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ABSTRACT
This essay reviews representations of Palestine and its Arab inhabitants through studying a set of Jewish-Austrian texts. It aims to investigate how the question of Palestine and the issue of the Palestinian “presence” were imagined by Jewish-Austrian authors beyond the reductive binary of Zionism and anti-Zionism. I will discuss Theodor Herzl’s texts, Der Judenstaat (1896), Altneuland (1902), and Herzl Relo@ded: Kein Märchen (Herzl Relo@ded: It’s no fairy tale, 2016) by Doron Rabinovici and Natan Sznaider. I will compare Zionist imaginaries among these texts and contrast them to the writings of Moshe Yàakov Ben-Gavriêl (1891–1965) who advocated for a pan-Asianist union between orientals: a category that included both Jews and Arabs for him.
My essay seeks to answer three main questions: first, can the tradition of thinking described by Edward Said as “Orientalism” be found in my corpus of analysis? Second, what forms of resistance and deconstruction of orientalist tropes can be found? Last, how would an analysis of Jewish-Austrian literatures and their gendered representations on Palestine and Palestinians complicate the current historiography of Zionism? I will answer these questions by offering both a literary analysis of the texts above alongside an appraisal of recent historiography on Zionism.
Acknowledgements
This article benefited from Adey Almohsen’s (University of Minnesota, USA) extensive input on Orientalism and Zionist historiography. I am also grateful to Alfred Bodenheimer (University of Basel, Switzerland) for introducing me to the works of Moshe Ya'akov Ben-Gavriêl. Last but not least, I would like to thank Glenda Abramson (University of Oxford, UK) for the thorough edits and helpful comments, and the JMJS peer reviewers for providing constructive criticism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Viktoria Pötzl has been Assistant Professor of German-Jewish Studies at Grinnell College since August 2019. Her PhD degree is in Jewish Studies from the University of Vienna in the field of Literature and Gender studies (2014). In 2010 she completed an MA degree in German philology, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna, focusing on Austrian literature in the field of gender, feminist and queer studies. In addition to having been a faculty member at the School of Applied Humanities and Languages at the German Jordanian University in Amman, Jordan, she also taught at the University of Vienna and the Buryat State University in Siberia. Viktoria was most recently a visiting scholar at the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota, where this article took shape. Her doctoral research culminated in a monograph published by Neofelis, in January 2018. Her current research project investigates representations of Palestine in modern and contemporary Jewish-Austrian literature.
Notes
1 Moshe Ya'akov Ben-Gavriêl was born 1881 in Vienna as Eugen Hoeflich and was socialized in a growing antisemitic environment. Armin A. Wallas, late Professor of Jewish-Austrian Literature, divides Ben-Gavriêl’s life into two parts. Part one is his teen Zionist Viennese years where he started writing and part two are his years in Israel/Palestine. (Wallas, “Eugen Hoeflichs Leben und Werk bis 1927,” 569). As already mentioned, with the Imperial and Royal Army of the Austro- Hungarian Empire he came to Palestine the first-time during the First World War Jersualem wird verkauft is a literary processing of this experience. When Ben-Gavriêl moved, to Palestine for good in 1927 together with his wife Miryam, a professional singer, he changed his name to Moshe Ya'akov Ben-Gavriêl, thus leaving his diaspora name behind and giving himself a Hebrew name. (Wallas, Tagebücher, 569.) With the rise of antisemitism in Germany and Austria and the National Socialists seizing power, it became increasingly difficult for Ben-Gavriêl to publish his books in German. Also, in 1938 he was fired from the German News Agency he was working for. Miryam had a private practice as a voice tutor and could provide a living for both of them. Ben-Gavriêl’s and the situation of many German-speaking Jewish writers in exile is compounded by the fact that publishing was nearly impossible. (Schmidt, Der Unterhaltungsschriftsteller Mosche Ya-akov Ben-Gavriȇl, 22–4). Ben-Gavriêl, trained as a soldier, joined the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization. After news broke about the Nazi atrocities in Europe he volunteered for the British Army in the Second World War. Later he participated in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and the Sinai Campaign in 1956. After the war he was one of the first Israeli journalists to write for a German newspaper and in 1951 he was the first Israeli author to be read in Germany. From then on, he wrote for various newspapers and undertook reading tours through Germany and Austria. (Schmidt, Der Unterhaltungsschriftsteller Mosche Ya-akov Ben-Gavriȇl, 25) He became well known as a writer of entertainment literature in the 1950s and 1960s and as a representative of literary expressionism. (Wallas, Tagebücher, 569.) Until the 1960s he coined the image of Israel within West Germany (Schirrmeister, “Der andere Krieg,” 223.) due to his work as a foreign correspondent. One of his greatest success was Das Haus in der Karpfengasse in 1963 (though 32 publishing houses rejected his manuscript), which was adapted into a film by Kurt Hoffmann. (Schmidt, Der Unterhaltungsschriftsteller, 27.) Ben-Gavriêl died 1965.
