by Simon Schama
It was an age when, for Europeans, especially the pale northern kind, public virtue was measured by sanitation. In Victorian Britain, Disraeli – the Jerusalem tourist, writer of Holy Land novels and leader of the Conservatives – had pronounced that from sanitary improvements flowed ‘most of the civilising elements of humanity’, and his motto of ‘sanitas sanitorum, omnia sanitas’ had, he felt sure, saved lives. And if such improvements were possible in the British Jerusalem, why not the real thing? Holy Land tourism was booming in the middle of the century of Improvement. Books about travel on the Nile and Jordan were being published every year for an apparently insatiable market. The reason was evident. Thomas Carlyle’s ominous prophecy that the ‘age of the machine’ would crush the spirit had not materialised – quite the opposite in fact. The more industrial European society became – and especially at its leading edge in Britain – the more ardent it waxed in its religious and spiritual enthusiasms. Machines might not have souls, but those who paid for them and those who worked them, high-minded opinion supposed, certainly did.
Machines could even deliver the truths of the Bible more effectively than ever before. By the 1850s the first photographs of the Holy Land were being printed from giant plates, replacing or enhancing lithographs, paintings and steel engravings that had been the conventional means of illustration. It would not be until the invention of half-tones in the 1880s that those photographs could be printed up in the books themselves, but in the meantime commercial exhibitions and albums were available. The look of Palestine, of its ruins, its landscape, its people of the three faiths, imprinted itself in the Victorian mind.3 In 1862, when the Prince of Wales had been sent off on a tour of penitence and Christian correction to the Holy Land in the company of the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Stanley (for his mother found it painful to be in the same room as him since she blamed Bertie’s philandering for the death of his father Albert), Britain knew all about it and some got to see the photographs that Francis Bedford took on the trip.
So the temptation to connect biblical antiquity with Modern Improvement, to marry together spiritual renascence with sanitary – and political – reform, to deliver health to the decayed Palestine, became irresistible for the Good and the Great of Victorian Britain. Those, moreover, who were most ardent were the least literal and fundamentalist in their recovery (a word they used a lot) of the Bible for the Modern Day. Just like the German (and indeed Jewish) scholars of their time who were asserting against the most literal believers that the Book was entirely the work of divine dictation, the engineers of refreshed spirit scoffed at the more puerile claims of miracle in order to insist on the essential historical reality of the core of the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. The latter required the former as its necessary precondition. Jesus was – constitutively, not incidentally – a Jew; the Old and the New Testaments were organically connected. Jewish history was the father of Christian history.
In that spirit, as much scientific as theological, they needed to know the verifiable truth of the Hebrew Bible. They thought that knowledge, not blind superstition, must be the midwife of faith. And sound, incontrovertible knowledge of what had actually happened to the Jews over the Bible centuries could only be gleaned by direct and immediate contact with the Holy Land itself. That is what Edward Robinson had meant by the title of his popular work, Biblical Researches. He had, he wrote, grown up with the names Samaria, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, all of which generated ‘the holiest feelings’, but ‘in my case these had subsequently become connected to a scientific motive. I had long meditated the preparation of a work on biblical Geography.’
Two sacred books guided the most fervent of the biblical geographers: the Old Testament, and The Engineers and Machinists’ Assistant, written by David Scott, published in 1853, the inaugural decade of continuous Bible Land exploration and learned tourism. The generation that came after missionaries and scholars like Robinson, the men who most forcefully propelled the modern effort to understand the Bible as factual history, were engineers before they were archaeologists.
The most dynamic and inexhaustible of their number was George Grove. He is remembered today almost entirely for the astonishing achievement of his Dictionary of Music and Musicians, but though his life in music – as champion of the hitherto under-appreciated Schubert, director of music and concerts at the Crystal Palace in its Sydenham home, and director of the Royal College of Music – was prodigious, Grove had another life as a Bible scholar, and it irked him that that was not as well recognised. ‘People will insist on thinking of me as a musician which I am really not in the least degree,’ he complained. ‘I took quite as much interest into the natural features and little towns of Palestine which I did for Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible and for Arthur Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine . . . perhaps more so.’
