Eitan Bar-Yosef
Biographic Data
| ID | 642368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eitan Bar-Yosef |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eitan |
| FAMILY NAME | Bar-Yosef |
| SIGNATURE | BAR-YOSEF E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6591-1839 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 13 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Balfour, Banksy, Brexit: The Balfour Declaration Centenary in Britain, November 2017
Issued in November 1917 to pledge Britain’s support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the Balfour Declaration has had dramatic historical repercussions, paving the way for the founding of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian Nakba, and the persistence of bloodshed. Tracing the complex dynamic of postcolonial guilt, self-exculpation, and amnesia that characterized various British responses to the Declaration…
Israel's Zangwill; or, The Return of the King of Schnorrers
This article explores Israel Zangwill's posthumous presence in Israeli culture, as reflected in various media and discursive arenas: press coverage of his death and Yahrzeits; trends in the translation, publication and staging of his works; the inauguration of streets bearing his name; and references to his views and legacy in various political debates. Demonstrating how the tensions and contradictions so typical of Zangwill's persona were interp…
Soraya Antonius’s Arab awakening: Palestinian identity, activism, and Anglophone literature
While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius's contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, p…
Shipwrecked in Jerusalem’: British Amateur Theatre and Colonial Culture in Mandatory Palestine
Established in Jerusalem in 1921 by a group of British officials, the Jerusalem Dramatic Society (JDS) was the most prolific amateur theatrical association in Mandatory Palestine; operating continuously until 1947, it played a key role in the cultural life of Palestine’s British community. Its unique features—a compressed timeline on the one hand, a surprisingly rich repertoire on the other—make it an ideal case-study, exposing subtle social and …
R obert H olland . The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination
“A splendid Midsummer shone over England,” notes Jane Eyre, recalling that glorious day in which she accepted Rochester’s marriage proposal: “It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South” to rest “on the cliffs of Albion.” When she discovers, at the altar, that Rochester is already married, Jane is encouraged to settle as Rochester’s mistress in his “whitewashed villa” in the South of France, “on the shores of the Mediterranean.” J…
Dr. Perowne and Mr. Baxter: Gothic Resonances in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
A guide to performance: Role-playing, theatricality, and celebrity in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide and My Dateless Diary
Raju’s performance as (and supposed transformation into) a holy man is only one of numerous other performances depicted in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958). These range from self-reflexive role-playing to direct engagements with theatrical and cinematic practices. Tracing the thematic significance of The Guide’s various performances, this article then turns to consider how Narayan develops the theme in a later and mostly neglected text, My Datele…
Bonding with the British: Colonial Nostalgia and the Idealization of Mandatory Palestine in Israeli Literature and Culture after 1967
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Yishuv's campaign against British rule has been idealized as a period of bygone heroism and commitment. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, this nostalgia for the pre-state, anticolonial struggle was complemented, even challenged, by a divergent nostalgic force—one that celebrates the romance of the Mandate's colonial features, yearns for the social and political opportunities made possible by the prese…
‘The Horror’ in Hebrew: Heart of Darkness in Israeli Culture
Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel's intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; …
Theatre, Masculinity, and Class in the First World War: Vivian Gilbert Performs the Last Crusade
Having fought in Palestine in WWI, the British actor Vivian Gilbert went on to narrate his wartime experiences—first in a series of lectures, then in a best-selling book. Rooted in his thespian career, Gilbert's self-fashioning as an officer/crusader builds on an array of performances—on and off the stage—which reflect gender and class anxieties, typical of WWI British culture
Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
The history of archaeology is generally told as the making of a secular discipline. In nineteenth-century Britain, however, archaeology was enmeshed with questions of biblical authority and so with religious as well as narrowly scholarly concerns. In unearthing the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, travellers, archaeologists and their popularisers transformed thinking on the truth of Christianity and its place in modern cities. This happened a…
New Cities for New Jews: Haifa as Futuristic Urban Fantasy in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland and Violet Guttenberg's a Modern Exodus
This essay explores the representation of the modern Jewish city in Palestine, envisioned in two fin-de-siècle futuristic tales: Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902) and Violet Guttenberg's A Modern Exodus (1904). Focusing on the northern port city of Haifa, transformed by the Jews from a poor Oriental town into a thriving Europeanized metropolis, both novelists employ the city's spatial, cultural, and human features to present radically different v…
