Israeli historical geography and the Holocaust: reconsidering the research agenda

The case of the Israeli historical geography demonstrates how nationalism affects academic research agenda. As in many other cases of nation-building, Israeli geographers have played an important role in the manipulation of landscapes and places to form a modern Jewish Israeli national identity. Their role in the construction of national consciousness expanded following the development of a territorial national conflict with the Palestinian Arabs. Despite the eighteen centuries of the pre-Zionist Diaspora, and the fact that more than a half of the Jews in the world live outside Israel, Israeli historical geographers almost totally neglect Diaspora lifestyles and spatialities and ignore the impact of the geographical imagination of Diaspora Jews on the (re)construction of Zionist territorial concepts and space. Following five decades of a Palestine/Israel-centered agenda, it is time for Israeli historical geographers to turn to the research of different spatial aspects of the Jewish Diaspora. This move should begin with the research of the spatial aspects of the concentration and annihilation of Jewish European communities during the Holocaust, and to more general spatial aspects of Nazism, as well as to the political and cultural geography of the Holocaust remembrance.     

Mosaic art in modern Israel and the construction of a sense of place

The article deals with the construction of a narrative and sense of place among the Jewish immigrant‐settler society in 20th century Israel in the context of its efforts to establish a national collective identity on indigenous (i.e. authentic) foundations and with the symbolic struggle with the Palestinian national movement as its backdrop. The case study under discussion is the instalment in public spaces of mosaic decorations inspired by ancient Jewish mosaics unearthed in archaeological excavations. I argue that intentionally or unintentionally, these decorations functioned as agents in the construction of an authentic narrative and a sense of place by producing a link between the current and the ancient Jewish presence in the place. This practice went hand‐in‐hand with the hegemonic national dogma about the link between an ancient, allegedly glorious era of the Jewish people in Palestine, and the modern Zionist project.     

HOW NINETEENTH‐CENTURY GERMAN CLASSICISTS WROTE THE JEWS OUT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.     

Messianic time,settler colonial technology and the elision of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem's historic basin

Advancing the settler colonial paradigm through a temporal perspective on territoriality, this article argues that the Jewish messianic idea is a distinctive feature of Israeli settler colonialism and an important element of Zionist territorial production. Specifically, the article contends that messianic time constitutes a specific settler colonial technology of domination which finds place-based expression in the ‘historic basin’ of occupied East Jerusalem. This is illustrated through two sites: the City of David archaeological park in the Palestinian village of Silwan and the Temple Mount/Haram al-Shariff, current home of the Dome of the Rock and prophesised location of the Third Jewish Temple. Both are at the frontier of settlement in the historic basin and the messianic conception of a mythical past and redemptive future aids claims to territorial exclusivity by ‘disappearing’ Palestinians in the present. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of an analytical focus on time for settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and in political geography more broadly.     

Imagined homeland: landscape painting in Palestine in the 1920s*

Abstract. This essay examines the proposition that landscape representations both reflect and endorse national ideology. By studying in detail selected landscape paintings by Jewish artists in pre‐State Israel some of the assumptions linking landscape and nationalism will be revisited. In particular, I shall challenge received notions in Israeli art historiography that interpret the numerous landscape paintings of the 1920s as directly expressing the identification with Zionism – the Jewish national movement. Analysis of the subject repertoire reveals that artists usually ignored images of the Zionist settlement in Palestine. They preferred instead to depict oriental countryside or ancient cities in an emblematic idealistic manner supported by stylistic borrowings from contemporary French painting. The country in these paintings is more an idea than a reality. Yet they evoke neither the biblical past nor a Zionist futuristic vision, but rather an oriental Arcadia of an unspecified time.     

An unlikely alliance: the 1907 Ukrainian–Jewish electoral coalition

This paper contextualises a political alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish national activists in Austrian Galicia during the 1907 parliamentary elections, Austria's first elections with universal manhood suffrage. This alliance represented a milestone in the making of a new paradigm of Ukrainian–Jewish relations. Ironically, the Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, portrayed elsewhere as staunch enemies, were uniquely able to overcome the profound social, religious, political, and cultural barriers separating the two communities. Ukrainian nationalists recognised the potential of a nationalised Jewish community to undermine Polish hegemony in Galicia, while some Zionists saw the potential to elect Jewish parliamentary representatives in rural Ukrainian districts where Poles and Jews competed for the districts' second mandate. The alliance mobilised the Ukrainian and Jewish electorate around shared slogans and goals. It was a qualified success, leading to a more powerful national Ukrainian faction as well as the first Zionist faction in any European parliament. Although the two sides failed to repeat the alliance in the subsequent elections in 1911, the coalition sparked a new sense of history for both communities. It created a pro‐Ukrainian discourse in Jewish politics, and a pro‐Zionist one in Ukrainian politics. The alliance also exposes Zionism as a response to the European‐wide nationalist revivalism rather than a reaction to rampant turn‐of‐the‐century racial anti‐Semitism.     