William Smith, the extraordinary lexicographer, had indeed hired the indefatigable Grove to help him with the concordances of Hebrew place names listed in the Bible, a great part of which Grove had already accomplished with his wife, even while running music at the Great Exhibition and after it closed at the Crystal Palace. He liked bolting things together, biblical or mechanical. Having trained as a civil engineer (the only Victorian calling arguably as exalted as the clergy), Grove had specialised in cast-iron lighthouses in the West Indies, worked with Robert Stephenson on the Britannia Bridge crossing the Menai Straits, became friend and colleague of all the engineering prometheans (Brunel and Sir Charles Barry, as well as Stephenson), and was also on familiar terms with the grandees of Victorian Britain: the Earl of Derby and the Duke of Devonshire, the scholarly William Thompson, Archbishop of York, the publisher John Murray and, crucially, the great Jewish philanthropist, mover and shaker Sir Moses Montefiore. Montefiore in particular was resolved to shake Palestinian Jews from what he believed to be their lethargy, degradation and unfortunate myopia to the blessings of the modern world; blessings he believed which in his own person had been shown to be fully compatible with Progress. After all, Montefiore’s company had brought gas lighting to illuminate regions of the world that had stumbled in darkness. He liked to think of cultural and technical light in the same way. No wonder he and Grove got along. Both of them had visited Palestine itself, Grove most recently in 1859 and 1861.
Another practical-biblical tourist, visiting the country to sketch proposals for the modernisation of Palestine (including rebuilding the port of Jaffa), was the civil engineer John Irwine Whitty who, through the good offices of the British consul James Quinn and his son Alexander, had been allowed to go down into the tunnels and look at what he called ‘a vast subterranean lake’, and (citing Tacitus) ‘a fountain of perennial water’. In 1862 he buttonholed Dean Stanley during the royal tour of the Holy Land, arguing that the insanitary and lethal horrors of the city (everyone complained of the reeking effluvia) would be a thing of the past were the ancient royal Judaean water system renovated for the modern age. Back in London Whitty became a tireless champion of the Old-New Jerusalem water, lectured on it at the Syro-Egyptian Society early in 1864, and then published his visionary ideas as ‘The Water Supply of Jerusalem, Ancient and Modern’ in the spring 1864 issue of the Journal of Sacred Literature and Biblical Record.4
To this day, for anyone interested in the history and fate of public health, a subject which has not gone away with the passing of time, Whitty’s essay makes exciting reading. It is a work of hydraulic imagination and constructive urgency in the spirit of the great Roman hydraulic engineer Frontinus, in whose steps he felt he was treading.
Whitty wrote about the water needs of Jerusalem’s 20,000 people as an extension of the endeavours that had tried to satisfy those of the mightily populated London and New York. He described Jerusalem as ‘the metropolis of the Christian and the Hebrew nations’, startlingly but typically neglecting the fact that Muslims might feel the same way about al-Quds. Jerusalem, he wrote to shock his readers, had a greater rainfall between December and March (a saturating sixty-five inches)
than London experienced all year. But the water was immediately fouled by the filthy streets through which it ran, many of them with open sewage, and it was this dangerously contaminated water that was stored in the cisterns that were the city’s only means of conservation. That water, the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem reported, ‘can only be drunk in safety after it is filtered and freed from the numerous worms and insects that breed in it’. And by early summer, the cisterns were in any case mostly dry. Jerusalem residents without domestic tanks sunk beneath their own houses had the choice of either buying water from the vendors who drew it from the Pool of Siloam (where women still did heavy laundry) and carried it in goatskins to their place on the street or market, or going to get it themselves the same way.
