Glorious, Accursed Europe

9. Europeanness and Anti-Europeanness in Palestine

– 154 – Europeanness and Anti-Europeanness in Palestine Decidedly, almost all the development, science, art, civil consciousness, and humanity we have—all of it, all I say, comes from that land of holy wonders! You see, our whole life, from earliest childhood, has been geared to the European mentality. Fyodor dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions1 I bring forth Ashkenazi ideas and clothe them in the purity of the Holy Tongue. mordechai aharon ginsburg, Aviezer2 Culture is, among other things, the set of normative values a society holds. Thus it is important to point out, at the outset of this chapter, that what follows constitutes no sort of value judgment on the contents ascribed to any particular cultural system. As a result, we will do without opaque concepts such as identity, essence, collective character, or collective mentality, whose meaning usually derives from self-awareness and subjective feelings. Although it is essential not to downplay the importance and influence of perceptions, representations, and stereotypes, we will attempt to examine the role of European cultural models and traits in the creation and consolidation of the cultural system of the new Jewish society in Palestine. In other words, we will investigate the status and role of the European heritage within the ensemble of concepts, values, symbols, customs, and practices which formed the cultural system and dominant habitus of Palestine’s Jewish society. We will not attempt to describe the content of the new Jewish (Hebrew ) layer of this cultural system—a subject on which there has been Europeanness in Palestine 155 much research. In any case, it is important to reemphasize the need to distinguish between rhetorical declarations or ideological expressions of what is desirable and cultural realia, or what we can actually observe. Our interest lies in what can be defined as the European layer of Hebrew culture in Palestine. In other words, we are interested in the role played by the European repertoire in Hebrew culture—a repertoire acquired through processes of transference, adaptation, and innovation. It is important again to note that it is not our intention in this or the following chapter to describe the history of Hebrew culture and the various stages of its development. For such descriptions, we refer the reader to the works cited in our endnotes. Our intention is to provide an overview and a few insights germane to the context of this book. In using the term “European values,” we are not referring to the cultural models perceived as Ashkenazi—that is, to those models that were part of the authentic culture of Ashkenazi Jews and, more precisely, part of Jewish village culture. Within Israel’s cultural polemic, the difference between Ashkenazi culture and the European traits of that culture is frequently blurred.3 It is also important to differentiate between, on the one hand, representations and images of European culture and the symbolic role they played in the public discourse in Jewish society in Palestine since the 1880s, and their actual cultural influence, on the other hand. Most of those who have written about the Jews’ need to leave Europe— including those convinced that the purpose of that departure was, among other reasons, to escape the destructive influence of Europe’s immanent ailments, as well as those who believe that the Jewish spirit (Geist) could be saved only in Palestine—do not believe that it was necessary or even possible to abandon many of the cultural and material assets that were the fruit of the Jews’ Western heritage. europeanness in hebrew garb On June 8, 1895, Herzl wrote in his diary that the goal of Zionism was to “uproot the [Jewish] centers and transfer them to Palestine. To transplant whole communities in which the Jews feel comfortable.”4 Here Herzl referred, as we have seen, to the organized, planned transfer to Palestine of the high-culture assets of modern Europe’s urban, bourgeois world; these included not only values, but lifestyles and institutions. In contrast, one of the authors of the Ramle Platform, the platform of the Poale Tzion party,5 quoted a line from Horace’s Epistles: “Those who cross 156 glorious, accursed europe the sea change the sky, not their spirits.”6 The purpose was to clarify that it was not European culture that would be transferred to Palestine, but rather its revolutionary consciousness. This would enable the Jews to establish in a new location a Jewish world built upon...