Inextricably Bonded: Israeli Arab and Jewish Writers Re-Visioning Culture

Introduction: Modern Hebrew Literature and Its Ideological Boundaries

Introduction Modern Hebrew Literature and Its Ideological Boundaries In his discussion of the “cultural controversy” among the various Zionist camps on the threshold of the twentieth century, Avner Holtzman identifies three projections of Jewish culture in the future Jewish state. First was “cultural Zionism,” whose most prominent leaders were Ahad Ha’Am and Berdyczewski. The considerable differences between them notwithstanding, both thinkers envisioned the Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel as the center of secular Hebrew national culture along the lines that the Jewish maskilim had developed in eastern Europe. Second was “political Zionism,” which, as represented by Herzl, saw the cultural character of the future state as a reflection of western European culture. Third was “religious Zionism ,” which viewed the Jewish state as the complete fulfillment of the Torah commandments. The debates among the camps—and especially within that of “cultural Zionism”—were for the most part fruitless because, as Holtzman tells us, the real problem lay in the “the absence of a body of literary texts . . . which would concretely shape the identity of the secular Hebrew culture.” The controversy was resolved with the sudden efflorescence of Hebrew literature in Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century. Having produced such literary giants as Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Shaul Tchernichovski, and Yosef Chaim Brenner, this literature defined the nature of Hebrew culture as a 83 84 Dissenting Literatures and the Literary Canon combination of the national and the universal. Composed in Hebrew, it did not, according to Holtzman, “limit itself to the national issues and Jewish suffering, but opened itself to the beautiful and to the humane in the world at large,” thus adopting the universalist values of an enlightened society. Holtzman concludes his essay with the realization that “this modern, profound, and rich literature constituted for both its writers and its readers the focus of secular Hebrew identity and laid the foundations for the future development of secular Hebrew culture.”1 The emphasis on the modern and secular foundations of Hebrew literature illuminates the centrality of the European heritage in Israeli culture. In its secularization of the Hebrew language and its separation from rabbinic literature, the new literature followed the European weltanschauung and its modernist artistic trends. While the Hebrew language identified this literature as national, the central themes of individuality, alienation, and the modern world highlighted the impact of European culture and its humanistic universalist attitudes. The nationalist Western orientation of Hebrew literature did not change when the center of Hebrew culture was transferred from Europe to Palestine. The culture of the Yishuv, and later of the state, has continued to define itself in terms of humanistic universalist values . At the same time, the growing cultural establishment maintained the exclusionary nationalist boundaries that promoted the Yishuv’s ideology of separation. That is to say, by defining itself in terms of the West, Hebrew culture severed ties with its Jewish Diaspora heritage in Europe and dismissed the Arab tradition in the land. Thus, Hebrew culture has shaped writers and readers, who have produced and received literature in a manner compatible with the Zionist telos to become like a Western nation. Perhaps most important , as the epigraphs to this chapter remind us, the self-definition of the Zionists as a European nation has determined the parameters of cultural “normality.” These parameters determined the “constitution of the literary canon,” which condoned either ignoring or appropriating and, in this sense, neutralizing anything that might disrupt the prevailing political norms of identification and conduct. A specific example of contemporary literary production and its reception provides a convenient starting point for an exploration of the parameters of the Hebrew literary canon. In his volume of col- Introduction 85 lected lectures A. B. Yehoshua makes an impassioned plea for moral literature. The book, significantly titled The Terrible Power of a Minor Guilt, urges fellow writers to “make an effort to represent and incorporate in our stories not only that which moves us and makes us marvel but also that which we consider good and bad.” Yehoshua believes that literature plays an important role in society because it is “relevant to the moral conflicts among people” and “a source of spiritual authority.”2 According to Yehoshua, to engage in moral issues is incumbent upon the responsible writer. Significant in this respect is the reaction of Ran Edelist, a reviewer of Yehoshua’s book, who shifts from seemingly effusive praise of Yehoshua ’s exhortation as...