British Orientalist Encounters with Urban Space in Late Ottoman Palestine

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Gabriel Polley

Figure 1:"Travellers' Camp". Source: Josias Leslie Porter, Jerusalem, Bethany and Bethlehem (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1887), p. 100.

Orientalism, Biblical Orientalism, and the Palestinian City

This essay investigates British travellers’ responses to urban spaces in Palestine during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, specifically Nablus and Haifa. The decades following the Egyptian occupation ending in 1840, formed a key period in Palestine’s history. European empires, engaged in the struggle over the disintegrating Ottoman territories, raced to ensure their primacy in Palestine, establishing diplomatic and missionary institutions. In Britain, the aggressive assertion of its influence in Palestine was euphemistically termed a “Peaceful Crusade”. ¹ This had deep cultural and ideological ramifications, profoundly influencing the policies pursued after Britain’s occupation of Palestine in 1917. Throughout the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of travellers flocked to see the Holy Land, many leaving written accounts, testifying to the fascination Western Protestants had for Palestine. ²

The use of Western sources raises methodological and ethical questions. The West’s warped image of the region it defined as “the Orient”, still holds sway in popular media and news; nowhere, perhaps, can this be more seen clearly than in relation to Palestine. ³ Uncritical use of Western sources only reproduces discourses long used to justify occupation, war and repression. Even if the texts are recognised as deeply ideological and of limited use for research on Palestine, another pitfall awaits. Much of Palestine’s social, political and economic development was excluded or misrepresented by Western observers, and can only be restored to the historical portrait with the use of Palestinian sources, such as the sijilat or Ottoman court records. One historian associated with this approach is Doumani, who has argued that ‘our knowledge of Palestinian history is highly uneven,’ and that ‘there is an urgent need to write the Palestinians into history’ in the Ottoman period. ⁴ This spirit has recently animated excellent research on Palestinian urban space, such as the 2018 volume Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940, in which authors use documents such as municipal records to restore what Doumani describes as ‘the messiness and complexity of the social life of the city’ during a time that has been ‘historiographically overdetermined as the era of western-inspired modernity.’ ⁵ Yet to entirely dismiss the records of Western travellers, problematic as they are, is to lose a valuable source not only for Palestine’s late Ottoman history, but for understanding, in Said’s words, ‘the idea of Palestine in the West,’ and particularly British attitudes preceding Britain’s colonial involvement in Palestine. ⁶ They reveal the sometimes surprising degree of ideological prehistory of many British policies in Palestine, supporting Lévi-Strauss’s preposition, certainly in this context, that ‘the primary function of writing […] is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.’ ⁷

Well before setting foot on Palestinian soil, travellers’ expectations had been strongly conditioned by two social discourses. The first was Orientalism. In a narrative already disseminated in countless travel narratives, the Orient was cast as a vast region fundamentally different from and, crucially, inferior to Europe. In the words of Said, the Orient was almost always made to appear ‘lamentably under-humanised, antidemocratic, backward, barbaric, and so forth’ vis-à-vis the West, justifying a priori the colonisation of these regions. ⁸

There was another strong ideational influence. Travellers from the West had an intense interest in Palestine as the land of the Bible. They travelled to the Holy Land to witness the locales of Biblical events, not the society of its contemporary indigenous inhabitants. As Sanbar has written, Palestine appeared to travellers to be ‘a simple, humble land, unwilling to seem physically worthy to serve as a setting for the Divine Message. The scene needs to be reinvented. A new one will be fashioned, creating from the ground up a country that does not exist in reality.’ ⁹ Kamel has aptly characterised this attitude as Biblical Orientalism, an ideology which also led to the establishment of societies for “Biblical archaeology,” beginning with the 1865 Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in Britain, which hunted for physical evidence of the Bible narrative, erasing the region’s present in favour of the remote past. ¹⁰ Another key aspect of Biblical Orientalism was support for Jewish “Restoration”, the “return” of the Jewish people to Palestine, and their conversion to Christianity. Although part of Protestant theology since the sixteenth century, in the Victorian era this notion was widespread, and many travellers in their writings inaccurately represented Palestine as having become desolate and depopulated, and ready for Jewish settlement. ¹¹

Orientalism and Biblical Orientalism deeply impacted how travellers related to urban space in Palestine. Travellers preferred the open spaces of the countryside, which they could imagine as barely having changed since the Biblical times, to the towns and cities. The latter were marked by Arab and/or Islamic identity, a multiplicity of non-Protestant, non-Western Christian churches, and Jewish quarters whose residents had seemingly little in common with the Biblical Israelites. Elizabeth Rundle Charles (1828-1896) commented in her 1862 Wanderings Over Bible Lands and Seas that ‘Eastern cities carry you into the Arabian Nights. The country, on the other hand, recalls you to the Bible.’ ¹² That was all very well for Cairo or Damascus, but Protestant travellers did not journey to Palestine for an exotic, Arabian Nights-style experience; they came for the austere spirituality of their Bible.

