Abstract

This article examines modern European intervention in the Middle East and the subsequent changes that shaped a new environment in the region as a whole and in Ottoman Palestine in particular. What were these changes and how did they intertwine with the creation, by the end of the century, of a substantial Western cultural and political presence in the Palestinian provinces of the Ottoman Empire? How did this presence, in turn, help to move the idea of a Jewish return to Palestine from the realm of fantasy to reality? This article examines how, in the framework of ‘productivization’ and European penetration, ideas of settlement of land—proto-Zionism—developed not just among Christian Restorationists but also within the Jewish community.