A growing literature on tourism in Palestine in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries has emerged in recent years. This special edition seeks to both build on and challenge aspects of this body of work, and particularly to address the paradox presented by the fact that the “Holy Land” was actively produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an ancient and Biblical land, yet beneath this image lay the modern infrastructures that facilitated first religious pilgrimage and later more secular forms of tourism.

“Vocabularies  of  Tourism” seeks to broaden and deepen these studies in various ways. Firstly, it challenges the implicit or explicit focus of many existing works on mainly Christian tourists from Northwestern Europe and North America, considering in addition the presence and experience of travelers from Russia (the source of most Christian pilgrims, at least until the Bolshevik Revolution), and from India.  Secondly, it seeks to interrogate  the distinction between tourists and pilgrims—with the underlying implications of modernity versus premodernity with which these terms are often used—and stresses the presence of Muslim as well as Christian travelers in Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. And thirdly, it foregrounds the many diverse experiences of the ordinary residents of Palestine as they interacted with the tourist industry: as guides, phrasebook authors, business owners and employees, and producers of images and souvenirs. This collection investigates how citizens of late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, both Arab and Jewish, interacted with the imaginaries imposed on them by foreign travelers and by the needs of an industry which provided a livelihood for large numbers of people of various classes and ethnicities.