Urban spaces were frequently denigrated. Eliot Warburton (1810-1852) stated in his 1844 The Crescent and the Cross,

‘Towns in the East are so disagreeable, and have so few resources, the country is so beautiful and full of interest, that I always felt a lively pleasure in passing out from the guarded gates of some old city to return to the tent and the wild pathway of the plain or mountain.’ ¹³

Warburton’s friend Alexander Kinglake (1809-1891) provided a stereotypical picture in his popular travelogue Eothen (1844). ‘The Moslem quarter of a city is lonely and desolate,’ Kinglake claimed. Passing through ‘narrow lanes walled in by blank, windowless dwellings,’ travellers found ‘the rubbish of centuries,’ ‘big, wolf-like dogs lying torpid under the sun,’ and ‘the dry, dead perfume of strange spices.’ Drawing on Orientalist tropes of death, silence and stasis, Kinglake continued ‘the foot falls noiseless upon the crumbling soil of an Eastern city, and Silence [sic] follows you still’. When the traveller encountered ‘turbans, and faces of men’, Kinglake complained that the city-dwellers ‘have nothing for you – no welcome – no wonder – no wrath – no scorn,’ viewing the Western visitor as an ‘unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God.’ ¹⁴

Travellers frequently applied their Eurocentric standards to towns in Palestine. The non-Western locales were thus always worse in comparison to British or European cities. David Morison Ross (1852-1927) wrote in his 1891 The Cradle of Christianity that the traveller ‘will be disappointed if he expects to see beautiful cities, like Edinburgh or Florence.’ Whilst admitting that some Palestinian cities ‘can boast of a picturesque situation,’ Ross complained of the lack of ‘fine gardens or squares, […] spacious streets or handsome shops.’ Lovers of London’s Savile Row or Parisian boulevards, Ross finally warned, ‘will feel ill at ease in the David Street of Jerusalem or the bazaars of Nablous.’ ¹⁵

Western travellers had difficulties in comprehending town- and city-dwellers in Palestine with their limited Arabic capabilities, were constricted by Orientalist prejudices, and as further detailed below, preferred not to stay inside towns overnight. Urban residents posed a particular challenge. Obsessed with fitting everything they encountered in Palestine into a Biblical mould, travellers equated the rural peasantry or fellahin to the ancient Canaanites, and the nomadic Bedouin to the wandering Israelites. ¹⁶ Complex urban societies could not be slotted into a simplified Biblical template so easily. This was particularly true in the last decades of Ottoman rule, when a cosmopolitan intelligentsia began to emerge in Palestine’s main cities, influenced by nationalist or Pan-Arab ideas. ¹⁷ As this contradicted what travellers believed “Orientals” to be capable of, and their image of Palestine as still an essentially Biblical land, they often simply ignored what they could not understand. Their travelogues have limited representation of life in towns and cities, in comparison to rich descriptions of travel in the countryside or romanticised accounts of Bedouin encampments. One rare account of an urban elite came from Laurence Oliphant (1829-1888), an influential proto-Zionist activist, who lived in Haifa from late 1882 to mid-1884, when he moved to a nearby village. Oliphant portrayed Palestinian city-dwellers as a semi-savage petty bourgeoisie in his 1887 Haifa, with ‘a thin varnish of European civilization overlaying their native barbarism.’ He scoffed that their houses might contain ‘a three-hundred-dollar piano, on which the lady never plays; and […] pictures, of which the frames are more artistic than the subjects.’ ¹⁸ The poorer masses of the cities seemed alien and threatening, as illustrated in the section on Nablus below.

The Palestinian city was to be entered with caution. European attitudes towards the Arab city closely resembled Fanon's characterisation of the coloniser's view of Arab urban space: ‘the colonised’s sector, or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. […] It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together.' ¹⁹ When they reached towns and cities, travellers often still preferred to stay in their tent encampments outside the city limits, even after hotels began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century (figure 1). Josias Leslie Porter (1823-1889), an author of several works on Palestine, wrote in Jerusalem, Bethany and Bethlehem (1887) that ‘travellers, when about to spend a few days or weeks at a town or village, generally rent a garden and live there,’ for ‘the fresh balmy air of the country’ was ‘far preferable to the close, stifling atmosphere of an Eastern city.’ ²⁰

Nevertheless, many of the sacred sites travellers wished to see were located within Palestine’s cities, such as Bethlehem, Hebron, Nazareth and, above all, Jerusalem. Jerusalem was central to Western travellers’ Christian faith, and the highlight of a traveller’s journey. Yet even this city was a disappointment for many Westerners, compared to, as Norman Macleod (1812-1872) wrote in his travelogue Eastward (1866), ‘a Jerusalem of their own – full of the beautiful, the sacred, the holy, and the good.’ ²¹ This meant an idealised, historical, Biblical Jerusalem, free of indigenous Arab Palestinian presence. ²² Instead, what travellers encountered was a living, breathing city, which frequently made them feel uncomfortable.

Travellers even denigrated the traditional religious sites which they came to see. Oliphant commented that Jerusalem contained ‘within its walls more sacred shams and impostures than any other city in the world.’ ²³ For instance, Western Protestants’ doubt that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marked the true site of Christ’s tomb. The novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) wrote in Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1846) that the Church ‘seems to an Englishman the least sacred spot about Jerusalem’, which led British Protestants in 1893 to purchase land outside the Old City which they thought a more fitting site. ²⁴ This became known as the Garden Tomb, located in today’s East Jerusalem off of Nablus Road. ²⁵ The areas in Jerusalem which attracted the most positive representation from travellers were the Mount of Olives, where Westerners could view the city from a safe distance, and the Haram al-Sharif (figure 2), another open space, where travellers could imagine the historic Jewish Temples, which they believed had occupied the site, replacing the existing Islamic structures.

