Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land. Edward Fox

the Holy Land, based on an Anglican New Jerusalem absorbing Jerusalem of old, was an equally potent Russian idea of the holiness of the Holy Land: a belief in a divine role for Russia in Palestine. Proclaiming itself the successor to Byzantium as the world’s Christian empire, imperial Russia encouraged its subjects, mostly poor peasants, to undertake gruelling pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the sites around it. A Russian hospice and cathedral were built for the purpose. It was not difficult for anyone visiting Jerusalem at the time to see that there was a political aim behind this policy: the Russian spiritual claim to Palestine, expressed through its role as the traditional protector of the interests of the Orthodox Church, could without much adjustment be translated into an assertion of political rights. Under Czar Nicholas I, Russia demanded the Ottoman Empire accept a Russian protectorate over all its Orthodox subjects. Within a few years, the Crimean War began.

      The Crimean War was a war of negative cosmopolitanism. Its nominal cause was a feud between the Catholic and Orthodox caretakers of the shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem, priests and monks who in the past had fought each other with broomsticks over the right to adorn and maintain parts of the shrines associated with the life of Christ, mainly in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity. In 1847, an ornate silver star marking the traditional site of the birth of Christ was stolen. The Catholics blamed the Greeks. The conflict escalated. With its own mystical claim to the Holy Land, expressed in a claim to protection of Catholic interests in Palestine, France took the side of the Catholics. France and Russia needed a war for extraneous political reasons, and so war was joined over the Orthodox-Catholic conflict over control of the holy sites, with France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire on one side and Russia on the other. Russian public opinion viewed the war as a religious crusade.

      The religious claims of the imperial states were the means of establishing political footholds in a geopolitically strategic corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Britain had established a consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, as a result of the lobbying of the Earl of Shaftesbury, but with practical political interests underlying Shaftesbury’s millenarian aspirations, and other powers did the same. Where the faith went, the flag followed.

      In the years after the Crimean War, Prussia too joined the competition for a political stake in Palestine, again expressing its involvement in distinctive religious terms. Like Britain, a Protestant country with no indigenous co-religionists in Palestine, Prussia established a religious claim to the land by identifying itself with the medieval Crusaders, by searching for the tomb of the German Crusader King Frederick Barbarossa and other Crusader remains, and by encouraging religious colonies modelled on the Knights Templar. In 1898, the Prussian Emperor, Frederick II, consolidated diplomatic relations with the Ottoman state with a ceremonial visit to the Holy Land. An opening was cut in the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, built nearly 500 years earlier by Sultan Suleiman, so that the imperial party could enter in full pomp, with the Kaiser on horseback. The intended symbolism was that Frederick would enter the holy city like his earlier Crusader namesake. The day was also the anniversary of Luther’s protest against the papacy, and once inside the city, the Kaiser inaugurated a church built on the site of an old Crusader hospice.

      Twenty years earlier, a Prussian archaeological institution in Palestine had been established. This was the Palästina Verein, founded in 1878. This organization sent vast amounts of antiquities back to the national museum in Berlin, and established formidable archaeological operations, which caused Britain in particular grave diplomatic and scholarly anxiety. Their main project was the excavation of the biblical site of Taanach, an expedition conducted in 1902–1904 by the Austrian biblical scholar Ernst Sellin. Sixty years later, in a re-excavation of the site sponsored by the Lutheran Church, this was the place where a young and idealistic Albert Glock was to cut his teeth as an archaeologist.