2 Ben-Gavriȇl, Jerusalem Wird Verkauft, 14–5.
3 Ben-Gavriêl, Jerusalem, 17.
4 Natan Sznaider was born 1954 in Mannheim, Germany. He was the child of Polish-born stateless survivors of the Shoah. He travelled to Israel in 1974, where he studied sociology, psychology and history at the University of Tel Aviv. In 1992, Sznaider received a PhD in sociology from Columbia University in New York. Currently, Sznaider is a professor of sociology at the Tel Aviv University of Applied Sciences. He has published extensively on topics related to the Shoah, Israel, Germany, Memory, and antisemitism. Together with Rabinovici, he edited an academic volume on antisemitism in 2019 and co-authored in 2016 the fictional text titled: Herzl Relo@ded.
5 Doron Rabinovici is a prominent Jewish-Austrian author, historian, and essayist from Vienna. He has received several literary prizes and has published many works of fiction alongside essays and academic articles. He was born 1961 in Tel-Aviv. His father, David, had fled Romania for Palestine in 1944. His mother, Shoshana, an author herself, came from Vilna and survived the ghetto and extermination camps, reaching Israel in the 1950s. In 1964, the family moved to Vienna. From this point on Doron Rabinovici has lived in Austria, but his connection to Israel stayed strong. (Kraft, Lexikon) Rabinovici is a dedicated political activist and has spent many years fighting antisemitism and racism in Austrian society. Today, he remains active in Austria’s political and cultural circles and is an outspoken opponent of Austria’s far-right party, the FPÖ.
6 Die Pforte des Ostens is Ben-Gavriêl’s main political and theoretical work. In it, he details - using the keyword “pan-Asianism” - his version of peaceful coexistence and a spiritual union of all Asian peoples as an alternative to European capitalism and imperialism. (Schirrmeister, “Der andere Krieg,” 225–6.)
7 Leitch et al. eds, The Norton Anthology. As pointed out, Said’s Orientalism is an assessment of the tenacious grip of ideologies over literary texts, which also holds true for Zionism. Not only do the literary points of origin of many Zionist authors such as Birnbaum, Nordau, Herzl come to mind, but also this essays corpus of analysis is made up of writers, placing literature at the centre of Zionist thought. Additionally, Arab and Palestinian responses to Zionism prominently came from writers and intellectuals like Salma Jayyusi, Najib Azuri or Ghassan Kanafani in contexts of discussions on Zionism in major journals, private talks and their texts.
8 Said, Orientalism, 3.
9 Schirrmeister, “Der andere Krieg,” 234–5.
10 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xiii.
11 Abramson, Hebrew Writing, xvi.
12 Ben-Gavriêl, Jerusalem, 119–20.
13 Benz, 54.
14 Ben-Gavriêl, Jerusalem, 120–1.
15 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte Des Ostens, 65.