Figure 2:"Enclosure of the Temple, Jerusalem". Source: William Henry Bartlett, Walks About the City and Environs of Jerusalem (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1844), facing p. 143.

Travellers frequently saved their harshest judgements for the Old City’s Jewish quarter, described in various travel narratives as ‘reeking with putrid filth,’ ‘stinking ruins,’ and ‘unspeakably offensive to eye and nostril.’ ²⁶ In awe of the heroic image of the Old Testament Hebrews, travellers had difficulty coming to terms with the reality of the existing Jewish community in Jerusalem, and resorted to anti-Semitic clichés when representing them. British travellers’ discourse closely resembled the comments of the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) in his diary when he visited Jerusalem in 1898. Herzl wrote that ‘if we ever get Jerusalem,’ he would ‘begin by cleaning it up’ and even ‘empty the nests [the residential quarters] of filth and tear them down.’ He also envisaged ‘a very pretty, elegant town’ inhabited by Jews outside the Old City’s walls. ²⁷

The overarching discourses of Orientalism and Biblical times conditioned most Westerner travellers’ responses to Palestine’s urban locations. While Jerusalem’s religious significance makes it a special case, aspects of travellers’ negative representations were shared with other urban contexts. Nevertheless, each Palestinian city was represented slightly differently. Nablus and Haifa, both growing in significance during the late Ottoman period, form compelling case studies, demonstrating how a British colonial gaze increasingly fell upon Palestine.

‘Perhaps the Most Interesting City in Palestine’: Nablus

Situated thirty miles north of Jerusalem in Palestine’s mountainous heartland, Nablus in the late Ottoman period was, as Doumani has noted, ‘Palestine’s principal trade and manufacturing centre,’ and thus one of the most important cities (figure 3). ²⁸ It was also among the largest, with Ottoman census figures indicating a population of approximately 20,000 people in the mid-nineteenth century. ²⁹ To Western travellers, the city’s attraction lay in its association with the Biblical city Shechem, and the small Samaritan community. Claude Reignier Conder (1848-1910), who led the Palestine Exploration Fund’s (PEF) Survey of Western Palestine in the 1870s and became an enthusiastic promoter of a British occupation of Palestine, wrote in Tent Work in Palestine (1878), ‘Shechem’ and ‘the Samaritan survivors living there’ were ‘perhaps the most interesting city and the most interesting people in Palestine.’ ³⁰ While primarily interested in Nablus for its Biblical associations, travellers were not blind to the contemporary significance of the city, or the opportunities it could afford a Western colonising power.

Figure 3:"Napulus and Mount Gerizim" c. 1890-1900.Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The first aspect noted by many travellers was Nablus’s surrounding environment, especially the valley in which the city was situated between the mountains Jabal 'Aybal and Jabal Jarizim. A frequent trope in travellers’ writing was praising the valley’s abundance and its fertility when cultivated by its residents. Mary Eliza Rogers (1827-1910) in Picturesque Palestine (1881) claimed that ‘all travellers, ancient and modern, speak in glowing terms of the peculiar loveliness of this valley,’ adding colourfully that Nablus’s contemporary inhabitants ‘proudly quote their prophet Muhammed himself as an authority for saying that “it is the place beloved by Allah above all other places.”’ ³¹ Oliphant gushed that ‘nothing can exceed in picturesqueness the situation of this place and the beauty of its surroundings.’ ³²

Some travellers argued that Western cultivation and order needed to be brought to Nablus’s ‘long-neglected garden,’ in Macleod’s words. ³³ Most notable was John Mills (1812-1873), a Welsh missionary who lived in Nablus for some time. Prior to Zionist colonies, from the mid-nineteenth century there were numerous European settler-colonial ventures in Palestine, and Mills had already published his arguments for establishing a colony of Welsh settlers. ³⁴ In Three Months’ Residence at Nablus (1864), while noting that surrounding Nablus were ‘gardens and orchards, luxuriant with vegetation,’ Mills averred that ‘with similar localities in our own country it will not bear a moment’s comparison.’ Pondering a role for European colonialism, Mills wrote that ‘with European industry, and art, and taste, I do believe that it could be made one of the most charming spots upon the face of the globe.’ ³⁵ The apparent potential of Nablus’s surroundings, as well as its central location in Palestine, led Conder to claim in 1879 that, in the event of a British occupation, Nablus ‘will prove in all probability the true capital of Palestine.’ ³⁶

Travellers also described urban Nablus, sometimes providing perspectives on the socio-economic conditions that contributed to the city’s prosperity. Not all were admirers; the eccentric spiritualist Ada Goodrich-Freer (1857-1931) complained in her 1905 In a Syrian Saddle of Nablus’s ‘heaps of decaying vegetable matter and […] roofed passages, dark as a cellar, and where only in the middle could one walk upright.’ ³⁷ Other travellers put Nablus in a different light. While overarching textual discourses such as Orientalism strongly coloured travellers’ representations, travellers were highly subjective, frequently providing contradictory reports on the same subject. The clergyman and naturalist Henry Baker Tristram wrote in The Land of Israel (1865) that Nablus was ‘by far the best town we had seen since we left Beyrout,’ its houses ‘as a rule, superior to those of Jerusalem,’ and clean streets with water flowing in channels. ³⁸

