Milk and Honey

An innovative historical analysis of the intersection of religion and technology in making the modern state, focusing on bodily production and reproduction across the human-animal divide.

In Milk and Honey, Tamar Novick writes a revolutionary environmental history of the state that centers on the intersection of technology and religion in modern Israel/Palestine. Focusing on animals and the management of their production and reproduction across three political regimes—the late-Ottoman rule, British rule, and the early Israeli state—Novick draws attention to the ways in which settlers and state experts used agricultural technology to recreate a biblical idea of past plenitude, literally a “land flowing with milk and honey,” through the bodies of animals and people. 

Novick presents a series of case studies involving the management of water buffalo, bees, goats, sheep, cows, and peoplein Palestine/Israel. She traces the intimate forms of knowledge and bodily labor—production and reproduction—in which this process took place, and the intertwining of bodily, political, and environmental realms in the transformation of Palestine/Israel. Her wide-ranging approach shows technology never replaced religion as a colonial device. Rather, it merged with settler-colonial aspirations to salvage the land, bolstering the effort to seize control over territory and people.

Fusing technology, religious fervor, bodily labor, and political ecology, Milk and Honey provides a novel account of the practices that defined and continue to shape settler-colonialism in the Palestine/Israel, revealing the ongoing entanglement of technoscience and religion in our time.Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey 1
Interlude: Bygone Buffalo and Lingering Value--A Prehistory of Plenty 15
1 Bible, Bees, and Boxes: Technologies of Movement and Obstruction 23
2 Getting their Goat 47
3 The Rise and Fall of Hebrew Shepherding 77
4 Holy Cow! Milk Yield and the Burdens of the "New Jewess" 99
5 Urine and Gold: Infertility Research and the Limits of Plenty 125
Conclusion: The Synesthetic Experience 147
Notes 157
Bibliography 225
Index 257“[Milk and Honey] was fascinating to read and provided deep insights into the ways that scientific knowledge and technical capacity were wrangled in service to the settlement of European Jews in Palestine.”
—H-Net Book Reviews

“Novick’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.”
—Agricultural History

“Through its focus on the interconnectedness of human and animal bodies, scientific knowledge, and colonial power, Milk and Honey provides a fresh perspective on the history of Palestine/Israel.”
—History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

“Tamar Novick skillfully examines the transformation of agriculture and animal husbandry adopted by the early Zionist settlers of Palestine, encouraged by the British, and continued post-1948 by the Israelis.”
—Jerusalem Quarterly

“Tamar Novick’s Milk and Honey is a richly detailed study that examines how the highly evocative rhetorical Biblical phrase—“a land flowing with milk and honey”—came to be embodied in settler and state projects to assert control over Palestine/Israel.”
—Technology and Culture“Novick enlists bees, goats, sheep, women and cows in a multispecies political history of remaking the land in modern Palestine, revealing the religion ingrained in the purportedly secular technosciences of modern nation-building. Enthralling!”
—Francesca Bray, co-author of Moving Crops and the Scales of HistoryTamar Novick is a senior research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.