Zionism, Apartheid, Blackface
Numerous theatrical productions in 1950s Israel employed blackface to simulate negritude on the stage. Focusing on Habima's 1953 production of Lost in the Stars-the musical drama based on Alan Paton's best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country-and reading it in the context of Israel's involvement in postcolonial black Africa, this essay demonstrates how, by reflecting the slippery nature of Jewish whiteness, blackface performances on the Hebrew …
'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture
The turbulent period from the Boer War to the introduction of the Aliens Act was marked by contradictory imaginings of 'the Jew' - pauper/capitalist, separatist/imposter, ideal colonizer/undesirable i
Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East
The striking image on the cover of Priya Satia's impressive study—a small Wapiti airplane whizzing over a camel party striding in the desert—is a perfect emblem of this book's theme: the role played by the informal network of Edwardian British spies in the construction of Britain's “covert empire” in Arabia, that “new form of imperial rule, invisible, barely existing on paper, designed for an increasingly anti-imperialist postwar world” (p. 7). J…
'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa
Spying Out the Land: The Zionist Expedition to East Africa, 1905
In a leader entitled 'Jews as Colonists', published in February 1896, the Jewish Chronicle proudly declared that 'Jews possess at least three of the most important qualifications which go to make successful Colonists — climactic adaptability, linguistic talents, and trading instincts.' This colonizing impetus, noted the Chronicle, could be traced all the way back to the ancient Israelites' mythical ties with both England and Africa: Both the clea…
(Post)colonial Jews
I'm Just a Pen: Travel, Performance, and Orientalism in David Hare's Via Dolorosa and Acting Up
Eitan Bar-Yosef's essay explores the affinity between theatrical performance, travel, and textual production by juxtaposing David Hare's Via Dolorosa (his one-man show in which he described his experiences visiting Israel / Palestine in 1997) and Acting Up (a diary in which he described his experiences performing Via Dolorosa). Tracing the playwright's various journeys-from the West End to the West Bank, from behind the scenes to the limelight, f…
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East? The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon‘s failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which mark…
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
Introduction: Holy Lands 1. Christian walks to Jerusalem: English Protestant culture and the emergence of vernacular Orientalism 2. The Land and the books: High Anglo-Palestine Orientalism and its limits 3. Popular Palestine: The Holy Land as printed image, spectacle, and commodity 4. Eccentric Zion: Victorian culture and the Jewish restoration to Palestine 5. Homesick crusaders: Propaganda and troop morale in the Palestine campaign, 1917-18 Epil…
Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture
IN ADDRESSING THE MEMBERS OF THE Jewish Historical Society of England in 1925, David Lloyd George spoke candidly about the origins of the Balfour Declaration. "It was undoubtedly inspired by natural sympathy, admiration, and also by the fact that, as you must remember, we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country." Lloyd George explained: "On five days a week in the day school, and on Sunday in our Sunday…
The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18
Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives or its complex historical consequences, the campaign in Palestine during the first world war was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Keen to capitalize on the romantic appeal of victory in the Holy Land, British propagandists repeatedly alluded to Richard Coeur de Lion's failure to win Jerusalem, thus generating the widely disseminated image of the 1917–18 Palest…
The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18
Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives or its complex historical consequences, the campaign in Palestine during the first world war was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Keen to capitalize on the romantic appeal of victory in the Holy Land, British propagandists repeatedly alluded to Richard Coeur de Lion's failure to win Jerusalem, thus generating the widely disseminated image of the 1917–18 Palest…
Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture
IN ADDRESSING THE MEMBERS OF THE Jewish Historical Society of England in 1925, David Lloyd George spoke candidly about the origins of the Balfour Declaration. "It was undoubtedly inspired by natural sympathy, admiration, and also by the fact that, as you must remember, we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country." Lloyd George explained: "On five days a week in the day school, and on Sunday in our Sunday…
Zionism, Apartheid, Blackface
Numerous theatrical productions in 1950s Israel employed blackface to simulate negritude on the stage. Focusing on Habima's 1953 production of Lost in the Stars-the musical drama based on Alan Paton's best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country-and reading it in the context of Israel's involvement in postcolonial black Africa, this essay demonstrates how, by reflecting the slippery nature of Jewish whiteness, blackface performances on the Hebrew …
