IO N ’ : T H E FA R M O F K E R E M AV R A HA M

Of all Victorians who travelled to Palestine, James and Elizabeth Anne Finn may have been most deeply afflicted by ‘Holy Land on the brain’. Their Evangelicalism manifested itself as an intense desire to see the ‘return’ of the Jewish people to Palestine. Unlike much of the missionary milieu from which they emerged, they had a far-sighted view of their ideal ‘returning’ Jews as settler colonizers who, if they could not be persuaded into trading their ancestral faith for Evangelical Protestantism, would at least adopt a Protestant work ethic in their agricultural pursuits. Records of the Finns’ official activities during James’s long period as British consul in Jerusalem from 1846 to 1863 are abundant; the Finns have appeared many in histories of nineteenth-century Palestine, particularly accounts focusing upon the Jewish community and Western travellers and residents in Jerusalem.1 It is easy to understand why pro-Israel historians, who present a teleological narrative in which growing Jewish immigration (both non-Zionist and Zionist) in the nineteenth century merges seamlessly into the State of Israel’s establishment in 1948, have dwelt at such length on the Finns. Their activities in Jerusalem revolved around the city’s Jewish community; through a focus on the Finns, therefore, Jews come into sharp focus, while Muslim and Christian townspeople are left indistinct. However, the Finns’ dedicated activity for the actual settler colonization of Palestine has largely been ignored.2 Previous discussion of the Finns has not appreciated the extent to which their vision significantly preceded and resembled later Zionist settler colonialism. This chapter thus explores one specific aspect of the Finns’ legacy, their establishment of Kerem Avraham, a small farm shortly outside the walls of Jerusalem. The first section briefly introduces the Finns and their conceptualization of settler colonialism in Palestine; the second analyses in detail their motivations for establishing Kerem Avraham, and the first few years of its operations, and the third chronicles the site’s later life, and Elizabeth’s continuing involvement in its operations.

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‘Half a Jew’: The Finns in Jerusalem James Finn, born in 1806 as the son of an Irish Catholic-turned-Protestant father and English Protestant mother, had a charmed childhood bringing him into contact with the aristocracy, and Palestine-obsessed missionary circles who would influence his life’s course. With his childhood education sponsored by the strongly Evangelical Earl of Clarendon, the young Finn began a study of Hebrew, and in the late 1830s began to publish works on the Jewish people. In 1841, he started to frequent Palestine Place, the large East London headquarters of the London Jews’ Society. At Palestine Place, Finn met the missionary and Hebrew scholar Alexander McCaul, considered such an authority on Jewish matters that he was known as ‘the Christian Rabbi’. McCaul, at the very centre of Protestant conversionist and Restorationist efforts towards the Jews, was, as his daughter recollected in the Jewish Chronicle (JC) decades later, a close associate (and Hebrew study partner) of Lord Shaftesbury.3 Suggested as a candidate for the first Protestant Bishop of Jerusalem in 1841, McCaul instead insisted that the role go to the converted Jew Michael Solomon Alexander as being of the ‘seed of Abraham’.4 Despite being only seven years his senior, McCaul was also to be Finn’s father-in-law. Elizabeth Anne McCaul had been born in Warsaw in 1825, whilst her father was a missionary to Polish Jews for the London Jews’ Society. It was always in her destiny that she would inherit her father’s interests: McCaul ensured the infant Elizabeth was taught the Jewish languages of Hebrew and Yiddish from the age of three.5 A little over two decades later, with James Finn almost twice Elizabeth’s age, they were married in January 1846. The following month, James having obtained the post of Jerusalem consul, the newlyweds departed for Palestine. They remained in the Holy Land for seventeen years, until Finn’s loss of the consulship and their return to Britain in July 1863. Finn initially obtained the post through his connections with the British ruling class; his only qualifications for a Foreign Office role in Jerusalem were his theological interests and Hebrew and Jewish scholarship, not any previous diplomatic experience or knowledge of the Palestine of the day. He was not a diplomat by temperament. Green describes him as ‘a quarrelsome man with an independent streak’, with ‘a rash, domineering character that made him many enemies’.6 The Finns’ life in Palestine was predictably centred on the Jews; Finn boasted that in Jerusalem he was known as ‘half a Jew’.7 Less flatteringly, his early twentieth-century successor as consul, Edward Blech, accused Finn of being ‘perfectly foolish where Jews were concerned’.8 Charles Warren described him as ‘King Consul’, who ‘rules supreme, not over the natives of the city, but over strangers’, religious Jewish immigrants from Europe who arrived to swell the ranks of the Old Yishuv.9 This position was owed to Britain’s consular ‘protection’ of many non-British Jews, who would have otherwise become stateless as a result of their long residence in Palestine; Blech characterized Finn’s approach as having ‘saddled the English Government with a crowd of burdensome, useless subjects in Jerusalem by registering every Jew who chose to apply’.10 Yet Finn’s activity in this regard may have ultimately had a more momentous

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importance than his successor realized. As Loevy notes, the nineteenthcentury idea of consular protection, in particular Britain’s protection of Jews in Palestine, fed seamlessly into the idea which animated the Balfour Declaration, of Britain’s protection of a Jewish settler enterprise.11 While the policies of protection may have been determined in European capitals, and as a product of the Capitulations originated in the eighteenth century, it was arguably Finn in mid-nineteenth-century Jerusalem who did more than any other individual to cement a feeling of shared interests between Jews in Palestine and the British imperial machine. Despite having officially resigned his membership of the London Jews’ Society when appointed consul, Finn also continued to take an intense interest in the small number of Jewish converts to Protestantism in Jerusalem. His continuous interference in the internal matters of the Jewish community, particularly concerning converts’ affairs, earned him the antipathy of traditional Jewish religious leaders, who eventually contributed to his dismissal as consul. One aspect of this particular interest was his involvement in several small-scale settlercolonial projects employing Jewish or converted Jewish labour, including the millenarian settlement of John Meshullam at the village of Arṭās near Bethlehem, and his own private estate in what became the neighbourhood of al-Ṭālbiya, west of Jerusalem’s Old City, as well as Kerem Avraham. Elizabeth was similarly active in Evangelical charity schemes targeting Jewish women in Jerusalem, aiming to bolster the influence of the London Jews’ Society and increase Jewish dependence on British missionaries.12 The Finns’ energetic involvement in these settlercolonial and missionary endeavours and other projects which were not always uncontroversial, illustrates how, in Shepherd’s words, Finn ‘consistently exceeded his brief ’ as consul.13 Like many Westerners who dreamed of Jewish ‘return’ and settler colonization in Palestine, the Finns were contemptuous of Ottoman rule, and wished to see a British style of colonial control imposed on Palestine. In her introduction to Stirring Times, James’s memoir (edited for publication after his death by Elizabeth) of the Crimean War years 1853 to 1856, Elizabeth wrote of the ‘anarchy’ apparently reigning in Palestine, the ‘slight hold’ of the Ottoman authorities, and ‘the facility presented for intrigues of foreigners’, a phrase in fact accurately epitomizing the Finns’ activities.14 The Finns had an inflated opinion of the influence they wielded over Palestinian affairs. ‘Happy was it for Palestine’, Elizabeth wrote of her husband, ‘that there was in existence an influence capable of restraining the restlessness and the disorder, and of preventing a wide-spread outbreak of open anarchy’.15 To give one example of the kind of influence the couple tried to wield, James noted with satisfaction of ‘the ill-conditioned ‘Abderrahhmȃn Amer’, an independently minded Palestinian leader from Hebron, that ‘there was one thing he feared, and that was a little book which the English Consul carried in his pocket, in which everything was written down, and from which, although not mentioned at the time, it was sure to be brought to light some day or other’.16 ***

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The Finns clearly articulated their hopes for Jewish settler colonialism in Palestine. Elizabeth’s thinly novelized 1866 account of British expatriate life in Jerusalem, Home in the Holy Land, illustrated Evangelicals’ hopes for mass Jewish immigration into Palestine which would change the face of both its urban centres and rural districts. One of her Jewish characters states ‘when our nation come back and have [Palestine] again, it will be much more beautiful. All the mountains will be covered with vines and fig-trees, and all the towns will be full of people’.17 It was in the surroundings of Jerusalem that Elizabeth most envisaged colonizing activity. Her characters wonder whether they would ‘see those silent environs of Jerusalem once more enlivened with the hum of workmen, and the sight of suburban houses and gardens’; while lamenting the loss this would entail of ‘the delightful quiet which now reigns around Jerusalem’, they continue that ‘when once things do begin to move in the East, progress will be rapid’.18 James Finn set out his rationale for Palestine’s colonization in a letter of September 1857 to the foreign secretary George Villiers, the Earl of Clarendon (the nephew of Finn’s childhood sponsor).19 In typical Biblical Orientalist fashion, Finn averred that Palestine was ‘in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population irrespective of religious considerations’. Finn ‘disclaim[ed] all sympathy’ with plans that ‘comprised the ejection of the Turks [from Palestine] at the same time’ as ‘England transplanting a Jewish nation into Palestine’. Finn framed his scheme of British-sponsored Jewish settler colonization as a means by which Ottoman control of Palestine could be strengthened, particularly against the efforts of the imperial rivals shared by Istanbul and London, the ‘Roman Catholic nations of Europe’ and Russia, the land purchases of which ‘cannot be too carefully watched’. Jewish settlers, he predicted, would form ‘a population which should be grateful and loyal’ to the sultan, while owing ‘no willing subjection to any European crown’. Finn gave serious thought to a number of practical dimensions of a settler colonial enterprise. As Laurence Oliphant would later do, Finn discounted the assimilated Jews of Western and Central Europe  – ‘the Jews of Frankfort, Paris and Vienna or London’ – but identified the oppressed Jews of the Russian Empire, and the Jewish communities of North Africa and ‘the Central nations of Asia’ as the ideal colonists. Finn claimed to ‘have lately seen a shipload and heard of another, of Russian Jews arriving at Jaffa’ who were ‘not as they used to come formerly, the aged and decrepit, but hale, robust men: men accustomed to outdoor employments’. Nevertheless, he warned that they would ‘lead a life of probable beggary’ unless they could engage in the kind of manual labour required on an agricultural colony. Inaccurately given the actual very small number of Jewish converts to Protestantism, Finn also stated that ‘there are now to be found in Europe and America, a sufficient number of baptized Christian Israelites, if they could be assembled together, to give a tolerable population to Palestine’. While presenting Palestine as a land of promise which could ‘yield a very speedy return’, and the ‘hale, robust’ Jews as a labour force full of potential, Finn also acknowledged that a colonizing venture in Palestine could initially face economic hurdles, stating the desirability of the Ottomans granting ‘an exemption from taxation for the first five years in all cases of Jewish agricultural settlement’.

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Finn also considered the prospects of relations between potential Jewish settlers and indigenous Palestinians. An awareness of the potential for conflict between settlers and natives is clear in his recommendation ‘That in forming rural colonies the immigrants, with regard to their own advantage, and the peace of the country, should be recommended and persuaded to do so in partnership with the Arab peasantry’. Yet the possibility of ‘quarrels’ between settlers and natives he dismissed, with the vaguely expressed ‘partnership’ and ‘identification of interests’ between them. Finn claimed in Stirring Times that this had already begun as a result of the millenarian settlement at Artas, which had apparently created ‘a flourishing village of natives where lately had been only ruins’, and was ‘changing marauding natives into cultivators of the soil […] in connexion with Jewish industry’.20 Given the praxis of all settler-colonial movements, including Zionism, and their demand for unhindered access to land, it is easy to dismiss Finn’s forecasts as naïve optimism. Yet Finn shared this view not only with other Victorian advocates of Zionism, but also (at least in their public statements) with many Zionist leaders before 1948.21 As a private message to Finn’s superior the foreign secretary, points of the text differ drastically from the Finns’ public discourse. For instance, in contrast with the spectre of ‘anarchy’ Elizabeth had claimed existed in Palestine, Finn confessed that ‘In England the idea may be common that Turkey [i.e. the Ottoman Empire] is a barbarous ill-governed country: but the Jews of Europe in general, would find far more liberty of conscience and action here than they are now accustomed to enjoy’. Similarly, while travellers commonly asserted that heavy taxation was crushing Palestine’s peasantry – Elizabeth, for instance, wrote of ‘the tax-gatherer, one of the irregular horse-soldiers of the Sultan, watching the reaping, and ready to claim his share as soon as it should be threshed’ – Finn admitted that ‘Taxation […] in this country is light, and simple in its forms’.22 As revealed in his own pencil note on the back of the letter, Clarendon read Finn’s proposal ‘with int[erest]’, and wrote about the scheme to the chief British diplomat in Istanbul, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe; Clarendon considered that ‘if the Porte [i.e. the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman court in Istanbul] were disposed to favor it [I] have little doubt that it would find support among the wealthy Jews in this country’, perhaps a reference to Moses Montefiore who had reached similar conclusions. *** Another consideration bearing on the Finns’ settler-colonial activity was their understanding of Palestine’s agricultural potential. In his letter, Finn asserted that ‘two thirds of Palestine’ consisted of uncultivated ‘waste lands’, available for Jewish colonists. As discussed in Chapter 2, this reflected a Western discourse that was widespread, though inaccurate, which built a powerful image of Palestine’s abandonment, current barrenness and latent promise. However, the Finns were in fact astute observers of the Palestinian landscape. Running throughout their writings, alongside and contradicting the representation of a squandered and abandoned Palestine, is a different picture of the land. James Finn, like Edward Robinson, was an insightful observer of the way the landscape had been shaped by the indigenous society.

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The sophistication of Finn’s view of the land is demonstrated in his Byeways in Palestine, first published in 1868, which records some of his journeys around Palestine over the years of his consulship. The book opens with the typical Evangelical and Orientalist discourse on Palestine, Finn claiming in his introduction that ‘Sad cogitations would arise while traversing, hour after hour, the neglected soil, or passing by desolated villages which bear names of immense antiquity’. Yet Finn then stated that his book would ‘show that the land is one of remarkable fertility wherever cultivated, even in a slight degree’. This contradicted those ‘believers in the Bible’ – Victorian Evangelicals – who ‘rush into the extreme of pronouncing the Holy Land to be cursed in its present capabilities’. Instead, Finn proposed that Palestine was only ‘verily and indeed cursed in its government, and in its want of population’, but that he had ‘seen enough to convince me that astonishing will be the amount of its produce, and the rapidity also, when the obstacles now existing are removed’.23 In his accounts of his travels, Finn presented a picture of highly successful farming conducted by the filaḥīn, in villages far from desolated, across Palestine. For example, Finn wrote of Tubas that ‘the natural soil here is so fertile that its wheat and its oil […] fetch the highest prices in towns; and the grain is particularly sought after as seed for other districts’.24 West of Jenin, he described ‘a fine village named Yaabad [Ya‘bad] in a lovely plain richly cultivated; there were after the earlier crops young plantations of cotton rising, the fields cleared of stones and fenced in by the most regular and orderly of stone dykes’.25 He praised Yibnā, south of Jaffa on Palestine’s coastal plain, writing ‘the population seemed very industrious: they have cheerful bayȃrahs, or enclosed orchards, and the open fields were exceedingly well cultivated’, and mentioning the ‘most pleasing’ sight of ‘the return of flocks and herds from pasture, and the barley harvest coming home upon asses and camels with bells on their necks all enlivened by the singing or chattering of women and children’.26 Of Asdūd, a short distance away, Finn exclaimed ‘I do not know where in all the Holy Land I have seen such excellent agriculture of grain, olive-trees, and orchards of fruit, as here at Ashdod. The fields would do credit to English farming’.27 Similarly, near Gaza, he wrote of ‘an immense park of olive grounds’ outside the city, and a ‘Cheerful scene of camels and asses bearing the barley-harvest home, attended by women and children; small flocks of sheep also, with their shepherd lads playing sweet and irregular airs on their nayahs’ (flutes).28 Elizabeth Finn provided a similar picture of highly productive indigenous agriculture which took place in the ‘silent environs of Jerusalem’. Exclaiming that she ‘never saw anything like the quantity of fruit’ as was brought by the filaḥīn to sell in the markets of Jerusalem, she described ‘mountains of watermelons and of grapes’ – the former of ‘immense’ size, she explicitly stated, while the latter were ‘beautiful’  – as well as ‘green and purple figs, scarlet tomatoes, cucumbers, and purple egg-plants, with other vegetables that I did not know’. Elizabeth insightfully referenced the way most Westerners viewed Palestine, with the elisions in their gaze which produced distorted accounts of the land: Any one looking at the landscape around Jerusalem, and the empty waste mountains around, would ask where it had all come from. But we had been in the

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habit of going out in the early morning, and of meeting the files of peasant women bearing on their heads basket-loads of vegetables; and had seen, in the course of our evening rides, the nooks down in the valleys whence such produce comes, and the vineyards on the hill-sides round the same villages, whence the grapes come which were brought in every morning by the men on countless donkeys.29

­ e peasantry were becoming so wealthy as a result of the high productivity of Th their lands, particularly their grain exports to Europe, that James Finn claimed that ‘Money in coin is accumulating like heaps of manure over the country’.30 Yet even for keen-eyed observers of Palestine like the Finns, it was the inaccurate and ideologically determined idea of Palestine as underpopulated and underutilized which gave an impetus to the expectation of the coming triumph of settler colonization in Palestine.

‘The Very Name of the Ground’: From Karm al-Khalil to Kerem Avraham As recounted in Stirring Times, the immediate cause behind the Finns’ establishment of an agricultural colony outside Jerusalem was a famine in the city as a result of the Crimean War. The conflict between the Ottoman and Russian empires was an important moment in turning British minds towards Palestine’s settler colonization. During the Crimean War Shaftesbury, writing in his diary in 1854, coined an early variant of a later (in)famous Zionist slogan: ‘There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country’ (emphasis in original).31 Finn portrayed the suffering of Jerusalem’s Jews in these years in Dickensian terms. ‘The spectacle was heartrending’, Finn wrote of British missionaries distributing bread to Jews on Ash Wednesday in early 1854: […] many were crying from mere weakness – some with young babies in arms, some staggering in fever or ague fits, who had got up from bed because their children were crying for food. Most were drenched with snow and rain, and perished by the keen wind blowing through their summer rags. It needed three stout kawwasses [Ottoman guards] to keep off the crowd.32

Sensationally, he claimed that The state of poverty among the Jews at this time exceeded anything we had before known. Parents were said to be selling their children to Moslems, as the only way of preserving their lives. Some were found dead in their rooms. […] there was scarcely a family that was not in the deepest distress. Little children cried themselves to sleep at night for hunger.33

This famine in Jerusalem did not discriminate between different religious communities. In February 1854, Finn wrote to Clarendon, explaining that the

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‘unprecedented’ cost of ‘of all kinds of provisions’, had been ‘equally disastrous among Christians and Moslems’ as among Jews, due to the absence of the trade Jerusalem’s vendors normally did with Russian Christian pilgrims arriving at Easter.34 However, Finn’s concern was almost exclusively for the suffering of Jews. This did not only reflect his obsession with the community, but also the fact that Jews who had emigrated to Palestine from the Russian Empire experienced especially straightened circumstances. They relied upon the haluka, charitable donations sent by Jews in Europe to sustain their coreligionists living in Jerusalem; this financial lifeline was disrupted by the war between Russia and the Ottomans, throwing Jews in Palestine into real hardship. It was not only the failure of this system which concerned Finn. Like other Evangelicals who harboured hopes for Jewish colonization, he judged the haluka itself very harshly. The system clashed with the bourgeois Protestant work ethic, ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat’ (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Finn asserted that the Jews living on the haluka existed in ‘a condition of mere and sheer mendicancy’, and that the system had created ‘a nation of paupers’ and ‘a race of spies and flatterers’ beholden to the rabbis who distributed the funds.35 Robinson had complained that the haluka ‘serves chiefly as a means of increasing [the rabbis’] own influence and control over the conduct and consciences of their poorer brethren’; later travellers claimed that the system constituted ‘a strong temptation on the part of the recipients to be idle, lazy, and suspicious’, and described it as ‘inevitably degrading’ and ‘the curse of modern Jerusalem’.36 For similar reasons, the haluka was also opposed by Oliphant, and pioneering Jewish Zionists in Palestine in the late nineteenth century, such as the Hebrew language journalists Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Eliezer Rokach.37 In a report written for Clarendon in January 1858, Finn spelt out the link he perceived between ending the haluka and beginning the process of Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine. After complaining of the ‘opposition of the Rabbis to European culture or improvement’, and the claimed tendency of Jews in Jerusalem to ‘habitually consider the world bound to maintain them, on the mere account of their residing there’, Finn set out his remedy as ‘agricultural or other manual employment to be afforded to the Jews’. He specified that this should take place under the control of ‘others than their [i.e. Jews’] own people’: Jews could not, in his mind, be entrusted with operating this project themselves.38 The Crimean War thus presented an opportunity, in Finn’s mind, to end the traditional solidarity between diaspora Jews and those residing in Palestine, break the rabbis’ power, and begin settler colonization under Western tutelage. Finn claimed that the charitable handouts to the Jews were ‘all very inadequate to meet the mass of misery with which we had to cope’.39 The famine provided the excuse for him and his wife to formulate a project which explicitly reflected their own ideological concerns. Charity would not be provided to passive recipients, like the haluka; rather, Finn stated, ‘to relieve distress by means of labour’ was the only thing that could ‘heal the cankering evil of pauperism’ amongst the Jews.40 Jewish poverty and suffering would be instrumentalized, turning people desperate for food and money into participants in a project with political implications. The

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Finns’ thinking was influenced by the mid-nineteenth-century notion of ‘selfhelp’. The figure most associated with the idea was Scottish writer Samuel Smiles, who completed his book Self-Help in 1854, the same year as Kerem Avraham’s founding, though the work was only published in 1859. The self-help philosophy reflected Victorian attitudes towards the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, and what the aims of charitable giving should be. ‘“Heaven helps those who help themselves” is a well-tried maxim’, Smiles’ began his book. ‘The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates’.41 This concept was eventually carried forward into the Zionist movement itself. As Sokolow stated, ‘self-reliance is of the essence of Zionism’ and ‘Zionism is real Jewish self-help’.42 It was specifically Jewish agriculture that impassioned Finn. Encouraging Jews to farm had the potential to enable their communal self-sufficiency and resilience against future shortages, though it was hardly a solution to the immediate humanitarian challenges of the famine in 1854. Finn envisaged a system which would ‘yield […] remote benefits, even though of a lasting character’, a hybrid of the agricultural commune and the Victorian workhouse.43 In the Finns’ minds, this would begin a process of Palestine’s ‘redemption’ from the Biblical curse, its possession and utilization by Jewish hands, and recreation in a Biblical image. Victorian travellers widely believed that, while the ancient Hebrews had been an agricultural people, their modern descendants had lost the ability to work the land. Quoting from the Bible’s Book of Micah, Eliot Warburton lamented that ‘the Jew has so long been accustomed to wander among the cities of the Gentiles, that he no longer desires “to sit under the shade of his own fig-tree, or to eat of his own vine”’.44 This idea derived from an anti-Semitic conception of the Jews as living a worthless, parasitic existence. ‘A Syrian Jew at work! the very words seem to spurn each other’, quipped William Hepworth Dixon.45 Changing this would not only begin to fulfil, in the Evangelical mind, the Jewish Restoration, but also – if the process was carefully managed by Victorian Englishmen and women – bring the Jews into the capitalistic age, simultaneously imbibing the Protestant work ethic and accomplishing prophecy. *** According to an elderly Elizabeth Finn in an interview with the JC, the direct spark of inspiration for Kerem Avraham came from the efforts of John Meshullam, who in the early 1850s operated a hotel within Jerusalem’s walls, with a small plot of land attached. Initially trying to grow some vegetables for his guests, he abandoned this attempt when the land proved ‘insufficient or unsuitable’, moving on to his settler endeavour at Artas. Elizabeth reported that she and James ‘rented the little potato and cabbage patch which he had abandoned and set two starving Russian Jews to work upon it’. Claiming that success was ‘immediately achieved’, Elizabeth recalled that they soon purchased

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a larger plot outside the walls for £250. She took pride in being, in her own words, ‘the first to set the poor Jews of Jerusalem to remunerative employment’.46 In Stirring Times, James Finn asserted that the ‘eight to twelve English acres’ of land which would become Kerem Avraham had originally been purchased in 1852.47 Whilst this land was intended for an ‘Industrial Plantation for Employment of Jews of Jerusalem’, and for several years the Finns had employed on menial tasks ‘as many poor Jews as the small funds at our disposal had permitted’, it was not until the 1854 famine that they besought funds from their Evangelical network, with donations being sent from England, India and America, to begin more ambitious work. In early 1854 the Finns set local Jews to work at menial but ‘profitable’ tasks on the plot, such as ‘clear[ing] off the loose stones from the land in baskets’, ‘building up dry walls of enclosure with’ – significantly – ‘the guidance of a few peasants’ and ‘carry[ing] water from the cistern’; with his typically patronizing attitude towards the community, Finn added that he believed that the Jews ‘could learn to do other things’. Finn hoped ‘that other branches of Jewish agricultural employment that might be carried on in other places in the vicinity should be associated with this institution, under the general name of “Industrial Plantation”’ – in other words, that the ten-acre farm might be the start of a much larger Jewish agricultural enterprise surrounding Jerusalem. From the beginning, there were important similarities and differences between the practices at Kerem Avraham, and at the later Zionist agricultural colonies established in the 1880s. One notable continuity was the renaming of the land from Arabic into Hebrew, beginning the process of giving modern Palestine a Jewish identity through altering its toponyms. As with Robinson’s project two decades before, this was done through drawing on indigenous knowledge and relationships to the land. An apparently empty field or hilltop, if locals identified it with a name even tenuously connected to Biblical cartography, would hold far more interest for an Evangelical traveller than the established Christian sacred sites. An assertable Biblical history made doubly attractive a patch of real estate which had latent potential for settler-colonial purposes. This was the case with the plot where the Finns established their project. Finn recounted that ‘the Arabic name which it bore among the peasants, its former owners, was Ker’m el Khaleel – the vineyard of the Friend – i.e., of Abraham, by which epithet Abraham is always known’. He commented approvingly that ‘The very name of the ground was attractive’. As Masalha notes of Finn’s change of the Arabic name Karm al-Khalil to its Hebrew equivalent Kerem Avraham, Finn started a process of ‘memoricide’ of indigenous placenames (which was almost, though not quite, complete for Karm al-Khalil by the 1930s).48 The act turned the otherwise nondescript few acres previously farmed by filaḥīn into a place to which Jews could feel a special connection, through both its Hebrew name and apparent link with their prophet Abraham. Finn proudly reported of workers on the site, ‘a ragged troop, very ragged but very happy, singing a chorus in Hebrew, “We are labourers in the field of Abraham, our father”’, leading him to think of Biblical verses and prophecy ‘better days to come for their nation’. In Finn’s observance

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of the site’s Jewish foreman doing his accounting in Hebrew, even this mundane administrative task took on a divine sheen.49 Nevertheless, the ancient Biblical resonance of the site’s new name was Finn’s own invention: no Jewish, Christian or Muslim tradition connected the site to Abraham. The precise origin of the site’s name are unclear, though could simply derive from the former presence of a vineyard owned by a local Palestinian named Khalīl, as was the practice with similarly named parcels of land elsewhere around Jerusalem.50 While the Zionist settlements which followed thirty years later were largely built in rural locations remote from Palestine’s urban centres, Kerem Avraham by contrast did not seek to remove Jews permanently from their residences in Jerusalem’s Old City. The labourers employed on the site left their homes in the Jewish Quarter each morning and walked the short distance to the farm, did the day’s work, and returned within Jerusalem’s walls by night. In Finn’s own words, the project was intended ‘not so much to constitute a rural colony of farmers on this spot, as to afford daily employment to residents of the city, returning from work every evening to their families’ (emphasis in original). Finn’s reference to ‘a rural colony’ where workers both lived and farmed reflected the fact that these projects for Jewish settler colonization were already being proposed: initiatives associated with Montefiore such as the windmill (intended to free Jews from reliance on nonJewish millers) and alms houses of the Mishkenot Sha‘ananim neighbourhood west of the Old City, plus the grandiose agricultural colonization plans of Montefiore’s travelling companion in Palestine, the former British governor of South Australia George Gawler.51 Kerem Avraham was intended to modify, not revolutionize, Jewish life in Jerusalem, and to ensure its long-term sustainability. As Evangelical Restorationists, the Jewish presence in Jerusalem was of great importance for the Finns. Nevertheless, the nearby farm was only to be the first step; Jewish colonization of more distant regions of Palestine, they hoped, would follow. Kerem Avraham was also a colonizing enterprise, insofar as it sent Jewish farmers to a wild ‘frontier’ area only minutes from the city gates, but which Western visitors imagined as desolate and forbidding. This countryside would now be stamped with not only the productive domesticity of the English kitchen garden, but also the mark of Jewish labour. In Elizabeth’s words from her later novel, ‘the hum of workmen’ would intrude upon ‘those silent environs of Jerusalem’. When work started at Kerem Avraham, the Finns faced the problem of labour supply. It was not that there was a shortage of Jews wishing to work on the site, Finn argued; rather, he doubted whether Jews were up to the task. ‘We were not so sanguine as to expect pallid creatures, weakened by hunger and disease, to perform the labours of healthy robust peasants of the villages’, he expressed, further claiming that ‘many of them were physically incapable of walking to their work, even the short distance of about a mile and a half, without becoming ill’. This view was shared by many Victorians who journeyed to Palestine and became enthusiasts for Jewish settler colonization, including Warren, Conder and Oliphant, who all – at least initially – viewed Jewish settlement as succeeding in conjunction with the labour power of the natives.

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Thus, the Finns found themselves out of necessity also providing some employment to local Arabs, as well as Jews. Decades later, Oliphant appreciatively quoted Elizabeth’s judgement on the filaḥīn who had been in their service, that ‘they made excellent agricultural labourers and builders’, in support of his own colonial plans.52 Under filaḥīn guidance, the Jewish labourers learnt to build the walls around the plots, and to use the native tools the fās (pickaxe) and majrafa (spade). The peasantry’s knowledge and experience of agriculture was vital for Kerem Avraham, which was modelled on the indigenous village farming which the Finns so admired. In this, Kerem Avraham was no different from those of the early Zionist settlements from the early 1880s until 1909, all of which used local Arab labour until the establishment of the first kibbutz communal settlement of Degania, south of the Sea of Galilee.53 Finn remunerated Arab and Jewish labourers at the same rate, although he claimed that while the former ‘were of course ablebodied men and could do much more for the money […] it must be remembered that 3½ piastres given to a Fellahh is to him worth more than twice its value to a poor Jew’; Jews were thus provided with additional food and clothing. Indigenous Palestinians not only supplied manpower and contributed their knowledge of agriculture, but also advised on technical matters. As Elizabeth recalled decades later in her reminiscences to her daughter, posthumously published as a memoir, the Finns contracted an architect from Bethlehem to plan the site’s farmhouse, which Jewish labourers then constructed under his instruction.54 While Finn raised the spectre of the danger of ‘weak defenceless Jews [going] alone even so far from Jerusalem to work among the native peasantry’, he credited his own patronage of Kerem Avraham for ensuring its safety. However, one incident relayed by Finn hints at the inherent conflict of settler colonialism. ‘One day a peasant, one of the former owners of the ground, gave a little trouble’, Finn recalled. After the local man ‘used threatening language, and then threw stones’, Finn intervened with the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, who briefly imprisoned the man. After several days, ‘he appeared, humbly begging to be allowed to do some ploughing, which the Jews were not strong enough or able to do’. Soon, the peasant – who had been turned into a landless labourer by Kerem Avraham’s establishment – was ‘laughing, skipping, and running’ among the Jewish employees, ‘and there was never another attempt at rough usage of our Jewish workmen’. The subsequent reality of indigenous-settler relations would not be so idyllic. More serious opposition soon came from the traditional Jewish community leaders. Within weeks of work beginning, Finn reports, ‘a deputation came on the ground from a Synagogue, and denounced the work as unlawful’. Finn may have predicted that such a showdown would occur, with his belief, as stated in his letter to Clarendon, that Jerusalem’s rabbis were set against ‘European culture or improvement’. Nevertheless, Finn also asserted that there were also ‘profound Talmudists, capable of judging for themselves what was lawful in Rabbinical Law’ who came to work on the site undeterred. Yet conflict continued among the Jewish community as a result of the Finns’ project. Finn reported that on one day, the delegates of Jerusalem rabbis ‘were posted with whips at the Jaffa gate to flog back all Jews proceeding with their tools to work on the Plantation’, leading some to

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climb over Jerusalem’s walls or take the long way around through Damascus Gate, although ‘The very old and otherwise feeble could do nothing but submit to the spiritual discipline of the whip’. Apart from these incidents, the Finns painted a rosy picture of operations on the farm. James Finn claimed that within weeks, the number of Jewish labourers had risen to 100, and then 130, including ‘Young Rabbis of the oldest and proudest families’. All were men; while Finn recorded that ‘even Jewish women applied to us in their despair for field work’, the socially conservative Evangelicals in charge of Kerem Avraham decided that agriculture was ‘neither expedient nor desirable for women’. Victorian gender roles were reinforced, as women were redirected to ‘Miss Cooper’s institution for teaching and employing Jewesses in needlework’, a missionary institution already existing in Jerusalem. This gendered division of labour was in effect replicated in the early Zionist agricultural settlements: for both Evangelical Victorians and later Jewish Zionist pioneers, the work of ‘redeeming’ Palestine’s land through farming was considered almost exclusively a man’s task.55 Finn presented his project as having a transformative impact on both the bodies and souls of his Jewish workers. Finn asserted that the life of study and prayer enabled by the haluka had created ‘unhealthiness of body’ and ‘deterioration of character’ among the Jewish community in Jerusalem. When these Jews started agricultural work, Finn stated that they ‘suffered from the great change from a life of study to exposure under the burning Syrian sun’. He even claimed that ‘many of them were physically incapable of walking to their work, even the short distance of about a mile and a half, without becoming ill’, including being ‘seized with fever’ and having to lie ‘helpless’ until they recovered enough ‘to allow of their crawling home again’. To remedy the claimed initial weakness of the Jewish workers, ‘a loaf and two hard boiled eggs’ provided to each labourer before work began apparently proved a miraculous panacea. Soon, Finn remarked with satisfaction, ‘their health and power of working improved daily’. Significantly, conforming with the Evangelical maxim that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, Finn claimed the workers ‘were not so ragged as formerly – all with clean faces, and some with clean stockings’. Their ‘return’ to the soil of the Holy Land, his narrative implied, had begun to have profound and attractive effects on the labourers. Finn’s discourse here was replicated by later settlers at the forefront of Zionist colonial efforts, such as the writer Elhonan Levinsky who forecast that agricultural labour would make Jews ‘mentally and physically the healthiest people on earth’, and the prominent official Arthur Ruppin who believed that engagement in farming would prevent the creation of ‘a new ghetto’ characterized by poverty and degradation in Palestine.56 The workers of Kerem Avraham also represented in Finn’s narrative an embryonic but authentic agricultural working class, to one day rival (and ultimately replace) the indigenous Palestinian peasantry. Finn described the Arab Jewish (‘Sephardim’) workers as singing ‘Conformably with the Oriental peasant customs’ in Arabic, chants such as ‘“Ya Khaleel Allah” (“O, thou friend of God!”), referring to Abraham’. His own and Elizabeth’s names, in Hebrew, were similarly

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‘introduced into their chants’. Finn’s discourse indicates how a largely immigrant Jewish population could begin to be ‘indigenized’, in the minds of Western visitors. Despite all the Finns’ missionary instincts, there was no explicit Christian proselytizing element to the operations at Kerem Avraham. Their refusal to allow London Jews’ Society missionaries onto the site, Finn revealed, left ‘some of the Missionaries of the London Society […] angered’. He recorded that ‘the perfect freedom and religious liberty of the workpeople were respected’, and that the labourers were allowed to down tools for Jewish prayer at the allotted time. ‘Now and then it happened that one or two who applied for admission and joined the others in the field had become Christians’, Finn admitted, but continued that these converts ‘were, like the others, eligible for employment as being Jews in distress’. It is unsurprising that some among the small number of converted Jews in Jerusalem wanted to work under Finn’s instruction in the farm; indeed, the site manager, named Aaron Hornstein, was a converted Jew.57 Yet what really mattered to Finn was not that they were converts to Evangelical Protestantism, but that they were Jews at work on the soil, alongside their unconverted brethren. The Finns’ considerations in this choice are clear. A missionary component at Kerem Avraham would have generated even greater conflict with traditional Jewish leaders; it may also have deterred Jews from seeking work on the farm. The Finns demonstrated a (somewhat rare) moment of self-reflection in recognizing that allowing proselytizing activity to take place on the farm ‘might have savoured of attempting to convert needy people by taking undue advantage of their distress’. But the decoupling of Jewish labour to ‘redeem’ Palestine’s land, from Jewish conversion to Christianity, also indicates a seed of recognition that the first objective could not be subordinated to the latter, given the low rates of conversion. What Sharif identifies as the late nineteenth-century move towards ‘scientific Zionism’, a settler colonization based on supposedly rational economic principles rather than theological enthusiasm, is discernible in the Finns’ choice to keep Kerem Avraham as an officially secular project.58 But just how viable and productive was Kerem Avraham? Ironically, given the Finns’ insistence that it was not charity but was intended to enable Jews’ economic independence, the project was dependent on Evangelical goodwill for the entirety of its existence. In Autumn 1854, English Evangelicals sent an iron oil press, and Finn asserted that ‘We pressed a small quantity of olives, and made some good wine’. Referencing his ambitious plans for Jewish agricultural settlement around Palestine, Finn also claimed that ‘Some fruit and vegetables were also grown; enough to prove the fertility of the soil, and the certainty that agricultural enterprise might be profitably carried on in Palestine’. Yet operations were not so ‘profitably carried on’ in Kerem Avraham itself, and writing to Evangelicals back in Britain, Finn tried to justify the evidently meagre fruits of his workers’ labour by stressing that the farm did not aim for ‘profitable farming which should return cash profit, but employing Jewish poor who come to us en masse for relief ’ (emphasis in original). While Finn claimed that sufficient interest was elicited by his fundraising efforts for Kerem Avraham that ‘An Association was formed in London to aid in giving

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agricultural employment to the Jews’, Victorians’ generosity did not last long after the initial crisis of the famine of 1854. ‘The good people in England’, Finn regretfully wrote, ‘did not know’ the true extent of the Jews’ plight, or understand ‘that the Jews of Jerusalem had no kind of employment by which they could earn daily bread’. So it was that the Finns ‘were under the painful necessity of reducing our numbers’, laying off a significant portion of Kerem Avraham’s workforce. Rhetorically turning this defeat of his vision into its vindication, Finn dramatically asserted that ‘some who had begun to benefit by the food and fresh air, soon sank down – in one case at the Synagogue door – and died of want’. The drying up of vital funds from Britain only months after operations began at Kerem Avraham seems to confirm Bar-Yosef ’s thesis that despite the widespread cultural notion in nineteenth-century Britain of the ‘return’ of the Jews to Palestine, active support for this aim was only marginal.59 Nevertheless, work on the site did not entirely cease. The Finns continued to employ Jewish workers ‘with whatever funds were from time to time entrusted to our care for the relief of Jewish distress by means of out-of-doors work’. This amount, Finn complained, was not enough to formulate ‘a plan for permanent and self-supporting institutions’; Elizabeth later lamented that work at Kerem Avraham was ‘kept up steadily, though on a very small scale, the funds from abroad being very small indeed’.60 But James took credit for the farm as instilling in Jews a more durable appetite for settler colonization: The idea of labouring in the open air for daily bread had taken root among the Jews of Jerusalem – the hope of cultivating the desolate soil of their own Promised Land was kindled. These objects were never again lost sight of: The Jews themselves took them up. […] The time has, perhaps, come for our efforts to be renewed in a more systematic manner for employment of Jews in the Holy Land.

Kerem Avraham did arouse the interest of a small number of Jews whose views and activities foreshadowed the more organized later Zionist movement. A Russianborn Jerusalem rabbi Hayim Zwi Sneersohn, who from the 1860s to the 1880s toured in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa raising support for Jewish settler colonialism in Palestine, wrote approvingly of the ‘so-called “Industrial Plantations for Jews”’ in 1863. This close friend of the Finns (he visited them in London after their return there) continued that Palestinian Rabbis were quick to recognize the activity of the British Consul. James Finn was indeed an English pioneer of the idea of colonization of Palestine and of Britain’s protection of Palestinian Jews. […] Though an ardent Christian, he won the sympathy of the most orthodox Jerusalem Rabbis, and their moral support for the colonization of Palestine.61

The model the Finns developed at Kerem Avraham  – small-scale, tied to the traditional Jewish community of Jerusalem, and firmly under the Finns’ paternal

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control – was somewhat at odds with the ‘self-help’ impetus of the First ‘Aliyah, beginning almost two decades after the Finns had left Palestine. But around the same time, Kerem Avraham was to experience a new lease of life which last for almost half a century.

­‘Ripe for Development’: The Syrian colonization fund and Kerem Avraham, 1882–1931 James Finn lived less than ten years after returning to Britain in mid-1863. Lask Abrahams notes that ‘Although he was no longer bodily in Palestine, his heart was in the Holy Land’. Until his death in 1872, Finn occupied his time with various schemes which remained on paper, including the installation of a water supply network for Jerusalem and plans for mineral and even petroleum extraction in Palestine.62 What happened at Kerem Avraham itself in these years is unclear, yet Elizabeth’s association with the ‘eight to twelve English acres’ outside Jerusalem was far from over, although she would never visit Palestine again.63 The impetus for eventually restarting the project was provided by the outbreak of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, sparked by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. Over the following years, to convinced Zionists, the Russian pogroms confirmed the prognosis that anti-Semitism was an eternal feature of non-Jewish societies, that Jews’ assimilation into and peaceful existence in these societies was impossible, and that the only viable option was Jewish emigration to a new exclusively or majority-Jewish homeland. As Sokolow wrote in his History of Zionism, ‘It was a terribly instructive lesson for those Jews who believed in the progress of humanity as a solution of the problem of the Jewish tragedy. They had a sudden and rude awakening’.64 It was not only such Jews who were so shocked but also, as Sokolow indicates, the Victorian public, who could follow the terrible events in Kiev, Odessa and Warsaw in the pages of the Times and Daily News: All the English newspapers dealt sympathetically with the position of the persecuted Jews, and gave full accounts of the atrocities. These articles caused an outburst of pity and sympathy throughout England. Several mass meetings were held and funds were started. Questions were addressed in both Houses to the Secretary and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

However, the words of Zionist chroniclers such as Sokolow, who presented emigration to Palestine as the heartfelt wish of all persecuted Jews, should be viewed sceptically. Between 1881 and 1914, during the First and Second ‘Aliyas (the Second ‘Aliya in the early twentieth century, like the first, was initiated by Russian pogroms), some 2.5  million Jews left Europe. A tiny proportion, only 60,000, emigrated to Palestine; of this number, most did so for reasons unrelated to the Zionist goal of a Jewish-colonized Palestine, and adopted the lifestyle of the Old Yishuv, while only around 8000 became agricultural settlers.65

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Far more Jews sought safety and opportunity elsewhere, particularly in the United States and in Britain, where a new life could be begun without survival staked on successfully farming the difficult and limited tracts of soil not already worked by the filaḥīn. This indicates the challenge facing pro-Zionist Victorians in the late nineteenth century: while Evangelicals’ hopes for Palestine were deeply ideological, the immediate crisis faced by many Jews was humanitarian in nature, demanding first and foremost a safe haven for thousands of refugees. Thus the more pragmatic charitable outfits (which also wished to divert Jews from settling permanently in Britain) formed in response to the refugee crisis, such as the Mansion House Committee, were more enthusiastic about sending Jews to the Americas where they could be simply absorbed by established European-style settler societies, than to Palestine where they would be confronted by a host of further challenges. Yet these considerations did not stop dedicated Evangelicals like Elizabeth Finn from seizing the moment to advocate for Jewish colonization in Palestine. Elizabeth Finn’s return to pulling the strings in Kerem Avraham should also be seen in the context of settler-colonial plans for Palestine appearing before the outbreak of Russian pogroms. As discussed in Chapter  2, with the late 1870s publication of Warren’s and Conder’s discussions on colonization, and with Oliphant’s journey to the Eastern Mediterranean in early 1879 as explored in Chapter 7, interest in Palestine’s colonization was growing in Victorian Britain in these years. The pogroms presented an opportunity for Finn to raise support for a preconceived plan. *** The Syrian Colonisation Fund (SCF), founded in early 1882, was the product of Elizabeth Finn’s collaboration with two like-minded individuals. The SCF’s first president was Lord Shaftesbury. He drafted the charity’s objects as ‘to give relief and employment to Jews especially in the Holy Land, till increase of funds shall give us the means to enable them to form themselves into colonies on their own responsibility’.66 For Shaftesbury’s convenience, the SCF’s first premises were located near the Houses of Parliament, allowing him to attend ‘amost [sic] every meeting of the Committee’.67 The ‘lady president’ of the SCF was Emily Anne Smythe (née Beaufort), Lady Strangford, widow of the aristocratic Orientalist Percy Smythe and an author of popular Orientalist texts in her own right, including an account of a journey to Palestine; she had been prominent in raising support in Britain for the Bulgarian insurrection against Ottoman rule in the late 1870s, another cause presented as a just and humanitarian one. Finn herself would serve throughout the SCF’s existence as its ‘honorary secretary’, a role which included most of the responsibility for its day-to-day operations, particularly after the deaths of Shaftesbury and Strangford in 1885 and 1887 respectively.68 Elizabeth Finn’s effective leadership of the SCF and the organization’s appointment of a woman president were products of social changes for women occurring within Finn’s lifetime. While ‘In the early nineteenth century it was

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virtually unheard of for a woman to make a public speech’, by the early twentieth century women ‘no longer blushed at the prospect of mounting a platform’.69 Women played a key role in Victorian philanthropy, with Finn one among many women in charge of charitable organizations by the end of the nineteenth century.70 As can be judged from press reports of the SCF’s activities, a large proportion of the attendees at SCF events, and those who organized fundraising drives for Jewish settlement in Palestine, were also women. The name of the SCF (also known throughout its existence as the Society for the Relief of Persecuted Jews and the Society for the Relief of Distressed Jews), indicates its ambiguous status between provider of sorely needed charitable aid to Jewish refugees, and ideologically driven sponsor of settler colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean. While its founders’ passions lay with the latter mission – why else would they wish to establish their own philanthropic project, when other bodies like the Mansion House Committee were already providing humanitarian aid to Jews? – from the start, the SCF tried to cover both bases. Hence, a July 1882 report in the Liverpool Mercury stated we gather that the precise object in view is the raising of a fund out of which to grant loans to settlers for the purchase of land, agricultural implements, and stock, these loans to be principally granted to refugees possessed of some personal capital; but it is also intended to give voluntary assistance to the poor members, with a possible chance of repayment in case of better times setting in.

The report warned that the ‘generous assistance’ offered by other charitable bodies and the public to Jewish refugees ‘might beget pauperism, and nip the principle of self-dependence. As a corrective, nothing could be better than colonisation’. Asserting that ‘the idea of Jewish colonisation in Syria’ was not only ‘idyllic and singularly appropriate’ but also practical, the Mercury threw itself behind the SCF’s mission ‘on financial rather than historical or even charitable grounds’.71 Elizabeth Finn used all the same justifications for the SCF as had been used at the time of the founding of Kerem Avraham. Writing to the JC in early 1886, for instance, she asserted that ‘my late husband and I tried the experiment of giving field-work in the fresh air to the emaciated, fever stricken Jews of Jerusalem’, with the result that ‘poor creatures who had not at first strength to walk the little distance, but fell by the wayside, soon became active and hearty labourers’. She also stressed the importance of non-Jewish guidance: for the Jews to be ‘raised out of the slough of despond in which we find them’, it was necessary for ‘some one’ to ‘teach them how to work’.72 Wealthy supporters rapidly flocked to the SCF, as seen in the registers of the SCF’s first general committee and its donors, published in September 1882. Among the fifty-four names on the committee were two earls, fourteen Anglican priests of varying seniority, seven military and naval officers, three sitting members of parliament, a former lord chancellor, a magistrate and six titled women. Several were notable pillars of the imperial establishment. Among the committee members were the Earl of Aberdeen, John Hamilton-Gordon, who would later be appointed

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Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and then Governor General of Canada; Henry BartleFrere, Governor of Bombay in the 1860s, and in 1882 recently recalled from his post as High Commissioner for Southern Africa, after his mismanagement led to the Anglo-Zulu War and First Boer War; John Henry Lefroy, who had served as Governor of Bermuda and Administrator of Tanzania in the 1870s and 1880s, and William Patrick Andrew who had been the director of Britain’s railway network in northern India, and was an ardent proponent of British construction of a railway along the Euphrates Valley to serve as an alternate route to India. One committee member familiar to Elizabeth from her years in Jerusalem was William Holman Hunt, who had attended the Finns’ soirées in the 1850s.73 This enthusiasm from the British ruling class for the SCF, and by extension for Jewish colonization in Palestine, rather challenges Bar-Yosef ’s argument that Christian Zionism was a fringe movement in the nineteenth century, ‘located […] beyond the cultural consensus’.74 Many more opened their wallets wide for the cause. Notable donors included the French aristocrat the Comtesse de Noailles who gave £500 (the equivalent of over £33,000 or almost $45,000 in current values), and – touchingly – one listed in the SCF’s published accounts as ‘H.E.P. Punjaub’, the Maharaja of the Sikh Empire Duleep Singh, exiled at the age of sixteen to Britain in 1854 after the defeat of the Sikhs by the East India Company, and converted as a child to Christianity by Evangelical missionaries. A few years after Singh made his donation of £20 to the SCF, he would re-embrace his ancestral faith Sikhism, recognizing his exploitation by the British who now occupied his homeland. Overall, by September 1882 the SCF had raised £5645 16 shillings, today over £370,000 or half a million dollars.75 Fundraising drives were organized; on the occasion of Shaftesbury’s (final) birthday in April 1885, a ‘Ladies’ Committee’ raised £730 for the SCF ‘to give employment at Jerusalem  – where some land near the city [i.e. Kerem Avraham] is at once available’ and ‘to help the Jewish families in Galilee who have asked our aid in forming a settlement there under favourable conditions’. The money thus collected included ‘a subscription in farthings and half-pence from nearly 200 children of the “One Tun Ragged School,” sent by them “for the poor Jews”’.76 Another method of fundraising practised by the SCF in the 1880s and 1890s was public meetings, at which Finn usually spoke on the conditions Jews faced in Jerusalem or the Russian Empire, before taking a collection from attendees; Finn raised almost £300 in several months.77 In March 1882, for instance, she lectured on ‘Jews and their Customs’, appropriately enough, in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey; Finn claimed to have been the first woman to deliver a speech inside the building.78 She was usually joined on the platform by other SCF supporters and local luminaries, especially clergymen who lectured on Biblical history. Throughout her late fifties and sixties, Finn attended meetings up and down Britain, most frequently in London, but also in towns and cities from Edinburgh, to Sunderland, to Oxford; in the latter city, SCF meetings were attended by the University’s leading Orientalists and theologians.79 Supporters were encouraged to form local SCF branches. At least one such branch was formed much further afield, as in October 1882 the South Australian Register reported

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that ‘the ladies of Adelaide – Jews and Christians – have resolved to co-operate in sisterly union to form a branch of the Syrian Colonization Fund’.80 Predictably it was Evangelical Christians, not Jews, from whom the organization drew most of its support. Even when placing an advertisement in the JC, the SCF specified that it sought funds from ‘the many Gentile readers of this paper’, rather than its Jewish audience.81 Jewish suffering was a humanitarian cause particularly close to Evangelicals’ hearts, and dovetailed, as Green notes, with the British Empire’s interference in Islamic lands on Jews’ behalf in an ‘imperialism of human rights’.82 Victorians dug deep into their pockets for Jewish refugees in the 1880s; as the JC reported, while all the SCF’s income ‘with one or two exceptions was subscribed by Christians’, it was also the case that ‘The Christian contributors to the Mansion House Fund have not been few’.83 But there were specific reasons why British Jews’ response to the SCF was underwhelming. Firstly, despite the denial of any missionary aspect to the SCF’s work, an air of conversionism hung over it. For instance, speaking for the SCF at Saint Leonard’s Church in Perth, Scotland (SCF meetings were frequently held in churches or church halls) in September 1884, the converted Jew Eliezer Bassin not only predicted that ‘Britain would ere long have the honor of conveying’ the Jews to Palestine, but combined this with the more eccentric doctrine of British Israelitism, asserting ‘that the British people were indeed his Brethren of the House of Ephraim’. Sometimes, only a thin line divided the lectures delivered at SCF meetings from overt anti-Semitism. Bassin, for instance, stated of the Russian pogroms that ‘while these persecutions could not be justified by any human reasoning, he could see the finger of God in it all, as the Jews were thus prevented from settling down amongst those Gentile nations at the risk of losing their identity’.84 Nor would any Jews in the audience (if there were any) at Saint Paul’s Church in Southsea, listening to the vicar W. H. Denovan who shared the platform with Finn in April 1890, have felt reassured by his words that ‘they must not think they were going to stop these persecutions, but only alleviate them. Not only would they continue, as he read the Word of God, but they would manifestly increase’.85 Finn and the SCF’s supporters were also not above weaponizing the antiSemitism sparked by increased levels of Jewish immigration into Britain, to engender support for their mission. In March 1887, covering a SCF public meeting in London, the Daily News reported that ‘The influx of distressed Jews into London is regarded with the greatest anxiety’ by the SCF.86 Similarly, the newspaper the Graphic, reporting on the SCF’s activities, stated in alarmist tones in June 1891 that Numbers [of Jews] come to England, and it is a matter of urgent importance that they should be enabled to depart quickly to new homes where there is room for them to earn their bread […] the Society [the SCF] is now appealing for funds to enable work and training in out-of-door employment to be given to refugees who might otherwise come to England to add to the congested state of the Eastend of London.

