The “Married to another Man” tales

The ubiquity of “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man” stories illustrates how professionalism is often intentionally put aside to advance political agendas and as part of efforts to delegitimize the state of Israel — and how this approach has become so entrenched that apparent fictions are relied upon even when documented events could be made to serve such purposes instead.

Though these stories preceded his book, their very rapid spread began with the publication of Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W. W. Norton & Co.) in December 1999. In the prologue to his popular and often-cited history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Shlaim — now Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony’s College and a former Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford — wrote about the beginnings of political Zionism (p. 3):
The publication of [Theodor Herzl’s] The Jewish State evoked various reactions in the Jewish community, some strongly favorable, some hostile, and some skeptical. After the Basel Congress [i.e., the First Zionist Congress in 1897] the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine. This fact-finding mission resulted in a cable from Palestine in which the two rabbis wrote, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”
Shlaim offered no source for his account of Viennese rabbis, two fact-finding representatives, and a cautionary cable from Palestine, but with the publication of his influential book an assortment of “bride is beautiful” stories, which had been scarcer until then, quickly proliferated and became more prominent. Ghada Karmi, for instance — now a former research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter and a former Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House) — based the title of her Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2007) on the same “bride is beautiful” story found in Shlaim’s book.
All versions of “the bride is beautiful” stories — which are often set during the 1890s (in Ottoman-ruled Palestine) and less frequently during the 1920s (in British Mandatory Palestine) — lack primary sources. In some versions of the “bride is beautiful” stories, it is the First Zionist Congress, rather than the rabbis of Vienna, that dispatches the representatives to Palestine. In other versions, Herzl himself or his friend and fellow Zionist leader Max Nordau sends the rabbis and receives their reply.
Sometimes the same writer will alternate between the stories’ different versions. This can been seen with one of the stories’ frequent tellers, the Egyptian journalist and public intellectual Mohamed Heikal, who deployed a version on page 23 of his Secret Channels: The Inside Story of Arab-Israeli Peace Negotiation (HarperCollins, 1996):
After the Basel conference the rabbis of Vienna decided to see for themselves what Herzl was talking about, and sent two representatives to Palestine. A cable sent by the two rabbis during their visit became famous: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man’. It was a message Zionists did not wish to hear, and the inconvenient husband was never acknowledged.
Later, Heikal used the stories to portray Zionist Jews as unremittingly opposed to conciliation with Palestinian Arabs, suggesting that just as Herzl was unwilling to give up his plans to form a Jewish state in the Middle East — even though “the two rabbis he dispatched to Palestine” told him by telegram that the land was already possessed by others — it is similarly unlikely that contemporary Zionists will “compromise” (which is to say, agree to no longer have a Jewish state of any size in the Middle East) now that their sought after state already exists. In this subsequent 2001 telling, it is Herzl, rather than the rabbis of Vienna, who sent “the two rabbis” and received their cable.
Rawan Damen’s documentary Al Nakba (Al Jazeera Arabic, 2008/Al Jazeera World, 2013) incorporated a “bride is beautiful” story in which it is Nordau, rather than Herzl or the rabbis of Vienna, who “sent two rabbis” to Palestine. The Independent’s Joe Sommerlad repeated that version as part of his “A brief history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” (May 13 and May 20, 2021), published during the eleven days of fighting between Israel and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in May 2021’s Operation Guardian of the Walls. Of the start of the Zionist movement, Sommerlad (following Damen) wrote:
Austro-Hungarian journalist Dr Theodor Herzl’s book The Jewish State appeared a decade later, envisioning the establishment of such an entity with the coming of the 20th century. Two rabbis were sent by Herzl’s friend Max Nordau to Palestine to investigate the feasibility of the prospect but reported back: “The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man.”
As a result of my critique of Sommerlad’s online article, The Independent made significant changes to its content. The article was modified to state that the authenticity of the story about two rabbis being sent by Nordau to Palestine to investigate the feasibility of a Jewish state is “contested.” In addition, at first, the following italicized editorial note was appended:
This article was amended on 18 June 2021 to include a reference to Al Nakba as a source, and also to say that the authenticity of the quote ‘The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man’ is contested. We added a reference to extermination camps in relation to The Holocaust, changed an incorrect reference to Irgun ‘rising up’ in 1942 as it had already been active for some years by then, and also changed a reference to Resolution 338 to say it followed the Yom Kippur War, and not Black September, as had previously been incorrectly stated.
