Renan read present Palestinian village life as proof of the biblical past

Evidence

Nazareth was a small town in a hollow, opening broadly at the summit of the group of mountains which close the plain of Estraedon on the north. The population is now from three to four thousand, and it can never have varied much… . The town, like all the small Jewish towns at this period, was a heap of huts built without style, and would exhibit that harsh and poor aspect which villages in Semitic countries now present. The house, it seems, did not differ much from those cubes of stone, without exterior or interior elegance, which still cover the richest parts of the Lebanon, and which, surrounded with vines and fig-trees, are still very agreeable. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 194

Categorization

• XREF: This is a concrete specimen of Said’s orientalism: the ethnographic present describing the biblical past. Also connects to the ‘archive in flesh and blood’ premise from Renan’s own methodology.