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‘During this last month of May’, the article noted with satisfaction, ‘above fifty [Jews] have been sent off ’ from Britain’s shores by the SCF.87 Most blunt of all was a letter from Finn which appeared a few days later in the Morning Post. Finn stated clearly ‘This society helps refugees to leave England in search of new homes’. She continued, ‘We ask for funds to extend the work and relieve, not only the Jews whose condition is desperate, but also the congestion and anxiety here in overcrowded London, by finding them wholesome work out of England’. Tellingly, Finn’s letter was printed together with an item of correspondence from a member of the racist organization the Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens, who complained of a ‘wholesale invasion’ of ‘London and the other great centres of population’ by Jews.88 Secondly, the Russian pogroms and Jewish refugee crisis had also spurred the formation of Jewish-led organizations supporting settler colonialism in Palestine, particularly the Hibbat Zion. It was only natural that most Jews desirous of establishing colonies in Palestine would give their support to these groups, rather than to the Christian-led SCF. Non-Jewish individuals such as Conder as discussed in Chapter  2, and Oliphant as discussed in Chapter  7, gained a level of authority among pro-Zionist Jews which Elizabeth Finn and the SCF never matched, because Conder and Oliphant worked closely with such groups, rather than attempting to spearhead their own rival projects. Wishing that Finn and other like-minded Christians would give their ‘sympathy and substantial assistance’ to existing Jewish-led organizations supporting settlers in Palestine, the JC in 1887 spikily dismissed the SCF by remarking ‘There are many cogent reasons why we should say in this connection, “Save us from our Friends”’.89 Finally, some Jews’ opposition to or uneasy feelings about Zionism should not be ignored, particularly in combination with the SCF’s approach which affirmed rather than combatted anti-Semitic prejudice. Understandably, some British Jews were alarmed at the energetic efforts to remove Jews from the country. This is illustrated in the intervention of one Jew who attended a SCF meeting (‘chiefly filled by ladies’) in London’s Grosvenor House in February 1891, the Anglo-Jewish financier Frederick David Mocatta. At the end of the meeting, when a vote was proposed on a resolution of it being ‘the duty of Christians to give practical aid to persecuted and suffering Jews, especially in the Holy Land’, Mocatta could not remain silent. The Daily News reported that while Mocatta voted in favour of the resolution (which, predictably, unanimously passed), he put it on record that ‘he did not encourage the movement of Jews to Palestine, but they would go though the country was not the best for colonization. He, however, found satisfaction in the fact that the movement was gradual’.90 Mocatta’s lukewarm support and expressions of concern reflect many British Jews’ fears that non-Jewish enthusiasm for the departure of Jews to Palestine ‘contained elements of blatant anti-semitism’ which the SCF consciously stoked, and instrumentalized Jews ‘to further British imperialist self-interest’.91 Hardly helping Jewish perceptions of the SCF was that its first foray into settler colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean was an unmitigated disaster. This story, already told elsewhere, is worth recounting briefly, as it set the scene for the

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re-emergence of Kerem Avraham at the centre of the SCF’s operations.92 The first site obtained by the SCF for a Jewish settlement was at the northern Syrian port of Latakia. This was obviously far outside Palestine’s boundaries, and was a choice determined by Ottoman restrictions placed on Jewish travel to the Holy Land in 1882, followed by a March 1883 law preventing Jews without Ottoman citizenship purchasing land there.93 Latakia was apparently open for business, but did not inspire the same enthusiasm from pro-Zionist Jews. Francis D. Mott, the SCF’s co-honorary secretary alongside Finn, attempted to deflect any criticism along these lines in a letter to the press in October 1882, in which he advocated ‘the one divinely-appointed solution’ to the persecution of the Jews in Eastern Europe, ‘namely, the re-settlement of the Jews in the one and only land which is theirs by God’s promise to their forefathers’. This ‘land’, Mott continued with Biblical quotations and archetypal proto-Zionist language, was a country, about the size of France, of unparalleled natural fertility, extending from ‘the entering in of Hamath’ [the Syrian city of Hamāa] on the north, and from ‘the River of Egypt’ on the south, eastwards as far as the River Euphrates, and including the vast tract of cultivatable land now indeed styled by the geographers the Arabian ‘Desert,’ but which can only be so called only in the sense of being ‘deserted’ by its proper inhabitants, comprising as it does an immense area of some of the most fertile prairie land on earth.94

This was a maximalist interpretation of the ‘Promised Land’, potentially including large parts of modern Egypt, Syria and Iraq, as well as nearly all of Palestine/Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. By sponsoring Jewish settlement at any location within this huge region, such as Latakia, the SCF could claim its activities remained in fulfilment of the ‘divinely-appointed solution’ for the Jews. Yet events were not to proceed so smoothly. The episode began in late August 1882 at Finn’s home, the Elms, in West London’s upscale Brook Green. Representatives of forty-five Jewish families  – unified, according to the JC, in refusing the Mansion House Fund’s assistance for emigrating to America  – who were the Latakia colony’s pioneers, gathered to receive a scroll of Jewish law, purchased for them by Shaftesbury, symbolizing the SCF’s formal assurance that there would be no Christian proselytizing at the colony.95 Proclaiming that ‘This is the first time in the history of the Jewish people that any of them have been restored to the Land of Promise by exclusively Gentile agency’, the Standard reported a few days later that on 28  August, around 100 of the would-be settlers began their journey to Latakia on a train from London Bridge. Finn was at the station to see them off, ‘giving words of encouragement in their own language to the women and men, and dispensing little presents to the children’.96 In August 1883, however, the JC’s Jerusalem correspondent reported that ‘The colony of Latakia, which was founded by an English Christian society, exists no more’. Citing ‘envy and hatred’ between the settlers, ‘intellectual solitude’ and ‘the want of schools’ for the children, and ‘fever and opthalmia’ (sic) as contributing

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to the settlement’s collapse in under a year, the correspondent also reported that the Latakia settlers whom he encountered ‘felt a secret pang as to the real intentions of their English friends’, believing that sooner or later they ‘would have fallen a prey to the Mission’ and been made to convert. Reporting that some of the colonists had accepted the SCF’s offer to be relocated to British-occupied Cyprus (apparently ‘they had no choice in the matter, their families having been sent there from London’), others had ‘given up the idea altogether’, and returned to Britain or Russia. Implicitly criticizing the SCF’s decision to send Jews so far from Palestine, the strongly pro-Zionist JC stated that ‘the fate of the Latakia enterprise […] could not be otherwise, for colonization without a real aim has no raison d’être among us’.97 The JC’s point was implicit but clear: only settlement in Palestine was worth pursuing. The colony at Cyprus, in the island’s mountainous southwest, fared little better. There soon began an acrimonious exchange in the JC between the newspaper’s editors and disgruntled settlers on the one hand, and Finn on the other. As early as September 1883, the JC claimed that the new site in Cyprus was ‘as unfitted for the purposes of colonization as were their original quarters in the neighbourhood of Latakia’, and argued that ‘It would be far preferable even to repatriate these poor people [to Russia] than to allow them to continue to suffer as they have done since they left their native country’.98 In her correspondence to the JC – the feeling that these letters were frantically written as a damage limitation exercise is palpable – Finn asserted that the new colony site was ‘good and in a most healthy situation in the hills’, and that the SCF was ‘providing funds for the settlement of the colonists, for cultivation, sinking of wells and building of dwellings’, as well as ‘clothing, food, lodging and medical attendance’.99 She also attempted to shift the blame for the colony’s evident failings from the SCF onto the settlers themselves, once the hopes of the SCF’s whole endeavour and supposedly hand-picked by its committee. Finn claimed that much of their time had been spent in ‘Jewish fasts and festivals’ rather than more agriculturally productive pursuits, and asserted that while some were’ honest and industrious’, they were also, ‘owing to former distresses, and present lack of skill, […] but “feeble folk”’.100 Alternately the settlers’ spokesman Joseph Massel, later a Zionist activist and attendee at the first and second Zionist congresses in 1897 and 1898, stated that the site was ‘overgrown with thorns and bushes that have been there for several centuries’, and was ‘wholly devoid of water, which we could not find after digging 18 yards deep’. Massel bitterly accused the ‘honourable society’ of the SCF, and Finn in particular, of ignoring and suppressing the complaints of the settlers. ‘Such, then’, he wrote acridly, ‘is the action of a society, that was established on the grounds of charity and of loving kindness’.101 In May 1884, Massel claimed that the SCF’s agent at the colony had abandoned his office ‘from cowardice or malice’, leaving the settlers ‘in the agonies of hunger’.102 Finally, in August 1884, the JC reported that ‘a summary conclusion has been put to the peregrinations and sufferings of the Russian Jews sent out to Cyprus by the Syrian Colonisation Fund’, with the return of the ex-colonists to Russia. With an eye on the incipient Zionist colonies in Palestine, the JC nevertheless carefully added, ‘the failure of

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the expedition cannot be regarded as any proof of the inability of Jews to lead an agricultural life’.103 With the abject failure of the Latakia-Cyprus venture, it was to Palestine, and Kerem Avraham in particular, that the SCF’s activities also now shifted. *** Kerem Avraham possessed clear advantages over any other potential site in the Eastern Mediterranean. Firstly, unlike the clearly unsuitable land the SCF had managed to obtain in Latakia and Cyprus, the Finns’ Jewish protégés in the 1850s and 1860s had already demonstrated the possibility of coaxing at least some produce from its soil. The land had already been cleared, the infrastructure of walls and a farmhouse built, meaning that minimum time and outlay would be required before agricultural work could begin again. Secondly, there was obvious appeal in the land’s location. Ottoman restrictions on Jewish land ownership and colonization in Palestine were circumvented by the fact that Kerem Avraham had probably remained in British or missionary hands, possibly the Finns’ own, since the Finns’ departure from Palestine. The location within the Holy Land, on the outskirts of Jerusalem no less, could also prove a major draw for pro-Zionist Jews, and for the Victorian Evangelicals who remained the SCF’s main donors. Finally, there would be no need for the time, money and effort expended in shipping large numbers of would-be colonists out from Britain. Despite the Finns’ best efforts in the 1850s, there were still Jews in Jerusalem living in ‘mere and sheer mendicancy’ who could be recruited for Kerem Abraham; despite Ottoman restrictions, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their numbers were swelled by new Jewish immigrants, more potential ‘labourers in the field of Abraham’. By early 1887, ten Jews were once again at work on Kerem Avraham. Addressing a public meeting in Pimlico, London, Finn gave a somewhat sinister appraisal of the ‘industrious, temperate, frugal, and thrifty’ Jewish workers on the site: They were willing, she said, to work any number of hours, even 18 or 20 at a stretch, if there was a task to be finished. They wasted nothing in drink [alcohol], and could exist on a slice of bread and a little tea, besides which they would accept a mere pittance as wages.104

As a result of insufficient funding – ‘We could take on hundreds more of the starving Jews if funds are provided to extend the various industries’, Finn wrote pointedly to the press in 1896  – work at Kerem Avraham remained on a modest scale.105 Reports indicate from fifty to the low seventies of daily workers in the 1890s and early 1900s, although Finn herself claimed that the number had occasionally ‘risen to as high a figure as 200’.106 As before, the Jewish labourers were left unbothered by missionaries. Herman Shandel, a Jewish minister in Ramsgate, southern England, and close associate of Moses Montefiore during the latter’s last years, wrote after visiting Palestine in 1913 to inform the JC that while Kerem Avraham was ‘not

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precisely a Jewish Institution’, the Jewish workers were given ‘every encouragement to observe their religious rites and customs, even to the reading of the afternoon prayers with Minyan [the quorum of ten Jews required for prayer] every day’ by the site’s British manager, a Mr. Dunn.107 Workers were employed in growing cereals, olive oil soapmaking, and stonecutting.108 Several water cisterns (paid for by SCF donors in Tunbridge Wells, Halifax and Birmingham) were also constructed by the labourers on the site. According to Finn’s stated intentions, ‘Her plan had always been to draft off workers from Abraham’s Vineyard to become farmers and cultivators of various parcels of land’, a finishing school for further colonial ventures, as James and Elizabeth Finn had once envisaged; this never came about, as ‘funds have never been sufficient’.109 Payroll practices at Kerem Avraham during the site’s reincarnation under the SCF differed from its early days. While in 1854 all workers, including local Arabs, had been paid at the same rate, a 1903 feature entitled ‘The Returning Hebrews’ on Kerem Avraham and Zionist settlements in an Evangelical magazine revealed that ‘The least skilled employés are paid, according to the ordinary rate of wages of the country, one shilling a day’, but ‘Skilled workers are paid, of course, at a higher rate’.110 These ‘least skilled employés’ likely included Jews from Yemen, who began settling around Jerusalem in increasing numbers in the late nineteenth century, and other new immigrants to Palestine. The Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy, who visited Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, noted ‘Circassian, Persian, Yemenite and other Jews employed’ at Kerem Avraham, while the American Zionist leader Henrietta Szold credited Elizabeth Finn as ‘the first to find work for the quick fingers of the Yemenites’.111 Kerem Avraham thus prefigured the exploitation of Yemenite and other Mizrahi Jews as cheap labour in Zionist enterprises, beginning a process which would eventually render indigenous Palestinian labour obsolete to the Zionist movement during the British Mandate period, continuing during the early years of the State of Israel until the occupations of 1967 made available a large captive workforce of Palestinians.112 Simultaneously with these operations at Kerem Avraham, the SCF was forced by the scale of the continuing Jewish refugee crisis to provide humanitarian assistance to far greater numbers of impoverished Jews arriving in Palestine than could be employed on the small farm. Robert Scott Moncrieff, commissioned by the SCF to travel to Palestine in 1891–2, reported a dire situation. In January 1892, amid snowstorms in Jerusalem, an overwhelmed Scott Moncrieff wrote despairingly that ‘I have found depths beneath depths of misery among the poor Jews here’113 With the SCF sending £150 per week, his time was occupied in distributing food and fuel to starving Jews; he even established a soup kitchen in Jaffa to cater for the hunger of newly arriving immigrants.114 Scott Moncrieff also found time to tour early Zionist settlements around Palestine, and report on these to the SCF. While noting the difficult conditions also existing among some settlers, he waxed lyrical on the ‘nice two-storied houses, each with well-stocked garden and vineyard’ of the colonies supported by Baron Edmund de Rothschild; with their imported European order and domesticity,

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these were what Evangelical enthusiasts for colonization had long envisaged.115 Finn seized upon his reports to beseech for further donations for Kerem Avraham, claiming that ‘the only home of maintenance for destitute Jews lies in agricultural settlements; […] there is land to be had in many suitable localities, and that no time should be lost in taking the necessary steps as fast as the funds available permit’.116 Upon his return to Britain, Scott Moncrieff lectured on the Zionist colonies at the SCF’s public meetings. Asked at a meeting in Edinburgh’s Royal Hotel in January 1893 ‘what room, field, and encouragement there was’ for the settlers, blithely ignoring the presence of Palestine’s indigenous population and their agriculture, he replied ­ e whole country was a field for them [i.e. Jewish settlers], and there was Th room for them in every village, while there was no finer land in the world than Palestine in proper hands, and the Jews were perfectly capable of getting on as agriculturists. He did not see, however, how, without capital, the Jew settler could find a good opportunity of settling in Palestine.117

As the years drew on, however, capital became an increasing problem for the SCF, as did its total reliance on Elizabeth Finn. In late 1904, the SCF’s treasurer and president informed the press that ‘The lengthy and severe illness of the secretary, Mrs. Finn, has caused the affairs of this society to be almost at a standstill for the last three months’, and that ‘the strain on the funds of the society has been so great that it has been found necessary to suspend all work at Abraham’s Vineyard’.118 Finn recovered and work continued at Kerem Avraham, although the site was buffeted by the winds of economic precarity and difficult conditions for agriculture; Shandel noted that work in its soap factory had ceased during his visit due to ‘the bad crop of olives’, which had also thrown ‘many Jewish workers out of employment’.119 The First World War years were not kind to Kerem Avraham. Like all institutions in Palestine connected with Britain and the nations at war with the Ottomans, the farm was closed until work could start again under Britain’s occupation. In the intervening years, Jerusalem’s Ottoman defenders had apparently ridden roughshod over the site. In late 1920, only weeks before Finn’s death at the age of ninety-five, a small advertisement appeared in the Times, making an ‘urgent appeal for funds’. While ‘a few poor Jews’ were again employed at Kerem Avraham, the appeal noted that the most urgent task was ‘to repair SOME of the damage done by the Germans and the Turks who cut down and BURNT 78 of our olive and fruit trees. They wrecked our house there, BURNING furniture, doors, and windows’.120 Whatever setbacks the project faced, Elizabeth Finn until the end of her life in 1921 retained a passion for settler colonization in Palestine; ‘that the Holy Land will again be peopled by its lawful owners, the Hebrew nation’, she asserted in her memoir, ‘and will again “blossom as the rose,” when Israel fulfils the Divine conditions, we fully believe and expect’.121 Kerem Avraham did not long survive after its guiding light was extinguished. The last stock of its famous olive oil soap, ‘made from the original formulæ dating

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from Biblical times’, was sold off at a 1924 Christmas bazaar in Exeter, southwest England.122 With the barriers to Jewish immigration and Zionist colonization now removed by British rule, the small farm was rapidly superseded by the new settlements, which evinced a very different vision of Palestine’s future. Moreover, as Jerusalem’s population was swollen by Jewish immigration and indigenous Palestinian population growth, the farmland now represented valuable real estate. In 1931, the site was finally put up for sale. While the advertisements (which still identified the land by its Arabic name, ‘Ker’m el Khaleel’) noted the site’s ‘about three hundred Trees, Olives, Fruit-bearing and others’, they pitched the property as ‘ripe for development and the building of houses and shops for which there is a demand’.123 After its purchase by developers based in Jerusalem and India, the farm of Kerem Avraham duly disappeared under an urban neighbourhood bearing its name, home to some of the European Jewish immigrants whose numbers soared in the Mandate era.124 The prominent Israeli novelist Amos Oz, born in 1939 and among the first generation to grow up in the neighbourhood, recorded how ‘huddled little houses were built among the plantations and orchards of the farm and progressively ate into them’. The farmhouse itself was preserved, and used by the British as a young offenders’ institute, army headquarters, and jail for Italian prisoners during the Second World War. After 1948, shortly across the Israeli side of the Green Line dividing Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem from Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem, the farmhouse was occupied by a succession of Israeli state forces and a paramilitary youth group. Finally, and ironically given the Finns’ long campaign against aspects of traditional Jewish religion, the building has become an UltraOrthodox girls’ school. Oz evocatively described how ‘the old house has shrunk over the years, as though its head has been pushed down into its shoulders with an axe-blow. It has been Judaized. The trees and the shrubs have been dug up, and the whole area of the garden has been asphalted over’.125 Symbolizing a final victory of the Jewish religious establishment over the Finns’ project, the New Testament verse which James Finn had engraved over the building’s entrance has been replaced by a quotation from the Torah; there is, nonetheless, a small display on the Finns inside the building. There is no other public memorialization of the Finns in today’s State of Israel, although the Israeli government acknowledged a debt to them by sending a representative to the funeral of their daughter Constance in 1950, born in Jerusalem almost a century earlier.126 *** The story of the Finns, the SCF and Kerem Avraham, spanning eight decades from James and Elizabeth Finn’s arrival in Jerusalem until the disappearance of their project under bricks and mortar, illustrates key continuities and fractures between the Christian Zionism of Victorian Evangelicals and the practices of later Jewish settlers. Much about the operations at Kerem Avraham would have been anathema to the ideological militants of the Second ‘Aliya, particularly its dependence on

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non-Jewish benevolence and charity, and the tight control always exerted over it by James and, particularly, Elizabeth Finn. As shown by the experiences of the SCF’s unfortunate early colonists in Latakia and Cyprus, Elizabeth never granted Jews any significant agency in what she treated as her pet colonization projects. This was far from ‘real Jewish self-help’ as Sokolow described Zionism, although that was what Kerem Avraham purported to offer. But in many other ways, the small farm outside Jerusalem was a model for later settler colonization. It was an intervention in Jerusalem’s Jewish community which encouraged their engagement in agriculture, physically, mentally and spiritually transforming Jews into hearty farmers who, it was hoped, could spread this activity around Palestine. Simultaneously, this took land out of Arab Palestinian ownership and cultivation, and stamped it with a Jewish character, including erasing its Arabic toponyms and replacing them with Hebrew equivalents. This is precisely what the Zionist movement, and the Israeli state, have attempted since their establishment. It is thus unsurprising that the early Zionist movement indeed took an interest in the farm; when the Russian Zionist Noah Sokolovsky arrived in Palestine in 1913 to produce a film, The Life of the Jews in Palestine, which would be shown at the eleventh Zionist congress, he made sure to turn his camera on Kerem Avraham.127 This book returns to the Victorians’ colonization plans for Palestine in Chapter  7, with an investigation of Laurence Oliphant’s more ambitious and influential schemes. Before then, however, the work considers in closer detail the relations between Victorian travellers and Palestine’s indigenous people.

­Chapter 5 ‘D OW N W I T H T H E B E L L ! ’ : T H E NA B LU S U P R I SI N G O F 1 8 5 6

While Victorian voyagers take centre stage for most of this book, the next two chapters explore how Palestine’s indigenous population reacted to these outsiders. Palestinians were far from passive or uncomprehending bystanders as Western visitors’ colonial ambitions became clear. With the limited means available to them, they tried to assert their agency, whether by resisting or accommodating the foreign visitors in their homeland. The following narratives of indigenous society are largely reconstructed from travellers’ writings, newspaper reports and other Western sources. This raises two interrelated ethical-methodological questions. Firstly, given travellers’ propensity to exaggerate, misinterpret and misrepresent, and above all their Orientalist ideology placing white Westerners above all they surveyed, can their accounts be trusted to contain more than a grain of truth? This quandary has been answered, if not resolved, by a careful cross-referencing of different texts. It is at least possible to establish a basic narrative of the Nablus uprising of 1856, explored in this chapter, and of the life of Ya‘qub al-Shalabi recounted in the next. Both chapters are enriched by recent decades’ research on the social history of late Ottoman Palestine, providing a picture of much greater complexity than the one-dimensional portrait of most Victorian texts. Secondly, can it be expected that an authentic account of indigenous Palestinian society can be drawn from Orientalist accounts, even with an awareness of their inherent prejudices and unreliability? It would be an error to imagine that, to reference Spivak, the nineteenth-century Palestinian subaltern can ever speak through the Western text.1 As Said notes, paraphrasing Marx, Orientalism rests on the belief that non-European peoples ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’.2 Even when the occasional indigenous Palestinian voice appeared in the West, through a letter to the press or a published memoir, that voice was translated, edited and filtered through Victorian sensibilities so it did not disrupt prevailing hegemonic discourses. These chapters nevertheless seek an insight into Palestinians’ interactions with travellers in the contact zone, and to understand why they behaved as they did.3 Simultaneously, by reading the source material as Stoler has it ‘along the archival grain’, a clear sense can be gained of how Victorian travellers already began conceiving of Palestinians as

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colonial subjects, as well as themselves becoming subject to ‘dreams of comforting futures and forebodings of future failures’ in their thinking about Palestine.4 While al-Shalabi’s journeys take us much further afield in Chapter 6, both these chapters centre on the city of Nablus. Situated thirty miles north of Jerusalem, Nablus was one of Palestine’s largest cities with around 20,000 inhabitants in the mid-nineteenth century.5 It was also, as Doumani has noted, ‘Palestine’s principal trade and manufacturing centre’. With a high degree of autonomy from Ottoman control for much of the period, Nablus was fought over by powerful clans, and the city developed its own complex local identity.6 These social dynamics have usually been considered in isolation from the explosion of Western travel to Palestine; Yazbak, for instance, has asserted that Western presence in Palestine was ‘hardly felt before the end of Ottoman rule’, and that ‘prominent figures, let alone the broader strata of the town’s inhabitants, rarely met Europeans’.7 These chapters challenge such claims. This chapter first considers Victorian travellers’ relationship with Nablus, before moving on to the dramatic events of 4  April 1856, triggered by an action of one of those travellers with tragic consequences.

‘The Very Furnace of Mahometan Bigotry’: The Victorians in Nablus Nablus was a significant stop for travellers in Palestine, for several reasons. Firstly, it lay on the main road between Jerusalem and the north, including Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, essential attractions for any Victorian traveller. Edward Robinson and Eli Smith took such a route, leaving Jerusalem at 6:45 on the morning of 13 June 1838, travelling on horseback via the villages of al-Bīra, Jifna, ‘Aīn Sīnyā, Jiljīlyyā, Sinjil, Turmus‘ayyā and al-Lubban, names still immediately recognizable to Palestinians of the central West Bank, until they arrived at Nablus at 1:30 on the afternoon of the following day.8 Secondly, the city – frequently referred to by Evangelicals by its ancient Hebrew name Shechem – itself possessed ample Biblical attractions. Shortly east of Nablus were sites associated with two Israelite patriarchs, Jacob’s Well (also the backdrop to a New Testament story of Christ) and Joseph’s Tomb. Robinson claimed that ‘we may thus rest with confidence in the opinion’ that both were genuine Biblical locations; considering the controversy around many other New Testament sites, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley noted of Jacob’s Well that ‘Of all the special localities of our Lord’s life in Palestine, this is almost the only one absolutely undisputed’.9 There could be little doubt either about the two mountains which flanked Nablus, Jabal Jirzim (Mount Gerizim) to the south and Jabal ‘Aybāl (Mount Ebal) to the north, which also had their Biblical appearance in the Book of Deuteronomy. George Grove dryly quipped that ‘Not even Dr. Robinson doubts the tradition which identifies the two long, rough, lofty, ridgy hills, that rise so steeply on either side of the valley, with Ebal and Gerizim’.10 A third major draw was Nablus’s small Samaritan population, whom travellers viewed more as a surviving fragment of Biblical archaeology rather than a living part of society. Victorian travellers’ relationship with the Samaritans is fully discussed

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in Chapter  6. Here it is enough to note, as Claude Reignier Conder exclaimed, that many travellers considered ‘Shechem and […] the Samaritan survivors living there’ were ‘perhaps the most interesting city and the most interesting people in Palestine’.11 Two main tropes about Nablus were frequently repeated by travellers, illustrating the extent to which many of the Holy Land travelogue genre’s literary productions were deeply intertextual, strongly conditioned by preceding travellers’ accounts and virtually reproduced in later works. The first trope was that the rural surroundings of Nablus were, by comparison to elsewhere in Palestine, highly attractive because of a supposedly superior fertility. Mary Eliza Rogers hardly exaggerated when she commented that ‘all travellers […] speak in glowing terms of the peculiar loveliness of this valley’ in which Nablus lay.12 Robinson, for instance, exclaimed that ‘a scene of luxuriant and almost unparalleled verdure burst upon our view’ as his expedition entered the area. Nablus’s ‘gardens of vegetables and orchards of all kinds of fruits, watered by several fountains’, Robinson continued, was ‘like a scene of fairy enchantment’, with which there was ‘nothing to compare […] in all Palestine’.13 Stanley stated that the Nablus valley was ‘the most beautiful, perhaps it might be said the only very beautiful spot in central Palestine’.14 Grove similarly wrote that Nablus ‘is usually the first place [the traveller] reaches which has any natural charm or beauty about it […] the springs and brooks of the valley of Nábloos, its green trees and vegetation, soft moist atmosphere and twittering birds, are naturally very pleasant and refreshing’.15 Laurence Oliphant gushed that ‘nothing can exceed in picturesqueness the situation of this place and the beauty of its surroundings, especially when the almond and peach trees are in bloom in the valley’.16 Underlying these panegyrics was the anticipation that the area’s agricultural fertility would bring economic benefits in a (settler-)colonized future. Victorian visitors began to envisage how the natural resources of Nablus could be exploited. John Mills, a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist missionary who spent several months in Nablus in 1855, noted the ‘gardens and orchards, luxuriant with vegetation’ around the city like other travellers. However, he also complained that the area was ‘destitute […] of all traces of science, art, and taste’. ‘Compared’, Mills argued, ‘with Palestine in general, the valley of Nablus is a beautiful garden; but with similar localities in our own country it will not bear a moment’s comparison’. Mills explained the role that European colonization – perhaps a colony of Welsh settlers, as he had outlined several years earlier – might play in Nablus: ‘with European industry, and art, and taste, I do believe that it could be made one of the most charming spots upon the face of the globe’.17 More explicitly a quarter-century later, after passing through Nablus during the Survey of Western Palestine, Conder proposed that, with its location among ‘cool healthy mountains, in the centre of the land, close to the most fertile plains and the finest olive-gardens and vineyards’, Nablus would ‘prove in all probability the true capital of Palestine’ under a British occupation.18 Inside the city, many travellers were not blind to the vibrancy of its local economy, which attracted global capital in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘Among

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the low Oriental domes and the tall palms which here and there wave over the courtyards of Nablous’, noted Henry Baker Tristram in 1865, ‘rises a large modern structure of yesterday – neither more nor less than a cotton-mill!’ Noting that the expansion in cotton production was a result of the disruption caused to American exports by the Civil War, Tristram described how ‘The busy hum of the cotton-gins greeted us on all sides, and heaps of cotton-husks lay about the streets’. In Biblical Orientalist fashion, the parson-naturalist felt uncomfortable when confronted with industrial modernity in the Holy Land, writing that ‘the cotton-factory in Shechem was as grotesque in appearance as in idea’; yet he also wrote approvingly that Nablus was ‘one of the few towns where the Moslems seem not indifferent to trade’.19 Oliphant similarly claimed that ‘for a Moslem city, it may be considered an enterprising and go-ahead place’.20 However, these observations were overshadowed by a second, more negative trope about Nablus: that the city’s Muslim majority exemplified the fanatical and potentially violent tendencies which the Orientalist worldview attributed to Islam.21 Schölch aptly notes that ‘whoever arrived in Nablus with a European guidebook in hand would feel a shiver run down his spine’.22 In colourful language, Alexander Kinglake averred that ‘Nablus is the very furnace of Mahometan bigotry’. Claiming that only the Egyptian occupation had made its streets safe for Europeans, Kinglake still asserted that when he passed through Nablus, ‘every man suspended his employment, and gazed on me with a fixed, glassy look, which seemed to say, “God is good, but how marvellous and inscrutable are His ways that thus he permits this white-faced dog of a Christian to hunt through the paths of the faithful”’.23 Claiming that ‘If an Englishman wants to know something of a sphere of human life about as diametrically opposite to his own as can be imagined’ then Nablus could not be beaten, Grove also cautioned that ‘it is but fair to warn him that there is no place where he will be more soundly cursed as he works his way through the bazaar, or stands a better chance of being mobbed and illtreated’.24 Mills identified Nablus’s Muslims as ‘the most fanatic and wicked of all the Mussulmans of Palestine’, and recounted that when he attempted to enter Nablus’s Great Mosque, he ‘was soon surrounded by a clamorous and insolent rabble, who were ready to teach better manners to the Christian dog’.25 He concluded that ‘Nablus is not the safest place for a Frank to remain in’.26 Tristram, too, noted that ‘bigotry and fanaticism are considered to be more strongly marked in the inhabitants of this district than in any other’, adding that ‘many travellers have complained of the insults, and even violence’ they claimed to have experienced in Nablus.27 Travellers’ attitudes filtered into many of the press reports of the 1856 uprising discussed below; the Istanbul correspondent of the Times described Nablus’s population as ‘among the most savage and fanatical of Asia’.28 Nevertheless, the generally high level of safety and security for Western travellers in Palestine deserves to be noted here. While rare incidents of hostility from the local people were amplified to magnify travellers’ exploits and cast Palestine as part of a barbarous Orient, these were the exception. Most travellers’ reports contain little sense of threat and, like Robinson’s, are full of anecdotes of friendliness and

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assistance given by Palestinians. As James Finn noted of conditions in Palestine in 1858, a period of significant unrest across the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘English travellers, including ladies, are journeying as usual without apprehension, and some Englishmen have just related to me how friendly the peasantry were to them when they lost their road recently by dark night’.29 James’s wife Elizabeth similarly recounted that ‘for English people, life was safer than in England’; after a character in her novel went for uneventful solitary rambles outside Jerusalem, she asked ‘Is this the wild and dangerous country which I have heard described as Palestine? Surely in England we should scarcely be unmolested thus’.30 Some travellers expressed disappointment that Palestine was not as dangerous as they had been led to imagine. Alexander Boddy confessed his disappointment that his desire to be kidnapped by ‘Arab thieves’ as ‘it would at least be interesting’, remained unfulfilled.31 Despite its reputation, Nablus was no different, and few travellers could relate actual experiences any more unpleasant than attracting some quizzical glances. Despite his evident propensity to invite himself onto Palestinians’ private property, Tristram recounted that, beyond the harmless muttered curses on “the dogs,” a few innocuous scowls, and the boys occasionally spitting on our boots as we rode through the streets, we were never molested during three visits which we paid to Nablous. I have wandered alone, and sometimes unarmed, over the hills and through the groves, and trespassed in many a garden round Nablous, as I should not have ventured to do in some other places of better repute.32

Robinson noted that while the villagers of the Nablus region appeared sullen – Robinson attributed this to the presence of his armed Egyptian escort, warily viewed by the peasants after they ‘had felt the stern vengeance of the Egyptian government, after the rebellion of A.D. 1834’ – he did not encounter this attitude within the city itself.33 When Robinson’s local guide, a Samaritan, failed to locate Jacob’s Well and Joseph’s Tomb, a Muslim passer-by helpfully conducted them to the sites.34 After her later visit to Nablus, Isabel Burton reported that its residents were ‘extremely civil. They were not fanatical, but showed us everything with much pleasure, and stood up and saluted us as we passed’.35 The story told in this chapter was a very rare occurrence of danger to a traveller’s life, instigated only after a fatal encounter and which would leave several more Palestinians – not foreign travellers – dead. It should be asked why Victorian travellers viewed Nablus as such a ‘furnace of Mahometan bigotry’, potential violence and danger to Westerners, if there was little actual evidence for this. Travellers’ comprehension of contemporary Palestine through the lens of the Biblical past was partly to blame, as they attempted to ascribe Nabulsis’ claimed behaviours to the nature of their forebears of prior millennia. For instance, Mills argued that Nablus’s ‘inhabitants have always been domineering and insulting, from the time of the Ephraimites, through the Samaritan period, down to the present Mussulman bigots’.36 Finn concurred,

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writing that the exploits of the ‘brutish people’ of Nablus made the Bible’s ‘book of Judges […] read like a record of modern occurrences thereabouts’.37 Mostly, the discourse on the people of Nablus reflected the era’s predominant attitudes towards Islam. Unlike most other large towns and cities which Western travellers passed through in Palestine  – Jaffa and ‘Akka with their Levantine atmosphere, Bethlehem and Nazareth with large Christian communities and missionary institutions, and Jerusalem with its religiously mixed population and cosmopolitan visitors  – Nablus had a large Muslim majority, with only small Christian and Samaritan communities.38 A visit to the city therefore provided travellers with an excuse to make Orientalist assessments of Islam in general. Given Nablus’s politically independent spirit, beneath assertions of the ill nature of its residents can also be discerned an awareness of the challenges governing such a city might pose to a Western colonial power. This subtext runs through narrations of the 1856 uprising, as now shown.

‘A Curious and Not Very Credible Statement’: Travellers narrate the uprising On Friday 4 April 1856, an English missionary named Samuel Lyde shot a man dead outside Nablus. An Anglican clergyman in his early thirties and a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Lyde had complained that ‘ill-health prevented him from exercising the duties of his profession in England, at least during the winter months’. After visiting the Eastern Mediterranean in the winter of 1850–1, Lyde decided to settle permanently in Latakia, doing missionary work among the area’s Alawite population though ‘unconnected to any missionary society’, and authoring Orientalist texts on the ethno-religious community.39 After journeying to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter with his fellow European Protestants, Lyde was travelling back northwards, when the fatal incident occurred outside Nablus’s northern gate. The victim, according to the British newspaper reports which began to appear several weeks later, was a local Muslim man, ‘Yasma, son of El-Abd’, a disabled but well-known Nablus resident.40 While Lyde maintained that the shooting had been accidental, rage rapidly erupted. A day of violence and destruction ensued, directed not against Lyde who was quickly sheltered by the city’s governor, but against Nablus’s small Christian community. By nightfall, according to reports, several indigenous Christians had been killed and more injured, their churches ransacked and their homes looted. The house of the governor, a member of the powerful ‘Abd al-Hādi clan, was briefly besieged after Lyde took refuge there. Although the uprising lasted only one day, the aftermath dragged on in the Jerusalem and Beirut courts for months, and haunted the memories of those British figures who found themselves involved. While much more contained than other outbursts of violence in the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the anti-conscription riots in Aleppo in 1850 and the violence in Damascus in 1860 in which 3,000 local Christians may have been killed, the uprising in Nablus held significance for the Western encounter with

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Palestine in the Victorian era.41 In addition to the violence against their Christian neighbours, Muslims targeted symbols of Western presence in Nablus – European flags, the Protestant missionary school and the houses of local agents of European consuls. Behind the immediate fury at Yasma’s death lay an incipient awareness of the West’s ambition for sweeping interference in Palestine, with missionary and consular activities representing the tip of an iceberg. As discussed below, this interference was authorized by the Ottoman Empire itself, with the announcement by Sultan ‘Abdül Mecīd I of the Ḥaṭ-ı Hümāyūnu or Imperial Reform Edict weeks before the uprising, dictated by the Ottomans’ nominal European allies. The uprising thus turned Nablus into the site of a collision between Ottoman politics, European colonial ideology towards Palestine and local Nabulsi identity. This chapter argues that the incident might be characterized as an incipient anti-colonial revolt; not a politically conscious and skilfully directed rebellion against a wellgrasped threat of future occupation, but rather, in Fanon’s words, ‘a programme of complete disorder’ in response to an unacceptably brutal display of the Western presence in Palestine.42 Before reconstructing in greater detail what, as far as can be gleaned, did happen that day, the sources from which the story can be pieced together require some further consideration. To the British public, the first indication of the uprising was a brief report appearing in several newspapers on 28 April. Under the headline ‘Alarming Outbreak in Syria’, the short item warned that ‘the whole of the Nablous country is in a state of insurrection, in consequence of the reported murder of a Turkish [i.e. Muslim] mendicant by an English missionary. The foreign consulates had been pillaged, and the Prussian consul killed’.43 The following day, however, retractions appeared, disowning the ‘curious and not very credible statement’ of the uprising, describing the murder as ‘alleged’, and proclaiming ‘we withhold our belief from the assigned cause of this emeute until we have more direct details to satisfy us on the point’.44 In fact, most of the initially reported details were correct, although most sources agreed it was the Prussian consul’s unfortunate father who was killed.45 This initial disbelief is noteworthy. Firstly, there was incredulity that an English missionary – the bearer of civilizational light into the dark reaches of the globe – was capable of murder. Yet also, despite the oft-claimed danger of Nablus, the Orientalist ideology held that such was the almost mystical reverence in which Orientals held Westerners, that any backlash against Western presence was unlikely. With an arrogance inculcated by Britain’s experience of imperial rule elsewhere, travellers believed that the inhabitants of the Orient would respond only with respect to their violent treatment at Westerners’ hands. As Kinglake commented, ‘the Asiatic seems to be animated with a feeling of profound respect, almost bordering upon affection, for all who have done him any bold and violent wrong’; he asserted that he could ‘see no limit to the yielding and bending of his mind when it is wrought upon by the idea of power’.46 The events in Nablus thus proved especially disturbing because not only did they threaten the British influence in the Eastern Mediterranean carefully built up during the Peaceful Crusade; the uprising also proved their conceptions about Palestine and Palestinians wrong, and showed that

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the desired occupation of the region would involve far more difficulty than the Victorians had previously imagined. After the flurry of press reports on the uprising in May 1856, several years elapsed before any more substantial account of the incident appeared in print. The first was in Mary Eliza Rogers’s Domestic Life in Palestine. The uprising occurred midway through her two-year stay accompanying her brother Edward Thomas Rogers, British vice-consul in Haifa. Mary Rogers was in Jerusalem during the uprising, though she gained a first-hand account of the destruction which had been wrought from her brother, quickly dispatched to Nablus. In 1864, Mills’s Three Months’ Residence at Nablus also contained a short account of the uprising; Mills was not in Palestine at the time, but gleaned the information from one ‘Yohannah El Karey, a young Arab and native of Nablus’.47 Yohannah, born in 1843 or 1844, would have been aged twelve or thirteen at the time of the uprising; a convert to Protestantism, Mills sponsored his missionary training in Britain in the 1860s, after which he returned to Nablus until his death in 1907.48 To Mills, Yohannah claimed that he had been ‘beaten without mercy’ during the uprising, until saved by a Muslim friend.49 A much fuller account of the uprising, its causes and the fallout was finally included in Finn’s Stirring Times in a chapter entitled, with quintessentially English understatement, ‘Unexpected Troubles’.50 In none of these sources were indigenous Palestinians, either perpetrators or victims of the outburst, given a voice. The only account supposedly presenting a Palestinian perspective was a report appearing in the Daily News, purporting to be ‘an almost verbatim transcription of a letter addressed by three of the most respectable Protestant Christians in Nablous’, out of the city during the uprising. The authenticity of this letter, apparently sent to the Anglican missionary John Bowen who had returned to Britain shortly before the uprising after spending some years shepherding the small Protestant flock in Nablus (he would die of a fever in 1859 in West Africa, having been appointed Bishop of Sierra Leone), and accuracy of its translation, cannot be verified. The letter apes the florid Islamophobia of Victorian Orientalism. After a bloodthirsty retelling of ‘the strange and awful evils which have been inflicted by the ravenous wolves of Nablous upon the weak sheep, the miserable, despised Christians of the town’, the letter provided grist to the mill of those in the West who wished to see European powers exert their influence within the Ottoman Empire, nominally in defence of Christians: Where are the English, where the French and the Sardinians, who have shed their blood to uphold the power of Islam [i.e. supported the Ottomans in the Crimean War], and to give liberty to the Christians of the East? They have spilt their blood in vain. Their toil has gone in emptiness. Pharoah will not let Israel go. He will not let them go – he will not let them go. He will lay on them a greater and heavier yoke.51

Nowhere, except through the pens of Western travellers and journalists hostile to Islam, were Muslims provided a voice in the textual productions which appeared in Britain. This erasure means that the broader array of grievances which preceded

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Lyde’s killing of Yasma and led the rioters’ anger to fall upon their Christian neighbours, must also be reconstructed from the Victorian accounts, as well as the uprising’s wider context of political reform across the Ottoman Empire and localized resistance to it. *** The uprising occurred midway through the era of Tanzimat reforms, lasting from 1839 to 1876. The Tanzimat has been the subject of much scholarly debate, to the reforms’ supporters hailing the beginning of a semi-constitutional era in Ottoman history, and to their critics symbolizing the Empire’s declining strength and growing susceptibility to outside influence.52 Theoretically legislating equality between Muslim and non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, the reforms were in fact partly the product of European pressure. In return for British aid in ousting the forces of Muhammad ‘Ali from Syria and Palestine, in November 1839 ‘Abdul Mecid passed the first such reform, granting greater freedoms to the Ottoman Christians who were the prime targets of European missionary activity in Palestine and elsewhere. Makdisi summarizes the central contradiction of the Tanzimat period: Equivocation and ambiguity were at the heart of the Tanzimat. The sultan’s immediate concern was pacifying and appeasing foreign powers. Yet the object of the decrees was his vast and disparate subject population. The Tanzimat reforms were couched in language of total sovereignty, but in their timing, content, and concessions they actually underscored Ottoman dependency on Britain.53

The Hat-ı Humayunu proclaimed in Istanbul in February 1856, which little more than reaffirmed the earlier commitment to equality, was no exception. While Muslims and Christians had previously mainly coexisted peacefully, the reforms aroused many Muslims’ concerns around the erosion of Ottoman sovereignty, and European powers’ use of Christian communities to advance their interests. In the Tanzimat, the Ottomans (and behind them, the Europeans) singled out Christians for special treatment; considering the patronage and protection they now received from European powers, ordinary Muslims seemed disadvantaged, even though they were the subjects of an Islamic empire whose sultan was also the caliph of Islam.54 As Bowen reported from Istanbul during his return journey to Britain, Catholic and Orthodox Christians were likewise suspicious of the Hat-ı Humayunu, which they ‘considered too favourable to Protestantism’, evidencing the opinion amongst many Ottoman subjects, Muslim and Christian alike, that a British hand had effectively authored the reform.55 British commentators articulated the Nablus uprising as a reaction to the Hat-ı Humayunu. For example, the Times’s Istanbul correspondent argued that the uprising was ‘altogether of a political nature, in which Christian as well as Mahometan Arabs are concerned’. While asserting that ‘Eastern people are slow in their excitement, and the reaction against any unpopular measure does not manifest itself till some time after’, the correspondent argued that the uprising

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was an early expression of Muslims’ opposition to the new edict.56 Rather than ‘Eastern people’ being especially slow to react to political developments, it may have been the nature of communications between the Ottoman imperial centre and outlying regions which were sluggish. Finn’s consular diary reveals the Hat-ı Humayunu was only officially announced in Jerusalem on 6 April, two days after the uprising.57 However, Finn asserted in Stirring Times that while the reform ‘had not […] been officially communicated to the authorities in Palestine, much less to the native public’, it was nonetheless known in Nablus ‘through the European newspapers and general rumour’. ‘There can be’, he wrote, ‘no doubt of this charter of religious toleration and equality having been eminently distasteful to the old Mohammedan population, and distressing to their ancient feelings’.58 As evidenced in the reports of the uprising, in Nablus as elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire it was the ‘ulamā’ or Muslim clergy who led the opposition to the perceived latent European imperialism of the Tanzimat. Palestine’s ‘ulamā’ were habitually troublesome to whichever power occupied the land, playing a leading role in the larger uprisings of 1825 against the Ottomans, and 1834 during the Egyptian occupation.59 Several reports of the uprising, without offering any evidence other than hearsay, presented the event as the product of a pre-ordained plan of the ‘ulamā’ to rouse an anti-Christian attack, the disastrous events before the uprising merely presenting a convenient cover.60 Yet rather than considering the ‘ulamā’ as a purely reactionary force opposed to all reform and peaceable Muslim-Christian relations, their role in the Nablus uprising should be considered in the context of the far-reaching changes beginning to be engendered by European intervention in Ottoman affairs. The Tanzimat reforms ruptured traditional social relations in Palestine, leading local elites such as the ‘ulamā’ to make new appeals to their old constituents to maintain their position, sometimes by openly challenging Ottoman rule.61 Behind the rabble-rousing calls of the ‘ulamā’ as described (and quite possibly exaggerated) in the source texts discussed below, lay an evident awareness of their precarity in the emerging sociopolitical system heralded by the reforms. Predictably, British commentators’ narrations of the uprising were built upon the assumptions that the event confirmed the ‘bigotry and fanaticism’ of Muslims, the inability of Muslims to coexist peacefully with non-Muslims and the inevitable failure of all the Ottomans’ attempts at reform, raising the question of which European power was to inherit the Holy Land from the doomed Islamic empire. Yet rather than considering anti-Christian hatred – a ‘treacherous snake, bred long before’, which ‘came forth with its burning venom’ after the Ottoman reforms, as the Nablus Protestants’ letter put it – as the underlying cause of the unrest, the Nablus uprising can be read as an act of resistance by the inhabitants of Nablus to what they considered an attack on their identity, foisted upon them by foreigners.62 As will be shown, despite numerous European provocations in Nablus and rumours of the Hat-ı Humayunu, only after the tragic death of Yasma at the hands of Lyde, and Lyde’s narrow escape from mob justice, did the anger of some Muslims of Nablus fall on their Christian neighbours. ***

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Talk of the Hat-ı Humayunu, along with news of the Ottoman and allied European victory in the Crimean War, emboldened European consuls and missionaries. While travellers claimed that a European could barely pass through Nablus without attracting verbal, even physical, abuse, some longer-term European residents and the local agents employed by European consulates held no qualms about what feelings a triumphal display might engender among the local population. In this spirit, Samuel Gobat, a Swiss Calvinist appointed the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem in 1846, set out from Jerusalem to Nablus, where he arrived on the evening of Saturday 29 March. As Finn recalled in Stirring Times, ‘His Lordship took a bell with him in his luggage, which had been procured from England, to be put up there upon the [Anglican missionary] Chapel School. Of this I had no notice or knowledge’.63 Bitterly, Finn regretted that ‘I had no idea, when riding out part of the way with the English bishop to escort him on his road to Nabloos, that he had such an instrument of peril to the public peace for such a town as Nabloos, among his luggage on the mules’. The Nablus Protestant community was small: Bowen recorded twenty-one communicants of his Anglican mission in January 1856, with an average church attendance of thirty. Bowen recorded that several years earlier, a situation of ‘a bitter persecution of the Protestants’ had existed; however, this had been brought to an end by ‘the interference of the British consul at Jerusalem, and the good sense and friendship of two or three influential Moslems’. So amicable did MuslimProtestant relations soon become, that near half (twenty-eight of sixty-four) of the children registered at the missionary school came from Muslim families, which Bowen remarked was ‘a great point in so bigoted a town’. In the months preceding the uprising, Protestants ‘were allowed to live in peace, and to meet for worship without molestation’.64 Nevertheless, the small community was vulnerable to any potential rise in sectarian tensions. Like the other indigenous Christians of Nablus, the Protestant community had previously refrained from bell-ringing, in order to maintain a low profile. However, Gobat decided the Hat-ı Humayunu meant the time was right to ring out the Protestant presence in Nablus. He informed the governor, Maḥmūd ‘Abd al-Hādi, that the bell would be installed the next day over the Anglican missionary school. In Finn’s account, Abd al-Hadi inquired whether Gobat had permission from Jerusalem’s governor Kāmil Pasha “for the putting up of the bell in such a town as that”; upon Gobat’s citation of the Hat-ı Humayunu, “Abd al-Hadi acquiesced, and sent his personal guards when the bell was first rung for the Sunday service. Finn remarked that “all remained quiet for that day”. Nevertheless, he and other British commentators, plus the Nablus Protestants” letter which described the bellringing as “unendurable” to the Muslim population, identified Gobat’s impolitic decision as a key cause of the uprising.65 Finn’s personal antagonism to Gobat is evident in his account; revealingly, in a circular letter by Gobat himself, whilst the bishop complained that “my school-house was not only plundered, but partially destroyed” in the uprising, and of Muslims ‘intolerably insolent and threatening attitude throughout the country’ afterwards, he neglected to mention his own role in the whole affair.66 Never having to suffer the consequences of his poor decision,

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Gobat, along with Bowen’s replacement as resident Protestant missionary John Zeller, and several of their local converts, departed for a visit to Nazareth on the morning before the outbreak, ‘happily for them’, as Finn put it. An excuse for another show of European presence in Palestine was provided by the birth of the Prince Imperial, heir of the French Emperor Napoleon III, on 16  March. The news reached Jerusalem on the last day of the month, and was announced at dawn, noon and sunset by cannon fire from the Citadel. Finn contrived to have the first and most ostentatious Jerusalem celebration of the French royal birth held in the British consulate that evening. Mary Rogers was enlisted to decorate the consulate (then housed in a building adjacent to Christ Church near the Old City’s Jaffa Gate) ‘with green garlands and wreaths of flowers, and about one hundred wax candles’; the somewhat inflammable decor was topped with flaming beacons on the roof, tended by the consulate’s guards and Ethiopian servants, and a firework display from the courtyard ‘to the delight of hundreds of spectators’.67 For the more select crowd of British and French travellers and Kamil Pasha, an extravagant party was thrown within the consulate, as Finn colourfully described: Native musicians attended and performed Oriental music on the dulcimer, accompanied with singing. The son of the barber Butros was the chief singer, and he and his fellow performers also gave us a free translation in Arabic of the initial verses of the ‘Marseillaise’ and the ‘Parisienne’ (which, by the bye, could not have been sung in France at the time). […] ln the rests between these performances, some Jews outside the windows […] gave us interludes on a kind of bagpipe, with cymbals and a big drum, played without any intelligible time, or tune.