But a day after Hamas’ 7 October 2023 invasion of Israel, The Independent’s editors inexplicably republished what was essentially its same Al Nakba-based June 18, 2021 article — while removing Sommerlad’s name from the byline and replacing it with “Independent Reporters,” and while deleting all acknowledgment that the article had needed to be significantly amended over two years earlier in June 2021. (The 8 October 2023 version of the article is still viewable here.) Though an identical URL as for the 2021 article was being used by The Independent, the reworked article’s title was soon changed from “A brief history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict” to “The Israel-Palestine conflict, explained.” This kind of erasure is not unique in The Independent’s coverage of Israel, and has been shown by Adam Levick of CAMERA in another context.
In a less widespread variant of the “bride is beautiful” stories the setting is not Western Europe, the lifetime of Herzl, or even the nineteenth century. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi — now Emeritus Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa — related a version supposedly involving Golda Meir on page 74 of his Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel (Pluto Press, 1992):
There is a famous story, told during a meeting between Prime Minister Golda Meir and a group of Israeli writers in 1970. A Jew from Poland visited Palestine in the 1920s. On his return to Europe, he summarized his impressions by saying: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she has got a bridegroom already’. Golda Meir responded by saying: ‘And I thank God every night that the bridegroom was so weak, and the bride could be taken away from him.’
As is the case with the two rabbinic representatives from Vienna in other versions, the lone Jewish traveler to Palestine in Beit-Hallahmi’s story is unnamed. The traveler’s town or city of origin is not identified, either, and no specific year is given for his visit to Palestine or return to Poland. Beit-Hallahmi gave a year for Meir’s meeting with Israeli writers, but no precise date or reference, and offered no source for the “famous story.”
Ilan Pappe — Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter — began the fourth chapter of his Ten Myths about Israel (Verso Books, 2017), which focused on discrediting the notion that “Zionism Is Not Colonialism” and in which he argued against what he described as the “myth…that Zionism is a liberal national liberation movement” (p. xi), with this account (p. 41):
The land of Palestine was not empty when the first Zionist settlers arrived there in 1882. This fact was known to the Zionist leaders even before the first Jewish settlers arrived. A delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations reported back to their colleagues: “the bride is beautiful but married to another man.” Nevertheless, when they first arrived, the early settlers were surprised to encounter the locals whom they regarded as invaders and strangers. In their view, the native Palestinians had usurped their homeland.
Who was in the delegation to Palestine? When was it sent? By which early Zionist organizations? Pappe cited Beit-Hallahmi’s Original Sins as the source for the “bride is beautiful” story he told. But Original Sins made no mention of a pre-1882 “delegation sent to Palestine by the early Zionist organizations” and reporting “back to their colleagues” that “the bride is beautiful but married to another man.” Rather, Beit-Hallahmi wrote of “a Jew from Poland” who “visited Palestine in the 1920s” and who had said, “The bride is beautiful, but she has got a bridegroom already.” How did Pappe come by this anti-Zionist myth he related as historical fact? Why did he alter the details of Beit-Hallahmi’s version involving Meir? Pappe’s use of a “bride is beautiful” story is symptomatic of his broader tendency to misrepresent information and misuse sources. Yet, without a trace of irony or self-awareness, he opened Ten Myths about Israel, which he claimed was meant to challenge Zionist “myths, which appear in the public domain as indisputable truths” (p. x), with these sentences (p. ix):
History lies at the core of every conflict. A true and unbiased understanding of the past offers the possibility of peace. The distortion or manipulation of history, in contrast, will only sow disaster. As the example of the Israel-Palestine conflict shows, historical disinformation, even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm.
A “bride is beautiful” story also showed up in an article by the late Eric Silver, foreign correspondent and expert on Israel and the Middle East for The Guardian (“Decade of Disillusion,” June 4, 1977, p. 7), written on the ten-year anniversary of the Six-Day War:
An ageing pioneer was interviewed once on Israeli television. He explained how the elders of his Russian Jewish village had sent an emissary to Palestine to spy out the land. The man reported back: “The bride is beautiful, but she is already married.”
