Measuring Jerusalem: The Palestine Exploration Fund and British Interests in the Holy Land (review)

Abstract

Palestine was many things to middle-class, and some upper-class, Victorian men and women. It was the "Land of the Book," visited, experienced, and described to illustrate the veracity of the revealed scriptural texts, and the focus of millennial hopes and projects; the subject of biblical archaeology and geography, as well as of new brands of scientific orientalist studies, such as modern (stratigraphic) archaeology and comparative Semitic philology. And from the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was increasingly important strategically to Western powers competing for influence over territories formally ruled by the Ottomans. The sense that, regardless of its actual political and juridical status, Palestine was British, is manifest in the words of William Thompson, Archbishop of York, in his inaugural address to the meeting of the Palestine Exploration Fund on 22 June 1865: "The country of Palestine belongs to you and to me. It is essentially ours" (qtd. 70). What is so striking about Victorian constructions of Palestine is the absence from them of its Muslim inhabitants. In the predominantly evangelical vision of the East there was no place for Mohammedans.