The French celebrated their own royal birth in their consulate the next evening, with another soiree for the European contingent of Jerusalem, the heads of churches and Kamil. According to Rogers, after a banquet employing ‘Turkish, French, Greek, and Italian culinary skill’, and dinner table conversation peppered with ‘occasional Spanish, Turkish, Italian, and German expletives’, Finn tactfully proposed a toast to the sultan, and Kamil praised ‘The alliance of Turkey, France, and England’. In the salon or divan afterwards, coffee and French sweets were served, and Mary Rogers and the wife of France’s consul-general in Syria ‘did not hesitate’ to partake of the proffered cigarettes and narghile pipes. In these congenial surroundings, Finn negotiated with Kamil to finally obtain the long-desired access to the Haram alSharif on the morning of Friday 4 April, as recounted in Chapter 3. It was after the travellers’ return home from that triumphal journey to the locus of Biblical dreams and desires, that Finn and the others received the first worrying reports from Nablus. While lavish displays of European imperial pride were acceptable in Jerusalem, in Nablus the situation was different. There, while the local branches of the consulates had previously functioned unmolested, it had ‘been hitherto thought advisable not to excite [Nablus’s] fanaticism by any external signs of foreign influence, and the Consular agents never hoisted their flags’.68 When the news of the prince’s birth arrived in the city on 1 April, the French agent in Nablus, a local Muslim – the

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Prussian press described him as ‘the son of a rich Mahomedan […] only 14 years of age’  – decided that the occasion demanded a celebratory gesture in that city too.69 Duly borrowing French and Ottoman flags from the Protestant missionary school, the agent raised these above his home at dawn on 2 April, a move echoed by Britain’s agent with the British flag. Finn described these flags as ‘small affairs […] not much exceeding the size of a pocket-handkerchief ’, although according to the Istanbul correspondent of the Times the French flag was large enough for the consular agent to later be ‘enveloped […] in his own flag, and rolled […] thus through the street’ by a crowd during the uprising.70 Noting that the flags remained aloft until the uprising, ‘a great mistake among many other mistakes’, Finn asserted that ‘among the fanatic Nabloosians, a hostile feeling was seething, and waiting only for an opportunity of overt explosion’. The Nablus Protestants’ letter adds that there had been ‘a feast of rejoicing for three days in the house of the consul’ (i.e. French agent). Lyde made his disastrous entrance onto the stage on 4  April. While Lyde’s carrying of a loaded gun was not unusual among travellers – one source defending Lyde asserted that carrying a gun was ‘absolutely necessary in a country where even the fellah works in the fields with his weapon beside him’ – it demonstrates the misplaced fear of and will for superiority over the natives felt by most Western visitors to Palestine.71 The missionary’s fatal shooting of Yasma, the incident that sparked the uprising, remains shrouded in mystery by contrast with the preceding and subsequent events. This is partly due to an apparent absence of witnesses whose testimony has survived; while Mills’s interlocutor El Karey claimed to have been accompanying Lyde when the shooting occurred, Finn recorded in his diary during Lyde’s trial that the only witnesses who could be identified were three women, whose testimony could not be heard in the Ottoman court system because of their gender.72 No alternative to Lyde’s narrative of accidental shooting, with the aggressive and irritating Yasma effectively causing his own death by grabbing at Lyde’s gun – a story repeated, with slight variations, in most of the press and literary accounts in Britain – has survived from the time. Even more significant is the predictable Orientalist subtext of the accounts, of European superiority and non-European inferiority, making Western commentators unwilling to consider anything except the story Lyde provided. Yasma – not even dignified with a name in many of the accounts, including the books by Rogers, Mills and Finn  – was turned from victim into villain. According to Finn, Lyde had been ‘beset by beggars’, among whom numbered Yasma. This accorded with the pervasive notion that practically all inhabitants of the Orient were indigent paupers who would pester Western travellers for their last penny, if afforded the opportunity. As stated in Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria, Everywhere, from morning till night, the traveller will be tormented with applications for backsheesh, which has been called the alpha and omega of Eastern travel. It is the first word an infant is taught to lisp; it will probably be the first Arabic word the traveller will hear on arriving in Palestine, and the last as he leaves it.73

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Yet reports did their best to blacken Yasma’s character beyond that of the common beggar. Several disparaged him for his apparent disabilities. The Nablus Protestants’ letter described Yasma as ‘of evil form, utterly untrained, like the people of his country’. Rogers condescendingly wrote that Yasma ‘was deaf and dumb, and slightly deranged in intellect, and consequently was superstitiously respected by the Arabs, and was yet, at the same time, an object of their amusement’; she added that ‘he was a professed beggar, and very importunate’. Finn wrote similarly of his ‘habitual impudence’. The closest to an expression of sympathy for the slain Yasma was Mills’s description of him as a ‘poor fellow’. By contrast, the chroniclers of the uprising expressed their sympathy for Lyde, seeking to exonerate the missionary from any guilt. Finn, for instance, wrote that subsequently, ‘the poor man was in great grief at the result of the accident, and needed all the cheering and kindness which friends could bestow’. The remorse Lyde expressed over the incident, Finn wrote, in addition to his ‘well-known life of courage and self denial’, earned him ‘a deep feeling of respect for him from all quarters (except, of course, the turbulent fanatics of Nabloos)’. In Mills’s narrative (the action is unreported in any other account of the uprising), the sorrowful Lyde proceeded straight to the house of Yasma’s family to offer financial compensation. ‘The father, with characteristic love of backsheesh’, Mills claimed, wished to accept the offer, which would have ended the affair had not the rumour been ‘rapidly spreading through the city, that a Christian dog had killed a Moslem’. Finn provided a dramatic account of the events that now proceeded: The cup of fanaticism was full, and the one drop more caused it to run over. This accident became the signal for a popular insurrection. The mob rose. Mr. Lyde was with difficulty defended from the fury of the rabble by the gatekeeper and two or three Tufenkchis, until a force came down from the Governor, and barely succeeded in conveying him into the Seraglio, where the gates were closed. Shrieks and cries arose from the infuriated crowd – ‘Vengeance on the Christians for the blood of Islâm!’ – ‘Down with the flags!’ – ‘Down with the bell!’ The bell and the flags, including the Turkish, were soon on the ground – the tricolor of France, subjected to special indignity, having an old shoe tied to it before being dragged through the miry street, by way of expressing the popular hatred. The French Agent’s house, and the Protestant mission house and school, as well as the dwellings of Protestant natives, were sacked. The grey-headed father of the Prussian Agent, Kawwâr (the old man was not a Protestant), running for refuge to the house of his friend the English Agent (who was happily absent from Nabloos), was murdered within its threshold. Not only were the houses of the Agents and of the Protestant Christian natives sacked, but the others, the Greek-rite Christians, were likewise plundered in their houses and in their church, and the dwelling of the deacon in charge of it.

Luckily for Lyde, Nablus’s governor was determined to ensure the safety of European travellers, even those who had committed murder or manslaughter,

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in his city. In Rogers’s words, Mahmud ‘Abd al-Hadi’s ‘new and beautiful house […] was actually besieged by the people, and considerably injured, because the Governor refused to yield the offender up to them’. According to her narrative, a saint-like Lyde hastily ‘made his will, wrote a few letters, and then begged the Governor to let him go out to the mob, that they might be appeased by his death. He said: “If they cannot kill me, others will surely suffer”’. ‘Abd al-Hadi politely declined the missionary’s offer; surely on his mind were the diplomatic row which would erupt, and possible consequences for him, if he allowed the British subject to come to any harm. The Nablus Protestants’ letter added more blood-curdling detail of what transpired on the streets of Nablus, in language emphasizing the helplessness of the Christians, and thus – implicitly – their need of European protection. Members of the ‘ulamā’ – the letter names a ‘Mohammed Tiforha’, ‘his brother Amar’ and ‘Sheick Sulah-el-Bacane’  – roused Muslims gathering for Friday prayer with an incendiary invective:74 Soon all the Moslems were assembling in the mosque to prayer, and the Ulema and Imaums said to them “Go, pray behind the (Christian) priests and consular agents; the religion of Mohammed is dead.” They excited the people by such words, send them out, and prevented the prayer. The people said to them, “What shall we do?” They answered, “If you are Moslems, manifest the religion of Mohammed,” and began to tell them what to do. The crowds shouted, “God is great! Oh, religion of Mohammed!” and the women began to shout and urge them on.

In the letter’s account, unlike Finn’s, no disrespect was paid to the Ottoman flag, which the crowd ‘took in honour to the palace’; nevertheless, there was a strong element of anti-Ottomanism in the uprising, as the crowd ‘cursed him who commanded’ the Hat-ı Humayunu, that is, the sultan, and invoked the formula that ‘The ruled need not obey when the ruler is rebellious’. In the Anglican mission, the mob ‘broke the bell […] and pulled down part of the wall, broke the windows and frames, and burnt the books’, and assaulted ‘the father of the Chojabash [i.e. khuwāja bāsha, leader of the community] of the protestants [sic] (an old man of 80) […] and beat his wife with a stick (a helpless old woman)’. After then attacking the Prussian agent’s unfortunate father ‘with swords, axes, and clubs’, the crowd ‘took all the jewellery of the [agent’s] wife, and her clothes, leaving nothing in the house of the least value’, and ‘broke even the English iron plough’, symbolic in the Biblical Orientalist mind of the introduction of European progress into Palestine. In Zeller’s house, which Bowen before his departure had ‘furnished […] for his successor, providing for him many English comforts he had denied to himself, such as tables, chairs, crockery, knives and forks, &c. […] believing that it would raise the position of the missionary to live in a more English style’, the crowd ‘broke open the boxes and cupboards, [and] wounded his servant Hannah, who now lies at the point of death. […] Mr. Zeller’s house was left desolate, and they would have killed him had they found him’.75 Figures given for the number of fatalities by the end of the day vary, but the dead seem to have numbered between four and six.76

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The Nablus Christians, including non-Protestants who had nothing to do with Gobat’s bell or the French and British agents’ flags, suffered gravely from an absence of the kind of protection which the governor afforded to Lyde. Yet multiple sources record instances of Muslim-Christian solidarity in the city, reflecting the previous amiable coexistence in Nablus. Several reports noted that the Prussian agent’s Muslim neighbours armed themselves to protect his home from the mob.77 The Protestants’ letter stated that while the crowd ‘attacked the Greek [Orthodox] church, plundered its vessels, broke the woodwork, and burnt the books’, Nablus’s resident Orthodox priest was saved from harm, ‘protected by Abd-el Feteh Aga Minmer’. Finn’s consular diary confirms that many Christians were sheltered by their Muslim neighbours. In July 1857, Finn was visited in the Jerusalem consulate by ‘Shaikh Mahhmood Yaeesh of Nablus & his son (Hhassan) who […] protected the Christians […], saved lives, & fed the suffering for several days in his own house’.78 The occurrence of these acts of intercommunal solidarity shows that the reports in which, as the letter claimed, ‘a whole city […] rose on 500 miserable Christians’, were somewhat hyperbolic. Finn also noted that ‘neither Jew nor Samaritan was either insulted or injured’ during the events, underlining Muslims’ specific grievance towards the Hat-ı Humayunu and Christians’ perceived closeness towards European powers, and not any general prejudice against non-Muslims. The uprising was short-lived and remained confined to Nablus. Finn reported that the people’s anger dissipated as they realized they could face heavy consequences: Within a few days, less than a week, when the rioters had time to begin to reflect upon what they had done, and what would be the consequences, they became so frightened that they not only remained perfectly quiet, but came by night and threw back into the houses some of the stolen things.

The British and Prussian agents, lucky to escape the uprising, fled to Jerusalem by the evening of 4 April; Finn noted that the agents had ‘trusted (and in this they were not mistaken) to Moslem principles of honour for the safety of their female relations’, leaving the latter behind in Nablus. The next day Mary Rogers’s brother Edward, along with Kamil Pasha and a detachment of troops, was dispatched to survey the situation in Nablus, and to retrieve Lyde. Edward Rogers reported what he found in Zeller’s home: ‘the lower rooms utterly pillaged, and the floors covered with broken china, leaves of books, maps and papers of all descriptions, in fragments. Upstairs, I found the trunks, desks, boxes, a chest of drawers, &c., broken and destroyed’. Many of Nablus’s Christians had temporarily abandoned the city, while some of those who remained entrusted Rogers with their family jewellery to take to Jerusalem for safekeeping.79 Lyde himself was finally brought to Jerusalem under Ottoman guard on 10 April, and as Finn wrote ‘left at large within the city, on my giving bail, as Consul, to the Turkish authorities for his due appearance to answer the charge of murder’. These repercussions would drag on for months.

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­‘A State of Insanity’: The aftermath of the uprising For Finn and the British officials in the Eastern Mediterranean, there were three pressing matters in the aftermath of the uprising: obtaining a favourable result in Lyde’s trial for Yasma’s death, obtaining compensation for the Nablus Christians in general and the Protestant community in particular and ensuring that the perpetrators of the uprising were severely punished by the Ottoman authorities, deterring any future actualizations of local resentment against Britain’s colonial project in Palestine. Judging from the tone of consular documents, the last of these goals was held most important. Yet only in the first two did the British obtain some satisfaction, by a roundabout route, and at the cost of Lyde’s own conscience and mental health. Lyde’s trial was scheduled in Jerusalem’s Ottoman court in front of an Islamic judge or qādi for 21 April. As Lyde was a British subject, Finn had the right, under the Capitulations granted by the Ottomans to European powers in the eighteenth century, to request that the trial be held in a consular court convened by himself. Deciding against what would have been a somewhat flagrant abuse of his powers, Finn demurred, and was criticized in the British press for the decision.80 In Stirring Times he belatedly defended himself, arguing that ‘According to the international capitulations the Turkish courts retain their proper supremacy in criminal causes’. In the meantime, Finn did his best to make Lyde comfortable, inviting him for a ride to the village of Artas and John Meshullam’s settler colony. On the same day as this pleasant excursion, 19 April, Yasma’s bereaved family arrived in Jerusalem to attend the trial.81 During the trial, Finn acted effectively as Lyde’s lawyer, with the right of halting court proceedings if they seemed to be turning against Lyde, and appealing the sentence if necessary. As Finn recalled, ‘Lyde acknowledged the facts of the charge’ but consistently denied murder, ‘pleading that the man [Yasma] had by his conduct made it necessary to shake him off, and thus had caused the discharge of the gun, by which he was wounded’. The trial quickly ran into the abovementioned problem of the apparent lack of male witnesses. The qādi adjourned the trial so that Jerusalem’s Islamic authority, the mufti, could be consulted; this was not immediately possible, as he was attending the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the shrine of al-Nabi Mūsā. Finally, on 29 April, the verdict pronounced Lyde guilty of deliberate homicide. He was ordered to pay Yasma’s family the sum of 10,000 drachmas of silver, a quantity which Finn noted was not precisely defined in monetary value, and included ‘A sliding scale of wide limits’, but which was roughly equivalent to around £250, close to £15,000 or almost $21,000 in current values. Finn appealed directly to Istanbul against the sentence, and in early July, Lyde wrote to the British press to assure its readership that the final verdict was accidental homicide.82 Lyde had been treated extremely leniently by the court, too leniently indeed for his own conscience to bear. He wrote the abovementioned letter from Latakia, to which he had quickly returned to continue his missionary work before the compensation was paid. Lyde’s movement was authorized by the Ottoman

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authorities, and his case transferred to the governor of Beirut Khurshīd Pasha and Britain’s consul-general there, Niven Moore. As consular correspondence reveals, the British diplomats decided to strategically exploit the fine, linking its payment to the payment of compensation for the Nablus Christian community and European agents, and the punishment of the uprising’s leaders.83 As these were slow in coming, Yasma’s family went uncompensated for some time. It was not only Yasma’s family who suffered from this manoeuvre. When Lyde journeyed again to Jerusalem in February 1857, Finn noted in Stirring Times, he ‘complained that among his anxieties was still that of the amount of the fine being unsettled’. Finn’s diary is far more revealing, recording that on 4 February, ‘Mr. Lyde arrived in a state of insanity’. Presumably tortured by his guilt over Yasma’s death and the unpaid fine, Lyde suffered a mental breakdown. Finn had him confined in Jerusalem’s Prussian Hospice, and finally sent back to Britain on 17 March.84 Meanwhile, Finn worked in concert with Moore in Beirut to attempt to achieve their other objectives. After almost two years of their lobbying for the punishment of the uprising’s ringleaders and the compensation for the Nablus Christians, Khurshid finally submitted to their demands, on 28  April 1858 sending 55,000 piastres for Moore to distribute among the Christians, a sum which Mills later complained ‘was but small compensation for the injury done’.85 Along with the money, Khurshid sent an extraordinary letter, in which he pledged that ‘10,000 piastres should be paid by the [Ottoman] Government to the heirs of the dumb man […] on condition that the clergyman who ventured to kill the dumb man, the occurrence which occasioned this affair, should be sent to England never to return again’. Unaware that Lyde had long departed the Eastern Mediterranean under the shadow of his mental torment, Khurshid admitted that ‘the authorities are ignorant of what has been done with respect to the aforesaid clergyman’. Moore was evidently happy to reply that ‘Mr. Lyde […] has, of his own free will, returned to England, with no intention I believe of returning to Syria’.86 Thus the Ottoman government ultimately agreed to itself pay the fine which it had originally imposed on Lyde for Yasma’s murder, almost two years to the day previously. Achieving this unusual outcome was nothing less than a masterstroke of British diplomats’ dogged insistence and tightfistedness. Yet perhaps also explaining why Khurshid ultimately proposed this unusual arrangement, as Finn revealed in Stirring Times, was that under the Ottoman legal system the costs of the whole case were to be deducted from this payment and return to the government, so that ultimately Yasma’s family were to receive ‘a mere trifle’. Whether Lyde ever knew of this dubious conclusion to the case is unknown, but it seems likely that Yasma’s ghost haunted him for the remainder of his life; he died in Alexandria on 1 April 1860, aged thirty-six.87 Much more important to the British diplomats was that the uprising’s ringleaders were brought to justice. The security of Britain’s expanding influence in Palestine was at stake. This also presented an opportunity to test the effectivity of the new Hat-ı Humayunu, and the local authorities’ willingness to implement it. The spirit of the Tanzimat meant that the persecutors of Christians should have faced punishment; publicly, Finn put his faith in the letter of the new Ottoman

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law, stating his belief that ‘if the laws of Turkey were only enforced, there would be neither necessity nor pretext for any protection of Christians in the East’ by European powers.88 Privately he and Moore, and the rest of the diplomatic corps in the Ottoman Empire, considered the Tanzimat as a tool through which British interests could be assured without the need for open intervention, although this would require just as much pressure as had been necessary to obtain the Ottomans’ pay-outs for the Nablus Christians and Yasma’s family. Finn and Moore thus hounded Khurshid and Kamil for these ends for two years.89 Finn was certain that he had identified the guilty individuals. In Stirring Times, he accused ‘one Shaikh Sulâhh and his sons’, presumably identical with the ‘Sheick Sulah-el-Bacane’ named in the Nablus Protestants’ letter. In his correspondence to Moore, conveyed to Khurshid, Finn also accused the qādi and mufti of Nablus, along with ‘Sheik Mahomed Ashour’ and ‘Abdul Fettah Aga Numr’, the latter doubtlessly the same as the ‘Abd-el Feteh Aga Minmer’ mentioned in the letter as protecting the Orthodox priest. Finn and Moore called repeatedly for these notables of Nablus to face justice. However, Khurshid stalled, sticking with bureaucratic tenacity to the position that ‘the imprisonment of a few of the vagabonds who ventured to commit the riots, is not consistent with justice’, and that instead a ‘strict investigation’ was instead necessary. Matching Khurshid’s obstructiveness was the attitude of Nablus’s governor, who was reluctant to detain the individuals whom Finn and Moore desired. All feelings of gratitude towards ‘Abd al-Hadi for his protection of Lyde during the uprising had long evaporated. Having had his home besieged by armed rioters, probably saving Lyde’s life, now ‘the notorious Mahmoud Abd-ul-Hady’, as Moore described him, was angrily accused by the British diplomats of sheltering the guilty men who still walked free in his city.90 ‘Abd al-Hadi’s refusal to round up the individuals the British wanted and dispatch them to justice likely resulted from local political considerations. While in his sheltering of Lyde, ‘Abd al-Hadi had put the Ottoman relationship with European powers first, now he was probably unwilling to take an action against local Muslim notables which would surely be unpopular, increasing the precarity of his governorship vis-à-vis the residents of Nablus. British ill will towards the governor was exacerbated by a state of continuing instability in the Nablus district, with skirmishes between the ‘Abd al-Hadi clan and their rivals. This was a strictly intra-Palestinian affair, not endangering any European lives. Nevertheless, these indigenous power struggles appeared intolerably chaotic in the eyes of diplomats who, idolizing the order enforced by the British Empire in its dominions, desired them stamped out; any future British occupation of Palestine would benefit from the accomplishment of this task, after all. Schölch notes that Western consuls received instructions to support the central Ottoman government in any local conflicts after 1856.91 In a letter of October 1858, Finn complained of Bedouin allies of the ‘Abd al-Hadi clan who had waylaid an Ottoman postman and stolen livestock, and expressed the belief that ‘Palestine is in need of some one capable and honest man, armed with full powers, to put it all right in a few days’.92 If this was not to be a British governor, it could at least be a strongman appointed directly by the Ottomans from elsewhere in the empire, who

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would not be subject to the same rivalries and pressures from the local population as a candidate from one of Nablus’s notable families. While the uprising’s leaders were never made to face any punishment  – in Stirring Times, Finn bemoaned the fact that ‘to this day neither the seditious rioters nor the actual perpetrators of the violence of the 4th April 1856, have met with any chastisement’  – the British diplomats at least took some satisfaction from playing a part in Mahmud ‘Abd al-Hadi’s eventual downfall. Lobbying for ‘Abd al-Hadi’s removal, the rival Ṭūqān family sent delegations to Finn and Moore, from whom they received ready support, and the Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem and Beirut.93 These pleas dovetailed with Ottoman concerns about the level of autonomy Nablus enjoyed under ‘Abd al-Hadi. Finn and Moore’s wish was finally granted when, in late 1858 or early 1859, Ottoman soldiers were dispatched from Damascus to Nablus to arrest ‘Abd al-Hadi, who was ultimately exiled to Beirut. Moore recorded with clear satisfaction, that ‘the arrest of this Chief has, owing to his unpopularity, been effected without the least opposition’.94 Shortly afterwards, in April 1859, Ottoman forces mounted a large-scale assault on the ‘Abd al-Hadi family’s stronghold of ‘Arrāba, north of Nablus, finally ending Nablus’s autonomy and reinstating the principle of governors directly appointed from Istanbul.95 While this objective of British diplomats in the Eastern Mediterranean was achieved, British activity in Nablus sharply declined after the uprising. Finn withdrew his agent from Nablus, and did not consent to the British flag being raised in the city again for two years. This was in marked contrast to the behaviour he attributed to the French in Stirring Times. Considering ‘the affair of the insurrection as merely a disturbance, such as will happen occasionally anywhere’, Finn asserted that the French consulate in Jerusalem ‘sent to have the French flag raised again in Nabloos […] with firing of muskets’. The Tricolour was, however, quickly lowered, followed by ‘a speech made to the effect that it was not to be hoisted again till a proper reparation of honour could be obtained, seeing that Nabloos had shown itself to be unworthy of being honoured by the banner of France!’ While this did not apparently provoke an overt display of resistance, Finn imagined ‘the expression of countenance prevailing among the street populace on hearing this condemnation of themselves’. Protestant missionary activity in Nablus also declined for several years. Zeller moved the Anglican mission to Nazareth, where proselytizing could much more comfortably be carried out among the city’s Christian majority and the plethora of other European missionary institutions.96 Some members of the Nablus Protestant community left the city permanently for parts of Palestine where they felt greater security, especially Jerusalem; as Mills wrote of what he found in 1860, the ‘little flock’ of Protestant converts had been ‘ruthlessly scattered in a day’. Those who remained, Mills complained, ‘were of very inferior quality’, and rarely held services (it did not occur to Mills that this may have been part of a survival strategy by maintaining a low profile, and/or a result of trauma after the uprising). ‘The dayschool had continued, and was incomparably the best in Nablus’, he noted, but the teachers, local Protestant converts, while ‘sufficient for their pupils’, left something to be desired.

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British travellers continued to pass through and stay for periods in Nablus, largely without apprehension. Yet for decades, the city continued to loom large in Victorians’ paranoid imaginations as a site of potential danger to their colonial enterprise in Palestine. Travelling in Palestine at the turn of the twentieth century, Boddy recorded hearing ‘a startling but inaccurate story of a massacre of our Missionary staff at Nablȗs’, which created ‘a feeling of insecurity among all our English folk’.97 Ultimately, only the full British occupation of Palestine would assuage such feelings, and allow a colonial reimagining of Palestine in the ways the British had desired. *** In the years after the uprising, the event assumed a new significance in Victorian minds. As shown above, while a background of apprehension towards the Hat-ı Humayunu was also common to the other episodic outbreaks of sectarian violence in the Eastern Mediterranean, the uprising in Nablus was short-lived, highly localized and very specific in its immediate causes. Yet to Victorians after 1860, the small uprising in Nablus retrospectively formed a direct prelude to the much greater violence that erupted in Syria and Lebanon several years later, despite the fact that Palestine itself was largely unaffected by that violence and Christians remained safe.98 Cyril Graham, a member of a commission sent to Syria to investigate the sectarian fighting of 1860, referenced the uprising in a report, stating that ‘the Protestant chapel and school, and the English consulate [sic] at Nablous, were plundered, the consul’s father was killed, and a number of others were severely beaten’. Without attempting to mask his hostility towards Islam, and dismissing the chances of successful reform in the Ottoman Empire, Graham concluded that ‘no man, with Syria’s dark history before him, can say that Mohammedanism is productive of ought but evil’.99 As shown in Graham’s starkly Islamophobic language, connecting the Nablus uprising to later incidents of sectarian hostility was to make a point rooted in Orientalist belief: that across the Eastern Mediterranean, it was the supposed inherent intolerance and violent nature of Islam that posed the major danger to non-Muslim minorities, requiring the direct intervention of European empires in the region to impose order. Some Westerners, intimately involved in the build-up to the uprising, asserted that it and later sectarian attacks resulted from a shadowy Islamic conspiracy, taking the blame off their own blundering interventions in Nablus. At a missionary conference in London nineteen years after the uprising, Gobat – who had played as much of a role in triggering the uprising as any of Nablus’s ‘ulamā’ – attributed the event to a conspiracy centred in Mecca: in the year 1855 there was a great meeting at Mecca, at which it was resolved that in all countries the Mohammedans should destroy all that was not Mohammedan; and the first fruit of it was at Nablous, where some Christians were killed, and several were wounded. Several houses were plundered, as was also his [Gobat’s] own school there.100

­ ritish concerns around Islam were not limited to the Eastern Mediterranean, B insofar as Muslim opposition to European presence also appeared to threaten the

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imperial project elsewhere. John Wilson, for many years a Church of Scotland missionary in Bombay (and encountered at greater length in the next chapter), asserted in 1847 that Indian Muslims had ‘acknowledge[d], with humble submission, that resistance to [British] power is wellnigh, if not altogether, hopeless’, that they were ‘not insensible to the general uprightness of our administration’, and that by comparison the Muslims of the Eastern Mediterranean, where Wilson journeyed in 1843, were ‘below them in regard to character and conduct, and fiercer and more bigoted in religion’.101 Such evaluations were swept away in May 1857 by the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, in which South Asia rose up against East India Company (mis)rule. While the Mutiny united Hindus, Muslims and other sections of the Subcontinent’s society, it was not long before British commentators were attributing the cause of the revolt to fanatical Islam.102 Upon hearing the first rumours of events in India, the British residents of Palestine could not but remember what destruction had been wrought against the European diplomatic and missionary presence in Nablus in a single day. As Finn vividly expressed, the Indian Mutiny seemed to presage a nightmarish (to the British) scenario, in which the conquests not only of Britain but of all the European empires with a stake in the broadly defined Islamic world were threatened by a pan-Islamic revolutionary surge: the Green Flag must be unfurled, the Jehâd (Holy War) must be proclaimed against all Christians – in Circassia and Asiatic Russia – in Algeria against the French – in India against the English – all true believers would rise as one man, and, Inshallah! it would not be long before the last great triumph, the coming of Mohammed, and victory for ever to Islâm.

Such talk, Finn averred, ‘could never be quite idle […] so long as thousands and millions of men, women, and children believe in [such ideas], are influenced by them, and are ready, at whatever sacrifice, to act blindly upon them’.103 This possibility, of course, never came to pass; the belief in it rested upon an Islamophobia arising from Orientalist ideology and the paranoia arising from the attempt to impose colonial control over many millions of people around the globe. Yet the fire lit in India, the Finns worried, could easily spread to Palestine. News of the Mutiny did not only travel to Palestine via the official dispatches and European newspapers landing on Finn’s desk. As Finn astutely commented, ‘India seemed to many in Jerusalem much nearer than England, because they knew something about it and could understand it’.104 Owing to Jerusalem’s holy status in Islam, Palestine was a major site of pilgrimage for Indian Muslims.105 As British consul, Finn was officially responsible for their welfare during their time in Jerusalem. He tellingly recalled an occasion in 1856, when he ‘was honoured by a visit from a well-dressed gentleman from Delhi, and on my remarking his perfection in speaking English, he replied, in a tone of voice which expressed discomfort, “Yes, it is the language of our masters, and we have to learn it”’. The following year, Finn wrote in Stirring Times, the British residents in Jerusalem received ‘sufficient

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annoyance from Indian pilgrims connected with, and in anticipation of, the outbreak of the great Indian Revolt’.106 James Finn did not discuss this intriguing subject further. However, Elizabeth recounted in her memoir that  – apparently shortly before official notice of the Mutiny reached Jerusalem – a group of English travellers, encountering some Indian pilgrims between Jerusalem and Jaffa, were surprised when ‘the Indians used menacing gestures, drawing their hands across their throats to threaten the English’.107 The spectre of an anti-imperial revolt, exported from India to Palestine, haunted Victorian minds, threatening much greater danger to the British presence in Palestine that what had been faced in Nablus in 1856. *** As displayed throughout this chapter, the uprising’s Victorian observers viewed the event exclusively through a colonial lens. They reduced a complex situation, in which the growing European presence in Palestine, local political factors in Nablus and changes across the Ottoman Empire combined in dramatic fashion, to a binary opposition between Islam and Christianity, Orient and Occident. To be properly understood, the Nablus uprising must be divorced from the imperial ideology of its Western chroniclers and placed in its proper context. Despite the near uniform biases in all the accounts cited in this chapter, it is possible to read in them not a simplistic story of ‘fanatical’ Muslims persecuting minorities and ‘helpless’ Christians demanding the imposition of colonial control, but a more complex one of resistance to the growing presence of European empires, and unpopular reforms dictated by the Ottomans and those same European powers. The plight of both the Christian community, and the fears of the Muslim majority – which eventually proved well founded, as Palestine came under British occupation in 1917 – are both deserving of sympathy. Yet as shall be seen in the next chapter, one native of Nablus chose accommodation with, rather than resistance to, the Victorians’ colonial enterprise in Palestine, with a story no less striking than that of the uprising.

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­Chapter 6 ‘P R I N C E O F T H E S A M A R I TA N S’ : T H E U N L I K E LY ST O RY   O F YA‘QU B A L - SHA L A B I

The previous chapter presented one case in which Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants resisted Europeans’ increasing presence in their homeland. As the chapter noted, this was a very rare occurrence. Relationships between Palestinians and Victorian travellers were generally amicable, if mostly facile, transient and built on a power relationship favouring the visitor. Palestinians guided travellers around the Eastern Mediterranean, ensured their safety and well-being, and welcomed them into their cities, villages and even homes. Palestine’s inhabitants had for centuries made gains from the Holy Land’s irresistible pull for pilgrims. In the nineteenth century, however, this burgeoned in the towns and cities most frequented by Europeans. Locals ‘who had picked up a little smattering of English at one of the missionary schools’ could set themselves up as dragoman guides, souvenir and antique dealers, and even hoteliers, asserting their agency in the tourist trade which had arrived on their doorsteps.1 This entrepreneurial spirit proved a rude awakening to Victorians who found any expression of modernity uncomfortable in locations they imagined should maintain a pristine Biblical stasis. Haskett Smith, for example, complained of the ‘shower of cards’ assailing any traveller to Bethlehem, each card announcing that Salim Khouri, or Hanna Massad, or Ibrahim Antoun, or some such vendor of Oriental curiosities, was the only reliable merchant in Bethlehem from whom might be procured, at the very lowest prices, rosaries, mother-of-pearl crosses, crucifixes, baptismal shells, goblets, and dishes of Dead Sea stink-stone, cameos, amulets, charms, and every article that superstition could devise or credulity could cherish. Of all places in the world, Bethlehem takes the palm for importunate sellers of spurious relics and trashy articles of so-called sacred interest.2

Not all travellers were so dismissive; one male traveller commented approvingly that ‘modern Bethlehem is awake to commercial opportunities presented by a constant stream of tourists and pilgrims’, particularly noting the town’s ‘girls’ whose ‘business overtures, so far from having any taint of whining importunity’, were ‘characterized by smiling alertness and an engaging maidenly dignity’.3

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It is in this context of an emerging tourist industry in Palestine that the life of this chapter’s subject should be read. Ya‘qub al-Shalabi’s first contact with the West in 1843, when he was aged thirteen or fourteen, came almost by chance. Yet he cannily realized that, merely by dint of his birth into the small Samaritan community of Nablus, many Westerners were automatically fascinated with him. Fashioning himself as a bridge between the Samaritans and Victorian visitors – and facilitating the flow of hotly sought-after antiquities (or convincing fakes) from the former to the latter  – Ya‘qub gained influence within his community, lined his pockets and travelled abroad. He was among a very small number of Palestinians in the nineteenth century to journey in the opposite direction to the current of the Peaceful Crusade, making multiple trips to the West; the first of these, a sojourn in Britain and Ireland for close to two years, can be closely followed in the press of the day. As discussed in the previous chapter, exploring indigenous subjects through Western sources presents multiple challenges. Although parts of Ya‘qub’s life are more heavily documented than others, the main problem is not a paucity of evidence. Ya‘qub stands out for the sheer volume of records through which his life can be traced, from tens of travelogues, to his 1855 autoethnography (possibly the first modern text authored by a Palestinian, at least in part, to be published in English), to a plethora of newspaper reports. However, while Victorian reports provide sufficient information to piece together an account of Ya‘qub’s colourful life – at least those parts of it in which Western travellers were interested – they are equally subject to Orientalist biases and prejudices. In some travellers’ hostility to Ya‘qub can be detected their antipathy to an ‘Oriental’ encroaching on domains they believed should be the preserve of Europeans alone. Ya‘qub may well deserve censure for looting his community’s tangible heritage on behalf of the insatiable demands of Western collectors; yet his life deserves a more nuanced reading for what it reveals about the possibilities of Palestinians’ own agency vis-à-vis the Peaceful Crusade. The second and third sections of this chapter tell Ya‘qub’s story, after we first consider travellers’ attitudes towards the Samaritans.

‘An Ethnological Fraction of Antiquity’: Victorians view the Samaritans As mentioned in the previous chapter, one major draw for Victorian travellers to Nablus was the presence of the Samaritans, who numbered between 150 and 200 in the mid-nineteenth century.4 The ethno-religious community (who also identify themselves as Israelites or Israelite Samaritans) had maintained a millennia-long presence in Nablus, with their numbers gradually declining from the majority of the city’s population in antiquity. While their sacred texts, religious practices and traditions share some core features with Judaism, among their departures from the latter faith was (and is) their consideration of Jabal Jirzim, rather than Jerusalem, as their most sacred site.5 While in prior decades small Samaritan communities could be encountered in cities around the Eastern Mediterranean, by the midnineteenth century the only place where travellers could meet Samaritans was

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their quarter in the shadow of Jabal Jirzim.6 Upon reaching Nablus, most travellers made a beeline for the Samaritans, and closely inspected them with an interest exceeding anything evinced for most Palestinians of other communities. While many European visitors assumed that the Samaritans were highly vulnerable to Muslim oppression, this was not the norm. Nor did most travellers’ conceptualization of the Samaritans solely in terms of their descendance from their ancient forebears, in isolation from the rest of Palestine’s and Nablus’s existing society – ‘entirely apart from the rest of the world’, as Isabel Burton put it – reflect the lived reality of the community.7 Their continuing presence in the majority-Muslim city indicates the Samaritans’ amicable coexistence with their Muslim neighbours. As John Wilson noted after his fateful visit to Nablus, the Samaritans worked as ‘merchants, agents, clerks, weavers, and tailors’, professions which clearly brought them into intimate contact with other Nabulsis.8 Beyond this, some Samaritans were involved in the administration of the city and its hinterland. Ya‘qub reported that his grandfather Yūsif (who died in 1805) served ‘faithfully under twenty-seven successive Governors’ as Nablus’s treasurer, a figure testifying both to the power struggles over Nablus, and Yusif ’s political and biological longevity. According to Ya‘qub’s memoir, Yusif ’s brother ‘Abd al-Sāmari, Ya‘qub’s great-uncle, then became treasurer in 1811, surviving in the post for several decades through multiple changes of administration, spans of imprisonment in Damascus and ‘Akka, and protracted local conflicts which, understandably, turned ‘Abd al-Samari ‘suddenly […] white-headed’.9 Western travellers’ inability to recognize the Samaritans’ existence within a larger, richly complex society, resulted from their view of the Samaritans as living Biblical relics. Travellers believed that the community had preserved their ancient religion, communal identity and genetic stock in pristine condition. Norman Macleod likened his sensation at meeting a Samaritan to ‘feelings of wonder such as one might experience if in some distant land he came upon a breed of Mammoths, or Pterodactyles [sic], which everywhere else were known only as fossils’.10 John Mills expressed the same sentiment when he claimed of the Samaritans that ‘having perpetuated their ancient customs and sentiments, the life of such a people cannot but be of importance, especially to the Bible student’; Laurence Oliphant similarly asserted that ‘As an ethnological fraction of antiquity they are, perhaps, the most interesting group of people extant’.11 Blinded by their Biblical obsession, few travellers could comprehend of the Samaritans as any more than a ‘fraction of antiquity’. Travellers attributed the Samaritans’ insistence on marrying within their community, ‘the oldest and smallest sect in the world’ as Arthur Penrhyn Stanley wrote, to their small numbers.12 Western frequently made unfounded predictions of the encroaching extinction of the Samaritans, which became a continually repeated trope about the community. ‘They have now dwindled down to a very small number’, Mills commented of the Samaritans, ‘and before many generations more have passed away, this nation, in all probability, will have become extinct’. He had no doubts that Nablus’s Muslims were to blame, claiming ‘the Mohammedans, ever ready to fall upon unbelievers, have wreaked their fanaticism upon the feeble

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and unprotected Samaritans times without number’.13 Claude Reignier Conder similarly opined that ‘year by year the Samaritans are dying out’.14 Stating that ‘Perhaps no people have been persecuted and oppressed from age to age more than they have’, an American Evangelical encyclopedia also asserted that ‘before many generations more have passed away, the ancient Samaritan nation will have become extinct’.15 These predictions of the Samaritans’ doom fuelled Victorian travellers’ obsession with buying up their material heritage for museums and private collections, of key importance for Ya‘qub’s career. The Western obsession with acquiring Samaritan artefacts, particularly historic manuscripts of the Samaritans’ sacred text the Pentateuch, predated the Peaceful Crusade by several centuries. Fascination with the Samaritans emerged during the Protestant Reformation. Theologians both Protestant and Catholic sought out Samaritan manuscripts, believed to be pristine examples of ancient Biblical texts, to use as ammunition in their debates. However, the Samaritans proved largely unwilling to sell their heritage. From the sixteenth century onwards, travellers thus resorted to subterfuge to part the community from their manuscripts; for instance, the British Levant Company’s Robert Huntington, visiting Nablus in 1671, deceitfully obtained at least one Pentateuch on behalf of a non-existent Samaritan community in Britain.16 This continued apace throughout the nineteenth century. European collectors took advantage of the Samaritans’ straightened circumstances to persuade them to part with their sacred texts. The largest single appropriation of Samaritan artefacts occurred in 1864, with the purchase by the Russian collector Abraham Firkovich of almost the entire contents of the Nablus genizah or Samaritan library, totalling 1341 manuscripts and fragments.17 As demonstrated below, British travellers were anxious not to fall behind, and were desperate to obtain what they believed were antique fragments of the Pentateuch or, failing all else, merely obtain a glimpse of the Samaritan’s most precious scrolls. Their desire to amass Samaritan objects often betrayed distinctly sinister undertones. When Wilson asked the Samaritan priest if he could purchase a Pentateuch and was informed ‘We shall on no account whatever sell a copy of the books of our prophet’, Wilson resorted to threats on an imperial scale. ‘Take care what you say’, Wilson replied in his own account, ‘if the English come and take possession of the country, and restore to you Mount Gerizim, won’t you give them a copy of the Law in token of your gratitude?’18 The Victorians’ interest in Samaritan artefacts sprang from the Biblical obsession of the Peaceful Crusade. They no longer sought manuscripts under the pretences of scholarship or theological argument, but rather simply desired to possess mementos of Palestine or to contribute to collections in museums and libraries. While Samaritan artefacts were not exactly looted by force, their history bears some comparison with objects such as the Benin Bronzes and others with dark stories to tell, still housed in ‘dark rooms crammed with unfulfilled obligations from across the British Empire and beyond’.19 The indigenous middlemen like Ya‘qub who, acting on the profit motive, helped collectors acquire vast swathes of the world’s heritage to be concentrated in

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Western museums, did not speak for their communities at the time, still less for then unborn future members who, in more recent years, have campaigned for the restitution of their heritage taken in past centuries through colonial practices.20 How harshly Ya‘qub may be judged for his role in this process, the reader may decide from the evidence below.

­‘Taking Admirable Care of Number One’: Ya‘qub in Nablus, Britain and Ireland Aside from the events which, in 1843, brought Ya‘qub unexpectedly into the orbit of Western travellers, almost the only source for his early life from his birth in 1829 until his first departure to the West in 1854, is his ethnography, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, Illustrated by Incidents in the Life of Jacob Esh Shelaby. One thousand copies of this pamphlet, written with and translated by the Haifa vice-consul Edward Thomas Rogers, were printed in mid-1855, and sold during Ya‘qub’s fundraising journey in Britain and Ireland. As Pratt has noted, the ethnography genre is characterized by ‘instances in which colonised subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the coloniser’s own terms’.21 This is especially true for Ya‘qub’s and Rogers’s text, which played up to ingrained tropes about the ‘grievously injured and oppressed’ and ‘hitherto friendless tribe’ of the Samaritans, and the ‘very fierce and fanatical’ Muslims of Nablus, in order to elicit sympathy from Evangelicals and open up their pockets.22 Thus, like the Nablus Protestants’ letter discussed in the previous chapter, the document should be read with some scepticism: while Ya‘qub appears to speak directly to the reader, his voice is filtered through Orientalist ideology, colonialist aims and Rogers’s translation. Furthermore, as Ya‘qub’s subsequent history demonstrates, he was a highly unreliable source of information. Nevertheless, as a very rare example of a Palestinian memoir from the mid-nineteenth century, Notices of the Modern Samaritans deserves scholarly attention. It paints a colourful picture of Ya‘qub’s early life. After the death of his father Shalabi, Ya‘qub, aged only five, was taken in by his great-uncle the Nablus treasurer ‘Abd al-Samari.23 Notices relays in detail the turbulence of the Nablus district in the 1820s and early 1830s, but the most dramatic development of Ya‘qub’s early life was the Egyptian occupation of Palestine and Syria, beginning in 1831. ‘Abd al-Samari initially retained his post under the Egyptians, but his friendship with Qāsim al-Aḥmad, a rural notable from the Nablus area, caused trouble when al-Ahmad joined the ringleaders of the 1834 peasant revolt against the occupiers.24 After the defeat, capture and execution of al-Ahmad and his sons, ‘Abd al-Samari, Ya‘qub reported, was ‘compelled by threats to show the property and treasures of that house, which were confiscated to the Government of Ibrahim Pasha’. According to Ya‘qub, ‘Abd al-Samari tendered his resignation as treasurer in 1839, after ‘such incessant trouble was given to the Government employés, by rigid examinations, in consequence of suspected dishonesty and trickery in some of the offices’.25 During his visit to Nablus in 1838, however, Edward Robinson noted that while he found ‘Abd al-Samari ‘in affluent

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circumstances’, the former treasurer had already ‘recently been superseded in his influence with the governor by a Copt; and now held only the second place’.26 Despite these political vicissitudes, according to Ya‘qub the years of the Egyptian occupation were generally good for the Samaritan community, who were able to perform their Passover ceremonies on Jabal Jirzim which the Ottomans had not previously permitted. Yet these good times did not outlast the defeat of the Egyptians. ‘Abd al-Samari’s proximity to Nablus’s pro-Egyptian governors led some of the local populace to associate his family with the oppressive policies of the occupiers; when the former governor ‘fled during the night’ as Ottoman troops retook Palestine in 1840, Ya‘qub related, his family went into temporary hiding. Shortly afterwards, the Samaritan community apparently underwent another period of hiding during which they ‘gave to the Mohammedans money, plate, and jewelry to the amount of nearly £1000’, and endured being ‘objects of universal displeasure’ after being accused of effecting the arrest of a popular governor. Yet by 1841, ‘Abd al-Samari had regained his treasurer’s position, and began training the young Ya‘qub to follow his footsteps and enter civil service, for example taking the child on an official visit to Beirut, returning via Haifa, ‘a small sea-port town […] of very little importance at that time’.27 In April 1843, however, much wider horizons were to open to Ya‘qub with his first contact with the West. John Wilson had journeyed not eastwards from Europe, but westwards from India, where he had worked as a Church of Scotland missionary in Bombay for fourteen years. A decidedly colonial-minded Evangelical, in his travelogue The Lands of the Bible Wilson wrote of India that Though, for thousands of years, it has counted its numerous sages, renowned in the eastern world for the depth and subtlety of their inquiries and speculations, it has made no progress of itself in the attainment of that wisdom of greatest price, the beginning of which is the fear of the Lord. The prince of evil has reigned over its fair and luxuriant provinces, and amongst its countless inhabitants, with almost uncontrolled power and authority; and he has demanded and received of them the most costly sacrifices and victims which have been laid on his polluted altar.

