Rhetoric and Nation: The Formation of Hebrew National Culture, 1880-1990

7. National Aesthetics in Crisis

266 7 National Aesthetics in Crisis Amos Oz’s Political Writings the fifth zionist congr ess in Basel in 1901 saw the first exhibitions of work by Jewish artists in a national context in central Europe.1 On this occasion, the philosopher Martin Buber (1878– 1965) addressed the Congress on the importance of art for the upbringing of the Jews as a nation: For thousands of years we were a barren people. We shared the fate of our land. A fine, horrible desert sand blew and blew over us until our sources were buried and our soil was covered with a heavy layer that kills all young buds. The excess in mental power that we possessed at all times expressed itself in Exile merely in indescribable one-sided spiritual activity that blinded the eyes to all the beauty of nature and of life. We were robbed of that from which every people takes again and again joyous, fresh energy—the ability to behold a beautiful landscape and beautiful people. Blossom and growth beyond the ghetto was unknown to and hated by our forebears as much as the beautiful human body. All things, over whose magic poetry spins its golden veil, all things, whose forms are forged through art’s blessed hand, were something foreign that we encountered with an ineradicable mistrust. . . . The very thing in which the true essence of a nation expresses itself to the fullest and purest, the sacred word of the national soul, artistic productivity, was lost to us. 1. Berkowitz 1996, 129; Manor 2005, 3–4; Presner 2007, 65–71. National Aesthetics in Crisis ✦ 267 Wherever the yearning for beauty raised itself with tender shy limbs, there it was suppressed with an invisible, merciless hand. Wherever a young bud stretched toward the sun in fear and expectation, it was suffocated by the existence of the most terrible destiny.2 Buber turns a narrative of time and space, a history of territorial dispersion , into a tragic narrative of aesthetics. The myth of land and people abandoned and desolate becomes a myth of the suppression of beauty in exile. In exile, Buber asserts, Jews became blind to the beauty of both nature and the human body; that is, Jewish loss of national independence manifested itself not merely in Jews’ physical exile from land, but also in the loss of their relationship to beauty, a loss only a “renewed” national sentiment could undo.3 Toward the end of his speech, Buber sets what he calls the “aesthetic education of the people” (61/167) as a countermeasure to this history.4 Under this slogan Buber subsumes a number of themes. First and foremost, he shifts from the question of beauty to the question of artistic productivity, and the suppression of beauty is revealed as the suppression of the arts. The rumination on the vicissitude of the beautiful vis-à-vis history and territory thus becomes an oration on Jewish European artists and their artistic achievements in music, painting, and sculpture and, to a lesser extent in literature. This oration forms the bulk of Buber’s speech. It should come as no surprise that at the center of the speech are European Jewish fine arts for, as Buber makes clear, the discourse of the beautiful in a Jewish context 2. Buber 1999, 48; 1901, 152–53. In what follows, I cite first the English translation and then the German version of Buber’s speech. 3. On Buber’s conception of the Jewish within the context of the debate on whether Jews can produce visual arts, on the one hand, and of the nature of Jewish art as a national art, on the other, see, among others, Berkowitz 1993, 89–92, 129– 31; Bland 1999; Richard Cohen 2001; Frojmovic 2002; Gutmann 1993; Manor 2005, 13–16; Mishory 2000, 16–18; Presner 2007, 65–87. 4. I say more on aesthetic education and nationalism in my discussion of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in chapter 9. 268 ✦ Rhetoric and Nation is closely linked to European culture; “it was our marriage to Western civilization, after all,” he writes, “that made it possible for us to unfold our ancient desire for national existence . . . in the modern form that we call Zionism. And it was also that marriage which allowed our yearning for beauty and action . . . to mature to a young power in whose unfinished present form we venerate the...