How to Dress up in Eretz Israel, 1880S–1948: a Visual Approach to Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building

INFS 6 (2) pp. 217–237 Intellect Limited 2019

Svenja Bethke University of Leicester, United Kingdom

How to dress up in Eretz Israel, 1880s–1948: A visual approach to clothing, fashion and nation building

Abstract Keywords This article provides a methodological approach to the integration of Zionist photo- Jewish migration graphs into research on the pre-state Jewish community in Eretz Israel from the nation building end of the nineteenth century until the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. By Eretz Israel focusing on dress, and drawing on visual culture and fashion studies, the article Yishuv highlights the role of the individual in nation building and foregrounds the influence Zionism of various migrant groups in the emergence of a national project. While scholarship male dress has largely ignored the role of dress, and especially male dress, in pre-state settings, visual culture the article takes the example of Eretz Israel to show how examining dress in Zionist photography photographs sheds light on the experimental and transnational character in search of a new Hebrew culture. By examining three photographs of socialist Zionist groups of the second Aliyah, the article shows how male Zionist settlers integrated transnational dressing habits and fantasies about their imagined homeland. They created a new way of dressing as an expression of political agendas that were interconnected with the reinvention of a new image of the male Jew. Looking beyond the case study of Eretz Israel, the article stresses the broader relevance of dress in the negotiations and power struggles at the micro level of a pre-state community and the emergence of national clothing ideals. It concludes by outlining ways of refining the

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methodological approach, and suggesting future research avenues at the intersection of fashion studies and nation building by shifting the focus towards case studies prior to the existence of national fashion systems.

Introduction There is a striking black-and-white photograph taken at the beginning of the twentieth century in one of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, Moshav Ein Ganim, established in 1908 near Petakh Tikva. A group of people standing in a field are looking at the cameraman who captured them (Figure 1). Everyone in the photograph is dressed differently: a woman lying on the ground in front of the group, one arm propped up to hold her head, is wearing an elegant bright dress with quilling. Some of the men wear the fez, the official headwear for men in the Ottoman Empire, and bright Russian peasant shirts. Other men have bright scarves as keffiyehs on their heads, as was common among Arab Bedouins. Some of those photographed are holding tools, as if they complemented their outfits. The people pictured were part of the large-scale migration movement that took place between 1882 and 1914; about 70,000 Jewish people from Eastern Europe came to Ottoman-ruled Palestine, or as they saw it the ‘Land of Israel’ – Eretz Israel. Having escaped anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire and hoping for a better economic future, they were influenced by Zionist ideas, which advocated the return of the Jewish People to what they thought of as their historical homeland. The majority of them had worked as artisans and in small businesses, often in the textile industry and sweatshops; some of them had experience in agriculture (Frankel 1981: 3). While they were united in their aim to settle in Palestine, the diversity of the Zionist movement was reflected in a broad range of parties and youth groups, with differing religious and political agendas. The immigrants of the first

Figure 1: Jewish settlers in Moshav Ein Ganim, after 1908. The Oded Yarkoni Historical Archives of Petakh Tikva. Sign. 002-002/2514.

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Aliyah (‘immigration wave’) between 1882 and 1903, as part of the so-called Hibat Zion groups, established the first agricultural settlements, often with the financial support of large capitalist plantation owners. However, immigrants of the second Aliyah between 1904 and 1914 were largely influenced by socialist ideas (Neumann 2011; Shapira 1992; Frankel 1981; Mendelsohn 1993; Penslar 1991; Vital 1987a, 1987b). Disappointed by the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, the settlers were aiming to realize a Zionist version of socialism in Eretz Israel. The Zionist movement in the second half of the nineteenth century was inherently transnational in character. The many different Zionist groups that existed in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, all aimed to mobilize Jews across national boundaries in order to build a new national homeland in Palestine. In his monograph Prophecy and Politics (1981), historian Jonathan Frankel portrayed this migration movement as resulting from the failure of emancipation. The migrants had shifted their focus towards what the influential Zionist thinker Lev Pinsker called in 1882 ‘self-emancipation’, which was national and socialist in character: ‘the conviction that the Jewish question could not – and would not – be solved by the grant of equal rights from above nor by a return to the status quo ante of traditional Judaism, but had to be won by total change, collective action, political planning, and organization’ (Frankel 1981: 2). Scholars like Frankel have conducted crucial research into political considerations, organizational skills and networks of the socialist Zionist settlers, and innovative research on Zionism has started to emphasize the importance of cultural practices in nation building (Saposnik 2008; Campos 2011; Jacobson 2011; Almog 2000; Halperin 2015; Berkowitz 1996, 2004; Presner 2010; Spiegel 2013). Yet the role of clothing and photography has received little attention. In scholarship and beyond, the notion seems to be prevailing that socialist Zionists, especially men, had more important things to worry about than what to wear. This article will argue otherwise. While the Zionist settlers discussed dress only to a limited extent, one of their major aims was the creation of political and social cohesion. Dress, expressed in an emerging Zionist visual culture, played a key role in realizing this ideal. While this visual culture also included expressions such as painting, printmaking, architecture and design, this article will focus explicitly on photography (Berkowitz 1996; Arbel 1996; Silver- Brody 1998; Oren 1995; Sela 2003). As the popularization of photography at the beginning of the twentieth century correlated with the strengthening of the Zionist movement, it is possible to investigate how the Zionist settlers made use of this new medium in the creation and anchoring of their (sartorial) ideals, not only in a local, but in a transnational dimension. We do not know who took the photograph of the variously dressed migrants. Yet, given the time period, we can assume that taking the picture required some preparation and a person who knew how to take a photograph. When the photographic process was invented in 1839, taking photographs was marked by long technical preparation for the photographer and the sitters in photographic studios (Gernsheim and Gernsheim 1969; Newhall 2009). Subsequently, various inventors endeavoured to improve and accelerate the process, but it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that cameras became available to the wider public. However, photography was mainly practised by the upper middle classes in North America and Western Europe; the invention of the Brownie range of Kodak cameras allowed them to take snapshots outdoors, at an affordable price (Pasternak 2015, 2013). With companies focusing on the Western European market, access to cameras in Eastern Europe was far more

