To See a Promised Land: Americans and the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (review)

To See A Promised Land provides a much needed thematic interpretation to research in the field of American Protestants and the Holy Land prior to the Balfour Declaration. Vogel’s thesis is that Protestant Americans shared a composite of perceptions of the Holy Land which produced a mythic image. The reality of the Land was seen through its “tapestry,” the present through the “veil” of the past. The reality-myth relationship was threatened, however, when American Protestants actually went to the Land.

The reactions to the threat varied. Some continued to believe there was no disjunction, others adjusted the “lens of myth,” some concentrated on the original community that fit the myth, and others claimed that the alien present reality fulfilled God’s threat to punish the Land’s Jewish inhabitants. For those who would not adjust or could not distance themselves, the myth-reality relationship remained a source of tension with practical consequences. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, the American Colony of Jerusalem, the “ordained” consuls and the American School of Oriental Research who were able to both appreciate the Land’s uniqueness and be aware of their own perspectives, had successful experiences. Missionaries Parsons and Fisk, the Adams colonists, early consuls and the American Palestine Exploration Society, who could not control their images, failed to carry out their ambitions; in the end, “only the colonies that adapted to the new environment and were ready for survival ultimately prospered” (p. 159).

Vogel studies the main groups: Travelers, missionaries, colonists, consuls, archaeologists. There was some variety among travelers: Some were reassured (Emily Severance), others disappointed (Mark Twain), others invested the disparity with the theology of Israel’s sin (Joseph Inskeep Taylor, Nathaniel Mark Burt). But overall they were “soberly disappointed with the Holy Land’s landscape and physical features. The desolate conditions they found in Palestine did not correlate with the image carried into the sojourn.” The attempts to “reason out the dichotomy through faith-enhancing formulas or to arrive at a new level of consciousness . . . did not come easily” (p. 76). Missionaries, out to win the “paramount ‘holy’ Land” for Christianity and thereby weaken Judaism and Christianity, were divided—from the thwarted efforts of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the success of the Society of Friends. ¹ Collectively, however, they yielded lasting results in education, Bible publication—and they defined the image of the Land for American consciousness. The logistical and financial support they received from America was a major positive factor. The colonists were largely victims of the image-reality disjunction. Clorinda Minor’s colony was defeated by dissonance between idealistic religious purpose and business practice. The Adams colony turned into a “fiasco” because the realities of settlement defied the leaders’ messianic compulsions. The consuls, by contrast, were obliged to cope with politics, commerce and ethnic diversities, directing any mythic energy to the facts on the ground; the “ordained” consuls regulated their perspectives in the context of their daily work. ² Archaeologists, for whom faith and doctrine were subdued by scholarship, had the best grip on reality. While sharing the others’ “perception of lapsed time,” this “most intentionally past-oriented” group avoided the image-reality tension by going straight to antiquity. Instead of getting involved in the confrontation between imagined past and real present, it focused on bringing the scientific mind of the present to the real past.

Given the importance of the Land as sacred space to American Protestants, I would have given more weight to the internal, existential dimension to the encounter. For example, for Minor and Adams the quest was primarily religious, to advance the advent of the messiah. In this sense they succeeded by their very act of trying, whether or not their colonies actually flourished.

Even in terms of the cultural, rather than religious history which the book explicitly is, the myth-reality encounter should be measured not only...