The Holy Land In History And Thought

Drawing on both primary texts and archaelogy, Wilken traces the Christian conception of a Holy Land from its origins inthe Hebrew Bible to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the seventh century.

This book is the first to investigate the effect of the biblical Holy Land on American religious institutions, from early Puritanism in 1620 to Judaism in 1948. It explores the attachment between religious America and the Land of Israel from a pluralistic perspective, tracing the history of religion in America as it relates to the spiritual and geographical identity of the Holy Land. Contents: Preface; Introduction: The Holy Land in American Religious Thought. PART I: THE HOLY LAND COMES TO AMERICA; Puritans and Congregationalists: The Americanization of Zion; Sephardic Jewry: Present and Future Zion; American Indians: Ten Lost Tribes and Christian Eschatology. PART II: NINETEENTH CENTURY INDIVIDUAL TIES TO THE HOLY LAND; Protestant Pilgrims: Disjunction between Expectation and Reality; Protestant Missionaries: Jewish Conversion and Christ's Return; Consuls: Jews and Holy Land History. PART III: RELIGIOUS GROUPS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY; Christianity among Blacks: The Spiritual Holy Land; Protestant Liberalists: Jewish Return and Christian Kingdom; Mormons: Dialectical Holy Lands; Judaism: American Impact and Internal Divisions. PART IV: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY; Protestant Liberalism: Universal Ideas; Catholicism: Holy Land of Christ's Crucifixion; Judaism: Centrality of the Land; Conclusion.

The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East? The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary - 'Promised Land', 'Chosen People', 'Jerusalem' - and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the 'Holy Land' played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself. As it traces the diversity of 'Holy Lands' in the Victorian cultural landscape - literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual - this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the Orientalist discourse functions - or, to be more precise, malfunctions - in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan centre, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history.

This book examines the relationship between American Protestants and Palestine from 1842-1917. The eastward views of Palestine drew the ancient biblical past into the present for Protestants, thus bringing a sharper focus to a new frontier and inventing the idea of a Christian Holy Land.

This fifth volume of the With Eyes Toward Zion series brings together 19 internationally renowned scholars to interpret how Jerusalem returned to the world stage in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The rediscovery of the Holy Land coincided with the greatest era of Christian missions and the birth of Zionism, and the face of Jerusalem began to change markedly. This volume explores those changes, looking at the influx of travelers and explorers to the Holy Land, and the evolving theological concepts among the various religious groups. This discussion of the rediscovery of the Holy Land delves into an issue that is at the forefront of current world discussion: the meaning of Jerusalem to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.