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PDF FormatThe autochthonous myth had made its first appearance in Zionist culture in the writings of the Hovevei Zion (“Lovers of Zion”) movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their literature, it is claimed that contrary to the biblical account, the Hebrew people was indeed born in the land of Israel. Subjugated by the Canaanites, the Hebrews suffered political and cultural oppression until they were liberated by Joshua.31 A prominent autochthonous motif appears, for instance, in the writings of Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, who had a powerful influence on an entire generation of Zionist thinkers and artists. Berdichevsky’s vibrant nationalism called for casting off the Jewish tradition that had begun in Yavneh with R. Yohanan ben Zakai, which the writer held to be a legacy of detachment and passivity, under the protective aegis of the Tora. Berdichevsky, clearly inspired by Nietzsche, sought to reveal in Judaism a kind of primitive youth, almost idolatrous in force, which would generate the drive and vitality necessary to create a “new Jew,” earthy and close to nature. He urged the people to turn their backs on spineless spirituality, and to return to “the primeval past before the giving of the book,” in which the Jew was united with nature in a primal, mythic embrace.32
Despite the foreignness of Berdichevsky’s ideas to Zionist leaders such as Herzl and Ahad Ha’am, or to the thought of religious Zionism, they had considerable influence on the socialist stream in Zionism, the force which led the movement for most of its history and had a decisive impact on its final form. The three most prominent figures of the Labor movement—Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin and David Ben-Gurion—saw Berdichevsky as a decisive influence in determining their paths.33 The idea of creating a new Jew from the ancient mold took hold of the pioneers of the second and third Aliyot who, in the name of the Zionist ideal and the socialist idea, had cut themselves off from their families, communities and other components of traditional Jewish identity in exile. Despite their thoroughly modern worldview, these people felt a need to attach themselves to a shared historical past and an ancient collective memory, which would imbue their deeds with meaning and validity.
Thus the Zionist enterprise grew mythic roots from which it could draw vitality for its pioneering endeavor. The settlers of the Labor movement, which had abandoned their halachic heritage as associated with exilic Judaism, adopted the Bible as a literary and historical work that expressed the ancient connection between the people and its land, between the Jew and his native landscape. In the Bible, the pioneers found what they had missed in the rabbinic literature: An earthly, corporeal, natural life on the land. As Tabenkin attested, “The Bible served as a kind of birth certificate for the immigrant, helping him erase the line between man and the land, and develop a ‘sense of motherland.’ These ties evoked human powers that helped him put down roots and cleave to this plot of earth, so different in climate, nature and views from the land of his birth.”34 In the eyes of the socialist pioneers, the Bible was understood as a basis for the “myth of our right to the land,” instilling a sense of indigenousness and ownership among the sabras—nearly all of whom were immigrants or children of immigrants.35
Zionist propaganda and pedagogy, then, stressed the “native” aspects of the national experience in the Bible, which were considered to bear immediate historical, political and educational significance. An apt description of this consciousness and its meaning appears in sociologist Oz Almog’s study of the sabra, the native-born Israeli: “If the territories conquered are the liberated lands of our forefathers, then the native Israeli warrior who liberated them is no mere second-generation European, but the successor to the biblical youth who scaled the mountains of Canaan in their sandals.... If the pioneers felt at home in the land of Israel upon their arrival, their native-born children saw themselves, by virtue of the myth, as if they had lived in the land from time immemorial, like the trees of the field and the wild animals of the land of Israel.”36
It was David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and the leader of socialist Zionism, who most actively promoted the autochthonous conception. After the establishment of the state, he began to show heightened interest in the Bible, perhaps under the influence of events during the War of Independence.37 Over time, Ben-Gurion even developed a number of original ideas concerning the biblical texts and history. One of them was that the Hebrew tribes had inhabited the land of Israel in times predating the exodus from Egypt. In fact, in Ben-Gurion’s view, the Hebrew nation predated even Abraham, whom Ben-Gurion numbered among its sons. In one of the forums he held on these subjects with scholars and biblical researchers, Ben-Gurion opined that
The people of Israel, or the Hebrew people, was born in the land and raised in the land, even before the days of Abraham, as one of the peoples of Canaan. It was dispersed among the south, central and northern regions, and its spiritual and perhaps also its political center was Shechem. I accept as unquestionable facts the exodus from Egypt, the appearance of Moses and the event at Mount Sinai; these were central and decisive events in the chronicles of our people, whose consequences are recognizable to this day. Yet, in my opinion, only a few families, of the most exalted lineage and perhaps also among the most important, descended to Egypt. The Hebrews dwelt in the land among the Canaanite peoples even prior to Abraham. Their language was Hebrew, like the language of the other peoples of Canaan and Moab and Ammon, yet from the outset they were distinguished from all their neighbors by one thing: They believed in one God, a supreme God, ruler of heaven and earth.38
Originally the autochthonous myth in Zionism served for the most part as an educational-cultural motif for strengthening ties to the land. As a historical argument, it appeared only later, as a response to competing claims from the local Arab population. The basic argument was that the Hebrews’ presence in their motherland during the biblical period had endowed them with a kind of original entitlement, in comparison with the populations which came after. This entitlement did not expire with the exile, since the Jews never willingly left the land. It was in 1937, in the course of his testimony before the British Peel Commission, which deliberated the future of the land of Israel, that Ben-Gurion coined the expression “The Mandate is not our Bible—the Bible is our mandate.” Scholar of Zionism Eliezer Schweid presents the conventional formulation of this view: “The argument on behalf of a historical right is not based on the fact that once, in the distant past, the forefathers of the Jewish people dwelt in the land of Israel. It is based on the determination that the connection between the people and its land was never terminated.... The people of Israel was constrained to leave its land and prevented from returning to it. It never relinquished its right, and a possession whose owners do not relinquish it to those who stole it remains a possession.”39
So Zionism created a national story based, among other things, on artificial myths—admixtures of modern European ideas and selective interpretations of Jewish history. The result may have been political, economic and military success in the short and medium run, yet in the long run it was an educational and cultural failure which only now is showing its full effect. The collapse of the pioneer ethic created a large ideational vacuum, leading in the last twenty years to the rapid alienation of Israeli culture from its land and its past. As a result, Israel has developed a rootless culture, characterized by the chronic aping of mindless fads and fashions.
This sort of societal ennui is fertile ground for the emergence of new theories to justify the current academic and political trends. In a manner reminiscent of Rosenzweig, a number of post-Zionist intellectuals have promoted the “exilic consciousness” as a preferable, more colorful and humane alternative to Jewish nationalism. They offer up an apparent conflict between Zionism and Judaism: The former, by their account, is a tribal and oppressive reality, the outgrowth of a difficult political situation; the latter is portrayed as a pristine, liberated morality, deriving its force from an abstract reading of the text.40
In this context, of course, not only is modern Zionism invalid, but so is ancient Israelite nationalism. In post-Zionist academic literature on the Bible, for example, is found the fashionable post-modern claim that God’s promise to give his chosen nation a land which belongs to the “other” is taken to signify a guilty conscience on the part of the author over stealing the land from its original inhabitants. Those who hold such a position discern within the Bible a “subversive” attitude toward the settlement of the land, which ultimately reaches full expression in the tradition of the Sages, who purportedly have abandoned willingly the national concept of the redemption of the land, and consequently are depicted as the forefathers of post-Zionism.41
