[Poetics Today 11:1 (1990), pp. 175-191.]
During the hundred years of new Jewish settlement in Palestine, whose
starting point is conventionally assigned to 1882 (and commonly called
"the First Aliya"),1 a society was produced whose nature and struc-
ture proved to be highly fluid. The periodic influx of relatively large
groups of immigrants continually disrupted or disturbed the appar-
ent ad hoc stability of the community insofar as its structure, demo-
graphic consistency, and salient characteristics were concerned. Each
new wave resulted in a restructuring of the whole system. It is, how-
ever, commonly accepted that around the time of the establishment
of the State of Israel, in 1948, a relatively crystallized Jewish society
existed in Palestine with a specific cultural character and a high level
of self-awareness, as well as established social, economic, and political
institutions. It differed, culturally and otherwise, from the old Jewish,
pre-Zionist Palestinian community, and from that of Jewish commu-
nities in other countries. Moreover, this distinctiveness was one of its
[p. 176]
major goals, involving the replacement of the then-current identifica-
tions "Jew" and "Jewish" with "Hebrew."2 But with the founding of
the State of Israel and the massive immigration which followed, what
appeared to have been a "final," stabilized system was again subjected
to a process of restructuring. The distinction between Jewish and He-
brew cultures has become secondary and eventually obsolete. Hebrew
culture in Palestine has become Israeli, and although the latter defi-
nitely springs from the previous stage, it seems very different from it.
Thus, as a working hypothesis for this study, it would be convenient
to accept 1948 as a more or less imprecise termination of the period
which had started in 1882. An adequate description of the develop-
ment of the thirty years since, that is, subsequent to the establishment
of the state, will not be possible without first providing a description
of the longer and more complicated period which preceded, and thus
laid the foundations for what followed.
The early waves of the new Jewish immigration to Palestine, at least
until the early 1930s, seem to be different from other migrations in
modern times, including those of later periods. From anthropologi-
cal and sociological studies on immigration, we know that the cultural
behavior of immigrants oscillates between two poles: the preservation
of their source culture and the adoption of the culture of the target
country. A rather complex mechanism eventually determines, for any
specific period in the history of an immigrant group, which option
will prevail. The value images of the target country as compared with
those of the source country can constitute an important factor in de-
termining the direction of cultural behavior. Most migrations from
England tended to preserve the source culture. European immigrants
to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, on the other
hand, left their home countries with the hope of "starting a new life in
the new world"--a slogan of highly suggestive potency. Its effect was
to encourage the replacement of the "old" by the "new" and often en-
gendered attitudes of contempt towards the "old." Such replacement
assumes, of course, the existence of an available cultural repertoire in
the target country, and when this is the case the major problem of the
immigrants is how to authenticate acquired components so that they
will be considered "not foreign" by members of the target community.
[p. 177]
What actually takes place in the process of acquiring target cultural
patterns need not deter us at this point. What is important is only to
emphasize the necessity of the existence of an alternative system, that is,
an aggregate of alternatives, and it is precisely here that the case of
immigration to Palestine stands in sharp contradistinction to that of
many other migrations. A decision to "abandon" the source culture,
partially or completely, could not have led to the adoption of the tar-
get culture since the existing culture did not possess the status of an
alternative. In order to provide an alternative system to that of the
source culture, in this case East European culture, it was necessary to
invent one.
The main difference between most other migration movements and
that of the Jews to Palestine lies in the deliberate, conscious activity
carried out by the immigrants themselves in replacing constituents of
the culture they brought with them with those of another. This does
not mean that it is possible to establish a full correlation between the
principles which apparently underlay the search for alternatives and
what ultimately took place in reality; but there is no doubt that these
principles were, in fact, decisive--both for the deliberate selection of
possible items and the presence, post factum, of those items pressed
into the cultural system by the operation of its mechanism. Zionist
ideology and its ramifications (or sub-ideologies) provided the major
motivation for immigration to Palestine as well as the underlying prin-
ciples for cultural selection, that is, the principles for the creation of
an alternative culture. This does not imply the existence of any kind
of bold cultural pattern during this period, nor the acceptance by the
immigrants themselves of these principles, either in part or in full,
in a conscious fashion. But a schematic examination of the period in
retrospect will reveal that the governing principle at work was "the
creation of a new Jewish people and a new Jew in the Land of Israel,"
with emphasis on the concept "new."
