Rurality, a Playground for Design? Architecture and the Zionist Rural Village, 1870-1929

Rurality, a playground for design? Architecture and the Zionist rural village, 1870-1929. Axel Fisher The emergence of Zionism and of its basic goal – the return to the (holy and promised) land and to agriculture – can be seen as a reaction, and a positive one, to Europe’s refusal of Jewish identity. From late 18th century onwards, the modern nation-building process questioned the role of ethnic and religious minorities within countries commanding national solidarity, sacrifice against the threat of rival nations, and active participation to the production of the national wealth. From a nationalist point of view, Jews did not comply with such requirements on the ground of their double allegiance to both their secular homeland and their religious community, but also because of their presumed natural unproductiveness and predisposition towards usury (fig. 1). Within this context, European Jews had only but a few choices: assimilation, which implied the sacrifice of their peculiar collective identity, or immigration. The large majority voted with their feet, and settled in the first effective and modern Promised Land: the United States of America. However, a third way came to the fore: the modernization and “normalization” of Jewish identity, which could be achieved through secular and vocational schooling, and though the adoption of the local language, habits and customs. Jewish Enlightenment intellectuals invited Jews to be “a man in the streets and a Jew at home, a brother to your countryman and a citizen to your king1”. Along the same line of thought, it were the Russian Tsars to actually promote the first campaigns of Jewish resettlement to the countryside, and foster the emergence of a Jewish peasantry more akin to the large majority of Russian people. The first villages were established in 1806-1807 in Ukraine. Within one century, about a hundred thousand Jewish farmers, among which the young Lev D. Bronstein (Trotsky), were tilling the land in more than 170 colonies (fig. 2). Around the same period, rural values gained popularity among 3 Axel Fisher 4 both gentile and Jewish Russian masses; the noble savage figure and the contention, solutions, means and results. First, Zionist agrarianism glory of agricultural work (depicted among others in Tolstoy’s Ana primarily appealed to uprooted individuals, crushed by the compressor of Karenina, 1875-1877) became valid alternatives to those conveyed by modernity, whom it proposed a landscaping device – agricultural Shakespeare’s Shylock. Soon enough, the ruralization of the Jewish people colonization – which activated a sort of reconciliation and identification emerged as an effective device to turn the luftmensch2 into a productive with the physical materiality of land. Second, the key of its success lays in a member of the modern nation. To be sure, such views were also popular promise; a messianic promise in the bargain. Whether it promised the within Jewish philanthropy3, involved in the establishment of vocational return to the Promised Land and the building of a new national identity, or schooling networks and agricultural colonies in Europe, North-Africa something else is here irrelevant. Third and finally, it responded to a colonies, the Middle-East, and the Americas. demographic issue with a demographic solution. The present essay draws on key experiments in the Jewish agricultural colonization of Palestine, to highlight the role of village architectural, urban and landscape design, in relation to farming models, to the issue of individual and collective identity, and to the quest for original alternatives to the city as privileged form of settlement. The AIU’s farm-school: a human and vegetal produce pool 1. “Unproductive” Belorussian Jews at the 2. Late 19th century Jewish agricultural The AIU’s school of agriculture (1870), at the outskirts of Jaffa, shtetl market, early 1920s. settlement in Russia. preludes to the Jewish colonization of Palestine. It stands out for its The emergence of Zionism introduced a radical shift in the previous ambition to reach financial self-sufficiency by marketing its products, attempts to reform Jewish identity, moving from the realm of charity to the pursuing at first a subsistence farming model (barley, wheat, table grape, political, secular, and public scene. The auto-emancipation of the Jewish kitchen garden vegetables and fruits), and focusing later on “luxury crops” people, Zionism claimed, depended on its capacity to turn into a Nation for export (strawberries, asparagus, citrus, perfume flowers, vine grape4). It among the Nations, to establish a healthy national economy based on addresses the children of local Jewish urbanites, providing agricultural agriculture, and to settle within well-defined