Some travellers noted the impact trade was having on the city, where both local and global networks of commerce met. ‘Among the low Oriental domes and the tall palms which here and there wave over the courtyards of Nablous,’ noted Tristram, ‘rises a large modern structure of yesterday – neither more nor less than a cotton-mill!’ The cause of the growth of cotton production around Nablus, Tristram explained, was the impact of the American Civil War on the United States’ cotton production. ³⁹ In Biblical Orientalist fashion, Tristram felt uncomfortable when confronted with this industrial modernity developing in Palestine, writing that ‘the cotton-factory in Shechem was as grotesque in appearance as in idea’; yet he also represented the city as ‘one of the few towns where the Moslems seem not indifferent to trade, and the only one in the country, so far as I know, where the commerce is in their sole hands.’ ⁴⁰ Oliphant similarly stated that ‘for a Moslem city, it may be considered an enterprising and go-ahead place.’ ⁴¹

According to Orientalists, Islam was a fatalistic religion, stymying initiative and progress. Conder, for instance, contrasted the ‘thriving modern town’ of Christian-majority Bethlehem, with ‘a city of the past’- Muslim-majority Hebron, attributing the differences between them to ‘the contrast between Christianity and Islam, between the vitality of the religion of progress and civilisation and the hopeless stagnation of a fatalistic creed.’ ⁴² Travellers were challenged by the changes which Muslim-majority Nablus was undergoing as a result of its situation at the heart of local and international trade networks. Rogers recorded items for sale in Nablus’s markets like ‘Manchester cottons, printed calicoes, Sheffield cutlery, Bohemian glasses for narghilehs, and crockery and trinkets of all kinds from Marseille’, and commented on the new construction including ‘several large new dwelling-houses, showing signs of local prosperity and progress.’ ⁴³

Nevertheless, travellers retreated into Orientalism’s well-worn modes of representation, particularly when representing Nablus’s inhabitants. Time after time, travellers described Nablus’s Muslim majority as being bigoted and prejudiced against (Western) Christians. Kinglake averred that ‘Nablus is the very furnace of Mahometan bigotry,’ and claimed only the Egyptian occupation had made Nablus’s streets safe for Westerners. ⁴⁴ Mills wrote similarly that Nablus’s people were ‘the most fanatic and wicked of all the Mussulmans of Palestine,’ and claimed that when he attempted to enter the city’s Great Mosque (figure 4), he ‘was soon surrounded by a clamorous and insolent rabble, who were ready to teach better manners to the Christian dog.’ He concluded that ‘Nablus is not the safest place for a Frank [Crusader-era term for European] to remain in.’ ⁴⁵ Tristram too noted that ‘bigotry and fanaticism are considered to be more strongly marked in the inhabitants of this district than in any other,’ and added that ‘many travellers have complained of the insults, and even violence’ they experienced in Nablus. ⁴⁶

Figure 4:"Entrance to the Great Mosque (Jamia el Kebîr), Nâblus". Source: Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt, ed. Charles Wilson (London: J.S. Virtue and Co., 1881), Volume 2, p. 7.

Kushner has noted that Nablus and Hebron were often singled out in travellers’ accounts as ‘zealous towns.’ ⁴⁷ Rather than revealing anything meaningful about these cities, this attests instead to the deep intertextuality of travellers’ attitudes. Popular accounts like Kinglake’s influenced subsequent travellers who, already expecting to find displays of ‘bigotry,’ and found it in what may have been locals’ expressions of wariness towards Western travellers. ⁴⁸ Unlike most of the towns and cities in Palestine which travellers were interested in visiting – Jerusalem with its religiously mixed population, Christian-majority Bethlehem and Nazareth, and Tiberias with its sizeable Jewish community – Nablus and Hebron had only small non-Muslim minority communities. Representing these cities thus provided Western travellers the opportunity to vent their negative opinions on Islam, seen by most Westerners as an intruder in the Judeo-Christian Holy Land. Nevertheless, these accusations levelled against Nablus’s inhabitants were also highly subjective. Isabel Burton (1831-1896), wife of Richard Burton- the infamous Orientalist and British consul in Damascus (1868-1871), wrote in The Inner Life of Syria (1875) that the inhabitants of Nablus ‘were not fanatical, but showed us everything with much pleasure, and stood up and saluted us as we passed.’ ⁴⁹

‘Modern Life in Palestine’: Haifa

While Biblical antiquity attracted travellers to Nablus, Haifa (figure 5) on Palestine’s northern Mediterranean coast had no comparable religious or historical associations. As Elizabeth Charles commented, Haifa was ‘more like a town than any place we had entered since leaving Jerusalem; but not one Bible association detained us among its narrow streets.’ ⁵⁰ Until the mid-nineteenth century Haifa, then a small fishing village, rarely featured in travellers’ itineraries, some travellers overlooking its existence entirely. On a ship from Beirut to Jaffa in the early 1840s, William Henry Bartlett (1809-1854) described Palestine’s northern coast in Walks About the City and Environs of Jerusalem (1844), as ‘a beautiful, but lifeless expanse’ aside from ‘the white walls of St. John of Acre.’ ⁵¹

Figure 5:"View from near foot of Mount Carmel, Chaifa" c. 1890-1900. Source: Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

