Going Home to the Holy Land: The Jews of Jerusalem in Nineteenth-Century French Catholic Pilgrimage

Abstract

In 1806, Viscount Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand set out, in his words, “to complete the circle of studies that he had always promised [himself] he would achieve” by undertaking a trip to the Orient. The result was the Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem. This was an account of his pilgrimage, a notion that he alluded to somewhat self-consciously: “It may seem strange today to speak of wishes and of pilgrimages, but on this point I am not restrained by a sense of modesty, and for a long time now, I have aligned myself with the class of the superstitious and the weak. I may be the last Frenchman to leave my country to travel to the Holy Land, with the ideas, the goal, and the sentiments of an old pilgrim.”1 Chateaubriand was to be proven wrong. Pilgrimage was one way that Catholics maintained their attachment to their idea of France in what was a rocky century for the church: in the middle of the century, in particular, there was an extraordinary rise in expressions of Catholicism. The rise and role of popular pilgrimage, such as the journey to Lourdes, as a means of creating a Catholic community and ensuring the ongoing vitality of Catholicism in France has been well documented.2 The story of those pilgrims who ventured further afield has not been so closely examined. Yet pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while not accessible to all, was nonetheless also intrinsic to the process of imagining and maintaining French Catholicism. At the end of his description of his stay in Jerusalem, Chateaubriand took the reader on one final metaphorical tour. Amid what he called the “extraordinary desolation” of the Holy City, he sought to leave the reader with an image that he found “even more extraordinary”: the continued existence in