Victorian ethnographic perceptions of Palestine and the historiography of ancient Israel: a preliminary exploration

ABSTRACT

Victorian travellers, explorers and scholars in the Levant produced a series of ethnographic observations of Palestine’s indigenous population essentially through biblical lenses. These perceptions sought ultimately to retrieve the biblical past in the context of the imperial present. At the same time, modern historiography about ancient Israel developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the full-blown allochronism and Orientalism of the early modern Western visitors to Palestine have in recent decades been surpassed by more critical insights in the scholarly assessment of the region, some traits from that Victorian ethnographic and Bible-centred gaze still linger in contemporary historical constructions of ancient Palestine through the concept of ‘ancient Israel’, notably in the conceptualisation and periodisation of such a history.

KEYWORDS:

• Victorian ethnography
• allochronism
• Orientalism
• Palestine
• ancient Israel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 On the problematic terminology of the ‘Near/Middle East’, the ‘Orient’, and related concepts, cf. Bonnie and Amanat 2012, and especially Yilmaz 2012.

2 Or as Laurens (2019 [1997], p. 232) put it, ‘l’expédition d’Égypte n’est plus le début du mouvement de civilisation de l’Égypte mais la première “agression culturelle” d’une série inlassablement répétée jusqu’à aujourd’hui’. For the geopolitics of Palestine within the European imperial expansion into the so-called Middle East, see the informed synthesis in Heacock 2001, and also Kamel 2015, pp. 1–25.

3 In general, on the Victorian age and its different aspects and features, see for instance Hewitt 2012.

4 It should be noted that all these institutions made extensive use of photographs and visual depictions of the land and its population, instantly linking them to biblical imagery and, in this way, contributing to the reproduction of a present biblical landscape. On this issue, see e.g., Baram 2007; and most recently the essays in Sanchez Summerer and Zananiri 2021.

5 ‘Ancient Israel’, with quotation marks, following Davies (1992), in order to identify a historiographical construct merging archaeological and epigraphic discoveries in Palestine within the framework of the biblical narrative, and different from a ‘historical Israel’ (to which direct archaeological and epigraphic data can be referred to) and a ‘biblical Israel’ (the complex literary figure about which we can read in the biblical narrative).

6 As Fabian stated: ‘Anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time. It is a discourse whose referent has been removed from the present of the speaking/writing subject’ (Fabian 1983, p. 143, see also McGrane 1989, pp. 93–100, Pratt 2008, pp. 56–66).

7 Already in the early nineteenth century, Milman (1829 I, p. 9) had characterised Abraham as a pastoralist sheik or emir, with clear reminiscences of contemporary Bedouin people. In fact, this understanding was common throughout the nineteenth century (as illustrated, for instance, in the works by J. Wellhausen and W. Robertson Smith) and up at least to the 1970s, and it has even been recently proposed again (see Bailey 2018). On the construction of Palestinian Bedouin peoples as pure remnants of ancient times by British imperial explorers, see Assi 2018.

8 See further on visual representations of Palestine, Burritt 2020.

9 As Clifford (1997, p. 197) indicates: ‘Before the separation of genres associated with the emergence of modern fieldwork, travel and travel writing covered a broad spectrum. In eighteenth-century Europe, a récit de voyage or “travel book” might include exploration, adventure, natural science, espionage, commercial prospecting, evangelism, cosmology, philosophy, and ethnography. By the 1920s however, the research practices and written reports of anthropologists had been much more clearly set apart’. Further on British travellers to Palestine, see now Polley 2020.

10 For another recent ‘customs and manners’ study related to the Bible, which would fit very well into a properly Victorian anthology of the theme, cf. Vos 1999.

11 The wider issue of the construction of Palestinian indigeneity, in relation to the presence of Victorian Christian travellers and, later on, Zionist colonists but also through nationalist lenses and in relation to the archaeology and ethnography of the land, escapes the limitations of the present discussion.

12 On Tawfiq Canaan, see Tamari 2004, Mershen and Hübner 2006. Further on this ethnographic understanding, Kirchhoff 2005, pp. 308–312.