The cloak,the cage and the fog of sanctity: the Zionist mission and the role of religion among Arab Jews*

Abstract. This paper examines the Zionist national mission to mobilise Jewish ethnic communities in Arab countries, in the period preceding the establishment of the state of Israel. It draws on archival texts to trace a phenomenon known in Jewish historiography as ‘Shadarut’; a voluntary religious practice of fundraising which was widespread in the Jewish world for hundreds of years. The paper shows how this pre‐national religious practice (to be labelled ‘the cloak’) was adopted and incorporated into the Zionist national project (‘the cage’), first generating tension between the Jewish religious establishment and the Zionist ‘secular’ movement, and then blurring the distinction between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a national identity. The paper shows how secular emissaries of European origin arrived in Arab countries as religious emissaries (‘shadarim’) and aspired to discover a strong religious fervour among members of the Jewish communities there. This is because in the eyes of the Zionist (ostensibly secular) movement, being religious Jews in Islamic countries was a criterion that demarcated them from their Arab neighbours. This analysis entails two main conclusions: (a) that contrary to the experience of the European Zionist national movement in which secularism and the revolt against the Jewish religion played a central role, in Islamic countries it was particularly the Jewish religion, and not secular nationalism that was used to mobilise the Jewish community into the Jewish national movement; (b) that the ‘shadarut’ practice refuses to yield to the epistemological imperatives and the common divisions that arise from the binary distinction between ‘religiousness’ and ‘secularity’, particularly in the Middle East. Some implications for contemporary Israeli society are discussed.     

From Masada to the Little Bighorn: The role of archaeological site interpretation in the shaping of national myths

Abstract

This paper describes the changing commemoration, political meaning and archaeological presentation of Masada and the Little Bighorn National Battlefield in an attempt to understand the role that each has played in the crystallization of national consciousness. In examining official efforts to preserve the site of ‘Custer's Last Stand’ – from its establishment as a US military cemetery in the late nineteenth century through recent archaeological exploration by the National Park Service – the paper analyses the theme of heroic death of ‘the few against the many’ as symbolic legitimation of frontier conquest. In tracing the history of the commemoration of Masada – from its initial identification by Edward Robinson in 1838, through its adoption as a Zionist symbol in the 1930s, to the large-scale excavations of the 1960s – the paper discusses archaeological attempts to verify Josephus' account of the mass suicide of the Jewish rebels and the site's use as a symbolic legitimation of territorial sovereignty. Finally, changes in the ‘official’ interpretations of the two sites (and emergence of dissenting viewpoints) are placed in political and intellectual context. This cross-cultural comparison is the basis for general observations on the role of archaeology, patriotic mythology and tourism in the development of modern nation states.     

The Muslim Settlement of Late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine: Comparison with Jewish Settlement Patterns

In the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, Palestine's rural landscape underwent a great transformation. This study examines how the Muslim population expanded beyond its traditional inhabitation in the highlands and settled the fluid inventory of marginal lands in the coastal plains and unpopulated valleys of Palestine. In settling these marginal landscapes their settlement dovetailed with Jewish settlement patterns. While most studies have emphasized the competitive aspect of this process, examining Zionist and Arab national claims, this research points to a different aspect of this new settlement—mainly how much the Jewish and Muslim settlement patterns mirrored one another and how they were part of similar physical processes and complemented one another. Relying on censuses, aerial photographs, and period maps, as well as other archival sources, this is the first systematic research to examine the full extent of new Muslim settlements in Palestine in the late Ottoman and Mandatory periods, and to draw parallels between this phenomenon and the settlement endeavors of the Zionists.     

