The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917.(Book review)

The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917, by Eitan Bar-Yosef; pp. ix + 319. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 50.00 [pounds sterling], $95.00.

Eitan Bar-Yosef's thoughtful monograph surveys the complex place of the Holy Land in the making of English culture between 1799, when the Royal Navyallied with the Ottoman army to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte's army at Acre, and 1917 when the British army marched into Jerusalem itself. He deftly reconstructs the shifting pattern of England's intellectual, religious, and political entanglements with the Holy Land in this period, charting Britain's increasing attachment to Palestine because it served as a crucial gateway to the Indian colony and its thickening commercial and political connections to the Holy Land in the wake of construction of the Suez Canal and the occupation of Egypt.

Aiming to trace the "fusion between imaginative and empirical geographies, between the literal and metaphorical Jerusalems" (vii-viii), Bar-Yosef fully realizes this goal as he reconnects the imagined Jerusalem of British Protestant tradition and Brit ain's very real …