On Chariots with Horses of Fire and Iron: The Excursionists and the Narrow Gauge Railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem (review)

The Jaffa-Jerusalem Railroad, opened for traffic in 1892, has received relatively little attention compared with other Ottoman railroads, especially the famous Anatolian-Baghdad project and the Hijaz Railroad. Anthony Travis’s book thus represents an important, but ultimately disappointing, contribution to the literature. While it contains a wealth of information about the railroad, Travis fails to ground the narrative, or the mountains of data, in a central argument or within the existing literature on the history of railroads in the Ottoman Empire.

In his preface Travis informs the reader that “the aim of this monograph is to document the development of the railroad that was built to exploit the growth of tourism in the Holy Land at the end of the nineteenth century” (p. vi). Similarly, in the introduction we are told that the “railroad and its travelers also had a major impact on the Europeanization and expansion of this remote outpost of the Ottoman Empire” (p. 6). These statements are as close as Travis comes to providing a thesis for the work, and they might have provided a useful starting point for exploring the ways in which the construction and operation of the railroad was influenced by political and cultural forces. The strongest part of the narrative focuses on the development of modern tourism in Palestine and the role of the railroad in that story. There is plenty of information here, in the form of travelers’ accounts and newspaper stories, to enable an exploration of the political, economic, and cultural calculations influencing the construction and exploitation of the railroad. Unfortunately, Travis presents this information with little or no analysis.

A related problem is the almost complete lack of any exploration of the question of agency. The motivations of the original railroad concession holder, an Ottoman Jewish subject named Joseph Navon, and the subsequent French owners of the railroad company, are addressed in only the most cursory manner. Travis focuses almost exclusively on the actions of Western European and North American investors, politicians, tourists, and pilgrims. He hardly considers the motivations, plans, attitudes, and activities of Ottoman state actors or the local population. When anonymous Ottoman “authorities” make an appearance in the narrative, they obstruct the plans of the railroad engineers and developers for no apparent reason. Since Travis provides no analysis of the sultan’s decision to grant the concession in the first place, the reader has no way of guessing at the possible causes of Ottoman “obstructionism.”

We also get very little investigation of what the local population thought of the railroad. There is a brief mention of sabotage aimed at the railroad, as well as information about the competition from camel and wagon transport. What does this tell us about the ways in which railroad technology influenced, and was influenced by, local cultural attitudes and existing transportation technologies? For example, in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, long-distance camel caravans could not compete against the railroad and eventually vanished. But sometimes the caravan operators reinvented themselves as local carriers and “branch lines” for the main-line railroads. Travis provides some interesting hints that something similar happened in Palestine and further notes that some European pilgrims even preferred this sort of transportation to the railroad. Unfortunately, these tantalizing hints are not developed in any real depth.

Having pointed out the things this book fails to do, let me conclude by noting some of the things it does very well. First, despite its flaws, it will become the basis for further studies of the Jaffa-Jerusalem Railroad. It provides important information on the stations, the locomotives, and the rolling stock, as well as detailed data about the line itself. This information is accompanied by excellent illustrations, diagrams, and charts. Finally, while not choosing to develop the many interesting questions suggested by the information in his own...