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was sharp criticism of
many elements in Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Among the secular,
or semi-secular Jews, who were the cultural products of sixty years of
the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskala movement, Jewish culture was
conceived to be in a state of decline, even degenerate. There was a
notable tendency to dispense with many of the traditional constitu-
ents of Jewish culture. The assimilationists were prepared to give up
everything; the Zionists, in the conceptual tradition of the Haskala,
sought a return to the "purity" and "authenticity" of the existence of
the "Hebrew nation in its land," an existence conceived according to
the romantic stereotypes of contemporary (including Hebrew) litera-
ture, exalting the primordial folk nation. It is interesting to note that
both assimilationists and Zionists accepted many of the negative Jew-
[p. 178]
ish stereotypes, promulgated by non-Jews, and adapted them to their
own purposes. Thus they accepted at face value the ideas that Jews
were rootless, physically weak, deviously averse to pleasure, averse to
physical labor, alienated from nature, etc., although these ideas had
little basis in fact.
Among the numerous ways manifested for counterposing "new He-
brew" to "old Diaspora Jew" were the transition to physical labor
(mainly agriculture or "working the land," as it was called); self-defense
and the concomitant use of arms; the supplanting of the old, "con-
temptible" Diaspora language, Yiddish, with a new tongue, colloquial
Hebrew (conceived of at one and the same time as being the authen-
tic and the ancient language of the people), adopting the Sephardi
rather than the Ashkenazi pronunciation;3 discarding traditional Je-
wish dress and adopting other fashions (such as the Bedouin-Circassian,
notably among the youth of the First Aliya and members of Ha-shomer,
the Watchmen's Association); dropping East European family names
and assuming Hebrew names instead.
The decision to introduce Hebrew as the spoken language of the
community was not accepted or agreed upon even by those most ac-
tive in the creation of modern literary Hebrew. Nor did it immediately
appeal to members of the First Aliya. On the contrary, there were
objections to giving Hebrew pride of place in the new colonies, and
practical knowledge of the language was quite limited. Furthermore,
the adoption of Sephardi pronunciation cannot be explained either
by the fact that Sephardi circles in Jerusalem supported the idea of
Hebrew as a spoken language or that Eliezer Ben Yehuda was con-
vinced by a Christian priest (while he was lying ill in a French hospital)
[p. 179]
that Sephardi pronunciation should be preferred. After all, even in
Eastern Europe, the Sephardi pronunciation was considered to be the
"correct" one, but this did not prevent any Hebrew poet from- the
late nineteenth century until the early 1930s from using the Ashke-
nazi variant, even in Palestine itself, where it contravened the prevail-
ing Sephardi pronunciation (see below). The most important element
in the twin decisions to speak Hebrew and speak Sephardi Hebrew
stemmed from their qualities as cultural oppositions: Hebrew as against
Yiddish, Sephardi as against Ashkenazi; in both cases, new against
old. This outweighed any principle or scholarly discussions about "cor-
rect" pronunciation (although the latter were often conducted in such
terms).
Thus, the establishment of the new Jewish community in Palestine
involved a series of decisions in the domain of cultural selection, and
the ideology which permeated this project (i.e., Zionism) made ex-
plicit decisions compulsory. It was urgent to provide at least a few
conspicuous components for an alternative system, for an aggregate
of new functions. In some instances it was not even alternative extant
functions that were needed, but new ones, dictated by new conditions
of life. A long retrospective view seems to point to the fact that ex-
periments were continuously carried out in Palestine to supply the
components necessary for the fulfillment of the basic cultural opposi-
tion new Hebrew-old Jew. It was not the origin of the components which
determined whether or not they would be adopted, but their capacity
to fulfill the new functions in accordance with this opposition. Green
olives, olive oil and white cheese, Bedouin welcoming ceremonies, and
kaffiyehs all acquired a clear semiotic status. The by now classical liter-
ary description of the Hebrew worker sitting on a wooden box, eating
Arabic bread dipped in olive oil,4 expresses at once three new phenom-
ena: (a) he is a worker; (b) he is a "true son of the land"; (c) he is not
eating in a "Jewish" way (he is not sitting at a table and has obviously
not fulfilled the religious commandment to wash his hands). Or we
have the typical village elder in Yitzhak Dov Berkovitz's novel Days of
the Messiah (1938). He builds a house for himself which he considers to
be like a khata (in Russian--a peasant's hut) "painted white, with small
[p. 180]
windows, a yard, a gate and a small bench by the gate."5 His neigh-
bors in the same village, actualizing the same function for themselves,
construct houses like those of "Polish noblemen, with high windows."
