[1] 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.
'"[3] 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.'
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 phrase appears are unsubstantiated.
Afsai has discussed Avi Shlaim, Anthony Pagden, Ghada Karmi, and others as examples of those who treat the stories as historical fact without providing primary sources.
[10] Following the publication of Afsai’s Shofar article, a number of writers on the Middle East began referring to stories featuring the phrase "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man" as apocryphal or as myths.