"...Will Issue Forth from Zion"?: The Emergence of a Jewish National Culture in Palestine and the Dynamics of Yishuv-Diaspora Relations

Reflecting on the transformation that his new idea—a Jewish state—promised to effect in the lives of Jews throughout the world, Theodor Herzl argued that "Once fixed in their own land it will no longer be possible for them to scatter all over the world. The diaspora," he continued, "cannot be reborn, unless the civilization of the whole earth should collapse." ¹ Hardly as confident of the potential for such a radical elimination of the Diaspora, Ahad Ha-am, the spiritual leader of cultural Zionism and Herzl's arch nemesis, argued that even should Herzl's political Zionism in fact succeed in creating a Jewish state, "the greater part of our people will remain scattered on foreign soil." For this reason, according to Ahad Ha-am, the proper aspiration ought to be, above all, for a spiritual center in Palestine. From such a center, he contended, "the spirit of Judaism will radiate to...all the communities of the Diaspora, to inspire them with new life." ²

Zionist thought, from its very outset, implied a radical transformation in the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and the projected Jewish center in Palestine. The undoing of galut (exile) was a goal shared both by radical Zionist conceptions, which envisioned the complete elimination of a Jewish Diaspora, and by more mild formulations, such as that of Ahad Ha-am, which foresaw the continued yet substantially altered existence of a Diaspora. That Diaspora, however—thanks to the transformative power of the spiritual center in Palestine—would no longer suffer the profound ailments of exile. The geographical- demographic change that the Jews were to undergo, in other words, would in its very essence bear profound implications for the nature of Jewishness in the modern world.

As the Diaspora itself was undergoing dramatic political, economic, and demographic changes (in which Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe played the role of both cause and effect), the small percentage of those emigrants who made their way to Ottoman Palestine began to make its impact felt in that land as well. During the decade preceding World War I, as the "New Yishuv" of Palestine developed and began to emerge as a nascent national entity with an identifiable culture of its own, one consequence was ongoing change in the relationship between that community and the Jews of the Diaspora. Although implicitly anticipated in virtually all strains of Zionist thought, the changing relationship was, from its outset, filled with unexpected substance and took on unforeseen forms, leading to what were often mounting tensions between the Yishuv and the Diaspora. The distress and discomfort that many Diaspora Jews—among them many Zionists—felt at the sight of the Yishuv's emerging culture served as a wellspring of polemics and debates that inspired new cultural undertakings, which would ultimately mark the beginnings of a veritable revolution of Jewish life in the modern world.

Although tensions between the Yishuv and its emerging culture, on the one hand, and the Jewish Diaspora, on the other, have been the subject of earlier scholarship, such tensions have largely been attributed to developments in Palestine and in the Jewish world during the interwar period. ³ Much of the literature on the emergence, or creation, of the "new Jews" and their consequent friction with their "elder" siblings abroad, moreover, has tended to focus almost exclusively on the imagery and ideas associated with this Zionist vision and has failed to place significant stress on the concrete cultural and institutional mechanisms that provided this system of images and conceptions with a flesh-and-blood reality.

* * *

Prior to the period of modern, nationalist-influenced settlement in Palestine in the 1880s, the Jews of the Holy Land had been largely supported by monetary donations from Jews abroad (the halukah system). As Hibat Zion (Lovers of Zion...