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Alphonse Dupront analysed in Le mythe de croisade the survival of the idea of Crusade until the contemporary era. In this history, the 19th century has a special interest, since it actualized this latent virtuality of the western collective consciousness, and gave it new directions. The rediscovery of Palestine was made possible by the conjunction of very different factors such as the revolution in transportation, the rise of European imperialism, or the internal reforms in the Eastern countries (Egypt and the Ottoman Empire). The episteme of the Western sciences was also transformed by the emergence of new disciplines (biology, geology, philology), and the gradual formation of archaeology. The Christian and biblical Holy Land was rediscovered by the biblical archaeologists, and its image disseminated well beyond the scholars and learned men. This article studies some of the mechanisms of dissemination of these discourses, overall in the protestant world, and points to the connection to the birth of the Zionist movement: it has given more and more importance to the matter of the land, which has become in the 20th century the main issue, and has largely used not only results from the biblical archaeology, but also its methods for naming and framing the territory. Thinking about the birth of a Western protestant way of seeing the Holy Land lets us understand better the relations between Israel and the West since World War II, and we must finally remember of Alphonse Dupront's wider project, who tried to promote history as a psychoanalysis of the western collective consciousness and consequently a way of mutual understanding. This article is a contribution to such a project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]