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At a personal level Caton’s persistence in collecting poetry amidst the chaoslooks like an act of sustained courage but his purpose in providing details of hisown life is to allow the reader to gauge the extent to which claims to objectivitymust be attenuated. There are difficulties in this kind of approach and lay read-ers may find that anthropological engagement can rob the analysis of some ofthe benefits of scholarly distance. But the potential drawbacks prove intriguingrather than irritating and the book is refreshing and intelligent. The reliance onthe theme of ingenuous traveller confronting wily native is worryingly familiarfrom modern travel writing, where this trope is usually played for all it is worth,but Caton is extremely subtle in demonstrating the manner in which his statusas an outside observer mediates his contact with the people he meets.

Robbed of its metre, syntax and rhyme, the poetry which Caton collectsappears oddly prosaic to the western eye. What remains are a few occasionalarresting images such as a judgement on the republican successors of the imams:‘Those who come after are like the skimmings of animals.’ What is lost in aes-thetic terms by Caton’s literal translations is compensated for by the sense of thewider purposes which this poetry serves and the alien conditions in which it isproduced. Caton resists any facile attempts to assimilate local life into westerntraditions and his argument that engagement with this kind of difference isdifficult and messy but necessary is, as he emphasizes, a timely one.

University of Nottingham

SPENCER MAWBY

Cross on the Star of David: The Christian World in Israel’s Foreign Policy, 1948–1967

. By Uri Bialer.

Indiana University Press. 2005. xiv + 240pp. $39.95.Built on newly available Israeli sources, this monograph suggestively rather

than definitively explores the fledgling state’s early interactions with Christianity.Although unbalanced by the inaccessibility of collateral Vatican and other churchrecords, it tightly reconstructs relations with various metropolitan and localCatholic, Lutheran, Greek and Russian Orthodox interests, much as Coptic,Anglican, Armenian, Ethiopian and other sects are somewhat overlooked.Bialer’s central theme is their place in Israel’s overall search for formative legiti-macy and security. Creating a declaratively Jewish polity frequently uprooted orimpinged on pre-existing communities and rights, with whom Israel’s dilemmawas to reconcile on terms preserving its territorial, settlement, security andcultural imperatives. Overcoming the Vatican’s latent anti-Semitism and overtanti-Zionism, rooted deep in its diplomatic service, was a particularly demand-ing challenge. Difficulties were compounded by cleavages between Israel’s morepragmatic diplomats and its hawkish religious affairs ministry, which regulateddomestic Christian activities mainly to prevent any dilution of Jewish life, espe-cially by proselytizing educators. This internal institutional tension is indeed oneof the book’s most interesting sub-themes.

Jerusalem’s status was a vital issue, with dialogue on religious access con-trived to pre-empt UN internationalization. Bialer’s loyalties are suggested byrepeated subliminal references to the city as Israel’s pre-1967 capital; but he isfair when discussing Ben Gurion’s forcible restraint of embarrassing desecra-tions and expropriations by Haganah and other forces before 1949. Nevertheless,with the physical occupation of many ecclesiastical holdings often proving atrump card, Israel tended to play tough, often invoking mandatory regulations,

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© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing.

many of which Britain had tried at the last minute to dissolve. German Lutheranproperties were a notable case, where Israel felt particular justification; the break-ing up of Palestinian Christian communities, denying their rights of return, wasanother. Russian Orthodox and Catholic rights were handled more delicately forinternational political reasons, with general Soviet sympathies and, for example,Catholic South America’s UN voting behaviour at stake.

In ending at 1967, the book avoids qualitatively altered circumstances afterthe conquest of the Old City and West Bank; it does examine the banning ofChristian Arab clergy, revenue collection and pilgrims from Israel proper, despiteotherwise restored Christian access in the 1950s, and the carrot-and-stick approachon these questions which gradually detached the Greek Catholic Patriarch, Archbi-shop Hakim, from the emerging Palestinian national movement. Overwhelm-ingly, however, Christianity is seen in exogenous context, analogous to otheroutside cultural and non-governmental organizations, which tends therefore tominimize a closer and perhaps more challenging analysis of how Israel treatedindigenous Christian Palestine in a concentric context relating its broad foreignpolicy with Middle East inter-state politics, and Palestine Arab refugee, land andcitizenship questions.

Bronx Community College of the City University of New York

SIMON DAVIS

Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Repub-lican China

. By Theodore Huters.

University of Hawai’i Press. 2005. ix + 370pp.£55.00.

China today is interacting with the world (and, in particular, the west) in moreintricate ways than has ever happened in the past. Given this extraordinarydevelopment and the equally extraordinary transformations in Chinese societythat are currently underway, it is both imperative and enlightening to focus onan earlier period in China’s past during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies when the country’s intellectuals and writers first confronted the ques-tion of how western ideas and values were to be accommodated in the quest toguarantee China’s survival as a political and cultural entity. Focusing on proseessays and fictional narrative (

xiaoshuo

) written between the 1890s and 1919,Theodore Huters argues that there was a persistent sense of anxiety amongstwriters and intellectuals born of an awareness that China needed

both

to breakradically with its past (and accommodate western values) in order that a newnation be constructed,

and

to maintain a continuity with that very past in orderto retain some kind of cultural identity. Such a description of the dilemma facedby Chinese intellectuals confronted by an expanding west echoes that of JosephLevenson in the 1960s in his study of Liang Qichao, but Huters makes an addi-tional and significant point: that the period 1895–1919 should be studied in itsown right (with its own ‘paradigm’ and ‘research protocols’) rather than viewedmerely as a transitional period between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ China. Hefurther notes that it was precisely during this period that (Chinese) intellectualsfirst grappled with problems of cultural translation and engaged in the question-ing of universals and ‘post-modern’ deconstructions of the tradition/modernitybinary (assumed to be scholarly phenomena of the late twentieth century).

Huters begins his analysis with a discussion of how the assumption (firstenunciated in a 1866 memorial by Prince Gong) that western ideas had originated