What could be done to improve matters? The answer, Whitty thought, lay in the Bible, and particularly in the Hezekian conduits beneath the Temple Mount, expanded in the time of the Hasmoneans and Herod the Great in the first century BCE. If those passages and channels could be cleared of their obstructing rubbish and impedimenta, and protected from the jettisoning of entrails and the pollution of sewage, then the waters might easily slake the thirst of the city, and from that would come such a blossoming of Jerusalem as hadn’t been seen since the Roman destruction. ‘It is manifest,’ he wrote, ‘Jerusalem has in itself the necessary elements of strength and prosperity and that without any miracle, the people in its behalf can be fulfilled to render it a mighty city more glorious than it has been.’
The grandees of Victorian virtue paid close attention. Dean Stanley, who had already sold 200,000 copies of his own book about the Holy Land, described Whitty’s scheme as invested with ‘a sacred halo’. The fact that it could be economically effected with a mere £8,000 drew acclaim from the Athenaeum to the Jewish Chronicle. Much was made of Whitty’s promise that this would be a joint enterprise of both Jews and Christians. A Jerusalem Water Relief Society, patronised by the Montefiores and Rothschilds as well as members of the British clergy and nobility, was set up in 1864.
A year later, on 12 May 1865, many of those most passionate about the union of biblical antiquity with modern science gathered – where else? – in the panelled Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey (where the usurper-king Henry IV had died in lieu of going on a penitential crusade). Along with Dean Stanley was the learned and zealous Archbishop of York, William Thompson, who like Stanley had twice visited Palestine and was the author of yet another Holy Land book, and George Grove. There too was the second-richest woman in England (after Queen Victoria): Angela Burdett-Coutts, daughter of a great parliamentary Radical, and granddaughter of a banker, thus perfectly designed to be a social zealot, creator of model homes for the East End slum dwellers, friend of Dickens and of fallen women, inaugurator of night classes for the London poor (not to mention patroness of the British Goat Society, president of British Bee-Keepers, and of the newly formed Horological Society). Twin passions had brought this extraordinary gathering together: the biblical and the scientific, for in high Victorian England it was not only possible but in these circles expected that one would be an enthusiast for both.
Like Edward Robinson, on whose inaugural topographies they all relied, the founders of what became the Palestine Exploration Fund believed that while it was wise to retain a degree of healthy scepticism about the more improbable miracles offered up in the Old Testament (the stopping of the sun over Ai for Joshua’s military convenience, say, or Jonah’s weekend in the cetacean belly), modern science – above all the sciences of accurate mapping and learned archaeology – would vindicate the Bible as, in essence, the true history of the Israelites, and thus the ancestry of the Saviour. The Fund, once established (and blessed, as it was bound to be, by Queen Victoria), would lend its powers to the only empire that mattered, the empire of knowledge. The mapping of the Holy Land, as they liked to call it, pace the inexhaustible Robinson, had barely begun and was still full of vast lacunae and unfeatured wilderness emptiness. The work that purported to provide information on biblical sites, William Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, was all very well, but it was an armchair gazetteer. Grove, its assistant editor, was the first to acknowledge as much. What was needed was first-hand, strictly precise observation. The Fund would be the godparent to that mighty enterprise, mapping, surveying, identifying, publishing. A true history of the Hebrews would emerge, to live for the modern age alongside its sacred Testament.
So, with Lady Burdett-Coutts’s largesse in hand, the Palestine Exploration Fund was created. George Grove was to be its prime mover and, should he not be detained elsewhere with music, its secretary.5 Military engineers would be dispatched to survey the Holy Land, beginning with Jerusalem but ultimately encompassing the length and breadth of what they called ‘Western Palestine’ from Mount Hermon to the southern Negev, and from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.
