From Sofia to Jaffa Guy H. Haskell, Raphael Patai Published by Wayne State University Press Haskell, H. & Patai, Raphael. From Sofia to Jaffa: The Jews of Bulgaria and Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/61463 Access provided at 14 May 2019 17:40 GMT with no institutional affiliation This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. CHAPTER 2 Cflze gmergence of Gufture One of the most important areas of settlement for the new im­ migrants was the moshavim (cooperative small holders agricultural settlements). Whether the immigrants were placed in homogeneous communities or not, these new settlements provided an ideal setting for the application of anthropological techniques; they were small, closed communities often consisting of one or more groups of the same lineage or place of origin. One of the earliest of these applica­ tions to appear in English was " Reciprocal Change: !\ Case Study of a Moroccan Immigrant Village in Israel" in 1962, by Alex Weingrod, an anthropologist at the Hebrew University in .Jerusalem. Trained in the United States, Professor Weingrod presently teaches at Ben­ Gurion University of the Negev. 1 This work would serve as a starting point for later studies, and provides a good example of the "moshav study" genre. The moshav is a unique type of planned village based on individ­ ual ownership of land, combined with communal services, marketing and purchasing, democratic village institutions, and a high degree of cooperation. Unlike the kibbutz, the basic social unit of the moshav is the nuclea• family. Between 1920, when the first moshav was estab­ lished, and 1948, 7'2 rnoshavim (pl. of rnoshav) were founded , and between 1948 and 1958, which includes the period of the mass immi­ gration, 274 moshavirn were founded.~ During the mass immigration to Israel ( 1948- 1954), many immi­ grants, especially from the Middle East and North Africa, were trans­ ferred from the transit camps to the newly founded moshavirn. After 1954, groups of immigrants were often taken directly from the boats which brought them to Israel to the agricultural villages. For most of these immigrants the shock of transplantation to a new country was 36 Immigration and Ethnicity compounded by having to contend with a new community structure and, as few of them were formerly agriculturalists, a new vocation. From June, 1958 until November, 1959, Alex Weingrod con­ ducted fieldwork in a newly established moshav in the Negev desert which was inhabited by immigrants from Morocco. He found that whereas the immigrants had adopted many of the technological and cultural norms of the new environment, they adapted the imposed social structure and institutions of the moshav to their own cultural norms and community structure. Furthermore, he found that the traditional clan structure, which had experienced a significant break­ down during the years immediately preceding emigration. was re­ inforced in the new environment to such a degree that the basic social and economic structure of the moshav was founded on resurrected forms of communal relationships. Between 1959 and 1962, Weingrod served as Director of Social Research in the Jewish Agency Settlement Department, which em­ ployed several young sociologists to study developments in new immi­ grant communities. From among these fieldworkers, Shlomo Deshen and Moshe Shokeid emerged as key ftgures in the field. Both were students of Eisenstadt who served as region<tl sociologists in southern Israel in the Land Settlement Department of the .Jewish Agency. Deshen broke from his teacher's methods and emulated Wein­ grod's example when he found that he could not understand develop­ ments in the political structure of the moshav without reference to the cultural-historical background of the village's inhabitants. Whereas Eisenstadt implied a relationship between an immigrant's "predisposi­ tion to change," his main indicator of assimil<ttion, and cult ural back­ ground, Deshen made this relationship explicit. Deshen devoted a significant portion of his research reports to description of the cultural and political setting in the villagers' region of origin. With time, he would largely abandon sociological theory and methodology for those of anthropology, which he found more applicable to understanding actual cult.ural processes involving immi­ grants in the new country. Deshen's 1964 essay, Case of Breakdown of Moderniza tion in an lsraPli Immigrant Community, examined the return to traditional t·ivalries in a community which was culturally predisposed to the moshav organiza­ tional system, and had lor a time functioned productively according to that model. Changing fortunes and a shifting population led to the re-emergence of political factions based on pre-immigral ion regional rivalries, especially between two communities f'rorn the Tunisian Is­ land of Djerba, which had not played a significant role during the early years of the moshav. This situation is similar to that described in Weingrod's work. Deshen presents a vivid picture of those aspects of