2. Zionism
Any survey of the influences on the specific way of life
that has developed in Israel must begin with Zionism.
In other places, ideas introduced to a population became
an integral part of the culture of that society, but modern
Israel was born out of an idea without which there would
be no Jewish society or State here. Reiteration of this
basic point is essential to understanding the impact of
Zionism on this country.
One of the most important discussions within the Zionist
movement dealt with the type of culture that the Old/New
Land (the title of Herzl’s futuristic novel on life
in Eretz Yisrael) should produce. There were already questions
regarding the relationship between the old and the new,
and the West and the East, in the early stages of the
movement. Indeed, both are expressed in Herzl’s
book. The Zionist organization was the arena in which
the main discussions on culture were fought out in the
early days; however, the focus for these questions gradually
moved – appropriately – to the Land of Israel
itself. As the different streams of Zionism developed,
each formed its own concept of the culture that should
flourish in Zion.
All of these streams spoke of the development of something
fundamentally new in the Jewish world. Under Herzl’s
sway, political Zionism conceived of a way of life in
Eretz Israel infused with advanced Western culture. Religious
Zionism talked of the need to blend ‘Torah Ve‘avodah’
(Torah study and work) into a new kind of a culture for
the Jewish people. Labor Zionism believed that laboring
on the soil, as working men and women constructed their
own lives, would result in a culture based on the relationship
between the people and the land. There was also a stream
called cultural Zionism, built round the ideas of one
of the greatest of all Zionist thinkers, Ahad Ha‘am.
He spoke of the need to secularize the Jewish heritage
and use the finest Jewish values, culled from the works
of the Prophets, as the basis for the new society. It
was the friction between these varied visions that created
the foundations of the new society and its way of life.
One notable creative expression of Zionism was the conscious
attempt to produce an art form that would be suited to
the land and its nationalist movement. The leading name
in this regard was that of Professor Boris Schatz, who
immigrated from Bulgaria at the beginning of the 20th
century. He opened the first art school in Palestine:
Bezalel.
Schatz tried to inspire his students with the need to create
a national art. The result was a highly romanticized blend
of Oriental symbols and Biblical imagery, which became
known as ‘Hebrew Eastern.’ For millennia,
the Jewish imagination had been filled with images of
the land. Schatz and his artists tried to use this to
create a new combination of icons and symbols. They drew
pictures of ancient Hebrews hauling great bunches of grapes
over mythical landscapes; Hebrew women drawing water from
ancient wells and prophetic figures pointing the way over
distant mountains, that would both capture old images
and help to create new ones. They used a variety of art
forms to do this; for example, their work became extremely
important as the basis for the propagandistic posters
that served the Zionist movement so well in the early
decades of the movement, and the wall tiles that they
created to adorn the buildings of early Tel Aviv.
Another significant achievement of early Zionism in this
context was the creation of a series of mythic heroes
who became the basis for Zionist education and inspiration.
These were figures, old and new, out of whose reconstructed
stories a model of new Jewish heroism was built. Chief
among these were the trilogy of ancient heroes: the Maccabees,
the fighters of Masada and Bar Kochba. Each of these figures
or groups served as the inspiration for countless poems,
stories, plays and visual images.
The mythos of Masada gained widespread popularity after
the Zionist poet Yitzhak Lamdan wrote his poem Masada
the in the wake of the terrible Eastern European pogroms
of the early 1920s. From that time onward, it became a
fundamental story in early Zionist youth movement culture
(see further in this essay). Thousands of youngsters trekked
to Masada in tough conditions in order to prove their
worthiness to be connected to the Zionist society of the
Yishuv, providing an interesting example of art’s
influence on life. Among the newer legendary figures,
Yosef Trumpledor, Hana Senesh and the fighters of the
Warsaw ghetto also provided material for countless dramatic
sketches and poems.
In general, Zionism contributed a heroic layer to the developing
self-image of the new Jewish society that was building
up in Eretz Yisrael. This heroic aspect would affect all
forms of artistic expression in the early years of the
young society and State. The beginnings of Israeli cinema
are often referred to as ‘the heroic years’.
This epithet is not meant to reflect the hardships faced
by the early film-makers, but rather the way in which
their films tended to reinforce the Zionist mythos, strengthening
the self-image of the Yishuv as participating in an heroic,
historic drama.