However, Haifa grew rapidly in the late Ottoman period. The roots of Haifa’s success lay in the decision of Dhahir al-'Umar, the powerful governor of northern Palestine in the eighteenth century, to move an existing hamlet several miles to Haifa’s later position, ideally suited for a port. ⁵² Dhahir’s role was noted by several travellers, such as Porter, who called him a ‘patriotic Arab chief’ in his 1889 “Through Samaria” to Galilee and the Jordan. ⁵³ The opportunities offered by Haifa attracted not only Palestinians, but also European settlers. The German Templars, a Christian sect, established a colony close to Haifa in 1868, before founding six more colonies around Palestine until the early twentieth century; they were then followed by Zionist immigrants. Haifa became a mercantile centre of the Eastern Mediterranean and overshadowed Palestine’s older ports of Jaffa and ‘Akka, and was connected to the Hijaz Railway in 1905. The town’s population grew from 2,000 people in the mid-nineteenth century, to 10,000 by 1910, and 20,000 by 1914. ⁵⁴

Some travellers did visit Haifa before the German Templars arrived. Mary Rogers, whose brother Edward Thomas Rogers was British vice-consul in Haifa in the 1850s, stayed for several weeks in September and October 1855 and left a sympathetic representation of the town in Domestic Life in Palestine (1862). Unusual among travellers, Rogers immersed herself in Haifa’s society, attending an Orthodox wedding and noting the cosmetic treatments applied to the bride by a widow named Angelina, who was apparently ‘in sad disgrace with the clergy of Haifa, for encouraging all this vanity.’ Also, in 1855, when the European victory against the Russian Empire during the Crimean War was announced, Rogers reported that in one of ‘the open cafés and barbers’ shops’ where ‘story-tellers and singers attracted earnest listeners,’ her brother translated and adapted ‘to Arab comprehension’ the plot of Jane Eyre for a local audience. Commenting on Haifa’s architecture, Rogers contrasted the houses ‘occupied by [European] consuls and merchants […] large, substantial buildings of hewn stone, with central courts and broad terraces,’ with the ‘poorer class of houses […] of earth and rough stone.’ Appreciating the ‘fine fruit gardens,’ around Haifa, Rogers also complained that ‘within the town, wherever there was space, flocks and herds were lying down, crowded together.’ In her description of the ‘narrow, tortuous, dirty, channeled streets,’ and ‘muddy pools […] and heaps of vegetable refuse’ in them, there was a hint of the Oriental chaos characterising travellers’ representation of other Palestinian towns. ⁵⁵ Tristram complained more stridently of the ‘filth and squalor of the streets, or rather gutters of Caiffa.’ ⁵⁶

The establishment of the German Colony rendered Haifa as a new interest for Western travellers. Travellers greatly admired the settlers’ creation of colonies based on Northern European Protestant societies, their “taming” of the landscape through orderly Western-style farming, and their exclusion of the indigenous population. Unlike Warburton’s ‘disagreeable’ Eastern towns with their ‘few resources,’ travellers represented these colonies as European “villages” in the Palestinian landscape. In his first travelogue of Palestine, The Land of Gilead (1880), written before he decided in 1882 to settle in the Haifa German Colony for over a year, Oliphant wrote approvingly that ‘every where [sic] the sigils of thrift and industry were apparent. The village consists of two streets, of well-built stone houses, each standing separately in its own garden, the streets lined with young trees; and the most scrupulous tidiness was everywhere apparent.’ ⁵⁷ Later, he described the Colony as ‘an oasis of civilization in the wilderness of Oriental barbarism,’ and wrote that on entering the Colony, visitors were ‘apparently transported into the heart of Europe.’ ⁵⁸

Travellers viewed the European settlers as the levers of all progress in Haifa since their arrival. Contrasting his first visit to Haifa before the German Colony was established with later visits, Porter claimed,

‘When I first visited Haifa, now many years ago, it was dirty and poverty-stricken; its houses were falling to ruin; its inhabitants were oppressed by a rapacious government on the one hand, and by the [Bedouin] nomads […] on the other. Now all is different. New life and activity appear everywhere; the bustle of eager business is seen on the streets, in the shops, and on the shore.’

This was, Porter emphasised, ‘mainly due to a small colony of Germans.’ He claimed that ‘their influence is good; and the Arabs of all sects and classes find it to be to their advantage to follow the example set them by a successful community.’ ⁵⁹ Oliphant similarly celebrated the colonists for ‘the introduction of wheeled vehicles,’ as he claimed that, before the settlers’ arrival, ‘a cart had never been seen by the inhabitants of Haifa.’ ⁶⁰ Significantly, Oliphant subtitled his book Haifa with Life in Modern Palestine; as for most Western travellers, Palestine was a country locked in the Biblical past, but in Haifa alone, ‘modern life’ was becoming possible as a result of the modernity imported by the European settlers.