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1. While throughout the limited (Dobroszycki and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1977). It is thus unlikely nineteenth century, small groups of that ordinary Eastern European immigrants to Eretz Israel had brought such Maskilim in Eastern cameras with them. It is fair to assume that the picture from Moshav Ein Europe had already Ganim had been planned in advance and that the photographed knew before- aimed to modernize the Hebrew language, hand that a picture would be taken that day. Despite our limited information expressed in secular about the picture, it seems as if the photographed gave some thought to what literature as part of the to wear and were choosing clothes and poses with care. Yet they had different enlightenment era, it was the Zionist groups ideas on what the ideal dress for the occasion was. at the turn of the This article highlights the relevance of early photographs of Zionist groups century that linked the revival of the language with a focus on dress to bring to the fore a subtle and yet very personal dimen- with their new national sion of nation building. It will suggest how to apply approaches from visual agenda and the call culture and fashion studies to explore how Jewish immigrants to Eretz Israel for immigration to Palestine. from the 1880s until the foundation of the state in 1948 used dress in visual representations to express feelings of belonging and the search for a new Hebrew culture1 (Glinert 2011) in the creation of a national project. It focuses on the socialist Zionists of the second Aliyah to investigate how they integrated previous experiences and political ideas from their countries of origin to anchor visual and sartorial expressions of their new ideology. The article focuses specifically on men, arguing that the creation of a new male Jewish identity was crucial to Zionist ideology. The image of the ‘new muscular Jewish man’ working the land and engaging in manual labour was created as an anti- dote to the anti-Semitic images propagated in the Zionists’ European countries of origin throughout previous decades and centuries. While the image of the Jewish woman as the ‘desirable Jewess’ in these contexts had erotic connotations, the image of the male Jew had been marked by de-masculini- zation; the male Jew was portrayed as weak, ill, womanly, spreading diseases, unmanly (Gilman 1991, 1993). It was thus the recreation of the image of the male Jew that lay at the core of Zionism; this article will argue that visual representations of dress played a key role in this process. By emphasizing that the socialist Zionists integrated transnational references into their ways of dressing and communicated these new ideals through photographs across national boundaries, the article places itself in the field of transnational history (Adam 2018; Körner 2017). In this, they were similar to other modes of political dressing, such as socialist dress that emphasized an idea of internationalism (Bartlett 2010). What was specific about the Zionist movement was that the references and the outreach were transnational, but at the same time part of an ideology looking towards a nation state. While research on nation building has not systematically used photography to examine clothing ideals in emerging nation states, fashion history with its emphasis on nation states has heavily focused on profes- sional fashion photography (Friedl 2007; Ganeva 2003; Shinkle 2008). This article addresses these gaps by suggesting an approach that can in the broader perspective not only bring to the fore the influence of heterogeneous migrant groups in the emergence of a national project, but sheds light on negotiations and power struggles in a pre-state community. Furthermore, it helps to explore the troubling broader question of how clothing becomes fashion, or in the case of Eretz Israel ‘anti-fashion’ (Hollander 1975: 364–65; Maxwell 2014: 9–28), as we will see later. An approach that makes use of photographs comes with a number of methodological problems and challenges. When, and if, photographs such as the one introduced above found their way into the archives, they were often separated from other written material that would allow us to gain insights into

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the motivations of the photographers and the subsequent use of the photographs. In addition, the order of the collections has often not been preserved, and the exact date of the photograph as well as the photographer’s identity and that of the sitters are often unknown. As cultural critic Walter Benjamin stated, there is always the ‘approximate’ when analysing photographs and reflecting on their cultural impact ([1931] 1972: 25). This is even more true for photographs of the early Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish population) in Eretz Israel, where the practice of taking pictures was not institutionalized, cameras were rare and the settlers were not preoccupied with preserving photographs for future research. Despite these problems, this article aims to integrate photographic sources into research on dress and cultural practices in Eretz Israel, because as Benjamin also formulated, ‘Photography makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious’ ([1931] 1972: 7). While Benjamin coined this term to integrate the suppressed working class into the narrative, it can be used here to add an unexplored perspective on the Zionist groups. Adding photographic sources to the analysis to look at visual appearance can shed light on the experimental and personal dimension of the search for and the creation of a new national project. Acknowledging the limitations and the speculative character of such an undertaking, I will use this article to outline and test an idea to advance the systematic integration of photographic sources, not explicitly aimed at communicating clothing ideals, into fashion studies and intersections of fashion and nation building. Drawing on approaches from visual culture, the article uses photographic sources to examine social and cultural group habits, borrowing methodolo- gies from the field of visual sociology (Knowles and Sweetman 2004: 1–3; Bourdieu [1965] 1990; Tagg 1988: 13). The article classifies these sources as public, institutional photography under the assumption that it was political groups, organizations or individuals in support of these groups that initi- ated the taking of these pictures. The fact that these photographs found their way into archives that are dedicated to the Zionist cause makes it likely that they were intended to mobilize Jews to immigrate to Palestine and to docu- ment political activities in the Yishuv (Raz 2003: 239–40; Silver-Brody 1998). However, research to date has shown that the line between public and private photography was often blurred. We cannot know if the photographs were only used for Zionist mobilization or if they were also sent for personal reasons to family members. Based on preliminary archival research in Israel, this article will look at three photographs that have been chosen from photo collections held at the Pinchas Lavon Institute, the Central Zionist Archives and the Oded Yarkoni Historical Archives of Petakh Tikva to shed light on key aspects of the emergence of new Zionist clothing ideals in the pre-state community; it will conclude with consideration of the direction future research should take.

