The Bride: An Illustrated History of Palestine 1850-1948
by Roger Hardy
Anthony Eyre, £15, 320 pages
This account of a momentous century in the history of the Holy Land takes its title from Palestine itself, a bride who attracted many suitors. A Victorian Archbishop of York, William Thomson, declared starkly that the place of “our Redemption” belonged “to you and to me”. In a classic expression of Christian imperialism, he declared that Britain had a sacred duty to rescue it from darkness by means of a new crusade. As heir to the Crusaders, France too claimed a stake in Palestine; so did Russia as the guardian of Orthodoxy. The Kaiser asserted German influence by opening the Church of the Redeemer in the old city of Jerusalem in 1898, when he was accused of trying to set himself up “as a sort of Protestant Pope”. American millennialists were drawn to Palestine in order to witness the Second Coming. By dint of long occupation Arabs claimed the land from which Muhammad had ascended into heaven; Jews saw it as the land of Israel, at its heart the city of David. All told, Palestine was, to adopt the words of St John, “a bride adorned for her husband”.
