Memory, the Rebirth of the Native, and the “Hebrew Bedouin” Identity

Yael Zerubavel Memory, the Rebirth of the Native, and the “Hebrew Bedouin” Identity IN APRIL 1 9 0 3 , THE K ISH IN EV POGROM SENT A WAVE OF SHOCK THROUGH European Jewry.* The publication of a report by the Zionist poet Chaim Nachman Bialik and the powerful poems he wrote under the im pact of the pogrom heightened the Jewish public’s awareness ofthese atrocities and the precarious conditions of Jewish life in czarist Russia. Russian Zionists organized a com m ittee to aid the children whose parents had been m urdered in Kishinev and requested th at the Zionist Congress would assume a communal responsibility for them . In December 1903, Israel Belkind, a Zionist educator and First Aliyah1 leader, brought a group of Kishinev orphans to Palestine to launch his plan to establish a Jewish agricultural boarding school and socialize its students to become “Eretz-Israeli Hebrew farm ers” (Shiloni, 1990a: 126-61; Elboim-Dror, 1996a: 268-272). In a photo taken about a year following their arrival to Palestine (Shiloni, 1990b: 134), these boys are featured as a group, each one wearing a white kafiya (also kufiya, the Arab headdress) w ith a black igal (cord) on top, holding a nabut (large stick) in his hand. The obviously posed photograph was not m eant to reflect the children’s ordinary attire but the very choice to pose w ith those Arab accessories is quite telling: it was designed to embody the success of the Zionist project in transform ing children w ho were exilic Jewish victims to natives who have become part of the local landscape. social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 200 8 315 The children’s hybrid dress is interesting not merely as historical curiosity but as a symbolic gesture that is indicative of its time. This delib­ erate performance of an identity change was part of a larger process of experimentation with the shaping of a native Hebrew identity during the formative years of the Zionist Yishuv—“the Settlement”— the Hebrew reference to the Jewish society of Palestine from the 1880s to 1948. The challenge to create a new type ofJew was at the heart of the Zionist ideol­ ogy and drew on Jews’ bifocal perspective on their past that privileged the period of antiquity w hen Jews lived in their own land as their golden age, and highlighted the negative impact of a long histoiy of exile and dispersion on the Jewish identity and culture (Zerubavel, 1995:13-36). The Yishuv period provides an excellent foundation for the study of how a collective m em ory and identity are being transform ed and reshaped in support of a national agenda. A closer look at various m nem onic strategies and practices reveals the selective and dynamic process of exploring the m eaning and the boundaries of identity. A new hybrid construct—the “Hebrew Bedouin” (at times referred to as “Jewish Bedouin”)—was one of the options that em erged out of this attem pt to bridge over historical gaps and offer an alternative vision of the past and the future. In itself the desire to reform Jews’ identity and culture was not new to Jewish society. Under the impact of the Enlightenm ent, Jewish society in Europe was engaged in debating these issues, and Zionism grew out of the disillusionm ent w ith the future of European Jewry. Jews’ return to their hom eland was seen as the means to recover Jewish national identity and reclaim their roots as a nation that has its own territory, culture, and organizational structure. Although Zionist Jews shared the sense of an acute need to introduce a profound change in Jewish histoiy, they did not necessarily have a unified vision of their future society, and their diverse social, political, and religious views thus resulted in alternative configurations. From today’s perspective of a long and bloody history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and existing tensions betw een Jews and 316 social research Arabs w ithin the state of Israel, the idea of a “Hebrew Bedouin” iden­ tity m ight seem odd, if not incredulous. Yet in the early decades of the tw entieth century, w hen...