1869. Eça de Queiroz in the Holy Land

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

1869.
Eça de Queiroz in the Holy Land

Eça de Queiroz’s Palestine chronicles occupy a distinctive place at the crossroads of literary history and Middle Eastern history. They document Jerusalem and its Jewish quarter under late Ottoman rule through the eyes of a young European realist in formation, revealing both the material conditions of the city and the prejudices of the observer. At the same time, they mark a decisive stage in Eça’s own evolution, providing him with the descriptive techniques, thematic concerns, and symbolic geography that would animate some of his greatest fictional achievements.

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Eça de Queiroz’s brief passage through Palestine in late 1869 marked a turning point in his development from a lyrical novice into the great realist of Portuguese literature. Traveling as a 23‑year‑old guest to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal, he encountered not only a world‑historical engineering event but also the social and religious realities of the Eastern Mediterranean under late Ottoman rule.

The journey itself, undertaken in the company of his friend Luís de Castro Pamplona, Count of Resende, placed Eça within an elite transnational network. About one thousand dignitaries from across Europe and beyond were invited to the Suez Canal opening in November 1869. Eça’s route, via Cádiz, Gibraltar, and Malta to Alexandria, then Cairo, Port Said, Suez, and onward to Jaffa and Jerusalem, allowed him to juxtapose different imperial and local worlds in a single itinerary.

The first literary fruit of the trip was a set of four chronicles, “De Port Said a Suez,” published in the newspaper Diário de Notícias in January 1870. Scholars of Portuguese journalism see these texts as inaugurating Eça’s mature practice of reportage, blending vivid description with irony and social criticism. Much more extensive, however, are the notebooks he kept during his travels, which his son and daughter later edited as O Egipto: Notas de viagem (1926) and Folhas soltas (1966).

Eça’s Jerusalem, first seen after landing at Jaffa and traveling inland, differs starkly from the celestial city of religious devotion. In his manuscript notes, he describes an urban landscape of poverty and neglect: narrow, sloping lanes full of mud, slippery stones, crowded markets, and a general air of dilapidation. The city’s misery, he suggests, arises from the combination of a harsh climate, Ottoman administrative indifference, and the accumulated weight of centuries of conquest and decline.

The Jewish quarter of Jerusalem fascinated and repelled him in equal measure. On the one hand, he called it the most miserable district, emphasizing dirt and crowding. On the other, he recognized it as the most vibrant and densely populated part of the city, where intense communal life unfolded amid harsh conditions. His physical descriptions of the residents, pale, upright figures with “harshly aquiline features,” heavy beards, and dark, concentrated eyes, reflect both genuine attention and the racialized physiognomic thinking of his era. Eça ascribed to these faces a mixture of “avarice, hatred, cunning, fanaticism, pride,” a catalogue that reveals as much about contemporary European stereotypes of Jews and “Orientals” as it does about the people he observed. Yet the very intensity of his impressions testifies to the impact these communities had on him as embodiments of continuity and endurance in a city otherwise characterized by decay.

Economically, Jerusalem appears as a marginal town within the Ottoman system, marked by uneven development and fragile commerce. He comments on bazaar stalls crowded together in “miserable promiscuity,” unsanitary market conditions, and eerily empty thoroughfares that gave parts of the city the feel of a place abandoned. At the same time, Eça’s framing of dysfunction as “oriental neglect” reflects the orientalist habit of attributing structural problems to supposed cultural or racial traits rather than to imperial policy or global economic forces.

From a Jewish historical perspective, Eça’s 1869 notes capture a moment just before the transformations that would come with organized Jewish immigration and late Ottoman reforms. The Jewish communities he saw in Jerusalem were overwhelmingly traditional and religious, oriented toward prayer, study, and pious residence in the Holy Land. Their presence represented a continuity of pre‑modern patterns of settlement, supported in part by funds from diaspora communities.

Literarily, the Palestine journey bore its richest fruit in A Relíquia [The Relic], written in the early 1880s and published in 1887. The novel’s protagonist follows a route that closely echoes Eça’s own itinerary to the Holy Land, allowing the author to recycle descriptive passages and spatial impressions from his travel notebooks. Scholars argue that this interplay between observed reality and creative re‑imagining became a hallmark of Eça’s mature style, enabling him to transform travel experience into a powerful social critique.

Sources and Selected Readings

De Araújo, Luís Manuel. “Eça de Queiroz en Egypte.” RES Antiquitatis Vol 1 (2010): pp. 83-106.

Eça de Queiroz, José Maria. A Relíquia. Porto: Lello & Irmão, 1887.

Eça de Queiroz. O Egypto: Notas de Viagem. 3rd ed. Porto: Livraria Chardron de Lello & Irmão, 1926.

Peixinho, A.T. “Literature and Journalism in Portugal: The Major Contribution of Eça de Queiroz,” TMG Journal for Media History 24(1-2) (2021): 1 – 22.

Talbot, Michael, Anne Caldwell, and Chloe Emmott. “Perceiving Palestine: British Visions of the Holy Land.” Jerusalem Quarterly 82 (2020): 50–76.