‘A brighter day, however, is about to dawn’, Wilson continued. Through ‘the wonderful providence of God’, he asserted, India had come to be ‘governed by the benevolence of Britain’, which took upon itself the mission of spreading ‘those divine and heavenly influences which were first manifested on the heights of Israel’ to ‘that hitherto benighted land’.28 Wilson wished to see what he considered the wellspring of the mission for which he laboured. While returning to Britain in January 1843, Wilson disembarked his ship at Suez, and for six months journeyed extensively in the Eastern Mediterranean. Upon reaching Nablus on 6 April 1843, Wilson immediately asked the first Muslim residents of the city he encountered to take him to the Samaritan quarter, where he stayed for two days. In addition to his desire to obtain a Samaritan Pentateuch (see the conversation with the priest quoted above), Wilson had another, more

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unusual objective. In 1839, during a Church of Scotland missionary expedition to Jewish communities in Palestine and Europe, the missionary Andrew Bonar had managed to drop his Bible down the dried-out Jacob’s Well.29 Wilson was determined to retrieve the object, and procured the services of ‘a Samaritan lad, named Yáḳúb’, to guide him to the well, or so he told Ya‘qub, before they set out for the site. Wilson’s readiness to use a Palestinian child to accomplish the dangerous and unpleasant task, for a rather unnecessary aim, illustrates the power relations between European travellers and local people during the Peaceful Crusade. Local villagers removed the stones blocking access to the room covering Jacob’s Well, and Wilson explained Ya‘qub’s task to him through a translator, promising the child ‘a handsome bakshish’. Wilson provided Ya‘qub with matches and candles to aid the search at the bottom of the well, and watched as the child tied a rope around himself. Wilson noted that as Ya‘qub ‘looked into the fearful pit on the brink of which he stood, terror took hold of him; and he betook himself to prayer in the Hebrew tongue’. Eventually, the villagers lowered Ya‘qub into the orifice (Wilson recorded the depth as 75 feet), and the Bible, ‘reduced to a mass of pulp’, was found after several minutes of searching. Now faced with return, Ya‘qub was ‘evidently much frightened at the journey which was before him to the light of day’, and ‘betook himself again to prayer, in which he continued for a much longer time than before his descent’. Whilst he ‘he dangled very uncomfortably in the air, and complained much of the cutting of the rope near his armpits’, Ya‘qub finally appeared unscathed. Initially ‘unable to speak’ after the experience, Wilson typically claimed that ‘“Where is the Bakshish?” were the first words which he uttered, on regaining his faculty of speech’. The payments of amounts to Ya‘qub’s ‘fullest satisfaction’, and to the local helpers, were made on the spot.30 This episode was also recorded in Notices, with minor differences. Ya‘qub recalled that he was lowered down the well by four ropes tied together, plus material from two Samaritans’ turbans, a highly hazardous-sounding arrangement. Amusingly, in Ya‘qub’s account, he rapidly found the Bible, but was initially too embarrassed by the pitiful object to inform the group at the top of the well, thinking that ‘this could not be the book […] for the recovery of which [Wilson] had expended so much labour and money’. Ya‘qub could only imagine from Wilson’s dogged insistence for the retrieval of the item that the book held the secret of ‘necromancy’.31 The next day, Ya‘qub served as Wilson’s guide on Jabal Jirzim. Subsequently, after Wilson’s visit to the Samaritan Synagogue and his sinister conversation with the priest regarding the ancient manuscripts, Wilson recorded that Ya‘qub stated ‘privately’ to him, ‘If you will take me with you to England, I shall take my copy [of the Pentateuch] along with me, and we shall get on well together’. Wilson, about to head onwards to the Galilee and Lebanon, agreed Ya‘qub could accompany him when he passed through Nablus again before his journey back to Britain.32 While this may be early evidence of Ya‘qub’s self-serving entrepreneurial streak, in Ya‘qub’s own account Wilson made this promise during his efforts to persuade Ya‘qub to venture down the well.33 Whatever the truth, this journey was not to be. When Ya‘qub saw Wilson several weeks later, he informed the traveller, in Wilson’s words, ‘that the declaration of his intention to go to Britain with me, had raised

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such a squall in the small tub of his community, as had nearly blown the bottom out of it; and that he had been obliged to forego his purpose’. While Wilson made a ‘moving speech’ about his ‘disappointment’ if he could not get his hands on Ya‘qub’s Pentateuch, he was secretly able to purchase a bundle of documents ‘from a Samaritan, whose name I promised not to mention’.34 *** Ya‘qub would have to wait eleven more years for his journey abroad. Information on this intervening time comes only from Notices, marked by Orientalist sensibilities and, possibly, Ya‘qub’s liberality with the truth.35 Ya‘qub recorded that he served as treasurer of Jenin and forty-five surrounding villages between 1848 and 1851.36 He also continued to guide Western travellers in the Nablus and Jabal Jirzim area as he had done Wilson, though probably not to the same frequency as he would do in later years; one traveller who did mention Ya‘qub in his account of this period was Stanley, visiting Palestine in 1851.37 Most significantly, during this period, Ya‘qub made the acquaintance of Edward Rogers, then an official in the Jerusalem consulate. While Wilson was the initial catalyst of Ya‘qub’s interest in travelling to the West, Rogers was the agent through which it would eventually come about. Yet Nabulsi local politics would intervene. Fighting between the Tuqan and ‘Abd al-Hadi families led to the latter’s temporary triumph, and exile of the Samaritans’ Tuqan protectors to the Black Sea port of Trebizond. Difficult days followed, in which ‘Abd al-Samari was accused by the new administration of having extorted bribes, the allegation having ‘such an effect upon him in his declining years, that he died broken-hearted’ in 1851. The Samaritans were ordered to pay 111,000 piastres, for which Ya‘qub recounted they had to sell their ‘jewelry, furniture, copper kitchen utensils […] and, indeed, everything that would realise any value’. After going to Jerusalem to seek James Finn’s aid, and journeying to Jaffa with the intent to leave Palestine (so he claimed, to join his exiled former employers in the Black Sea port of Trebizond), Ya‘qub was arrested by the Nablus governor Mahmud ‘Abd al-Hadi. Dramatically asserting that Mahmud’s ‘desire was to annihilate Jacob Shelaby from the earth’, Ya‘qub claimed to have been tortured, bound in heavy iron chains, and kept in near-starvation conditions ‘in a very small dungeon’ in Nablus. It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which Ya‘qub embellished his account of this chapter of his life to give him an air of romance, but it could easily belong to the pages of the Arabian Nights. Ya‘qub’s mother sold her family home in an unsuccessful attempt to raise the money to secure his release; more successful, however, was her smuggling into the prison of tools to enable his escape. He claimed to have freed his fellow inmates, including ‘a Bedouin Chief, a Prince among his people’, restrained them from murdering the sleeping guards and escaped night-time patrols in the bazaars of Nablus by scaling the city walls. Fleeing their pursuers into the Jordan Valley, eventually the fugitives encountered a Bedouin encampment. Ya‘qub stayed with the tribe two months, ‘during which time (as I could not from religious scruples eat the meat which they had slaughtered) I took only bread and milk’. Finally, he reached Jerusalem, where he claimed British protection and lived for some time with the Finns and Rogers.

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Ya‘qub returned to Nablus after Mahmud’s (again, temporary) downfall, to find ‘the whole of the Samaritan community in deep poverty, their houses mortgaged, and every valuable sold’. Yet their suffering was Ya‘qub’s opportunity, an opening for his long-desired journey to Britain. He was tasked by the Samaritan priest Amran (or Amram) with lobbying the British government for further protection of the community, and to elicit donations among sympathetic Evangelicals. Amran authored an Arabic petition, beseeching ‘the people of mercy and charity’ – that is, Victorian Evangelicals – to view ‘one of the sons of our Community, Jacob esh Shelaby, our Agent and faithful Trustee’ with ‘the eyes of mercy’, and Finn and Rogers also provided commendatory letters, reproduced in Notices, and printed in the Jewish Chronicle in November 1854.38 Ya‘qub’s journey could conveniently be made in the company of Rogers, who was due a period of leave. Probably in early September 1854, aged twenty-four or twenty-five, Ya‘qub finally arrived in Britain.39 *** In London, Ya‘qub stayed at 10 Carlisle Street, Soho Square, with the father of Edward Thomas and Mary Eliza Rogers, the renowned woodcarver William Gibb Rogers.40 Ya‘qub quickly and easily found success in the immediate political and financial objectives set by Amran. His appearance in London, throwing himself at British mercy, conveniently dovetailed with British priorities in the Eastern Mediterranean, increasing influence among sections of the population. Though the Samaritans were numerically insignificant, British patronage of them allowed Britain to present itself as a defender of oppressed minorities against Islamic persecution and Ottoman apathy and ineffectiveness. Barely had Ya‘qub arrived in September, than Lord Clarendon at the Foreign Office provided him with a donation of £50 (around £4,000 in current values) for the Samaritan community.41 In April 1855, British protection of the Samaritans became official policy, as Clarendon wrote to Finn in Jerusalem, Nevin Moore in Beirut, the British consular agent William Kayat in Jaffa, and Stratford de Redcliffe in Istanbul, ‘to instruct you to afford to [the Samaritans], in case of need, such protection as may be proper towards [British] subjects’.42 Ya‘qub also made numerous public engagements and private audiences with the great and good among Victorian Evangelicals, becoming a cause célèbre. Presenting him as a Biblical curio, the newspapers making much of the fact that ‘England has never before received a visit from any member of this interesting people (the Samaritans)’.43 As the Anglo-Irish aristocrat and Orientalist Catherine Tobin noted after encountering Ya‘qub back in Palestine several years later, his name had ‘become well known in England’, and ‘excited a great sensation among vast numbers of most influential people, both clergy and laymen’.44 The calibre of supporters Ya‘qub attracted can be gauged from the register of the first donors printed at the back of Notices. Particularly notable are that perennial supporter of Christian Zionist causes, Lord Shaftesbury; Alexander McCaul, discussed above in Chapter 4; the Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield; the vice-chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge; John Spencer-Churchill, grandfather of Winston

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Churchill; Culling Eardley, founder of the Evangelical Alliance, treasurer of the London Missionary Society, and prominent campaigner on behalf of non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire; and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who knew Ya‘qub from his journey in Palestine three years earlier.45 Ya‘qub’s appearance in London fuelled the Victorians’ fascination with the Holy Land, and directed Evangelical minds towards their ideological goals for Palestine’s future. Initially acting as Ya‘qub’s publicist, Edward Rogers held out to Evangelicals the hope ‘that kindness shown to this community, by a Christian people, may induce them to make more serious enquiries into the Evangelical truths’ – in other words, that through Ya‘qub, the door could be opened to the conversion of the Samaritans to Protestantism.46 In some circles, Ya‘qub’s journey was even taken as a sign of Biblical prophecy: with strongly sectarian wording, the Belfast News-Letter stated that Ya‘qub’s ‘visit was an illustration of the singular character of the time in which we live, and might be regarded as a striking proof of the authenticity of Scriptures, which were never more audaciously attacked than at present by Infidels and Papists’.47 A sketch of Ya‘qub’s activities during the remainder of his time abroad can be pieced together from press reports and a few later accounts of travellers who encountered him back in the Eastern Mediterranean. One colourful incident soon after his arrival demonstrates that controversy quickly began to follow him, in this case during his visit to the village of Isle Brewers in England’s southwest county of Somerset. Ya‘qub’s visit to the rural location owed to the village’s Anglican vicar Joseph Wolff, a German-born Jewish convert to Protestant Christianity. As a missionary Wolff had travelled widely in efforts to convert Jewish communities, bringing him in 1821 to Palestine, where he encountered Ya‘qub’s uncle in Jaffa. Ya‘qub paid Wolff a return visit from 23 to 27 November 1854.48 Wolff provided details of the visit in his memoir. As Wolff and his wife were out when Ya‘qub arrived, ‘Jelebee’ was forced by Wolff ’s servants to wait outside the house. After Wolff returned, accompanied by Edward Rogers, ‘Jelebee cooked a dinner at the Vicarage, in the Samaritan fashion, which was liked by all’. Yet cultural misunderstandings subsequently led to an incident which briefly put Ya‘qub’s fundraising mission in jeopardy: One day, Dr. and Lady Georgiana Wolff walked out with Mr. Rogers and Jelebee, when some pigs passed by, which are a horror in the eyes of the Samaritans; and Jelebee said in Arabic, Allah yalan al-khan-zeer kulla-hoom, which means, “God curse the pigs, every one of them.” This was explained to the parishioners, and they got angry with Jelebee, because he had “overlooked” their pigs with an evil eye; and, unfortunately, next day one of these pigs was drowned: on which, all said, “If only this fellow, with his singular dress, was out of the place, we should be very glad.” Wolff could scarcely get 10s. [shillings] for him, because he had cursed the pigs; but the gentry and clergy were generous, and subscribed about £20 for the Samaritan before his departure.49

Ya‘qub also spent several interesting and eventful months in British-occupied Ireland. He crossed the Irish Sea in mid- to late-1855, after spending around a

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year in England.50 This journey does not seem to have been part of his initial itinerary: Clarendon’s letter of April 1855 asserts that Ya‘qub was then ‘about to return to Syria’, and it seems likely this was intended when Edward Rogers returned to Palestine, accompanied by Mary, on a ship which departed from London Bridge on 14 June.51 The reasons for Ya‘qub’s failure to accompany them, and prompting his journey to Ireland instead, remain unclear. One or more of the Protestant clergymen with whom he would be closely associated in Ireland may have invited him to visit the adjacent British colony. In addition, particularly given his increasing command of the English language – as Oxford theologian Charles Marriott noted in April 1855, ‘by adopting a simple style of grammar’ he was ‘able to converse with Yakub himself in English’ – Ya‘qub may have been relishing his stay too much to be in any hurry to return home.52 Victorian Britain and Ireland certainly offered possibilities very different to those within the confines of Nablus, although Ya‘qub would find out that his new temporary home was subject to its own codes of behaviour. In the meantime, his lengthy absence from Palestine created tension in his community in Nablus. Visiting the Samaritans during Ya‘qub’s absence, Mary Rogers reported that while Amran was grateful for the British protection Ya‘qub had obtained for the Samaritans, and others ‘were highly amused’ by the stories she told of Ya‘qub’s English exploits, his mother made an emotional appeal that spoke of her doubts that he would ever return: ‘How long shall I wait for my son Jacob, and not see him? Why does he stay so long away from his country and his people? Why did you leave him in England, lady? I shall die and never see him again’. Similarly, Rogers found Ya‘qub’s erstwhile fiancée, a young girl named Zora, in a dejected state, after Ya‘qub’s lengthy absence had provoked Amran to break their engagement and arrange her marriage to another man. Rogers could plainly see, by [Zora’s] manners and by her few words, that she was angry with herself and with her absent betrothed, and still more angry that she had not been permitted to await his return. She even seemed embittered against the English people, as if they had lured Jacob away from her […]53

Mills, who had encountered Ya‘qub in Britain and, in his words, ‘contributed my mite to the good cause’, also visited the Samaritans during Ya‘qub’s absence. He reported that Shalmah, Amran’s father, ‘had heard that Shelaby had met with great success’ in fundraising in Britain, ‘but had remitted nothing up to that time, which had put him in a terrible rage’. Mills ‘could neither introduce any other subject, nor calm the present storm’, as the senior priest ‘denounc[ed] Shelaby in the most unmeasured style, and would listen to nothing else’.54 Over a decade later, another traveller remarked that Amran pointedly described Ya‘qub as ‘neither a wise man nor a priest, but a rich man’.55 The tension between Ya‘qub and the traditional hierarchy of his community would continue after his return to Palestine, as shall be seen. ***

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Meanwhile, in Ireland, Ya‘qub was once again the centre of attention, though not always for the right reasons. As in London, he was feted in Belfast, Cork and Dublin, though  – in keeping with the nature of the Victorian fascination with Palestine – only amongst the Protestant community. Ya‘qub’s main patron during this time was William McIlwaine, a prominent Anglican clergyman and the rector of Saint George’s Church in Belfast. With McIlwaine’s support Ya‘qub continued his fundraising activities, for instance appearing at two meetings about the Samaritans in Belfast’s Victoria Hall on 10  January 1856 where donations were gathered among ‘the audience […] composed of the most respectable class’. Bearing ‘a document under the seal and signature of Lord Clarendon […] sufficient to authenticate his genuineness’, Ya‘qub was also dressed for the part ‘in the picturesque costume of his country’. However, most of the actual speaking – primarily lectures on Biblical history – was done by McIlwaine and other Protestant luminaries, Ya‘qub explaining that ‘he had only been one year in this country, and he could not speak much English’. McIlwaine also ‘read several documents to show that Mr. Shelaby was not an impostor  – a rumour which had originated in Cork, having gone abroad, that he was an Italian and a Roman Catholic’.56 This unusual announcement was rendered necessary by an article which had appeared in November 1855 in the Belfast News-Letter’s rival, the pro-Catholic Cork Examiner.57 The Examiner’s coverage of Ya‘qub’s arrival in Ireland was irreverent and sceptical compared to its Protestant competitor. The Examiner’s columnist had noted the presence in Cork of ‘a strapping fellow, of goodly stature and excellent proportions, parading the streets […] his Eastern dress an object of intense interest to a rather numerous cortege of little boys’. Yet the Examiner had been ‘ignorant of the name, calling, and country of our showylooking Eastern visitor’ until the visit of three anonymous informants. These ‘hard-headed people’ had apparently observed an ‘animated dialogue carried on, in a carriage of the Cork and Passage Railway, between the Samaritan and a wellknown interpreter’. The report claimed that, upon learning the interpreter was a Catholic, Ya‘qub displayed ‘pious and patriotic delight’, responding ‘Glory be to God, I have at last found a good Christian that I can speak to in my own tongue!’ A number of question marks are raised by these conspiratorial accusations, not least by the anonymity of the witnesses, and their comprehension of Ya‘qub’s conversation with the interpreter when, as the article admits, they had no knowledge of Arabic. But the article does demonstrate that some sceptics desired to derail Ya‘qub’s mission, and received support in this aim from the pro-Catholic press. The article made further allegations, revealing and exacerbating a growing controversy around Ya‘qub’s his activities in Ireland. While the Examiner stated that Ya‘qub had proclaimed his own conversion and had been ‘for some Sundays’ attending a Protestant church in Cork, it cast doubt over the sincerity of his departure from the Samaritan faith by recounting a ‘miserable little incident’ in which he ‘refus[ed] a slice of delicious ham at the table of a citizen

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who afforded him his elegant hospitality’.58 With a caustic and mocking tone, the journalist wrote that to such lengths have doubt and uncertainty risen, that the grave men who frequent the Commercials [i.e. stock exchanges] are more busy with the faith of Jocob [sic] Esh Shelaby, than with the price of corn, the rise on sugar, or the war in the Crimea. The question of “Christian, or no Christian?” has already been debated with a laudable animation; and the secondary proposition, of whether he belongs to Rome or Canterbury [i.e. was Catholic or Anglican Protestant], has received considerable attention. In fact, there are people so incredulous about his conversion, that nothing less will satisfy them than the time, place, and certificate of his baptism!

One Cork resident apparently wrote to the Foreign Office in an attempt to confirm Ya‘qub’s credentials, receiving the reply that while ‘Lord Clarendon had no reason to doubt his being what he was represented’ when Ya‘qub had ‘stated his intention shortly to return to Samaria’, Clarendon was ‘not aware upon what authority, or in whose behalf, Mr. Shelaby is now collecting subscriptions in Ireland’. From presenting a convenient opportunity for imperial philanthropy, Ya‘qub was now a minor embarrassment to the Foreign Office. This marked the start of an antipathy that persisted into the 1870s and 1880s, when official diplomatic correspondence warned that Ya‘qub was ‘not entitled to put himself forward as the representative of the Samaritan Community or as charged in any way with its general or special interests’, and that ‘there are various accusations against him of dishonesty at a previous period of his life’.59 The Examiner complained bitterly of the generosity of wealthy Protestants to the Samaritans, with Ya‘qub becoming ‘the cherished guest of the well-born and the exclusive’, while dire poverty was widespread in Ireland itself. With dripping sarcasm, the Examiner highlighted the irony of Ya‘qub’s journey to ‘our affluent island, and […] its cities teeming with riches’, on a fundraising mission to a land still recovering from the devastation of the Potato Famine. The writer argued that ‘however interesting the case of the Samaritans at Nablus […] it is quite possible to find objects of greater necessity nearer home, in garrets and cellars’, and lamented that ‘the poor at home have not a handsome, slashing ambassador, in a picturesque garb, to excite the double emotion of interest and compassion’. The article also alleged that Ya‘qub had revealed his true purpose in Ireland to be ‘a dealer in jewels and diamonds’ – probably a reference to precious Samaritan artefacts which Ya‘qub had brought with him on his journey – and added, again sarcastically, that ‘it is satisfactory to know, that while Jacob is advancing the cause of the Samaritan community at Nablus, he is also taking admirable care of Number One’. With its mentions of Ya‘qub’s ‘handsome, slashing’ appearance, the article also hinted at the interest taken in him by some women, with possible aspersions of impropriety in this regard. Asserting that ‘the bare recital of one-tenth of the attentions bestowed on the Protestant Samaritan by our fair countrywomen, would make a

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touching record, honourable alike to his powers of fascination, and their womanly enthusiasm’, the writer especially noted ‘a band of young ladies’ with a particular penchant for Ya‘qub. Decades later, after encountering Ya‘qub’s son in Haifa, Oliphant reminisced more explicitly that Ya‘qub ‘had been in London under the title of “The Prince of the Samaritans,” and the romance which attended his style and dignity had, it was reported, even captivated a fair Englishwoman, who was willing to become a Samaritan for his sake’.60 This claim may be supported by Amran’s annulment of Ya‘qub’s engagement, justified, according to Mills, ‘on the plea of Yacub’s dishonourable conduct as their messenger to England, coupled with the report that he was living there like the Gentiles’, perhaps a veiled reference to a rumoured love affair.61 But the most serious allegation levelled at Ya‘qub, not only from those who belittled his fundraising mission but also from his erstwhile supporters, was that of financial dishonesty. This aspersion, made very publicly in the press, dogged Ya‘qub for the last months of his trip, and seems to have finally prompted Ya‘qub’s return home. On 4 February 1856, a letter penned by George Fisk, an Anglican clergyman in Lichfield and London who had previously sponsored Ya‘qub and had contributed a preface to Notices, and the Anglican chaplain in Jerusalem William Douglas Veitch, appeared on the front page of the Times. In the apparent absence of reputable trustees being appointed to safeguard the donations which Ya‘qub raised, Fisk and Veitch announced they had ‘withdrawn all authority from […] Yacoob-esh-Shelaby to use their names in any manner to enable him to collect money’.62 From Belfast, Ya‘qub quickly wrote back (probably with McIlwaine’s help) to the Times. Protesting his innocence of any wrongdoing, he asserted that Fisk and Veitch’s letter was his ‘first intimation’ of their demand for the appointment of trustees.63 Soon after, McIlwaine wrote to the Belfast NewsLetter, ‘to protect from injustice a defenceless stranger’. He claimed that Fisk and Veitch’s accusations were based on misunderstanding, partly resulting from Ya‘qub’s ‘very imperfect knowledge of the English language’, and that Ya‘qub had not received communication from them since leaving England six months before. Fisk pinned the blame on the absent Edward Rogers, and a group of Belfast Protestant luminaries asserted that Ya‘qub was ‘not only willing, but anxious, that trustees should be appointed to superintend the distribution of the Samaritan Fund, now that the nature of such appointment has been explained to him; and further, that he has not even up to this time had exclusive control of the sums collected’. It was apparently Ya‘qub’s ‘intention, as soon as he conveniently can, to proceed to London’ for the purpose of appointing the trustees with his bankers.64 The issue was apparently finally resolved in May 1856, when Fisk again wrote to the Times to announce his wish to ‘recall my prohibition’ of Ya‘qub using his name to elicit donations. He also attached the full balance sheet of Ya‘qub’s twenty months to date in Britain and Ireland. While this was clearly meant to dispel any lingering doubt over Ya‘qub’s integrity, the figures nevertheless reveal that the bulk of the money which Ya‘qub had raised on the trip had been spent on his own expenses. Ya‘qub had raised a total of £576 6s 1d in donations and sales of copies of Notices, equivalent to over £34,000 or almost $47,000 in current values. This sum may be measured against £311 10s spent as Ya‘qub’s personal expenses (‘including

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board, lodging, domestic expenses, travelling, &c., in various towns in England and Ireland’). This large figure, as well as the substantial sums spent on ‘advertising expenses in newspapers’, ‘printing circulars’, and other sundries, meant that there was only £141 8s 7d for the trustees to safeguard; accounting for £50 which had been sent back to the Samaritans in Nablus – perhaps to assuage the community’s growing displeasure with Ya‘qub – this meant that no less than two-thirds of the money raised had already been spent on Ya‘qub and his journey.65 In summer 1856, that journey finally ended with Ya‘qub’s return to Palestine, an event again reported in several London newspapers. In a meeting in the presence of Finn in Jerusalem on 7 August, Ya‘qub, Amran and another member of the community officially requested the transfer of the funds from the trustees in London, and ‘agreed among ourselves for the amount of remuneration to be given to Jacob esh Shelaby for the pains he has taken on our behalf ’.66 Supporting Ya‘qub to the last, the Belfast News-Letter commented that the letter provided ‘unassailable testimony to the genuineness of Shelaby’s mission to these countries, and to the perfect blamelessness of his character’, and also vindicated McIlwaine for his ‘spirited’ defence of Ya‘qub, with a ‘decided victory over the malice of his, and of Shelaby’s enemies’.67 Ya‘qub’s first visit to the West was thus attended only by modest financial success on behalf of his community. Its greatest significance for Ya‘qub himself, however, was in opening his eyes to the privileges which a close association with the upperclass Evangelicals and Orientalists obsessed with the Samaritans could provide him. It also revealed the kinds of hostility which could emerge from those circles, as a result of their inbuilt distrust of ‘Orientals’ particularly when they began to exercise their own agency, although whether Ya‘qub learned the lessons from his incautious behaviour seems somewhat doubtful. As the final section of this chapter will show, Ya‘qub’s first journey to Britain and Ireland was the beginning of a long and intimate involvement with the Victorians.

‘Many an Unwary Traveller’: Later encounters with Ya‘qub The main source material for Ya‘qub’s life after his return to Palestine is once again the accounts of Western travellers. One such account, authored in the late 1860s, notes Ya‘qub’s claim that ‘had seen all the principal scholars who have visited the Holy Land for the last twenty years’.68 While this claim seems slightly premature in chronology – Ya‘qub’s work as a guide took off in earnest only after his return to Britain – his cameo appearance in tens of travel narratives published from the 1860s to the 1890s testifies to the fact that he indeed acted as an interlocutor for many Western visitors to the Nablus area. Another traveller in the 1880s testified that Ya‘qub ‘asked for our cards, and then shewed us quite a large number left by great men and others who had visited him on previous occasions’.69 Readjusting to life in Nablus after his extended sojourn away cannot have been easy, particularly if  – as the above-cited accounts of Mary Rogers and Mills suggest  – he returned under something of a cloud. Nevertheless, Rogers

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claimed that Ya‘qub ‘soon reaccustomed himself to the simple yet active life of the Samaritans’. Several sources note that, with some of the proceeds of his journey, he established a school for Samaritan children, including girls (Rogers states that this school, held in a room of the Samaritan synagogue, was modestly named ‘the Shellabi School’).70 Return home also soon brought the start of family life. While his initial marital plans with his first fiancée Zora had been frustrated during his time away, in 1857 Ya‘qub married a woman named Shemseh, described as ‘very pretty’ and ‘exceedingly good’ in a letter from Amran reproduced in Rogers’s Domestic Life in Palestine; their first child, a boy named Emîn ‘who resembles the moon’, was born on 1 July 1858.71 A detailed account of Shemseh’s appearance and dress was later provided by Isabel Burton, who encountered Ya‘qub and his family in 1871. Noting that Shemseh was ‘more richly dressed’ than the other Samaritan women, indicating that Ya‘qub had done well for himself and his family, Burton focused on Shemseh’s jewellery, including a head covering ‘of mail of gold, and literally covered with gold coins’ and ‘diamond and enamel earrings’, as well as her hair ‘dressed in a thousand little plaits down her back’.72 Three of the couple’s children were described by the English clergyman James Bardsley, visiting Nablus in 1868: Ya‘qub’s son was ‘a most amusing pocket edition of the grand portfolio’; while reflecting the mid-nineteenth-century integration of Palestine into global trade markets, their daughters were ‘dressed in hideous yellow Manchester prints’.73 Ya‘qub quickly and efficiently established himself as the local guide and host for Western travellers in Nablus, ‘the showman-general of the place’ as Lady Strangford put it; Henry Baker Tristram’s comment that, by the 1860s, Ya‘qub was ‘well known to every English traveller’, seems warranted.74 From the accounts of some Victorian visitors, it appears that Ya‘qub practically kept watch over the entrance to Nablus, ready to pounce whenever European travellers were spotted approaching. ‘The first person we saw’, Strangford reported of her journey in 1859, ‘on reaching Nablous, was Jacob Shellaby’.75 On his journey over two decades later, another traveller similarly reported that, after arriving at a campsite in an olive grove outside Nablus, ‘We had no sooner got out of the saddle and drunk our afternoon cup of tea, than we were waited upon by Jacob Shellaby’.76 With ‘really a fine commanding presence’ as Bardsley wrote, Ya‘qub provided all Westerners he encountered with a memorable experience, although many took the information he provided with a pinch of salt. Travellers apart made assertions ranging from the accusation that there was ‘little dependence to be placed on Shellaby’s word’, to his being not ‘equally trustworthy’ as he was ‘communicative’.77 Not only acting as a guide to the Samaritan quarter and Jabal Jirzim, Ya‘qub clearly relished the opportunity to host travellers in his own home, described by Tristram as ‘spotlessly clean, and furnished more elaborately than is the habit of the Mussulmans’, with ‘an upper gallery, frequented by the ladies of the house’ in the reception room where visitors were entertained. On this occasion, Ya‘qub demonstrated the extent to which he had imbibed the manners of a Victorian gentleman, ‘prid[ing] himself on understanding how to preside at the tea-table’. He also evidently liked to share a stronger drink with his guests, presenting

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Tristram with three bottles of wine.78 This clashed with the teetotal practices of some Evangelical visitors. When, on the occasion of a visit of a teetotal American Unitarian clergyman in 1881 (by which time Ya‘qub had grandchildren), Ya‘qub ‘ordered wines, upon which we were soon to have a good time’, his guest ‘explained that we did not indulge in wine-drinking’, a fact which Ya‘qub ‘somehow could not understand’.79 Several travellers, including George Grove, stayed overnight in Ya‘qub’s home during their time in Nablus.80 *** These hours in the company of Victorian visitors were not only about pleasure for Ya‘qub, but were undoubtedly also for business. Ya‘qub exacted a fee for his services and company, with the proceeds of which he was not only able to support himself and his family – one account notes that travellers’ tips were ‘his principal means of livelihood’ – but also to continue to fund his school.81 He understood that this income was dependent on Evangelicals’ fascination with the Samaritans, and thus Orientalized and romanticized himself to encourage a more lucrative flow. From his time in Britain and Ireland onwards, he continually gave Westerners the impression that he was the Samaritans’ temporal and/or spiritual leader – ‘the self-styled chief of the Samaritans’, as Agnes Smith put it – a deception which put him at odds with the Samaritans’ traditional community leaders.82 Ya‘qub also revealed to Smith, when she and her companions encouraged him to convert to Protestant Christianity, that ‘he knew that by remaining a Samaritan he made himself much more interesting’, although he told another visitor ‘that he is himself secretly a Christian, and that he is only waiting for the adherence of the rest of the community to the Christian faith, to declare himself openly’, when he calculated this would increase travellers’ pecuniary generosity.83 Ya‘qub also profiteered from Westerners’ desire to see or to possess the Samaritans’ material heritage. Travellers’ accounts here provide an enlightening depiction of how precious artefacts could be obtained by Victorian collectors through opportunistic local middlemen. Ya‘qub made money in two ways. The first involved charging travellers a fee to view the Samaritans’ historic manuscripts within their synagogue, especially their most sacred scroll which Conder described as a ‘golden goose, as the manuscript brings in a yearly income’.84 Ya‘qub frequently acted as an agent in this transaction, which also sometimes involved the junior Samaritan priests. Several travellers describe this as occurring in secret from the rest of the Samaritan community, who opposed the turning of their sacred texts into a spectacle for cold, hard lucre. For instance, Grove recounted that ‘in consideration of a liberal backsheesh, and the present of my knife’, Ya‘qub and a priest showed him the scroll by night. Grove admitted that this ‘would, no doubt, have been very much resented by the community, if they had known of it’, a fact which gave the episode ‘a curious zest’ for Grove.85 Tristram reported that while other Samaritans were nearby, Ya‘qub ‘seemed unwilling or unable to give the information we sought’ about seeing the scrolls. When the others had left, apart from a younger priest who ‘was evidently on most intimate terms’ with Ya‘qub,

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arrangements were made for Tristram to see the Samaritans’ most precious scroll ‘for a liberal backshish’, but only ‘under a promise of secresy’ (sic) in ‘the darkness of the night’ (Tristram also purchased a lesser manuscript he was offered, for the purpose of ‘propitiating the priest’).86 Burton similarly described Ya‘qub showing her a collection of manuscripts in the synagogue, but only after he had ‘sent out of the room a few Samaritans’.87 The second way involved the direct sale of manuscripts and objects of varying age. Several travellers record Ya‘qub offering them the chance to buy objects of dubious antiquity. One recounted how, in the early 1860s, he allowed Ya‘qub to ‘take a peep through’ his ‘very excellent’ binoculars whilst they stood on Jabal Jirzim. Ya‘qub apparently pestered the traveller until he obtained the binoculars permanently for himself, in exchange for some ‘fragments of old manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch’ and ‘a promise of a lasting interest in his warmest prayers!’ Back in Ya‘qub’s home, the traveller was shown a carved inscription which Ya‘qub claimed to have found on Jabal Jirzim; ‘trusting too much to Shellaby’s word’, the traveller considered acquiring the object for the British Museum. Subsequently, the traveller ‘found that Shellaby’s word was not trustworthy, and that the stone was probably of no antiquarian value’.88 Bardsley related that when alone with Ya‘qub, the latter ‘surreptitiously took out a manuscript […] which he said he was anxious to sell me. “Ancient, very ancient”’. Likening Ya‘qub to the Greek antiquarian Constantine Simonides who achieved notoriety as a forger in the 1850s, Bardsley pointedly estimated that the manuscript dated ‘from about the middle of the nineteenth century’.89 Accounts of travellers with the Palestine Exploration Fund shed further light on Ya‘qub’s activities. Charles Warren provided a detailed account of his encounter with Ya‘qub in 1867 while surveying for the PEF.90 Warren was invited by Ya‘qub to Nablus to observe the Samaritans’ Passover ceremony in April 1867, and stayed among the Samaritans for six days. Warren’s impressions of Ya‘qub were mixed. He paid tribute to Ya‘qub’s force of personality, which was able to bring disputing wings of the Samaritans together for Passover in advance of Warren’s visit, ‘from which’, Warren claimed, ‘he hoped to profit handsomely’. Noting disputes among the Samaritans during their Passover sacrifice, Warren expressed that ‘Jacob is truly a great man among his own, for he has so absorbed within his grasp all the reins of office, that whether for good or evil, he alone of mortals, can keep them in order’. Warren also depicted Ya‘qub’s influence over the Samaritans in more sinister terms, writing that ‘it appeared as though the people were as puppets dancing to Jacob’s wire-pulling’. Warren alleged that Amran, who had borne Ya‘qub little love since his time abroad, was prevented from talking with Warren whenever Ya‘qub was present; Amran finally managed to inform Warren that ‘He felt he was gradually dying day by day, and talked of being fed on poisonous food’. Whether or not Ya‘qub really was attempting to hurry the demise of the Samaritan community’s traditional leader in this way, Warren reflected that Amran ‘had gradually been pushed into the background by the superior knowledge of Jacob: knowledge of the world, I must say, for, as far as I could ascertain, Jacob had received no education, and could not even read or write the Samaritan characters’.

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Ya‘qub subjected Warren and his British assistant ‘to much questioning about the effect of certain acids […] it was clear that the questioning was with the object of ascertaining a means whereby new parchment could, when written on, be made to look ancient’. Warren gathered that Ya‘qub’s ‘existing knowledge of such matters was [already] considerable’, and felt obliged to ‘warn future tourists not to trust too implicitly in the appearance’ of supposedly ancient Samaritan manuscripts offered to them for sale. Nevertheless, Warren himself accepted several manuscripts from Ya‘qub: a fragment for the PEF’s collection which Ya‘qub claimed had been snipped from the Samaritans’ most precious and ancient scroll (while Warren doubted this, he nevertheless considered it ‘an article of great value’ which ‘should be deposited in some museum where it may be of use’), with Ya‘qub claiming in addition ‘that if desirable he could obtain the whole Pentateuch [scroll], except that portion exposed to view’; and other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artefacts as gifts for William Thomson, the Archbishop of York and a founder of the PEF, and for Warren himself. Ya‘qub was photographed ‘holding the pipe of his argileh to his mouth with one hand and giving with the other’ one artefact to Warren.91 Perhaps sensing Warren’s growing mistrust of him, Ya‘qub ‘would at the time have no payments for these articles, and only wished them forwarded home in hopes that the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund would see their value and take him into favour and help the cause of his people’. On Warren’s departure, he paid Ya‘qub ‘a most liberal backshish’ for the food he had supplied to the surveyors during their time in Nablus, whilst Ya‘qub bade farewell to the travellers with ‘as angelic a cast to his countenance as he could summon up’ and a kiss to Warren’s hand. Yet the artefacts he had given to Warren would prove a bone of contention. Warren recorded that, after sending the items back to Britain and waiting several months for a reply from the PEF, ‘Jacob became more and more importunate, and his great love for the Palestine Exploration Fund gradually curdled into hatred’. Eventually, three years later, finding Ya‘qub ‘one day at Beyrout much in want of money’, Warren belatedly paid him £5 for the items, a sum at which Ya‘qub ‘made a wry face’. A similar account of Ya‘qub featured in Conder’s Tent Work in Palestine, after Conder encountered him in Nablus in 1872. Introducing Ya‘qub as ‘a gentleman who is an accomplished savant’, Conder continued In England he appeared for some time in the character of a Samaritan prince. He supplied travellers with many ancient Samaritan hymn books, purloined, it is said, while the congregation were reverently prostrating themselves. He described to us with immense gusto the mode of preparing ancient manuscripts, by steeping a skin in coffee-grounds, and placing it for a month or two under the pillows of the diwan. Many an unwary traveller has been taken in by his false antiquities, stones, and manuscripts.92

Ya‘qub was not the only enterprising forger operating in Palestine at the time. Moses Shapira, a Russian Jewish convert to Protestantism and antiques dealer

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in Jerusalem, attempted to market forged Moabite figurines to the PEF (Conder was convinced) in 1872, and a Biblical scroll to the British Museum in 1883; the unmasking of the latter hoax by the French Bible scholar Charles ClermontGanneau led to Shapira’s suicide.93 Ya‘qub’s methods appear to have been cruder than Shapira’s  – Conder reported being shown ‘a large fragment of green slag from some old glassworks’ which Ya‘qub asserted was ‘a gigantic emerald’ – but he nevertheless continued to make a living out of the flow of visitors through Nablus. Yet there were consequences to Ya‘qub’s continuous profiteering from ancient Samaritan heritage and attempts to exert control over his community. While the precise details of intra-Samaritan disputes are difficult to discern from Western travellers’ accounts, Conder provided an outline of Ya‘qub’s continuing story. After Amran’s death in 1874, with fears over a possible attempt of Ya‘qub to sell off the Samaritans’ most sacred scroll (as he had apparently offered to Warren), and Ya‘qub’s ‘holding an heretical passover [sic] of his own on Gerizim’, he and his family were expelled from Nablus, and were encountered by Conder in Jerusalem in 1875.94 This narrative of events is corroborated by another traveller visiting Nablus in April 1875, who reported that the ‘intelligent and well-informed’ Ya‘qub had, ‘owing to some recent dispute […] separated from the rest of his brethren; and intended, he informed us, to keep a special passover for himself and his family’.95 Nevertheless, accounts already cited of several travellers who visited Nablus in the 1880s show that this exile was only temporary, and Ya‘qub returned to his activities in the city.96 Ya‘qub travelled extensively around the Eastern Mediterranean in the 1870s. He was encountered not only in Nablus, Beirut and Jerusalem, but also in Cairo, where his path crossed that of the eccentric English traveller, geographer and Bible scholar Charles Tilston Beke. In December 1873, aged seventy-three, Beke embarked on a bizarre fool’s errand: a three-month expedition to Egypt and the northwest Arabian Peninsula, in an attempt to disprove the widely accepted location of Mount Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula, and move the scene of Moses’s receipt of the Ten Commandments across the Gulf of ‘Aqaba, using his Biblical and geographic arguments. In a posthumously published series of letters to his wife, Beke recorded his impressions of Ya‘qub. Beke first encountered the ‘large, portly, well-dressed native’ who could speak ‘very good English’ on Christmas Eve 1873 in the courtyard of the British consulate in Cairo, near the legendary Shepheard’s Hotel. The Cairo consul at this time was no less than Ya‘qub’s old mentor Edward Rogers: over two decades since their first meeting in Palestine, Ya‘qub had travelled to visit his old friend in the Egyptian capital. Striking up a conversation with Beke, Ya‘qub realized that they had previously met during the Englishman’s earlier visit to Palestine; he had offered Beke a brandy after the traveller had tumbled down the steps of the Samaritan synagogue in Nablus. Reporting to his wife that the two men ‘had a long chat’, Beke expressed that he ‘really should be very glad’ for Ya‘qub to accompany him to Arabia as his dragoman, and noted that ‘Rogers tells me he is a highly respectable man’.97 The following day, Ya‘qub joined Beke, Rogers and his wife, and an assortment of other Europeans present in Cairo, for ‘a very pleasant Christmas’, with ‘the orthodox roast Turkey [sic], and plum-pudding and mince

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pies, with plenty of champagne’.98 Ya‘qub humoured Beke’s ideas about Mount Sinai, and his presentation of Samaritan beliefs on the subject further convinced Beke of his the correctness of his theory, to the extent that he namechecked Ya‘qub in a letter on the subject to the Times.99 Yet further experience of Ya‘qub taught Beke to be more wary. Soon after – perhaps after observing Beke’s difficulties in securing further funding for his expedition – Ya‘qub began looking for another dragoman to accompany Beke. On 6 January 1874, Ya‘qub presented Beke with a ‘whole bagful’ of testimonies for a dragoman named Abu Nabut, ‘an intelligent, sound, hale old man’ whom Beke was pleased to learn was a sayid or descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘always of value amongst these people’ as he commented to his wife. Reading the ‘first rate’ testimonies of prior travellers (the essential stock in trade of any successful dragoman) and taking Ya‘qub’s advice, Beke ultimately employed Abu Nabut for a fee of £5 per day from his departure from Cairo until his return to the city.100 As the journey to ‘the true Mount Sinai’ and back lasted thirty-five days, this would ultimately equal the not insignificant sum of £175 (nearly £11,000 or over $15,000 in current values). Given his keen propensity for moneymaking, Ya‘qub surely received a handsome commission for his successful advocacy of Abu Nabut’s services. Ya‘qub sought to profit further from Beke, selling the traveller his Arab scarf or kūfiya, and – in collaboration with Abu Nabut – initially short-changing Beke by obtaining a palanquin for his conveyance across the Arabian sands without the crucial covering to shade him from the sun.101 Nevertheless, Abu Nabut proved a faithful guide to Beke, and won a reputation as ‘the prince of dragomans’ for undertaking the unusual journey.102 *** Ya‘qub also travelled back to Britain multiple times in the 1870s and 1880s. Various pieces of evidence place him in Britain in 1870, 1877, 1884 and 1887. The primary purpose of these later journeys, far less documented than his first eventful journey to the West, was undoubtedly the sale to British collectors of yet more Samaritan manuscripts.103 Such was the reputational damage done to Ya‘qub by travellers’ repeated allegations that the Dublin Anglican clergyman and Hebrew scholar Charles H.H. Wright, in a letter about Ya‘qub to the Belfast News-Letter of 30 January 1884, had to admit that ‘Of his personal character I cannot claim to be any judge, nor do I mean to pass any judgement on the value of the Samaritan MSS., which I understand he is now offering for sale’.104 Yet that Ya‘qub made the costly and laborious journey to Britain no fewer than four times after his first visit (a record of travel that can have been matched by very few indigenous Palestinians in the nineteenth century), indicates that there were enough eager, trusting and wealthy buyers to make these trips worthwhile. Ya‘qub also continued to present himself as working for the well-being of the Samaritan community. In a letter to the Times of March 1874 (possibly written with the aid of Edward Rogers or another British traveller), Ya‘qub complained in terms familiar from the discourse of Notices, of the ‘continual and daily increasing

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molestation and injury’ afflicted upon the Samaritans by ‘the Mahomedan rulers of the Holy Land’, from which only ‘the kind intervention of English gentlemen’ had saved them. The letter dramatically warned that unless more British consular assistance to the Samaritans, which had declined after the Finns’ departure from Jerusalem, was forthcoming, the community expected ‘soon to be utterly destroyed and annihilated’.105 Victorian Evangelicals’ guilty consciences, and Ya‘qub’s ability to ply them with the much-desired artefacts, ensured a continuing tolerance for him from sections of high society, academics, and the clerical elite. Individuals he associated or corresponded with over these years, included the Oxford professor of medicine Henry Acland, at whose home on Oxford’s Broad Street Ya‘qub stayed (and where he may have encountered another of Acland’s erstwhile lodgers, John Ruskin); the aristocratic Anglo-Irish absentee landowner Francis Conyngham; and Joseph Barclay, the third Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem.106 The last traces of Ya‘qub which can be detected in Western sources relate to his final visit to Britain. In mid-March 1887, the Oxford theology don and Orientalist Joseph Estlin Carpenter penned a downbeat letter which appeared in newspapers. ‘There is now in London the Sheikh of the ancient Samaritan people, Jacob-esh-Shellaby’, Carpenter’s letter began. Judging from the tone of the letter, Ya‘qub’s 1887 trip had been less successful than previous visits: while Henry Liddon, another Oxford theologian, had ‘helped him with a donation of 5l. and a hearty letter of commendation’, few others had apparently done so. Asserting that ‘The Catholics have not unnaturally declined to aid, and even the liberal Jews still prefer to have no dealings with the Samaritans’, Carpenter invited concerned Evangelicals to send donations for Ya‘qub to himself. The closing words of his letter reveal a depressing state of affairs: ‘The matter presses. Shellaby has been in London for seven weeks, in a dismal attic in a by-street off Fitzroy-square. He does not know how to plead his cause. Meanwhile his people are entreating him urgently to return’.107 Another individual who donated to Ya‘qub’s cause on this journey was the Scottish minister and missionary Andrew Bonar, who had dropped his Bible down Jacob’s Well outside Nablus in 1839. More than four decades after undergoing the dangerous ordeal of being lowered down the well to retrieve the object on John Wilson’s whim, Ya‘qub wrote to the elderly Bonar, revealing that ‘I am the man who got your book up out of Jacob’s Well’, and beseeching ‘money for my poor brethren’. In response, Bonar ‘got a very little gathered’ for Ya‘qub, who ‘wrote back a thousand thanks, saying that he would keep his letter and put it in the synagogue of his people’.108 Bonar’s belated repayment, bringing Ya‘qub’s involvement with the West full circle, provides an apt closure to Ya‘qub’s long entanglement with the Victorian travellers of the Peaceful Crusade. Ya‘qub returned to Palestine, and passed away in 1889 or 1890, aged about sixty.109 A remarkable life had come to an end. ***

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If Ya‘qub deserves condemnation for wilfully helping to denude his own community of their tangible cultural heritage, he also deserves recognition for his many achievements. He was perhaps the first Palestinian in modern times to have a book printed in his name in the English language; a traveller who skilfully traversed cultural barriers; and a successful businessman, surely no more unscrupulous than many capitalists in Victorian Britain. An ambitious and entrepreneurial figure, Ya‘qub could not be easily harmonized with the pristine, Biblical Orient such as Victorian Evangelicals believed Palestine was. They turned against him as he responded to the demand which they themselves created for Samaritan artefacts. But despite their antipathy, from the late 1850s to the 1880s Ya‘qub enjoyed a heyday as the undisputed tour guide to Nablus, and was just as at home in Belfast, London and Oxford, as in some of the cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. A fitting epitaph may, perhaps, be found in words in a letter he wrote to Barclay, after Barclay’s resignation from the Jerusalem bishopric under something of a cloud, but which may equally apply to Ya‘qub himself: ‘No one can work a great work in the world, and make all pleased with him. Can’t help it, to make some people not glad’.110

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­Chapter 7 ‘A F I R M HA N D U P O N T H E A R A B S’ : L AU R E N C E O L I P HA N T ’ S B LU E P R I N T F O R C O L O N I Z AT IO N

Laurence Oliphant had already lived a colourful life before he developed a sustained interest in Palestine in his last decade. In many ways  – the glib descriptions of the land and people, scenes of the population’s suffering at Ottoman hands, the overarching obsession with Jewish Restoration  – his writing on Palestine, was unexceptional among the travellers of the Peaceful Crusade. Yet for the development of settler colonialism in Palestine, his influence was unmatched by any other nineteenth-century traveller. The first section of this chapter addresses Oliphant’s 1879 journey to the Eastern Mediterranean searching for land for a Jewish colony, and his plans for such a colony in his 1880 work The Land of Gilead. The second section focuses on his subsequent years living in Palestine after 1882. The final section investigates his posthumous influence, and his present-day commemoration by the State of Israel.

