Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION In 1933, a young South African Zionist named Marcia Gitlin wrote up her impressions of her first visit to Palestine for the South African Jewish Chronicle. The first installment, devoted to Tel Aviv, opened with these words: When I look back now on the days before I visited Palestine and try to recall the conception I had of Tel Aviv I find myself at a loss. I do not really know what I expected to find. This I do remember, that I felt I knew a great deal about this first hundred percent Jewish town. I had fed on the reports of numerous people who had visited it, on the statements of Zionist propagandists and on various photographs that had come my way. From these, no doubt, a picture had been built up in my mind, but whatever it may have been its outlines have become blurred and faded in the live dynamic thing which is the Tel Aviv I have seen that I would scarce recognize it if I saw it today.1 The city Gitlin visited dated back to 1906, when an association of Zionist Jewish merchants and professionals purchased 120 dunams (30 acres) of land northeast of Jaffa. A predominantly Arab city, Jaffa had a number of Jewish neighborhoods, built at the end of the nineteenth century. The members of the association wanted to escape Jaffa’s crowded and substandard housing by creating a garden suburb. Construction commenced in 1909, and before the year was out the association members had decided to call their neighborhood Tel Aviv. The name, literally “ancient mound of spring,” was the Hebrew translation of the title of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist novel Altneuland (Old-New Land).2 Tel Aviv grew rapidly, but its growth halted suddenly at the outbreak of World War I in 1917. When the fighting approached Palestine, the country’s Turkish rulers expelled the city’s inhabitants. After the British conquest, the exiles returned to their homes and a new era of Tel Aviv’s history began. From a small garden suburb, it quickly turned into a commercial and manufacturing urban center. In 1921, Palestine’s Arabs carried out a series of 2 y o u n g t e l a v i v attacks on the Yishuv, as the Jewish community in Palestine called itself. Jewish refugees from Jaffa settled in Tel Aviv. That same year, the Mandate administration granted Tel Aviv independent municipal status, and soon thereafter attached Jaffa’s old Jewish neighborhoods to the new city. During the period of the British Mandate, 40 percent of the Jewish immigrants who arrived in Palestine settled in Tel Aviv. Most of the Yishuv’s political, economic, and cultural institutions were located there. The city became the territorial, demographic, and economic center of the Yishuv.3 Tel Aviv’s population, about 2,000 in 1919, swelled during the 1920s, reaching 40,000. By the end of the 1930s, it had quadrupled to 160,000. The municipality estimated that about a quarter of this population growth was due to natural increase, with the rest attributable to immigration into the city. At the beginning of the 1920s, Tel Aviv’s territory totaled 1,400 dunams—slightly more than half a square mile. By the end of the 1930s, it encompassed about two and a half square miles. Its geographical expansion to the east and southeast was blocked by the Arab neighborhoods of Sumil, Salameh, and Sarona, the last a neighborhood built by the German Templar sect. With land in limited supply and demand burgeoning, real estate prices soared upward. The high price of land encouraged intensive, dense construction, including the addition of wings, rooms, and upper stories to existing structures.4 Prior to World War I, Tel Aviv’s only manufacturing took place in small workshops. But during the Mandate, with the arrival of new waves of immigrants and the resulting construction boom, the first factories were built, and existing facilities were enlarged. During the 1920s and 1930s, about half the country’s industrial plants were in Tel Aviv, but most of these engaged in small manufacturing enterprises. The city’s location next to the Jaffa port and to a convenient road network allowed it to become a regional and national center for wholesale trade. Retail business also grew rapidly , at an even faster rate than the population. The city’s diverse economy eased the absorption of immigrants, because middle-class Jewish newcomers could often find employment in...