Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (review)

Palestine was many things to middle-class, and some upper-class, Victorian men and women. It was the "Land of the Book," visited, experienced, and described to illustrate the veracity of the revealed scriptural texts, and the focus of millennial hopes and projects; the subject of biblical archaeology and geography, as well as of new brands of scientific orientalist studies, such as modern (stratigraphic) archaeology and comparative Semitic philology. And from the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was increasingly important strategically to Western powers competing for influence over territories formally ruled by the Ottomans. The sense that, regardless of its actual political and juridical status, Palestine was British, is manifest in the words of William Thompson, Archbishop of York, in his inaugural address to the meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund on 22 June 1865: "The country of Palestine belongs to you and to me. It is essentially ours" (qtd. 70). What is so striking about Victorian constructions of Palestine is the absence from them of its Muslim inhabitants. In the predominantly evangelical vision of the East there was no place for Mohammedans.

Years of multidisciplinary research and study of High British Imperialism (between 1875 and the end of the First World War), have taught us that seemingly separate areas, forms, and configurations of British interest in the Orient, such as travel, missionary work, or scientific investigation, did not evolve discretely but formed parts of a web, that discourse now commonly described as "Orientalism," drawing on Western political and military superiority. But as a few students of the history and literature of Orientalism have noted, over recent years research has focused on representations of the Orient and neglected to investigate the actual dynamics and machinery of the discourses of empire. These dynamics would include, most importantly, the apparatuses for the gathering of knowledge on Palestine (such as the network of British evangelical missions, publishing houses, and pressure groups), the systematization of this knowledge and its distribution, as well as the relationships between formal and official agents of empire such as the state and the army on the one hand, and those agents active within civil society on the other.

John James Moscrop's study of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) contributes towards filling this gap. Moscrop's is the first objective, critical study of the Fund, following the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' "inside" histories, which frankly served to raise money for the chronically insolvent Fund. The first part of the book summarizes British involvement in Palestine from about 1800, including missionary activities. The bulk of the book, based on the PEF's rich archives, surveys its history, from its foundation as an interdenominational and "scientific" body devoted to mapping and scientifically collecting archaeological evidence, while seeking to illustrate the veracity of the Bible, to its demise after the British occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1918. These somewhat contradictory purposes, and the Fund's affiliation with a number of philanthropic and proselytizing organizations in Palestine, made it a battleground between traditional evangelical scholarship and the newer archaeology. The Fund's animosity towards American Fredrick Jones Bliss, who dug on its behalf at Tel el-Hesi, and surveyed Jerusalem, is just one example of how strong the older trend of using archaeological finds to illustrate the scriptures remained, long after the decline of evangelicalism as a social and cultural power.

Moscrop's substantial discovery is about the relations between the Fund and the military. For three decades, between 1865 and 1888 and between 1911 and 1918, the Fund worked in tandem with, through, and for the Royal Engineers and, more significantly, the Topographical Department which became military intelligence, and which was practically founded by the Fund's chief surveyor and most powerful board member, Charles Warren. The military-scientific network drew on...