ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces into scholarly research a photographic collection of albums and texts created by a Zionist enthusiast during the early decades of the twentieth century. Haim Shmuel Mizrahi emigrated to Palestine from Corfu and documented the transformation of Palestine into Eretz Israel with photographs and textual accounts of local travels. His journeys, included in the albums as an unpublished, handwritten travel guide, regard the land through biblical sources, in ways that are directly impacted by the archive. His travels provide an important example of the impact of the Zionist photographic archive on private spaces. And yet, as a non-Ashkenazi Revisionist, Mizrahi’s hawkish views were at odds with the mainstream of the movement. Through his photographs and texts, his personal histories and public life, a more nuanced image of the impact of the photographic archive is revealed, which the institutional system could not have predicted (or reconciled).
