The Zionist Paradox

Hebrew Literature and Israeli Identity

Yigal Schwartz, Michal Sapir

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781611686029
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Many contemporary Israelis suffer from a strange condition. Despite the obvious successes of the Zionist enterprise and the State of Israel, tension persists, with a collective sense that something is wrong and should be better. This cognitive dissonance arises from the disjunction between "place" (defined as what Israel is really like) and "Place" (defined as the imaginary community comprised of history, myth, and dream). Through the lens of five major works in Hebrew by writers Abraham Mapu (1853), Theodor Herzl (1902), Yosef Luidor (1912), Moshe Shamir (1948), and Amos Oz (1963), Schwartz unearths the core of this paradox as it evolves over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.

1

The Love of Zion, Avraham Mapu, 1853

The Beautiful Daughter of Zion, the (Faux) Shepherd Boy, and the Cutting Up of the Monster

Had a talented writer seen us on that fine morning, he would have found ample material for a poem. This would have been a poem about four married Jews and how they lay unbuttoned on the grass, enjoying the day in silence. Also included would be a sun and its warm rays, a sky, nature, dewdrops, songbirds and horses, each prettier than the last. Such a writer should, of course, be generous enough to add some products of his own imagination too: a flock of sheep grazing in the meadow, a clear running brook at which “Jews do break their thirst.” He would doubtless place flutes in our mouths on which we would trill a song of praise to the beloved bride in the Song of Songs, just like the shepherds of yore. We had our own baskets of food, thank God, so that we would not have to impose upon the writer for refreshments.

—MENDELE MOCHER SFORIM, Fishke the Lame

The Legend of the New Age

The Love of Zion (Ahavat Zion) is the first Hebrew text to consistently and systematically rebel against the basic assumption that has underlined traditional Hebrew literature. This is the first text to describe an Eretz-Israeli imagined landscape from a position that assumes that it is possible to erase the “perennial gap” between the “place” and the “Place”—between the “earthly Jerusalem” and the “heavenly Jerusalem.”

The Love of Zion’s originality in this context was noted by the critic Shlomo Tzemach. In an essay entitled “A Conversation,”¹ written in the form of a debate held by several participants about the question, What is the use of still teaching The Love of Zion in Israeli schools? S. Tzemach’s representative in the discussion, “an old writer,” states that The Love of Zion is the first text in Hebrew literature to feature landscape description “as a self-contained form of art.” True, “an old writer” says, “This is certainly not the landscape of Zion and Jerusalem. These are the gardens of the Lithuanian capital Kaunas, with its mountain ranges and the banks of the Nemunas; it is there that Mapu built his arbor, under whose shade he wrote these words. But it matters not. In Witz’s first landscape painting, ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,’ it is also not the sea of Tiberias and its banks that are depicted, but the Swiss lake. The main thing is the urge to refer to outdoors views and transfer them from the realm of nature to the realm of art. Here in this passage, mute nature is metamorphosed by man into a world entirely expressive of the human spirit.”

The obvious question—why we had to wait until 1853, the year of The Love of Zion’s publication, before we could read landscape descriptions in Hebrew literature “as a self-contained form of art”—is answered by Tzemach through the words of the “teacher,” another participant in the fictional discussion about The Love of Zion’s relevance: that in that period a new individual was created, “an individual with a new feeling, which he had not felt [before], or which he had felt very vaguely, and it is this clear feeling which revealed to him the secret of the landscape’s beauty.” And he adds that “[this] new feeling that was attached to nature and colored it with its world [is] the love for the homeland, for the Land of the Fathers.”

Tzemach ties the appearance of landscape descriptions in The Love of Zion to the emergence of “a [Jewish] individual with a new feeling,” a Jew feeling a new kind of “love for the homeland.”²

Like Tzemach, I also believe that The Love of Zion is the first attempt in Hebrew literature to create a new Jew and a new national landscape. Like him, I also think that The Love of Zion is a book that should be seen as a foundational text, both on the socio-ideological level (that is, the level that concerns the plans and actions of many people [in our context, Jews] from different places across the world) and on the artistic/literary level (that is, the level that deals with the ways in which the imagined Eretz-Israeli landscape is portrayed and described).