The Orientalist view of modernity as a European introduction to Palestine, owing to the German colonies starting at Haifa, has been widely disseminated in Israeli society and academia since 1948. ⁶¹ Overlooked in this narrative and the accounts of Oliphant, Porter and other travellers, however, were the often poor and sometimes hostile relations between the German settlers in Haifa and indigenous locals whom the settlers viewed with contempt, as documented by Yazbak. ⁶² Travellers rarely hinted at this aspect of the German Colony, although Mary Rogers, returning years after her initial stay in Haifa, reported that the colonists ‘live peaceably with the people of the country, but apparently do not desire to fraternise with them.’ ⁶³ In the German settlers’ aloofness from the indigenous people, and desire to build a wholly European society on non-European soil, lay the roots of settler-colonialism’s structural violence, and the aim of, in Wolfe’s words, ‘the elimination of the native.’ ⁶⁴ Not all travellers neglected the developments occurring in Arab Haifa alongside the German Colony. Looking over Haifa from Mount Carmel, Goodrich-Freer recorded ‘the estates of Selim Effendi Khuri – the millionaire of a district in which are many rich men, mainly Germans.’ Reflecting that ‘Haifa, and all its gardens, offered, perhaps, the most smiling and prosperous picture which Palestine had ever shown us,’ with its ‘detached houses, buried in trees’ and ‘unwonted completeness and order of the cultivation,’ as earlier travellers had written of Nablus’s valley, Goodrich-Freer asked ‘where else can we find a prospect such as this?’ ⁶⁵

The establishment of the German Colony aroused travellers’ interest in Haifa’s colonial potential. In his 1879 article “The Haven of Carmel,” Conder commented briefly on the ‘town of 4000 inhabitants squeezed in between four brown walls a century old, and presenting the usual picturesque and half-ruinous appearance of Levantine towns.’ What clearly excited him were the opportunities Haifa apparently offered in the event of Palestine’s future occupation by Britain. Conder argued that while ‘Napoleon called Acre “the key of Syria,”’ this dubious honour truly belonged to Haifa, for its superior port and roads leading inland. Regarding military strategy, Haifa formed ‘a base of operations in a position in immediate communication with the sea, and which must be attacked in front, as it could neither be outflanked nor masked.’ Estimating very optimistically that Jews already formed a quarter of Haifa’s population, Conder mused that should ‘the Jews […] become the owners of the country,’ then ‘the town of Haifa would certainly rise to a position of importance as the only good port within the limits of the Holy Land.’ ⁶⁶ A similar vision was later articulated by Theodor Herzl in his 1902 novel Altneuland, in which the Haifa in a future Palestine colonised by the Zionist movement was ‘a magnificent city […] built beside the sapphire-blue Mediterranean,’ with ‘craft of every shape and size, flying the flags of all the nations’ in its harbour –effectively an alternative capital of Palestine, to replace the Jerusalem which Herzl had disliked. ⁶⁷ Ultimately, this vision of a Jewish Haifa would only be achieved with the ethnic cleansing of most of the city’s 75,000 Palestinians by Zionist forces in the 1948 Nakba (Palestinian mass displacement, literally catastrophe). ⁶⁸

Colonial Afterlife: Conclusion

Western travellers’ interest in Palestinian cities lay in their evaluations of locales such as Haifa and Nablus as spoils of imperial conquest, or cities in a future Palestine colonised by Zionist settlers. After 1917, travellers’ reports received an extra-textual afterlife as they were reflected in colonial policies of urban space. British officials clearly asserted their right to reshape Palestine’s cities, without consideration of local opinion. Ronald Storrs (1881-1955), an appointed British military governor of Jerusalem in 1917, asserted that Jerusalem’s modernisation would equate to its ‘destruction,’ and thus, in Mazza’s words, set about turning ‘intramuros Jerusalem into an open-air museum.’ ⁶⁹ Elements of Jerusalem’s design which were not in conformity with British aesthetics or ideas about what the holy city should be like the Ottoman clock tower at Jaffa Gate, were summarily demolished- ‘a real pity’ in the words of Wasif Jawharriyeh (1897-1968), a Jerusalemite Palestinian who worked for the Mandate authorities. ⁷⁰ British policy segregated communities, encouraging Jewish settlement west of Jerusalem’s Old City, while large sections of the Arab Muslim and Christian communities were confined inside the increasingly cramped Old City. ⁷¹ Walled Jerusalem and other historic Palestinian cities, such as Nablus, were now not only thought of as domains of the past, but consciously underprivileged by British policies, denying them the development afforded to Zionist settlements.

Haifa, accepted as a site of modernity, was subjected to different treatment. As the city’s economic expansion and its development into a major port attracted thousands of Palestinian labourers and their families, as well as Zionist immigrants, slum housing appeared across Haifa. Bowing to the Zionist leadership’s desire for the ‘Judaization’ of Haifa, during the 1930s, Britain formulated a plan – never ultimately realised – to remove large numbers of Palestinians from the city altogether and resettle them further away from Zionist settlements. British officials also hoped that Britain would be able to maintain some sovereignty over Haifa after the termination of the Mandate, still viewing the port, as the ‘key’ to the Eastern Mediterranean region. ⁷²

The most brutal method Britain used for reshaping urban spaces was outright destruction, such as using dynamite to demolish entire Palestinian neighbourhoods, villages and homes (figure 6). During the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt, British soldiers routinely destroyed homes of those suspected of engaging in or supporting the Revolt. On 16 June 1936, with less than a day’s notice, between 220 and 240 buildings were destroyed in Jaffa, ostensibly to improve sanitation, but made 6,000 Palestinians homeless. The real motivation was to send an unambiguous message on the cost of supporting the Revolt, and to ease British military access to the city. ⁷³ As revealed in earlier travelogues, British travellers often expressed their unease in the ‘narrow’ and ‘torturous’ streets of Arab cities. The easiest way to assert colonial control over these spaces was simply to wipe them off the map.

