“Like A Necklace of Black Pearls Whose String Has Snapped”: Bialik’s “Aron ha-sefarim” and the Sacralization of Zionism

This study seeks to disentangle the relationship between Zionism and Jewish religious tradition by exploring Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik’s project of cultural ingathering (kinus). Bialik played a critical role in the Zionist movement’s endeavor to fashion a critical mass of Jews into a national collectivity; during the first decades of the twentieth century, he, along with other Zionist activists and intellectuals, believed that the nation’s aron ha-sefarim, its “bookcase” of classical Hebrew texts, its Torah, could be mobilized to construct a unified Hebrew nation from diverse Jewish communities dispersed throughout the world. This study argues that Bialik’s efforts to instill a new enthusiasm for the Bible, rabbinic literature, medieval Hebrew poetry, and other classical texts among Jews were less an expression of the nationalization of the religious tradition than the reverse: a sacralization of Jewish nationalism. Rather than secularizing religious texts, Bialik sought to imbue the national movement with a measure of their sanctity.

Drawing upon the work of theorists who challenge the distinction between “secular” and “religious” so often used to describe Zionist theory and praxis, this article argues for the persistent centrality of religion in the national movement and insists that the boundaries between the secular and sacred are permeable and overlapping. Notwithstanding its rebellion against and negation of religious life, Zionist nationalism (like other nationalisms) remained theological, and emerged out of a process of sacralization as well as secularization. An analysis of the cultural enterprise of one important Zionist writer and activist may be the first step in untangling the deeply entwined connection between the sacred and profane in the Zionist movement more generally.