Shipwrecked in Jerusalem’: British Amateur Theatre and Colonial Culture in Mandatory Palestine
Established in Jerusalem in 1921 by a group of British officials, the Jerusalem Dramatic Society (JDS) was the most prolific amateur theatrical association in Mandatory Palestine; operating continuously until 1947, it played a key role in the cultural life of Palestine’s British community. Its unique features—a compressed timeline on the one hand, a surprisingly rich repertoire on the other—make it an ideal case-study, exposing subtle social and …
I'm Just a Pen: Travel, Performance, and Orientalism in David Hare's Via Dolorosa and Acting Up
Eitan Bar-Yosef's essay explores the affinity between theatrical performance, travel, and textual production by juxtaposing David Hare's Via Dolorosa (his one-man show in which he described his experiences visiting Israel / Palestine in 1997) and Acting Up (a diary in which he described his experiences performing Via Dolorosa). Tracing the playwright's various journeys-from the West End to the West Bank, from behind the scenes to the limelight, f…
The Last Crusade? British Propaganda and the Palestine Campaign, 1917–18
Irrespective of its genuine strategic objectives or its complex historical consequences, the campaign in Palestine during the first world war was seen by the British government as an invaluable exercise in propaganda. Keen to capitalize on the romantic appeal of victory in the Holy Land, British propagandists repeatedly alluded to Richard Coeur de Lion's failure to win Jerusalem, thus generating the widely disseminated image of the 1917–18 Palest…
Christian Zionism and Victorian Culture
IN ADDRESSING THE MEMBERS OF THE Jewish Historical Society of England in 1925, David Lloyd George spoke candidly about the origins of the Balfour Declaration. "It was undoubtedly inspired by natural sympathy, admiration, and also by the fact that, as you must remember, we had been trained even more in Hebrew history than in the history of our own country." Lloyd George explained: "On five days a week in the day school, and on Sunday in our Sunday…
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East? The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon‘s failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which mark…
The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism
Introduction: Holy Lands 1. Christian walks to Jerusalem: English Protestant culture and the emergence of vernacular Orientalism 2. The Land and the books: High Anglo-Palestine Orientalism and its limits 3. Popular Palestine: The Holy Land as printed image, spectacle, and commodity 4. Eccentric Zion: Victorian culture and the Jewish restoration to Palestine 5. Homesick crusaders: Propaganda and troop morale in the Palestine campaign, 1917-18 Epil…
I'm Just a Pen: Travel, Performance, and Orientalism in David Hare's Via Dolorosa and Acting Up
Eitan Bar-Yosef's essay explores the affinity between theatrical performance, travel, and textual production by juxtaposing David Hare's Via Dolorosa (his one-man show in which he described his experiences visiting Israel / Palestine in 1997) and Acting Up (a diary in which he described his experiences performing Via Dolorosa). Tracing the playwright's various journeys-from the West End to the West Bank, from behind the scenes to the limelight, f…
'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture
The turbulent period from the Boer War to the introduction of the Aliens Act was marked by contradictory imaginings of 'the Jew' - pauper/capitalist, separatist/imposter, ideal colonizer/undesirable i
Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East
The striking image on the cover of Priya Satia's impressive study—a small Wapiti airplane whizzing over a camel party striding in the desert—is a perfect emblem of this book's theme: the role played by the informal network of Edwardian British spies in the construction of Britain's “covert empire” in Arabia, that “new form of imperial rule, invisible, barely existing on paper, designed for an increasingly anti-imperialist postwar world” (p. 7). J…
'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa
Spying Out the Land: The Zionist Expedition to East Africa, 1905
In a leader entitled 'Jews as Colonists', published in February 1896, the Jewish Chronicle proudly declared that 'Jews possess at least three of the most important qualifications which go to make successful Colonists — climactic adaptability, linguistic talents, and trading instincts.' This colonizing impetus, noted the Chronicle, could be traced all the way back to the ancient Israelites' mythical ties with both England and Africa: Both the clea…
(Post)colonial Jews
Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
The history of archaeology is generally told as the making of a secular discipline. In nineteenth-century Britain, however, archaeology was enmeshed with questions of biblical authority and so with religious as well as narrowly scholarly concerns. In unearthing the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, travellers, archaeologists and their popularisers transformed thinking on the truth of Christianity and its place in modern cities. This happened a…
New Cities for New Jews: Haifa as Futuristic Urban Fantasy in Theodor Herzl's Altneuland and Violet Guttenberg's a Modern Exodus