The village elder dreams of Hebrew farmers who will eat "kasha and
sugar," and deplores the fact that he cannot obtain "crude galoshes,
like those worn by our Ukrainian farmers." The Baron de Rothschild's
version of the Jewish farmer in Palestine, on the other hand, was the
"authentic" French model: a semi-literate who kept only the Bible on
his table. The dominion of such components was short-lived and they
gave way in the course of time and in the wake of experimentation to
other cultural options. As mentioned before, their survival or disap-
pearance depended on their ability to fulfill a function in accordance
with the new ideology of national revival.
Specific materials often mislead those observing them years later.
For instance, what precise meaning can be attached to the adoption
of items of food and clothing from the culture of the Bedouins and
fellahin, first by members of the First Aliya, and later by those of the
Second, most notably among them the tight-knit Watchmen's Asso-
ciation, Ha-shomer? There can be no doubt that nineteenth-century
Romantic norms and "Oriental" stereotypes (including the identifica-
tion of Bedouin dress with that of our Biblical ancestors, so readily
inferred from numerous illustrations of the time) were central factors.6
They constituted a ready-made model for generating positive attitudes
towards these items and, further, for identifying them with the realia
of the population and the landscape. All this notwithstanding, this
was not a case of non-mediated contacts with a neighboring culture.
It was rather a case of reality being filtered through a familiar model.
Certain components of that model were fairly well known through the
general stereotypes of the "Orient" (through Russian poetry and, sub-
sequently, Hebrew poetry as well). But in fact, one could say that what
was taking place was an act of "translating" the new reality back into
an old, familiar, traditional cultural model, specifically that which had
crystallized in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century. In
this manner, the data of the new reality and the new experience could
be understood and absorbed. For neither Bedouin nor fellahin was
an unequivocal concept: on the one hand, they were heroes, men of
the soil, dedicated to their land; on the other, inferior and almost sav-
age. Again--on the one hand, their food, dress, behavior, and music
[p. 181]
expressed everything alien to the Jew: courage, natural nobility, loy-
alty, roots; on the other hand, these expressed primitiveness and cul-
tural backwardness. This example offers us a simple, uncomplicated
"translation" of a familiar East European model, in which old func-
tions, namely, the Ukrainian peasant and the Cossack, are transferred
to new carriers. The "heroic Bedouin robber" replaces the Cossack
and the fellah the Ukrainian peasant. The kaffiyeh takes the place of
crude galoshes and the Palestinian Hebrew song"How Beautiful are
the Nights of Canaan" that of a sentimental steppe song of the Don
Cossacks.