Figure 6:"Palestine disturbances during summer 1936, Jaffa: Effects of dynamiting" c.1936. Source: American Colony of Jerusalem, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The British Mandate’s policies towards Palestinian urban spaces had their roots in Orientalist ideology and the attitudes formed by Western encounters with towns and cities in the late Ottoman era. Against a background of Western travellers’ preference for a countryside, which they imagined as Biblical and untouched by human hand, cities such as Nablus and Haifa were growing in importance, challenging Orientalist notions of Palestine’s stasis. Accounts of their social life and urban development seen through Western eyes can sometimes complement more recent scholarly research into Palestinian society during the last decades of Ottoman rule. Yet, in hindsight, after over a century of Western colonial dominance and Zionist settler-colonisation of Palestine, it is clear that travellers’ reports of urban spaces often served to advocate for the colonisation of these very spaces, the exploitation of their flourishing resources, and their recreation in the image of the West.

1. Alexander Scholch, “Britain in Palestine, 1838-1882: The Roots of the Balfour Policy,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 39-56 ↩

2. Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 67 ↩

3. See for example Greg Philo and Mike Berry, Bad News from Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2004) ↩

4. Beshara Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), p. 6 ↩

5. Beshara Doumani, “Introduction,” in Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, ed. Angelos Dalachanis, Vincent Lemire (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 140, 139 ↩

6. Edward W. Said, “The Idea of Palestine in the West,” MERIP Reports, 70 (September, 1978), pp. 3-11 ↩

7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Criterion Books, 1962), p. 292 ↩

8. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 150 ↩

9. Elias Sanbar, “The Invention of the Holy Land,” in A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb, Benjamin Stora (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 294 ↩

10. Lorenzo Kamel, “The Impact of ‘Biblical Orientalism’ in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine,” New Middle Eastern Studies, 4 (2014), pp. 1-15 ↩

11. Regina Sharif, “Christians for Zion, 1600-1919,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 5, No. 3/4 (Spring - Summer, 1976), pp. 123-141 Eitan Bar-Yosef, “Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture,” Israel Studies, 8, No. 2 (Summer, 2003), pp. 18-44 ↩

12. Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Wanderings Over Bible Lands and Seas (London: S. Nelson and Sons, 1866), p. 25 ↩

13. Eliot Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858), p. 214 ↩

14. Alexander W. Kinglake [anonymous], Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home From the East (London: John Ollivier, 1844), pp. 7-8 ↩

15. David Morison Ross, The Cradle of Christianity: Chapters on Modern Palestine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1891), p. 3 ↩

16. See Claude Reignier Conder, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), pp. 335, 337 ↩

17. See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 35-88 ↩

18. Laurence Oliphant, Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1887), p. 114-116 ↩

19. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. 4 ↩

20. Josias Leslie Porter, Jerusalem, Bethany and Bethlehem (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1887), p. 102 ↩

21. Norman Macleod, Eastward (London: Alexander Strahan, 1866), p. 120 ↩

22. For a comprehensive survey of Western representations of Jerusalem in the period, see Issam Nassar, European Portrayals of Jerusalem: Religious Fascinations and Colonialist Imaginations (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006) ↩

23. Oliphant, Haifa, p. 296 ↩

24. William Makepeace Thackeray [Mr. M.A. Titmarsh], Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem: Performed in the Steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company (London: Chapman and Hall, 1846), p. 219 ↩

25. Sarah Kochav, “The Search for a Protestant Holy Sepulchre: The Garden Tomb in Nineteenth-Century Jerusalem,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46, Vol. 2 (April 1995), pp. 278-301 ↩

26. William Henry Bartlett, Walks About the City and Environs of Jerusalem (London: Arthur Hall, Virtue & Co., 1844), p. 80; Thackeray, Notes of a Journey, p. 205; William Hepworth Dixon, The Holy Land (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), p. 211 ↩

27. Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Pitai (New York and London: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), Volume 2, pp. 745-747 ↩

28. Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 1-2 ↩

29. Beshara Doumani, “The Political Economy of Population Counts in Ottoman Palestine: Nablus, circa 1850,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 26, No. 1 (February, 1994), p. 1 ↩

30. Claude Reignier Conder, Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1879), Vol. 1, p. 32 ↩

31. Mary Eliza Rogers, “Samaria and Plain of Esdraelon,” in Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt, ed. Charles Wilson (London: J.S. Virtue and Co., 1881), Volume 2, p. 1 ↩

32. Oliphant, Haifa, p. 441 ↩

33. Macleod, Eastward, p. 232 ↩

34. Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), pp. 55-58 ↩

35. John Mills, Three Months’ Residence at Nablus, and an Account of the Modern Samaritans (London: John Murray, 1864), pp. 26-27 ↩

36. Claude Reignier Conder, “The Haven of Carmel,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 125, No. 759 (January, 1879), p. 37 ↩

37. Ada Goodrich-Freer, In a Syrian Saddle (London: Methuen & Co., 1905), p. 196 ↩

38. Henry Baker Tristram, The Land of Israel: A Journal of Travels in Palestine, Undertaken with Special Reference to its Physical Character (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1865), p. 139 ↩

39. Palestinian cotton had been a lucrative export to Europe from the seventeenth century. See Mahmoud Yazbak, “The Politics of Trade and Power: Dahir al-'Umar and the Making of Early Modern Palestine,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 56, No. 4/5 (2013), p. 709 ↩