Definitions of ideal clothing and fashion in an emerging nation In 1904, the importance of dress and conflicts arising from differing ideas in the context of nation building were explicitly mentioned by Hemda Ben-Yehuda, the second wife of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the Zionist promoter of the modern Hebrew language, who had immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1881. Hemda, who liked to dress elegantly according to the latest Paris fashion, wrote in a newspaper article: ‘This is the first time during my lifetime that fashion will have

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been discussed in the Hebrew press. I write these lines with real fear and trep- idation […] who knows whether they might not also ostracize me?’ (quoted in Raz 1999). Hemda was referring to socialist Zionists that propagated a simple and functional way of dressing as an expression of their ideology, while reject- ing any notion of a bourgeois European culture. We can see here that clothing ideals, and clothing defined as fashion, are relative and subject to change. They can be rooted in the different geographical, cultural and social contexts the wearers originate from and interconnected notions of what would be appropriate to wear; clothing can express feelings of belonging as well as personal and political visions for the future. Given the fact that everybody has to wear something to cover the body, clothing and fashion represent a highly personal and intimate phenomenon. While dress is used as a neutral term, referring to the visible parts of clothes, clothing is seen as serving a functional purpose, and fashion comprises an aesthetic dimension and is characterized by constant change and the requirement to advertise it as such. In addition, it is usually linked to the existence of a ‘fashion system’ with a textile industry, processes of design, advertisement and consumption (Welters and Lillethun 2018; Eicher 2005; Steele 2005). Cultural practices linked to clothing and fashion thus concern the individual and are at the same time embedded in the specific social and cultural contexts of a community. Fashion history has not paid much attention to case studies prior to existing national fashion systems (Maxwell 2014: 1–8; e.g. Guenther 2004; Zakharova 2011; Stitziel 2007; Pelka 2008; Bartlett 2010); it has moreover heavily focused on female fashion with only limited consideration of male fashion (Breward 1999, 2016; Chenoune 1996). The same constraints have applied to the case study of Eretz Israel, where research on dress has focused mainly on the period after the foundation of the state, when the then dominant left-wing Zionist groups propagated a new national – Zionist – way of dressing that scholars labelled retrospectively as socialist ‘anti-fashion’, emphasizing its functional and uniform character as a political statement (Helman 2011, 2008, 2007, 2010; Bat-Yaar 2010). A small number of studies on the pre-state period provide crucial information on design, fabrics, the infrastructural context of the emerging textile industry and a consumer sphere (Raz 1996, 1998; Shavit 1992; Fisher 2013). Yet, the means by which migrant groups with differing clothing habits and ideals negotiated and communicated pre-existing and new ways of dressing prior to the foundation of the state have not gained much attention (Helman 2012; Stockdale 2007: 63–107). It is especially the importance of visual sources and their broader cultural, social and political considerations that have been largely overlooked in this context. Neither a developed textile industry nor a national fashion system existed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Eretz Israel. While the first small clothing factories were set up in 1918, it was only in the 1920s that immigrants from Poland and Czechoslovakia created medium-sized textile indus- tries, often called Lodzias with reference to the textile industry in Lodz (Almog 2015: 20–21). Before that, immigrants had often brought their clothes with them or sewed clothes themselves; those who could afford them bought the latest fashion items imported from Europe and also integrated local Arab fabrics and dressing habits into their outfits (Almog 2015: 20–21; Raz 1996: 134). The socialist Zionists formed only a small part of the pre-state Jewish community, but they were the first to organize political parties to satisfy the needs for support and ideological belonging of the immigrants of the second and third Aliyah (Almog 2015: 19; Shafir 1996; Horowitz and Lissak 1978: 70).

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The heterogeneity of the Yishuv was reflected in the diverse ways the different 2. Pinchas Lavon Institute, Soskin Collection, 175 segments of the society dressed to express their notions of ethnic, social and 4472, P-52033. political belonging. As we have seen with Hemda Ben-Yehuda, it was espe- 3. Central Zionist cially middle-class immigrants settling in the urban centres who were striv- Archives, PHG/1003272, ing to dress according to the latest European fashion trends at the beginning PHG/1017404, of the twentieth century, who were inspired by international newspapers and PHG/1017574. European travellers visiting the region. The wish to dress elegantly according to European fashion, even if the clothes were already worn out, becomes visible in studio photographs of individuals and families at the beginning of the twentieth century.2 Other political groups such as the non-socialist Zionists like Hibat Zion also used dress to create a sense of group identification in choosing similar outfits when group photographs were taken. Yet, in contrast to the socialist Zionists, the clothing – although time delayed – was oriented towards the common fashion in the countries of origin, thus expressing membership of the middle class (Raz 1996: 43–47).3 With his concept of social distinction, Pierre Bourdieu observed in the context of discussing modern France that class differences find their expression in notions of taste, which are importantly expressed in clothing ([1979] 2015). Looking at Eretz Israel, in which the idea of nation building was for the socialist Zionists interconnected with the realization of a workers’ and peasants’ society, the question arises as to what extent pre-existing notions of taste in clothing were altered or prevailed in the course of nation building in which the socialist Zionist would eventually gain political power. In the photograph from Moshav Ein Ganim, we see both elegant European middle-class dresses, ‘fashionable’ in the urban centres of the countries of origin, functional work clothes fitting the socialist ideal of working the land and items such as the fez and headscarves referring to the new Eastern homeland. Despite the broad range of outfits, we can assume that the Zionist immigrants’ choice of dress as represented in the photographs went beyond the functional. Although not defined as ‘fashion’ in the newly settled land, the immigrants were expressing certain, yet differing perceptions of an ideal, and even fashionable clothing in the course of nation building. Moshav Ein Ganim was the first settlement in which the settlers from the Russian Empire were both pursuing urban as well as rural labour in contrast to the later settlements with their exclusive focus on collective rural work (Neumann 2011: 20). This double character as well as the early stage in which common ideals were not anchored was expressed in the combination of different ways of dressing. Without knowing what exactly the motivations of the photographer and the photographed in Moshav Ein Ganim were, we can assume that the settlers wanted to be perceived as a group and wanted to show what their life in the Jewish settlement in the Middle East looked like. ‘This is us, we are a group, and this is what we look like in the Land of Israel, where we aim to build a home’, was the message of the picture. In communicating this, dress played a crucial role. How can such an approach change our understanding of nation building? Ernest Gellner, the influential theorist of nationalism, formulated that two men belong to the same nation if they share the same culture, understood as ‘a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving’. He further pointed out that this only happens if they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation (Gellner 2006: 7). Although visual representations of dress as an expression of concepts of the nation seem to be a fruitful approach in

