Transmitting Jewish Culture: Radio in Israel

The written sign is the linchpin of Western civilization, the chief vehicle for the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Although rooted in an oral epic tradition, ancient societies from Babylonia to Rome assiduously transcribed and preserved foundational texts. The Hebrew Bible presented divine enunciation and human transcription of Torah as nearly simultaneous. The Jewish Oral Law of late antiquity metamorphosed into a massive corpus of written exegetical and legal texts, just as primitive Christianity's logocentrism ("In the beginning was the [spoken] Word," says the Gospel of John) engendered the medieval monastery, whose center was the scriptorium. In the early modern period, the development of print technology freed the word from its cloister and made possible the wide dissemination of abstract thought, which is most effectively expressed in concrete text. ¹ The nineteenth-century newspaper further de-sacralized the written word—Hegel remarked that newspaper reading was the modern substitute for daily prayers—and democratized it. But from the epoch of the Bible to the era of the boulevard press, the written word remained the common vehicle for signification and communication.

Between the two World Wars of the twentieth century, the cultural systems of the Western world were challenged by radio, which, along with cinema, were post-literary media of mass communication. (See Figure 1.) Radio restored the fallen pillars of pre-literary civilization, orality and aurality, by making the spoken word accessible to millions of listeners. But orality in the age of electronic communication—what Walter Ong refers to as "secondary orality"—as well as practices of listening were qualitatively different than in previous eras. In pre-literate society, oral communication and comprehension occurred via direct, immediate interaction, whereas the body of transmitted cultural knowledge was fluid and subject to change with every act of narration. In the technologically sophisticated societies of the twentieth century, however, whatever potential for spontaneity lay in the broadcast of human speech was overwhelmed by the written, prepared text: the political manifesto, the news bulletin, the dramatic soliloquy, all corresponding to a fixed body of knowledge. ² The spoken word, based on a written text, was broadcast from centers of power by disembodied yet widely recognized and trusted voices to an unseen population of workers and citizens. Radio also presented the paradox of a nonverbal mass medium in that the most popular broadcast material was music, in which words were either absent or subordinated to melody. During the 1920s and 1930s throughout Europe and North America, intellectuals, policy makers, and entrepreneurs debated whether broadcast speech or music should be seen as merely extensions of live performance or as a new form of communication altogether, and whether the primary purpose of radio was entertainment or education.

All of these concerns came to play in the Zionist project, which, like other nationalist movements in the mid-twentieth century, saw in radio an important tool for the nationalization of the masses. The founders of Hebrew broadcasting in Palestine hoped that radio would be an equal partner, alongside journalism and formal education, in the creation of a Hebrew vernacular and a Zionist culture. Aspirations toward the development of a specifically Hebraic culture dwelled with a desire to instill into the Israeli populace an appreciation for cosmopolitan, mainly European, high culture, in the form of the international language of classical music or translations of classic dramatic and literary works. Radio was also meant to be a source of general social and scientific knowledge. Thus Hebrew broadcasting, first in Mandatory Palestine and then in the state of Israel, was accorded a mission similar to that of the Jewish press in nineteenth-century Europe—to serve as a melits, an intermediary, between a raw yet educable people and the high cultures, Judaic and European, that were at present just beyond its grasp.

The case of Israeli radio provides a unique opportunity to study the relationship between the electronic media and Jewish culture. During the previous century, outside...