The Love of Zion’s status as a foundational text can be deduced from hundreds of testimonies. Many Jews who emigrated to Eretz Israel in the first Aliyot reported that “this little book” captured their hearts, provoking an emotional turmoil that made them decide to pack their belongings and leave for Eretz Israel. The Love of Zion’s importance in the lives of its contemporaries can also be inferred from the thoughts and memories of famous public figures, writers, and essayists. Here, for example, is a passage from a piece by Ya’akov Fichman:

This naïve story became not only a primordial vision, but also a clarion call for a new life, a wake-up call to leave the dark narrow alleyways for the lush open land. The smell of fields and gardens arose from its pages and the voices of vine growers and farmers filled all its corners with joy. A longing for the grace of youth and love sang from all its chapters, and a kind of yearning for happiness, for a full life, for a generous sun—that filled the young hearts with warmth and intoxication.

It was the book of the time, its instructive and rousing work. It reopened our eyes to see the greenness of the land, it soothed our hearts, it carried us away from the surrounding ugliness and pettiness; and it also taught us to loathe the swarm of flatterers and hypocrites who stood between us and the fountains of life.

We today have no sense of the great revolution that this little book brought about at the time. . . . Anywhere it arrived it carried the spirit of the coming days. In every corner it reached it was received as the harbinger of a new gospel. Hope spoke through its lines—the hope of days to come. . . . [Mapu] created the legend of the new age, a legend that anticipated redemption and that paved the way for it.³

The Love of Zion’s status as a foundational text in the artistic sense—as a source of inspiration for many writers and a literary and stylistic model for imitation (both from an admiring and a disparaging position)—was pointed to by Dan Miron:

The short description of the town of Bethlehem and its environs in the beginning of chapter 4 of “The Love of Zion” left its mark on several generations of readers. First, from the novel’s publication in 1853 to approximately the end of the 19th century, this description—the first landscape description in the first Hebrew novel—served as both an admired stylistic model and a descriptive, picturesque “topos.” Both as a basic literary scene of the ideal Hebrew countryside, and as a perfect example of an elegant use of the language of the scriptures adapted to contemporary taste, the description was often imitated in literary and other texts (Eretz-Israeli travel literature, Zionist opinion journalism, the flowery correspondence of Hebrew-speaking maskilim and Hovevei Zion). Sentences such as “this beautiful landscape shall grow fresh olives and red vines with their first succulent bunches” or “its hills girded with joy and its dales embroidered with flowers and roses” seemed to flow spontaneously from the quills of writers and other purveyors of poetic phrases, intertwined with verses from Amos and Isaiah and with the poeticisms of Job and the author of Psalms. The influence of the Bethlehem description was especially evident in early Eretz-Israeli prose, which started appearing in the later decades of the 19th century, with the emergence of the “new Yishuv” . . . [the writers of the period] sidestepped the Eretz-Israeli reality as it was then . . . [drawing] instead . . . an idyllic-ideal picture of a renewed Hebrew life in the land of the Fathers [in Mapu’s style]. [Or, as Brenner claimed in his ironic introduction to “From Here and There” (Mi-Kan U-Mi-Kan), 1911] “wonderful poetic scenes of the glorious splendor of the Carmel and the Sharon, of work in the Bethlehem fields, of the courage of those born and bred in Eretz Israel—of the love of the daughters of Zion and Jerusalem.”⁴

The plot of this foundational book, published in 1853 and reprinted many times since, takes place in the kingdom of Judah, at the time of Ahaz and Hezekiah. It is a period marked by a crisis of faith, and later by a religious, social-moral, and economic resurgence. This resurgence is put under threat by an external force (Assyria), but eventually the threat is removed by divine intervention (the epidemic in Rabshakeh’s army).

The story centers on the love affairs of two young couples, Tamar and Amnon and Peninah and Teman. Tamar and Teman are siblings, as are Amnon and Peninah. Their families belong to the upper socio-economic and political echelon of Jerusalem.