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this context, research on nation building has not paid much attention to the topic. New scholarship understands nationalism as ‘perspectives on the world’ and not ‘perspectives in the world’ to stress the multi-layered agendas and ideas of different actors on the existing or desired nation (Anderson 2006; Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Maxwell 2018). As part of this way of thinking, scholars such as Brubaker and Cooper convincingly replaced the vague term ‘identity’ by terms such as ‘identification’, ‘categorization’, ‘self-understanding’ and ‘groupness’ (2000: 14–20) to emphasize the agents behind these complex and fluid processes of construction, a suggestion that has been adopted in this article. Echoing this, Alexander Maxwell pointed out that ‘Understanding nationalist thought requires scholars to confront ambiguity and incoherence’ (2014: 2). While Maxwell had mainly linguistic notions in mind, the inclu- sion of photographs allows us to look at these highly personal and intimate cultural practices to gain access to subtle and personal notions of belonging. The ‘Land of Israel’ represents a suitable case study for a number of reasons: the pre-state society was highly heterogeneous, with Jewish immigrants coming from Russia/Soviet Union, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Germany, encompassing a broad range of geographical and social backgrounds. They settled in a region with a large Arab, Christian and Yemenite migrant population that was frequently visited by numerous Christian pilgrims and travellers from Europe. The European migrants’ motivations ranged from socio-economic reasons, flight from anti-Semitic pogroms and Nazi persecution, to the advancement of political Zionist aims. The transformation of male and female identities was an integral part of the Zionist ideology. This process took place in a region with changing occupying authorities: Ottoman (until 1918) and British rule (1918–47) preceded the foundation of the state (1948) and correlated with the gradual development of a textile industry that was not yet marked by the characteristics of a developed ‘fashion system’.

Zionist clothing in the pre-state period: Dressing up the ‘new Jew’ in a transnational space Avraham Soskin was born in 1881 in the village of Orsha in the Mogilev prov- ince in the Russian Empire, today in Belarus. As a member of the party Poalei Zion, he was active in the socialist Zionist youth movement and started working as a photographer in 1901. He immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1905 during the time of the second Aliyah and set up his first photo studio in Neve Shalom (Raz 2003: 237–38; Guez 2015). In and outside of his studio, he took photographs of members and activities of the Yishuv that shed light on the transnational character of the Zionist project and the references expressed in the photographs. The transnational perspective has only recently started to impact studies on clothing and fashion by calling attention to colonial power relations, global mobility and (Jewish) migration (Ross 2008; Stein 2008; Nahshon 2008; Silverman 2013). While these studies focus mainly on the enforcement of clothing ideals through ruling elites and actors in trade and production, photographs such as the ones by Soskin allow us to look at a period in which power relations were fluid enough to shed light on migrant groups communicating clothing ideals as an expression of their political agendas. A studio photograph taken by Soskin from around 1913 can outline some of these ideas further (Figure 2). In the photograph, we see five men proudly looking into the camera; in the background is a nature scene with large trees and mountains. The painted sky is

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Figure 2: HaShomer, around 1913. Archives of the Pinchas Lavon Institute, Avraham Soskin Photo Collection. Sign. P -51055.

foggy, giving the photograph a mystical character. Three of the men are standing, two of them are sitting, one on an artificial rock. Each of them is wearing a different kind of dress, and yet every outfit has been composed with care. The sitter on the left is wearing a black long dress with a loose white belt. Around his head he has a white keffiyeh that is loosely draped around the back and shoulders, complemented by an agal, a black rope. The man sitting on his left is wearing a black dress, an ammunition belt hanging over his shoulder; he is holding a rifle in his hands. His head is covered by a black hat, which is presum- ably made of fur, resembling hats that were traditionally worn by Cossacks. The hat was a variant of the Papakha that was worn in Central Asia and the Caucasus and had also been integrated into the Russian uniform by emperor Alexander III in 1881 (Ruane 2009: 159–60). By adopting this style, the Zionists were referring back to the multi-ethnic setting of the Russian Empire, in which dress had been key to manifesting ethnic and social belonging. Another sitter is wearing the same kind of hat, this time combined with a Rubashka shirt, a cotton shirt with a high collar usually closed with buttons. Here as well, a rifle in his right hand complements his sartorial appearance. The other two sitters are wearing Rubashka shirts in combination with bright trousers: one is sitting cross-legged, allowing the viewer to see that he is wearing pants inside black leather boots, which was common among Russian peasant men (Ruane 2009: 159). The sitters in this picture are Meir Spector, Yechezkel Chankin, Shaul Karbel, Eisenstein and Yaakov Feldman (Raz 2003: 154). The men who orig- inated from the Russian Empire were members of the HaShomer movement, a Jewish self-defence organization established in Eretz Israel in 1909 by members of Poalei Zion to defend early Jewish settlements against thieves (Frankel 1981: 419–20; Shapira 2015: 28). Whilst not forming a distinctive political group, members of HaShomer played an important role as the first Jewish guards in the realization,

