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"Human Engineering" and Shaping Space in the New Hebrew Culture

2005; Indiana University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jss.2005.0026

1527-2028

Yigal Shvarts,

Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

Every evening stars shine out of the dark.Every morning the sun sows its light.No doubt, the sky here is doing well . . .All that is left is to create the land. —Nathan Alterman,"To create land!" During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Jewish thinkers, journalists, and writers created dozens of utopian models that depicted in detail a way of life they considered suitable for the Land of Israel.1 Most of these models were immediately forgotten, and others had a considerable public life span. A few, however, became "constituting texts," foundational cultural documents that reflected and, to varying degrees, shaped some of the basic myths of the new Hebrew society. They became founding texts that, as scholars in different fields have noted,2 describe events and processes that created, interpreted, and justified social structures customary or common in a specific community.3 This article examines three such constituting texts: Abraham Mapu's Ahavat tsiyon (Love of Zion; 1853), Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (Old New Land; 1902), and Yosef Luidor's "Yoash" (1912–13). The particular nature of these works as well as the result of the contest for control over public consciousness between the cultural models they reflected determined for decades the image of the society in the Land of Israel. [End Page 92] Before presenting these national-spatial models, each separately and in relation to the others, I will discuss the following two basic questions in general terms: What is the source of the tremendous emotional and intellectual energy that Jewish intellectuals over the generations invested in fashioning geo-cultural models of the Land of Israel? And, why was it that only in the mid-nineteenth century—starting with Mapu's Ahavat tsiyon—did these models take on a real and tangible nature?4 These significant questions cannot be answered without taking into account the complex system of connection between the different models—which, in this respect, represent all the modern models for belles lettres in the Land of Israel—and two spatial-national metamodels: between the texts that imagined the old/new homeland over the past 150 years, and the model of the Land of Israel in biblical texts along with the formative model of the eastern European Jewish town in its classical manifestation. The latter crystallized in Jewish shtetl literature and reached the peak of its sophistication in the tales of Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem. Taking into account this intertextual web, the fundamentally ambivalent stance evident in the ways these two basic models shape a national space can be seen as the major source for the amazing number of literary and nonliterary texts that present imagined models of the Land of Israel. In their important essay "Al ha-makom (antropologyah yisreelit)" (About the Place [Israeli Anthropology]), Zali Gurevitch and Gideon Aran distinguish between three types of place: "place," the daily space in which we live; "no-place," a liminal space always construed as extraterritorial; and "the place," the ideal space, an existential space that is noble and abstract. This triple distinction is derived from the basic biblical model, which also defines it: The biblical myth is a myth of place, but not of a place that develops out of itself; rather, of a place located in an idea that precedes it and exceeds its terrestrial limits and dimensions. The myth consists of various secondary myths in which the place is revealed from outside itself [e.g., the liminal space of the desert, or, in Gurevitch and Aran's term, the "limbo"], of reaching the place and leaving it, a departure that revives the myth of arriving as the myth of the "promised land." "The place" ("the land") is an idea that precedes "place." The precedence of idea over place means a lack of identity between place and idea. This is the dialectical element in Jewish thinking about place and the source of persistent ambivalence, because...