19th-Century Americans in the Holy Land

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When the first American missionaries arrived in the Holy Land in 1819, it took three days to travel from their port of disembarkation in Jaffa to Jerusalem. When Mark Twain arrived nearly half a century later, he still found the roads “infernal” and the place as a whole “desolate and unlovely.” Jerusalem, he said, was “a pauper’s village … The glory of Jerusalem has indeed parted.”

Americans’ engagement with the Holy Land in the 19th century is a multifold story. Following the missionaries in the early part of the century came the scholars, most notably Edward Robinson, the “father of Biblical geography,”^a who visited the Holy Land in 1832 (and again in 1852) with his friend and former student Eli Smith. A professor and theologian at Andrews Theological Seminary, Robinson identified scores of Biblical sites by their survival in modern Arabic names: for example, Bethel in Arabic Beitin; Shiloh in Arabic Seilun; and Anath in Arabic Anathoth.

Robinson also identified Robinson’s Arch in the western wall of the Temple Mount, which he thought supported a bridge to the other side of the city. Actually it supported a staircase leading up to the Temple Mount.

In 1847–1848 United States Navy Lieutenant William F. Lynch successfully searched for the source of the Jordan River and explored the Dead Sea; it was the first scientific exploration of the region.^b

In 1857, Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, paid a visit, but he was not impressed. He found it “a caked, depopulated hell.”

After the Civil War, traffic picked up, as if the cessation of the horrors of war somehow released the spirit. Moments before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln himself expressed a desire to visit the Holy Land.

After General Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms as president and an unsuccessful bid for a third, he went on a worldwide tour that included the Holy Land. General William Tecumseh Sherman, who marched on Atlanta during the Civil War and succeeded Grant as commander of the army after the war, likewise paid a visit to the Holy Land.

The future president Theodore Roosevelt, then 15, visited the Holy Land with his family in 1873. Even at 15, he observed in his diary that Jaffa “is thoroughly oriental with very pretty women.”

Most of these visitors—Edward Robinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ulysses Grant and William Seward (Lincoln’s Secretary of State), among others—stayed at the Mediterranean Hotel, which occupied three successive locations in the Old City. The latest overlooks Hezekiah’s Pool just inside Jaffa Gate. Due to overbooking, however, the Roosevelts were denied their rooms and had to move to the Damascus Hotel.

It was not uncommon for tourists to chip “souvenirs” from holy sites. Many of them carried a hammer and chisel in their bag specifically for the purpose. Twain himself admitted to hacking pieces of stone from what he believed was Solomon’s Temple.

Most of this information is contained in a tasteful, bilingual catalog (Hebrew and English; but you have to open it from the “back”) for a beautifully designed exhibit titled Dreamland—American Travelers to the Holy Land in the 19th Century at the Hebrew University Library 015 in Jerusalem, sponsored by the National Library of Israel and the Shapell Manuscript Foundation of Los Angeles and curated by Dina Grossman of the Foundation. The exhibit closes in late November, but if you can’t make it, the catalog is still available and well worth the price.

The exhibit title Dreamland comes from Mark Twain’s immensely popular book The Innocents Abroad, which he lovingly dedicated to “my aged mother.”^c Despite his negative judgments, he observed that “Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is dream-land.”

When the first American missionaries arrived in the Holy Land in 1819, it took three days to travel from their port of disembarkation in Jaffa to Jerusalem. When Mark Twain arrived nearly half a century later, he still found the roads “infernal” and the place as a whole “desolate and unlovely.” Jerusalem, he said, was “a pauper’s village … The glory of Jerusalem has indeed parted.” Americans’ engagement with the Holy Land in the 19th century is a multifold story. Following the missionaries in the early part of the century came the scholars, most notably Edward Robinson, the “father […]