Subsequently, Sinai, the desert of the theophany, God’s appearance to Moses and the reception of the Law – now an utterly blank zone in the map of modern knowledge – would get the same exacting treatment. No one was confident of ever mapping the journeyings of Abraham and the patriarchs from Chaldea to Canaan and Egypt – Genesis was unhelpfully vague about routes and place names, barring Bethel and the oaks of Mamre – but of the Sinaitic Exodus, somewhat more plotted, they had no doubt. It was where everything formative for the Jews, and thus for the Christianity that was its purer descendant, had truly originated. Statistical survey would sort fact from fancy, and establish exactly what the truth of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient history of the Israelites had been. Along with topographical measurement would go its kindred enquiries: botanical and zoological, hydraulic investigation and archaeology. Since this was a modern enterprise in search of ultimate ancestry, a camera would record its steps. But first and foremost there had to be the maps.6
George Grove took the Fund in hand right away as its honorary secretary (Walter Besant was its working secretary) and steered it towards the union of practical science – surveying and engineering – and biblical history. What was needed were troops in the field: corps of heroes, unselfish young men who, without thought for their health or wealth, would volunteer to map, tunnel and dig for the Fund. Graduates from the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, many of them already deployed on its British Ordnance Survey maps, were called to step up. The Palestine Exploration Fund required that they should be young men whose intelligence and integrity would be matched by the physical courage and perseverance expected from frontiersmen of the empire of knowledge. Some did indeed die from diseases, especially yellow fever; others were murdered in the desert or, like Claude Conder – the brilliant young Ordnance Surveyor, Kitchener’s companion in the Survey of Western Palestine in the 1870s – were attacked so brutally that they never completely recovered from their wounds.
They came forward nonetheless, the Woolwich sappers. The first and most senior was the Liverpudlian Charles Wilson, who had been sent to begin the authorised surveying of the Jerusalem tunnels, tanks and water courses even before the formal founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund. His work, completed with the help of Conrad Schick’s expertise, was impressive enough for him to be asked to carry out an on-the-spot ‘feasibility’ enquiry for a complete survey of ‘Western Palestine’.
Wilson and his little corps took their theodolites and measuring chains all the way down from the Lebanon and western Syria in the winter and spring of 1866, through Galilee, where he got excited about identifying synagogues dating from the time of Christ or just a little later. The results landed Wilson the plum job at home of chief engineer of the Ordnance Survey of Scotland, leaving to those who followed – Charles Warren, Claude Conder and the young Herbert Kitchener – the work of the Survey of Palestine.
But Wilson languished in the heather and was restive at being merely a member of the Palestine Exploration Fund committee. In 1868, when it was proposed to take the survey south beyond Palestine proper into the wastes of Sinai, he was quick to put himself forward. For those who w
anted an answer to the biggest question of all – what was the route of the Exodus? (Or for the more courageous minds, had it really happened the way the Bible related?) – this was the expedition that would count most. Who knew, perhaps they would find remains of the Tabernacle, the debris of ancient Israelite encampments? Somewhere amid the desert mountains must lie answers about how the Israelites put a different mark on the history of the world; how Moses (whose historical reality no one among the Palestine Exploration Fund brigades doubted) received directly from God the laws which created the first father-monotheism and made the Israelites Jews.
Dean Stanley put the question that would guide Wilson’s expedition of 1868–9: ‘can a connection be traced between the scenery, the features, the . . . situation of Sinai and Palestine and the history of the Israelites?’7 And the composition of the corps reflected the mix of biblical piety and modern investigation: Edward Palmer was an extraordinary linguist and Arabist (whose first foreign language had been Romany, learned from the gypsy camps near Cambridge where he had grown up); the Bible scholar Reverend F. W. Holland; the naturalist Wyatt on the lookout for gazelles and mountain goats; another engineering officer, H. S. Palmer (no relation); and, indispensably Colour Sergeant James Macdonald, who was there as photographer and who produced from his elaborately made wet collodion plates images of the expedition’s progress through Sinai.