These love affairs begin with a symbolic event between the family patriarchs, Yoram and Yedidiah. Yoram, who is about to go to war against the Philistines, meets Yedidiah in his country house on the Mount of Olives and persuades him to pledge on a handshake that their children will get married when they come of age. The handshake between the patriarchs is complemented by two symbolic events related to Hananeel, the father of Yedidiah’s wife Tirzah, and the only representative of the grandparents’ generation in the story. The first event: Hananeel, who is present in Jerusalem at the time of Tamar’s birth, entrusts his daughter with a ring “made by an artist,”⁵ which she is supposed to pass on to his granddaughter when the latter grows up. Tamar is supposed to wear the ring once becoming an adult, the ring serving her as “a testimonial that Tamar shall be an equal heir with my children to all my wealth.”⁶ The second event: Hananeel, who was one of the noblemen of Israel and is now among the exiles traveling on foot to Assyria, writes to Tirzah about a dream he had during a night’s stopover on the banks of the river Chebar. Here it is: “And I saw . . . a tall youth of a comely face, beautifully attired, a sword girded to his side, and wearing an open helmet. He had raven locks crowning his brow, and rosy cheeks; his forehead was as white as the driven snow; his jaw was firmly set and he had pearly teeth; he was astride a beautiful black steed. When I looked upon his handsome face, I cried bitterly and called: ‘Oh, God, my God, I too had sons as handsome as he, and now none are left to close my eyes in death nor to inherit my wealth.’ As the youth heard my cries, he alighted from his horse and took my right hand, saying in his gentle voice, ‘Why, I am he who is in love with thy grandchild, Tamar, and I am seeking thee in the land of thy captivity so that I may release thee and take thee to Zion to thy beloved children.’ And I asked him his name and that of his father, and he said, ‘This I cannot tell thee now, because some deep mystery enshrouds it, but it will come to light in the near future.’ He showed me the ring which I gave to Tamar, and he said, ‘Tamar gave it to me as a sign of her love for me.’ Then I awoke, and, alas, it was only a dream” (LZ, 29–30).

The plot thickens due to a series of intrigues, which forces Naame, the wife of Yoram, who has been taken captive in the war against the Philistines and exiled to the island of Kapthar (Crete), to run away with her children and wander around the villages, drawing their livelihood from seasonal work. Amnon and Peninah’s (temporary) poor financial situation and their apparently low social status do not deter Teman and Tamar, who travel to their parents’ rural estates (Teman to Carmel and Tamar to Bethlehem) and desperately fall in love with Amnon and Peninah.

The plot then continues to thicken, not only on the familial/private level and the national/political level (the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem and a group of the city’s residents—including Zimri, who is responsible for the plots against the two eminent families—who wish to discourage the besieged Jerusalemites and surrender to Sennacherib), but also on the symbolic level (the changing fortunes of the ring).

These complications, however, which are all interconnected, are soon resolved. The plots are discovered, the siege is removed, the bad guys get punished, and the lost ring is restored to its rightful owner, Tirzah’s father, Hananeel, and Yoram and Amnon return from their place of captivity, and the members of both families— and with them Hadoram, the family’s loyal friend from the city of Tyre—are united in a dual wedding celebration (Amnon and Tamar, Teman and Peninah) in the country house on the Mount of Olives that Yoram gave Yedidiah at the beginning of the story, when the two made the pact agreeing to the marriage of their offspring.

Topography at the Service of Ideology

We can learn about Mapu’s new position with regard to Jewish culture from a methodical examination of The Love of Zion’s topographical plane, that is, the work’s spatial organization, which is perceived by the reader as a kind of geographical map. One of the ways to perform this examination is to describe and interpret the structural and thematic link between the “central area” of the portrayed world’s map (the area that serves as the setting for the events that are crucial to the plot) and the “surrounding area” of this map (the area that serves as the setting for the plot’s background events).⁷ This distinction between the central area and the surrounding area is of great importance in the context of discussing the work’s status in terms of its historical reception. The surrounding area represents the “old” worldview—the one that was customary and common in the author’s time. The central area, on the other hand, represents the “new” worldview—the one that the author espoused and which he tried to disseminate to his readers.⁸