I said before that the source of the constituents is of secondary
importance in the new cultural system-in-the-making. This does not
mean that the material aspect of the constituents themselves is neu-
tral. From the point of view of the mechanism which either accepts or
rejects them, they may (in principle) be considered neutral. But this is
not the case with regard to their availability. The desire to actualize a
cultural opposition generates the search for alternative materials able
to fulfill the desired functions; but "the-people-in-the-culture" can
seek alternatives only where they are likely to find them, which means, gen-
erally, in nearby or accessible contexts. This is what made the transfers
from adjacent systems possible: from the Russian, Yiddish, Arabic, or
any construct (imaginary or credible) formulated, at least on an ideo-
logical level, as an option within culture. For instance, the desire to
discard Yiddish, to give it up as a spoken language, has led to the
choice of Hebrew as a replacement. But Hebrew, of course, had been
an extant, established phenomenon within Jewish culture during all
the centuries of dispersion. It was only the option of speaking it that had
not been actualized and even seemed impossible. Similarly, the desire
to discard the most conspicuous features of the European Diaspora led
to a decision to drop Ashkenazi pronunciation: it reminded one too
much of Eastern Europe and Yiddish. Hence, the popularity of Sep-
hardi pronunciation. But the latter had been an existing option even in
the repertoire of Haskala culture in Eastern Europe, only it had never
been actualized in Hebrew speech. The desire to dress as a "non-Jew"
popularized the kaffiyeh and the rubashka (a Russian shirt) adorned
with a cartridge belt; these were the options that an adjacent, acces-
sible culture provided. Accessibility alone could not have determined
the selection. For example, constituents belonging to the English cul-
ture were at the time gradually becoming accessible in Palestine, but
they were not adopted by the local Hebrew culture because they could
not fulfill the functions needed for the cultural opposition.
The deliberate struggle for the massive adoption of new constitu-
ents does not, however, ipso facto annihilate all the constituents of the
"old" culture. And no system which maintains an uninterrupted exis-
[p. 182]
tence is able to replace all its constituents. Normally, only the center
of the system changes; relations at the periphery change very gradu-
ally. From the point of view of the people who in their behavior and
existence actualize what we call, in the abstract, "systemic relations,"
even a deliberate decision to change behavioral constituents will lead
to changes only in the most dominant constituents, i.e., those in which
there is a high degree of awareness. But in areas such as proxemic
relations, body movement, etc., in which awareness is low and not
easily governed by deliberate control, even deliberate decisions will
fail to produce change. Nevertheless, since "culture" is not merely the
existence of one system attaching to a homogeneous group, but rather
a heterogeneous system, one member-group in the culture may be
impelled by certain factors, while another is not. Yet both exist simul-
taneously and are unavoidably correlated with each other within the
same polysystem. Thus, only a pseudo-historical idealization would
confer on the First Aliya a homogeneity capable of creating "a new
Hebrew people" according to the tenets of a specific ideology. Recent
studies and numerous documents from this period clearly demon-
strate that there were very few among the first settlers who were even
familiar with this ideology and even fewer who identified with it and
took it upon themselves to actualize the cultural opposition.
In other words, side by side with the penetration of new constitu-
ents, there remained a substantial mass of "old culture." As a result,
the cultural opposition to it probably constituted one of the important
factors in that system which, in retrospect, must now be recognized
as the central, the "official" one. Yet the cultural opposition of the
"new Hebrew" was both conditioned by and correlated with other
factors operating within the polysystem, some of which supported it,
while others neutralized it to a greater or lesser extent. Among other
factors which determined (to an extent that still requires further in-
vestigation) the penetration of new constituents into the system and
its reorganization at each subsequent phase, the following should be
considered:
1. The predominance of constituents from one particular source
over the entire society. (An example of this--as an illustrative hypothe-
sis only--would be the predominance of the Lithuanian high norm of
intonation and vowel quantity over the official norm of Hebrew. For
more explanations see below.)
2. The penetration of constituents from other cultural systems as
a result of "normal" contacts (such as the continued penetration of
Russian models into official, "high" Hebrew culture up to the 1950s,
at least).
3. The neutralization of certain features as a result of the impos-
sibility of unilateral domination (for instance, on the phonetic and
intonational features of spoken Hebrew).
[p. 183]
4. The emergence of local, "native," constituents as a result of the
dynamic operation of the repertoire beginning to crystallize, in ac-
cordance with the three foregoing principles (e.g., new body move-
ments, neologisms, verbal constituents with pragmatic functions, de-
velopment of various linguistic registers, such as slang, etc.).
The perseverance of old constituents, both items and functions, is
no less important for the dynamics of a system than the penetration
of new ones. This principle can be called the "inertia of institution-
alization." Established constituents will hold on as long as possible
against pressures which try to force them out of the center onto the
periphery or out of the system altogether. Many constituents perse-
vered in this way inside the new cultural system in Palestine, either in
their original form or by transferring their functions to new forms.