‘The Luxuriance of the Hillsides of Gilead’: Planning a settler colony Oliphant’s exploits as globe-trotting journalist, diplomat, novelist and member of parliament, are already recorded in several biographies.1 Nevertheless, the extent to which he was already embedded in settler-colonial structures before his arrival in Palestine deserves emphasis.2 His father, a fervent Evangelical and member of an aristocratic Scottish Highland clan, was part of Britain’s caste of colonial administrators, serving as Attorney-General in Cape Town (where Oliphant was born in 1829) and subsequently Chief Justice in Ceylon. Oliphant was thus inured to the workings of colonialism from an early age. In 1854, he began to follow in his father’s footsteps as a colonial official, by briefly serving the British administration in Canada as Quebec’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs; he wrote of his ambition ‘to remodel […] the whole system upon which the Indian tribes are at present managed’, along lines which he himself recognized were ‘a little arbitrary and despotic’.3 His activities in this post, which included negotiating treaties with indigenous tribes to open up regions to white settlement, constitute a clear precedent to his later settler-colonial plans for Palestine.4

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Some of Oliphant’s activities as superintendent, along with his travels in the American Midwest, are detailed in his 1855 Minnesota and the Far West. Oliphant celebrated settler efforts in North America, presaged of course on the erasure of native presence. Travelling from Toronto to Lake Simcoe in Ontario, Oliphant admired the ‘smiling, prosperous-looking district’ colonized by European settlers, with its ‘Substantial farm-houses […] planted in the midst of orchards and gardens’ and ‘acres of waving cornfields’. Oliphant reflected with satisfaction that ‘not even a stump was left to remind the railway traveller how short a time had elapsed since the solitary Indian was the only wayfarer through the silent and almost impenetrable forests that then clothed the country’.5 At St. Anthony in Minnesota, he praised the industries established by the settlers, and commented on their incessant hubbub – delightful music to the white man, who recognises in the plashing of water, and the roar of steam, and the ring of a thousand hammers, the potent agency which is to regenerate a magnificent country, and to enrich himself – but the harshest sounds that ever fell upon the ear of the Indian, for they remind him of the great change through which he has already passed, and proclaim his inevitable destiny in loud unfaltering tones.6

Oliphant did not ignore North America’s indigenous population whose lives he briefly controlled in Quebec, or believe their forecasted disappearance would occur only as a by-product of the ‘waving cornfields’ and ‘delightful music’ of settler activity. Indigenous peoples’ way of life would rather be purposely annihilated through their removal from the bases which sustained them, and their total assimilation into white society. ‘So long as he is surrounded by all the incidents of his wild life’, Oliphant expostulated, and can choose between hunting buffaloes and learning to spell, or between fighting Sioux and planting cabbages, he will invariably choose the former more congenial occupations: in order to his really advancing, these must be placed beyond his reach, and he must find himself in the midst of an industrious and energetic community of Anglo-Saxons, and feel compelled to compete with them in the arts of peace.7

Indigenous populations around Montreal and Toronto, Oliphant averred, had already been ‘incorporated into the great Anglo-Saxon community. In fact, they differ very little from their white neighbours’.8 Yet the use of violent force, if necessary, against indigenous people, was also implicit in his text. Oliphant described encountering ‘four wild-looking Indians’ travelling along the Mississippi, continuing ‘They were armed to the teeth, and carried long rifles. In their savage attire and uncouth aspect they resembled Bedouin Arabs’.9 Oliphant gave these members of the Winnebago people a wide berth; a quarter-century later he would advocate the ethnic cleansing of their Bedouin counterparts from Palestine. Oliphant’s first recorded interest in Palestine dates to the period following the Crimean War, which underlined the sharpness of the ‘Eastern Question’, the

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European empires’ struggle for influence in Ottoman territories. In May 1856, he met in London with Moses Montefiore, Culling Eardley (one of Ya‘qub’s sponsors) and the Ottoman Grand Vizier ‘Ali Pasha, to discuss a proposed railway from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Nothing immediately came of the plan; however, Oliphant met Montefiore again in Malta a year later en route to China, where he witnessed some of the major British assaults of the Second Opium War. The editor of Montefiore’s diaries recorded that Oliphant ‘took a great interest in all matters relating to the Holy Land, and conversed freely with [Montefiore] on certain schemes which might serve to improve the condition of its inhabitants’.10 The most notorious aspect of Oliphant’s life is his membership of the bizarre religious cult the Brotherhood of the New Life, led by the British-born ‘prophet’ Thomas Lake Harris.11 Oliphant resigned his parliamentary seat in Westminster, where he had ineffectually represented the Scottish constituency of Stirling Burghs as a Liberal, to join Harris’s Brotherhood at its community Brocton in New York State in 1867. The cult dictated all aspects of Oliphant’s life for a decade: Oliphant and his mother, whom he also persuaded to join, put all their wealth at Harris’s disposal, and worked at hard agricultural labour. Harris even demanded sexual abstinence between Oliphant and his Norfolk-born wife Alice, née le Strange, after their marriage in 1872. Discussions of Oliphant have often tried to link the mysticism evident in his attachment to Harris with his support for settler colonialism. Moruzzi states that ‘Oliphant’s religiosity cannot be held separate from his Christian Zionist diplomatic efforts’, while Bar-Yosef has used Oliphant’s eccentricity to argue that ‘plans concerning the Jewish restoration to Palestine were very often associated with charges of religious enthusiasm, eccentricity, even madness’.12 This chapter will argue against these representations of Oliphant, and his settler-colonial activity, as lying far outside the social mainstream, and thus being of only marginal significance for the Victorian embrace of Zionist ideas. Obenzinger insightfully notes ‘the ways in which what is usually designated as the extreme or exceptional actually sets the standard, how the margins reassert the core narratives of settler dominance’.13 Even in Oliphant’s interlude with Harris there may have been a more practical aspect, with the years spent in the Brotherhood’s agricultural communities giving Oliphant practical experience of life in a settler colony. Oliphant also acquired land in the United States at this time, and in 1882 wrote that he had ‘sent forty-five [Jewish] souls to some farms I own in America, and they have all settled down to an agricultural life upon them, in preference to other occupation.’14 Oliphant thus used his American property as a training ground for the Zionist colonies he later sponsored in Palestine. *** Oliphant’s attention was turned again towards Palestine by the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, which demonstrated the prescience of the Eastern Question and the Russian Empire’s ambitions for the Ottomans’ disintegrating territory. Oliphant, at heart a servant of Britain’s imperial interests, saw an imperative

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need to strengthen Ottoman domains against the Russian threat. As he stated in The Land of Gilead, his concern was to prevent ‘an external interference in the domestic affairs of Turkey, of a more pronounced character than had ever existed before’. This was a euphemism for preventing specifically Russian ‘interference’, while drastically expanding British interference by dictating the desired reforms to the Ottoman Empire’s structure. The empire’s security, he argued, could be increased through ‘decentralization’, and ‘the development of a single province, however small, under conditions which should increase the revenue of the empire, add to its population and resources, secure protection of life and property, and enlist the sympathy of Europe, without in any way affecting the sovereign rights of the Sultan’. Similarly to Charles Warren’s The Land of Promise as discussed in Chapter  2, Oliphant specified that this ‘might be attained by means of a Colonisation Company, and […] one of those rich and unoccupied districts which abound in Turkey might be obtained and developed through the agency of a commercial enterprise’, drawing capital from Europe.15 ‘It would probably be found impossible’, Oliphant argued, to prevent Jerusalem ‘from becoming the object of a Russian religious crusade’, or to ‘solve the Eastern problem in any other way’. His plan for Palestine would, he averred, secure a British foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean.16 In late 1878, Oliphant presented these ideas to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) and other sundry royals, the Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and the foreign minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil; French officials were also informed.17 It was thus in a form calculated to correlate to the demands of Eastern Question realpolitik, that Oliphant won support for his plan, although Disraeli may have fondly recalled his own escapades in Palestine decades earlier.18 Significantly, shortly before his departure to the Eastern Mediterranean, Oliphant met with Claude Reignier Conder in London.19 Conder was two decades younger than Oliphant, though much more experienced in Palestine travel. Yet in Tent Work in Palestine, Conder had opposed settler colonization in Palestine, instead advocating a British occupation similar to that in India. Conder emphasized this again in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle, quoted by Oliphant in The Land of Gilead, arguing that the principle of colonization ‘is not that of superseding native labour, but of employing it under educated supervision’ – the British Empire reaping the fruits of the filaḥīn’s labour.20 Oliphant’s thinking was markedly different. Reflecting on who should populate a colony in Palestine, Oliphant turned to the Jews, who (according to him) could draw on large reserves of wealth, enjoyed relative freedom and lack of persecution in Ottoman domains, and were ‘strongly attached by historical association to a province of Asiatic Turkey’. Oliphant was clear he did not mean Jews ‘from England or France, but from European and Asiatic Turkey itself ’, and from the Russian Empire ‘where they are more especially oppressed’. In line with the antipathy with which travellers viewed Jews in Palestine as discussed in Chapter  3, Oliphant discounted the Old Yishuv already in Palestine as ‘a mendicant class’.21 He also argued that by supporting Jewish colonial efforts in Palestine, a European power could win the support of a community with

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‘financial, political, and commercial importance’, and that there could be no more ‘valuable an ally to a nation likely to be engaged in a European war, as this wealthy, powerful, and cosmopolitan race’.22 To counter the notion, commonly raised by sceptics of Restorationism, ‘that the Jews are not agriculturists, and that any attempt to develop the agricultural resources of a country through their instrumentality must result in failure’, Oliphant cited instances of successful Jewish farming around the world, adding that the Jews’ ‘early history testifies that no such objection to a rural life existed in former days’, the ancient Biblical period. Oliphant cited a letter to the Jewish Chronicle from a ‘Society for the Colonisation of the Holy Land’ in Bucharest, which painted a vivid picture of the oppression of Jews in Romania  – ‘a land whose princes are like the wolves of the forest, in their endeavour to annihilate the children of Israel’  – and proclaimed, with an appropriate Bible quotation (Genesis 2:15), their ‘intention to journey to Palestine to “till the ground and to guard it”’.23 Oliphant knew his plan would sound to some like nothing more than a rehashed Restorationism. He thus carefully expressed that ‘it is somewhat unfortunate that so important a political and strategical question as the future of Palestine should be inseparably connected in the public mind with a favourite religious theory’. Oliphant viewed the coupling of Palestine’s colonization with the Evangelical desire for Jewish conversion as a hindrance: The restoration of the Jews to Palestine has been so often urged upon sentimental or Scriptural grounds, that now, when it may possibly become the practical and common-sense solution of a great future difficulty, a prejudice against it exists in the minds of those who have always regarded it as a theological chimera, which it is not easy to remove.

He made clear that ‘as my own efforts are concerned, they are based upon considerations which have no connection whatever with any popular religious theory upon the subject’.24 Oliphant’s colonization plans, whilst visionary, were also hard-headed. His words reflected the growing rationalization of Christian Zionism in the later nineteenth century, towards arguments which – while to a degree remaining rooted in Evangelicals’ millenarian hopes – now advocated a clear-eyed colonization of Palestine on the grounds of economic feasibility, political advantage (for Britain) and a solution to the oppression Jews suffered. This ‘scientific Zionism’, as Sharif names it, was also a reaction to the negligible results which Protestant missionary work targeting Jews had achieved.25 Oliphant’s words were well-perceived by Jews supporting settler colonialism in Palestine, the Jewish Chronicle in January 1880 stating approvingly that Oliphant ‘has no religious motives’ and that ‘Christianity is to him of as little consequence as Judaism’ (a charge which Oliphant defended himself against, while also benefitting from).26 Oliphant’s essentially secular stance won him the support of Zionist activists and settlers in Palestine; his associate and translator Sokolow described his reassurances as ‘particularly worthy of the

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attention of those who, ignorant of the actual facts, are inclined to represent Zionism merely as a theological or sectarian idea’.27 Given Oliphant’s articulation of the Jews as ideal colonists, it is ironic that in his original plan, Oliphant did not intend Jews to do the actual labour of the colony. At least initially, Jews would play the role of land-owning ‘Hebrew capitalists’.28 The hard work would be assigned to others: ‘sedentary Arab tribes’ glad to obtain work under the ‘favourable conditions which they would obtain from emigrant farmers and capitalists’; the filaḥīn ‘who would flock over in numbers to obtain employment, where they would live under the protection of a just and lenient Government’, and Muslim refugees from the Balkans, whom Oliphant thought ‘would probably bring a greater degree of intelligence and experience to bear upon their operations that the peasant of Palestine’. Eventually, Oliphant considered, there was a possibility ‘that by degrees poor Hebrew emigrants might be trained to labour upon the soil’.29 Oliphant’s initial plan thus put him significantly at ideological odds with the ideal of Hebrew labour, already prefigured at Kerem Avraham, and which would come to dominate the Zionist movement, particularly in the Second ‘Aliya. That Oliphant was prepared to dispense with the notion of Jews as agricultural labourers, instead using what he believed were more reliable sources of labour, further indicates the extent to which he desired his plans to be viewed as viable. His decision also may have been grounded in an anti-Semitic notion of the Jewish people’s abilities and nature, clearly highlighted in Conder’s approving comments in his review of The Land of Gilead for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, that ‘the genius of the [Jewish] nation is adverse to manual labour’, and that Oliphant’s scheme ‘assign[ed] to the Jews their true position as capitalists, bankers, and landowners’.30 These were the ideas of colonization which Oliphant already held when he arrived in Beirut in early 1879. His plans would develop further during his travels. *** For several months, Oliphant and his travelling companion Owen Phibbs (indispensable as a fluent Arabic speaker) journeyed in modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine/Israel. From Beirut southwards to Sidon, they travelled southeast to the Huleh Valley and the Golan Heights; then, on the eastern bank of the River Jordan  – the Biblical region of Gilead, giving Oliphant’s book its title – Oliphant traversed the major towns and archaeological sites. After crossing the Jordan, Oliphant took in central and northern Palestine’s major sites and then journeyed to Damascus, where he presented his colonization plan to the Ottoman governor Midḥat Pasha. In May 1879, he went on to Istanbul to try his luck with the sultan himself. The route Oliphant took was more adventurous than that taken by most Western travellers since Edward Robinson’s expansive journey. Oliphant was contemptuous of the rapidly expanding tourist industry taking Victorian ladies

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and gentlemen on ‘the route prescribed by [Thomas] Cook’.31 Not for Oliphant was ‘travelling over a certain route fixed by Cook, at £1, 5s. a day, with a miscellaneous herd of tourists’.32 Journeying in remote areas and taking local guides ad hoc as Robinson and Smith had sometimes had its pitfalls, providing Oliphant with opportunities for colourful anecdotes. For instance, as a guide from the town of Salṭ east of the Jordan to Jerusalem, Oliphant engaged the ‘extremely captivating and intelligent’ Elias Daoud, a Christian native of Jifna. According to Oliphant, Daoud claimed to have ‘peddled sacred relics through Russia’ and ‘accompanied the British expedition to Abyssinia’ in which British forces had routed the troops of Ethiopian king Tewodros II in 1868, although Oliphant painted Daoud as a habitual liar. Oliphant accused him of (unsuccessfully) conspiring with a Bedouin tribe to rob him; Daoud eventually abandoned Oliphant near Bethany, in the process purloining Oliphant’s pistol. ‘He was the most plausible and fascinating of scoundrels’, Oliphant wrote, ‘and possessing, besides, the great qualification of being a Christian, may yet hope to rise, under the enlightened protection of foreign Powers, to a position of affluence and dignity in the country’.33 Other than such incidents, and the marked predilection he displayed for the Druze community in Lebanon and northern Palestine explored further below, Oliphant’s journey was unexceptional. Until, that is, his steps turned towards the region east of the Jordan – ‘Eastern Palestine’, as it was commonly known by travellers. This area was no terra incognita for Westerners; it was traversed in the early nineteenth century by the European traveller-Orientalists Seetzen and Burckhardt, and subsequently by several British travellers who published their accounts of the region.34 It was frequently painted as fraught with danger from lawless Bedouin tribes. Josias Leslie Porter, who traversed the area in the 1860s, warned that ‘the state of the country is so unsettled, and many of the people who inhabit it are so hostile to Europeans, and, in fact, to strangers in general, that there seems to be but little prospect of an increase of tourists in that region’.35 By the 1880s, however, Eastern Palestine was an established part of Holy Land travel, for the reasonably intrepid. In 1882, Conder (who the previous year led an illfated Survey of Eastern Palestine, curtailed as a result of souring OttomanBritish relations) led two British princes, including the future George V, on a five-day trip across the Jordan, and in 1885 a section advising on ‘Tours East of the Jordan (Moab)’, referencing another of the area’s Biblical names, even appeared in Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria.36 Yet compared to Palestine west of the Jordan, which Porter wrote ‘is traversed every year; it forms a necessary part of the Grand Tour, and it has been described in scores of volumes’, the region was the perfect place for Oliphant to get off ‘the route prescribed by Cook’.37 Another important attitude existing around the area was that it was far more fertile than west of the Jordan. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, with a somewhat unlikely simile, claimed the region ‘in beauty and fertility […] as far surpasses western Palestine as Devonshire surpasses Cornwall’.38 Henry Baker Tristram agreed,

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writing that the comparative lack of human presence had left ‘the present state of Bashan and Gilead […] just what Western Canaan was in the days of Abraham’.39 Oliphant fully agreed with these evaluations, writing The traveller who only knows Palestine to the west of the Jordan, can form no idea of the luxuriance of the hillsides of Gilead, doubly enjoyable by the contrast which they present to the rocky barren slopes of Galilee and Judea, or even to the plains of the Hauran and Jaulan.40

It was the region’s agricultural potential that appealed to Oliphant. He wrote that ‘it would be difficult to imagine a country more highly favoured both as regards soil and climate’. Claiming that this potential was largely squandered by the local residents, he went on that The climate is eminently adapted for the cultivation of all descriptions of English farm and garden produce in its higher altitudes; while the productions of Syria and Palestine, such as tobacco, silk, sesame, flax, &c., are only not grown because the population is too poverty-stricken and apathetic to raise them.41

Prior travellers had thus already established a representation of east of the Jordan as an untouched paradise, bursting with untapped agricultural resources, sparsely populated by natives who were untouched by Western civilization. It was left to Oliphant to champion the colonization of this ‘new world’, as he had done decades before during his sojourn in North America. Oliphant waxed lyrical on ‘the luxuriant pasture-lands of Jaulan [the Golan Heights], the magnificent forest-clad mountains of Gilead, the rich arable plains of Moab, and the fervid subtropical valley of the Jordan’.42 These areas subsequently became highly desired areas for Jewish colonization. In a speech to Zionist activists in 1892, Conder recommended they ‘buy all the land you can get at moderate prices in Bashan and in Northern Gilead, and buy it soon, for the price will go up’.43 Decades later, Sokolow still claimed that ‘the plains of the Hauran, the villages of the Jordan, and the land of Gilead would form one of the richest and largest food-producing areas in the world’ (emphasis in original).44 Yet only one Zionist settlement would ever be established in this region, Beit or Bene Yehuda, founded in 1886 east of the Sea of Galilee by Jews from Safad, according to Hyamson ‘on the suggestion of Laurence Oliphant’.45 Oliphant, who hoped that the colony would turn ‘into agriculturists [Jewish] natives of the country who have hitherto lived on the Haluka’, called it ‘the best experiment of the kind which exists in Palestine’.46 The settlement was eventually disbanded during the British Mandate. Britain also obstructed Zionist settlement east of the Jordan, causing consternation particularly to Revisionist Zionists who harboured ambitions for settlement on both banks of the Jordan.47 Only following the Six-Day War of 1967 with the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights and the western (but not the eastern) bank of the Jordan, did any of the areas Oliphant recommended for colonization become available for settlement.

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Oliphant identified a specific site for his colony, the entirety of the Balqā’ district, ‘a tract of at least a million, or possibly a million and a half acres’, extending from the Jordan eastwards, in Oliphant’s phrase, ‘to the limit of the good land’.48 This vast region was much larger than the amount of land Zionist settlers could purchase before 1948; until the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, colonization proceeded slowly, with the settlements often isolated from each other and interspersed by Palestinian villages.49 Oliphant conceptualized the Balqa’ as almost empty of population, with vast tracts belonging to the Ottoman crown, ripe for the taking.50 He believed the area was capable of ‘maintaining a very large population’, a claim he deduced from the asserted existence of the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah in the area.51 He envisaged industrialized European-style agriculture in his fantasy colony, with the Jordan Valley acting as ‘an enormous hothouse for the new colony’, producing a wide range of tropical as well as European fruits, vegetables and grains, and cotton, olive oil and wine. Oliphant was also convinced ‘that the Dead Sea is a mine of unexplored wealth’, which would prove ‘most lucrative’ to the colony from the extraction of resources.52 Another key aspect of Oliphant’s plan was the colony’s connections by rail. He included a detailed map in The Land of Gilead showing the colony and its rail connections. ‘The western section of the colony’, Oliphant wrote, ‘would be within an easy day’s journey from Jerusalem, from which city in the early stages of development supplies and necessaries could be drawn; but the true outlet for its produce would be the port of Haifa’. Haifa’s importance in Oliphant’s plan reflected his opinion of the growing port town’s potential, unlike Jerusalem which he denigrated in his travel narrative, though he conceded that ‘it might also be deemed desirable […] to have a short branch or tramway by way of tramway of Jericho to Jerusalem’, to connect Jerusalem with Haifa.53 Oliphant had likely been influenced by Conder’s opinion of Haifa. In a spring 1879 article for Blackwood’s, Conder lauded Haifa’s port as a strategic ‘base of operations’ for a European occupation of Palestine, adding that should ‘the Jews would become the owners of the country and the chief employers of native labour’, then ‘the town of Haifa would certainly rise to a position of importance as the only good port within the limits of the Holy Land’.54 Also connected to Oliphant’s rail network were Damascus and the ports of ‘Aqaba and Ismailia on the Suez Canal, thus furnishing ‘an alternative route to India’ for the British.55 Connecting the Eastern Mediterranean by rail was a long-term obsession for Oliphant, since his earlier discussions on Palestine with Montefiore in 1856. When he later settled in Palestine in the 1880s, he eagerly followed the progress of the first surveys for a rail route in northern Palestine, which would only be actualized with the branch of the Hijaz Railway connecting Haifa and Damascus in 1905.56 Oliphant expected that ‘enterprise and capital’ would follow ‘the scream of a locomotive’, leading to the ‘redemption’ of potentially productive agricultural land.57 He personally journeyed to Alexandria in 1883 to lobby British authorities for their support for a Haifa-Damascus railway.58 He also expressed his belief that the construction of a railway would provide employment for Jews in Palestine, thus weaning them off the haluka payments;

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the British industrialist Edward Cazalet, with whom Oliphant also corresponded, had already articulated a similar plan.59 Rail also had a symbolic significance, perceived as a way of extending European influence and a Eurocentric notion of modernity into a previously unchanging Orient. Oliphant characterized the idea of a railway in Palestine as heralding ‘some distant impending social revolution.’60 The same idea was expressed by other Westerners: when Palestine’s first railway, the Jaffa-Jerusalem line, opened in 1892, the United States’ consul in Jerusalem Selah Merrill wrote that while ‘the sound of whistle and rushing train among the old and quiet hills of Judea’ seemed like ‘sacrilege’, it was an indicator that ‘Providence is guiding the march of civilization’. Merrill claimed that ‘the natives, both high and low, are gradually waking up to the idea that it means promptness and rapidity’. Ominously, he judged that the railway had turned 1892 into ‘a kind of “Columbus year” for Palestine’.61 The strongest adherents of colonization in Palestine explicitly linked the rail to their ideas. Conder predicted that settlers could use ‘railways, […] the pioneers of civilisation’, to ease the ‘occupation of lands which, in future, will be reached by a few hours’ journey, instead of several days of toilsome march, with pack-animals or camels’.62 Oliphant’s most important consideration in selecting the Balqa’ was that it was comparatively sparsely inhabited and cultivated compared to Palestine west of the Jordan. Gilead itself, he wrote, was ‘except by a few wandering Arabs uninhabited, and consequently totally uncultivated, waiting, let us hope, to be reoccupied by the descendants of the same race which once pastured their flocks in their luxuriant valleys’. Moab, also included in the colony’s prospective borders, was ‘without doubt, the finest territory for agricultural and pastoral purposes in the whole of Palestine, while it is the only province where there are no legal occupiers of the soil, and no settled population’. Oliphant claimed that excepting the inhabitants of the town of Salt, one local Protestant convert was the only house-dweller in the entire area.63 Simultaneously, Oliphant depicted Western Palestine as unsuitable for colonization. Like Robison’s reports of Palestine from fifty years earlier, Oliphant’s words read as a rebuke to claims that the area was under-inhabited and desolate in the nineteenth century. Oliphant explained that ‘the few fertile spots which exist are already under cultivation by the resident population’. Little land could be sold easily to colonists, and the density of the indigenous population would mean a colony ‘would not be susceptible of the same administrative autonomy as the unoccupied country to the east of the Jordan’.64 Later, he wrote of Marj ibn ‘Amir in the Galilee: Readers will be surprised to learn that almost every acre of the plain of Esdraelon is at this moment in the highest state of cultivation […] It looks to-day like a huge green lake of waving wheat, with its village-crowned mounds rising from it like islands; and it presents one of the most striking pictures of luxuriant fertility which it is possible to conceive.65

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Oliphant initially believed that a Jewish settler colony could only thrive if the settlers could command a large contiguous region, without competing against an indigenous population. While Zionist settlers would soon begin devising a ‘solution’ to this problem in the form of population transfer or ethnic cleansing, Oliphant did not consider this practicable in Palestine west of the Jordan.66 Yet he significantly prefigured this aspect of Zionist thought through his plans for the Balqa’. Posing a significant challenge to Oliphant’s plan were the presence of nomadic Bedouin tribes throughout the area he coveted, as well as Salt with its population of several thousand Muslim and Christian locals.67 Oliphant recognized that while most of the land he desired could be easily purchased from the Ottoman state, ‘Salt […] with the cultivated land surrounding it’, would have to ‘be dealt with separately’.68 Oliphant stayed for several days in Salt with Khalīl Jamal, a Palestinian Church of England minister.69 Oliphant claimed the town ‘takes our breath away by its unexpected extent and relatively imposing appearance’ compared with ‘the squalid villages’ further north; he was also appreciative of the town’s developing capitalism, commenting that the trade of Salti merchants with the Bedouin was leading the latter to ‘imperceptibly acquir[e] commercial instincts, for nothing civilizes a man so rapidly as teaching him to borrow money and run into debt’. Yet he also described Salt’s inhabitants as ‘an idle and somewhat defiant-looking race’, and stated that there was not even ‘a partially civilized individual’ living in the town.70 More of a potential problem were the Bedouin. Oliphant considered how various tribes would view the proposed colony. The Māndhur tribe in the valley of the River Yarmūk south of the Sea of Galilee were ‘a peaceful tribe much given to agricultural pursuits, and could be easily dealt with’ through ‘black-mail’, to allow ‘enterprising capitalists’ to develop the local hot springs for tourism.71 In general, Oliphant envisioned that tribes which promised to live peaceably with the settlers would cease their traditional nomadic lifestyle, and instead would be made to ‘adopt sedentary habits’ in ‘special tracts’.72 Evidently reminiscing about his former posting in Quebec, he mused that ‘the same system might be pursued which we have adopted with success in Canada with our North American Indian tribes, who are confined to their “reserves,” and live peaceably upon them in the midst of the settled agricultural population’.73 The import of the reservation system from North America to Palestine was only one strategy Oliphant devised. He also recommended the use of ‘a firm hand upon the Arabs’, claiming that ‘wherever it has been tried it has succeeded’.74 He described the Banū Ṣakhr tribe as ‘a more dangerous foe’ who would have to be ‘kept in check […] by the police and military force’ of the local Ottoman governor (whom Oliphant still expected to provide protection to the otherwise autonomous Jewish colony).75 In fact, Oliphant recommended the outright expulsion of the Banu Sakhr from their lands, describing them as ‘invaders, who should be driven back across the Hadj road’ between Damascus and Mecca.76 He insisted that ‘the Arabs have very little claim to our sympathy’ for their supposed role as raiders in

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preventing effective farming from occurring, and that ‘if they were driven back to the Arabian deserts from which they came, there is abundant pasture in its oases for their camels and goats’. Oliphant expected this would be easily accomplished, writing of Bedouin in the Jordan Valley that ‘there would be no difficulty in clearing them out’.77 The course of action Oliphant advocated amounted to ethnic cleansing, the exclusion of the Bedouin from a region they had traditionally long traversed. He was not the first to suggest this violent approach. After being told that members of a Bedouin tribe had prevented farming at Tayba near Jerusalem, Finn was ‘sincerely desirous to have such Arab vermin as these mongrel tribes swept off the land’.78 Norman MacLeod wrote in the 1860s ‘the Turkish government, or even a London “Limited” Company possessing ordinary sense and enterprise, might, with a dozen rifled cannon placed in commanding positions, keep these Ishmaelites at bay, and defy them to steal west of the Jordan’.79 Yet Oliphant was the first to explicitly connect such a violent expulsion to a settler-colonial project. His ideas strongly influenced later Zionist thought, for instance the Revisionist Zionist Eliahu Ben-Horin who in the 1940s wrote: ­ e Palestinian Arabs will not be removed to a foreign land but to an Arab Th land. […] If the transfer and the colonisation project are well planned and systematically carried out, the Palestinian fellah will get better soil and more promising life conditions than he can ever expect to obtain in Palestine.80

Oliphant unknowingly witnessed the beginning of the long process of the dispossession of the Palestinian filaḥīn in the Marj ibn ‘Amir area. Oliphant’s attention was caught by the activities of the Sursuq Lebanese banking family, who in 1872 purchased agricultural land including, according to Oliphant, over twenty villages inhabited by 4000 peasants. Oliphant noted approvingly how ‘the Arabs [Bedouin] have been driven out’ of the area proving ‘how easy the Arabs really are to deal with’, and Sursuq’s harnessing of the labour of the peasants, who became effectively ‘his absolute dependants and slaves’.81 Later, from 1901 to 1925, the Sursuq family sold off this land to Zionist settlers, leading to the eviction of almost 9000 Palestinian villagers.82 Yet despite all Oliphant’s prescience of Zionism’s methods, his initial colonization plan came to nought. After a positive meeting in Damascus with Midhat Pasha (whom Oliphant admired for the harsh measures he had taken against the Bedouin), Oliphant went on to Istanbul. Although after almost a year Oliphant finally obtained a meeting with ‘Abdül Ḥamīd II, his Gilead plan failed to make any headway against what he described as the ‘arbitrary and irresponsible authority of the Sultan’.83 The victory of Gladstone’s anti-Ottoman Liberals in the April 1880 British election, ousting Oliphant’s original sponsor Disraeli, and ending any pretence in British foreign policy of upholding formal Ottoman sovereignty, finally killed the dream of a giant settler colony; as Hyamson wrote, Oliphant’s plans were ‘utterly destroyed by the polls in the English boroughs’.84 Oliphant’s experience in Istanbul closely mirrored that of Theodor Herzl in 1901; after failing to persuade

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‘Abdul Hamid of the supposed benefits of Jewish colonization in Palestine, Herzl shifted his strategy to seeking the patronage of a European imperial power able to remove the barriers to colonization.85 Oliphant returned from the Eastern Mediterranean empty-handed. However, before The Land of Gilead’s publication at the end of 1880, knowledge of his plan began to spread, particularly through the Jewish Chronicle which described it as ‘the most feasible plan that has yet been put before the world’ for settler colonization in Palestine, and stated that it deserved ‘the consideration of all earnest and sincere Jews’. When would-be Zionist settlers in Romania contacted the newspaper, as mentioned above, Oliphant replied by advising, along with other recommendations, that ‘there are in the Caimakamliks [governorates] of Tiberias and Jenin about 200,000 acres of most eligible land’ for Jewish colonists to farm – barely a fifth of the minimum area he had outlined in the Balqa’. This was a shift away from Oliphant’s initial vision to a much more constrained yet pragmatic settlement west of the Jordan.86 Such a settlement would not require permission from the sultan, but merely the emigration of Jews to Palestine and their becoming Ottoman subjects. Oliphant continued to press what he saw as the supposed political expediency of Britain occupying Palestine and becoming the ‘mother country’ of a Jewish colony, concluding The Land of Gilead with the words The population of Palestine in particular, of which 25,000 belong to the Hebrew race, is looking to England for protection and the redress of grievances; and those who see in the relations which our own country now occupies towards the Holy Land, the hand of Providence, may fairly consider whether they do not involve responsibilities which cannot lightly be ignored.87

Oliphant’s work was received with some interest by the British press. Some reviewers reacted to The Land of Gilead as the creation of an eccentric mind. The Pall Mall Gazette described it as ‘the oddest and most original book of the season’, adding ‘never was a stranger potpourri of politics and prophecy, Blue-books, and Holy Writ served up to tickle the palate’.88 Similarly, the Daily News likened Oliphant’s plan to older forms of Restorationism, long disowned by mainstream Evangelicals. ‘On the face of it’, the reviewer wrote, ‘the thing looked so much like Millenarianism or Lost-Ten-Tribesism or Anglo-Judaism, or one of the myriad of other crazes which the chosen people have suggested to imaginative Christians, that a certain amount of ridicule seemed to attach to it’.89 Yet the Pall Mall also recognized the book as ‘a political work of considerable importance’: in a genre ‘done to death by hordes of note-taking authors, from Burckhardt to Mark Twain’, Oliphant’s work stood out for containing both ‘the testimony of a clear-seeing Englishman as to the present state of one of the most important provinces of Asiatic Turkey’, and ‘a scheme of colonization which may possibly effect a great and beneficial change in the East’.90 The Examiner’s reviewer claimed that while ‘the book is as commonplace a volume of travels as we have lately seen’, in other respects it was ‘a volume as remarkable as its author’. Oliphant’s colonization plan, as well as the pogroms in the Russian Empire, led the reviewer

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to (overly) confidently state that ‘if […] the Hebrew race were polled, there is no doubt that a large majority would declare in favour of an emigration upon reasonable conditions to the land between the Great Sea and the Great River’.91 In his Blackwood’s review of a work which reflected his own ideas, Conder described the plan ‘not [as] the dream of an enthusiast, but […] a singularly original idea advocated by a man of known ability and experience’.92 Oliphant would soon put that ‘ability and experience’ at the service of the early Zionist settlers in Palestine.

‘All More or Less Under Control’: Oliphant as settler Oliphant’s failure to convince ‘Abdul Hamid proved to be the very strength of his colonization plan. Remaining only on paper (in its early Hebrew translation by Sokolow, The Land of Gilead quickly achieved significant popularity in Zionist circles in Eastern Europe), his plan retained all its utopian appeal.93 He himself recognized this, writing in 1882 that he was ‘thankful to be relieved from the responsibility which success would have entailed, and cannot but regard the delay which has resulted from my failure upon that occasion as providential’.94 Oliphant never had to deal with the chores which faced the Finns at Kerem Avraham, mundane tasks of administration or challenges including Palestinian suspicion, local Jewish hostility and financial concerns, which would surely have also beset the Gilead colony had it been realized. Two significant occurrences worked to shift Oliphant’s role from grand strategist of a future colony to a settler in Palestine himself, working to facilitate the nascent Zionist colonies. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 to suppress the nationalist revolt led by ‘Urabi Pasha reawakened Oliphant’s conviction that Jewish settlement would be greatly beneficial to Britain’s interests. In opposition to what he saw as the Liberals’ laissez-faire approach to administering Egypt, Oliphant advocated a distinctly ‘hands-on’ approach to colonial rule. While claiming to support a British withdrawal and a self-governing Egypt when that would become expedient (he also believed that anti-Ottoman Arabs would ‘hail’ European occupations ‘with delight’), he also asserted that ‘in proportion as [Britain] weakens its hold politically on the country, will the necessity for a prolonged military occupation increase’.95 He confidently stated that In the course of years the [Egyptian] Fellaheen will come to understand the advantages they are deriving from the establishment of courts of justice, of a properly officered gendarmerie, and police force, and reduced taxation. And as security for life and property increases, we shall hear no more of their fanaticism. The more intrigue and suppressed revolt goes on among the upper discontented classes, the more necessary is the presence of a force to control it.96

Oliphant’s writing asserted that a powerful connection existed between Egypt and Palestine. ‘[T]he fate of each country must ever be powerfully influenced […] by the destiny of the other’, Oliphant proclaimed, ‘and their relative position towards

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each other, topographically and commercially, must always cause the influence which is paramount in Egypt to be powerfully operative in Palestine’.97 Yet there was undoubtedly an earthly reason why Britain, already ‘paramount in Egypt’, should also seek to be ‘powerfully operative in Palestine’: the importance of the Eastern Mediterranean to Britain’s link with its colonial possessions in Asia, and the old Eastern Question rivalry with Britain’s European rivals. While Oliphant had initially presented his colonization project as involving the ‘decentralization’ rather than end of Ottoman rule, events in Egypt precipitated his belief that Palestine’s total removal from Turkish rule was now called for. In a November 1882 article, Oliphant argued that the only option, given ‘the jealousies existing among European Powers on the subject’, was ‘neutralising the Holy Land under a European guarantee’; for this purpose, considering (with an overtly racist logic) ‘the absence of any local population worthy the name’ (sic), Jewish immigrants would be constitute Palestine’s ‘nationality’.98 Oliphant soon came to advocate an exclusively British and no longer ‘neutral’ Palestine. While Britain’s access to the Suez Canal was ensured with its occupation of Egypt, Oliphant argued in October 1883 that ‘no control of our communication with India is complete which does not embrace a Palestine as well as an Egyptian Protectorate’. He bemoaned Britain’s apathy towards the Jews in Palestine which contrasted with the proactive French and Russian attitudes towards their own protégés. ‘England’, he claimed, ‘could not find a leverage upon which to base her political action more powerful than that which is furnished by a Jewish immigration which should be facilitated by her protection, and by specially safeguarding the interests of the Hebrew population now in Palestine’.99 In March 1882, Oliphant became a member of the Mansion House Committee, formed in London as a response to the eruption of Russian pogroms. Oliphant travelled to Eastern Europe as part of the Committee’s relief efforts. Already known in Jewish circles which were supportive of emigration to Palestine, Oliphant now claimed to ‘have been overwhelmed with a correspondence and addresses, containing over ten thousand signatures, which leave no doubt in my mind as to the sincerity and extent of the sentiment in favour of colonization in Syria and Palestine’.100 Whether or not thousands of Eastern European Jews really perceived him as ‘their Moses’ bound to lead them to Palestine, as Oliphant later alleged, his meetings with early Zionist leaders and Jews willing to become colonists at least reassured him that a constituency for his ideas existed.101 By contrast, amongst Palestine’s existing Jewish communities of the Old Yishuv, Oliphant had encountered a mixture of indifference, apathy and (at best) noncommittal support for his colony plan. Oliphant had to admit that he had found so strong a belief prevailing that a second deliverance was at hand, more or less miraculous in its character, that I scarcely liked to intrude upon this occasion with the extremely prosaic and mundane idea of a colony which should be based rather upon commercial than upon religious considerations.

While ‘various Jews in Palestine and Syria’ to whom he had proposed his project ‘regarded it with favour’, this was on the proviso ‘that that they were not themselves

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intrusted with the entire administration of the affairs of the colony in the first instance, as they were utterly wanting in experience’.102 Like many others before him, Oliphant blamed the haluka and the traditional Jewish establishment in Palestine  – ‘a set of useless bigots […] opposed to every project which has for its object the real progress of the Jewish nation’  – for their opposition to ‘the establishment of agricultural colonies, or the inauguration of an era of any kind of labour by Jews in Palestine’.103 Yet Oliphant had also encountered indifference amongst the assimilated Jews of Western Europe and America, who viewed schemes for Jewish Restoration ‘as fantastic and visionary’.104 He therefore set his sights upon Eastern European Jews, eager to escape the oppression they suffered at home, as the ideal colonists. He even resigned from the Mansion House Committee when the charitable body proposed to send Jewish refugees to America, rather than acquiesce to Zionist demands by supporting emigration to Palestine. Oliphant’s thought at this time, a mixture of philo- and anti-Semitism which characterized Victorian Evangelicals’ views of Jews, can be discerned in two articles. ‘Jewish Tales and Jewish Reform’ appeared in November 1882 on the eve of his return to Palestine. In the article, Oliphant exhibited all his prejudices against Orthodox Jews. Drawing primarily not upon his actual travels in Eastern Europe but on contemporary novelized depictions of Jewish life, Oliphant asserted ‘the bigotry and oppression’ of Hassidic Jewish society, and Eastern European Jews’ ‘medieval superstitions’ and ‘ignorance, credulity, and intense devotional sentiment’.105 Disturbingly, he also aped anti-Semitic rhetoric by claiming that the Jews’ own communal cohesion constituted ‘a serious and legitimate grievance against the Hebrew communities on the part of Christian administrators’ such as the Russian Empire, and – without explaining his logic – argued that it would be ‘difficult to accord equal political rights’ to Jews.106 Eastern European Jews’ prime virtue in Oliphant’s eyes was that some of them wished to leave Europe for Palestine. While Jews in Western Europe and North America, he averred, opposed ‘a reoccupation of their own country’ on the grounds that the Restoration would take place through divine intervention and not human efforts, Oliphant claimed that the Jews he had encountered in Eastern Europe ‘all recognise the fact that if Palestine is to be reoccupied, it must be by their own efforts’.107 The Jews’ backward characteristics, as Oliphant had described them, he believed would simply vanish once the Jews became settlers. ‘I would ask’, he rhetorically proclaimed, ‘those familiar with the Ghettos of Eastern Europe whether it is possible to conceive of them transferred in all their hideous squalor to the Land of Promise?’ He emphatically argued that ‘with the consciousness of a new-born national existence’  – a European-style, territorial-based nationalism  – ‘the whole habits of their existence […] would become revolutionised’.108 A transfer of the Jews to Palestine would eliminate most of what set them apart from other European nationalities, albeit with unique characteristics for ‘the only nationality in the world whose name possesses a purely religious signification’.109 Silver notes regarding Theodor Herzl and his fellow political (as opposed to Ahad Ha‘am’s cultural) Zionists that ‘what they were really talking about was the obliteration of the historically rooted ways of life

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of millions of Jews in the world, particularly in Russia’s Pale of Settlement’.110 The same applies to the implicit message of Oliphant’s writing. Oliphant demonstrated the same esoteric logic in ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, an article which appeared in August 1882, though with rather more explicit and sinister connotations for the indigenous residents of Palestine. He claimed that the Russian pogroms ‘were inevitable, and […] unless the Jews are removed from the countries in which they have taken place, we may certainly anticipate their recurrence upon a much larger scale’. Oliphant even gave credence to the views of the perpetrators of the pogroms, by admitting ‘all that is charged against the Jew’, and claiming that ‘by degrees he [“the Jew”] came to control all the small commerce of the country, and when he dared he took his pound of flesh’; by comparison, the ‘sluggish and lazy’ Slavic peasant who had joined the pogroms, ‘was as certain to disappear before the sober, industrious, and highly intelligent Jew […] as the Red Indian of America before the Anglo-Saxon’.111 Jews would always pose a threat to, and provoke the antipathy of, their non-Jewish neighbours, until they were removed en masse to Palestine and elsewhere in Ottoman territory: ‘in Mesopotamia, North Syria, and some of the southern provinces of Asia Minor’, Oliphant claimed, ‘immense tracts of fertile unoccupied land exist, capable of maintaining the whole Jewish population of Russia’.112 Conder made a similar argument a decade later, after the pogroms had continued and increasing numbers of Jewish refugees had arrived in Britain. Describing the Jews outside Palestine as ‘a parasitic nation’, he played on xenophobic fears of ‘the dreaded influx of hungry foreigners’ to convince his readership that the Jews should go to Palestine rather than London’s East End.113 Oliphant linked the Russian pogroms with ‘Urabi’s revolt in Egypt, concluding that if simultaneously the West had rejected the Jews and the East had rejected the West, the solution to both problems was the transplantation of the Jews to Muslim lands. In full Orientalist flow, Oliphant described ‘the Moslem code of morality’ as ‘repulsive’, and claimed that ‘assimilation is socially impossible between the Mussulman and the Christian’; however, this was not the case for Muslims and Jews, who ‘in their common Semitic origin […] possess a racial bond which separates them widely from the Aryan peoples of Europe, and which tends, in the case of the Jews, to attract them to those Eastern lands from which they have sprung’.114 Yet there would be no equal relationship between Jewish colonists and indigenous Muslims, but rather the latter’s subservience, or even eventual annihilation. In the racially charged language of social Darwinism, Oliphant claimed that while the colonizing project in Palestine meant Jewish society was beginning to ‘palpitate with the quickening currents of a new life’, alternately ‘the forces of Islam were preparing instinctively for a death-struggle’. He concluded that ‘if the final solution of the “Eastern Question” involves the doom of the Moslem, it opens up his future destiny to the Jew’.115 While Oliphant was not the only Victorian traveller to forecast the ‘doom’ or disappearance of Islam – his friend Alexander Kinglake had also decades earlier predicted a future in which ‘Islam will wither away’ under the influence of Western ‘progress’ – no other had yet connected the elimination of Islam from Palestine with the onset of settler colonization.116

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In late 1882 Oliphant and his wife Alice moved to Palestine. Writing less than a year after his arrival of land in the central Galilee with ‘a most fertile soil’ and ‘many nourishing villages’, Oliphant explicitly advocated a strategy of colonizing land ‘purchased from the natives’, bringing him into harmony with early Zionist strategy in Palestine.117 Oliphant’s interactions with the early Zionists will be explored at the end of this section. First, however, are considered his attitudes towards two other key groups in Palestine: the German Templar colonists of Haifa, and the Druze of northern Palestine. *** Oliphant’s first Palestinian home, from November 1882 to summer 1884, was in the German Templar colony adjacent to Haifa. As already noted, Oliphant’s attention on his first Palestine expedition was attracted by the port town. Haifa, established in the 1760s by the Palestinian leader Ẓāhir al-‘Umar, was expanding quickly at the time of Oliphant’s visit.118 In the 1850s, it was already home to European consuls and vice-consuls, and a cosmopolitan Levantine society; by the 1880s, Mary Eliza Rogers described the town where she had stayed a quarter-century earlier with her brother as ‘rapidly rising in importance’.119 Oliphant had described Haifa as ‘a thriving, growing place’.120 Oliphant’s second book on Palestine, Haifa (a collection of his letters from Palestine to the New York Sun from November 1882 to November 1885), was not only named after the town, but subtitled Modern Life in Palestine: Western travellers such as Oliphant viewed Haifa as the only place in Palestine where ‘modern life’ was possible. Oliphant attributed Haifa’s development to ‘the proximity of the German colony’.121 ‘Prior to the arrival of the colonists of the Temple Society’, Oliphant claimed in 1883, ‘Haifa was as dirty as most Arab villages’; by the time of his residence, not only was it ‘well paved throughout’, but it had grown to ‘contain a bustling and thriving population of about six thousand inhabitants’.122 From the establishment of the first Templar colony near Haifa in 1868 until 1907, seven settlements were founded around Palestine by the esoteric Protestant sect which originated in Württemberg, Germany. Most travellers who visited these colonies greatly admired the settler society which resembled West European agricultural villages. The opinions of travellers such as Oliphant presaged the attention which Israeli scholarship from the 1970s onwards has given to the movement, viewing the activities of the Templars as preparing the ground, literally and metaphorically, for the Zionist movement.123 As Yazbak has indicated, this idealized narrative overlooks the Templars’ aggressive tendencies and conflictual relations with local Palestinians.124 During his time with the Survey of Western Palestine in the 1870s, Conder stayed in the Haifa colony for several months. In his account, the settlers were ‘hard-working, sober, honest, and sturdy’ and ‘a pious and God-fearing people’, and had accomplished ‘the introduction into Palestine of European improvements, which are more or less appreciated by the natives’. With racist overtones, he contrasted these natives, ‘the dirty, squalid, lying Fellahin’, with the Germans, ‘redcheeked, flaxen-haired peasants, with cheery salutations, and honest smiling faces’.

