Exorcising the "Angel of National Death" -- National and Individual Death (and Rebirth) in Zionist Palestine

During the decade preceding WWI, a sense that the Jews were a nation on its deathbed motivated Zionist cultural activists to work for the creation of a new Jewish national culture in Palestine. Imagery of death and a counter-imagery of rebirth consequently emerged as central elements in the Yishuv's new national culture. Informed by a European discourse in which the threat of racial degeneration and social decadence had become a ubiquitous trope, imagery of death emerges as a window into the new Jewish life which Zionists sought to construct. The refiguration of death was part of a comprehensive Jewish revolution which remained, almost despite itself, deeply indebted to the discourses and imageries of the traditional Judaism it sought to reject and defy. It was the encounter between a European nationalist sensibility and a quintessentially Jewish language that informed the consciousness and motivations of the Yishuv's cultural activists, and which shaped the culture they would produce. Their attempt to grant new meanings to death-and through it, to life-sheds light on a complex and nuanced interaction of old and new in Jewish nationalism. It seems to call for a historiography more attentive to the continued stirrings of the old within the new in nationalism generally-not in negation of nationalism's fundamental modernity, but towards a deepened appreciation of the nature of that modernity itself.