For example, with regard to the perseverance of form, Hebrew be-
came institutionalized rather painlessly in the registers of formal, pub-
lic, and non-intimate communication. But in intimate, familiar, or
"popular" language, even among fanatic Hebraists, Yiddish (or rather
fragments of Yiddishisms) persevered. Thirty years ago, it was still
relatively simple to record macaronic discourse in colloquial Hebrew.
Today we are forced to reconstruct it, partly from written testimony,
partly from the macaronic speech observable among old-timers still
with US.7 On the other hand, as regards the transfer of functions, this
was carried out by domestic carriers. On the linguistic level, to take
one instance, this procedure was based on providing loan-translations
[p. 184]
(calques). Pattern transfer, though, seems to have been possible more
in "low profile" areas: in intonation rather than lexicon, gesture rather
than morphology and the like.
The inertia of institutionalized constituents can also explain be-
havioral differences between various sectors of the emerging culture.
There were certain areas, for example, where new functions were
needed not to replace old ones, but simply to fill slots where there were
no old functions to begin with. Here the complex play between se-
lection factors from existing repertoires and the element of creativity
was less constrained than in those highly institutionalized areas where
quick replacement was impossible because those principles were not
valid for them.
We can see this at work in the case of language and literature. The
canonized patterns of Hebrew literature and the Hebrew language
which had crystallized in Eastern Europe maintained their central
positions in these systems throughout the entire period discussed in
this article and even later. The new, "native" constituents, which could
have provided alternative options, were forced to remain at the pe-
riphery of these systems, penetrating the center only in the late 1950s.
Let us look a little closer at these matters.
The process by which Hebrew became a modern language during
the nineteenth century and the dominant native tongue later in Pales-
tine illustrates many of the points mentioned above. Hebrew had to
mobilize all of its resources to meet the need which arose for writing
secular poetry, narrative prose, journalistic nonfiction, and scientific
prose. At the same time it had to maintain the existence of the cultural
oppositions emerging from the respective ideologies of each phase
of development. At the beginning of the Haskala, the need to cre-
ate a language in counterposition to rabbinical vernacular resulted in
the rather fanatical reduction of Hebrew exclusively to its Biblical va-
riety. When that need weakened in the face of the greater need to
counterpose the accepted form of early Haskala prose, many features
of rabbinical language were reintroduced, though now with differ-
ent functions. This process was particularly notable in the language
of literature, and was determined by literary requisites. For Mendele
Mokher Sfarim (1836?-1917; a founding father of modern Hebrew
and Yiddish literatures), for example, the language of the most appre-
ciated writer of the Enlightenment period, Abraham Mapu (1807-
1867), was stilted and artificial, especially in dialogue, and totally in-
compatible with the type of reality he was interested in describing
(Mapu's novels described life in ancient Biblical times). Consequently,
he introduced various constituents of post-Biblical Hebrew. Moreover,
Mendele unhesitatingly turned to Yiddish for further options. It was
socially, though not linguistically, the repertoire closest to Hebrew. He
[p. 185]
borrowed from the Yiddish not words, not even calques, but those lin-
guistic patterns of which there is a very low level of awareness: syntax,
sentence rhythm, and intonation. By doing this he achieved an un-
precedented effect of naturalness of speech in a language which was
confined to writing, thus opening the way for the later development
of both literary and spoken language. The effect of naturalness can
be understood only if we keep in mind that Mendele's readers were
at home in both languages and thus able to appreciate his singular
achievement by juxtaposing them.8 Other writers followed suit.
In observing the history of new spoken Hebrew (for which, unfortu-
nately, we have only partial documentation),9 two things become clear:
first, an enormous revolution was needed to turn it into a secular
tongue for daily use; secondly, the linguistic and paralinguistic phe-
nomena which perforce accompanied its revival had no connection
whatsoever with any kind of ancient historical situation. I refer here
to those linguistic features the conscious control of which is very dif-
ficult, even impossible, and whose penetration into the system of spo-
ken language is absolutely unavoidable: voice quality, the quantitative
and qualitative characteristics of sounds, sentence rhythm and intona-
tion, paralinguistic phenomena accompanying speech (hand and head
gestures), onomatopoeic sounds and interjections. In all these areas,
Yiddish and Slavic features massively penetrated Hebrew, dominated
it for a long time, and can still be observed in part today. Clearly,
the so-called Sephardi pronunciation actualized by natives of East-
ern Europe was quite different from that employed in Palestine by
non-Europeans. What was actualized, in fact, was only the minimum
necessary to establish it in opposition to Ashkenazi pronunciation.