This essay explores the representation of the modern Jewish city in Palestine, envisioned in two fin-de-siècle futuristic tales: Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902) and Violet Guttenberg's A Modern Exodus (1904). Focusing on the northern port city of Haifa, transformed by the Jews from a poor Oriental town into a thriving Europeanized metropolis, both novelists employ the city's spatial, cultural, and human features to present radically different v…
Zionism, Apartheid, Blackface
Numerous theatrical productions in 1950s Israel employed blackface to simulate negritude on the stage. Focusing on Habima's 1953 production of Lost in the Stars-the musical drama based on Alan Paton's best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country-and reading it in the context of Israel's involvement in postcolonial black Africa, this essay demonstrates how, by reflecting the slippery nature of Jewish whiteness, blackface performances on the Hebrew …
Theatre, Masculinity, and Class in the First World War: Vivian Gilbert Performs the Last Crusade
Having fought in Palestine in WWI, the British actor Vivian Gilbert went on to narrate his wartime experiences—first in a series of lectures, then in a best-selling book. Rooted in his thespian career, Gilbert's self-fashioning as an officer/crusader builds on an array of performances—on and off the stage—which reflect gender and class anxieties, typical of WWI British culture
‘The Horror’ in Hebrew: Heart of Darkness in Israeli Culture
Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel's intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; …
Bonding with the British: Colonial Nostalgia and the Idealization of Mandatory Palestine in Israeli Literature and Culture after 1967
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Yishuv's campaign against British rule has been idealized as a period of bygone heroism and commitment. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, this nostalgia for the pre-state, anticolonial struggle was complemented, even challenged, by a divergent nostalgic force—one that celebrates the romance of the Mandate's colonial features, yearns for the social and political opportunities made possible by the prese…
Dr. Perowne and Mr. Baxter: Gothic Resonances in Ian McEwan’s Saturday
A guide to performance: Role-playing, theatricality, and celebrity in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide and My Dateless Diary
Raju’s performance as (and supposed transformation into) a holy man is only one of numerous other performances depicted in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958). These range from self-reflexive role-playing to direct engagements with theatrical and cinematic practices. Tracing the thematic significance of The Guide’s various performances, this article then turns to consider how Narayan develops the theme in a later and mostly neglected text, My Datele…
Shipwrecked in Jerusalem’: British Amateur Theatre and Colonial Culture in Mandatory Palestine
Established in Jerusalem in 1921 by a group of British officials, the Jerusalem Dramatic Society (JDS) was the most prolific amateur theatrical association in Mandatory Palestine; operating continuously until 1947, it played a key role in the cultural life of Palestine’s British community. Its unique features—a compressed timeline on the one hand, a surprisingly rich repertoire on the other—make it an ideal case-study, exposing subtle social and …
R obert H olland . The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination
“A splendid Midsummer shone over England,” notes Jane Eyre, recalling that glorious day in which she accepted Rochester’s marriage proposal: “It was as if a band of Italian days had come from the South” to rest “on the cliffs of Albion.” When she discovers, at the altar, that Rochester is already married, Jane is encouraged to settle as Rochester’s mistress in his “whitewashed villa” in the South of France, “on the shores of the Mediterranean.” J…
Israel's Zangwill; or, The Return of the King of Schnorrers
This article explores Israel Zangwill's posthumous presence in Israeli culture, as reflected in various media and discursive arenas: press coverage of his death and Yahrzeits; trends in the translation, publication and staging of his works; the inauguration of streets bearing his name; and references to his views and legacy in various political debates. Demonstrating how the tensions and contradictions so typical of Zangwill's persona were interp…
Soraya Antonius’s Arab awakening: Palestinian identity, activism, and Anglophone literature
While scholarship on Anglophone Palestinian literature has burgeoned in recent years, there has been no attempt to retrieve and assess the work of Soraya Antonius (1932–2017), author of two remarkable English-language novels depicting British-ruled Palestine from the 1910s to 1948, The Lord (1986) and Where the Jinn Consult (1987). Exploring and contextualising Antonius's contribution to this literary corpus, this article examines the cultural, p…
Balfour, Banksy, Brexit: The Balfour Declaration Centenary in Britain, November 2017
Issued in November 1917 to pledge Britain’s support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the Balfour Declaration has had dramatic historical repercussions, paving the way for the founding of Israel in 1948, the Palestinian Nakba, and the persistence of bloodshed. Tracing the complex dynamic of postcolonial guilt, self-exculpation, and amnesia that characterized various British responses to the Declaration…
History (19 works) · Art (17 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (13 works) · Literature (12 works) · Ancient history (11 works) · Archaeology (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works)