Leaving the Old City of Jerusalem through Damascus Gate and walking toward Sheikh Jarrah along Salah al-Din Street, one cannot miss a European-style building – one of several in this quarter – clearly marked as St. George’s College. Not to be confused with the older St. George’s School, founded in 1899, the College was established in 1920, a few years after British forces captured the city in 1917. Stephen Need, dean of the College from 2005 to 2011, offers a narrative account of its history from the founding to the present day. Conceived as an Anglican foundation, the College is today an international and ecumenical institution, drawing students from around the world for courses of varying length throughout the year. The book is organized into five parts comprising twelve chapters, together with a rich appendix of documents illustrating the College’s structure and functioning. The opening chapters supply the historical context needed to understand how and why the College first opened its doors. Particularly valuable is Need’s treatment of the years following 1948, and later 1967: he shows how the College – and, in effect, the Anglican leadership – navigated these troubled decades, and how the local Anglican Church in Jerusalem came to embrace a Palestinian identity, most visibly through the appointment of its first diocesan Palestinian bishop, Faik Ibrahim Haddad.

After examining the College’s buildings and administrative structure, Need turns to the mid-1980s, a period he calls its “Coming of Age.” These years brought change to both the physical campus and the curriculum, along with an influx of visiting scholars and a growing reliance on local academic expertise, drawn from institutions ranging from the Hebrew University to Al-Quds University. Chapter seven focuses on the courses themselves, showing how they were designed to be interactive – taking students across the Holy Land to experience firsthand what had been taught in the classroom. Offerings such as “The Palestine of Jesus” combined visits to synagogues, churches, mosques, and archaeological sites over a ten-day itinerary. While teaching remains the heart of the College’s mission, in recent years it has also invested time and resources in projects such as Kids4Peace, which brings young Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, together with young Israeli Jews to build a space for dialogue from below.

Overall, the book offers valuable material and richly detailed insight into the Anglican Church and its mission across Jerusalem, Palestine, and Israel. It is best read, however, as an institutional history written from within: appreciative rather than critical, it documents the College’s activities without subjecting its mission or its operations to sustained analysis. Readers seeking a scholarly assessment of Anglican missionary and educational work in the modern Middle East will nonetheless find much to draw on here, even if they must supply the analytical framework themselves.