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A full-blooded Protestant Christianity dominated educated life in nineteenth-century America. For the professional classes the Holy Land was an important reality, and American missionary activity in the Near East, and in Palestine in particular, was intense. By the 1820s hardy American Protestants had begun to uplift the Arab world, and by the second half of the nineteenth century, genteel but serious tourists from the United States were trekking to Palestine. After the Civil War, the college-trained middle class and some less well educated but sincere believers desired to appropriate the ancient East at a time when robust Protestant belief was under assault.
Academics have taken up this episode in American cultural life with more or less imaginative skill, and works that have studied the issue include David Finnie, Pioneers East (1967); Lester I. Vogel, To See A Promised Land (1993); Moshe Davis, America and the Holy Land (1995); and John Davis, The Landscape of Belief (1996). Scholars have chronicled the travels of the tourists but additionally striven to understand how they imposed their own sense of social verities on the nineteenth-century Near East. Western tourism has recently come under (usually hostile) scrutiny, and some authors have used contemporary theories to investigate the cultural imperialism at work in the experience of Palestine.
Hilton Obenzinger develops some of these themes in this latest contribution to the literature. For him American tourism was in part a sort of re-creation of what the travelers took to be the original Protestant expedition to the New World. The Puritans in America had thought of themselves as latter-day Israelites on a journey into the wilderness that would eventually see the construction of a new promised land. In the nineteenth century, those who made the pilgrimage to Palestine, in what Obenzinger refers to as a "doubling," were reclaiming, re-appropriating the ancient salvific experience of the Israelites; they were corroborating the covenantal journey of the first Euro-Americans.
There is something to this theorizing. The contemporary American fascination with touring the Normandy beaches, especially since the success of Saving Private Ryan, perhaps suggests what Obenzinger is getting at. Being on the ground in Normandy somehow affirms for people the significance of the great events of D-Day, puts them in touch with heroic, bygone days. So in the third-quarter of the nineteenth century when educated Americans felt Christianity under attack from Darwin and the Higher Criticism; treading in the steps of Moses and Jesus verified the legitimacy of the direction in which these ancients walked.
Obenzinger is a learned and erudite guide to these problems. He writes in a tradition of literary criticism that sees great works of art as privileged texts whose close explication will get at truths about the period that may not be available in standard empirical research, or in works that have not been penned by genius. But in addition to emphasizing certain works, Obenzinger is knowledgeable of the period, and has a firm grasp of all the literature written in the West about the Holy Land, from the seventeenth century on.
Nonetheless, the book seems to me fatally compromised by the author's judgment and expository style. He concentrates on Herman Melville's poem Clarel (1876) and Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869). A narrative of a tour of the Holy Land, Clarel runs to almost 18,000 lines. It is based on a trip of Melville's in 1856-7, and laments the crash of Christianity in the wake of Darwin, and what the crash meant to various representative men. The poem is perhaps the least intelligible of Melville's writings, and lacked a critical edition until 1991 when Northwestern published a 900-page version—500 pages of poem, and 400 of scholarly commentary.
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