The surrounding area in The Love of Zion—which in cartographic terms can be likened to a large-scale map—is demarcated by six points: Jerusalem in the center; Nineveh in the northeast; the kingdom of Ephraim (Israel) and its destroyed capital Samaria in the north; the island of Kapthar, where Yoram and later Amnon are exiled, in the northwest; Botzra, where Tirzah and Tamar and later Amnon are exiled; and Echron, the Philistines’ city, in the southwest. The “central area”—which can be likened to a small-scale map—is delineated by four points: Jerusalem in the center, the Dead Sea in the southeast, Bethlehem in the south, and Carmel in the southwest.

The waypoints of the surrounding area were chosen according to a thematic coordinate system, underpinned by two binary oppositions. The first opposition is between homeland (Judah) and places of exile (the island of Kapthar and Nineveh, and the stations on the way to them, Botzra and Echron). The second opposition is between the city of God and faith (Jerusalem) and pagan, power-worshipping cities (the great Nineveh on the one hand and Samaria, the capital of the kingdom of Ephraim, on the other).

As a frame of reference for his story, an author can choose the present in which he lives or, more precisely, sections of this present. He can also choose segments from any period in the past. And he can also choose sections from the future as he imagines it. Whichever way, the author’s choice of anchoring his narrative’s events in a particular segment on the extra-narrative temporal plane is significant, since this choice links his story to a defined group of metanarratives that suggest several basic mytho-historical interpretive positions, each giving rise to certain worldviews with which the author has to contend. The crucial importance of a decision of this kind is clearer in works that turn to a defined period in the distant or near past that is routinely mediated in the collective consciousness through a specific metanarrative.⁹

Mapu’s choice of anchoring his story in the time of Ahaz and Hezekiah creates a sharp historical analogy between the location and situation of the author and his immediate readers (exiles in eastern Europe) and the location and situation of the story’s protagonists (the citizens of the sovereign kingdom of Judah). The writer enhances this analogy by giving the topic of exile and expulsion a special status in the novel’s plot structure: a considerable number of the story’s events take place under the strong influence of one exile (the exile from the kingdom of Ephraim) and the threat of another (the exile from the kingdom of Judah). The events on the collective plane have a direct influence on the events on the private plane. Many of the central characters are exiled from their country (Yoram, Hananeel, Amnon, Zimri) and some from their home (Naame, Amnon, Tamar). Furthermore, the exile of some of the characters (Yoram, Hananeel) dictates the exile of other characters (Naame, Amnon, Peninah). And this, among other things, is because another exile, Zimri (who is exiled from Ephraim to Judah), consistently uses the spatial rift between the characters to further his own manipulations, which, among other things, cause some of the characters to be exiled from the central area of the story’s portrayed world to its surrounding area.

The tension between homeland and exile in The Love of Zion has a clear moral dimension. This is due to the link Mapu made between the historical period in which the fictional events are anchored and the metanarrative that may be called the Nebuchadnezzar Syndrome. It is a symmetrical moral plot model that says that whoever does what is good in the eyes of God shall live peacefully on their land, and whoever does what is bad in the eyes of God shall be exiled from their home and land. This mytho-historical conditional pattern is reflected in The Love of Zion insofar as all the characters that come from the “sinful” Samaria are permanently exiled from their land (a course of events that is also orchestrated symmetrically and morally—Zimri, the bad character from Samaria, is exiled to Jerusalem and murdered there, whereas Hananeel, the good character from Samaria, is exiled to Nineveh and later returns to Israel, but to Jerusalem rather than Samaria), whereas all those exiled from Jerusalem return, sooner or later, to their city and home.

The second opposition around which the surrounding area in The Love of Zion is structured is, as already mentioned, the one between the city of God and faith (Jerusalem) and the pagan power-worshipping city (Nineveh); the same opposition, on a smaller scale, is created between Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Judah, and Samaria, the capital of the kin...