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J Billie Melman The Legend of Sarah Gender, Memory, and National Identities (Eretz Yisrael/Israel, 1917–1990) Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. . . . [T]he essence of a nation is that all the individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. —Ernst Renan1 C an there be a surfeit of memory? wonders the historian Charles Maier, referring not only to the collective preoccupation with preserving the past and commemorating certain fragments of it, but also to the burgeoning of the history of memory and commemoration during the last two decades. Students of history and culture, including historians , Maier points out wryly, act as though they were assigned the task of metaphorically dipping their madeleines in the memories of the past.2 He means, of course, the famous cookies dipped by the narrator in the first volume of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; their taste, which reThis article, which was first published in Zion 65, no. 3 (2000): 343–78, is dedicated to the memory of George L. Mosse, whose writings on memory, war, and masculinity have brought me to study the associations among gender, memory, and identity and Eretz Yisraeli culture. An English version appeared in the Journal of Israeli History 21, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Autumn 2002), special issue; and was reprinted in Hannah Naveh, ed., Gender and Israeli Society: Women’s Time (London , 2003), part 1, pp. 55–92. I thank Shulamith Shachar and Shulamit Volkov, who read an earlier version of the article. I owe special thanks to Natalie Zemon Davis and Avner Ben-Amos for their contributions to my understanding of the complexity of collective memory. I extend thanks to Deborah Bernstein, Yaffah Berlovitz, Dalia Ofer, and Margalit Shilo for their comments. The staff of the Beit Aaronsohn Archives (BAA) in Zikhron Yaakov helped me find a variety of documents dealing with the commemoration of Sarah Aaronsohn in the 1930s and 1940s. I am also indebted to Devorah Omer, Zohar Shavit, Yael Dar, Rima Shichmenter, and Naama Sheik Eitan. minds the narrator of the taste of the linden leaf tea that he drank in his childhood , was enough to carry the weight of “the immense edifice of memory.”3 This excessive preoccupation with memory, bordering on the obsessive, both within and outside the academe, is also characteristic of Israeli culture .4 Like the discourse elsewhere, so the Israeli discourse, both in the historiography of Eretz Yisrael before and after the establishment of the state and in the broader public debates, is marked by an intense interest in collective memory, in methods of commemoration, and in the preservation of certain narratives of the past and the forgetting of others. This interest is also a reexamination of national identity: of its boundaries and of what it includes and excludes. The “lieux de mémoire” (to use Pierre Nora’s term) of Israel and Eretz Yisrael have been diligently mapped since the second half of the 1980s. These sites include commemorative sites such as cemeteries and monuments, rites, official and “spontaneous” memorial literature (Emmanuel Sivan’s term), the Zionist calendar of Jewish history, as well as old revived or “invented” traditions of sacrifice for the nation such as the tradition of Tel Hai and the story of Masada.5 The ongoing fascinating discussion of memory and commemoration is thus, on the one hand, an examination of identity itself and, on the other hand, an elucidation of the question of which groups and which historians own memory and commemoration of the past. To paraphrase Natalie Zemon Davis, this discussion is about “who owns history?”6 Nevertheless, the debate over memory between so-called “old” and “new” historians, and between them (or some of them) and sociologists of various schools, is somewhat flawed, or deficient. Its deficiency stems from the fact that the concern with the relationship between the memory and myths of “Eretz Yisraeliness ” and Israeliness, and the formation of national identities is separated from the historical study of male and female gendered identities. With a few exceptions, the “general” discussion of memory has not yet taken into account the ways in which gendered identities formed the boundaries of the collective memory. This lapse can be seen in important studies of identity and commemoration, such...

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