Silver’s language of spying out the land calls to mind the Biblical episode of the twelve Israelite spies sent to the Promised Land in Numbers 13, ten of whom advised Moses against trying to conquer the territory, reporting that “it is indeed a bountiful country — a land flowing with milk and honey.… But the people living there are powerful, and their towns are large and fortified” (vv. 27–28). How did Silver learn about this interview that “once” took place? What was the ageing pioneer’s name? When was he interviewed on Israeli television? On what program? Who was the interviewer? When did the emissary travel to Palestine? Which Russian Jewish village were the pioneer and the emissary from? Silver disregarded those questions.
And a version of the stories made its way into Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s 2015 documentary Colliding Dreams. In the film’s second section, “One Land. Two Peoples,” Yaakov (Kobi) Sharett (the eldest son of Israel’s second prime minister, Moshe Sharett) narrated the following over old black-and-white footage from the Land of Israel/Palestine, accompanied by melancholy piano music:
In the early years of Zionism, certain groups sent a mission to Palestine to see whether it is really a place which millions of Jews can go into. So they went around Palestine and then came back and wrote a report. And in the report, they said something of the sort — I think it was true: “Palestine is a wonderful place. It’s like a beautiful girl. But the girl is already engaged.” Meaning that it belongs already to some other people.
Sharett’s version does not have even the illusion of specificity, such as a decade (pre-1882, the 1890s, or the 1920s), a European location (Vienna, Poland, or Russia), the size of the mission to Palestine (a lone traveler, two rabbis, or a larger delegation), or descriptive information about which organizations or individuals sent him/them and received his/their report (village elders, a rabbinic organization, a Zionist organization, Herzl, or Nordau). “Certain groups sent a mission.” Who? When? From where? Sharett believed the mission’s “report” to be “true,” and the filmmakers’ pictorial and musical framing of his story lends it credence, signaling to viewers that this was an event that took place in the early years of Zionism — conveyed by an authoritative speaker, the son of an Israeli prime minister — which sums up the injustice at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In June 2012, I published “‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man’: Historical Fabrication and an Anti-Zionist Myth” (Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 30, no. 3, pp. 35–61). I followed up my 2012 Shofar article with several shorter pieces, including “‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’ The tenacity of an anti-Zionist fable” (Fathom Journal, Autumn 2020), “‘The Bride Is Beautiful But She Is Married to Another Man’ Stories” (Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2024), and “An Analysis of ‘The Bride is Beautiful but she is Married to another Man’ Tales” (New English Review, January 2025). This much has remained constant: while no primary sources for the stories have surfaced, they continue to be retold uncritically — and by now often with full awareness, on the part of those who tell them, that the stories are baseless. The anti-Zionist potential inherent in the “bride is beautiful” stories remains irresistible to many scholars, journalists, and filmmakers.
When Shlaim published an “Updated and Expanded” edition of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (W. W. Norton & Co., 2014), he once again, and still without offering a source, included a “bride is beautiful” story. He made, however, one change. Shlaim now, without explanation, cited it as “an apocryphal story”: “After the Basel Congress, according to an apocryphal story, the rabbis of Vienna decided to explore Herzl’s ideas and sent two representatives to Palestine” (pp. 3–4). Even so, Shlaim went on to discuss the story as though it were factual and not apocryphal, exactly as he had done in 1999. Shlaim has taken the same approach on page 34–35 of his latest book, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld Publications, 2023):
Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Viennese Jew and the father of political Zionism, made this promise in 1896: ‘For Europe we shall serve there as the vanguard of civilisation against the barbarians.’ Apocryphally, the rabbis of Vienna decided to explore Herzl’s ideas and sent two representatives to Palestine. The fact-finding mission resulted in a cable from Palestine in which the two rabbis wrote: ‘The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.’
That now-pervasive “bride is beautiful” story has been too central to Shlaim’s chronicling of Zionism to be treated with the historical rigor that would exclude it.
For more by Shai Afsai on this subject, see here.