Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land

Hung in my grandparent's house was a black-and-white photo of my great-grandmother, Esther Melamed, wearing dirty working clothes and a bright white headscarf, maternally hugging a young calf. During the 1920s, the time the photo was taken, Esther raised milking cows in her small Zionist settlement in northern Mandatory Palestine. I grew up staring at the picture, hearing stories about Esther and her deep love for cows and people. My grandparents never mentioned the calf, which was most likely a female. It was left unidentified, with no name or history. Tamar Novik's new book Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land is an excellent example of how people like Esther and bovines like her calf could (or, rather, should) be leading characters in the history of agricultural settlement in the region.Novik describes how biblical dreams of a land flowing with milk and honey drew Christian missionaries and Zionist activists to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the late nineteenth century. Soon, however, European settlers discovered a desert where they hoped to find a cornucopia. Novik shows how British colonial officials, Christian missionaries, and Zionist settlers promoted biblical visions of plenty using various technologies, legal decrees, and environmental policies. More than anything else, they reoriented the production and reproduction cycles of (primarily female) animals such as bees, goats, sheep, and cows and aspired to monitor and control reproduction among female settlers. Novik thus argues that plenty was not a description of the local ecologies that settlers found but a prescription for a technological shakeup that followed the colonial encounter. Colonialism in the holy land was thus more than a political project; instead, it was a "biotic settler colonial project" that sought to redeem culture and nature in tandem by creating plenty (144).The book opens with a short interlude telling the history of water buffalo and the people who grew, taxed, and eventually eliminated them from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century: a reminder of the region's long history of manipulating ecosystems, appropriating local knowledge, and utilizing bodies. The first three chapters focus on movement regulations as a biocolonial tool. The first chapter centers on local apiculture (honey production) and the introduction of movable frame hives during the late nineteenth century by the Baldensperger family, who were German French missionaries. The new mobile hives allowed year-round honey production and were used to demonstrate the superiority of colonial production over the local fixed hives. The second chapter focuses on British and Zionist efforts to regulate the movement of local goats and their Arab owners, both seen as environmentally harmful. Regulation attempts included measuring, counting, and categorizing and culminated with the Plant Protection Law (better known as the Black Goat Law) in 1950, which offered Arab owners replacements for their local goats with sheep or cows and advocated that Jewish owners adopt the house (white) goat over the local (black) one. The third chapter uncovers how some Jewish immigrants viewed local Arab shepherds as the historical link to biblical times and began imitating their shepherding methods. With time, however, Arabs were depicted as backward, and local practices were replaced by "scientific shepherding" that favored monitored pens over open meadows (84). The remaining two chapters demonstrate how "producing plenty depended on the bodies of females" (120). Chapter 4 focuses on the Zionist dairy industry, tracing experiments with cross-breeding and artificial insemination techniques to increase milk production despite local climatic predicaments. Finally, the last chapter tells the story of Bernhard Zondek, a German gynecologist who sought to solve the (overexaggerated) infertility problem among Jewish women and farm animals.Drawing on an impressive pool of sources, including agricultural manuals, memoirs, official colonial and state reports, and local media, Novik masterfully recreates the world of colonial technology and biopower. Arguing against the dichotomy between religious traditions and scientific practicality, Novik demonstrates that both shaped everyday practices of regimentation, extraction, and regulation of bodies and ecologies. Furthermore, her narrative also includes stories of "everyday resistance" (65) to the colonial project, highlighting the Arab petitioning campaign against the Black Goat Law and how local goats, sheep, and cattle frustrated the colonial project by refusing to stop grazing, staying in pens, and producing more milk, respectively. The various voices result in a vivid account of the complexities of the colonial encounter and illustrate how its shock waves continue to reverberate through local communities and ecological systems. Overall, Novik's work is a tour de force of historical analysis that would enrich historians of science and technology, environmental historians, scholars of Mandatory Palestine, and nonacademic readers alike.