18 • cHAPTeR 1
taken to suggest that an “imagined” territory is any less significant his-
torically than one that was politically, legally, or sovereignly bound.
This was, after all, the “Holy Land” as understood by Jews, christians,
and Muslims alike, those within the land and, no less, those far beyond
its imagined borders. Its general territorial contours were known to
Jews and christians from the Bible and to Muslims from the Qurʾan
and later Islamic commentary.^9
In fact, the notion of a place called palestine, as a single entity,
was especially meaningful precisely in the fin de siècle period. Three
phenomena sparking renewed interest in the holy Land during this
period are worth highlighting here: the dramatic increase of european
Christian missionary activity (especially in the wake of european in-
tervention in response to Muhammad Ali’s conquest of the Levant);^10
the rise of Zionism, a Jewish nationalism that focused its ambitions on
ereẓ Yisraʾel (typically translated into european languages by Zionists
themselves as palestine);^11 and the beginning of a distinctly palestinian
identity among the land’s Arab majority.^12 the primary location of the
encounter analyzed in this book, then, may indeed be called palestine.
Jerusalem, the Ottoman empire, and
Intercommunal DifferenceBen- Yehuda and al- Khalidi’s Jerusalem was not only the central city of
the district that shared the city’s name, or of an imagined place called
palestine; it was also part of the Ottoman empire. that this encounter
(^9) On the variety of ways the borders have been imagined, beginning in the hebrew
Bible, see havrelock, River Jordan. For different post- Ottoman Zionist versions of the
imagined borders, see Shelef, Evolving Nationalism, 25– 106. On Islamic views, see, e.g.,
porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian- Arab National Movement 1918– 1929 , 1– 16. the
Qurʾan refers to the “Holy Land” in Q. 5:20– 21, in which Moses says, “O my People!
enter the holy Land which God has assigned unto you, and turn not back ignominiously,
for then will you be overthrown, to your own ruin.” cited in Abu Sway, “The Holy
Land, Jerusalem and al- Aqsa Mosque in the Qurʾan, Sunnah and Other Islamic Literary
Sources,” 88. See also Q. 17:1– 4, which refers to al- masjid al- aqṣā, “whose precincts we
have blessed.”
(^10) the presence of missionaries in Jerusalem is discussed further below. See also perry,
“ha- Naẓrut ha- maʿaravit: Protastantim”; Perry, British Mission to the Jews in Nineteenth-
Century Palestine.
(^11) a classic study of Zionist ideology is Shimoni, The Zionist Ideology. For a recent in-
troduction to the history of Zionism, see engel, Zionism. Zionists in the pre- 1948 period
often translated Ereẓ Yisraʾel as “Palestine.” After the creation of the State of Israel, and
especially since the 1960s, there has been a marked ambivalence among Zionists toward
the use of the term palestine, associated as it is with a competing nationalist movement.
(^12) On the complex phenomenon of palestinian identity, see Khalidi, Palestinian Identity.