Yet one of the most conspicuous phenomena in the area of pronun-
ciation was the gradual rejection of the various foreign linguistic and
paralinguistic features and their replacement by a very characteristic
and unmistakable native-Hebrew sentence intonation. The most dras-
tic departure from the effects of the interference of other language
systems probably took place in the area of voice quality and verbal
sounds. Furthermore, contrary to expectations regarding language ac-
quisition, the pronunciation of native Palestinian Hebrew speakers was
not in imitation of their parents' pronunciation but appeared rather
to follow a neutralization procedure: it sought the common denomi-
nator of all pronunciations (of those brought from Eastern Europe,
not from Middle Eastern countries!) and rejected all exceptional fea-
[p. 186]
tures. No existing inventory could have dominated the actual speech
of native Hebrew speakers (although it could and did dominate the
canonized pronunciation of specific sectors, such as the Hebrew the-
ater [see below]). This is a common procedure for a lingua franca.
Clearly no new inventory of sounds has been created but rather a local
phonological system. Neutralization on the level of sound per se is not
a defensible notion. One must say rather, and at a higher level of ab-
straction, that whatever was unnecessary for the phonological system in
terms of phonetic oppositions was in fact eliminated.10
How did the development of "native Hebrew" influence Hebrew cul-
ture in Palestine? It turns out that in spite of the ideology of "the new
Hebrew man/woman" and the subsequent adoration of the native-
born sabra 11all of whose linguistic "inventions" were zealously col-
lected, neither native phonetic norms nor the majority of other native
verbal phenomena were accorded official recognition.12 They did not
[p. 187]
become central to the cultural system, nor did they constrain the
norms of its written texts. Ultimately, they began to penetrate the cen-
ter through the classical process by which phenomena on the periph-
ery move towards the center, and even then, arduously and without
"official" sanction. Thus, when the Palestinian Broadcasting Service
was opened to Hebrew broadcasting, no "native" pronunciation was
heard there. What one heard was either a "Russian-Yiddish" Hebrew
or an attempt at "Oriental" pronunciation, i.e., actualizing some of the
guttural consonants as they were supposed to be pronounced--in imi-
tation of the equivalent Arabic sounds. Both endeavored to maintain
the canons of classical Hebrew morphology, that is, in accordance with
the canonized "vocalization" system (the so-called Tiberian tradition
which crystallized in the city of Tiberias by the Sea of Galilee in the
tenth century), as interpreted by later generations.
Similarly, until the 1940s native Hebrew did not have any position
in the language of the theater, since the latter was an official cultural
institution. The acting and textual models of the Hebrew theater in
Palestine were perfectly compatible with the conventions of Russo-
Yiddish pronunciation. This included quite a large range of phenom-
ena: phonetic features pertaining to vowels and consonants and voice
quality (tone, timbre, stability of voice vs. vibration), rhythm, fluency
of speech, and intonation. The Habima theater, founded in Moscow in
1918 and transferred to Tel Aviv in 1926, perpetuated Russo-Hebrew
speech the same way it perpetuated Russian acting conventions and
mise-en-scènes, at least until the beginning of the 1960s; only with the
foundation of the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv in the early 1940s did one
get the opportunity to hear a different kind of Hebrew--not exactly
native, but relatively liberated from Russo-Yiddish features. Actually
the characteristics of native spoken Hebrew were not only ignored,
but even strongly opposed. Native Hebrew was--and still is in certain
areas of the establishment--conceived of as an ephemeral phenome-
non, which if ignored would gradually go away. This attitude is further
reinforced by the school system at all stages by its emphasis on "cor-
rect" usage and classical grammar. The various functions required by
a colloquial Hebrew and therefore introduced into the language by
native speakers, either through transfers or exploitation of indigenous
"reserves" of Hebrew, were conceived of as errors.
