The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland Book

Introduction: Banal Murder and Toponymy 1

Memories from an Ancestral Land l Rights to an Ancestral Land 10

Names of an Ancestral Land 22

1 Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property? 31

The Homeland-A Natural Living Space? 33

Place of Birth or Civil Community? 39

Territorialization of the National Entity 53

Borders as Boundaries of Spatial Property 60

2 Mytherritory: In the Beginning, God Promised the Land 67

Gifted Theologians Bestow a Land upon Themselves 68

From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Judea 86

The Land of Israel in Jewish Religious Legal Literature 102

"Diaspora" and Yearning for the Holy Land 107

3 Toward a Christian Zionism: And Balfour Promised the Land 119

Pilgrimage after the Destruction: A Jewish Ritual? 121

Sacred Geography and Journeys in the Land of Jesus 132

From Puritan Reformation to Evangelicalism 141

Protestants and the Colonization of the Middle East 156

4 Zionism Versus Judaism: The Conquest of "Ethnic" Space 177

Judaism's Response to the Invention of the Homeland 179

Historical Right and the Ownership of Territory 196

Zionist Geopolitics and the Redemption of the Land 214

From Internal Settlement to External Colonization 230

5 Conclusion: The Sad Tale of the Frog and the Scorpion 255

Afterword: In Memory of a Village 259

Forgetting the Land 260

A Land of Forgetting 271

Acknowledgments 283

Index 285