13 The Survey of Western Palestine (1871–78) was carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund and supported by the British War Office (see Moscrop 2000, pp. 95–128, and Kirchhoff 2005, pp. 149–158).

14 See further Pappe 2004, pp. 49–56, Krämer 2008, pp. 107–127, Kamel 2015, pp. 70–84. On the impact of modernisation on the lives of peasants and Bedouins during the twentieth century, see Seligman 2013.

15 Whitelam 1996. Cf. some of the reviews/reactions to the book, who mostly branded it as ‘ideology’ (namely, a distorted and politically oriented view) while dodging the main (and important) historiographical issues raised by it: Levine and Malamat 1996, Provan 1997, Dever 1999, pp. 96–100. Cf. Whitelam’s response to some of these reactions in Whitelam 2002a. In broad terms, ‘biblical minimalism’ refers to scholars who are sceptic of the plain historicity of the stories in the biblical text and its usefulness for reconstructing the history of ancient Palestine, while ‘biblical maximalists’ contend the contrary; see further in Davies 2005, Hjelm 2019, Lemche 2022.

16 Cf. also Pfoh 2020.

17 See the seminal criticism to this approach in the writings of the ‘biblical minimalists’: Davies 1992, Lemche 1998, Thompson 1999. See also now Lemche 2022.

18 While it is impossible to name here every article and volume published, it is illustrative to browse in this respect some of the leading journals in Old Testament studies between 1960 and 2020: from the conservative Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, Biblica and Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft to the more progressive Journal for the Study of the Old Testament and Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament.

19 North-American religious (conservative-evangelical) interest in biblical historicity, as well as Holy Land landscapes and scenarios, was naturally an important source of funding and a driving force for the exploration of the past of the region from the nineteenth century onwards; see further Obenzinger 1999, Long 2002. Current conservative biblical scholarship in the United States still revolves around the historicity of the Bible as a key epistemological departure for writing history (Lemche 2022).

20 See the volumes referred to in the previous section; cf. Kirchhoff 2010.

21 A (now dated) history of archaeological research in Palestine is conveniently presented in Moorey 1991. Another history of biblical archaeology is offered by Davis 2004, which ought to be contrasted with more critical perspectives in, for instance, Abu el-Haj 2001, Greenberg and Keinan 2007, al-Houdalieh 2010. Important insights on the relation between Jewish religious nationalism and the ancient past in the West Bank are made in Feige 2009, pp. 91–111, while a critical presentation of the entanglement of archaeological research and politics in the Old City of Jerusalem is thoroughly studied in Kletter 2020.

22 The imaginative construction of the Holy Land as a religious landscape in the West deserves further analysis but, once again, this escapes the boundaries and scope of this paper. See provisionally Whitelam 2008, 2011, Aiken 2010, Sand 2012.

23 Interestingly, in Tel Hazor (Israel), as of September 2022, this kind of ethnic periodisation in the archaeology of the site still appears on the different signs that inform the visitors, as witnessed by this author.

24 The most recent and promising historical perspectives are found in Hjelm et al. 2019, and in Stordalen and LaBianca 2021. See also the prospects in Pfoh 2017. Recent German histories of ancient Israel (Knauf and Guillaume 2016, Frevel 2018, Knauf and Niemann 2021), while probably the most sound and the best of the genre, and incorporating a wider scope of historical issues and problems, still operate to a certain degree within the framework of a historiographical ‘ancient Israel’, as discussed above, and are still mainly concerned with providing historical backgrounds for biblical exegesis. This should be not surprising since, institutionally and for the last two hundred years, the histories of ancient Israel have been produced almost exclusively in faculties of theology in Europe or in theological seminaries in the United States. On the contrary, a recent attempt to write the history of Palestine during the last 4,000 years, like Masalha 2018, while important in its critical impulse as it aims at overcoming Bible-oriented versions of the past of the region, is more concerned with historiographical designs and issues for such a history, and many times offers a rather partisan (if not flawed) version of a past that should, instead, be constructed in a more integral and comprehensive manner.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emanuel Pfoh

Emanuel Pfoh, Ph.D., is a researcher at the National Research Council (CONICET), Argentina, and at the Centre of Excellence 'Ancient Near Eastern Empires', University of Helsinki, Finland.