BiblioVault - Books about Holy Land

Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land

Wealth, Personnel, and Buildings of a Mediterranean Church between Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Michael McCormick

Harvard University Press, 2011

In Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land, Michael McCormick rehabilitates and reinterprets one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. The roll of documents translated and edited in this volume preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments (including exact dimensions), and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.

Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne’s move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king’s ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.

Supplementing McCormick’s major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.

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Clarel

A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land

Herman Melville

Northwestern University Press, 2008

Melville’s long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville’s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.

But modern critics have found Clarel a much better poem than was ever realized. Robert Penn Warren called it a precursor of The Waste Land. It abounds with revelations of Melville’s inner life. Most strikingly, it is argued that the character Vine is a portrait of Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Clarel is one of the most complex theological explorations of faith and doubt in all of American literature, and this edition brings Melville’s poem to new life.

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Defending the Holy Land

A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy

Zeev Maoz

University of Michigan Press, 2008

Defending the Holy Land is the most comprehensive analysis to date of Israel's national security and foreign policy, from the inception of the State of Israel to the present. Author Zeev Maoz's unique double perspective, as both an expert on the Israeli security establishment and esteemed scholar of Mideast politics, enables him to describe in harrowing detail the tragic recklessness and self-made traps that pervade the history of Israeli security operations and foreign policy.

Most of the wars in which Israel was involved, Maoz shows, were entirely avoidable, the result of deliberate Israeli aggression, flawed decision-making, and misguided conflict management strategies. None, with the possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence, were what Israelis call "wars of necessity." They were all wars of choice-or, worse, folly.

Demonstrating that Israel's national security policy rested on the shaky pairing of a trigger-happy approach to the use of force with a hesitant and reactive peace diplomacy, Defending the Holy Land recounts in minute-by-minute detail how the ascendancy of Israel's security establishment over its foreign policy apparatus led to unnecessary wars and missed opportunites for peace.

A scathing and brilliant revisionist history, Defending the Holy Land calls for sweeping reform of Israel's foreign policy and national security establishments. This book will fundamentally transform the way readers think about Israel's troubled history.

Zeev Maoz is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. He is the former head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy and of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, as well as the former academic director of the M.A. Program at the Israeli Defense Forces' National Defense College.

Cover photograph: Israel, Jerusalem, Western Wall and The Dome of The Rock. Courtesy of Corbis.

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Fratricide in the Holy Land

A Psychoanalytic View of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Avner Falk

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

This is the first English-language book ever to apply psychoanalytic knowledge to the understanding of the most intractable international struggle in our world today—the Arab-Israeli conflict. Two ethnic groups fight over a single territory that both consider to be theirs by historical right—essentially a rational matter. But close historical examination shows that the two parties to this tragic conflict have missed innumerable opportunities for a rational partition of the territory between them and for a permanent state of peace and prosperity rather than perennial bloodshed and misery.
Falk suggests that a way to understand and explain such irrational matters is to examine the unconscious aspects of the conflict. He examines large-group psychology, nationalism, group narcissism, psychogeography, the Arab and Israeli minds, and suicidal terrorism, and he offers psychobiographical studies of Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat, two key players in this tragic conflict today.

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The Islamization of the Holy Land, 634–1800

Michael Ehrlich

Arc Humanities Press, 2022

From the seventh century onwards the population of the Near East gradually became Muslim. Nevertheless, other religious communities continued to exist, maintaining an enduring presence in the region, despite being surrounded by Muslims and by people becoming Muslims. This book argues that the causes that led to the conversion of most of the Holy Land's population, as well as the survival of some religious communities, are essentially social and geographic in nature, rather than theological, and that two parallel processes were the main catalysts of Islamization: de-urbanization and urbanization.

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The New Crusades, the New Holy Land

Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, 1969-1991

David T. Morgan

University of Alabama Press, 1996

Examines the conflict between modern-day Southern Baptists and “liberal” Southern Baptists over control of the Southern Baptist Convention

David Morgan captures the essence of the conflict between some modern-day Southern Baptists, who saw themselves as crusaders for truth, as they sought to redeem a new holy land--the Southern Baptist Convention-- from the control of other Southern Baptists they viewed as "liberals." To the so-called liberals, the crusaders were "fundamentalists" on a mission, not to reclaim the SBC in the name of theological truth but to gain control and redirect its activities according to their narrow political, social, and theological perspectives. The New Crusades provides a comprehensive history of the conflict, taking the reader through the bitter and divisive struggles of the late 1980s, that culminated in the 1991 emergence of a moderate faction within the SBC. The fundamentalists had won.

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Zombie Apocalypse

Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood

Terry Rey

Temple University Press, 2024