Peddlers and the Policing of National Indifference in Palestine, 1920–1948

This article explores nationalism and consumption in British-mandate Palestine using a history-from-below approach. It focuses on Arab and Jewish peddlers who regularly crossed national, cultural, and geographic borders in order to conduct petty trade with customers. Colonial and nationalist actors worked hard to curb the ubiquitous presence of such peddlers for various reasons. First, British colonial officials regarded urban hawking as unhygienic, noisy, and not modern. Second, many Zionist actors deemed Jewish-Arab trade threatening to the Zionist principle of ‘Hebrew consumption’. Zionist leaders also expressed concern about the presence of Jewish peddlers whom they viewed as the antithesis of the idealized, Hebrew-speaking Zionist ‘New Jew’. Third, Palestinian Arab nationalists policed Arab peddlers who violated the six-month national strike in 1936 by continuing to hawk their goods. In short, in the eyes of various nationalist actors, these peddlers displayed ‘national indifference’ that needed to be controlled. By studying how nationalist actors policed everyday, small-scale peddler-consumer exchanges, we are able to understand how a ‘culture of nationalism’ arose in mandatory Palestine.

Welcoming the Sabbath on the Kibbutzim

The Kibbutz culture was one of resistance; its very essence was resistance to classical European Judaism and a commitment to create the new Jew in his historic homeland. The kibbutz members left behind them the religious and liturgical culture of the past and experimented in creating a comprehensive and all-inclusive society, encompassing all aspects of the economic, social, and cultural life of its members. Albeit secular and even atheist, some of the more creative expressions of Israeli spirituality resided within the gates of the kibbutzim. To this day, some of the most interesting Israeli ritual innovations have deep roots in kibbutz culture. This essay examines the communal Shabbat welcoming ceremonies celebrated before Friday night dinner in the Kibbutz dining room. It explores the discussions and often intense arguments that accompanied their creation, the content of these ceremonies. It addresses the controversies relating to the Shabbat candle lighting and the special secular liturgies that were composed in the kibbutzim for this practice. The essay also discusses the emergence of the Shabbat welcoming ceremony in its historic context and its gradual disappearance (or its change) due to the waning of Kibbutz ideology.

Defying Religion and Deifying Nationhood

This chapter explores the widespread phenomenon of semantic secularization. An example of an ideologically-neutral semantic secularization is visible in the transition of the meaning for the English word cell from ‘monk’s living place’ to become instead ‘autonomous self-replicating unit from which tissues of the body are formed’. The main focus of this chapter, however, is on secularizations involving ideological what I call ‘lexical engineering’, as exemplified by deliberate, subversive processes of extreme semantic shifting, pejoration, amelioration, trivialization, and allusion. An example of such transvaluation, the transition of semantic value, is [bəloˈri:t]. In Mishnaic Hebrew this term means ‘Mohawk, an upright strip of hair that runs across the crown of the head from the forehead to the nape of the neck’, a distinctive of the abominable pagan and not to be touched by the Jewish barber. But, defying religious values as well as negating the Diaspora (where Jews by and large had tidy hair), secular Socialist Zionists use blorít with the meaning ‘forelock, hair above the forehead’, which becomes one of the defining characteristics of the ‘Sabra’ (‘prickly pear’ a metaphor for a native Israeli)—as if proposing that the ‘new Jew’ is a pagan. In line with the prediction made by Gershom Scholem in his famous letter to Franz Rosenzweig (Bekenntnis über unsere Sprache, 1926), some ultra-orthodox Jews have tried to launch a ‘lexical vendetta’: using secularized terms as dormant agents, as a shortcut to religious concepts, thus trying to convince secular Jews to go back to their religious roots.

Israelijew Jewisraeli: Yoram Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected and the Problem of the Human

This article considers the political and philosophical genealogies of the category “Israeli Jew” in terms of Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected, which I situate within the wider context of contemporary Israel. Israel is defined by some as a colonial and occupying state and by others as a liberal democracy founded on narratives of modern nationalism, but also on the Abrahamic narrative of 2000 years of Jewish exile. The category “Israeli Jew” thus brings together the figure of the diasporic Jew as not fully sovereign with Zionism’s figure of the “New Jew,” based on European modernity’s ideal of a sovereign, autonomous, citizen subject. I show how, by bringing these figures together, rather than replacing one with the other, the category “Israeli Jew” brings together the specificity of the different genealogies that these terms carry. In this regard, I argue, Israel can be understood as an instantiation of the historical legacy of the philosophical binary between the Athenian and the Hebraic, which, as Miriam Leonard, Jacques Derrida, and others have pointed out, informs the long durée of Western political philosophy.