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Yet Conder also identified faults which he asserted ‘seem to threaten the existence of the colony’. In addition to their failure to obtain legal deeds to the land, several factors related explicitly to settler-indigenous relations. He accused the local villagers of ‘insolence’ towards the colonists, complaining that ‘The property of the colonists is disregarded, the native goatherds drive their beasts into the corn, and several riots have occurred, which resulted in trials from which the colonists got no satisfaction’. Yet he acknowledged that ‘the indiscretion of the younger men’ among the settlers had made things worse, as ‘they have repaid insolence with summary punishment’ towards their Palestinian neighbours, creating a ‘feud with the surrounding villages’. In language saturated with racial pseudoscience and fear of miscegenation, Conder also slammed some Templars for engaging in mixed marriages with Palestinians. ‘The children of such marriages are not unlikely to combine the bad qualities of both nations’, Conder averred, insisting that ‘it is only by constant reinforcements from Germany that the original character of the colony can be maintained’.125 Despite these criticisms, Conder ultimately saw the German settlers’ activity as highly valuable, asserting s­ hould European attention be ever generally turned to Syria, it may be a matter of no little importance, that men acquainted with the language and the people, and, at the same time, trustworthy and honest, are to be found, who could render material assistance to new-comers, even though not attracted to the land by the belief that it is the natural inheritance of a true Israel, composed of any other nationality except the Jews.126

Oliphant was significantly less equivocal about the colony. He extolled the northern European order, tidiness and town planning, implicitly or explicitly juxtaposed with their lack, to European eyes, in Palestinian towns and villages. His first impressions, recorded in The Land of Gilead, were that ‘every where [sic] the sigils of thrift and industry were apparent. The village consists of two streets, of well-built stone houses, each standing separately in its own garden, the streets lined with young trees; and the most scrupulous tidiness was everywhere apparent’.127 Oliphant’s description of the colony as a ‘village’ naturalized the alien implantation in the Palestinian landscape, reflecting the fact that, to Victorian eyes, the German colonies with their order, genteelness and familiarity, were what real villages should be. Writing later, Oliphant described the colony as ‘an oasis of civilization in the wilderness of Oriental barbarism’ where Western travellers ‘will find good accommodation, and all the necessaries, if not the luxuries, of civilized life’.128 Oliphant tellingly commented that on entering the colony, the visitor found themselves ‘apparently transported into the heart of Europe’, an unequivocal stamp of his approval.129 He celebrated not only ‘the fact that land has risen more than three times in value since their arrival’, but also the colony’s potential as a winter tourist destination for Victorian travellers wanting something different from Cook’s Tours or ‘tent life’. While Oliphant claimed the Templars were ‘universally

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respected’ by Palestinian villagers, who often cooperated with them in agriculture ‘on terms of perfect harmony’, he also revealed that the Templars abandoned their plan to cultivate land near the ‘turbulent’ and ‘fanatical’ nearby village of al-Tīra, whose residents were ‘notorious for their bad character all through the country’. Yet reminiscent of Robinson’s reports of good treatment by the filaḥīn, and the contradictions between Orientalist ideology and empirical experience that litter travellers’ reports, Oliphant confessed that he himself had been ‘treated with much civility by the villagers’ of the same al-Tira.130 Despite Oliphant’s obvious admiration for the Templars, however, he departed their colony in summer 1884. While Oliphant’s stated reason for moving to the village of Dāliya (or Dāliyat al-Karmil) ten miles from Haifa was to mitigate the summer heat by moving to a higher altitude on Mount Carmel, additional motivations can be speculated. Among the Templars, whom as fellow white Europeans Oliphant perceived as equals, Oliphant was embedded within a settlercolonial venture not of his own design or control. In Daliya, in a home built especially for Oliphant, he gathered around himself and Alice the nucleus of a new European community, including former followers of Thomas Lake Harris. Among his more conventional pursuits in northern Palestine, Oliphant maintained an amateur interest (Conder had earlier noted that Oliphant was ‘not a Hebrew scholar, which is an almost indispensable qualification for the explorer of Syrian antiquities’) in Biblical archaeology, particularly in the environs of Mount Carmel.131 What he believed were antique fragments of columns or wine presses fuelled his suggestible imagination with pictures of the area’s supposed ‘hanging forests and terraced vine-yards, its columned temples, its teeming population’ in antiquity, contrasted with the present ‘mud-built village, ruined terraces, naked hills, and unpeopled valleys’, and influenced his vision of future Jewish colonization.132 His partners in archaeological ‘exploration’ included his brother-in-law the Orientalist Guy le Strange and Gottlieb Schumacher, the resident architect at the German colony and the initial surveyor for the railway line to Haifa; Oliphant’s notes were published in the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Quarterly Statement, as well as in his regular press outlets.133 However, to his new followers who settled in Palestine (including Haskett Smith who, rather ironically given Oliphant’s strong opinions on the growth of tourism in Palestine, became a Thomas Cook tour guide after Oliphant’s death), Oliphant occupied the position almost of a new Harris. He authored his own esoteric works, Sympneumata (1885), a pamphlet translated into Arabic aimed at converting local Muslims to his doctrines The Star in the East (1887), and Scientific Religion (1888).134 Before the end of Oliphant’s life, controversy began to surround the sexual activities of his followers in Palestine; as Hannah Whitall Smith, a prominent Anglo-American Evangelical, coyly wrote, ‘Very remarkable things are reported to have gone on at that community, and finally it had to be closed at the instance of the Vigilance Association of London, which threatened a complete exposure if it continued’.135 Yet all of this did not mean that Oliphant was relegated to the margins of eccentricity. In Haifa and Daliya, Oliphant hosted visiting members of the British imperial elite, including Charles George Gordon

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during the latter’s search for the ‘true’ site of Christ’s tomb – Oliphant predictably gave credence to Gordon’s bizarre claim that the map of Jerusalem resembled a woman’s body, writing ‘the lines of topographical configuration certainly bore out the resemblance in a very remarkable manner’  – and Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, the British Governor of Madras.136 In late 1886, on a return trip to Britain, Oliphant was even invited to dine with Queen Victoria, to whom he expounded some of his beliefs.137 At Daliya Oliphant was able to exercise a patriarchal control over the village’s Druze inhabitants. Oliphant had expressed his admiration for the Druze at length in The Land of Gilead. He was far from the only Victorian to become deeply impressed with the community. Even the level-headed Robinson became enticed with the Druze, making them the subject of a lengthy article, drawing on the fanciful reports of earlier Orientalists and the evaluations of American Protestant missionaries who sought to make inroads amongst the community. Dismissing their beliefs as ‘monstrous and incoherent’, Robinson nevertheless praised them as ‘high spirited and brave’.138 British sympathies for the Druze heightened particularly after Britain had backed the Lebanese Druze during the outbreak of communal violence in 1860–1.139 Isabel Burton, for instance, described the Druze as ‘the best fighting men, the most manly and warlike. They always behave like gentlemen by instinct, and, briefly, they are the only race [in the Eastern Mediterranean] fit to be our allies’.140 Oliphant similarly stressed the value which they could have as British allies, claiming to ‘have met individual Druses travelling in other parts of Syria who, finding I was an Englishman, at once called themselves countrymen’. Anticipating future conflict in the region, Oliphant wrote ‘the day may come when it may be well to remember that we have a warlike people in Syria absolutely devoted to us, and only longing to prove that devotion in acts’. What were considered faults in other communities, were presented as virtues in the Druze. Claiming that ‘with a little practice these Druses would make first-rate diplomats’, Oliphant admiringly wrote that ‘under a bold, frank, manly exterior, they conceal the utmost subtlety and cunning, and have a captivating way of deceiving which quite redeems it from anything base or unworthy’. He enthusiastically continued that the same qualities would make the Druze ‘excellent members of Parliament, and even Cabinet Ministers’.141 Later, he described them as ‘a sober, fairly honest, and industrious people’, and ‘the politest and most courteous people I have ever met’, excepting the Japanese.142 Another reason for Oliphant’s choice to make his home amongst the Druze was his penchant for Druze women  – in his own words, his attraction to ‘the exceptional beauty of the Druse girls of Dahlieh’.143 His descriptions of Druze women throughout his years in Palestine are striking for their repressed sexual desire. For instance, after observing a Druze religious festival, he exclaimed ‘I don’t know that I ever remember in the name number to have seen a larger proportion of pretty women’, and praised ‘their glorious eyes, white, regular teeth, bewitching smiles, and delicate fingers’.144 Palestine, framed as the pristine Holy Land in the Western Evangelical mind and the destination of choice for pious clergymen rather than romantic adventurers in the nineteenth century at least, was relatively rarely

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subject to the kind of overt sexualization in Orientalist art and literature to which other regions of the Eastern Mediterranean were subjected. However, Oliphant’s lingering gaze upon Druze women provides a clear illustration how, as Yeğenoğlu states, ‘in the case of Orientalism, the discourses of cultural and sexual difference are powerfully mapped onto each other’, and how the Orient is constructed in European texts as ‘a fantasy built upon sexual difference’.145 Oliphant’s penchant for Druze women may have been a product of his deeply repressed sexuality. Kabbani has argued that ‘the European was led into the East by sexuality, by the embodiment of it in a woman […]. He entered an imaginary harem when entering the metaphor of the Orient, weighed down by inexpressible longings’.146 In Oliphant’s representation of Druze society, the women stand for an eroticized, though ultimately platonic, ideal of the Eastern woman. In Oliphant’s representation of Druze women (and men), their beauty was frequently associated with what he perceived as their claimed whiteness. ‘Many of the Druses, both men and women, have brown hair and blue eyes, and complexions as light as our own, and some of both sexes are singularly handsome’, Oliphant commented approvingly. Writing of a Druze sheikh’s young wife, ‘with a fair complexion, magnificent eyes, and an elegant figure’, he claimed that ‘had she been dressed in the latest Parisian fashion’, it would have been impossible ‘by her features or complexion to distinguish her from any pretty American woman’.147 Oliphant was aesthetically drawn to Druze women because of their  – to his mind – European features, yet in the mindset of colonial hierarchy in which he operated, he could feel a superiority over them in racial as well as gender terms in a way which he could not with the Western women who formed part of his coterie. Forming an intriguing counterpoint to Oliphant’s sexless attraction to Druze women, Alice Oliphant was rumoured to have had multiple affairs with Palestinian men, supposedly as a means of proselytizing for the Oliphants’ bizarre beliefs.148 Oliphant’s initial preference for a home was the neighbouring village of ‘Isfiyā, which had a mixed Druze-Christian population. However, the residents demanded an exorbitant price for the land he wished to build upon, Oliphant attributing this ‘exclusively to the Christian section of the population’. Conveniently, Oliphant was visited soon after by the Druze sheikh of Daliya, who was unable to pay the fee required to exempt his son (whose wife Oliphant ogled as ‘one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen’) from Ottoman military service. For paying this money, Oliphant received in the village ‘a vineyard and garden of fruit trees, with a good title, and a site far surpassing in loveliness of situation that which I had failed to secure at Esfia’. Oliphant expressed his satisfaction that Daliya was ‘exclusively Druse, and does not contain a single Christian inhabitant’.149 Oliphant wrote of the village that while its ‘congeries of dwellings’ were ‘scarcely imposing-looking enough to be dignified with the name of houses’, they were ‘yet much superior to the huts of which an Arab village generally consists’; he identified the absence of ‘gigantic manure-heaps […] common to all Arab villages’ as particularly praiseworthy.150 Along with the land, the Oliphants also acquired an almost cult-like control of the Druze, according to the accounts of Oliphant and subsequent travellers. This they exercised through their financial means, mediating in their internal disputes,

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and protecting the community in disputes with the Ottomans. ‘Owing […] to the position which I occupy financially to the village, they are all more or less under control’, Oliphant boasted in one of his articles, in which he presented the Druze as crude, yet mostly good-natured, and constantly in need of his personal guidance.151 Oliphant’s patriarchal attitude sometimes reduced the Druze to abject servitude; approached by one villager selected for conscription into the Ottoman military, Oliphant bought the man’s freedom in return for him ‘bind[ing] himself to my service for five years in any part of the world’. Another incident had Oliphant beating an Ottoman soldier who had abused a villager, and making the Ottoman sergeant ‘stand in the sun for an hour in the presence of the villagers’ as further punishment. Perhaps more constructively, when Alice was not ‘studying Arabic’ or ‘painting in oils’, she was able to give the villagers medical treatment, and the Oliphants attracted missionary funds for the establishment of a school in Daliya.152 As the British and the Zionist movement would subsequently continue, Oliphant singled out the Druze as ‘good natives’, whose loyalty could be cultivated in return for a privileged status among the indigenous population.153 With his early evaluation of the Druze as a ‘martial race’, Oliphant continued to view them as useful for British interests; in his review of The Land of Gilead, Conder speculated whether ‘the Druse and Bedouin tribes’ – at least those of the latter who had not been expelled – could act ‘as a Landsturm’ militia to defend a Jewish colony in the Eastern Mediterranean.154 After the Oliphants’ deaths, a residual loyalty from the local Druze apparently continued. Upon Alice’s death in Palestine in early 1887, an unfortunate end to what can only have been an unhappy life, Druze reportedly gathered in a fifty-strong cavalcade to bear her coffin, and treated a memorial to her with (in Oliphant’s words) ‘greatest veneration [as a] sacred spot’.155 Several years after Oliphant’s own death, another member of his Scottish clan recorded that ‘the Druses in the villages of the hills entertain an almost superstitious veneration for his memory and that of Sitti [Arabic: Lady] Alice’.156 A tangible part of Oliphant’s legacy was the house Oliphant had constructed in Daliya. The house was built before summer 1884, a process sped up by the use of stones from the ruin of a nearby Roman quarry. Oliphant had deplored Palestinian villagers’ having made ‘a clean sweep’ of stones from ancient sites to build their own homes, and the Ottoman authorities’ failure to protect sites for Western archaeologists.157 Now, with barefaced hypocrisy, Oliphant justified doing the same, rhetorically asking whether the pilfered stones were ‘not as well preserved in the walls of my house as lying on the barren hill-top?’ Oliphant’s new home, with its ‘somewhat pretentious castellated roof, a generally unfinished appearance, and suggestions of landscape-gardening not altogether in keeping with the native surroundings’, was calculated to impress his Druze neighbours.158 He boasted that ‘in the eyes of the natives, this modest erection has seemed something palatial’. Oliphant claimed to have received in his home so many Druze visitors, not only from Daliya but leaders of the community from around the region, that he created a līwān or reception room for this purpose. While he was forced ‘to waste time over much drinking of coffee out of minute cups’ and ‘to hear their gossip on local politics’, he also took it upon himself ‘to try and give them some larger ideas than the very narrow ones which they have acquired upon these wild hillsides’.159

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Reflecting settler colonialism’s drive at creating an image of Europe, Oliphant attempted to cultivate the most English of garden features – ‘what I hope some day to call a lawn’ – on the ‘wild hillside’ around his home. Yet the landscape around Daliya held a greater significance to him, as inscribed with an ancient history of a supposedly large population and agricultural fertility. Oliphant’s mental image of the ‘vanished luxury and beauty’ of the area in antiquity led him to the reflection that ‘The future, not the past, seems to claim our energies and resources’. Messianically, he expressed his belief that ‘be mine the task, however feebly, to labour for the restoration of this land to its former condition of fruitfulness and abundance’.160 It was this belief that led him to continue his efforts in support of the early Zionist movement. *** Perusing some Crusader ruins in Tiberias, Oliphant wrote in 1883, ‘it occurred to me that the time had surely come for a new Crusade not to be undertaken with the modern Christian weapons of Krupps and Gatlings, in the name of a creed to cover a political purpose; but with steam-ploughs and locomotives, by farmers and mechanics’.161 To facilitate this ‘new Crusade’ through the means of Jewish agricultural colonization now became Oliphant’s raison d’être. His involvement with Zionist settlers has received significant attention, including his employment of the Galician poet Naftali Herz Imber, author of the words to the later Israeli national anthem ‘HaTikvah’, as his secretary in Haifa; his fundraising activities for the fledgling settlements among Christian Zionist groups in the West; and his patronage of often impoverished would-be settlers arriving from Eastern Europe.162 Zionist chroniclers quickly established a rosy narrative of Oliphant as their movement’s gentile benefactor.163 This narrative has continued in Israeli state discourse. In his introduction to an Israeli reprint of Haifa (subtitled Life in the Holy Land, erasing any mention of Palestine) Rehavam Ze‘evi, Israel’s far-right tourism minister assassinated by Palestinian militants in 2001, credited Oliphant as ‘one of the great instigators of the Jewish movement for the Return to Zion and the resettlement of the Land’.164 This section presents an alternative reading of Oliphant’s writing on the Zionist movement. Oliphant was in the habit of calling in on the local settlements without prior warning – ‘à l’improviste’ as he put it – to see how the money he had raised was being spent.165 In his school-teacherly reports of the First Aliya’s formative years, there is as much criticism as there is praise. In a December 1882 article for the New York Sun entitled “A Jewish Colony in its Infancy”, he covered the establishment of Zikhron Ya‘kov (initially named Zimmarin) by Romanian Jewish settlers. Despite his support for the colonists – he applauded their “bona fide attempt to change the habits of their lives and engage in agricultural pursuits” – an ambivalent attitude was revealed in his account of the settlers meeting with local Palestinians: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin, with their wild, shaggy, black

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beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihas [kūfiya] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [Arabic: ‘abāya, gown], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labor on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie.166

Th ­ e filaḥīn, though ‘wild’ and ‘shaggy’, were also ‘stalwart’ and ‘sturdy’, ‘inured to hard labor’, and able to defend themselves. By contrast, other than their ‘pleasing’ though misplaced self-confidence, Oliphant presented the settlers as effeminate, unused to socially useful enterprise, and generally unattractive. He explained that local Palestinian farmers were retained ‘as laborers and co-partners in the cultivation of the soil’ by the colonists, ‘until the new-comers shall have become sufficiently indoctrinated in the art of agriculture to be able to do for themselves’.167 This was the practice of not only all the Zionist settlements of the First ‘Aliya, but also – on a much reduced scale – of Oliphant’s old Balqa’ colony plan. Oliphant reported that the local Palestinians viewed the prospect of this collaboration with ‘considerable repugnance’.168 Oliphant was subsequently more optimistic. He described a visit to Rosh Pina in the northern Galilee in July 1883, with its colonists ‘hard at work on their potato-patches’, and its ‘sixteen neat little houses’. Oliphant wrote he ‘was pleased to find evidences of thrift and industry’, and claimed that ‘altogether this is the most hopeful attempt at a colony which I have seen in Palestine’.169 Like the Finns at Kerem Avraham, he emphasized the supposed transformative effect which colonization had on the settlers, writing that ‘in the course of six months’ field work’, they had ‘developed into bronzed horny-fisted farmers’.170 Oliphant also credited the Eurocentric norm of capitalist ownership for the transformation away from ‘the Ghetto life they had left’, emphasizing that the settlers ‘seemed to take a real delight in the consciousness of the fact that they had become landowners’.171 Rosh Pina was one settlement with which Oliphant had a particularly close relationship. The colony had been founded by the Hebrew-language journalist Eliezer Rokach and his followers, who had shortly before been driven out of Safad by the Orthodox Jewish community because of Rokach’s quarrelsome nature, attacks on the haluka and advocacy of other anti-traditionalist and protoZionist ideas which Oliphant shared.172 Oliphant thus put a very positive slant on indigenous-settler relations in his reports of the settlement. He claimed that the Palestinian inhabitants of the neighbouring village of al-Jā‘ūna ‘lived on terms of perfect amity with the Jews’ in Rosh Pina, had offered them ‘assistance and advice’, and generally seemed ‘well pleased to have them among them’.173 Subsequently, in

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contradiction to his earlier depiction of contrasting attitudes between Palestinians and settlers, he claimed ‘the fellahin are nowhere hostile to the colonists, but are, on the contrary, anxious and willing to co-operate with them where they see a profit in so doing, and that native competition is not therefore to be feared’.174 This mischaracterized the actually poor relations between settlers and local filaḥīn. In December 1882, for instance, Rosh Pina was attacked after settlers killed a Palestinian, an incident which Oliphant neglected to mention in his letters to the press. While the villagers of al-Ja‘una intervened to diffuse the tension, Oliphant’s characterization of settler-indigenous relations as ‘perfect amity’ obscured the native resistance increasingly faced by the colonies.175 Oliphant’s optimism initially grew slightly as the colonies survived their first few years. In June 1885, Oliphant reported on colonies around Jaffa in a letter entitled ‘Progress Even in Palestine’, in which he claimed S­ o far as energy, industry, and aptitude for agricultural pursuits are concerned, the absence of which has always been alleged as the reason why no Jewish colony could succeed, the experience of more than two years has now proved that such apprehensions are groundless, and that with a fair chance Jews make very good colonists […]176

Contradicting all his earlier appraisals of the indigenous filaḥīn as a source of labour and agricultural knowledge, Oliphant wrote of ‘the helpless ignorance and ingrained indolence of the native fellahin, who are [the settlers’] only rivals here’.177 With this assertion of settler superiority, he appeared confident that settler colonialism could triumph without relying on indigenous labour. Like Elizabeth Finn and the administrators at Kerem Avraham a few years later, Oliphant realized that Mizrahi Jews, particularly Yemenite Jews, might form an effective workforce, compared to the Ashkenazi immigrants with their ‘weak chetif physiques’.178 In his juxtaposition between the filaḥīn and the settlers quoted above, Oliphant also drew attention to ‘the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter’ between the parties: ‘a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves’.179 Mizrahi Jews, Oliphant implied, possessed the physical strength required in the settlements, and were a more reliable source of labour than the Eastern European arrivals. Oliphant continued to write positively of the Yemenites, for example describing the ‘mild and gentle’ expressions of a group he encountered in Jerusalem, their religiosity ‘without being hypocritical, which is more than can be said for Palestinian Jews generally’ and their positive ‘unsophisticated’ character compared to ‘those who have been in contact with Western civilisation’.180 However, Oliphant’s experiences with the Zionist colonies led him to re-evaluate his earlier considerations of the challenges they faced. He was disappointed with the financial mismanagement of some colonies, complaining of the ‘unnecessary waste of funds’ in Zikhron Ya‘kov leading the colonists to ‘undergo privations before they have sold their first crop’.181 Oliphant also lamented the apparent ‘jealousies and rivalries’ between settlers from different regions, particularly Romanian and Russian Jews. He claimed that ‘strong divergences of opinion

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among them on theological subjects’ made it ‘very difficult to combine them for united action of any kind, or to use any of them for positions of responsibility or authority’. These divisions among the colonists led to Oliphant’s patronizing tendency to assert itself: he described the settlers as ‘like untrained children who have fled from prison’, who required ‘some strong hand’ – that is, Oliphant’s own  – ‘to guide, restrain, and, if need be, to coerce’.182 Oliphant believed the settlements could thrive only if they accepted his complete leadership. The most serious obstacle led Oliphant to doubt the practicability of the whole Zionist mission. In The Land of Gilead, he had given little hint of any awareness that the Ottoman government, no matter how corrupt and inefficient, would stand in the way of the settler-colonial enterprise. Oliphant had confidently claimed the Jews were ideally suited to colonizing Palestine partly because they ‘had never alarmed the Turkish Government by national aspirations, but, on the contrary, had always proved themselves most loyal and peacable subjects of his Majesty’.183 It was only the Bedouin who posed a danger to colonization. However, several years after the inauguration of the first colonies in Palestine, Oliphant admitted that Bedouin ‘have never yet disturbed any of these Jewish agriculturists’, and that the real ‘insurmountable’ problem was posed by the Ottomans.184 While Oliphant had once seen the Ottoman Empire as a decrepit though harmless entity, which had not manifested the same anti-Jewish prejudice as had the West, after his close involvement with the early Zionist colonies began he claimed it had become ‘alarmed at an influx, on so vast a scale, of the race into the province which had given it birth’, and ‘feared the ultimate development there of a new nationality movement, should the descendants of its ancient inhabitants pour in to take possession of the land’.185 Oliphant’s perception, though couched in Restorationist rhetoric, was not far from the truth. During ‘Abdul Hamid’s reign the Ottomans, though allowing the establishment of the colonies of the First ‘Aliya, had left the settlers frustrated by the limits they imposed on their activity.186 In his articles, Oliphant complained bitterly that ‘the obstacles thrown in the way by the Government threaten to make it almost impossible for [the settlers], unless assisted by foreign influence, even to establish themselves permanently on the land’.187 The challenges posed by Ottoman control of Palestine led Oliphant to ponder the prospects of settler colonization under the current conditions. This brought him back to ‘a political problem of the highest importance’ that would decide ‘the destiny of Palestine’ and the settler project alike – the necessity a European occupation of Palestine.188 Oliphant privately came to realize that it was only through a broader colonial framework that the settlers’ aims could be realized. Near the end of his life, Oliphant even reconsidered his previously continuous calls for wealthy Christians and Jews in the West to open their wallets for the cause. Having interviewed Oliphant in the United States on his final visit there in summer 1888, the American newspaper the Jewish Messenger reported that while Oliphant was ‘as enthusiastic as ever as to the feasibility of colonization’, he had ‘altered his views as to the present expediency of the project under existing conditions’. The uneven successes of the colonies in the face of Ottoman (and local Palestinian) opposition led him to believe that Zionist activities in

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Palestine now had ‘a disquieting effect, apart from being wholly useless’. The reporter stated that Oliphant was ‘strongly opposed to sending money to aid existing Palestine colonies, or to found new ones, until the Eastern question is finally settled’.189 Oliphant had finally returned to the idea of a European, or British, protectorate of Palestine, which would remove all barriers to colonisation and act as the settlers’ patron, in distinction to the agricultural activity on the ground with which he had become closely associated in the intervening years.

‘The Foundations of Zionism That Are Here’: Oliphant’s legacy in Palestine Oliphant’s influence spread far within his own lifetime. The American Jewish poet and campaigner Emma Lazarus was deeply impressed by The Land of Gilead; she entered into correspondence with Oliphant over a failed plan to convince the Russian tsar to pressure the Ottomans into relaxing restrictions on Zionist colonization (a striking idea given Oliphant’s evident Russophobia).190 After Oliphant’s death from lung cancer during a trip to Britain in December 1888, Anglophile leaders of the Zionist movement, such as Israel Zangwill and Sokolow, drew influence from his pro-colonization arguments.191 His position as patriarchal overlord of the Zionist settlers in Palestine was continued in many respects by Baron Edmund de Rothschild, the major financial backer of the First ‘Aliya, whom Hyamson asserts first had his attention drawn to Zionism through Oliphant’s activities and writing.192 In Palestine, the Oliphants’ two former homes in Haifa and Daliya became shrines in their own right, visited by ‘Not a few travellers with names famous in Europe’.193 In the early twentieth century, one traveller found portraits of Laurence and Alice hanging in the German colony, and their memory lingering ‘as the odour of dead violets’ amongst ‘the Druses, the Germans, the Syrians, and the poor Jews in whose settlements they took so active and practical an interest’.194 Ada Goodrich-Freer, a kindred eccentric soul to Oliphant, described his Haifa home as ‘almost a place of pilgrimage’, and Oliphant himself as ‘a man of genius unappreciated, misunderstood’, whose settler-colonial mission in Palestine was the ‘work of – literally – sweetness and light’.195 Oliphant’s legacy in Palestine was continued in a particularly bizarre way by Rosamond Dale Owen, his second wife. Oliphant met Owen, the granddaughter of the Scottish entrepreneur and utopian socialist Robert Owen and daughter of Glasgow-born American Congressman Robert Dale Owen, on his final visit to America. With characteristic obsession travelling over a thousand miles from New York to meet her after hearing reports of her spiritual views, Oliphant ominously wrote that ‘we felt after an hour’s interview that we must combine our forces, as my work with women is too difficult and compromising for me to carry on alone’. Oliphant invited her to accompany him to Palestine; on the way to Britain, he claimed that ‘she was brought into very close relations with Alice’ – his dead wife – so they decided to get married.196 Oliphant died in London before they could move on to Palestine, but Mrs Oliphant, née Owen, soon continued there alone. Echoing her

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late husband’s earlier call for a European protectorate over Palestine, she authored pamphlets in the 1890s calling for Palestine to become ‘an International Republic’, apparently ‘a plan warmly desired by the Arabs’, so that Palestine’s resources could be ‘used for the Commonwealth’.197 Like other travellers who called for such an outcome, including Warren and Conder at various times, this was a thinly disguised call for Palestine’s resources to be put at the disposal of the British Empire. In Palestine, Owen made it her mission to secure the rights to areas of land Oliphant had purchased in northern Palestine, including Megiddo (the Biblical site of Armageddon), for agricultural colonization; she boasted on the title page of her deeply strange memoir My Perilous Life in Palestine that she was ‘Mrs. Laurence Oliphant, the owner of Armageddon’. She waged an epic and unsuccessful legal struggle spanning forty-seven years, involving twenty-five journeys to Palestine, and costing her £18,000 (over £824,000 or $1,144,000 in current values) until she had only £1000 to leave to her adopted son upon her death in 1937. Ironically, given Oliphant’s enthusiasm for connecting Haifa with rail, one site which Oliphant had owned and was requisitioned by the Ottomans after his death and for which Owen then battled, was after 1904 occupied by Haifa’s railway station; she fruitlessly demanded the astronomical sum of £50,000 or £60,000 as compensation.198 An interesting insight into Oliphant’s approach to land purchases is found in the claim that another plot Owen sought had previously belonged to a Palestinian village. Oliphant had assisted the villagers in paying their heavy Ottoman taxes, but had demanded a fifth of their lands in return.199 Frances Emily Newton, a missionary who lived in Palestine for fifty years until she was expelled by the British authorities in 1938, purchased the Daliya house from Owen in 1926; though Newton strongly opposed Zionism, she still regarded residence in Oliphant’s home as a badge of honour.200 Oliphant has also been commemorated by officials and institutions of the Israeli state. In 1929, the centenary of Oliphant’s birth was celebrated by the Zionist movement’s press in Palestine and a public meeting in Haifa.201 His death centenary too was marked, in 1988, with a ceremony of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation in the Daliya house.202 There are today Oliphant Streets in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and another in Katzrin, an Israeli settlement in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, where Oliphant had once dreamed of Jewish colonization. Purchased by the Israeli state in the late 1970s, the Daliya house was turned into a memorial for the Druze soldiers killed in service in the Israeli military (the Druze, unlike other Arab and Palestinian citizens of Israel, are conscripted for military service). The site both reflects Oliphant’s relationship with the Druze and performs a propagandistic function for the Israeli state. In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the building a national heritage site, speaking of ‘the foundations of Zionism that are here, the support of Christian Zionists like Sir Laurence Oliphant’, and incorrectly claiming that ‘his secretary, Naftali Herz Imber […] wrote Hatikva here, in this very place’. Netanyahu claimed that the 1880s home of the eccentric British traveller had ‘very deep roots’ in Israel.203

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Oliphant has repeatedly featured in various forms of media, entering the Israeli public psyche to a degree that no other Victorian traveller has. He appeared as a character in the novel Gai‘oni (1982) by the bestselling Israeli author Shulamit Lapid, a romanticized portrait of Rosh Pina in the First ‘Aliyah; Lapid has one Zionist settler exclaim of Oliphant, ‘He believes in the “Return to Zion” more than our Jews believe in it!’204 The novel was filmed in 2010, briefly bringing Oliphant to the big screen. In 2012 he was again represented in fiction, in best-selling Israeli author Ram Oren’s Nefesh Homiya, centring on a supposed love affair between Alice Oliphant and Imber.205 In other artistic domains too have the Oliphants been represented: an exhibition of Alice’s original oil paintings was held in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2003–4, while a two-day theatrical performance based on The Land of Gilead was staged by the Israeli Centre for Digital Art in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon in 2012.206 Features on Oliphant periodically appear in the Israeli press as light relief from the news, hailing him as a precursor of the modern state. Significantly, the Oliphants are also commemorated in the Friends of Zion Museum in West Jerusalem, an institution established in 2015 and dedicated to non-Jewish Zionists and presenting a positive view of Israel; according to its website, it ‘serves as a platform for fighting BDS’, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign for Palestinian rights  – perhaps making it unique among the world’s museums as having as one of its raisons d’être opposition to a contemporary activist movement.207 Portraits of Laurence and Alice Oliphant feature prominently in a display of ‘visionaries’, both physically within the museum and virtually on the museum’s website, wedged between Edward Robinson and Queen Victoria.208 The Victorians thus continue to be pressed into service for a state-propagated simplistic narrative, emphasizing centuries of Western Christian support for settler colonialism in Palestine, while whitewashing the Zionist project’s implications for the land’s indigenous people. *** These efforts have kept Oliphant’s name alive in Israel today. But most importantly, many of his ideas in The Land of Gilead have been adopted in Zionist settler-colonial practices. His blueprint for the colonization of Palestine was simultaneously a utopian vision and appeared to be a practical solution to not only European antiSemitism, but also to the Eastern Question, and thus could receive the support of European powers. It was at once a dream of unbridled settlement in an allegedly unpopulated land, and a treatise on colonizer-indigenous relations, up to ethnic cleansing, without which Oliphant’s plans would not have been applicable. Oliphant was unable to realize his grandiose colonization plans in his lifetime, and for decades afterwards the Zionist movement was unable to fully replicate the settlement strategies he initially recommended. Yet the very textuality of Oliphant’s Gilead plan was its strength, as Oliphant could construct a colony perfect in its abstraction, intricate in its detail and a blueprint for the Zionist movement to follow.

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In time, the State of Israel was able to put much of Oliphant’s vision into practice. In 1948, the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba actualized the expulsion of the indigenous population, leaving most of historic Palestine available for colonization. In 1967, the Six-Day War or Naksa allowed access to other territories which Oliphant had envisaged for colonization, and provided an effectively captive Palestinian workforce, just as Oliphant had once recommended the exploitation of the local indigenous population. While in places like the Friends of Zion Museum the overtly racist and violent aspects of Oliphant’s message are not put on public display, many Palestinians  – from Bedouin villagers of the Naqab/Negev Desert, to the residents of Jerusalem’s Shaykh Jarah, to those who call the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip home – might be able to recognize the implications of that message today. More than any other traveller of the Peaceful Crusade, Oliphant’s long shadow has been cast over Palestine’s history.

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­Chapter 8 ‘PA L E ST I N E I S T H U S B R OU G H T HOM E T O E N G L A N D’ : C O N C LU SIO N

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the massive volume of text on Palestine produced during the Victorian age had ensured that, in the words of Conder, ‘Palestine is thus brought home to England’. Accounts of travellers who visited the Holy Land came to exercise a profound influence over many more people who never set eyes on Palestine. Their discourse, propagated in books, magazines and newspapers of which this work has considered only a small portion, as well as in popular prints and postcards, spectacles like the public meetings for Ya‘qub alShalabi, and all forms of Victorian culture, permeated throughout British (and, to an extent, American) society. An image of Palestine as virtually barren of productive agriculture, sparsely populated with hostile but unthinking people like the ‘fanatics’ of Nablus, and merely awaiting the ‘return’ of the Jewish people, while remote from the truth, so well harmonized with Orientalist and imperialist assumptions about the world beyond Europe’s fringes that it became almost ubiquitous, including among the upper echelons of the British state. Britain’s wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whose Zionist sympathies were a key factor in his government’s issuance of the Balfour Declaration, could have been quoting from a Palestine travel account when he asserted to a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet in March 1917 that the Ottoman Empire was ‘misruling […] the most fertile and the most favoured lands in the world’, which had ‘at one time maintained countless millions of people’, but which had been ‘swept of all fertility by hundreds of years of Turkish misrule’, and proclaimed that ‘it will be a great achievement to restore these famous territories to the splendour they enjoyed in the past’.1 The more detailed discussions about Palestine’s settler colonization, in which the Finns, Warren, Conder and Oliphant were leading proponents, may have occurred in relatively small circles, yet they were nevertheless deeply influential for several generations of Zionist ideologues in Britain, Europe and Palestine. Herbert Bentwich, a leading British Zionist in the late nineteenth century, member of the central committee of the Zionist Organisation, and later himself a settler in Palestine, accurately wrote to the Times in 1912: As to sentiment, the Zionist movement, from its conception, has looked with a special affection towards England, which has always shown a vivid interest in

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everything affecting the Holy Land. It was Englishmen like Colonel Conder and Lawrence [sic] Oliphant who gave the most active service in the first colonization movement in Palestine […]2

Compared to the growing chorus of voices in Britain calling for Palestine’s settler colonization in the early twentieth century, only a few raised concerns based on the negative impact which a settler-colonial project would inevitably have upon the indigenous population. One was Marmaduke Pickthall, an Orientalist scholar and traveller who had visited Palestine in his late teens in the 1890s. In 1907, he noted that ‘a vast majority of the large and growing Jewish population are immigrants of the last fifty years, borne to Palestine on the waves of the Zionist movement, and looking about them surlily, with foreign eyes’; displaying a marked preference for the indigenous society, he asserted that ‘the Jew is now a foreigner in the Holy Land; and the standpoint and posture of his ancestors of the time of Christ to-day is found with the Moslem, who also claims descent from Abraham’.3 Pickthall’s standpoint might be partially explicable by his religious affinity for Islam; ten years later, he dramatically announced his conversion to the religion while he delivered a lecture in London. Yet adherence to Islam alone was no guarantee of opposition to settler colonialism in Palestine; Pickthall’s fellow Muslim convert Abdullah Quilliam, a close confidant of ‘Abdul Hamid II, described the ‘Zionist ideal’ as ‘noble’ and ‘patriotic’ in a lecture he delivered to the London Zionist League, although he stressed that Jews could ‘find their deliverance’ under the banner of the Ottoman sultan, rather than in a Palestine occupied by any other power.4 Astute opposition to Zionist settler colonization also came from a more surprising source, within the Evangelical fold. George Adam Smith, an Edinburgheducated theologian of the Free Church of Scotland, was feted as a successor to Edward Robinson after the publication of Smith’s The Historical Geography of the Holy Land in 1894. ‘On him willingly would Robinson have cast his mantle’, Robinson’s biographer later stated.5 In a short pamphlet published in 1918, while British Evangelicals were still in raptures from their country’s recent capture of Jerusalem, Smith sounded a note of caution against British aims in Palestine as revealed in ‘Mr. Balfour’s declaration on behalf of the British Government’. Smith, like so many others, expressed relief that ‘the hands of the Turk […] at last have been lifted from [Palestine’s] suffering soil’. Yet he also expressed deep concern at the practices and goals of the Zionist movement. ‘Of the human factors which demand the care of a just government’, Smith asserted, ‘none – not even the Jews – have a stronger claim than the native peasantry’. He noted that while the filaḥīn ‘labour, and for centuries have laboured, on the soil’, and formed ‘the basis of the people and the state’, before British occupation began tracts of their land had already been ‘mortgaged and then surrendered to the alien capitalist’. ‘When Jewish writers claim “the whole country for the Jews,” when they write of “the re-settlement and rebirth of Palestine” as “the national centre” of “the Jewish nation,” have they realized the economic and social disturbances which the execution of this claim would involve?’ Smith asked, with a foresight that most of his contemporaries lacked. ‘How do Zionists propose to preserve the legal rights

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and secure the social health of the fellahin, or to prevent the continuation of that process of buying and crushing them out of their communal property, by which so many have already been reduced to the position of serfs?’ Emphasizing that Palestine was not ‘the national home of the Jewish people and of no other people’, Smith noted that ‘a very great deal of difficult detail has still to be thought out’ before ‘justice and security’ could be assured ‘for all nations and creeds alike’.6 Smith’s worries proved to be well-founded during the upheavals of the British Mandate period, culminating in the Palestinian tragedy of 1948. The Palestinian people’s loss of their homeland was the bitter fruit of the work which Western travellers had been doing for over a century, casting Palestine as a piece of land eminently suited for colonization and settlement by a population which, it was believed, could transform the Holy Land into something resembling Evangelical Protestants’ Biblical reverie. *** Perusing some of the corpus of nineteenth-century travellers’ texts discussed in this book, it is impossible not to be struck with the thought that the Palestine seen by those Victorians, in their riding gear and sunhats with their Bibles tucked in pockets to be retrieved at a moment’s notice, has gone. The very journeys many of them took are today physically and politically impossible, passing across heavily fortified borders of hostile states, closed military zones, walls of ethnic separation and containment, none of them yet imagined in the nineteenth century. For the residents of the land, such movement is often discouraged or outright impossible. Where the well-paved highways between illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank turn off onto narrow, potholed tracks leading to Palestinian towns and villages, the traveller is invariably met with intentionally alarming signs stating ‘Entrance For Israeli Citizens Is Forbidden, Dangerous To Your Lives And Is Against The Israeli Law’ (capitalization verbatim). Palestinian West Bankers cannot follow the ancient road of countless Christian pilgrims (and Protestant Peaceful Crusaders) from Jerusalem to Nazareth, with access to both cities blocked by military checkpoints through which only Israelis and international passport-holders can move. Gaza, which Robinson and Smith found lying among ‘vast olive-groves’, today is hemmed in by Israeli siege from land, sea and sky, from which two million people cannot escape. The Palestinian refugees, and their descendants, who in 1948 fled their homes into the surrounding Arab states, have never been granted the right of setting foot in the land of their ancestors. The look of the landscape too has been irreversibly altered by human activity, and not only with the overt infrastructure – walls, settlements, checkpoints – of military occupation. The ‘glittering freshness of the sward, and the abounding masses of flowers’ on Palestine’s plains once celebrated by Kinglake, have in many places now disappeared under Israeli commuter towns, highways, fields of intensive agriculture.7 Many of the Palestinian villages once visited by Robinson and other travellers, like Bayt Jibrin, Bayt Nattif and Lubiya, have been erased from

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the map, their sturdy stone houses bulldozed into oblivion; numbering among the 531 Arab villages and eleven urban neighbourhoods depopulated in 1948, they nevertheless survive still in the collective memories of refugees. The transformation has been marked in urban areas too. While the best views of Jerusalem’s Old City and the Haram al-Sharif can still be had from the east and the Mount of Olives, today the panorama is overshadowed by the high-rises of West Jerusalem, where the farmland of Kerem Avraham too lies buried under bricks and mortar. Ya‘qub the Samaritan would today have no problem recognizing the mountains of Jabal Jirzim and Jabal ‘Aybal, though the city lying between has changed much. Old Nablus’s ‘paved covered markets, the old bridges, the narrow alleyways steeped in the odour of history’, its ‘orchards […] which extended along the green valley’ in the words of Nablus-born poet Fadwa Tuqan, had mostly ‘vanished, leaving little behind’ by the late twentieth century.8 The post-1948 Palestinian refugee camps of ‘Askar, Balāṭa, and ‘Aīn Bayt al-Mā’ which now form suburbs of Nablus, and the post-1967 Israeli settlements which surround the city, would have alike seemed alien to Ya‘qub not just in their appearance, but in their purpose and reason for existence. While Oliphant’s house still stands in Daliya as a monument to his colonial legacy, most Palestinian residents of the city fled from Zionist military assault during the Nakba, and the growing Arab town of Haifa which he knew has been subsumed by Israel’s largest industrial port. Yet as this book has endeavoured to show, the textual productions of Victorian travellers are no mere record of a disappeared Holy Land which can be read with pleasant nostalgia. These texts were themselves active partners in that disappearance. Insofar as Western travellers spilt their Biblical imaginations across the pages of their books, expressed their fantasies of a settler-colonial future in works read by Zionist activists and contributing to a broader social consensus supporting the colonization of Palestine, they helped to destroy (in order to replace) the landscape and the society which had existed in. When Stanley dreamed of Palestine’s antiquity when he imagined that ‘every hill was crowned with a flourishing town’ (and diminished the Palestine of the present which had ‘ceased to be the seat not only of civilization, but in many instances even of the population and habitations which once fertilised it’), he also spoke of the future which so many Evangelicals wished to see: Biblical Palestine reborn in a European settler-colonial image.9 It is also the fait accompli which Israel has tried to create in the fortified Jewish-only settlements which crown many of the hills of the West Bank, regardless of international law, demonstrable land ownership and the claims of the Palestinian people. Travel to, and in, today’s Palestine/Israel has thus become deeply politicized. Evangelical Christians, especially from America, continue to visit to see the Holy Land ‘through the eyes of the Bible’, continue to cast disdainful glances around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, have archaeological sites first identified by Robinson pointed out to them by Israeli ‘dragomans’ from air-conditioned tour buses. Yet the experience of travel is also indelibly impacted by the wounds that settler colonization has more recently left, whether the traveller chooses to try to ignore them for the sake of an easy vacation, or to actively express solidarity with

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the Palestinians. In 2010, British comedian Mark Thomas travelled to Palestine, not to follow in the footsteps of the Biblical patriarchs like his Victorian forebears, but to walk the length of Israel’s West Bank barrier, built since 2002 to separate Palestinians and Israelis. ‘For Israel’, Thomas writes in his travelogue Extreme Rambling, ‘the Barrier is a trompe l’oeil, a trick of the eye; it gives the illusion of safety and the illusion of security, with no effort to end the Occupation or strive for peace’.10 Palestinians, too, have authored their own accounts of travel around their own country, part of a project of ‘writing back’ to reclaim the land from the denigrating discourse which the Victorian travelogues set in motion, as well as from occupation and colonization. Specifically referencing Thackeray’s descriptions of Jerusalem, the Palestinian human rights lawyer and hiker Raja Shehadeh writes in his Palestinian Walks, The [Western] accounts I have read do not describe a land familiar to me but rather a land of these travellers’ imaginations. Palestine has been constantly reinvented, with devastating consequences to its original inhabitants […] what mattered was not the land and its inhabitants as they actually were but the confirmation of the viewer’s or reader’s political beliefs.

He continues that ‘I like to think of my relationship to the land, where I have always lived, as immediate and not experienced through the veil of words written about it, often replete with distortions’.11 Perhaps the Palestinians of the nineteenth century would have thought in similar terms, had they known what the Western travellers whom they welcomed to their land would write, once they returned to London, New York, or wherever else they called home. *** The writing of this book, from summer 2020 to summer 2021, was bookended by two highly significant series of events (against the background, of course, of a global pandemic which starkly highlighted social and racial inequality in Palestine/Israel as it did elsewhere).12 Firstly, a movement of global span and importance rapidly coalesced in response to the murder of the African-American man George Floyd by a white police officer in the US city of Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. Protestors took to the streets of scores of towns and cities primarily in the Global North, with a chant and a movement name that had originated in 2013: Black Lives Matter. The movement’s scope quickly expanded to become a reckoning with a present and past globe-spanning power structure which the movement’s supporters argued was, in essence, a legacy of colonialism. There followed a widespread and heated societal debate about the history of empire and colonization (and particularly the teaching thereof in schools and universities); the social, political and economic legacy of this history in the present, and what to do about it. Palestinians, both in their homeland and in the diaspora, were quick to express unconditional support for African-American victims of police violence

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such as Floyd. The parallels between the experiences of African-Americans and of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation were tragically illustrated by the shooting by Israeli police of Iyād al-Ḥalāq, a disabled Palestinian man walking to his workplace in Jerusalem’s Old City, just five days after Floyd’s death. In the cases of both Floyd and al-Halaq, Palestinians and their supporters argued, the root cause of tragedy was forms of colonial control and violence.13 This book has tried to show that in Palestine, as with many other contemporary contexts of injustice, the origins of the story also lie in the era of high imperialism and colonialism, and thus go significantly further back than the common narrative’s start in late 1917 with the Balfour Declaration and capture of Jerusalem. Palestine cannot be left out of critical conversations about global legacies of British imperialism, with everything such conversations imply. About a year after Floyd’s death and the movement it sparked, for several weeks in summer 2021, the world’s attention was on Palestine. Facing evictions from their decades-old homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Shaykh Jarah to make way for Israeli settlers on the basis of disputed claims of Jewish ownership of the site before 1948, several Palestinian families began protests to raise the profile of their plight.14 The situation escalated quickly after Israeli border police clashed with demonstrators and fired teargas at Muslim worshippers in the Haram al-Sharif in early May. Rocket fire from the militant group Hamas in the besieged Gaza Strip drew hundreds of Israeli airstrikes in response from 10  May to 21  May. Simultaneously, ultranationalist Israeli vigilantes launched attacks on Palestinian citizens of Israel and their homes and businesses, while Palestinians clashed with the police. Ultimately, by late May, 287 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank had been killed, while thirteen people were killed in Israel, figures starkly reflecting the disparity in power between the two peoples inhabiting the land.15 As with the events of 2020, protestors took to the streets around the world in large numbers, this time in support of the Palestinian cause. Many of those joining the demonstrations were also active supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, in a display of reciprocal solidarity, and a continuing awareness of the parallels in the violent realities suffered by AfricanAmericans and Palestinians.16 Just as the many injustices inflicted against African-Americans brought the sociopolitical legacies of colonialism into sharp focus, so too should the dramatic outbursts in the structural oppression suffered by Palestinians, today characterized variously as settler colonialism, occupation or apartheid. As this book has sought to demonstrate, it is in many respects to the Peaceful Crusade of Victorian Evangelicals that the roots of colonization in Palestine/Israel can be traced. The true reckoning with the colonial and imperial past of the West, which reached its apogee (or nadir) in the nineteenth century, can only be considered complete when it has confronted the West’s inglorious and profoundly irresponsible role in the history of Palestine.

NOTES Chapter 1 1

‘And anon we had passed from one commodious pavilion to another, and were seated at a repast, spread on a snow-white tablecloth, in which grilled kidneys, boiled eggs, and sardines were associated with hot rolls, buttered toast, a choice of preserves, a dish of delicious Jaffa oranges, and coffee served in a silver urn. And a few yards away, and all round about us, was barbarism’. Arthur E. Copping, A Journalist in the Holy Land: Glimpses of Egypt and Palestine (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1912), 100. 2 John Kelman and John Fulleylove, The Holy Land (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1902), 507. 3 Jás Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Introduction: Travel and the Problem of Modernity’, in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jás Elsner and JoanPau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 16. 4 Judy A. Hayden and Nabil I. Matar eds., Through the Eyes of the Beholder: The Holy Land, 1517–1713 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 5 Issam Nassar, European Portrayals of Jerusalem: Religious Fascinations and Colonialist Imaginations (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 58–60. 6 Regina S. Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History (London: Zed Press, 1983), 22. 7 Regina S. Sharif, ‘Christians for Zionism 1600–1919’, Journal of Palestine Studies 5, no. 3/4 (1976), 123. 8 Nabil Matar, ‘Protestantism, Palestine, and Partisan Scholarship’, Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 4 (1989). 9 Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 183. 10 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 42. 11 Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), 63. 12 Alexander Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882: Studies in Social, Economic and Political Development (Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993), 65. 13 Isabel Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land: From My Private Journal 1 (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1875), 136. 14 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 41. 15 Eliot Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel 1 (London: Henry Colburn, 1845), 5. 16 Mr. M.A. Titmarsh [William Makepeace Thackeray], Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by Way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), xii. 17 Naomi Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders: The Western Rediscovery of Palestine (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 180.

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18 Anonymous, Cook’s Tourists’ Handbook for Palestine and Syria (London: Thomas Cook & Son, and Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1876), 9, 16, 22. 19 Ibid., i, 7, 8. 20 Claude Reignier Conder, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure (1878; London: R. Bentley & Son, 1887). 21 John MacGregor, The Rob Roy on the Jordan, Nile, Red Sea, & Gennesareth, &c.: A Canoe Cruise in Palestine and Egypt, and the Waters of Damascus (London: John Murray, 1869), 212. 22 Anonymous, ‘Modern Palestine’, Morning Post, 20 April 1887, 2. 23 Said, Orientalism, 13. 24 Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 94–104. 25 Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), xii; Shalom Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew & the American Language (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 132. 26 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 22-3. 27 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 1, 4. 28 F.R. Wegg-Prosser, ‘Facilities of Modern Pilgrimage’, The Dublin Review 16, no. 2 (1886), 297. 29 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (London: John Murray, 1856), vii. 30 Anonymous, Cook’s Tourists’ Handbook for Palestine and Syria, iv. 31 Obenzinger, American Palestine, 3; Lorenzo Kamel, ‘The Impact of “Biblical Orientalism” in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, New Middle Eastern Studies 4 (2014). 32 Copping, A Journalist in the Holy Land, 97. 33 Anonymous [Alexander William Kinglake], Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (London: John Ollivier, 1844), 219. 34 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 65. 35 For an analysis of Eliot’s novel, see Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 60–6. 36 Baruch Kimmerling, ‘Academic History Caught in the Cross-Fire: The Case of Israeli-Jewish Historiography’, History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995), 50. 37 Figures from Gur Alroey, ‘Two Historiographies: Israeli Historiography and the Mass Jewish Migration to the United States, 1881–1914’, The Jewish Quarterly Review 105, no. 1 (2015), 104. 38 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 75. 39 Karin Loevy, ‘The Balfour Declaration’s Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self-Determination’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 12, no. 2 (2021), 138–9. 40 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 69. 41 Frederick Treves, The Land That Is Desolate: An Account of a Tour in Palestine (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1912), 10. 42 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (London: Abacus, 2001), 5. 43 Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 5.

