In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

J Hagar Salamon A Woman’s Life Story as a Foundation Legend of Local Identity At every lecture appeared a woman, bejeweled, tall, impressive, and at every lecture she disturbed. She disturbed every lecturer. Every foreign word she thunderously corrected immediately, and she immediately had a parallel word in Hebrew . And afterwards that woman would give a lecture on Arab dresses. And I sat there with my eyes actually rolling, actually, from all this course and from this personality . . . T his was the description given by a participant in a Jerusalem women’s embroidery group of her meeting with Zohar Wilbush, whom the embroiderers consider the “founding mother” of a female dynasty organized into embroidery groups in various places in Israel.1 The centrality of the figure of Zohar Wilbush, the conundrum of her age, and the mythological characteristics relating to her past stood out starkly in the embroidery group’s discourse. The women in the embroidery group drew a connection between her and the heroic past and struggle for independence in the prestate period. This stemmed from her family tree bearing famous figures from the history of the Yishuv along with Zohar’s rhetorical demonstration of her knowledge, which made her, in these women’s eyes, an actual, visual representation of feminine knowledge binding identity and history, the object of attraction, and a threat, all at the same time. This article is based on Zohar Wilbush’s own life story, as told in her JeI wish to thank Megina Shlein, whose special connection to Zohar Wilbush constituted the inspiration for this article; to Sharon Agur, who assisted with the field work; to Galit HasanRokem , to Miriam Salamon, and to anonymous readers for their important comments, and especially to Zohar Wilbush for the many hours she devoted in her largesse and for her wisdom. rusalem home to two women, one in her twenties, the other in her thirties, during long evenings in winter 1997.2 Zohar Wilbush (1908–2005), defined herself at the outset of her narrative as a “non-typical” woman. The story of her life spans over ninety years and moves in Eretz Israel between Hadera, Haifa, Deganiah Bet, and Jerusalem, and in the Middle East region and Europe—to Damascus, Alexandria, Constantinople, Athens, St. Petersburg, Paris, and Germany. Her overflowing story is characterized by authoritative, declaredly antifeminist rhetoric within which pulses Orientalism. Authoritativeness suffuses both the plot-content dimension and the formal-rhetorical dimension that integrates questions of knowledge that the listeners are supposed to answer , the use of concepts and sayings in every language of the region, and ethnographic “explanatory snippets” from Eretz Israel society. Knowing the Oriental Other, a definite component of Orientalism, dominates her biography both in content and rhetoric. Thus, when she collects traditional local embroideries and conducts groups for the study of folk embroidery, she again explains: “One must know the embroidery of nations. One must understand what they are thinking. Because when you want to know the country’s climate and the nation’s way of thinking, you only get to know this through material.” The rhetoric of her story is an unchallengeable rhetoric of knowledge. There is no question Zohar does not respond to, and her answers show no hint of hesitation. The Oriental axis, with its decidedly colonialistic characteristics, relies upon the special place of the female narrator within the Eretz Israel halutziyyut—as the daughter of a local family of industrialists with a prestigious family tree (related on her maternal side to Avshalom Feinberg; on her paternal side to Manya Shohat); she links her childhood with village life, closeness to the earth, to animals, and Arab villagers in the area; and presents her life wisdom as flowing from her location on the seam between the cultures and between the genders.3 For Zohar, this special position is the source of cultural and political insights that reveal multidirectional characteristics of the concept “culture” as Pierre Bourdieu proposes in his theory of practice.4 Culture, according to his approach, is rooted in experience in the sense of the merging between the axis that stresses the understanding that culture constructs practice (as in Geertz’s conception) and the complementary axis, the one that stresses a reverse, parallel process in which practice constructs culture. This dynamic, circular direction, which Bourdieu embodies in the idea of the “habitus,” passes like a scarlet thread through the unique Orientalist experience of the narrator.5 In her life story, Zohar looks backward to...

Share