Long before Their Diaspora: Palestinian Mobility in the Early Modern Era

How far back can we trace the mobility that became such a marked feature of Palestinian life in the 20th century? To what extent were Palestinian notions of global interconnectedness a product of the modern age? This paper addresses these questions through a discussion of Bethlehem in the period preceding the great migrations out of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century. Bethlehem is a highly unusual Palestinian town in many ways: an intensely parochial yet strangely global village, perched on the edge of the Judean desert. Its significance as a site of Christian pilgrimage has produced surprising consequences. It is the only town in the region with a Catholic Christian majority, a demographic trend that established itself in the early modern period and led to a unique series of connections with the Catholic Mediterranean. Yet it is this very rarity that makes Bethlehem an interesting case study to probe common assumptions about Palestinian and global history. The paper discusses examples of merchants from Bethlehem travelling to Italy and France in the late 17th century as forerunners of the better known 19th-century peddlers who sold Holy Land goods all over the world. Through these traveling salesmen we are able to test the usefulness of transnational methodologies across time and space. They also raise important questions about the compatibility of the micro with the global.