The Emergence of Culture 37 Djerban culture and politics which would manifest themselves later in Israel. His work provided a model for Israeli anthropologists during the following two decades in describing the process of acculturation and the development of ethnicity in Israel. The mid-1960s were pivotal years for the development of the role of anthropology in studying immigration to Israel. Finally, Israeli an­ thropologists would have the institutional backing they had lacked up to this time. Looking back ten years later, Don Handelman and Shlomo Deshen wrote: "The single greatest stimulus for anthropologi­ cal research in Israel has been the Bernstein Fund for Research in Israel, directed hy Professor Max Gluckman of the University of Man­ chester during the mid- and late 1960s, which has supported ten different extended field studies during the past few years."3 Indeed, many of today's prominent Israeli anthropologists were given a signifi­ cant boost as young researchers by this fund, and anthropology as we know it in Israel today was greatly influenced by it. The main focus of the work carried out under Gluckman's direc­ tion was on immigrant acculturation, and the moshav and develop­ ment town were the preferred sites for conducting research. Of the projects undertaken prior to 1970 under the auspices of the Fund, three were conducted in development towns, four in rnoshavim, two in kibbutzim, and one in a charitable workshop for old people in an urban seuing.4 Perhaps the most significant finding of these studies is that cul­ tural continuity was at least as important as social change in the adapta­ tion of new immigrants to their particular social setting in Israel. In their survey, Handelman and Deshen stated: "All rnoshavim consid­ ered ... have at least one major component in common. They all exhibit strong cultural continuities with their settlers' areas of origin. These cultural continuities should be translated as resources which enabled the immigrants to interpret their new situations and to adapt to them_,,-, A statement of this kind is a most significant development when we recall the car·lier disregard of culture in the "absorption" studies of I sracli sociology. One of the shortcomings of both the sociological and anthropo­ logical treatments of immigration and ethnicity in Israel was the ne­ glect of the city. Although over two thirds of all Israelis live in cities, which have been the primary sites of immigrant settlement, urban areas have seldom been considered for investigation. The emphasis on agricultural settlements and development towns is, of course, Llll­ derstandable, given both Zionist agrarian romanticism and the ease of studying these more isolated and independent communitiesY Of the ten Bernstein projects, only one explored an urban setting. One oft he important features of much of the research undertaken 38 Immigration and Ethnicity by the "Bernsteinites" was their commitment to supplying data to the settlement authorities which could be of value in improving their pro­ grams and correcting their mistakes.7 How and to what extent the data were utilized by these institutions remains a question.8 Moshe Shokeid also abandoned the sociological approach for the anthropological. Shokeid conducted research in a moshav settled by immigrants from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. He examined the settlement authorities' strategy of settling new immigrants in homoge­ neous communities. Shokeid discussed a case in which this policy had disastrous consequences, when three traditional clan groups battled for power in the new social setting of the moshav.9 The Bernsteinites were not alone in conducting anthropological research on immigration and ethnicity in Israel. Trained at Harvard, Harvey Goldberg was an outsider to the Israeli social scientific scene, unlike Deshen and Shokeid who were products of it. 10 Goldberg be­ gan publishing studies on various aspects of life in a moshav settled by Tripolitanian immigrants. His concerns lay within the traditional scope of anthropological research and, unlike other Israeli anthro­ pologists working during this period, his sources were drawn primar­ ily from the anthropological rather than sociological literature. His work in the moshav covered such diverse topics as the frequency of father's brother's daughter marriage in the village, 11 the relationship between its autocratic political and egalitarian economic structure, 12 and the organization of domestic wealth within the community.13 Taken as a whole, Goldberg's work clearly demonstrates the productiv­ ity of employing traditional anthropological methodology in the study of Israeli immigrant villages. Two pioneering books by Weingrod, one dealing with the moshav, appeared in the 1960s. 14 The first few years of the 1970s saw a greater acceptance and institutional backing of anthropological research and a significant increase in publications. The young researchers of the pre­ ceding decade came of age during this period and saw their work published in book form.