This essay examines the ways in which Jews were encoded into the holy land travel literature of the Christian Roman Empire (fourth through sixth centuries) as a means of naturalising and authenticating new modes of Christian, imperial power. Postcolonial criticism is used to analyse pilgrimage texts of the holy land (the Bordeaux pilgrim, Egeria, the Piacenza pilgrim) in order to explore various modes of constructing imperial Christian identity through use of the ‘figural Jew’ of ancient Palestine.