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44 Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University and Israel Exploration Society; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 11. 45 Beshara Doumani, ‘Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History’, Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (1992), 8. 46 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 47 See, in particular, Barbara Tuchman, The Bible and the Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: New York University Press, 1956). 48 Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and PostColonialism in Palestine-Israel (London: Zed Books, 2007). 49 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 63. 50 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1, 2. 51 Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 6, 7, 183–4. 52 Ibid., 183–4. 53 Nassar, European Portrayals of Jerusalem, 150. 54 Kamel, ‘The Impact of “Biblical Orientalism” in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, 15. 55 Said, Orientalism, 3, 7. 56 Ibid., 80. 57 Ibid., 12, 36, 39. 58 Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 322. 59 For the divergence between Herzl and Ha‘am, see Matthew Mark Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot: Preachers, Pioneers, and Modern Jewish Politics (Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2020), 186–7. 60 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, xxiv. 61 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), 388. 62 See Aljazeera, ‘Demolitions Begin in Occupied East Jerusalem’s Silwan’, Aljazeera, 29 June 2021. 63 Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’; for Herzl quotation, 388. 64 Gershon Shafir, ‘Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach’, in The Israel/ Palestine Question, ed. Ilan Pappe (London: Routledge, 1999), 73. 65 See, for instance, Francesco Amoruso, Ilan Pappe and Sophie Richter-Devoe, ‘Introduction: Knowledge, Power, and the “Settler Colonial Turn” in Palestine Studies’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019). For a comprehensive discussion of how the settler-colonial frame has also been articulated by Israeli scholars, see Uri Ram, ‘The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology: Internal and External Comparisons’, Journal of Historical Sociology 6, no. 3 (1993). 66 See for instance Sam Levin, ‘Suspension of Controversial Palestine Class at UC Berkeley Sparks Debate’, The Guardian, 16 September 2016. 67 Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 1. 68 William Hepworth Dixon, The Holy Land (1865; London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), 77–104.

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Chapter 2 Henry B. Smith and Roswell D. Hitchcock, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson, D.D., LL.D., Read Before the N.Y. Historical Society (New York: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1863), 84. 2 William Foxwell Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine (London: Penguin Books, 1954), 26; Thomas W. Davis, Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10; Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 100. 3 Neil Asher Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799–1917 (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 42, 45. 4 Obenzinger, American Palestine, xvii. 5 For an outline of Robinson’s biography, see Smith and Hitchcock, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson; Frederick Jones Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, being the Ely Lectures for 1903 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 184–223; and the more recent and fuller work by Jay G. Williams, The Times and Life of Edward Robinson: A Connecticut Yankee in King Solomon’s Court (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999). 6 Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petræa: A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838 1 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1841), 46. 7 Smith and Hitchcock, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson, 23. 8 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 141. 9 Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008), 58. 10 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 143. 11 Ibid., 151–3. 12 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 1. 13 Ibid., 2. 14 Ibid., 51, 43–4, 23. 15 Obenzinger, American Palestine, 4. 16 Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, 196. 17 Haskett Smith, Patrollers of Palestine (London: Edward Arnold, 1906), 326. 18 Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, 220–1. 19 Ibid., 205. 20 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 132. 21 Anonymous, ‘American Explorers in Palestine’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 3 (1871), 171. 22 Edward Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, and in the Adjacent Regions: A Journey of Travels in the Year 1852 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1856), 1. 23 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 133. 24 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 163. 25 Ibid., 266. 26 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 190–1. 27 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 101. 28 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 187. 29 Ibid., 253. 30 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 106. 31 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 118. 1

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32 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 143. 33 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 403. 34 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 195. 35 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 48. 36 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 105. 37 James Silk Buckingham, Public Address, Delivered by Mr. Buckingham, in Defence of his Lectures on Palestine, Against the Criticisms of the Reverend Eli Smith, Published, Anonymously, in the New York Observer, in 1839 (New York: W. Molineux, 1840), 3. For more on the Buckingham-Smith debate, see Issa A. Saliba, ‘Travel Literature, Pilgrims and Missionaries: A Mid-Nineteenth Century Duel Over the Holy Land’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 20, no. 1 (2021). 38 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 185. 39 Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, 185. 40 Edward Robinson, ‘The Reputed Site of the Holy Sepulchre’, Bibliotheca Sacra 1, no. 1 (1843), 185. The quote is from John Henry Newman; see Chapter 3. 41 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 154; Edward Robinson, ‘The Coming of Christ, as Announced in Matt. XXIV. 29-31’, Bibliotheca Sacra 1, no. 3 (1843), 545. 42 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 602. 43 Ibid., 282 44 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 348. 45 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, ‘Introduction’, in Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt 1, ed. Charles W. Wilson (London: J.S. Virtue and Co., 1881), x. 46 Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 1, 5. 47 For an overview of how Israel has used this narrative, see Michael Prior, ‘Zionism and the Challenge of Historical Truth and Morality’, in Speaking the Truth About Zionism and Israel, ed. Michael Prior (London: Melisende, 2004), 33–9. 48 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 386–7. 49 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 404. 50 Ridley Haim Herschell, A Visit to My Father-Land, Being Notes of a Journey to Syria and Palestine, With Additional Notes of a Journey in 1854 (1843; London: Aylott & Co., 1856), 69. 51 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 370. 52 Treves, The Land That Is Desolate, 128. 53 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1869), 607. 54 For a discussion of Locke’s contribution to this ideology, see Barbara Arneil, ‘Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of Colonialism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4 (1994). 55 Alan George, ‘Making the Desert Bloom’: A Myth Examined’, Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (1979). 56 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 302–14. 57 Titmarsh [Thackeray], Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 199; Henry Baker Tristram, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels in Palestine, Undertaken with Special Reference to Its Physical Character (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865), 367. 58 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 384. 59 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 145. 60 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 93.

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61 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 100. 62 Ibid., 139, 161, 367, 371, 377, 428; Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 26, 78, 285. 63 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 281, 305–7. 64 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 490; James Finn, Stirring Times, or Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856 1 (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1878), 315. 65 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 386. 66 Ibid., 390–1. 67 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 25, 29. 68 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 145, 160. 69 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 304, 276. 70 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 80 71 No’am G. Seligman, ‘The Environmental Legacy of the Fellaheen and the Bedouin in Palestine’, in Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel, ed. Daniel E. Orenstein, Alon Tal and Char Miller (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 49. 72 Yara Hawari, The Stone House (London: Hajar Press, 2021), 28. 73 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 155. 74 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 1. 75 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 376–7. For a discussion of travellers’ attitudes towards and relationships with dragomans, see Rachel Mairs, From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and His Clients (1884–1933) (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). 76 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 47. 77 Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 3. 78 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 376. 79 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 5. 80 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, vii. 81 Ibid., 377–8. 82 R.A.S. Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1925), 24. 83 Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven, 146. 84 John Wilson, The Lands of the Bible, Visited and Described 1 (Edinburgh: William White and Co., 1847), viii–ix. 85 W.F. Stinespring, ‘The Critical Faculty of Edward Robinson’, Journal of Biblical Literature 58, no. 4 (1939), 387; Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, 22–3. 86 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 155. 87 Basem L. Ra’ad, Hidden Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean (London and New York: Pluto Press, 2010), 175–6. On the Naming Committee, see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), 225–6. 88 Josias Leslie Porter, A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine 1 (1858; London: John Murray, 1868), 6; Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 263. 89 Andrew Russell, Glimpses of Eastern Cities Past and Present: Lectures Delivered on Sunday Evenings in Leslie Parish Church (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1890), 67. 90 Norman Macleod, Eastward (London: Alexander Strahan, 1866), 192. 91 Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 591–2. 92 Smith, Patrollers of Palestine, 269.

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93 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 318–19. 94 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 93. 95 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 659–60. 96 Ibid., 511. 97 Ibid., 177, 623. 98 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 310–11. 99 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 318. 100 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 104, 212–13. 101 Ibid., 176. 102 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 337, 346. 103 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 299. 104 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 111. 105 Ibid., 369. 106 Ibid., 395; Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 341. 107 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 85, 285. 108 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 98; Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 282. 109 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 379. 110 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 118, 122–3. 111 Ibid., 345–6. 112 Ibid., 346. 113 Ibid., 426–7. 114 Ibid., 347. 115 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 127. 116 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 364. 117 Ibid., 404. 118 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 58. 119 Ibid., 255. 120 Ibid., 31. 121 Ibid., 193–4. 122 Ibid., 393–4. 123 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 106. 124 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 364–5. 125 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 177, 185–7. 126 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 373. 127 W.M. Thomson, The Land and the Book; or, Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), 249. 128 On the 1834 uprising, see ‘Adel Manna’, ‘Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rebellions in Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies 24, no. 1 (1994); on the development of national consciousness in Palestine and the wider region, Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Ussama Makdisi, The Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 129 Edward Robinson, ‘The Druzes of Mount Lebanon’, Bibliotheca Sacra 1, no. 2 (1843), 210. 130 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 181, 184. 131 Ibid., 178.

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132 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 310. 133 Copping, A Journalist in the Holy Land, 185. 134 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 196. 135 Ibid., 358. 136 Ibid., 369. 137 Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross 1, 323. 138 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 465. 139 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 279. 140 Wasif Jawhariyyeh, The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, 1904–1948 (Northampton, Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2014), 99. 141 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 466. 142 Robinson, ‘The Druzes of Mount Lebanon’, 241. 143 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 52. 144 Smith and Hitchcock, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson, 30–1. 145 Edward Robinson, ‘The Aspect of Literature and Science in the United States, as Compared with Europe’, Bibliotheca Sacra and Theological Review 2, no. 1 (1844), 1–38, 3–7. 146 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 43–4, 76. 147 Goldman, God’s Sacred Tongue, 160. 148 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 274. 149 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, 118; portraits facing 62. 150 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 91, 99, 124. For Robinson’s account of his attendance, see Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 182–3. 151 Kamel, ‘The Impact of “Biblical Orientalism” in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine’, 6. For a full history of the PEF from its founding, see John James Moscrop, Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 2000). 152 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 1. 153 Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, 205–6. 154 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations in the following paragraphs are from Charles Warren, Underground Jerusalem: An Account of Some of the Principal Difficulties Encountered in its Exploration and the Results Obtained (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1876), 446–89. 155 Charles Warren, The Land of Promise; or, Turkey’s Guarantee (London: George Bell & Sons, 1875), 6, 23. 156 For a deeper analysis of this analogy, see Israel Shahak, ‘The “Historical Right” and the Other Holocaust’, Journal of Palestine Studies 10, no. 3 (1981). 157 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 559. 158 Tadhg Foley, ‘An Unknown and Feeble Body’: How Settler Colonialism was Theorised in the Nineteenth Century’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 159 Warren, The Land of Promise 5, 24. 160 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 374, 386. 161 Claude Reignier Conder, ‘The Present Condition of Palestine. [Reprinted from the Jewish Chronicle, by Kind Permission of the Editor.]’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 11 (1879), 13. 162 Albert M. Hyamson, ‘British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine’, Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 26 (1918), 154.

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163 Claude Reignier Conder, ‘Jewish Colonies in Palestine’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 149, no. 908 (1891). 164 ‘Obituary: Col. C.R. Conder’, Jewish Chronicle, 18 February 1910, 8. 165 Claude Reignier Conder, The Possibilities of Palestine. (An Address Delivered before the London Zionist League, Sunday, February 5th, 1905) (New York: The Maccabæan Publishing Company, 1905), 8. 166 Claude Reignier Conder, ‘The Future of Palestine’, in The Physical and Political Conditions of Palestine: A Course of Lectures Delivered under the Auspices of the English Zionist League Session 1906 (London: English Zionist League, 1907), 38. 167 For an analysis of the protection system and its possible bearing over the thought behind the Balfour Declaration, see Loevy, ‘The Balfour Declaration’s Territorial Landscape’. 168 Conder, The Possibilities of Palestine, 15. 169 Conder, ‘The Future of Palestine’, 37. Seligman writes ‘There is no consensus on population of Palestine at the beginning of the Christian Era. The numbers vary widely between less than a million and six million […]. As the potential productivity of the natural resources in the region sets a limit to population numbers, the lower estimate seems to be more realistic’. Seligman, ‘The Environmental Legacy of the Fellaheen and the Bedouin in Palestine’, 36. 170 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, 230–1.

Chapter 3 1

Canon [Thomas] Bell, ‘Canon Bell’s Tour in the East: Third Letter: Third Letter’, Cheltenham Chronicle, 5 June 1886), 5. 2 Elsner and Rubiés, ‘Introduction’, 5. 3 David Morison Ross, The Cradle of Christianity: Chapters on Modern Palestine (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1891), 3. 4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 30. 5 Charles Biggs, Six Months in Jerusalem: Impressions of the Work of England in and for the Holy City (Oxford and London: Mowbray and Co., 1896), 57–8. 6 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 328. 7 Norman Macleod, Eastward (London: Alexander Strahan, 1866), 120. 8 Ross, The Cradle of Christianity, 59–60. 9 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 335–6. 10 Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire eds., Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840–1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 11 Nassar, European Portrayals of Jerusalem, 155. 12 Said, Orientalism, 41. See also Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 6, 9. 13 Edward Robinson, Physical Geography of the Holy Land (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1865), 1–2. 14 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 21. 15 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 326. 16 Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 556–7. 17 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 375. 18 Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1887), 296.

204

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19 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 234; The Lands of the Bible 1, 407. 20 Herschell, A Visit to My Father-Land, 65–6. 21 Anthony Trollope, ‘A Ride across Palestine’, in Tales of All Countries 1 (1863; London: Chapman and Hall, 1873), 327. 22 For a discussion of the history of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, see Nassar, European Portrayals of Jerusalem, 26–34. 23 Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 582. 24 Harriet Martineau, Eastern Life, Present and Past 3 (London: Edward Moxon, 1848), 165–6. 25 Francis Gell, ‘On the Site of the Holy Sepulchre’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 33 (1901), 305. 26 Edward Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 26. 27 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine 170. 28 William Henry Bartlett, Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1844), 173–4. 29 Titmarsh [Thackeray], Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 218–19. 30 Martineau, Eastern Life 3, 163. 31 Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Wanderings over Bible Lands and Seas (1862; London: S. Nelson and Sons, 1866), 146. 32 Jackie Feldman, A Jewish Guide in the Holy Land: How Christian Pilgrims Made Me Israeli (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 60. 33 William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 2 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905), 380–1. 34 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 329. 35 Bliss, The Development of Palestine Exploration, 213–14; Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, 24. 36 Herschell, A Visit to My Father-Land, 143, 145. 37 Mary Eliza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), 299. 38 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 176. 39 Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, with Excursions in the Lebanon (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1880), 314. 40 Martineau, Eastern Life 3, 124–5. 41 Biggs, Six Months in Jerusalem, 69–70. 42 Herschell, A Visit to My Father-Land, 143. 43 Isabel Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 110–11. 44 William Robert Wilde, Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean, Including a Visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmessus, Cyprus and Greece 2 (Dublin: William Curry, Jun. and Company, 1840), 211. 45 Robert Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London: John Murray, 1849), 88, 102. 46 Ibid., 208–19. 47 Anonymous, ‘A letter of the 17th May from Syria’, Hull Packet, 25 July 1834, 1; Anonymous, ‘Shocking Occurrence at the Holy Sepulchre’, Hereford Journal, 30 July 1834, 2. 48 Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, 224–6. 49 See Sarah Kochav, ‘The Search for a Protestant Holy Sepulchre: The Garden Tomb in Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46, no. 2 (1995); Seth J. Frantzman and Ruth Kark, ‘General Gordon, the Palestine Exploration Fund and

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the Origins of “Gordon’s Calvary” in the Holy Land’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 140, no. 2 (2008). 50 J.E. Hanauer, ‘Notes on the Controversy Regarding the Site of Calvary’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 24 (1892), 295. 51 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 69. 52 Macalister, A Century of Excavation in Palestine, 25. 53 James Fergusson, An Essay on the Ancient Topography of Jerusalem (London: John Weale, 1847), 1. 54 Hanauer, ‘Notes on the Controversy Regarding the Site of Calvary’, 308. 55 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 203. 56 Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 78. 57 Anonymous [Kinglake], Eothen, 218. 58 Charles W. Wilson, Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre (London: The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1906), 103. 59 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 80; Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 371. 60 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 66. 61 Robinson, ‘The Reputed Site of the Holy Sepulchre’, 157, 174, 172. 62 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 60. 63 Charles George Gordon, Reflections in Palestine. 1883 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1884), 2. 64 Rev. Canon [Malcolm] MacColl, ‘The Site of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 33 (1901), 278. 65 Haskett Smith, ‘Calvary and the Tomb of Christ’, Murray’s Magazine 10, no. 57 (1891), 305–19. 66 Smith, Patrollers of Palestine, 186, 206. 67 Quoted in MacColl, ‘The Site of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre’, 282. 68 J.E. Hanauer, ‘On the Identification of Calvary’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 24 (1892), 200. 69 MacColl, ‘The Site of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre’, 273, 298. 70 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 80, 72. 71 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 469. 72 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 164–5. 73 H. Rider Haggard, A Winter Pilgrimage: Being an Account of Travels through Palestine, Italy, and the Island of Cyprus, Accomplished in the Year 1900 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 307–8. 74 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 167–8. 75 Ibid., 182. 76 For convenience, in this chapter ‘Haram al-Sharif ’ and ‘Haram’ refer to the entire compound, while ‘al-Aqsa Mosque’ and ‘al-Aqsa’ refer specifically to the building at the southern end of the compound. 77 Kelman and Fulleylove, The Holy Land, 161. 78 Herschell, A Visit to My Father-Land, 72. 79 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 85. 80 Biggs, Six Months in Jerusalem, 65. 81 Herschell, Visit to My Father-Land, 142; Agnes Smith, Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Three Ladies (London: Hurstt and Blackett, 1870), 252–3; Rider Haggard, A Winter Pilgrimage, 271. 82 Martineau, Eastern Life 3, 117–18.

206 83

Notes

The actions of Israeli governments and settlers in and around the Haram have been a continual source of grievance for Palestinians since the 1967 Israeli occupation of Jerusalem. In 1969, two years after the start of Israeli occupation, an Australian Christian Zionist named Denis Michael Rohan attempted to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque through arson, in his belief to hasten the building of a third temple. Nazmi Jubeh, ‘Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif: Crucible of Conflict and Control’, Journal of Palestine Studies 45, no. 2 (2016). 84 Bartlett, Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, 145. 85 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 168. 86 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 1, 414; Martineau, Eastern Life 3, 116–17. 87 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 360. 88 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 345. 89 William Simpson, ‘The Visit of Bonomi, Catherwood, and Arundale to the Haram Es Sheriff at Jerusalem in 1833’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 11 (1879), 51–3. 90 For Catherwood’s letter, see Bartlett, Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, 148–65. 91 James Finn, Stirring Times 2, 421–3. 92 The performance of non-Muslim religious worship (specifically Jewish rituals which Israeli settlers desire to hold) in the Haram has been another major cause of tensions at the site. Jubeh, ‘Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif ’, 26. 93 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 178, 184–5. 94 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 402–7. 95 Macleod, Eastward, 148. 96 Smith, Eastern Pilgrims, 282. 97 Fergusson, An Essay on the Ancient Topography of Jerusalem, 76. 98 James Fergusson, The Holy Sepulchre and the Temple at Jerusalem (London: John Murray, 1865), 5–6. 99 Ibid., 8. 100 Robinson, Later Biblical Researches in Palestine, 263. 101 Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 17. 102 Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 99. 103 Fergusson, The Holy Sepulchre and the Temple at Jerusalem, 62. 104 James Fergusson, The Temples of the Jews and the Other Buildings in the Haram Area at Jerusalem (London: John Murray, 1878), 208–9. 105 Charles Warren, The Temple or the Tomb (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), ix–xi. 106 Claude Reignier Conder and anonymous, ‘The Late Mr. James Fergusson’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 18 (1886). 107 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 439. 108 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 1, 470; Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 169; Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 347. 109 Karl Baedeker ed., Palestine and Syria: Handbook for Travellers (Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1876), 120; Anonymous, Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria, 137–8. 110 See E.H. Palmer, ‘History of the Haram es Sheríf: Compiled from the Arabic Historians by E.H. Palmer, M.A.’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 3 (1871).

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111 For the PEF’s reaction to the discovery of the mosaic, see Charles ClermontGanneau, ‘The Mâdeba Mosaic’, and Charles Wilson, ‘Note by Sir Charles Wilson, on the Mosaic at Mâdeba’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 29 (1897), 213–25, 239. Neither of the articles refer to the depiction of Justinian’s church in the Jerusalem section of the map. For early twentieth-century travellers who continued to describe al-Aqsa as Justinian’s church, see Ada Goodrich-Freer, Inner Jerusalem (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1904), 181; Frederick Treves, The Land That Is Desolate: An Account of a Tour in Palestine (New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1912), 99. 112 Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 167. 113 Andrew A. Bonar and Robert Murray McCheyne, Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839 1 (Edinburgh: William Whyte & Co., 1843), iii. 114 Kelman and Fulleylove, The Holy Land, 95. 115 See Bennett Kravitz, ‘Philo-Semitism as Anti-Semitism in Mark Twain’s “Concerning the Jews”’, Studies in Popular Culture 25, no. 2 (2002). 116 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 124. 117 Anonymous [Kinglake], Eothen, 230–1. 118 Kelman and Fulleylove, The Holy Land, 98–9. 119 Bartlett, Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, 80–1, 187. 120 Onslow Yorke [William Hepworth Dixon], Secret History of ‘The International’ Working Men’s Association (London: Strahan & Co., 1872), 24. 121 Dixon, The Holy Land, 211–12, 217. 122 Treves, The Land That Is Desolate, 51. 123 See Joseph Massad, ‘Zionism’s Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews’, Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 4 (1996). 124 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 351; Freer, Inner Jerusalem, 57. 125 Charles W. Wilson, ‘Jerusalem’ in Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt 1, 118. 126 Treves, The Land That Is Desolate, 115. 127 Anonymous [Thackeray], Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, 136. 128 Ibid., 151. 129 Ibid., 207, 205. 130 Sabrina Joseph, ‘Britain’s Social, Moral, and Cultural Penetration of Palestine: British Travelers in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine and Their Perception of the Jews’, The Arab Studies Journal 3, no. 1 (1995). 131 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 1, 427–8. 132 Stuart Charmé, ‘The Political Transformation of Gender Traditions at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 1 (2005), 7–8. 133 Treves, The Land That Is Desolate, 116. 134 Macleod, Eastward, 161. 135 Herschell, A Visit to My Father-Land, 131; Thomas Jenner, That Goodly Mountain & Lebanon (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1873), 71. 136 Samuel Manning, ‘Those Holy Fields.’: Palestine, Illustrated by Pen and Pencil (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1874), 115. 137 Smith, Eastern Pilgrims, 232; Helen B. Harris, Pictures of the East (London: James Nisbet and Co., Ltd, 1897), 11. 138 Elizabeth Anne Finn, Home in the Holy Land: A Tale Illustrating Customs and Incidents in Modern Jerusalem (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1866), 185.

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139 Haggard, A Winter Pilgrimage, 341–2. 140 Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot, 268–9. 141 Quoted in Amnon Rubenstein, From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000), 10. 142 Sheila H. Katz, ‘Shahada and Haganah: Politicizing Masculinities in Early Palestinian and Jewish Nationalisms’, The Arab Studies Journal 4, no. 2 (1996). 143 Around 5.8 per cent of Palestine’s land was under Jewish ownership in 1948. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 18. 144 The quoted order was given to fighters in the Hagana’s Carmeli Brigade in Haifa on 22nd April 1948. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 76. 145 J.E. Hanauer, Walks about Jerusalem (London: London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews, 1910), 30. 146 Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl 2 (New York and London: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), 745–7. See also Sufian Abu Zaida, ‘“A Miserable Provincial Town”: The Zionist Approach to Jerusalem from 1897–1937’, Jerusalem Quarterly 32 (2007). 147 Nicholas E. Roberts, ‘Dividing Jerusalem: British Urban Planning in the Holy City’, Journal of Palestine Studies 42, no. 4 (2013). See also Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, ‘“Marrying Modern Progress with Treasured Antiquity”: Jerusalem City Plans during the British Mandate, 1917–1948’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 15, no. 1 (2003), 50–3.

Chapter 4 1

2

3 4

5

See, for instance, Ben-Arieh, The Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, 163; Arnold Blumberg, Zion Before Zionism, 1838–1880 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 63, 70–2, 82–9, 97–100, 114–17, 132–4; Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City (New York: Elizabeth Sifton Books, 1985), 43–9, 52–9, 62–5, 69–72, 78–81, 86–7, 99–102, 117–18; Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders, 127–31, 149–52, 158–9; Sebag-Montefiore, Jerusalem, 351–2, 359–63. For the author’s previous research on Kerem Avraham, from which some of the information in this chapter has been incorporated, see Gabriel Polley, ‘From Karm al-Khalil to Kerem Avraham: A British Settler-Colonial Outpost Near Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (2019). See also the account of the Finns’ involvement in the Meshullam settlement near the village of Artas in Falestin Naili, ‘The Millenarist Settlement in Artas and Its Support Network in Britain and North America, 1845–1878’, Jerusalem Quarterly 45 (2011). Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Jewish Colonisation in Palestine’, Jewish Chronicle, 12 June 1891, 3; Elizabeth Anne Finn and anonymous, ‘Jerusalem Half-a-Century Ago: Interview for the Jewish Chronicle with Mrs. Finn’, JC, 20 May 1910, 14. Beth-Zion Lask Abrahams, ‘James Finn: Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul at Jerusalem Between 1846 and 1863’, Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 27 (1978–1980), 40–2; see also David B. Ruderman, Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis: The Evangelical Alexander McCaul and Jewish-Christian Debate in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 13–31. Gillian Webster, ‘Elizabeth Anne Finn’, The Biblical Archaeologist 48, no. 3 (1985), 181.

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Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 219. 7 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 56. 8 Anonymous, ‘Jews in Palestine and British Protection’, JC, 10 June 1910, 11. 9 Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders, 128. 10 Anonymous, ‘Jews in Palestine and British Protection’. 11 Loevy, ‘The Balfour Declaration’s Territorial Landscape’. 12 Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 179–81. 13 Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders, 128. 14 Finn, Stirring Times 1, xviii, xx. 15 Ibid., 370. 16 Ibid., 270. 17 Finn, Home in the Holy Land, 84–5. 18 Ibid., 294–5. 19 For the text of the letter, see Albert M. Hyamson ed., The British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine, 1838–1914 1 (London: Edward Goldston, 1939), 249–53. 20 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 294. 21 See for example the words of the Palestinian character Reshid Bey in Theodor Herzl’s novel Altneuland: Old-New Land (1902; Haifa: Haifa Publishing Company: 1960), 100: ‘How can you look on him who brings you something as a robber? The Jews have brought us wealth and health; why should we harbour evil thoughts about them?’ 22 Finn, Home in the Holy Land, 265. 23 James Finn, Byeways in Palestine (1868; London: James Nisbet & Co., 1877), vi–viii. 24 Ibid., 92. 25 Ibid., 222. 26 Ibid., 160. 27 Ibid., 162. 28 Ibid., 166. 29 Finn, Home in the Holy Land, 321–2. 30 James Lewis Farley, The Resources of Turkey, Considered with Especial Reference to the Profitable Investment of Capital in the Ottoman Empire (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 228. 31 Hyamson, ‘British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine’, 140. 32 Finn, Stirring Times 1, 442. 33 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 60–1. 34 Hyamson, The British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine 1, 222. 35 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 64, 82. 36 Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 2, 87; Macleod, Eastward, 271–2; Kelman and Fulleylove, The Holy Land, 99; Ada Goodrich-Freer, Inner Jerusalem, 57–8. 37 Ben Haldern and Jehudah Reinhardz, Zionism and the Creation of a New Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 51; Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot, 102–9. 38 Hyamson, The British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine 1, 258–60. 39 Finn, Stirring Times 1, 442. 40 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 75. 6

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41 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; With Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance (1859; London: John Murray, 1868), 1. 42 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, xxi. 43 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 76. 44 Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross, 280. 45 Dixon, The Holy Land, 397–8. 46 Finn and anonymous, ‘Jerusalem Half-a-Century Ago’. 47 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations on Kerem Avraham in the remainder of this section come from Finn, Stirring Times 2, 64–76. 48 Nur Masalha, ‘Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State’, Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 14, no. 1 (2015), 12–13. 49 Elizabeth Finn showed the 1854 accounts book, ‘most beautifully and neatly kept, Hebrew being the only language employed’, to the JC’s reporter in 1910. Finn and anonymous, ‘Jerusalem Half-a-Century Ago’. 50 Nazmi Jubeh, ‘Shaykh Jarrah: A Struggle for Survival’, Jerusalem Quarterly 86 (2021), 131. 51 For Montefiore’s windmill and Gawler’s plans, see Green, Moses Montefiore, 327–8, 214, 230. 52 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 296. For the original article, see Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘The Fellahheen of Palestine: Notes on their Clans, Warfare, Religions, and Laws’, Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 11 (1879). 53 For Zionist settler practices in the First ‘Aliya, see Shafir, ‘Zionism and Colonialism’. 54 Elizabeth Anne Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn (London and Edinburgh: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, Ltd., 1929), 134. 55 See Katz, ‘Shahada and Haganah’, 87. 56 Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot, 265. 57 Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 178. 58 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 66. 59 Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917. 60 Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 244. 61 Sneersohn’s words are quoted in Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 2, 253–5. For Sneersohn’s own pro-settler-colonial writings, see H.Z. Sneersohn, Palestine and Roumania: A Description of the Holy Land, and the Past and Present State of Roumania, and the Roumanian Jews (New York: Hebrew Orphan Asylum Printing Establishment, 1872). 62 Lask Abrahams, ‘James Finn’, 49–50. 63 Some accounts assert that the Finns sold Kerem Avraham, and their other property around Jerusalem, in order to repay their debts. Gilbert, Jerusalem, 118. Given Elizabeth Finn’s later continuing association with Kerem Avraham, it seems more likely that the Finns retained ownership. 64 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, 213. 65 Alroey, ‘Two Historiographies’, 104. 66 Hyamson, ‘British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine’, 140. 67 Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 254. 68 Replacing Shaftesbury and Strangford in the late 1880s as president and vicepresident respectively were the Earl of Meath Reginald Brabazon, and the Conservative MP, Lord Mayor of London and the baronet Robert Fowler. R.S. Ashton eds., The Christian Traveller’s Continental Handbook (London: Elliot Stock,

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1889), 88. In the early twentieth century, William Tyssen-Amherst, Lord Amherst of Hackney, occupied the president’s role. William Tyssen-Amherst and F.A. Bevan, ‘Society for Relief of Persecuted Jews’, Manchester Courier, and Lancashire General Advertiser, 1 November 1904, 3. He was succeeded by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the ninth Earl of Shaftesbury and grandson of Lord Shaftesbury, thus bringing the SCF full circle. Anonymous, ‘Society for Relief of Distressed Jews’, The Times, 25 March 1920, 4. 69 F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 2. 70 Hugh Cunningham, The Reputation of Philanthropy since 1750: Britain and Beyond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 146. 71 Anonymous, ‘The Syrian Colonisation Fund’, Liverpool Mercury, 7 July 1882, 5. 72 Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Jewish Agricultural Colonies’, JC, 8 January 1886, 6. 73 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 99. 74 Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 184. 75 For all names and figures above in this paragraph and the preceding paragraph, see Anonymous, ‘Syrian Colonisation Fund’, The Standard, 2 September 1882, 4. 76 Anonymous, ‘Birthday of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G.’, The Star; Guernsey, 24 March 1885, 4; Anonymous, ‘Birthday of the Earl of Shaftesbury’, The Star; Guernsey, 5 May 1885, 2. Ragged schools were charitable institutions providing a very basic education for impoverished children; the One Tun Ragged School, named after a former London pub, was located in Westminster. London Remembers, ‘One Tun Ragged School’, n.d. 77 Anonymous, ‘Syrian Colonisation Fund’, The Standard. 78 Anonymous, ‘Notes of the Week’, JC, 10 March 1882, 5; Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 253–4. 79 Anonymous, ‘The Relief of Persecuted Jews’, Edinburgh Evening News, 21 November 1883, 3; Anonymous, ‘Persecution of the Jews’, Sunderland Daily Echo, 15 September 1885, 2; Anonymous, ‘Colonization of Jews in the Holy Land’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 12 December 1891, 8. 80 See Anonymous, ‘Adelaide’, JC, 1 December 1882, 5. 81 Anonymous, ‘Syrian Colonization Fund’, JC, 8 September 1882, 2. 82 Abigail Green, ‘The British Empire and the Jews: An Imperialism of Human Rights?’ Past & Present 199 (2008). 83 Anonymous, ‘The Archives Israélites complains’, JC, 28 July 1882, 4. 84 Anonymous, ‘“The Reasons Why” a Congregational Minister Refuses the Identity’, in The Answer of History to the Objections Against the Israelitish Origin of Our Race, ed. Charles Adiel Lewis Totten (New Haven, CT: The Our Race Publishing Company, 1893), 318. For Bassin’s own memoir-cum-British Israelite manifesto, see Elieser Bassin, The Modern Hebrew, and the Hebrew Christian (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1882). 85 Anonymous, ‘A Southsea Vicar on Unfilled Prophecies’, Portsmouth Evening News, 15 April 1890, 2. 86 Anonymous, ‘Jewish Distress’, Daily News, 22 March 1887, 7. 87 Anonymous, ‘The Society for the Relief of Persecuted Jews’, The Graphic, 13 June 1891, 684. 88 Hugh Bryan and Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘The Alien Immigration’, Morning Post, 17 June 1891, 2. 89 Anonymous, ‘Notes of the Week’, JC, 25 March 1887, 5.

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90 Anonymous, ‘Persecuted Jews’, Daily News, 24 February 1891, 3. 91 Meyer, Imperialism at Home, 185. 92 For a full account of the misadventures in Latakia and Cyprus, see John M. Shaftesley, ‘Nineteenth-Century Jewish Colonies in Cyprus’, Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England) 22 (1968–1969). The affair of the Cyprus colony is the only aspect of the SCF’s history which has been researched in any depth before now. 93 Mim Kemal Öke, ‘The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880–1908)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 14, no. 3 (1982), 335, 336. 94 Francis D. Mott, ‘The Persecution of the Jews in Europe’, The Standard, 3 October 1882, 2. 95 Anonymous, ‘The Syrian Colonization Fund’, JC, 25 August 1882, 10. 96 Anonymous, ‘Jewish Emigrants’, The Standard, 30 August 1882, 6. 97 Anonymous, ‘Our Jerusalem Letter (From Our Correspondent)’, JC, 7 September 1883, 13. 98 Anonymous, ‘Notes of the Week’, JC, 14 September 1883, 3. 99 Elizabeth Anne Finn and anonymous, ‘Jewish Colony at Latakia and at Cyprus’, JC, 21 September 1883, 5. 100 Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Jewish Colonies in Cyprus’, JC, 22 February 1884, 5. 101 Joseph Massel, ‘Russo-Jewish Colony at Cyprus’, JC, 14 March 1884, 9. 102 Joseph Massel, ‘Jewish Colony in Cyprus’, JC, 9 May 1884, 6. 103 Anonymous, ‘Notes of the Week’, JC, 4 August 1884, 4. 104 Anonymous, ‘Jewish Distress’. 105 Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Syrian Colonisation Fund’, Glasgow Herald, 28 October 1896, 11. 106 Anonymous, ‘Society for the Relief of Persecuted Jews’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 6 May 1893, 5 (‘from 50 to 55 men’); F.A. Bevan and Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Society for the Relief of Persecuted Jews’, Glasgow Herald, 4 December 1899, 11 (‘67 Jews’); Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Russian Persecution of Jews’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 13 October 1903, 10 (‘72 Jews’); Finn and anonymous, ‘Jerusalem Half-a-Century Ago’. 107 Herman Shandel, ‘Notes and Queries: Abraham’s Vineyard’, JC (Books and Bookmen Supplement), 24 September 1913, viii. 108 Anonymous, ‘Society for the Relief of Persecuted Jews’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal. 109 Anonymous, ‘The Returning Hebrews: A Glance at the Work of the Syrian Colonisation Fund’, The Quiver 985 (1903), 1050, 1046. 110 Ibid., 1049. 111 Alexander Boddy, Days in Galilee, and Scenes in Judæa, Together with Some Account of a Solitary Cycling Journey in Southern Palestine (London: Gay and Bird, 1900), 255; Henrietta Szold, ‘Recent Jewish Progress in Palestine’, The American Jewish Year Book 17 (1916), 118. 112 See Ella Shohat, ‘The Invention of the Mizrahim’, Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 1 (1999), 9, 19. 113 Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘Relief of Starving Jews in Palestine’, Morning Post, 5 February 1892, 5. 114 Anonymous, ‘Distressed Jews in Palestine’, Birmingham Daily Post, 12 January 1892, 7. 115 Anonymous, ‘The Refugee Jews in Palestine’, Daily News, 13 November 1891, 3.

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116 Elizabeth Anne Finn, ‘The Syrian Colonisation Fund’, Morning Post, 16 August 1892, 3. 117 Anonymous, ‘The Jewish Problem’, Edinburgh Evening News, 28 January 1893, 2. 118 Amherst and Bevan, ‘Society for Relief of Persecuted Jews’. 119 Shandel, ‘Notes and Queries’. 120 Anonymous, ‘Society for Relief of Distressed Jews’, The Times, 21 December 1920, 15. 121 Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 249. 122 Anonymous, ‘Arts and Crafts: Christmas Exhibits and Sale at Exeter’, Devon and Exeter Gazette, 3 December 1924, 4. 123 Anonymous, ‘By Order of Trustees’, JC, 1 May 1931, 23. 124 Anonymous, ‘Land of Israel News Items’, JC, 29 April 1932, 13. 125 Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004), 120–1. 126 Abrahams, ‘James Finn’, 50. 127 Anonymous, ‘The “Palestine” film’, The Times, 8 January 1914, 8.

Chapter 5 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 2 Said, Orientalism, xii. 3 For the contact zone, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 4. 4 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1. 5 Beshara Doumani, ‘The Political Economy of Population Counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, circa 1850’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 26, no. 1 (1994). 6 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 1–2. 7 Mahmoud Yazbak, ‘Nabulsi Ulama in the Late Ottoman Period, 1864–1914’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 1 (1997), 72. 8 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3 (First Appendix), 81. 9 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 112; Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 238. 10 George Grove, ‘Nabloos and the Samaritans’, in Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1861, ed. Francis Galton (Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co., 1862), 339. 11 Claude Reignier Conder, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure 1 (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1878), 32. 12 Mary Eliza Rogers, ‘Samaria and Plain of Esdraelon’, in Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt 2, 1. 13 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 95. 14 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 230. 15 Grove, ‘Nabloos and the Samaritans’, 338. 16 Oliphant, Haifa, 441. 17 John Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, and an Account of the Modern Samaritans (London: John Murray, 1864), 26–7. For Mills’ settler-colonial plans, see Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), 55–8. 1

214

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18 Claude Reignier Conder, ‘The Haven of Carmel’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 125, no. 759 (1879), 37. 19 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 139–40. 20 Oliphant, Haifa, 442. 21 See David Kushner, ‘Zealous Towns in Nineteenth-Century Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies 33, no. 3 (1997). 22 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 269. 23 Anonymous [Kinglake], Eothen, 360–1. 24 Grove, ‘Nabloos and the Samaritans’, 338. 25 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 275, 92. This was not the experience of all travellers: John Wilson and his companion were ‘permitted to go in [the mosque] for a few minutes’ in 1843, while Charles Warren reported that he ‘found the fanatical Moslem quite unconcerned’ with his own entry into the mosque in 1867. Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 62; Warren, Underground Jerusalem (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1876), 229. 26 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 95. 27 Tristram, Land of Israel, 140–1. 28 Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, The Times, 16 May 1856, 10. 29 Various authors, Despatches from Her Majesty’s Consuls in the Levant, Respecting Past or Apprehended Disturbances in Syria: 1858 to 1860 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1860), 13. 30 Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 75; Elizabeth Anne Finn, Home in the Holy Land, 35. 31 Boddy, Days in Galilee, and Scenes in Judæa, 195. 32 Tristram, Land of Israel, 141. 33 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 93. 34 Ibid., 108. 35 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 203, 205. 36 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 71. 37 Finn, Byeways in Palestine, 92. 38 The Ottoman census of 1871–1872 records ninety-six Christian households in Nablus, primarily Orthodox, with a few Catholic and Protestant families. Alexander Schölch, ‘The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, no. 4 (1985), 486. 39 Samuel Lyde, The Ansyreeh and Ismaeleeh: A Visit to the Secret Sects of Northern Syria (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), iii–iv. 40 Anonymous, ‘The Outrages at Nablous’, The Daily News, 5 May 1856, 4. 41 Makdisi, The Age of Coexistence, 54. 42 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 27. 43 Anonymous, ‘This Day’s London News: Alarming Outbreak in Syria’, Belfast NewsLetter, 28 April 1856, 2. 44 Anonymous, ‘Outbreak in Syria’, Belfast News-Letter, 29 April 1856, 2. 45 Several reports (including a letter in the French newspaper Le Siècle) did not mention Lyde’s shooting at all, but claimed that the uprising was sparked by other grievances discussed below, then exacerbated by an act of self-defence by a British traveller when the crowd reached the British agent’s home: ‘An Englishman, who attempted to oppose their progress, was seized by the throat by one of the rioters, a very powerful man, and would have been strangled had he not drawn a pistol from his pocket and laid his assailant dead at his feet’. Anonymous, ‘Colonial and Foreign’, Liverpool Weekly Mercury, 10 May 1856, 2; see also Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, The Times. As this

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turn of events is not repeated in any of the more detailed accounts of the uprising, or in Finn’s consular diary, it is safe to assume that this narrative was among the ‘probably erroneous rumours’ mentioned in another press report. Anonymous, ‘The Disturbances at Nablous’, Daily News, 30 May 1856, 2. 46 Anonymous [Kinglake], Eothen, 203. 47 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, viii. 48 John H.Y. Briggs, ‘The Revd Youhannah El Karey and Nineteenth-Century Baptist Missions in Palestine: Part 1’, Baptist Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014), 86–98. 49 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 102. 50 James Finn, Stirring Times 2, 424–40. 51 Anonymous, ‘Outrages at Nablous’. 52 For a more positive appraisal of what the Tanzimat meant for the Ottoman Empire’s Arab regions than the analysis given by Makdisi and here, see Wajih Kawtharani, ‘The Ottoman Tanzimat and the Constitution’, AlMuntaqa 1, no. 1 (2018). 53 Makdisi, The Age of Coexistence, 52. 54 Ibid., 54. 55 John Bowen, Memorials of John Bowen, LL.D., Late Bishop of Sierra Leone (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1862), 508. 56 Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, Manchester Guardian, 10 May 1856, 4. 57 Arnold Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1858: The Consular Diary of James and Elizabeth Anne Finn (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 222. 58 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 425, 443. 59 Manna’, ‘Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rebellions in Palestine’. 60 Some commentators also tried to frame the events as part of the intra-Nabulsi power struggles between influential families, which were framed as proxies of Western consuls. For instance, the Istanbul correspondent of the Times wrote that the situation in Nablus ‘offered the most convenient battle-ground for petty skirmishes between rival foreign influences, of which ever Consul and Vice-consul took the best advantage he could’. Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, The Times. Finn, while claiming that he himself ‘steadily discouraged all idea of partisanship, and was on terms of equal civility with both clan’, similarly asserted that ‘Strange as it may seem, the Abdu’l Hâdy looked upon themselves as in some way French partisans’, while the rival Tuqan family were considered ‘entitled to English countenance’. According to Finn’s theory, in addition to being the product of Muslim anti-Christian and anti-progress sentiments, the uprising was a preordained plan by ‘the fanatical party of the Tukân’ against ‘the Liberal party’ of the ‘Abd al-Hadi, to whom the governor belonged. Finn, Stirring Times, 2, 431–4. Given that the uprising occurred only after Lyde’s shooting of Yasma, and targeted signs of both British and French presence in Nablus, these notions might rather speak to a rather inflated European sense of influence over indigenous society in Palestine. 61 Erik Eliav Freas, ‘Ottoman Reform, Islam, and Palestine’s Peasantry’, The Arab Studies Journal 18, no. 1 (2010). 62 Anonymous, ‘Outrages at Nablous’ 63 Unless otherwise stated, all narrative of the uprising below attributed to James Finn is taken from Finn, Stirring Times 2, 418–40. 64 Bowen, Memorials of John Bowen, 502–3. 65 All narrative of the uprising below attributed to the Nablus Protestants’ letter is taken from Anonymous, ‘Outrages at Nablous’.

216

Notes

Samuel Gobat, Samuel Gobat, Bishop of Jerusalem: His Life and Work (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1884), 315. For details of Finn’s relationship with Gobat, see Abdul Latif Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800–1901: A Study of Religious and Educational Enterprise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 133–8. 67 Unless otherwise stated, all narrative of the uprising below attributed to Mary Rogers is taken from Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 291–6. 68 Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, The Times. 69 Anonymous, ‘Prussia (From Our Own Correspondent)’, The Times, 8 May 1856, 10. 70 Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, The Times. 71 Bowen, Memorials of John Bowen, 509. 72 Unless otherwise stated, all narrative of the uprising below attributed to John Mills is taken from Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 101–2; Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1858, 223. 73 Anonymous, Cook’s Tourists’ Handbook for Palestine and Syria, 6. 74 Yazbak lists the Tuffaha and Baqani among Nablus’s important ‘ulāma’ families in the mid-nineteenth century. Yazbak, ‘Nabulsi Ulama in the Late Ottoman Period, 1864–1914’, 74. 75 Bowen, Memorials of John Bowen, 503. 76 Anonymous, ‘Colonial and Foreign’; Anonymous, ‘Prussia’. 77 Anonymous, ‘Prussia’. 78 Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1858, 262. 79 Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 294. 80 Anonymous, ‘Turkey’, Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald, 21 May 1856, 1. 81 Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1858, 223. 82 Samuel Lyde, ‘The Disturbances at Nablous’, Daily News, 26 July 1856, 3. 83 Various authors, Despatches from Her Majesty’s Consuls in the Levant, 15–18. 84 Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1848, 251, 254. 85 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 102. 86 Various authors, Despatches from Her Majesty’s Consuls in the Levant, 17–18. 87 Anonymous, ‘Cambridge’, Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald, 17 April 1860, 3. 88 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 446. 89 Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1858, 263. 90 Various authors, Despatches from Her Majesty’s Consuls in the Levant, 16–17. 91 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 198; for a detailed account of the situation in Nablus from 1853 to 1859, 215–25. 92 Various authors, Despatches from Her Majesty’s Consuls in the Levant, 16. 93 Blumberg ed., A View from Jerusalem, 1849–1858, 256. 94 Various authors, Despatches from Her Majesty’s Consuls in the Levant, 61; Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 226–7. 95 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 231–2; Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 389. 96 Church Missionary Society, ‘Zeller, John (1830–1902)’ (n.d.). 97 Boddy, Days in Galilee, and Scenes in Judæa, 278. 98 Schölch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856–1882, 203. 99 Cyril Graham, ‘The Disturbances in Syria’, North British Review 33, no. 66 (1860), 346, 332, 353. 100 Various authors, Conference on Missions to the Mohammedans, Held at the Church Missionary House, Salisbury Square, on the 20th and 21st of October, 1875 (London: Church Missionary Society, 1875), 23. 66

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101 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 702–3. 102 Ramesh Rawat, ‘Perception of 1857’, Social Scientist 35, no. 11/12 (2007), 15. 103 Finn, Stirring Times 1, 346. 104 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 410. 105 They were joined by Indian Christian pilgrims, and even, according to Elizabeth Finn’s memoir (see footnote 107 below), some Hindu travellers. 106 Finn, Stirring Times 1, 457–8, 459. 107 Finn, Reminiscences of Mrs. Finn, 169.

Chapter 6 1 Smith, Patrollers of Palestine, 55. 2 Ibid., 224–5. 3 Copping, A Journalist in the Holy Land, 232. 4 John Mills estimated a population of 150 in 1855; the Ottoman census for 1849 recorded ninety male Samaritans, indicating a somewhat larger number for the whole of the community. Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 179; Schölch, ‘The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850–1882’, 491. 5 Jim Ridolfo, Digital Samaritans: Rhetorical Delivery and Engagement in the Digital Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press and Digitalculturebooks, 2015), 25–8. 6 Before the nineteenth century Ya‘qub’s family, the Danfi, owned property in Cairo, Damascus, Gaza and Jaffa. Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans: A Profile (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1987), 161. 7 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 205. 8 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 66. 9 Jacob esh Shelaby and Edward Thomas Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans (London: Samson Low and Son, 1855), 15–24. 10 Macleod, Eastward, 236. 11 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, vii; Oliphant, Haifa, 346. 12 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 236. 13 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 179, 277. 14 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 28. 15 Anonymous, ‘Samaritans, Modern’, in Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature 9, eds. John McClintock and James Strong (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880), 302. 16 Ridolfo, Digital Samaritans, 28–30. 17 Ibid., 34. 18 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 73–4. 19 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 22. 20 For the efforts of today’s Samaritans to achieve greater access to their diaspora of manuscripts, see Ridolfo, Digital Samaritans. Many of the Samaritan artefacts acquired in the nineteenth century and today in Western museums are likely to have passed through Ya‘qub’s hands; he is documented in accessible records as the seller or collector for objects now held by the British Library and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. See British Library Digitised Manuscripts, ‘Or 2684’ (n.d.); Pitt Rivers Museum, ‘Relational Museum Collector Information’ (n.d.).

