Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels (review)

Between the late-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, few Americans journeyed to the Holy Land, yet many encountered it. From Lake Chautauqua's Palestine Park to the New Holy Land in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, Americans experienced the Holy Land through various geographic representations. In a readable and wonderfully illustrated book, Burke O. Long examines a number of these representations and argues that each was encoded with ideological, theological, political, and cultural meanings that often revealed more about American values than topographic reality.

Long skillfully applies post-modern theory about symbols, simulacra, and the intersection between reality and fantasy to his analysis. He draws on the concept of "geopiety," coined by John Kirkland Wright in the 1960s, to provide thematic coherency through an otherwise chronologically and topically diffuse book. Geopiety is characterized by a reverence for physical space, and yet, as Long shows, the geopious (more often than not Protestants in this book) often re-created geographic space, or at least representations of it, in highly idealized, romanticized or fantasized forms. The representations Long examines are diverse, and include the St. Louis World's Fair 1904 Jerusalem Exhibit, photographic and stereoscopic (three-dimensional projections of photographs) portrayals of the Holy Land, scientific and archaeological discoveries of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, and maps and atlases depicting biblical Israel.

The Holy Land posed a perplexing problem to turn-of-the-century American Protestants. Many believed in the sacred quality of the land, then under Ottoman rule, and yet few could reconcile the holiness of the land with their view of the actual inhabitants as foreign and seemingly uncivilized. Thus, as Burke shows, an element of American imperialism—the desire to control and civilize inhabitants of foreign lands—drove American desires to create a civilized version of the Holy Land. Yet imperial motives were complicated since many believed that the sacredness of the Holy Land had been preserved and untainted precisely because of the inhabitants' primitiveness and lack of progress. By transplanting the Holy Land to American soil, through maps, photographs and models, Christian Americans could possess the sacred space without actually having to come into contact with the so-called Oriental world. Few of the representations of the Holy Land differentiated between its modern existence and its biblical origins, indicative of the general view that non-Western groups had made little, if any, progress.

Americans came to understand the Holy Land not simply through their imperialistic attitudes, but also through new views on science and human discovery. Scientific inquiry into human origins and geographic formation has historically created theological difficulties and led to splits between various religious denominations. Long argues, however, that for many early archaeologists, an "exacting study of the Holy Land would bolster flagging confidence that biblical narratives, once set into their landscape environs, could be relied upon to yield true heavenly treasures" (p. 101). Despite his compelling evidence, I think that scientific attempts to reconstruct the Holy Land and the sites of holy events were also part of the shift in religious thinking from primary concern with the transcendent and divine realm toward a greater interest in human history and the mundane realm. Long does imply that scientific discovery often had political implications. For instance, cartographers who depicted pre-Israelite Canaan as a "mostly empty homeland conquered in the service of a divine purpose," forwarded a nationalist vision consonant with desires to dispossess or disregard the modern inhabitants of Palestine (p. 194).

Most of the representations of the Holy Land were packaged as consumer goods. Americans could buy maps and photographs or pay the admission price to walk through the reconstructed streets of the Old City of Jerusalem. Long's interest in material culture—the objects and places that sculpt people's experiences and worldviews—is reminiscent of the work of Colleen McDannell, Jenna Weisman Joselit, and Andrew...