The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917 (review)

Eitan Bar-Yosef's thoughtful monograph surveys the complex place of the Holy Land in the making of English culture between 1799, when the Royal Navy allied with the Ottoman army to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte's army at Acre, and 1917 when the British army marched into Jerusalem itself. He deftly reconstructs the shifting pattern of England's intellectual, religious, and political entanglements with the Holy Land in this period, charting Britain's increasing attachment to Palestine because it served as a crucial gateway to the Indian colony and its thickening commercial and political connections to the Holy Land in the wake of construction of the Suez Canal and the occupation of Egypt.

Aiming to trace the "fusion between imaginative and empirical geographies, between the literal and metaphorical Jerusalems" (vii-viii), Bar-Yosef fully realizes this goal as he reconnects the imagined Jerusalem of British Protestant tradition and Britain's very real imperial investment in the Holy Land. He reveals the manifold connections between England's imperial aspirations in the exploration and conquest of Palestine and the powerful English tradition that mobilised key biblical images—such as "Promised Land," "Zion," and the idea of a "Chosen People"—in efforts to define the unique nature of both England and the English people.

Of course, this emotive and spiritual connection to the Holy Land was long-standing as Bar-Yosef reminds us in his first chapter, which examines the emergence of what he terms "vernacular orientalism" from the mid-seventeenth century. This chapter traverses a wide terrain, beginning with an engaging reading of the foundational text of this tradition—John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678)—and ending with a discussion of the divergent millenarian teachings of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott. Subsequent chapters trace the transformation of English understandings of the Holy Land in the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 examines the Holy Land's place in "high" cultural forms such as fine art, novels, and travel writing, while chapter 3 assesses the popular media—including illustrated Bibles, the cheap illustrated press (such as the Penny Magazine), models, exhibitions, and dioramas—through which Victorians accessed the Holy Land. Chapter 4 focuses on the Victorian Christian Zionist tradition which was deeply committed to the restoration of Jews to Palestine, but remained very much at the margins of British religious and political life. With the fifth and final chapter Bar-Yosef somewhat abruptly shifts his focus to the British military campaign in Palestine during 1917–18 and the disenchantment of English soldiers with the real Holy Land and their conviction that the true "Promised Land" was not to be found in the Middle East, but in England itself.

The Holy Land in English Culture is a very important addition to the scholarship on Orientalism. Foregrounding the intimate connections between the Protestant tradition and English Orientalism, this volume offers a richly contextualized reading of English debates over the Holy Land. Rather than reading Orientalism as simply the intellectual veneer of political desires, The Holy Land in English Culture rematerializes the "religious energy" that shaped English engagement with the Middle East and that shaped the production of English Orientalist knowledge, both "at home" in England and "on the ground" in the Holy Land itself. Bar-Yosef suggests that English understandings of Palestine sit uneasily within Saidian models of Orientalist knowledge that are organised around a binary opposition between "Self" and "Other," because the Holy Land was never simply an object of an English imperial will-to-power. Throughout the long nineteenth century, as Bar-Yosef stresses, many key English intellectuals and religious leaders believed that the Holy Land was English or that England itself had also become the "Holy Land." He contends that this investment was the outcome of an "Orientalization of the self," which was produced by the centrality of Scripture in British life and its pivotal role in shaping the self-image of the English (8). Thus, a "vernacular biblical culture...