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4. Archive Pinchas Lavon negotiation and representation of new Zionist ideals in the Yishuv. The photo- Institute, Soskin Photo Collection. graph from around 1913 is one amongst a number of studio photographs that Soskin took of HaShomer members in his studio. Despite the fact that 5. Archive Pinchas Lavon Institute, Soskin Photo HaShomer members were known for their preoccupation with dress, photo- Collection, P-51041, graphs taken outside of those on guard duty suggest that HaShomer members P-51042, P-51067, did not choose such a broad range of clothes when working. While the ‘Arab P-51081, P-51087, P-51089. outfit’ can be seen in many group photographs, the Cossack clothes seem to have been less common.4 We can thus assume that the participants had dressed up specifically for the studio photograph. Soskin had a number of costumes at his disposal that he offered to people coming to his studio (Raz 2003: 226–40). We do not know how the clothes were chosen. Yet, given that Soskin himself was a member of Poalei Zion, closely interconnected with HaShomer, and a keen supporter and documenter of the socialist Zionist project, it is likely that the choice of clothes and the composition of the photograph were made by both the photographer and the sitters. Intentionally or not, a closer look at the dress choices made for the photograph allows us to explore the emergence and definition of new ideals as an expression of their agenda; they reveal transnational references and hierarchies, beyond categories such as ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ on a deeper level. In the studio photograph, a variety of references are expressed through clothing that have to be understood in the transnational context in which the Zionist settlers were operating. First, choosing the Rubashka shirts, traditionally worn by peasants in the Russian Empire as well as by soldiers underneath their Russian uniform, has to be understood as a pragmatic clothing habit, but also as an explicit reference to the countries and traditions of origin; at the same time expressing the Zionist political ideal of being able to cultivate the land in the new homeland. Yet, by complementing this with accessories, a new meaning was created. In this context, the rifles can be classified as accessories, changing the previous peasant dress from the countries of origin into the outfit of the new Jew by highlighting Jewish self-defence as a reac- tion to the traumatic experiences resulting from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. Fashion scholar Ruel Macaraeg has convincingly shown that it was historically societies in which the exertion of violence was not monopolized, that weapons became symbols to expose power. This was especially crucial for groups that were under ‘constant physical threat’ (2007: 45). Both factors are reflected by the weapons in the photograph. They symbolized the readi- ness to respond violently to the constant physical threat the Jewish population had been facing in the countries of origin. But young Zionists were also oriented towards a historical situation in which a Jewish state monopoly did not yet exist. Similar influences of Cossack garments and accessories can be identified both in group photographs and in photographs of individual HaShomer members.5 The choice of the Cossack dress was an expression of ideals that the sitters identified with the Cossacks, who had often acted as semi-inde- pendent military units in the Russian Empire, with a number of agricultural settlements in which they were granted certain autonomy (Shapira 2015: 28). In 1913, the year in which HaShomer set up their first colony in Eretz Israel to link their guard duty with their own labour, Mendel Portugali, one of the founders of the movement who was from Caˇ laˇ ras¸ i, Bessarabia in the Russian Empire, wrote in a letter to his wife: ‘The ideal of the guard is power; of the worker, brotherhood. [Our] settlement should be modelled on that of the Cossacks’ (quoted after Frankel 1981: 440). They represented an image of

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resilience, independence and pride as farmers and frontier people that the HaShomer members referred to in their choice of dress in the photograph. However, Cossacks had also taken part in violent acts against the Jewish population in Eastern Europe (Klier 2010; Löwe 2004; Hagen 2018: 468–70; Klier and Lambroza 2007). By dressing up like the previous antagonists, the HaShomer members might also have expressed indirectly the rejection of the mechanisms of anti-Semitic exclusion and persecution experienced in the Russian Empire. Thus, making reference to Cossack dress from a different historical and cultural context in the new Jewish homeland in the photograph served to create and communicate a new image of the Zionist male Jew in Eretz Israel. In addition, the oriental elements in the costumes chosen by the sitters symbolized the core of the Zionist project to settle in Palestine and in so doing to imitate the Arab population perceived to having settled the land success- fully for thousands of years (Bartal 2007: 69–79; Zerubavel 2008; Guez 2015). This desire was interwoven with a romantic nostalgia towards the Medieval Jews of the Islamic world, who had spoken Arabic, a trend that also found its expression in other spheres such as art and language (Halperin 2015: 15, 2006; Eyal 2008: 33–61). The mode of dress was informed by a romanticized western version of the Arab man, and hence also a colonial view of the Orient (Guez 2015; Geczy 2012). Historian Yael Zerubavel has convincingly described such performative practices – not only with regard to dress, but also language and practices such as horse-riding and sheep-herding – as an expression of the transformation of the ‘new Jew’, coined in the hybrid concept of the ‘Hebrew Bedouin’ (2008). All sitters in the photograph from 1913, and in numerous other studio photographs of political groups taken by Soskin, are men. Contrary to the notion that men, and especially socialist Zionists, were not concerned with dress and aesthetics, these photographs suggest strong interest in personal appearance. Scholars have looked at the creation of a new ‘strong’ male identity as a key element of Zionist ideology (Nordheimer Nur 2012; Byrne 2011; Gillerman 2005). However, reflecting the scholarly ignorance towards male fashion, the role and representation of male clothing has hardly gained attention in this context. Looking at the photograph, as one example, emphasizes the experimental character in the creation of new ideals of Jewish masculin- ity. These new ideals were far from being determined from the beginning of Zionist migration and clothing and photographic representations played a crucial role in their evolution. Soskin’s studio photograph shows that around 1913, when the picture was taken, a shared understanding of what the Zionists’ dress should look like was not yet anchored and enforced. As we have seen, both the photographer and the sitters were combining different ways of dressing with reference to their countries of origin, their experience, fantasies and political visions. This resulted in a co-existence of differing clothing ideals, and a certain room for manoeuvre. However, the creation and communication of different ideals were interconnected with political considerations and power relations. What was the appropriate way of dressing for the socialist Zionist man – and who was able to enforce this? Looking at the example of HaShomer, political criticism towards the guards was importantly expressed with reference to their dressing habits. Socialist groups such as HaPoel HaTzair, founded in 1905 in Petah Tikva to promote socialist agricultural settlements, pointed to the sartorial appearance of the guards as reflecting the fact that they were not genuine Jewish socialists. Yosef Aharonovich, the editor of the newspaper of HaPoel HaTzair, complained in November 1912

