The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (review)

Zionism, the Jewish national revival movement, arose at the end of the nineteenth century in response to the two great challenges to world Jewry at the time: assimilation and a newly resurgent antisemitism. The Zionists attempted to address these challenges both politically, by creating an independent Jewish state in Palestine, and through a national psychological revolution, by creating a new type of Jew. In The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew, sociologist Oz Almog examines the Sabra generation—Jews who were either born in Palestine or came from Europe at a young age but were educated in social frameworks of the Zionist Labor movement of the pre-State Yishuv—the generation that was responsible for the creation of the new Hebrew culture in Israel.

By analyzing the writings that they produced, Almog attempts to create a sociological profile of the Sabra archetype, and in his quest he leaves no stone unturned: Almog’s is the most comprehensive study of the Sabra culture. He examines the Sabras’ language, folklore, manner of dress, humor, literature, and names, as well as the various institutions—youth movements, military units and agricultural settlements—that shaped the Sabras’ social and cultural landscape. Almog’s study is so detailed that the reader becomes familiar with even the most trivial aspects of Sabra life, including their nicknames and their proclivity towards mischief and practical jokes.

Where Almog is rich in describing Sabra culture, however, his critical analysis tends to be one-dimensional, if not simplistic. Almog regards Sabra culture as a “national religion” with a single article of faith—the negation of the Diaspora. The Zionist pioneers envisioned themselves as warriors and workers, as productive members of a healthy society—the very antithesis of Diaspora Jews, whom they perceived as feeble, effeminate, and even morbid. This anti-Diaspora sentiment, Almog writes, governed the many facets of Sabra life. It informed their fascination with power and military life; it dictated their hostile attitude towards Jews who immigrated to Palestine, including Holocaust survivors; and it explains their scorn for learning and intellectual life, which they associated with the abnormality of Jewish life away from a homeland.

The archtypical Sabra that emerges from Almog’s description, then, is that of a man —Almog all but ignores the place of women in Sabra culture—who from a young age spent his life either working the land or fighting for it; who preferred the life of action over the life of contemplation; and who was willing to sacrifice his individual desires for the benefit of the collective. However, this ideal type was not uniquely Zionist; other national movements of the period, which influenced Zionist ideologues (Italy, Poland) promoted similar ideal types. Yet Almog, with his propensity to focus on the minutiae of the Sabra experience, tends to isolate the Zionist and Israeli case from that of other national movements and fails to appreciate its general qualities that transcend the relations between the Jewish community in Palestine and the Diaspora.

Zionism, like many other nationalist ideologies, is marked by profound internal contradictions. The Zionists sought to renounce the Diaspora and many aspects of their Jewish past, yet they continued to see themselves as a Jewish movement that received its legitimacy from the Jewish tradition. The Zionists saw themselves as the bearers of a universal message and at the same time as the representatives of the interests of a single nation. In The Sabra, Almog views the Sabra generation (about 20,000 when the State was established in 1948) as a cohesive group that adhered to a monolithic ideology. The subject of his book, however, is not a group of intellectuals cleaving to a strict manifesto, but rather a heterogeneous collection of individuals who lived in cities, kibbutzim, and moshavim. While they attended educational institutions run by the Labor movement and youth movements, which inculcated in their young members the principles of Zionist ideology, the cultural attitudes that the Sabra writers exhibited, as Almog himself shows, were varied...