Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880-1990

5. History and Myth

195 5 History and Myth Moshe Shamir’s He Walked through the Fields The New Jew In 1917, the central board of ha-Shomer youth movement in Vienna— one of the precursors of ha-Shomer ha-Tza‘ir—published a handbook for the movement’s youth guides. The handbook set its pedagogic mission against the figure of the exiled Jew: We claim that the worst illness of all is the individual’s distortion in the doctrine of the human being, whereas the main fault lies in the lack of self-respect and the absence of national awareness that appears to be the product of this shortcoming . . . if not for these young people, achieving real and pure humanism would be unlikely. We all know we are the miserable heirs of our forefathers’ ugly deficiencies . [ . . . ] Sorrow tightens our heart, and this also must be said: even though signs of beauty and nobility of spirit still remain, the sad sight of today’s Jewish society completely obscures them. The average Jew is a caricature of a normal, healthy human being, both physically and spiritually.1 For the authors of the handbook, the Jewish experience of dispersion and exile is embodied, first and foremost, in and through the Jewish 1. Poradnik dla kierowników szomrowych, ułozony przez Naczelną Radę Szorwą, Wieden 1917, 7–8; quoted in Lamm 2004, 66; first ellipsis in original. On the handbook, see Lamm 1998, 54–55; Peled 2002, 97–99. 196 ✦ Rhetoric and Nation body: exile produces a deformed being that can only be characterized as a caricature—not merely of the normal healthy body, but of humanity itself. The crisis of the masculine body pits sons against fathers, for the youthful, healthy body of the sons is burdened with the task of counteracting the malignant effect of the degenerated body of the fathers. The authors portray the ideal young man as follows: “Our ideal is a young, muscular, strong-willed Jew, who thinks like a normal healthy person, does not debate endlessly or utter foolish witticisms, is disciplined and obedient with an idealistic world view, who loves everything fair and beautiful.”2 The authors thus relate the realization of the national project to the (literal) transformation of the Jewish body; through national pedagogy, the Jewish body will shed its Jewish characteristics and come to embody the European ideals of the beautiful and the noble.3 The obsession with the Jewish body is by no means unique to haShomer ha-Tza‘ir, and appears in countless forms and genres from the late nineteenth century on.4 Indeed, the articulation of the nationalist project as the molding of the human body, and of the male body in particular, is not uniquely Jewish, for the desire to transform the human being—body and soul—informs modern European discourses in general and nationalist discourses in particular from the French Revolution on.5 Drawing on divergent European sources—such as 2. Poradnik dla kierowników szomrowych, 16–17; quoted in Lamm 2004, 89. 3. See also my discussion in chapter 2. 4. There is a vast literature on this subject. See, e.g., Shmuel Almog 2000; Boyarin 1997, in particular chapter 7; Elboim-Dror 1996; Evron 2002, 211–26; Gelber 1996; 1997; Lamm 2004; Mosse 1993, 161–75; Boaz Neumann 2011, 116– 49; Peled 2002; Presner 2007; Saposnik 2007; Shapira 1996, 1997c; Shavit 1987; Meira Weiss 2002. On the image of the New Hebrew Man in literature see, e.g., Berlovitz 1983; Basmat Even-Zohar 1988; Gluzman 2007; Schwartz 2007; Zerubavel 2002. On cinematic representations in Mandatory Palestine and in Israel, see Miri Talmon 2001. 5. On the fascination of European national discourses with the human body in general and with the male body in particular, see George Mosse’s seminal Nationalism and Sexuality (1985). History and Myth ✦ 197 German romanticism, Polish nationalism, and the Russian Narodnaya Volya and Communism—the Hebrew discourse of the nation produced divergent, at times conflicting, figures of the New Man. Notwithstanding the differences between these figures, however, all asserted themselves against an archetypical Jewish exiled body that embodied, so they contended, a decadent, degenerate, exiled past. Scientific and, in particular, medical discourses, which played a decisive role in shaping the European experience of the body in general , were likewise central to the figuration of the Jewish body. These discourses, Sander Gilman notes, were structured around a dichotomy between the Jewish body...