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that the moral state of the organization HaShomer was totally unsatisfactory (Aharonovich 1912: 4; Frankel 1981: 421, 440). While one argument was that the members of HaShomer were guarding private property, the fact that they were dressing up elegantly in Arab clothes was also explicitly mentioned: ‘The ideal must be to protect the Jews and […] to strengthen and defend simplicity and not to approve at all to imitate the Arab man in dressing up in his costume’ (Aharonovich 1912: 4). In this, Aharonovich labelled aesthetic notions of dress as incompatible with socialist ideology, an argument that can be identified in the above-mentioned discourses on anti-fashion. We also have to consider that such a criticism indirectly referred to the anti-Semitic notions of ‘being unmanly’, a reproach that Zionist men wanted to avoid at all costs. Furthermore, we can see here how new ideals of Zionist dress as the appropriate expression of Hebrew culture and related discourses were communicated via the pre-state press. If we scratch the surface of these images, we encounter ambiguity and incoherence; the notion of a consensus only exists at the surface, hinting at complex questions about which actors have the authority and means to communicate and impose their ideals as ‘Hebrew’, ‘Zionist’, ‘national’ or ‘socialist’. A determined cultural space within which newly created ideals were communicated, perceived and understood did not exist yet. There were no national political institutions, no national textile industry and no national press. It is thus worth considering these photographs as performative acts of disguising, in which the studio represented a space that allowed for experi- mentation with different notions of belonging and identity expressed in clothing. As shown above, habits from the countries of origin, experiences as well as personal and political aspirations and fantasies regarding the imagined homeland were influential in shaping a new way of dressing. Pierre Bourdieu, referring to urban and rural societies in modern France, described the photo studio as a space in which the photographer conforms to the social conventions of the society he is operating in; and that the sitters choose the studio knowing and expecting this (1990: 73–74, 83). In contrast, Soskin’s studio photograph from 1913 taken in Eretz Israel reminds us of the highly improvised and diverse settings as created and chosen by Zionist immigrants in the pre-state years. While photographic practices were informed by the experience and origin of the photographer and the sitters, the photographic studio became the stage on which sartorial appearance for the imagined homeland was tested out and in the case of group photographs labelled as political clothing. As we have seen, representations of dress expressed pre-existing and new feelings of self- and group belonging, interconnected with political aspirations. The example has demonstrated that in the negotiation and struggle over representations of the newly emerging Zionist ideals, clothing in photographs played a key role. Another photograph, taken by an unknown photographer in 1924 in the Soviet Union, now kept at the Central Zionist Archives, will allow us to consider the transnational dimension of Zionist dress and its representation further (Figure 3). The photograph was collected by Ariyeh Rafaeli Zenzipper, born in 1900 in the Oblast of Vitebsk in the Russian Empire, who became a passionate Zionist in his twenties and travelled in Eastern Europe, collecting thousands of photographs of Zionist groups. He handed over the collection covering the period 1884–1937 to the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem in the mid-1960s.

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Figure 3: Kvutzat Halutzi Tel Hai, 1924. Central Zionist Archives, Ariyeh Rafaeli Zenzipper Collection on the History of Russian Zionists 1884–1937, PHZPR. Sign. 1250453.

In the photograph from 1924, we see ten young men standing in a field. They are standing close together as a group; one man is lying in front of the others, the two men on the right and left are resting their elbows on their knees, and all are looking straight at the camera. Given their considered postures, it seems as if they had been following the instructions of the photographer on how to pose for the group picture. The viewer perceives the men as a group, not only due to the way they pose, but because of what they are wearing. Small variations aside, the men are dressed in a similar way. They are wearing bright shirts with low-cut necklines, complemented by dark or bright cotton trousers with belts. Five of them have their heads covered with bright long scarves worn like Bedouins; two others are wearing hats: one is a worker’s flat cap, and the other a bucket hat. The majority of them are holding rifles in their hands, presenting them in a confident manner. As we already saw in the studio picture by Soskin above, the weapons are complementing the outfits and can be classified as accessories. A note on the back of the photograph states that it was taken in 1924 in Tel Hai, Crimea, during that time part of the Soviet Union. This point is further supported by the knowledge that the photographs that Zenzipper collected originate from Eastern Europe. The men in the photograph were a group of young Halutzim, common in a Jewish agricultural settlement that had been set up in 1922 to prepare the young Zionists for their immigration to Eretz Israel (Magnes 1982: 261). A closer look at the headwear of the young Zionists suggests that the flat cap traditionally worn by workers in Europe and North America had become a symbol of the socialist movement. Lenin, as leader of the Bolshevik revolution, had changed his black Homburg hat for a flat cloth cap after 1917, thus expressing his solidarity with the working class and accounting for the cap’s spike in popularity (Ultimate History Project n.d.). By choosing the flat cap in the group photograph, the sitter was thus expressing his sympathy with the socialist movement. A second sitter is wearing a bucket hat. Originally