[p. 188]
The official guardians of the language appeared to be impervious
to the needs of a living language. To sum up, one may say that native
Hebrew assumed in fact the position of a non-canonized, non-official
system. Only through a complicated and prolonged process did it be-
gin moving into official culture. Naturally, the generation shift contrib-
uted to the acceleration of this process, but the generation shift per se
is not sufficient to explain this. The acceptance of canonized norms
totally opposed to those of common usage is quite common in most
cultures. In Palestine, native speakers learned to speak in Habima (and
the other theaters imitating it) with a Russian accent; on the radio they
acquired the habit of pronouncing many features completely absent
in their actual speech.13
Let us turn now to a consideration of the system of written texts.
This is the most highly institutionalized system within culture and as
the bearer of official recognition has the central function of generating
textual models. Within this system, "literature" often assumes a cen-
tral position. In modern Hebrew culture, literature definitely had such
a position and such a function, and it makes no difference whether
the models adopted by society came directly from Hebrew literature
or were mediated by texts such as social, political, and critical writ-
ings. The fact that Hebrew developed into a modern language during
the nineteenth century in a written form, and further that its long
tradition had been primarily literary, enables us to understand why
written models had priority over any alternative oral options which
might have crystallized during that period. The system of Eastern
European Hebrew literature in Palestine functioned in a manner simi-
lar to that of architectural and paralinguistic phenomena by resisting
the penetration of native cultural constituents. At least until the end
of World War I, the canonized literature produced in Palestine was
peripheral to the mainstream of Hebrew literature in other parts of
the world; the various types of texts published in Palestine, whether
"high" literature or sketches, poems, letters, diaries, etc., disclosed a
very strong affinity to earlier stages in the history of Hebrew literature
and not to what was the dominant norm at the time in Europe. There-
fore, in Palestine not only were new models for Hebrew literature not
generated (neither "native" nor any other kinds), with the potential of
providing an alternative option; Palestinian Hebrew literature consti-
tuted rather a conservative sector within the totality of literary taste
and literary activities. On the other hand, when the center of Hebrew
[p. 189]
literature was transferred to Palestine by means of immigration in the
1920s and early 1930s, it was already an institutionalized system with
clear decision-making mechanisms, i.e., clear procedures for employ-
ing existing options or finding new ones. The contacts with Russian
literature as the available source for alternative options at critical junc-
tures were perpetuated in Palestine at least until the middle of the
1950s.
The gradual rise of Sephardi stress as the metrical norm for He-
brew poetry illustrates the extent to which the institutionalized literary
models were closed to the penetration of existing native constituents.
For several decades after Sephardi pronunciation dominated spoken
Hebrew in Palestine, it still had no impact on the norms of poetic
language. Sephardi stress in poetry began to appear in the official
sectors only at the beginning of the 1920s; it became the central, domi-
nant norm only at the beginning of the 1930s. This was the case not
only with the older generation, but even with poets partly educated
in Palestine before World War I, such as Avraham Shlonsky (1900-
1977) and his generation. Similarly, when the new "modernist" school
of Hebrew poetry emerged in the late 1920s, the models they em-
ployed as alternatives to those of the previous generation were based
on a massive adoption of Russian constituents, including the rhythm,
intonation, word order, rhyming norms, vocabulary, inventory of pos-
sible themes, etc., most of which had little connection with local, native
constituents. As noted before, the Hebrew poetry created in Palestine
before the rise of modernism as well as the Hebrew prose which had
made a certain attempt to deal with the local scene on the thematic
level were not considered--nor could they have been--alternative op-
tions for introducing change in the literary norms. It was a literature
based upon models too old-fashioned for the tastes of the new writers.
Even in the narrative prose written by native Hebrew speakers
towards the end of the 1940s, writers who hardly knew any foreign
language and who were assuming positions at the center of the liter-
ary system, one finds amazingly few constituents of native language.
