Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (review)

170 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 Nonetheless, Craig has provided a new and rich perspective for understanding the continuing appeal of the Book of Esther. For that all students of Esther stand in his debt. Carey A. Moore Department of Religion Gettysburg College Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, by Yael Zerubavel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 340 pp. $32.50. Despite the growing body of books on Israel, few go beyond specific critical analyses to offer a broader vision of Israeli cultural life. Using Foucauldian and other contemporary theories, Zerubavel sets out to analyze the sources of Israeli national ethos. She examines this national ethos in the context of historical narratives, literary works, pedagogic texts, and widely shared practices and rituals, as well as folkloric expressins and media representations. Briefly put, she suggests that the Zionist foundation of the Israeli national ethos was constructed as a counterplot to the Jewish exilic master narrative. While the latter was conceived as a series of lachrymose events, the former was invented as a new beginning. The new Hebrew man was the counterimage of the traditional exilicJew. Where the Jew stood for servility and martyrdom, the Hebrew stood for heroism and strength. To legitimize the new Hebrew as the true Jew, Zionist educators constructed histories that posited the biblical past and the Israeli future as a continuum disrupted and interrupted by the aberration of Exile. Zerubavel selects three specific myths for close analysis: the battle of Tel Hai (1920), the Bar Kochba Revolt (132 BCE), and the fall of Masada (73 CE). Though over 1700 years separate the battle of Tel Hai from the other events that took place in antiquity, all three of the events were transformed by the historical imagination so as to become mainstays of national consciousness. All three historical battles ended with defeat and retreat, yet all three became symbols of heroic victory. Zerubavel examines the cultural transformation of these events in children's books and newspapers, noting the irony of the emergence of Yosef Trumpeldor, an officer who was decorated by the Russian army, as the symbol of the new Hebrew fighter. She also notes the irony of the emergence of Lag Ba-Omer and the rituals of bonfires as the celebratory transformation of the tragic day in 135 when Bar Kochba, the leader of the Jewish rebellion against the Book Reviews 171 Romans, was defeated. Similarly, Zerubavel notes that the modern pilgrimages to Masada, the military and paramilitary ceremonies, and the archeological excavations turned the site into a national symbol of successful resistance, when in fact Masada was the site of a gruesome mass suicide that led to the end of national sovereignty. In the founh and final pan of the book Zerubavel traces the decline and deterioration of these myths in macabre jokes, satires, and the abandonment of memory. Just as the myth of Tel Hai was invened to reflect profound disillusionment with Israel's policies in Lebanon and during the Intifada, so was the myth of Bar Kochba's revolt subjected to criticism amidst a state-sanctioned burial of the bones officially identified as the remains of Bar Kochba. The Masada commemorative narrative also came under critical scrutiny as scholars debated the heroism of the Zealots who supposedly died in defense of the fonress. Critics pointed out that the so-called defenders ofMasada avoided confrontation with the Romans and that their suicide was cowardly rather than heroic, and as such a poor collective symbol to be cherished and emulated. Religious critics juxtaposed it with Yavneh, the site of spiritual and scholarly survival. In the final chapter, "History, Memory, and Invented Tradition," Zerubavel offers a brilliant analysis of the narrative techniques involved in constructing and re-interpreting the commemorative narrative. Zerubavel demonstrates that narratives follow an ideology rather than historical fact and that they are structured so as to convey a desired message. Marginal facts are centered, while central facts are marginalized, ignored, or forgotten. The emergence of countennemories in contemporary Israel has given way to a process of a shattering of myths in the last two decades. This process makes possible the inclusion of diverse interpretations of...