Zionist Perception of the Rural Zvi Efrat Richard Kauffmann and the Zionist Rural Mise-En-Scène
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DIE STAHLKRAFT DER PROJEKTE / THE AGENCY OF THE PROJECTS V Zvi Efrat RICHARD KAUFFMANN AND THE ZIONIST RURAL MISE-EN-SCÈNE The haunt of the rural and the specter Zionist Perception of the Rural of the peasant occupy the Zionist scene of origin. Their perplexing emergence is satirically enunciated in the following citation from Theodor Herzl’s 1896 Der Judenstaat: Whoever would attempt to convert the Jew into a peasant would be making an extraordinary mistake. For a peasant is a historical category, as proved by his costume which in some countries he has worn for centuries; and by his tools, which are identical with those used by his earliest forefathers […]. The agrarian question is only a question of machinery. America must conquer Europe, in the same way as large landed possessions absorb small ones. The peasant is consequently a type on a course towards extinction. Whenever he is artificially preserved, it is due to the political interests he is intended to serve. It is absurd, and indeed impossible, to make modern peasants on the old pattern. No one is wealthy or powerful enough to make civilization take a single retrograde step […]. Are we, therefore, to attribute to intelligent Jews the desire to become peasants of the old type? […] Under these circumstances the Jews are perfectly justified in refusing to stir when people try to make peasants of them.1 1 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, translated by Jacob M. Alkow, New York 1988, pp. 88-89. 3 V ZVI EFRAT: RICHARD KAUFFMANN AND THE ZIONIST RURAL MISE-EN-SCÈNE In this foundational text, Herzl, a journalist and fictionist cum author of polit- ical Zionism, responds to the contentious situation that had been developing since the 1880s in Palestine: Jewish leaders, planners, philanthropists, agron- omists and adherents of various back-to-the-land movements – some holding an archaic ideal of a rural economy based on communities of peasants, and others emulating various modern models of colonization2 – were calling upon Jews, mainly Russian Jews escaping pogroms, to forgo urban areas for rural life on Palestine’s ‘moshavot’ (sing. ‘moshava’; a traditional type of agrarian colony whose members farmed their land independently), thereby undermining both the technical positivism of Herzl’s building-manual Der Judenstaat and the bucolic scenery of his later novel Altneuland (1902). But perhaps more than sparring with his contemporaries, Herzl’s dismay seems directed anachronically at his socialist successors in the Zionist organ- izations (those belligerent prophets of the hinterland whom he would never meet). Indeed, his derisive portrayal of the peasant Jew will be superseded, for decades to come, by accounts and tales ranging from pastoral utopias and agrarian manifestos, to redemptive petitions and apocalyptic sermons, reaching their climax with the following text from 1935 by David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist Labor movement: There is a warning to be heeded from world history. Anyone who has studied the history of Rome will remember the dramatic chapter known as the Phoenician War. In Hebrew it is referred to as the ‘Canaanite War’. There once was a great military leader, who was close in race to the ancient Hebrews; he had a Hebrew name and a Hebrew title: Hannibal, the Judge of Keret Hadeshet (New City), or Carthage. […] Roman mediocrity defeated Canaanite genius. Because Carthage was a city-state, and Rome was a rural-state, and in the desperate struggle between an urban nation and a rural nation, it was the rural nation that won. All of the commercial wealth of Carthage, and all of the genius of its great military leaders, came to nothing. Hannibal’s heroism was broken in the face of the persistent combat of the farmers of Rome. These farmers were not discouraged by one defeat after another – because they were rooted in the soil and connected to their land. They overcame Carthage and wiped it off the face of the earth, without leaving a trace. And here we have come to build a city-state and to establish an urban nation – while we are surrounded by a people that is connected to the land, not only in this country but in all the neighboring countries. We have the oppor- tunity to establish a large urban state in Tel Aviv and in Haifa, with a million inhabitants or more – but its end will be like that of Carthage. 2 According to sociologist Gershon Shafir, south-eastern Russia. […] Thirdly, Otto “between 1882 and 1900 Baron Edmund de Warburg and Arthur Ruppin, the heads of the Rothschild followed the model of French World Zionist Organization’s Land Development agricultural colonization in Algeria and Tunisia, Company, highly consciously tried to reproduce which was based on the development of the ‘internal colonization’ model developed by privately owned monoculture agriculture. When the Prussian government to create a German this French model floundered, three others majority in some of its eastern, ethnically were suggested in its place, in the first decade of Polish, territories.” Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor the [20th] century. First Aharon Eisenberg […] and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian who directed the Planters’ Society, the largest Conflict, 1882-1914, Berkeley/Los Angeles capitalist company in Palestine before the First 1996, p. 11. World War, recommended a Californian design 3 David Ben Gurion, Zionist Players and their for enabling urban people to move to the Role at this Time, in: David Ben Gurion, countryside. Secondly, members of HaShomer On Settlement: Collected Writings 1915-1965, (The Guard) organization longed to emulate the Tel Aviv 1986, pp. 63-64 (in Hebrew). Cossack’s military colonization of parts of 4 DIE STAHLKRAFT DER PROJEKTE / THE AGENCY OF THE PROJECTS V Read about the internal situation of Carthage in the days of Hannibal and you will find the image of Tel Aviv: the same disconnected culture, the same rootlessness, the same dependence on an alien, antagonist, rural environment, the same ostensible independence – does the same end await us?3 Ben Gurion’s doomsday interpretation of the Phoenician War sets the official tone from the 1920s and well into the 1950s. The more immigrants flooded the ‘Hebrew Carthage’ and the more ‘ostensible independence’ this city assumed, the bolder and broader the propaganda and concrete action toward colonizing the countryside became. Indeed, beyond rhetoric, the physical manifestation of Zionism’s romance with the rural is astounding: between the 1880s and the 1980s, about 700 new villages, rural towns and garden cities were designed and built in Palestine by and for Jewish citizens, mostly new immigrants (about 250 settlements before Israeli statehood, 450 after). But before we look into actual territorial operations and planning procedures – those demanding an architect protagonist in the Zionist script – let us linger a moment longer on the return of the object of desire, the rural-of-plenty, in modern Jewish writing. The earliest and perhaps the most inspiring fictional depiction of Arcadian Zion appears in a forgotten text, the first utopia written in Modern Hebrew: Voyage to the Land of Israel in the Year 2040, written by the journalist Elhanan Leib Lewinsky and first published in 1892, in Odessa. We had hardly begun our journey; we were just two or three hours from Jaffa, when before us lay a new land, with a new people, and new ways of life […]. The country is like one great garden, like a single field sown with vegetables and all sorts of grains. From the window of the coach we can see groves and orchards. […] Fields of grain, wheat, barley and spelt, and herds grazing in the plentiful pasture. Villages and plantations wherever one treads. Twenty, thirty houses – and behold, a village. […] The children of Israel pass through the fields, plowing, hoeing, sowing and reaping, and man and beast are healthy and satiated, bountiful and fresh. The houses are built with pride, clean and beautiful […]. Anyone who beholds this sight will understand that these are masters of their own land who live here […] and the whole village, by its modernity and cleanliness and by the good order that reigns, is like a modern estate, like beautiful toys […]. Such villages are on every road, and every road is like a single village […]. Throughout the days of their exile, in particular during the seventh century, the Jews came to understand the ‘secret of the earth’. They saw and understood that a king, the king of the world, is he who works the fields […]. They learned this great lesson in that University of Exile […]. Working the land – man’s only natural work – has become the legacy of an entire nation, not just one part of the nation, but, simply put, the entire nation. Israel now returns to its ancient ways, as it was in the days of the forefathers – an agrarian nation.4 3 David Ben Gurion, Zionist Players and their (ed.), Yesterday’s Tomorrow. The Zionist Role at this Time, in: David Ben Gurion, Utopia, vol. 2, Jerusalem 1993, pp. 77-78 On Settlement: Collected Writings 1915-1965, (in Hebrew, translated for this article by Tamar Tel Aviv 1986, pp. 63-64 (in Hebrew). Cohen). 4 Elhanan Leib Lewinsky, Voyage to the Land of Israel in the Year 2040, in: Rachel Elboym-Dror 5 V ZVI EFRAT: RICHARD KAUFFMANN AND THE ZIONIST RURAL MISE-EN-SCÈNE In the spirit of quasi-Marxist utopian literature and reformist social manifestos of the time, Lewinsky sketches an economic accord underlying his landscape of bliss, based on a crude collectivist bypass to common market-economy (and to commonplace Jewish diasporic habitus): I did not see many merchants, sellers, or brokers in and around the [village] because merchants whose whole being is trading merchandise for money and money for merchandise, are not to be found here […].