16 Rabinovici and Sznaider, Herzl Relo@ded, 65.
17 Edward Said for example, (Said, The Question of Palestine, 117) takes the position that “Palestinian self-assertion came as response to the influx of Jewish immigration during the First Aliyah of 1882 and against the ideological declarations of Zionism. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity and Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine criticize Said’s position and in their research focus instead on the internal dynamics of Palestinian society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They attempt to seek out nuances and dynamics within Palestinian society as reasons for the growing national Palestinian consciousness, thereby minimizing theories of Palestinian nationalism‘s dependency on Jewish arrival or on Zionism in late Ottoman Palestine.
18 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte, 64.
19 LeVine, Overthrowing Geography, 8.
20 Gribetz, Defining Neighbours, 6.
21 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte, 54.
22 For further readings with a focus on Italian Zionists see Marzano. “Visiting British Palestine,” 174–200.
23 Shafir, Land, Labour, 6–7.
24 Rabinovici, Sznaider, Herzl Relo@ded, 16.
25 Herzl, Der Judenstaat., 63–64.**
26 Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 24.
27 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte, 62.
28 Ben-Gavriêl, Jerusalem, 76–7.
29 Rabinovici, Sznaider, Herzl Relo@ded, 7–8.
30 Herzl, Altneuland., 32.
31 Ibid., 91.
32 Ibid., 34.
33 Rabinovici, Sznaider, Herzl Relo@ded, 13.
34 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 3.
35 Ibid., 236.
36 Herzl, Altneuland, 91–2.
37 Rabinovici, Sznaider, Herzl Relo@ded, 51.
38 Herzl, Altneuland, 52.
39 Roth, Juden Auf Wanderschaft, 16–7.
40 Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation, 6.
41 Roth, Juden Auf Wanderschaft, 20.
42 Dieckhoff, The Invention of a Nation, 2, 8. Dieckhoff views the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) of the nineteenth century as an embodiment of this phenomenon, launching a cultural renaissance in Hebrew and Yiddish aiming to unite many Jews, culturally at the least (3). He cites the likes of Herzl and Max Nordau, who utilized the Haskalah’s ideas of a unique Jewish people and culture to emphasize the necessity of Zionism and of the formation of a sovereign Jewish state (8). Dieckhoff traces in the different Zionisms an attempt to revive the past, as well as a serious confrontation with modernity. Zionist ideologues returned to a Jewish heritage, secularizing or modernizing certain elements within it to serve nationalist purposes (10). It follows then that “Zionism was not born in a vacuum” (10). It refined and redefined religious concepts with the grammar of the ideological systems of its surroundings (10). Zionism, thus, transformed a cultural heritage to modern discourse and to ideology with clear political aims. Furthermore, Zionism entailed both discovery and creation; discovering a Jewish antiquity and creating from it a modern understanding of the Jewish people as “a nation in search of a state” (11).
43 Yuval-Davis, Geschlecht und Nation , 68.
44 Pötzl, Nation, Narration Und Geschlecht:, 55.
45 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte, 63.
46 Said, The Question, 26.
47 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte, 57.
48 Ḥaddād, I Killed Scheherazade, 31.
49 Silverman, “Reconsidering the Margins,” 109–110.
50 I understand “orientalizing” as a violent praxis and process that has not much to do with an identarian category. One can be orientalized while not necessarily being defined as from the “Orient” as well as one can be orientalized while being self-defined as “oriental.”
51 Abu-Lughod, “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies,” 101.
52 Ibid., 105.
53 Said, “Interview,” 30–47.
54 Pellegrini, “Whiteface Performances,” 108.
55 Hastings, “Said’s Orientalism,” 130.
56 Ben-Gavriêl, Jerusalem, 138.
57 Kaur Bakshi, “Homosexuality and Orientalism,” 153.
58 Ben-Gavriêl, Jerusalem, 166–7.
59 Herzl, Altneuland, 72.
60 Herzl, Der Judenstaat, 32.
61 Yuval-Davis, “Nationalist Projects and Gender Relation,” 16.
62 Herzl, Altneuland, 10.
63 Ben-Gavriêl, Die Pforte, 138.