A single scholar’s biblical geography shaped post-WWI Palestine’s borders

Evidence

It would be difficult to overestimate the currency of the Semitic by 1914: it was the dominant frame for thinking about Western Asia in Western Europe. As testimony to this framing, the frontispiece of one of the most influential works in Britain on the historical geography of the Holy Land, written by George Adam Smith and first published in 1894, was a map of ‘The Semitic World’ (Fig. 5.1); the map of Palestine was tucked away at the back of the book. When General Allenby was appointed head of the British military campaign for Jerusalem in 1917, the year after Smith was knighted, Prime Minister David Lloyd George gave him a copy of this work. Allenby is said to have read the book, which was in its sixteenth edition by 1910, almost daily alongside the Bible. At the end of the war, when the world order had been turned upside down and the Ottoman empire destroyed, Lloyd George and his colleagues turned to Smith’s Atlas of the Historical Geography of the Holy Land, published in 1915, as their reference work for consideration of the borders for the new state of Palestine. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 653

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how maps and biblical geography underwrote colonial cartography elsewhere, e.g. the shaping of Israel/Palestine in later decades.
• SEED: Angle: how a single scholar’s biblical assumptions became de facto state borders — a case study in the material power of intellectual categories.