At its height, the British Empire was the largest to have ever existed. Aside from covering most of the globe, it was responsible for some of the greatest advances in engineering, art, and medicine that the world will ever know. The Empire gave us steam engines, penicillin, radar, and even television.However, life under the British […]
Archives for April 2020
Hunger strike Sukhdev Sandhu on Late Victorian Holocausts – the famines that fed the empire – by Mike Davis Sukhdev Sandhu
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World Mike Davis An estimated 20, 000,000 starved in India due to Britain’s free market demands in the late 19th century. Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the […]
The racist worldview of Arthur Balfour
Arthur James Balfour will, no doubt, be praised effusively by supporters of Israel in the coming weeks for a brief document he signed 100 years ago. As Britain’s foreign secretary in November 1917, Balfour declared his backing to the Zionist colonization project. Through his declaration, Britain became the imperial sponsor of a Jewish state – […]
Looking Back on the Bible Unearthed
Lawrence of Judea By Martin Gilbert The champion of the Arab cause and his little-known romance with Zionism.
T.E. Lawrence—better known in Britain and throughout the Middle East as Lawrence of Arabia—was a lifelong friend of Arab national aspirations. In 1917 and 1918 he participated as a British officer in the Arab revolt against the Turks, a revolt led by Sharif Hussein, later King of the Hedjaz. He was also an adviser to […]
Memory in Ruins By David Hazony
For nearly a century, biblical archaeology has been a pillar of the Jewish national revival. Its professional approach, combined with its often dramatic capacity to reconstruct the history of ancient Israel, has done much to convince the world that the Bible is not mere myth, but a document that reflects the truth concerning central periods […]
Before Balfour: the Reformation helped to create the state of Israel – Giles Fraser
The execution of William Tyndale, who translated most of the Old Testament into English, in 1536. ‘It was the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, a project at the heart of the Reformation, that opened up the stories of the Hebrew scriptures to ordinary people,’ writes Giles Fraser. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images The Israel […]
Cromwell and the ‘readmission’ of the Jews to England, 1656
Menasseh B Israel (pdf document 62kb) Cromwell and the Jews 2006 marks the 350th anniversary of the re-admission of the Jews into England. They were expelled in 1290 in the reign of King Edward Ist. Their re-admission in 1656 under the Cromwellian Protectorate is interpreted by some as evidence of Cromwell’s toleration and compassion. This […]
The Emergence of Israel in Canaan: An Update and Criticism – Cristian Rata
The greatest problem with the ‘mixed multitude’ theory is that there is no archaeological support for it. After all, we are having a very difficult time to distinguish between Israelites and Canaanites, how can we even come close to distinguish between the various groups that supposedly make up this ‘mixed multitude’? The impression from most […]