A Godless City: Shabtai's Tel Aviv and the Secular Zionist Project

Critics have tended to consider Yaakov Shabtai an artist who succeeded in portraying Tel Aviv as a secular Hebrew city, in the manner of Yitshak Danziger who "invented a face" for the "new Hebrew man" in his well-known sculpture Nimrod. They thus made Shabtai into the "secular prophet" of Tel Aviv, whose life work delineated a "proposal for a secular culture."

Close consideration of the critical output over the years shows that the wish to read Shabtai's writings as a secular opus involves a tight knot of complex, and at times contradictory, positions. Shabtai is portrayed as a secular artist who labored to puncture myths, as someone who put a question mark behind Zionist as well as religious teleologies. But he is seen, too, as an author whose work offers the model for a "secular pilgrim," or, alternatively, whose work "almost rose to the status of myth"— a secular myth.

This article argues that the tangled, and even contradictory language of Shabtai criticism originates in a doubleness characteristic of Israeli cultural discourse. This doubleness moves between secularism, or the disavowal of the language of religion, and, at the same time, the use of the language of religgious revelation. A closer look at the language of Shabtai criticism reveals how

this discourse actually reproduces a tension in Shabtai's own literary output. This article shows that Shabtai's Tel Aviv emerges from a combination of two opposing approaches toward secularism, pointing out how they are reflected in a "dual image" of the city's relationship to the Zionist enterprise.

Not only have critics so far been unaware of this doubleness: through "identificatory reading," studies have tended to reproduce it. What we need here is a critical reading of the Tel Avivan space that Shabtai creates, from a political, national, ethnic, as well as a gendered point of view. The present reading unpacks the secular image of Tel Aviv by means of revealing the disavowals and identity politics that underlie such presumably "nonideological" notions as secularism or normalcy.