"The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man" is a phrase of unknown origin and without a primary source that is found in connection with stories, often set in the 1890s and less frequently in the 1920s, about a supposed Jewish fact-finding mission to Ottoman or Mandatory Palestine. In these stories, the phrase generally conveys an ignored warning that a Jewish homeland could not be reestablished in the Land of Israel/Palestine without interfering with the existing Arab majority. Variants The Guardian'''s foreign correspondent and expert on Israel and the Middle East, Eric Silver, told a version of the story in 1977: "An ageing pioneer was interviewed once on Israeli television. He explained how the elders of his Russian Jewish village had sent an emissary to Palestine to spy out the land. The man reported back: 'The bride is beautiful, but she is already married.'" Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi of the University of Haifa recounted another version of the story in his Original Sins (1992): "There is a famous story, told during a meeting between Prime Minister Golda Meir and a group of Israeli writers in 1970. A Jew from Poland visited Palestine in the 1920s. On his return to Europe, he summarized his impressions by saying: 'The bride is beautiful, but she has got a bridegroom already.' Golda Meir responded by saying: 'And I thank God every night that the bridegroom was so weak, and the bride could be taken away from him.'" UCLA professor of political science and history Anthony Pagden presented a different version of the story in his Worlds at War (2008): "When in 1897 the rabbis of Vienna sent a fact-finding mission to Palestine, they famously reported back that the bride 'was beautiful but married to another man.' But the implication of this wry remark—that the Zionists should attempt to marry someone else—was disregarded." The phrase has been cited as an 1890s fact-finding message in University of Oxford Professor of International Relations Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall (2000), and the titles of the books Married to Another Man (2007) by Ghada Karmi and (in Swedish) Bruden är vacker men har redan en man by Ingmar Karlsson (2012) are based on versions of the story. Lack of historicity In 2012, American author Shai Afsai published an article in the academic triannual Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies asserting that the stories in which the