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6. Further examples: introduced around 1900 as a functional item in Ireland to protect fishers and Central Zionist Archives, farmers from sun and rain, it was adopted more widely in Europe and North PHZPR/1250496 (1917), America following the First World War (Stalder 2008: 55). A kind of bucket CZA/PHZPR/1250404 hat, then known as the Kova Tembel, would from the 1930s onwards become (1918), CZA/ PHZPR/1250408 (1929). a national symbol of the Zionist movement into the early years of the state (Almog 2015: 19, 21). However, in 1924, when the photograph was taken in Crimea, the hat was worn as a functional item to protect the head from the sun, but was not yet identified as a Zionist symbol. What is striking is the use of bright scarves worn in a way that reminds the viewer of oriental ways to cover the head. This way of wearing the scarf was in general not common in the Soviet Union. Non-Jewish socialist groups in the Soviet Union of the 1920s also rediscovered the headscarf; yet it was only women who were wearing it. Symbolizing the socialist ideological shift after 1917, women were no longer tying it underneath the chin, as was common amongst female peasants, but behind the head to represent the new proletar- ian ideals (Bartlett 2010: 14). However, the way in which the sitters were wearing the scarves in the photograph in Tel Hai was specific to this Zionist group. They were covering their head in the same way in which Zionist settlers in Eretz Israel presented themselves in group photographs, inspired by their ideas of the Arab population. First, this can be understood as an expression of their political fantasies and aspirations regarding the imagined future in Eretz Israel. Second, we can see here that Zionists integrated transnational modes of dressing in photographs of their political groups. The dress that the men had chosen for this photograph and that we can identify in similar photographs of the time suggests that in the 1920s, certain ways of dressing started to be labelled and recognized as a ‘Zionist way of dressing’. This creation of Zionist clothing ideals and the perception of them was both national and transnational. References did not only play a role when Zionist settlers were integrating ways of dressing from their countries of origin and imaginations of the Orient. The photograph shows that new clothing ideals in Eretz Israel, in combination with political aspirations and fantasies about the desired national home equally influenced visual representations of Zionist groups in Eastern Europe. The act of taking the photograph was an occasion for performativity in experimenting with different elements and styles that were then presented as an expression of the political aspirations of the Zionist group in the photograph.6

Conclusion and outlook This article has sought to integrate photographic sources from the pre-state Jewish community in Eretz Israel into research on the intersection of fashion and nation building. It has first highlighted the importance of dressing practices as a subtle and yet personal expression of engaging with the Zionist search for national belonging. Second, it has taken into consideration the importance of visual expressions in this transnational search that were acces- sible and visible for people beyond the discussions in political groups and parties. We have seen that the search was a process of construction that was reflected in choices and representations of dress. Socialist Zionists were not the only ones in the Yishuv who expressed self- and group belonging through dress. However, while non-socialist settlers referred to dressing habits in their countries of origin, usually in line with their previous social belonging, it was the socialist Zionists who sought to create a new way of dressing specific to their political vision of a new society.

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By combining elements from different contexts, a new way of dressing, differing from the common European middle-class fashion, was created and linked to political aims in the form of photographs, used to try to mobilize Jewish people to immigrate to Palestine. Items of clothing were charged with political meaning in a new transnational cultural context emerging from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, in which this new way of dressing was anchored and eventually recognized. Not yet linked to an existing national space, it expressed the longing for what the Zionists thought of as their national homeland. In her concise book on the history of modern Israel, Anita Shapira chose the title ‘Nation Building’ for her chapter on the period after the foundation of the state in 1948. This article has stressed that the complex processes underlying nation building started much earlier and must be understood in the cultural context of a community creating new values, symbols and meaning in the invention – or as Benedict Anderson put it, in the imagination – of a new national project. As Maxwell stated, these notions were ambiguous and incoherent. In the case of Eretz Israel, ideas were formed by ever-changing external dynamics and circumstances, as well as internal dynamics, determined by the origin and the visions of the people shaping these processes. Like linguistic conceptions, conceptions of ideal dress were fluid inasmuch as they referred to previous concepts. Visual representations of dress can show us that between the paradigms of nationalism and socialism, there were many layers of identification, influenced by origins and political fantasies. Acknowledging the initially outlined methodological problems and limitations with regard to photographs, a number of factors will have to be taken into consideration in future research to refine and test the validity of the approach further. First, the conditions of the production of the photographs in the light of available technologies and access to cameras deserves more thor- ough systematic attention. Photographs need to be contextualized thoroughly with the help of written material in order to identify relevant information on photographic collections, the photographers and the sitters. Primary sources that are deemed appropriate in this context are newspapers and political pamphlets of the political groups in the Yishuv, as well as memoirs, letters and diaries of Zionist settlers. Furthermore, secondary literature can provide crucial information on the institutional framework, the political organizations and the historical context. Third, a systematic comparative dimension will have to be introduced. With the outlined research focus on representations of dress in photographs of political groups, the pictures will have to be assessed against the following criteria, where the information is available: the time when the photographs were taken; the photographers and the photographic collections; the political groups in the photographs, their origin and political agendas; their countries and regions of origin; the changes in dress as represented in the photographs over time. Attention must be given to the time before and after the arrival in Eretz Israel; duration of stay in Eretz Israel; modes of photos taken and locations (photo studios or outside, snapshots); and the subsequent use of the photographs, if known. Fourth, in order to trace transnational references, the comparative element will have to be broadened in order to understand a) references to modes of dressing in the countries of origin; b) references to non-Jewish political movements; and c) references to western oriental fantasies represented in art and literature. This contextualization should be under- taken by drawing on photographic collections of Zionist as well as socialist youth groups in the countries of origin and relevant secondary literature to