Decadent pioneers: Land,space and gender in Zionist revisionist thought

Soviet Russia in the 1920s was the scene of intensified Zionist activity, fed by an economic and existential crisis among large segments of the Jewish population and tolerated to a surprising degree by the Soviet authorities. The article explores these factors and the “Soviet context” of Zionism, and documents the powerful influences they exerted on the young membership of the Zionist organizations. The author's interest goes beyond articulated ideological positions to include learned habits of work, political and cultural practices, and perceptions of the social and the personal. She analyzes the transplantation of these elements of political culture into Palestine by the 3,000-odd young Zionist immigrants who arrived between 1924 and 1931, cautioning that ideas and practices were borrowed selectively and modified by the reality of the Jewish settlement in Palestine.     

Imagining the Beloved: Gender and Nation Building in Early Twentieth‐Century Hebrew Literature

This article traces the gender dimensions of Zionist nation building by examining literary texts written in the first three decades of the twentieth century. It offers a gender‐oriented analysis of a range of canonic and marginal literary texts and their historical contexts, and pays special attention to the ways in which literary production in general, and in Hebrew in particular, became an essential component in the effort to create an image of a ‘New Hebrew Man’. This highly gendered image was a central foundation of the Zionist project of nation building in Europe, and in the Jewish community in Palestine. Hebrew poems, stories and novels produced and sustained the symbolic economy of gender of the Zionist cultural project. At the same time, I argue that some Hebrew writers resisted the overt and implicit ideological demands of this project by calling attention to the internal contradictions inherent in the feminine figuration of the nation and the attempts to transform Jewish masculinity.     

From the particularistic to the universalistic: national narratives in Israel’s mainstream press, 1967–97

The aim of this article is to study the development of the Jewish‐Zionist national idea as expressed in the national narrative as it appeared in Israel’s mainstream press during the years 1967–97, against the background of five critical events in the Israeli collective experience as well as in the wake of the Holocaust Memorial Days. This development is studied as a case of the immanent tension between nationalism’s universalistic message and its particularistic application. The Jewish‐Zionist narrative in Israel is found to be ‘shifting’ from its particularistic towards its more universalistic pole. This development is discussed as a transition from a ‘purely national’ to a ‘post‐national’ narrative, and is positioned in its local and global contexts.     

Jewish experiences in the Italian Risorgimento: political practice and national emotions of Florentine and Leghorn Jewry (1849-1860)

Recent political and historical debates in Italy have led to a re-examination of the Risorgimento. This article asks what this revisionist reconsideration of the national past means for Italian Jews and whether Italian-Jewish history needs to be rewritten. Taking Tuscany as a case study, this article examines Jewish experiences in ­Florence and Leghorn during the Risorgimento, from the return to power of Grand Duke Leopold II after the revolution of 1848-9 to 1859, when Tuscany joined the new Italian national state. Tuscan Jews participated enthusiastically in the national movement, playing a decisive role in the development of the new political culture and in creating the emotional appeal of the nation. Jews were deeply integrated into the new national state and shared the same values and political attitudes as their Christian counterparts. Any reconsideration of the Risorgimento must take into account that - from a Jewish point of view - this period had remarkable innovative aspects and promising perspectives.     

Hotel design in British Mandate Palestine: Modernism and the Zionist vision

From the early 1920s through the 1930s, an important yet forgotten avant-garde architectural phenomenon developed in the Zionist community of British Mandate Palestine. In cities and resort regions across the country, several dozen modernist hotels were built for a new type of visitor: the Zionist tourist. Often the most architecturally significant structures in their locales and designed by leading local architects educated in some of Europe's most progressive schools, these hotels were conceived along ideological lines and represented a synthesis of social requirements, cutting-edge aesthetics, and utopian national ideals. They responded to a complex mixture of sentiments, including European standards of modern comfort and the longing to remake Palestine, the historical homeland of the Jewish people, for a newly liberated, progressive nation. This article focuses on Jerusalem's most ambitious modernist hotel, the Eden Hotel, to evaluate how the architecture of tourism became a political and aesthetic tool in the promotion of Zionist Palestine.     

Imagining Palestinian Archaeologies: A Sampler

As three of the articles in this collection demonstrate, one central axis of the Zionist archaeological project is the absolute necessity of diminishing, and ultimately erasing, the importance and existence of aspects of “the archaeological record” that pertain to non-Jewish presences in Palestine, particularly and especially Islamic civilizations and the long-term presence of an indigenous non-Jewish Palestinian population. In this introduction, I focus, however, upon Zionist archaeology’s rearticulation of Jewish identity in nationalist form, an operation that has entailed the elaboration of a consistently simplified, unidimensional, or narrowly channeled interpretive version of Jewish history and Jewish identity in Palestine over time. Through several pointed queries, I suggest alternative interpretations of one element of the Zionist archaeological narrative that in turn could lead to other ways of thinking about the long-term presence of Jewish people in Palestine.     