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21 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 15. 22 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 11, 13. The former two quotes are from a preface to the text by George Williams, senior fellow and vice-provost of Kings College, Cambridge, warden of the elite Church of Ireland school St. Columba’s College, Dublin and previous chaplain in Jerusalem; the latter quote is from Rogers’s introductory note. 23 For an incomplete family tree of the Danfi family spanning ten generations, see A.E. Cowley ed., The Samaritan Liturgy 2 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1909), xlvii. ‘Abd al-Samari is not featured in the tree, while Ya‘qub’s father’s name is recorded as Ẓedaqah. Ya‘qub’s death date is listed as 1312 al-Ḥijra, that is, 1894–5. 24 For Qasim al-Ahmad and the 1834 uprising, see Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 46. 25 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 25–6. 26 Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine 3, 106. 27 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 27–32. 28 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 1, 1–2. 29 Bonar and McCheyne, Narrative of a Mission of Inquiry to the Jews 1, 283. 30 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 53–7. 31 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 34. 32 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 75. 33 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 33. 34 Wilson, The Lands of the Bible 2, 296. 35 Unless otherwise stated, all information in this section is from Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 35–50. 36 Ya‘qub’s claim of this official position sits uncomfortably alongside the subsequent statements of several travellers that he was unable to read and write in any language. See Lady Strangford [Emily Anne Beaufort], Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines 2 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 79; Lady [Catherine] Tobin, The Land of Inheritance; or, Bible Scenes Revisited (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1863), 346. Mary Rogers explicitly adds that he was unable ‘to cast accounts’, further indicating a lack of an even basic numeracy which would be essential for a treasurer. Mary Eliza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), 253. 37 In slightly different wording to the first edition of 1856, the 1868 edition of Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine makes it clear that ‘Jacob es-Shellaby […] acted as our guide in 1851’. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (1856; London: John Murray, 1868), 248. 38 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 50–4; James Finn et al., ‘Impoverished Condition of the Samaritans’, Jewish Chronicle, 24 November 1854, 116–17. 39 A date of 5 September 1854 is provided by George Fisk, ‘Yacoob esh Shelaby and the Samaritans’, The Times, 23 May 1856, 1. 40 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 55. 41 Finn, Stirring Times 2, 266–7. 42 Hyamson ed., The British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine 1, 233. 43 Anonymous, ‘Distress in Palestine’, Morning Post, 23 November 1854, 1. 44 Tobin, The Land of Inheritance, 345. 45 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 54–5. One American traveller later related that Ya‘qub had revealed that Blomfield ‘had offered the synagogue, through [Ya‘qub], a thousand pounds’ for the Samaritans’ most valuable Pentateuch,

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but Ya‘qub had refused. Throwing in his own two cents, Bellows, a Unitarian clergyman and a prominent relief organizer on behalf of the Union in the American Civil War, added ‘I think the time has come when it might be bought, and that it ought to be secured [for the West … ] before it becomes too late’. Henry Whitney Bellows, The Old World in its New Face: Impressions of Europe in 1867–1868 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1869), 320. 46 Edward Thomas Rogers, ‘The Samaritans of Nablous, Palestine’, in Evangelical Christendom: Its States and Prospects 9 (London: Partridge and Co., 1855), 60. 47 Anonymous, ‘The Samaritans of Nablous’, Belfast News-Letter, 11 January 1856, 2. 48 Anonymous, ‘Distress in Palestine’. 49 Joseph Wolff, Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, DD., LL.D. (London: Saunders, Otley, and Co., 1861), 136–7. 50 A letter by William McIlwaine states that Ya‘qub had been in Ireland ‘a period of upwards of six months’ by late February 1856. William McIlwaine and anonymous, ‘Jacob esh Shelaby’, Belfast News-Letter, 26 February 1856, 1. 51 Hyamson ed., British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine 1, 233; Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 1. 52 Shelaby and Rogers, Notices of the Modern Samaritans, 5–6. 53 Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 244–5, 247, 251. 54 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 182–3. 55 James W. Bardsley, ‘A Passover Night on Gerizim’, The Sunday at Home: A Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading 1196 (1877), 198. 56 Anonymous, ‘The Samaritans of Nablous’. 57 For all citations from this article below, see Anonymous, ‘Jacob esh Shelaby’, Cork Examiner, 12 November 1855, 2. 58 For a mention of Ya‘qub attending a Church of Ireland Young Men’s Society meeting in Belfast in February 1856, see Anonymous, ‘Church of Ireland Young Men’s Society’, Belfast News-Letter, 5 February 1856, 2. 59 Hyamson ed., British Consulate in Jerusalem in Relation to the Jews of Palestine 2, 404, 422. 60 Oliphant, Haifa, 346. Suspecting that Ya‘qub’s son ‘had lost his money by gambling’, Oliphant purchased a Samaritan manuscript from him for one dollar. 61 Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, 197. 62 George Fisk and William Douglas Veitch, ‘Yacoob-esh-Shelaby and the Samaritans’, The Times, 4 February 1856, 1. 63 Jacob esh Shellaby, ‘To the Editor of the Times’, The Times, 12 February 1856, 8. 64 William McIlwaine et al., ‘Jacob esh Shellaby’, Belfast News-Letter, 26 February 1856, 1. 65 Fisk, ‘Yacoob esh Shelaby and the Samaritans’. 66 Edward Gellatly et al., ‘The Samaritans’, The Times, 9 September 1856, 8. 67 Edward Gellatly et al., ‘Jacob Esh Shelaby and the Samaritans’, Belfast News-Letter, 12 September 1856, 2. 68 Bellows, The Old World in its New Face 2, 320. 69 T. Holmes, Heart and Thought Memories of Eastern Travel (Bolton: J.W. Gledsdale, 1887), 185. 70 Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 253; Beaufort, Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines 2, 81. 71 Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine, 254. 72 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 205–6.

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73 Bardsley, ‘A Passover Night on Gerizim’, 195. 74 Beaufort, Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines 2, 79; Tristram, The Land of Israel, 148. 75 Beaufort, Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines 2, 80. 76 Ross, The Cradle of Christianity, 187. 77 Beaufort, Egyptian Sepulchres and Syrian Shrines 2, 82; Ross, The Cradle of Christianity, 190. 78 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 148, 155. 79 James W. Hott, Journeyings in the Old World; or, Europe, Palestine, and Egypt (Dayton, OH: United Brethren Publishing House, 1887), 423. 80 Grove, ‘Nabloos and the Samaritans’, 343. 81 Smith, Eastern Pilgrims, 294; Anonymous, ‘A Surveying Trip Through the Holy Land’, in The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle for 1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1863), 37. 82 Smith, Eastern Pilgrims, 293; for a reference to Ya‘qub as the Samaritans’ ‘Chief and High Priest’, see Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 205. 83 Smith, Eastern Pilgrims, 293; Ross, The Cradle of Christianity, 193. 84 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 17. 85 Grove, ‘Nabloos and the Samaritans’, 355–6. 86 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 155–6. 87 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 2, 207. 88 Anonymous, ‘Shechem and the Samaritans’, Jewish Chronicle and Hebrew Observer, 11 November 1864, 7. Compare with the words of Conder and Kitchener of a small chapel on Jabal Jirzim: ‘Other small inscribed stones once existed here, but were taken by Jacob esh Shellaby and sold to travellers’. Claude Reignier Conder and Horatio Herbert Kitchener, The Survey of Western Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, and Archæology 2 (London: The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1882), 185. 89 Bardsley, ‘A Passover Night on Gerizim’, 195. 90 All citations from Warren below are taken from Warren, Underground Jerusalem, 205–36. 91 For a reproduction of this photograph, see James Alan Montgomery, The Samaritans, the Earliest Jewish Sect: Their History, Theology and Literature (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co., 1907), facing p. 141. Ya‘qub was evidently enthusiastic about being photographed during Warren’s visit, also being snapped along with his family, although Warren reported that he was ‘not quite comfortable as to the propriety of allowing it to be done’. The photograph later caused him embarrassment when a copy was obtained by the governor of Nablus. 92 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 17. 93 Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders, 210–14, 221. 94 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 17. 95 Charles H. Berners, Two Months in Syria in 1875; or, Reminiscences of Tent Life (London: William Hunt and Company, 1876), 180–1. See also Anonymous, ‘Samaritans, Modern’, 302. 96 See also Bell, ‘Canon Bell’s Tour in the East’. 97 Charles Tilstone Beke, The Late Dr. Charles Beke’s Discoveries of Sinai in Arabia and of Midian (London: Trübner & Co., 1878), 169–70. 98 Ibid., 185–6. 99 Charles Tilstone Beke, ‘The True Mount Sinai’, The Times, 30 March 1874, 5.

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100 Beke, The Late Dr. Charles Beke’s Discoveries, 223, 226, 228–9. 101 Ibid., 236, 256. 102 Ibid., 493. 103 Anonymous, ‘The Samaritans’, Jewish Chronicle, 28 September 1877, 10. 104 Charles H.H. Wright, ‘The Ancient Samaritans’, Belfast News-Letter, 31 January 1884, 6. 105 Yacoub Shalaby, ‘The Samaritans’, The Times, 3 April 1874, 10. 106 J.B. Atlay, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Bart., K.C.B., F.R.S., Regius Professor of Medicine in the University of Oxford: A Memoir (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1903), 383–4; Beke, The Late Dr. Charles Beke’s Discoveries, 209; J.B. Courtenay, Joseph Barclay, D.D., LL.D., Third Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem: A Missionary Biography (London: S.W. Partridge & Co., 1883), 376–7. 107 J. Estlin Carpenter, ‘An Interesting Visitor’, Daily News, 14 March 1887, 6. 108 Andrew A. Bonar, Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, Minister of St. Peter’s Church, Dundee (Edinburgh and London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1892), 191. 109 These dates are provided by Yaacov Shavit, Yaacov Golstein and Haim Be’er eds., Personalities in Eretz-Israel 1799–1948: A Biographical Dictionary (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1983), 256–7. 110 Courtenay, Joseph Barclay, 336–7.

Chapter 7 See Margaret Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, His Wife (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1892); Anne Taylor, Laurence Oliphant 1829–1888 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 2 All details of Oliphant’s life, unless otherwise stated, are taken from Taylor, Laurence Oliphant. 3 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 82. 4 For Oliphant’s role in obtaining treaties, see Laurence Oliphant, Minnesota and the Far West (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1855), 68, 76. 5 Ibid., 43. 6 Ibid., 245. 7 Ibid., 231–2. 8 Ibid., 234–5. 9 Ibid., 226. 10 Louis Loewe ed., Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Comprising Their Life and Work as Recorded in Their Diaries from 1812 to 1883 2 (London: Griffith Farran Okeden & Welsh, 1890), 59, 64. 11 See Herbert W. Schneider and George Lawton, A Prophet and a Pilgrim: Being the Incredible History of Thomas Lake Harris and Laurence Oliphant, Their Sexual Mysticisms and Utopian Communities Amply Documented to Confound the Skeptic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). 12 Norma Clair Moruzzi, ‘Strange Bedfellows: The Question of Lawrence Oliphant’s Christian Zionism’, Modern Judaism 26, no. 1 (2006), 57; Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917, 17. 13 Obenzinger, American Palestine, xii. 1

222

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14 Laurence Oliphant, ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 12, no. 66 (1882), 251. 15 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, xiii–xv. 16 Ibid., 520–1. 17 Ibid., xxxv. 18 Moruzzi, ‘Strange Bedfellows’, 65–9. For Disraeli’s travels in and writings on Palestine, see Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 146–57. 19 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 285–6. 20 Ibid., 297–8. 21 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, xii, xxi. 22 Ibid., 503. 23 Ibid., xxii–xxviii. 24 Ibid., xxxii–xxxiii. 25 Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism, 66. 26 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 528–9. 27 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, 209. 28 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, xxvi. 29 Ibid., 296–8. 30 Claude Reignier Conder, ‘The Land of Gilead’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 129, no. 683 (1881), 119. 31 Oliphant, Haifa, 121. 32 Laurence Oliphant, ‘A New Winter Resort’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 133, no. 808 (1883), 266. 33 Oliphant, Land of Gilead, 281–2, 305–13. 34 For a brief register of these travellers, see Conder, ‘The Land of Gilead’, 104. 35 Josias Leslie Porter, The Giant Cities of Bashan, and Syria’s Holy Places (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1865), 19. 36 Claude Reignier Conder, The Survey of Eastern Palestine: Memoirs of the Topography, Orography, Hydrography, Archæology, Etc. Volume 1. – The ’Adwân Country (London: The Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1889), 282; Anonymous, Cook’s Tourist Handbook for Palestine and Syria, 449–61. 37 Porter, Giant Cities of Bashan, 19. 38 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 318. 39 Tristram, The Land of Israel, 473. 40 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 160. 41 Ibid., 193–4. 42 Ibid., xxxvi. 43 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 2, 275. 44 Sokolow, History of Zionism 1600–1918 1, xxii. 45 Albert M. Hyamson, Palestine: The Rebirth of an Ancient People (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1917), 157. 46 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 391. 47 See Nadav Shelef, ‘From “Both Banks of the Jordan” to the “Whole Land of Israel”: Ideological Change in Revisionist Zionism’, Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004). 48 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 288–9. 49 See Zeev Drory, Eyal Lewin and Eyal Ben-Ari, ‘Kibbutz Under Fire: Back to the Days of Sickle and Bayonet’, Israel Studies 22, no. 2 (2017), 143. 50 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 291.

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51 Ibid., 293. 52 Ibid., 294–5. 53 Ibid., 300–2. 54 Conder, ‘The Haven of Carmel’, 37, 39. 55 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 302. 56 Laurence Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – I’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 134, no. 815 (1883), 371–2; Oliphant, Haifa, 63–8. 57 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – I’, 375. 58 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 337. 59 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – I’, 378. For Cazalet, see Hyamson, ‘British Projects for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine’, 162. 60 Oliphant, Haifa, 63. 61 Selah Merrill, ‘The Jaffa and Jerusalem Railway’, Scribner’s Magazine 13, no. 3 (1893), 290. 62 Conder, ‘Jewish Colonies in Palestine’, 867–8. 63 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 188, 269, 271. 64 Ibid., 284, 335. 65 Oliphant, Haifa, 59–60. 66 See Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Berkeley: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992). 67 While the site of modern Amman, the capital of Jordan, was also included within the borders of Oliphant’s colony, the area’s only inhabitants at the time were a small band of recent Circassian migrants, the modern city’s founders. See Oliphant, Land of Gilead, 251–5. 68 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 291. 69 For more information on Jamal, see Will Stalder, Palestinian Christians and the Old Testament: History, Hermeneutics, and Ideology (Minneapolis: Augsberg Fortress, 2015), 112–25. 70 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 198, 201, 205, 219. 71 Ibid., 139. 72 Ibid., 205. 73 Ibid., 285. 74 Ibid., 205. 75 Ibid., 139. 76 In fact, and with an almost breath-taking Orientalist presumptuousness, Oliphant also recommended ‘the abolition of the Hadj’, blaming the pilgrimage route which passed through the area for providing tribes with opportunities for robbery. Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 286, 303. 77 Ibid., 285, 293. 78 Finn, Byeways in Palestine, 213. 79 Macleod, Eastward, 242. 80 Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians, 162. 81 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 330–2. 82 Mazen Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 41, 60. 83 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 238, 461, 508. 84 Hyamson, Palestine, 100. 85 Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl 4, 1114. 86 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 528–9, 533.

224 87 88

Notes

Ibid., 524. Anonymous, ‘The Land of Gilead’, Pall Mall Gazette, 19 January 1881, 11. Blue books were (and are) volumes of statistics and/or policy documents produced by, among other bodies, the British government. 89 Anonymous, ‘Attentive readers of their newspapers’, Daily News, 17 December 1880, 5. 90 Anonymous, ‘The Land of Gilead’. 91 Anonymous, ‘The Restoration of the Jews’, Examiner, 25 December 1880, 1433. 92 Conder, ‘The Land of Gilead’, 104–5. 93 Taylor, Laurence Oliphant, 217. 94 Oliphant, ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, 253 95 Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Khemi: Up and Down the Middle Nile (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1882), 154–5; Laurence Oliphant, ‘Our Occupation of Egypt’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 133 no. 812 (1883), 835. 96 Oliphant, ‘Our Occupation of Egypt’, 834. 97 Laurence Oliphant, Episodes in a Life of Adventure; or Moss from a Rolling Stone (1887; Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1897), 5. 98 Laurence Oliphant, ‘Jewish Tales and Jewish Reform’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 132, no. 805 (1882), 649. 99 Laurence Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II: Jewish Agriculture’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 134, no. 816 (1883), 528–9. 100 Oliphant, ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, 250. 101 Oliphant, Episodes in a Life of Adventure, 353. 102 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 315. 103 Oliphant, Haifa, 69–70. 104 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II’, 524. 105 Oliphant, ‘Jewish Tales and Jewish Reform’, 640. 106 Ibid., 641. 107 Ibid., 649. 108 Ibid., 651. 109 Ibid., 648. 110 Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot, 201. 111 Oliphant, ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, 251. 112 Ibid., 250. 113 Conder, ‘Jewish Colonies in Palestine’, 858, 864. 114 Oliphant, ‘The Jew and the Eastern Question’, 244, 243. 115 Ibid., 254–5. 116 Anonymous [Kinglake], Eothen, 324. For the friendship between Kinglake and Oliphant, see Leslie Stephen, ‘Kinglake, Alexander William’, in Dictionary of National Biography 31 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1885–1900). 117 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II’, 529–30. 118 For an account of Haifa’s development, see May Seikaly, ‘Haifa at the Crossroads: An Outpost of the New World Order’, in Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean 1890–1920, eds. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 119 Mary Eliza Rogers, ‘Mount Carmel and the River Kishon’, in Wilson, Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt 3, 95. 120 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 332. 121 Ibid., 332.

Notes

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122 Oliphant, Haifa, 23. 123 See Haim Goren, ‘Israeli Scholars since 1970 and the Study of the European Presence in Palestine in the Nineteenth Century (until World War I): State of the Art’, in Europa und Palästina 1799–1948/Europe and Palestine 1799–1948: Religion – Politik – Gesellschaft/Religion – Politics – Society, eds. Barbara HaiderWilson and Dominique Trimbur (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2010). 124 Mahmoud Yazbak, ‘Templars as Proto-Zionists? The “German Colony” in Late Ottoman Haifa’, Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 4 (1999). 125 Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, 359–62. 126 Ibid., 363. 127 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 332–3. 128 Oliphant, Haifa, 22. 129 Ibid., 23. 130 Oliphant, ‘A New Winter Resort’, 256, 259–60. 131 Conder, ‘The Land of Gilead’, 113. 132 Laurence Oliphant, ‘Life in a Druse Village’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 136, no. 830 (1884), 715. 133 See in particular Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement 17 (1885) for several papers by Oliphant; Oliphant, Haifa, for numerous more; and Gottlieb Schumacher, Laurence Oliphant and Guy le Strange, Across the Jordan: Being an Exploration and Survey of Part of Hauran and Jaulan (London: Alexander P. Watt, 1886), 243–67. 134 For Smith, see Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 402; Smith, Patrollers of Palestine, 88. 135 Ray Strachey, Group Movements of the Past (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 220. 136 Oliphant, Haifa, 274–80; Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1886–1888 (London: John Murray, 1900), 247. 137 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 381. 138 Robinson, ‘The Druzes of Mount Lebanon’, 224, 236. 139 Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 37–8. 140 Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land 1, 346. 141 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, 345–6, 371, 349. 142 Oliphant, Haifa, 89–90, 141. 143 Laurence Oliphant, ‘Life in a Druse Village – Part II’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 137, no. 832 (1885), 243. 144 Oliphant, Haifa, 146. 145 Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–11. 146 Rana Kabbani, Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule (London: Pandora Press, 1988), 67. 147 Oliphant, Haifa, 142, 143. 148 Strachey, Group Movements of the Past, 221. 149 Oliphant, Haifa, 102–3. 150 Oliphant, ‘Life in a Druse Village’, 705. 151 Oliphant, Haifa, 369. 152 Oliphant, ‘Life in a Druse Village – Part II’, 235–6, 239, 241. 153 For the operation of this process in the State of Israel, see Kais M. Firro, ‘Reshaping Druze Particularism in Israel’, Journal of Palestine Studies 30, no. 3 (2001).

226

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154 Conder, ‘The Land of Gilead’, 107. 155 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 369, 393. 156 F.R. Oliphant, Notes of a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1891), 85. 157 Oliphant, Haifa, 95. 158 Oliphant, ‘Life in a Druse Village’, 713, 705. 159 Oliphant, Haifa, 167. 160 Oliphant, ‘Life in a Druse Village’, 714–15. 161 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – I’, 378. 162 See Thomas Amit, ‘Laurence Oliphant: Financial Sources for his Activities in Palestine in the 1880s’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 139, no. 3 (2007). 163 See Leopold Kessler, History & Development of Jewish Colonisation in Palestine: A Lecture Delivered before the West London Zionist Association (London: English Zionist Federation, 1918), 6. 164 Rechavam Zeevy, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Haifa or Life in the Holy Land 1882–1885, Laurence Oliphant (Jerusalem: Canaan Publishing House, 1976), x. 165 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II’, 529. 166 Oliphant, Haifa, 12. 167 Ibid., 11. 168 Oliphant, ‘A New Winter Resort’, 265. 169 Oliphant, Haifa, 71. 170 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II’, 530. 171 Ibid., 531–2. 172 Silver, Zionism and the Melting Pot, 104. 173 Oliphant, Haifa, 71; Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II’, 532. 174 Laurence Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – III’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 134, no. 817 (1883), 609. 175 Alan Dowty, Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Two Worlds Collide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 132. 176 Oliphant, Haifa, 191. 177 Ibid., 286. 178 Oliphant, ‘A New Winter Resort’, 265. 179 Oliphant, Haifa, 12. 180 Ibid., 311; Oliphant, Episodes in a Life of Adventure, 10. 181 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – III’, 608–9. 182 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – II’, 531. 183 Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, xvii. 184 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – I’, 367. 185 Ibid., 367. 186 See Öke, ‘The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880– 1908)’. 187 Oliphant, ‘A New Winter Resort’, 264. 188 Oliphant, ‘Letters from Galilee – III’, 609. 189 A.S.I., ‘With Mr. Oliphant’, Jewish Messenger, 20 July 1888, 5. 190 Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (New York: Schocken Books, 2006), 158–9, 171–2. 191 See Israel Zangwill, The Commercial Future of Palestine: Debate at the Article Club Opened by Israel Zangwill, November 20, 1901 (London: Greenberg & Co., 1901), 6, 9. 192 Hyamson, Palestine, 113.

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193 Maude M. Holbach, Bible Ways in Bible Lands: An Impression of Palestine (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1912), 16. 194 A.C. Inchbold, Under the Syrian Sun: The Lebanon, Baalbek, Galilee, and Judæa 2 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1906), 321–2. 195 Ada Goodrich Freer, In a Syrian Saddle (London: Methuen & Co., 1905), 247–8. 196 Oliphant, Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant, 399. 197 Rosamond Dale Owen, My Perilous Life in Palestine (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1928), 281, 342–3. 198 Anonymous, ‘Award of Land in Palestine: £50,000 for Widow of Laurence Oliphant’, The Manchester Guardian, 11 April 1931, 15. 199 Anonymous, ‘50 Years’ Litigation: Late Mrs. Oliphant’s Haifa Claim’, The Palestine Post, 30 June 1937, 4. 200 Frances Emily Newton, Fifty Years in Palestine (London: Coldharbour Press, 1948), 92–3. 201 Anonymous: ‘Palestine Marks Centenary of Laurence Oliphant’, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 19 August 1929. 202 Ya’acov Friedler, ‘All Honour to Oliphant’, The Jerusalem Post, 30 March 1988, 2. 203 Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘PM Netanyahu visits Druze on Nabi Shueib holiday’ (2013). While ‘HaTikvah’ was first published in Jerusalem in 1886, it was written by Imber either in Romania in 1878 or in 1882 – in either case, before the Daliya house was constructed. Geoffrey Wigoder ed., ‘Ha-Tikva’, in New Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel 1 (New York: Herzl Press, 1994), 566–7. Nor was Oliphant ever knighted and made a sir. 204 Shulamit Lapid, Valley of Strength (New Milford and London: The Toby Press, 2009), 53. 205 Ram Oren, ‘Alice, Her Husband, Her Lover and “Hatikva”’, Ha’aretz, 9 February 2012. 206 The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, ‘Alice in the Holyland: Painters from the Oliphant Circle’ (2003); The Israeli Center for Digital Art, ‘In the Land of Gilead: Oliphant’s Odyssey’ (2012). 207 Friends of Zion Museum, ‘About the FOZ Museum’ (2015). 208 Friends of Zion Museum, ‘Laurence Oliphant: Embedded in Israel’s National Anthem’ (2015).

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6

David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George 4 (1933; London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1934), 1773–5. Herbert Bentwich, ‘Jewish Colonization in Palestine: Aspects of the Movement’, The Times, 7 October 1912, 5. Marmaduke Pickthall, ‘Introduction’, in Folk-Lore of the Holy Land: Moslem, Christian and Jewish, ed. J.E. Hanauer (London: Duckworth & Co., 1907), xviii. Abdullah Quilliam, ‘The Jews Under Islamic Rule’, in The Physical and Political Conditions of Palestine: A Course of Lectures Delivered under the Auspices of the English Zionist League Session 1906 (London: English Zionist League, 1907), 29. Smith and Hitchcock, The Life, Writings and Character of Edward Robinson, 223. George Adam Smith, Syria and the Holy Land (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1918), 9, 40–57.

228

Notes

Anonymous [Kinglake], Eothen, 152. Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey: An Autobiography (London: The Women’s Press, 1990), 39. 9 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History, 120. 10 Mark Thomas, Extreme Rambling: Walking Israel’s Barrier. For Fun (London: Ebury Press, 2011), 332. 11 Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (London: Profile Books, 2008), xii–xiii. 12 On the COVID-19 pandemic in Palestine, see Diana Buttu, ‘COVID-19 Vaccinations Are Proof of Israel’s Medical Apartheid’, Aljazeera, 23 March 2021. 13 Oliver Holmes, ‘“Palestinian Lives Matter”: Israeli Police Killing of Autistic Man Draws US Comparison’, The Guardian, 1 June 2020. For more on the connections and parallels between the Palestinian and African-American struggles, see Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015); Michael R. Fischbach, Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics (New York: The New Press, 2021). 14 See Zainah El-haroun, ‘Clashes in Jerusalem Ahead of Court Case on Palestinians’ Eviction’, Reuters, 5 May 2021. For more historical analysis of the events, see Jubeh, ‘Shaykh Jarrah’. 15 ACAPS, ‘State of Palestine: Escalation of Hostilities and Insecurity in the Gaza Strip and West Bank’ (2021). 16 See Erum Salam, ‘Black Lives Matter Protesters Make Palestinian Struggle Their Own’, The Guardian, 16 June 2021. 7 8

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INDEX ‘Abd al-Hadi, Mahmud 119, 123, 127–8, 140, 141, 215 n. 60 ‘Abdul Hamid II 168–70, 183, 190 ‘Abdul Mecid I 115, 117 Acland, Henry 154 Acre See ‘Akka ‘Ain Bayt al-Ma’ refugee camp 192 ‘Ain Jidi 22 ‘Ain Sinya 110 ‘Akka 3, 8, 42, 114, 135 al-Ahmad, Qasim 137 al-Aqsa Mosque 52, 70–2, 205 n. 76, 207 n. 111 see also Haram al-Sharif al-Bira 110 Aleppo 114 Alexander II 96 Alexandria 22, 126, 165 al-Halaq, Iyad 193–4 ‘Ali, Muhammad 4, 44, 66 al-Ja‘una 181–2 al-Jib 29–30 al-Lubban 110 al-Majdal 30 al-Nabi Musa 125 al-Shalabi, Ya‘qub 16, 109, 189, 192, 36, 219 n. 58, 220 n. 82, 88 dealer in antiquities 134, 137, 145, 149–55, 217 n. 20 death 154, 218 n. 23 early life 134, 137–40 first visit to Britain 134, 141–3, 149 later visits to Britain 153–5 Notices of the Modern Samaritans 134, 137, 139, 141, 146, 153, 155 tensions with Samaritans 143, 150, 152 tour guide 140, 147–8, 218 n. 37 visit to Ireland 15, 134, 142–7, 149, 219 n. 50 wife and children 146, 148, 149, 219 n. 60, 220 n. 91 young adulthood 140–1, 218 n. 37

al-Talbiya 83 al-Tira 176 al-‘Umar, Zahir 174 al-Zahariya 22 Amman 222 n. 67 ‘Anata 36 Andrew, William Patrick 99 anti-Semitism 3, 72–6, 96, 97, 100–1, 162, 186 ‘Aqaba 22, 33, 152, 165 ‘Aqir 30 ­Armenians 32, 54, 58, 79 ‘Arraba 128 Artas 83, 85, 89, 125 Arundale, Francis 66, 69 Asdud 86 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony See Lord Shaftesbury Askar refugee camp 192 Baalbek 23 Balata refugee camp 192 Balfour, Arthur 80 Balfour Declaration 2, 9, 18, 19, 55, 83, 189, 190, 194 Banyas 23 Barclay, Joseph 154–5 Bardsley, James 148, 150 Bartle-Frere, Henry 99 Bartlett, William Henry 55, 65, 66, 73 Bassin, Eliezer 100 Baysan 23 Bayt Hanina 29 Bayt Jala 37 Bayt Jibrin 25, 37, 38, 41 destruction 191 Bayt Nattif 37 destruction 191 Bayt Ummar 37 Bayt ‘Ur 38 Baytin 22, 62–3 Bedouin 32, 41, 127, 140, 187

Index compared to Native Americans 35, 158 and Edward Robinson 34–6, 38 and Laurence Oliphant 34, 158, 163, 166–8, 183, 223 n. 76 supposed danger to agriculture 30, 167–8 supposed danger to travellers 34 tour guides 5, 22, 33–6 Beersheba 22, 29 Beirut 21–3, 40, 114, 126, 128, 138, 141, 151, 152, 162 Beit Yehuda 164 Beke, Charles Tilstone 152–3 Bell, Thomas 50 Bellows, Henry Whitney 218–19 n. 45 Ben-Horin, Eliahu 168 Benin Bronzes 136 Bentwich, Herbert 189 Ben-Yehuda, Eliezer 88 Bethany 24, 163 Bethlehem 15, 20, 23, 30, 83, 92, 114 tourist trade 133 Biggs, Charles 52, 57, 64 Bint Jibayl 22 ­Black Lives Matter 193–4 Blech, Edward 82 Blomfield, Charles James 141, 218–19 n. 45 Boddy, Alexander 105, 113, 129 Bonaparte, Napoleon 77 attempted invasion of Eastern Mediterranean 3, 12 Bonar, Andrew 139, 154 Bonomi, Joseph 66, 68, 69, 71 Bowen, John 116, 117, 119, 120, 123 Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign 186 Brabazon, Reginald 210 n. 68 British Israelitism 100, 169 British Levant Company 136 British Library 217 n. 20 British Mandate for Palestine (time period) 2, 9, 13, 42, 79, 105, 107, 131, 164, 191, 194 Kerem Avraham during 107 British Museum 57, 150, 152 Buckingham, James Silk 25 Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig 6, 169

247

Burton, Isabel 4, 7, 113, 135, 177 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 57, 61 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 148, 150, 220 n. 82 Burton, Richard 4, 57 Cairo 22, 33, 152–3, 217 n. 6 Carpenter, Joseph Estlin 154 Catherwood, Frederick 66–9 Cazalet, Edward 166 Charles, Elizabeth Rundle 55 Christ Church Jerusalem 4, 120 Churchill, Winston 141–2 Church of the Holy Sepulchre 16, 52, 62, 192 Easter at 22, 56–8 location 58–61, 69 travellers’ attitude towards 6, 24, 54–6, 75, 78 Church Missionary Society 4 Clarendon, Earl of and James Finn 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 141, 143–5 Clarke, Edward Daniel 58 Clermont-Ganneau, Charles 152 Conder, Claude Reignier 16, 28, 41, 91, 163, 166, 189–90 anti-Semitism 74 and Bedouin 33–5 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 55, 56–7 and German Templars 48, 174–5 and Haram al-Sharif 71 and Laurence Oliphant 48, 160, 165, 170, 176 and Samaritans 111, 136, 149 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 151–2, 220 n. 88 ­and Zionism 44, 48–9, 97, 101, 164, 189 Constantine I 54, 60, 69 Conyngham, Francis 154 Cook, Thomas 5, 6, 22, 34, 62, 163, 176 Crimean War 67, 83, 87, 88, 116, 119, 158–9 Cromwell, Oliver 3 Crusades 3, 32, 41, 55 Curzon, Robert 57–8

248 Dale Owen, Robert 184 Dale Owen, Rosamund 184–5 Daliyat al-Karmil 176–80, 184, 185, 192, 227 n. 203 Damascus 4, 23, 33, 128, 135, 162, 165, 167, 168, 217 n. 6 1860 riots 122, 129 Darwin, Charles 21 Dayr Dibwan 37 Dead Sea 6, 34 Edward Robinson’s visit 22, 26, 33, 34 and Laurence Oliphant 165 de Bertou, Jules 34 de Redcliffe, Stratford 85, 141 de Rothschild, Edmund 105, 184 de Sacy, Silvestre 21 Degania 92 Disraeli, Benjamin 160, 168 Dixon, William Hepworth 73, 89 Dome of the Rock 52, 63–4, 66–8 and James Fergusson 61, 68–72 see also Haram al-Sharif Druze Edward Robinson and 40, 42–3, 177 Laurence Oliphant and 163, 177–9, 184, 185 Dura 30, 38 Eardley, Culling 142, 159 East India Company 47, 99, 130 Edward VII 160 Egyptian occupation of Palestine and Greater Syria 4, 38, 40, 41–2, 44, 66–7, 113, 137–8 El Karey, Yohannah 116, 121 Eliot, George 8, 11 Evangelical Revival 7 Fanon, Franz 51 Fergusson, James 59, 61, 68–71 Finn, Elizabeth 45, 76–7, 81, 85–7, 97, 113 activities in Jerusalem 83–4 anti-Semitism 100–1 early life 82 and India 131 and Kerem Avraham 16, 89–90, 92, 93, 95, 104–6, 107–8, 182, 210 n. 49, 63 and Syrian Colonisation Fund 97–106

Index Finn, James 4, 30, 40–1, 45, 113, 181, 189, 215 n. 45 ­activities as British consul 81–3, 87–8, 119, 154 anti-Semitism 73 attitudes towards Palestine 86–7 early life 82 and Haram al-Sharif 67, 120 and India 130–1 and Kerem Avraham 16, 89–95, 104, 107–8, 210 n. 63 later life 96 and Nablus 114, 119 and Nablus bell riot 116, 118–28 opinion on the haluka 88 plans for settler colonization of Palestine 84–5, 88–9, 105 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 140 Firkovich, Abraham 136 First ‘Aliya See Zionism First World War 9, 106, 189 Fisk, George 146 Floyd, George 193–4 Fowler, Robert 210 n. 68 France 12, 47, 120, 122, 128, 130, 160, 215 n. 60 and Catholics 4, 171 Friends of Zion Museum 186, 187 Garden Tomb 58, 61–3 Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert 160 Gawler, George 91 Gaza 22, 29, 30, 37–9, 86, 217 n. 4 Gaza Strip 14, 187, 191, 194 Gell, Francis 55 George V 163 German Templars 28 and Claude Reignier Conder 48, 174–5 and Laurence Oliphant 174–6, 184 Gladstone, W.E. 168 Gobat, Samuel 119–20, 124, 129 Golan Heights 1, 13 Edward Robinson’s visit 23, 27 and Laurence Oliphant 162, 164, 193 Goodrich-Freer, Ada 74, 184 Gordon, Charles George 61, 176–7 Graham, Cyril 129 Grant Duff, Mountstuart Elphinstone 177 Grove, George 69–70, 110, 112, 149

Index Ha‘am, Ahad 13, 171 Hagana 78, 208 n. 144 Haifa 56, 138, 146, 192 and Laurence Oliphant 34, 165, 174, 176, 180, 184, 185 Halhul 30 Haluka 88, 93, 164, 165, 172, 181 Hamas 194 ­Hamilton-Gordon, John 98–9 Hanauer, J.E. 78 Haram al-Sharif 16, 52, 64, 71–2, 192, 194, 206 n. 83, 92 travellers’ access 65–8, 120 travellers’ attitude towards 64–5, 75, 78 see also al-Aqsa Mosque, Dome of the Rock Harris, Thomas Lake 159, 176 Hat-ı Humayunu 115, 117–19, 123, 124, 126, 129 Hebron 22, 25, 29, 30, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 72 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 21 Helena 60, 61, 69 Herschell, Ridley Haim 28, 54, 56, 57, 64, 76 Herzl, Theodor 10, 21, 22, 47, 168–9, 172, 209 n. 21 and Jerusalem 79 Hijaz Railway 165 Holon 187 Hunt, William Holman 56, 99 Huntington, Robert 136 Huwwara 29 Hyamson, Alfred Montefiore 48, 164, 168, 184 Ibrahim Pasha 4, 57–8, 67, 137 Idhna 25, 38 Imber, Naftali Herz 180, 185, 186, 227 n. 203 India 4, 45–7, 67–9, 90, 99, 107, 138, 160, 165, 171 1857 Mutiny 130–1 Irgun 78 Irish Potato Famine 145 ‘Isfiya 178 Israel Museum 187 Jabotinsky, Ze‘ev 78 Jaffa 6, 9, 29, 38, 84, 86, 114, 131, 141, 182, 217 n. 4

249

Jamal, Khalil 167 Jawhariyyeh, Wasif 42 Jenin 30, 86, 140, 169 Jerusalem 3, 13, 16, 20, 26, 30, 33, 36, 37, 42, 72, 75–6, 79, 89, 92, 99, 104, 105, 107, 108, 114, 119, 120, 124–6, 152, 154, 155, 160, 163, 166, 168, 177, 182, 185, 186, 191, 192, 194, 218 n. 22, 227 n. 203 British missionary activity in 4, 83, 93 and Edward Robinson 22, 25, 27, 29, 32, 39, 45, 52, 110 and Finns 81–4, 86, 96, 98, 130–1, 210 n. 63 Jewish Quarter 72–4, 91 travellers’ attitude towards 51–4, 63, 78–9 see also Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Haram al-Sharif, Kerem Avraham, Western Wall Jerusalem Literary Society 45 Jewish Chronicle 82, 89, 98, 100–4, 141, 161, 169, 210 n. 49 Jifna 30, 110, 163 Jiljilyya 110 Jimzu 38 ­Jericho 22, 31, 165 Jordan River 6, 23, 162 Josephus, Flavius 52 Justinian 71–2, 207 n. 111 Katzrin 185 Kerem Avraham 16, 73, 96, 98, 99, 101–2, 104, 162, 181, 182, 192 economic viability 94–5, 104–6 founding 89–90 renaming from Karm al-Khalil 33, 90–1, 108 sale and redevelopment 107 and Syrian Colonisation Fund 104–6 workers at 91–5, 104–5 Kinglake, Alexander 7, 8, 115, 191 anti-Semitism 73 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 59–60 and Laurence Oliphant 173 and Nablus 112 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert 220 n. 88 Korte, Jonas 58

250 Lapid, Shulamit 187 Latakia 102–4, 108, 114, 125 Lazarus, Emma 184 Lefroy, John Henry 99 le Strange, Guy 176 Levinsky, Elhonan 93 Liddon, Henry 154 Lifta 29 Lloyd George, David 189 Locke, John 28 London Jews’ Society 4, 75 and James Finn 82, 83, 94 London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews See London Jews’ Society Lubiya 37 destruction 191 Luther, Martin 3 Lydda 22, 38 Lyde, Samuel arrest 124 early life 114 killing of Yasma 114, 117, 118, 121–2, 125, 214 n. 45, 215 n. 60 and Mahmud ‘Abd al-Hadi 122–3, 127 mental breakdown and death 126 trial 125 Macalister, R.A.S. 33, 59 MacColl, Malcom 62 MacGregor, John 6 Macleod, Norman 52 and Bedouin 34, 168 and Haram al-Sharif 68, ­and Samaritans 135 and Western Wall 76 Madaba mosaic 71–2, 207 n. 111 Mansion House Committee 97, 98, 100, 102, 171, 172 Marriott, Charles 143 Martineau, Harriet 55, 57, 64–5 Marx, Karl 73, 109 Massel, Joseph 103 McCaul, Alexander 82, 141 McIlwaine, William 144, 146, 147, 219 n. 50 Mecca 69, 129, 167 Megiddo 185 Merrill, Selah 166

Index Meshullam, John 83, 89, 125 Midhat Pasha 162, 168 Mills, John and Nablus 111–13 and Nablus bell riot 116, 121, 122, 126, 128 and Samaritans 135, 217 n. 4 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 143, 146, 147 Mishkenot Sha‘ananim 91 Mizrahi Jews 74, 105, 182 Mocatta, Frederick David 101 Montefiore, Moses 67, 85, 91, 104 and Laurence Oliphant 159, 165 Mott, Francis D. 102 Merrick, Joseph 28 Moore, Niven 126–8, 141 Nablus 22, 29, 36–8, 125–7, 136–40, 147–9, 152, 192, 214 n. 38, 220 n. 91 1856 uprising in 15, 16, 109–10, 112, 114–24, 128–31, 215 n. 60 and Samaritans 110–11, 134–5, 143, 152 travellers’ attitude towards 51, 110–14, 189 Nakba 1–2, 78, 79, 187, 191–2 Naksa See Six-Day War Napoleon III 120 Nazareth 22–4, 26, 39, 110, 114, 120, 128, 191 Netanyahu, Benjamin 185, 227 n. 203 Newman, John Henry 61 Newton, Francis Emily 185 Nimrod Fortress 27 Nordau, Max 10 Oliphant, Alice 159, 174, 176, 178, 179, 184, 186 Oliphant, Laurence 2, 11, 16–17, 47, 88, 91, 92, 108, 223 n. 76 1879 journey 157, 160, 162–9 anti-Semitism 73, 162, 172–3 and Bedouin 34, 158, 163, 166–8 and Canada 157–8, 167 and Claude Reignier Conder 48, 160, 162, 170, 176 death 184 ­and Druze 163, 177–9, 184

Index early life 157 eccentricity 159, 169, 176 and German Templars 174–6 house 179–80, 184, 192, 227 n. 203 influence 157, 170, 184–7 and Jerusalem 54, 56–7 The Land of Gilead 157, 160, 162, 169–71, 177, 179, 183, 184, 186 last years in Palestine 174–84 and Nablus 111, 112 and Samaritans 135 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 145, 219 n. 60 and Zionism 2, 161–2, 168, 169–74, 180–7, 189–90 Oren, Ram 186 Owen, Robert 184 Oz, Amos 107 Palestine Exploration Fund 45, 48, 50, 60, 73, 150–1 founding 6, 45 and James Fergusson 69–70 see also Claude Reignier Conder, Charles Warren Palmerston, Lord 4 Petra 6, 22, 34 Phibbs, Owen 162 Pickthall, Marmaduke 190 Pitt Rivers Museum 217 n. 20 Porter, Josias Leslie 33, 163 Puritans 3, 20, 72 Quilliam, Abdullah 190 Ramallah 30 Ramin 38 Ramla 22, 30–1, 39 Reformation 3 Restorationism See Zionism Rider Haggar, H. 63, 64, 77, 78 Ritter, Karl 21 Robinson, Edward 2, 6, 15–16, 50, 52, 112–13, 166, 190, 192 1852 journey in Eastern Mediterranean 23, 37, 39, 40 1838 journey in Eastern Mediterranean 21–2, 39, 40, 42, 110, 162 attitude towards Palestine 20, 23–7, 45, 53–4

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and Bedouin 33–6 Biblical Researches in Palestine 16, 19, 22–3, 27 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 24, 56, 58–62 and colonization of Palestine 41–3 and Druze 40, 42–3, 177 early life 20 and fertility of Palestine 27–31, 46 and filahin 36–8, 40–1, 44, 48, 85 and Haram al-Sharif 39, 65–6, 71 influence 22–3, 45 ­Later Biblical Researches in Palestine 23 meeting with Eli Smith 21 misidentification of sites 26 and Nablus 111, 113 and place names 32–3 and Samaritans 37, 113, 137–8 and Settler colonialism 43–4 university studies 20–1 Rogers, Edward Thomas 124 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 137, 140, 141, 146, 152, 153, 218 n. 22 Rogers, Mary Eliza 56, 111, 141 and Haifa 174 and Nablus bell riot 116, 120, 121, 124 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 143, 147–8, 218 n. 36 Rogers, William Gibb 141 Rohan, Denis Michael 206 n. 83 Rokach, Eliezer 88, 181 Rosh Pina 181, 182, 186 Ruppin, Arthur 93 Ruskin, John 154 Russia 103, 130, 136, 151, 163, 172, 184 and Eastern Question 4, 84, 159–60 Jewish emigrants to Palestine from 84, 89, 95, 182 and Orthodox Christians 4, 171 pilgrims from 54, 55, 88 pogroms in 96, 97, 100, 169, 171–3 Sabastiya 25 Safad 22, 72, 164, 181 Said, Edward W. 3, 6–7, 27, 53, 109 Orientalism 11–13 Sakhnin 37

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Index

Salt (town) 163, 166, 167 Samaritans 16, 37, 110–11, 113, 114, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 149–55, 217 n. 4, 20, 219 n. 60 travellers’ view of 134–7 see also al-Shalabi, Ya‘qub Schopenhauer, Arthur 21 Schumacher, Gottlieb 176 Scott Moncrieff, Robert 105–6 Sea of Galilee 22–4, 30, 62, 92, 110, 164, 175 Second ‘Aliya See Zionism Seetzen, Ulrich Jasper 6 Shaftesbury, Lord and Alexander McCaul 82 anti-Semitism 72 Christian Zionism of 4, 11, 87 and Syrian Colonisation Fund 97, 99, 102, 210 n. 68 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 141 Shandel, Herman 104–6 ­Shapira, Moses 151–2 Shaykh Jarah 79, 187, 194 Shehadeh, Raja 193 Sidon 22, 162 Silwan 14, 79 Simonides, Constantine 150 Sinai Peninsula 8, 13–14, 152 Edward Robinson’s visit 22 Singh, Duleep 99 Sinjil 110 Six-Day War 1, 75, 79, 105, 187 Smiles, Samuel 89 Smith, Agnes 63, 149 Smith, Eli 2, 6, 15–16, 24, 29 1852 journey in Eastern Mediterranean 23, 37, 40 1838 journey in Eastern Mediterranean 21–2, 34–5, 110 Arabic ability 31–2, 36, 38–40 and James Silk Buckingham 25 Meeting with Edward Robinson 21 Smith, George Adam 190–1 Smith, Hannah Whitall 176 Smith, Haskett 34, 133, 176 and Garden Tomb 61–2 Smythe, Percy 97 Sneersohn, Hayim Zwi 95 Sokolovsky, Noah 108

Sokolow, Nahum 10–11, 44, 49, 89, 96, 108, 161–2, 164, 170, 184 South Africa 48, 95, 99, 157 Spencer-Churchill, John 141 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn 7, 24, 26, 110, 163, 192 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 62 and Haram al-Sharif 63–4, 65 and Nablus 111 and Samaritans 135 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 140, 142, 218 n. 37 Strangford, Lady 97, 210 n. 68 Stuart, Moses 21 Suez Canal 165, 171 Summil 41 Sursuq family 168 Sykes-Picot Agreement 49 Syrian Colonisation Fund 15, 16 activities 100–1 Cyprus colony 103–4, 108, 212 n. 92 founding 97–8 and Kerem Avraham 104–9 Latakia colony 101–3, 108 supporters 98–100 Szold, Henrietta 105 ­Tal al-Safi 30 Tanzimat 16, 117, 118, 127 Tayba 36, 37, 168 Tel Aviv 185, 186 Temple, Henry John See Lord Palmerston Tewodros II 163 Thackeray, William Makepeace 5, 29, 193 anti-Semitism 74–5 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 55 Thomas, Mark 193 Thomson, William (Archbishop of York) 151 Thomson, William McClure 40 Tiberias 22, 37, 38, 72, 177, 180 Tobin, Catherine 141, 218 n. 36 Treves, Frederick 28, 74, 76 Tristram, Henry Baker 29, 30, 62–4, 163–4 and Haram al-Sharif 68 and Nablus 111–13 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 148–50 Trollope, Anthony 54 Tubas 30, 86

Index Tuqan, Fadwa 192 Turmus‘ayya 110 Twain, Mark 7, 28, 34, 53 and Church of the Holy Sepulchre 54–5, 169 Tyre 22, 39, 47 Tyssen-Amherst, William 211 n. 68 United States of America 3, 7, 8, 20–2, 25, 39, 40, 72, 84, 90, 97, 136, 164, 166, 171, 176, 177, 183, 184, 189, 193–4 Civil War 112, 219 n. 45 and settler colonialism 14, 43–4, 159 travellers from 2, 5, 55–6, 77, 192 see also Edward Robinson, Eli Smith, Mark Twain ‘Urabi, Ahmad 42, 45, 170 Veitch, William Douglas 146 Victoria 177, 186 Warburton, Eliot 5, 42, 97 Warren, Charles 16, 82, 91, 160, 214 n. 25 and Haram al-Sharif 65–6, 68, 71 and James Fergusson 70–1 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 150–2, 220 n. 91 and Zionism 44–8, 97, 189 Wegg-Prosser, Francis 7 Weizmann, Chaim 9, 10 West Bank 13, 38, 110, 191, 192, 194 Western Wall 16, 52, 73 travellers’ attitude towards 75–9 Williams, George 218 n. 22 Wilson, Charles 60, 74 ­Wilson, John 33, 54, 214 n. 25 and Haram al-Sharif 65, 71

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and India 130, 138 and Samaritans 135, 136 and Ya‘qub al-Shalabi 139–40, 154 Wolff, Joseph 142 Wright, Charles H.H. 153 Ya‘bad 86 Yibna 86 Zangwill, Israel 184 Ze‘evi, Rehavam 180 Zeller, John 120, 123, 124, 128 Zikhron Ya‘kov 180, 182 Zionism 36, 73, 77–8, 87–9, 101–3, 105, 167, 210 n. 53 and Britain 8–9, 12, 14–15, 171, 184, 189–91 and Charles Warren 44–8, 97 Christian Zionism 3, 10, 14, 50, 55–6, 65, 82, 84, 94, 106, 107, 161, 169, 183, 186, 189, 191, 206 n. 83 and Claude Reignier Conder 44, 48–9, 97, 101, 164, 189 and Edward Robinson 44 and Finns 81, 84 and Jewish emigration to Palestine 8, 81, 96 and Kerem Avraham 90, 91, 95–6, 107–8 and Laurence Oliphant 2, 161–2, 168, 169–74, 180–7 Revisionist 78, 164, 168 settlements 91–3, 103, 105–6, 164, 180, 181, 182, 186 and settler-colonial theory 13–14, 28, 33, 85, 194, 197 n. 65

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