Much of the work of that generation was based on Russian-Hebrew
models in accordance with those traditional decision-making proce-
dures which had established themselves in the Hebrew literature of
Eastern Europe before the migration to Palestine. Thematic structure,
modes of description, narrative composition, segmentation and tran-
sition techniques, in short, the entire narrative repertoire of the texts
of this generation leaned heavily on both classical Russian and Soviet-
Russian models. One may say with justification that in all these areas
a vacuum existed in the Hebrew system, and the young writers found
the model they needed in the profusion of prose translated from Rus-
sian, especially by Shlonsky and his school. Naturally, these texts are
[p. 190]
not monolithic, and the so-called Russian-Hebrew principles prevail-
ing are not homogeneous; certain local elements are recognizable. But
what is decisive here is the fact that the role of native Hebrew was by no
means dominant. The conception of what a story would be, the elabo-
ration of narrated reality, the ways of reporting the speech of char-
acters all were linked to a very strong literary tradition, by no means
native, the result of the penetration of constituents through contacts
with another literature. Only in later texts did native language pene-
trate narrative prose written by some of the writers belonging to "the
generation of the 1940s." Even there it was not quite authentic. Others,
who probably had difficulty moving from traditional stylized literary
Hebrew, eventually found it easier to write historical novels: in such
novels they could employ the "make-believe" literary language with
more apparent justification. Furthermore, these phenomena were not
exclusively characteristic of the generation in question; they appeared
among other groups of writers at the opposite end of the ideological
spectrum, the so-called "Canaanites," who favored the total separa-
tion of native-born Palestinian Hebrews from the Diaspora Jews. This
clearly illustrates the principle that institutionalized options within a
cultural system are often stronger than ideologies. True, some of these
"Canaanite" writers objected strongly to "non-native" literary Hebrew,
and subsequently introduced new language into their journalism. But
this was not the case with their literary prose or poetry. Again, we see
that new constituents can penetrate the periphery more easily than
they can the more official sectors of a system.
Finally, it would be interesting to observe what took place in litera-
ture aimed at Hebrew-speaking children. It would be naive to suppose
that the situation here would be radically different. Children's lit-
erature usually assumes a non-canonized position within the literary
polysystem, adopting models that have undergone simplification, or
perpetuating models which occupied the center when they were new.
Hebrew children were obliged during the period under consideration
to read literary translations in an elevated, sometimes pompous liter-
ary language, some of which was a stylized Russian-Hebrew, some of
which employed the norms of previous stages in the history of liter-
ary Hebrew, norms long and far removed from the center of adult
literature. These included various components of the literary model
such as strophic matrices, composition techniques, thematic and plot
models, and so on. The mild attempts of certain writers to alter the
language of children's books were considered almost revolutionary,
and never became generative for the production of textual models
for children. So, the idea of the "new nation" notwithstanding, there
was no room for native constituents in the various sub-systems of the
culture. Native constituents which could have constituted alternative
[p. 191]
options found their way only into the periphery. Here, at least, there
was not too much opposition. Here conventional constraints which
prevailed in canonized literature hardly applied, or did not apply at
all. In these texts, often written by amateurs, various native constitu-
ents did penetrate, not homogeneously, but as part of a conglomerate
of diverse and contradictory features. The texts best known to us of
this kind are the short detective novels and the dime novels of the
1930s (see Shavit and Shavit 1974), but there were other peripheral
texts. As for canonized literature, it was only in the mid-fifties that a
change took place, and it took place first in poetry where the option
of employing the existing and available repertoire of the native system
was introduced. The Russian-Hebrew word order, rhythm, and in-
tonation were replaced, in varying degrees, by local Hebrew features.
Changes also occurred on more complex levels of the poetic model,
such as the phonetic structure, the use of realia materials, and so on.
Analogous processes took place in narrative prose too, but these were
much more gradual, and have hardly been finalized to date. (For some
recent discussions of these problems see Gertz 1983; Shavit 1982.)
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[This list does not appear in the printed version. All bibliogra- phical items should be looked for in the accumulated Bibliography of this issue.] Gorni, Yosef 1979 "Romantic Elements in the Ideology of the Second Aliya," Jerusalem Quarterly 13: 73-78.
Perry, Menakhem
Saulson, Scott B.
Shavit, Zohar, and Yaacov Shavit
Shmeruk, Khone |