"The Most Exalted Symbol for Our Time"?: Rewriting 'Isaac' in Tel Aviv

"Isaac is a passive object of the experiment," declared Moshe Shamir early in 1957, about a decade before his notorious shift to the right wing of the Israeli political map. Almost half a century later it is time to interrogate the psychological construction of the "first sons" of the Zionist revolution, especially their evolving use of the Aqedah and other sacrificial narratives as tropes for their own ideological predicaments.

This article analyzes the role of three modern frames of reference in shaping the discourse on sacrifice in Israel's most "Zionist" period, its first decade: Freudian psychology, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and twentieth-century scholarship on the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles. It argues that these newly discovered perspectives were employed in a dual process, one that signaled both a critique of sacrifice, and a psychological defense against such a critique. This ambivalence has ultimately culminated in a political dividing line between the upholders and rejecters of the Zionist, and also traditionally Jewish, position on sacrifice.