American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (review)

Fellow tourists, according to Mark Twain, had an annoying tendency to come away from their Holy Land visits with impressions fitted to preconceived notions, tailored to the tourist's own particular faith or frame of reference. "Honest as these men's intentions may have been," Twain wrote, "they were full of partialities and prejudices, they entered the country with their verdicts already prepared, and they could no more write dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own wives and children" (p. 49). Twain was bothered that tourists parroted mindlessly the words and thoughts of this travel writer or that faith. Actually, most Holy Land impressions reflected something more profound, a deeper cultural context. This context is the subject of Hilton Obenzinger's American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania.

The body of American Holy Land-related literature at the heart of Obenzinger's work has itself become a known landscape in recent years. The names of key players and episodes are now familiar markers along the path of the scholarly pilgrim seeking to understand the American relationship with Ottoman Palestine. Through earlier works we already know about the Holy Land connection of seventeenth-century Virginia settler George Sandys; nineteenth-century Biblical archaeology founder Edward Robinson; the strange saga of Philadelphia's Warder Cresson, a convert to Judaism; the popularity of Middle East missionary William Thomson's 1859 The Land and Book ; Abraham Lincoln's musings of a visit to the Holy Land on the day of his death; the settlement efforts of charismatic nineteenth-century Americans Clorinda Minor at Artas, George Adams at Jaffa, and Horatio Spafford at Jerusalem; and the huge typographical map of Palestine created at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. The challenge in offering a new analysis of this corpus is to devise a fresh interpretive approach.

In American Palestine, Obenzinger has produced a work of prodigious scholarship, with regard to Twain's Innocents Abroad, and to a greater degree in his dissection of Melville's lesser known poem Clarel. Obenzinger presents a revisionist interpretation of the wider America-Holy Land relationship, backed by a good deal of careful analysis. His central conceit is that Melville and Twain produced non-religious counter-texts which challenged conventional American literature on Palestine. Obenzinger maintains that this larger body of literature derives from what he calls America's "covenantal settler colonialism," a cultural process "that qualitatively affects all aspects of American society in the nineteenth century" (pp. 7-8). As works outside of this mainstream, Clarel and Innocents Abroad fucntion as mirrors to understand the wider context, serving as touchstones and counterweights to the body of traditional Holy Land literature. Discussion and analysis of both works are natural given their creators' notoriety. Is anything new added to existent analyses of these works? Certainly. We are taken far beyond territory covered in Franklin Walker's Irreverent Pilgrims (1974) and other works solely devoted to interpretations of Clarel and Innocents Abroad.

Obenzinger's paradigmatic approach has a measure of fashionability to it, although with regard to its specific conceit, I found it somewhat partisan for my personal taste, walking a fine line between objective analysis and "prepared verdict." Colonialism, imperialism, and the exploitation of foreign peoples are too weighted as obvious wrongs to provide a comfortable, non-partisan seat from which to view the past. But then, being challenged by that which makes us uncomfortable is perhaps the exact point Obenzinger seeks to make; and it is likely the work's most significant contribution.

Much to Obenzinger's credit as a scholar, he is not at all slavish or dogmatic; he presents his case in moderated terms. His thought-provoking analysis is done with straightforward organization and purpose, and he demonstrates an impressive command of sources. He often digs deeper into many of the subtopics than I have seen elsewhere in literature...