territorial boundaries, training and preparing them for the foundation of future colonies. This possibly in Palestine. There, the Jews would build to be (re)built, they first Jewish collective facility in the rural realm is a place of acclimation and would regenerate physically and morally and become a New Jew. experimentation for both students and plants: a genuine human and vegetal Looking back at historical roots of Zionist agrarianism allows to grasp produce pool. The school itself – a central building surrounded by teachers the Israeli national imagination’s peculiar style, but most and foremost, it houses and student halls – forms a compact and isolated group within the helps to appreciate the general issues addressed by Jewish agricultural estate; a settlement pattern closer to a European phalanstery than to a colonization and the conditions of its success. With due respect to the local khan, which inaugurated a long and enduring tradition of Jewish peculiarities and unrepeatability of Jewish history, Zionist agrarianism can grouped settlement (fig. 1). be read in more general terms, according to its aims, public, matter of 5 Axel Fisher 6 Despite the substantial flatness of the estate’s terrain, during the spontaneously to Palestine and found communities bound by strict school’s inauguration ceremony, the director walks across the fields, covenants8. These ad-libbed settlers consider the smallholder9 to be the identifying and naming a number of unperceivable topographic features pillar of colonization and private enterprise to be its driving force. Many according to Biblical names: mounts of Abraham, of Sarah, of Isaac and villages10, today called moshava (pl. moshavoth) or veteran colonies, are Jacob; plains of Moses and Samuel; valleys of Rebecca and Rachel… This established. Their salient features can be illustrated by the layout of otherwise insignificant episode actually initiated another powerful Rehovot (1890, fig. 5a), a moshava modeled after the traditional European tradition in Jewish rural settlement. Calling the founding community as street-village (Strassendorf11) and after its successful transplantation in witness, this ritual establishing of an imaginary topography5 acts as a Palestine on behalf of the German Templers12: a settlement arranged along symbolic appropriation of the settlement’s environment, which shall be one or more perpendicular streets serving strip plots hosting family farms, adopted as a common practice: “Metaphorically, perhaps, but not merely and a few square plots intended for non-farmer settlers, surrounded by figuratively, names became the true decorations and an inseparable part of extensive farming fields. In this kind of village, each family owns a number the style that emerged in these decades6” (fig. 4). of plots and fields in relation to its financial means, while one single plot is dedicated to public use: a municipal garden. 3. AIU’s farm-school buildings 4. AIU’s farm-school : schematic map. seen from the fields, 1930s : a transplantation of the European phalanstery. The pre-Zionist moshavot: from autonomous communities to administrated domains In Palestine, the first properly modern Jewish colonies are established during the first immigration wave (1880-1900). Eastern-European middle-class religious families, with little capital but no agricultural 7 experience or skills, inspired by romantic proto-Zionism , migrate 5. LEVIN-EPSTEIN E.Z., Schemati c plan of the Rehovot moshav[a], Warsaw, 1897. 7 Axel Fisher 8 The first moshavot communities, torn between the vain pretension to administration buildings qualify the village layout and inner landscape. In replicate the extensive cereal-growing landscape of the Ukrainian plains Rishon leZion, a synagogue dominates and concludes the main street’s and the attempt to develop intensive viticulture, thrashed about between perspective. In Zikhron Ya’akov, the village’s cross-like layout (fig. 6a) two economic models (self-sufficiency or export-oriented farming), soon spatially expresses community’s social structure: the main street lines up face their inability to reach financial autonomy. One after the other, these the settlers’ houses (fig. 6b), while the administrators’ dwellings are communities seek for European philanthropy’s help. Within less than a arranged along the secondary street. At both ends of the administrator’s decade, the baron Edmond Benjamin James de Rothschild (1845-1934) street, one significantly finds the school responding to the wineries; an becomes the main sponsor of Jewish colonization, dominating the scene arrangement which draws a parable of the settler’s ideal lifecycle, from from 1885 to 1905. Notwithstanding his wishful thinking, the baron education to factory (fig. 6c). Another prominent features introduced

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