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contextualize sartorial appearances and visual representations. Fifth, a systematic qualitative comparison with regard to different social groups in Eretz Israel has to be realized, more specifically by categorizing urban settlers and non- socialist Zionist groups. Beyond the case study discussed here, dress and its visual representations should be taken seriously in research on nation building. Such a focus adds a personal dimension and the agencies of heterogeneous migrant groups with their differing cultural, political and socio-economic backgrounds and motivations. Using photographic sources enables us to stress the visual dimension in communicating emerging and fluid ideals, especially in a region in which a common language was not yet achieved. This allows us to rethink the relationship between elites and grass-roots movements in nation building. Research on dress in pre-state contexts can show how different political actors created, anchored and finally enforced their ideals in their rejection of the dress ideals of the changing elites and ruling authorities; it thus sheds new light on the relationship between majorities and minorities, established groups and newcomers as expressed in sartorial appearance. Research on clothing ideals in a pre-state context can furthermore shed light on the empowerment of political actors as newcomers who are able to enforce and communicate their ideals by drawing on transnational networks. Ultimately, we can see how fantasies of the new nation were informed by the political, social and cultural backgrounds of the nation builders. It is in the representation of dress that references to experiences from their countries of origin, notions of political belonging and visions for the future become obvious. This process reveals to what extent a new national culture and aesthetics derive from previous national cultures and elements. The expression of hybrid identities helps us to reconsider regions in which melting pot ideals became new national ideals to question assumptions about a uniform national culture. This approach can further inform fashion studies by stressing the relevance of dress as an expression of national belonging, informed by clothing habits and ideals from the countries of origin and projected fantasies with regard to an envisaged nation state. Drawing on case studies in which multiple perceptions and concepts of ideals of dress existed enables us to rethink the construction and anchoring of sartorial ideals and terms linked to them. We will thus have to reconsider fixed categories such as ‘fashion’ and even ‘anti-fashion’ for a historical situation in which the members of the heterogeneous community did not (yet) agree on common values and perceptions of aesthetics in clothing. We have to ask how immigrants tried to create a new way of dressing and the meaning they attached to it. In so doing, we will see multiple references as well as the mechanism of rejection that played a role in clothing that was presented as the ideal dress in the new homeland. Furthermore, the analysis of visual representations beyond official fashion photography highlights the importance of photography in the migrants’ experience and in securing their ideals. Ultimately, it emphasizes the importance of dress in the construction of male identities prior to an existing fashion sphere. In a broader dimension, this article lays the foundation for case studies in which differing understandings of appropriate and fashionable clothing existed together and influenced each other. It is relevant to historical case studies where the emergence of a national project and immigration form key characteristics. The article thus aims to encourage comparative research on regions such as the United States, Great Britain and Australia to shed

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light on changing agencies and dynamics within heterogeneous communities in their negotiating of a common sense of aesthetics as expressed in dress. In contemporary times of mass immigration, economic exploitation and mobility in a global dimension, such analysis can ultimately contrib- ute to an understanding of aesthetic perceptions, and ideals of dress and beauty as expressions of power relations, cultural hybridity, integration and exclusion.

Acknowledgement The research for this article was financially supported by the School for History, Politics and International Relations (HyPIR) at the University of Leicester with a Research Development Fund in 2018. It was completed during tenure of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, IDCLOTHING 795309, held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 2019 to 2021, funded by the European Commission. I am grateful to the funders for their generous financial support, to Anat Helman at the Hebrew University for her guidance, and to the University of Leicester and my colleagues at HyPIR for supporting my research and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. For their suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this article, I thank Gil Pasternak, Nathalie Keigel, Rebekka Grossmann, Anat Helman, Klaus Richter, Anna Novikov, the anonymous peer reviewers and the main editors of the International Journal of Fashion Studies.

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Suggested citation Bethke, S. (2019), ‘How to dress up in Eretz Israel, 1880s–1948: A visual approach to clothing, fashion and nation building’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, 6:2, pp. 217–37, doi: 10.1386/infs_00006_1

Contributor details Svenja Bethke is a lecturer in modern European history and a member and the former deputy director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Leicester. From 2019 to 2021, she is a visiting Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with her project on ‘Clothing, Fashion and Nation Building in the Land of Israel, 1880s–1948’. Her research interests lie in Holocaust studies, Modern Jewish history, legal history, visual culture and fashion history. Contact: School of History, Politics and International Relations, Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK. E-mail: [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5883-9920

Svenja Bethke has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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ISSN 2052-4013 | Online ISSN 2052-4021 2 issues per volume | First published in 2016

Aims and Scope Editors Studies in Costume & Performance aims to encourage, generate and Donatella Barbieri disseminate critical discourse on costume and the relationship between London College of Fashion, costume and performance. The journal will bring together experts in UK costume, scenography, performance, fashion and curation as well as [email protected]. ac.uk critically engaged practitioners and designers to reflect and debate costume in performance, its reception in production, exhibition and in Sofia Pantouvaki academic critical discourse. Aalto University, Finland [email protected] Call for Papers Suzanne Osmond Editors invite practitioners and scholars to submit articles, reviews and National Institute of visual essays on all aspects of costume and performance. Dramatic Arts, Australia suzanne.osmond@nida. edu.au

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