LITMIR.BIZ

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his earliest recollections and holiest feelings’, he wrote. For Americans from a variety of backgrounds – for Edward Robinson, for Albert Glock and for millions of others – the sacred geography of the Holy Land (itself abstracted from the geography of Palestine) was superimposed on the geography of North America. The notion of America as the new Israel, a God-fearing, perfect society set apart from the rest of mankind, ‘a city on a hill’, was imported with the first English settlers in the seventeenth century, and remains an essential part of America’s idea of itself.

      This sentiment gave rise in Edward Robinson to a ‘scientific’ curiosity, to explore the country whose place names were already so familiar to him. In exploring Palestine he was, in a sense, exploring New England: he was fathoming his own experience, his own identity. ‘In no country of the world, perhaps, is such a feeling more widely diffused than in New England.’

      But this feeling was widely diffused in a number of places besides New England. Turn, for example, to the earliest report of the Palestine Exploration Fund. This was established in London in 1865 with a purpose similar to Robinson’s: to study, according to its original prospectus, the ‘archaeology, manners and customs, topography, geology, natural sciences (botany, zoology, meteorology)’ of the Holy Land, on the grounds that ‘No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted.’ Founded by the great and the good of Victorian Britain, with Her Majesty the Queen herself as its patron, the PEF was launched amidst great popular enthusiasm, combining the adventure of discovery with the high goals of scholarship, Christian piety, and the emotional appeal of national purpose and pride. Its aim was to send expeditions to Palestine that would be funded by public contributions. In its first general meeting, the Archbishop of York, who chaired the gathering, expressed the project’s fundamental motivation.

      This country of Palestine belongs to you and to me, it is essentially ours. It was given to the Father of Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee.’ We mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in the breadth of it, because that land has been given unto us … It is the land to which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England, which we love so much. (Cheers.)

      So Palestine belongs to the Englishman, as well as to the American. It also belongs, one discovers, to the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Armenians, the Ethiopians, the Jews and the Muslims, and a few other groups as well. Each of these nations has a claim to the Holy Land that is exclusive and incommensurate with the others, because it is based on either a claim to territory or property that overlaps someone else’s, or on an idea, which can’t be argued about because it is entirely subjective and non-rational and cultural. Since the beginning of the Christian era, Palestine has been the focus of this multitude of claims to produce an effect of what one might call negative cosmopolitanism. The usual sense of cosmopolitanism denotes an outlook in which a person from one location identifies with a wide variety of places. Negative cosmopolitanism means the opposite: the identification of people from a wide variety of locations with one place.

      The Protestant attachment to the Holy Land was separate from the tradition of Helena but it too was subject to imaginative conceptions of the holiness of the Holy Land, and nowhere more than in Victorian England at the time of the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund. In its first years, the subject that dominated the pages of the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement was the location of the sites of the crucifixion and the tomb of Christ, which the earlier Catholic tradition established inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Reason required the rejection of the Holy Sepulchre as the historical location of these sites, but faith required an alternative, and one was soon found. The modern tourist can now visit a walled garden outside the old city, near the Palestinian bus station and the Damascus Gate, known as the Garden Tomb. It contains a pair of stone grottoes that probably were used as tombs at some point in history, but Protestant tradition has settled on one of the grottoes as the likely tomb of Christ, and it has come to be invested with holiness. Its tranquil setting and physical simplicity compared to the hectic Holy Sepulchre reflects the more individualistic and unadorned character of Protestant spirituality. The site had other advantages for nineteenth-century Protestant sensibility as the true site for the tomb of Christ. The rocky mound out of which the tomb was cut bore a physical resemblance to the dome of a human skull, which conforms to the meaning of the biblical word ‘golgotha’ used to describe the place of the entombment: the place of the skull. Like Helena, the Victorian Protestants were seeing what they wanted to see, finding what they wanted to find.

      The Orthodox tradition saw no need to identify the ‘true’ sites of the events of the life of Christ. To Russian Orthodox pilgrims, whose liturgy retained the mysticism of an older form of Christianity, the Holy Sepulchre complex was not supposed to be historically realistic. This was a place where the cosmic realm penetrated into the earthly realm. Normal physical reality was pushed aside here by metaphysical reality, and time was replaced by the eternal. The tomb of Christ was a three-dimensional icon, a miraculous object possessing real supernatural power, not just representing it. If it looked like a normal tomb, or was held to be one, it could not be the tomb of the son of God and it would not put the beholder in touch with the divine. In entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the pilgrim was entering a zone of divine reality, not a real place but something higher. Like the earliest Catholic pilgrims, he sought to be amazed, not reassured.

      The Protestant Golgotha inspired the visionary imagination of one especially eminent Victorian: the British military hero General Charles Gordon, the martyr of Khartoum. Before he embarked on his doomed expedition to confront the rebel forces of the Mahdi in the Sudan, and after his victorious campaign crushing the Taiping rebellion in China in 1864, Gordon spent a year in Jerusalem as a solitary mystic, studying the Bible and the topography of Jerusalem. His research led him to the conclusion that the sacred sites were set out on the landscape of Jerusalem in the form of a vast human skeleton. The skull-shaped hill, with two caves resembling eye-sockets, was its skull, Solomon’s Quarries were its chest, the lower back lay on the Temple Mount, with the Dome of the Rock at its pelvis, the knees at the Dung Gate and the feet some distance outside the Old City. Gordon propounded this theory in the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement in 1885. Why a skeleton? Because it would represent sculpturally an enormous human sacrifice on the Temple Mount.

      Gordon’s idea is of interest mainly for its eccentricity, but it is a good example of the tendency towards biblical mysticism that thrived among members of the ruling class of Victorian England, and motivated the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund, despite the ‘scientific’ nature of its expeditions. A more widespread notion, similar to one held by contemporary American fundamentalist Christians, was the desirability – as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy – of the ‘restoration’ of the Jews to Palestine from their world-wide diaspora, a development which would be followed by their conversion to the true (Anglican) Christian faith and the return of the Messiah as the leader of a thousand-year era on earth of peace and justice, before the end of the world. This belief (called chiliasm) led to the establishment of missionary societies dedicated to the conversion of Jews in England and even in Palestine itself. Although the success rate of organizations like the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (established 1808) was dismal, making only about six or seven converts a year even after thirty years, its members remained optimistically active throughout the nineteenth century.

      The best-known proponent of this movement was the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, better known now for his campaigns for benevolent social legislation, such as the Ten Hours Bill, limiting the working hours of factory workers. The same evangelical Christianity that inspired his social campaigning at home led him to work equally hard for the conversion of the Jews, and he became president of the ‘Jews’ Society’ in 1848. Although he saw little evidence that mass conversion had begun, as he hoped, Shaftesbury had considerable success in influencing British foreign policy in line with his ideas. He persuaded the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, to establish a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, charged with the protection of local Jewish interests, and granting Palestinian Jews British citizenship. A few years later, his lobbying bore fruit in the creation of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, with a converted

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