40. Tristram, The Land of Israel, p. 140 ↩

41. Oliphant, Haifa, p. 442 ↩

42. Conder, Tent Work in Palestine, p. 146 ↩

43. Rogers, “Samaria and Plain of Esdraelon,” pp. 10, 13 ↩

44. Kinglake, Eothen, pp. 360-361 ↩

45. Mills, Three Months’ Residence, pp. 275, 92, 95. Another traveller, the missionary John Wilson (1804-1875), reported that he was easily able ‘to go in for a few minutes’ after paying a small fee in the 1840s. John Wilson, The Lands of the Bible Visited and Discussed in an Extensive Journey Undertaken with Special Reference to the Promotion of Biblical Research and the Advancement of the Cause of Philanthropy, (Edinburgh: William White and Co., 1847), Volume 2, p. 62 ↩

46. Tristram, The Land of Israel, pp. 140-141 ↩

47. David Kushner, “Zealous Towns in Nineteenth-Century Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies, 33, No. 3 (July 1997), p. 597 ↩

48. For Orientalism’s textuality see Said, Orientalism, pp. 92-93 ↩

49. Isabel Burton, The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine and the Holy Land. From My Private Journal (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1876), Volume 2, p. 205 ↩

50. Charles, Wanderings Over Bible Lands and Seas, p. 253 ↩

51. Bartlett, Walks About the City and Environs of Jerusalem, p. 5 ↩

52. Yazbak, “The Politics of Trade and Power,” p. 721 ↩

53. Josias Leslie Porter, “Through Samaria” to Galilee and the Jordan (London, Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1889), p. 216 ↩

54. May Seikaly, “Haifa at the Crossroads: An Outpost of the New World Order,” in Modernity and Culture from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean 1890-1920, ed. Leila Tarazi Fawaz, C.A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 98 ↩

55. Mary Eliza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), pp. 83-109 ↩

56. Tristram, The Land of Israel, p. 95 ↩

57. Laurence Oliphant, The Land of Gilead, with Excursions in the Lebanon (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1880), pp. 332-333 ↩

58. Oliphant, Haifa, pp. 22, 23 ↩

59. Porter, “Through Samaria” to Galilee and the Jordan, pp. 215-217 ↩

60. Oliphant, Haifa, p. 20 ↩

61. See Haim Goren, “Israeli Scholars since 1970 and the Study of the European Presence in Palestine in the Nineteenth Century (until World War I): State of the Art,” in Europa und Palästina 1799-1948/Europe and Palestine 1799-1948: Religion – Politik – Gesellschaft/Religion – Politics – Society, ed. Barbara Haider-Wilson, Dominique Trimbur (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2010), pp. 56-57 For an example of such a Eurocentric view of Haifa’s development by an Israeli historian, see Alex Carmel, Ottoman Haifa: A History of Four Centuries under Turkish Rule (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010) ↩

62. Mahmoud Yazbak, “Templars as Proto-Zionists? The “German Colony” in Late Ottoman Haifa,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 28, No. 4 (Summer, 1999), pp. 40-54 ↩

63. Mary Eliza Rogers, “Mount Carmel and the River Kishon,” in Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt, ed. Charles Wilson (London: J.S. Virtue and Co., 1881), Volume 3, p. 98 ↩

64. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, No. 4 (December, 2006), pp. 387-409 ↩

65. Goodrich-Freer, In a Syrian Saddle, p. 252 ↩

66. Conder, “The Haven of Carmel,” pp. 35-42 The Ottoman census of 1871-2 reported eight Jewish households in Haifa, out of a total of 460 households. Alexander Scholch, “The Demographic Development of Palestine, 1850-1882,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 17, No. 4 (November, 1985), p. 488 ↩

67. Theodor Herzl, Old New Land, trans. Lotta Levensohn (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1960), p. 58 ↩

68. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006), pp. 92-96 ↩

69. Roberto Mazza, “‘The Preservation and Safeguarding of the Amenities of the Holy City without Favour or Prejudice to Race or Creed’: The Pro-Jerusalem Society and Ronald Storrs, 1917-1926”, Ordinary Jerusalem, 1840-1940, pp. 408, 413 ↩

70. Wasif Jawharriyeh, The Storyteller of Jerusalem: The Life and Times of Wasif Jawharriyeh, 1904-1948, ed. Salim Tammari, Issam Nassar (Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press, 2014), p. 139 ↩

71. Nicholas E. Roberts, “Dividing Jerusalem: British Urban Planning in the Holy City,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 42, No. 4 (Summer 2013), pp. 7-26 ↩

72. Tamir Goren, “Efforts to Establish an Arab Workers’ Neighbourhood in British Mandatory Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies, 42, No. 6 (November 2006), pp. 917-933 ↩

73. Matthew Hughes, “The Banality of Brutality: British Armed Forces and the Repression of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-39,” The English Historical Review, 124, No. 507 (April 2009), pp. 322-323 ↩

Author

Gabriel Polley is currently completing his doctorate at the European Centre for Palestine Studies, the University of Exeter, supervised by Ilan Pappe and Nadia Naser-Najjab. His research focuses on the representation of Palestine in British travelogues, 1840-1914. He is an active campaigner for Palestine and other social and environmental causes.

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