从犹太复国主义到后犹太复国主义

犹太复国主义作为一种社会思潮和政治思潮,同早期的犹太宗教文化存在各种内在联系。现代犹太复国主义容纳了不同的犹太思想流派,并赋予犹太教中的返乡复国以时代内涵,借此实现了古老弥赛亚观念的现代复活。以色列建国后,犹太多数派中的强硬思潮长期制约着以色列和犹太复国主义的走向。后犹太复国主义是后冷战时代以色列犹太社会中出现的一种新思潮。它对以色列的犹太种族特征和发展方向及其对阿拉伯人的政策等提出了一系列批判性新观点。尽管后犹太复国主义思潮尚未摇撼传统和极端犹太复国主义在以色列政府决策中的话语权,但它却对未来以色列政治的发展构成了不容忽视的潜在影响。     

From Yekke to Zionist: Narrative strategies in life stories of Central European Jewish women immigrants to Mandate Palestine

This article examines the life stories of Jewish women who emigrated from Central Europe to Palestine in the 1930s, on the basis of memoirs written, or transmitted orally, many years later. Although the experience of migration could have caused a crisis in self-perception, their memoirs show that they managed to construct their lives (and identities) anew in a coherent way by means of two main narrative axes – continuity and meaning. The axis of continuity served to establish a bridge between the women's lives, before and after emigration, while the axis of meaning, focusing on the Zionist meta-narrative, provided justification for the choices they made. This discussion illuminates how Central European Jewish women coped with the challenges of immigration to Palestine, both those that were unique to the experience of aliyah to Eretz Yisrael and those that were similar to the challenges faced by immigrants in other times and places.     

Heretic or Traitor? Spinoza’s Excommunication and the Challenge That Judaism Poses to the Study of Religious Diversity

ABSTRACT

When political theorists talk about “religious diversity,” they usually intend the multiplicity of “religions” in a given society. Yet we now know that the secular, liberal framing of the problematic presupposes a controversial definition of “religion.” My primary goal, in this paper, is to reorient scholarly discussion around what we might call “the critical religion conception of diversity” – not the multiplicity of “religions,” but the myriad ways that the sacred intersects with national and political identity, some of which resist assimilation to the “religious” paradigm. Toward this end, I relate a story about Spinoza’s Hebrew reception in the interwar period. For Zionist intellectuals, Spinoza symbolized the deformations that “religion” imposed on Judaism’s self-understanding and the constraints that it placed on Jewish intellectual horizons. Studying the Zionist critique of “religion” exposes the limitations of received theoretical frameworks, which cannot address the kinds of diversity that were politically consequential for twentieth-century Jews.     

The family is worthy of being rebuilt: perceptions of the Jewish family in Mandate Palestine, 1918-1948

Although the Jewish community of Palestine was an extremely family-oriented society and the institute of the family played a major role in the establishment of the new Zionist nationhood, the historiography has henceforth paid little attention to its role, images, and functions. This article will examine the diverse and often contradictory perceptions and influences that have shaped the Zionist period. Traditional Jewish perceptions intertwined with modern, bourgeois, and revolutionary notions of the family, whether national or socialist. These contradictory perceptions were manifested in the contested professional and public discourse regarding the many dysfunctional urban families in Tel Aviv, who were treated by welfare authorities and mental health specialists during the 1930s and 1940s.     

Creating a country through currency and stamps: state symbols and nation‐building in British‐ruled Palestine

ABSTRACT. Recent studies have examined the use of currency and stamps for nation‐building in various contexts, with these artefacts seen as vehicles for indoctrination and gaining legitimacy by ruling elites – as a form of “banal nationalism”. This article goes further to argue that in moments of geopolitical upheaval, these symbolic artefacts can play a crucial role in shaping the very framework of nationhood. This article focuses on the Middle East during World War I and its aftermath, and on British efforts to shape public opinion through the issuing of Palestine postage stamps and currency (1920–7), which were intended to convey Britain's commitment to Zionism. Parallels are drawn to the introduction of Arab stamps and flags during the Arab Revolt (1916–18). The benefit to Zionist nation‐building and “Hebrew Revival” is discussed, as well as the strikingly different reactions of local constituencies – Arabs and Jews – to the political message of these symbolic objects.