Canaanites (movement)
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The Canaanites is a political and aesthetic movement, which reached its peak in the 1940s among the Jewish residents in Palestine, and has significantly impacted the course of Israeli art, literature, and spiritual and political thought. The movement's original name was the Council for the Coalition of Hebrew Youth (Hebrew: הוועד לגיבוש הנוער העברי).
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[edit] The Canaanites and Judaism
In 1943, the Jewish-Palestinian poet Yonatan Ratosh published an "Epistle to the Hebrew Youth", the first manifesto of the Canaanites. In this tract, Ratosh called upon Hebrew youth to disaffiliate themselves from Judaism, and declared that no meaningful bond united Hebrew youth residing in Palestine and Judaism. Furthermore, Ratosh argued that Judaism was not a nation but a religion, and as such it was universal, without territorial claims; one could be Jewish anywhere. For a nation to genuinely arise in Palestine, he maintained, the youth must uncouple from Judaism, and form a Hebrew nation with its own unique identity. The birthplace and geographical coordinates of this nation is the Fertile Crescent.
| The Council for the Coalition of Hebrew Youth calls upon you as a Hebrew, as one for whom the Hebrew homeland is a homeland in actuality: not as vision, nor as desire; and not as solution for the Jewish question, nor as solution to cosmic questions, and not as solution to the variegated neuroses of those stricken by the diaspora. As one for whom the Hebrew language is a language in actuality and practicality, a mother tongue, a language of culture and of the soul; the one and only language for emotion and thought. As one whose character and intellect were determined in the Hebrew reality, whose internal landscape is the landscape of the nation and whose past is the past of the nation alone. As one who, despite the best efforts of rootless parents, teachers, statesmen and religious leaders, could not be made to like and affiliate with the Shtetl and the history of the diaspora, the pogroms and expulsions and martyrs, and whose natural estrangement from all prophets of Zionism, the fathers of Jewish Literature in the Hebrew tongue, and the diaspora mentality and the diaspora problem, cannot be expunged. Whereas all these were conferred upon you by force, like a borrowed cloth, faded and tattered and too-tight. [1] |
Out of their estrangement from Judaism, the Canaanites were also estranged from Zionism. The State of Israel ought to be, they argued, a Hebrew state, not a solution to the Jewish Question. Following the first Aliyot, a generation arose in Palestine that spoke Hebrew as a native language and did not always identify with Judaism. Designating the Israeli People as a "Jewish People", the Canaanites argued, was misleading: If it was possible to be a Jew anywhere, then the State of Israel was merely an anecdote in the history of Judaism. A nation must be rooted in a territory and a language—things which Judaism, in its very nature, could not provide.
[edit] Canaanites and History
The movement promoted the idea that the Land of Israel was that of ancient Canaan (or, according to others, the whole of the Fertile Crescent) in which ancient peoples and cultures had lived, and that the historical occasion of the reemergence of an Israeli people constituted a veritable revival of these selfsame ancient Hebrews and their civilization, and consequently a rejection of religious Judaism in favor of a native and rooted Hebrew identity.
Because the Canaanites sought to create in Israel a new people, they mandated a certain wilful amnesia—the absolute dissociation of Israelis from Judaism and the history of Judaism. In their stead, they placed the culture and history of the Ancient Near East, which they considered the true historical reference. Furthermore, they argued that the people of the Land of Israel in the days of the biblical monarchs had not been Jewish, but Hebrew, and had shared a cultural context with other peoples of the region. Citing contemporary biblical criticism, the Canaanites argued that the Tanakh reflected this ancient history, but only partly, since it had been compiled in the period of the Second Temple by Jewish scribes, who had rewritten the history of the region to suit their world-view.
Much of the Canaanite effort was dedicated to researching the history of the Middle East and its peoples. The Canaanites cited approvingly the work of Mosheh David Kasuto, who translated Ugaritic poetry into Hebrew. (Ugarit was an ancient city located in modern-day northern Syria, where in the early 20th century many important ancient texts, written in the Ugaritic language, were discovered.) Ugaritic verse bore an uncanny resemblance to the language of the Tanakh. The Canaanites argued that these texts proved that the people of the Land of Israel had been much closer socially and culturally to other peoples of the region than they had been to Judaism.
[edit] Canaanites and Literature
In his book, Sifrut Yehudit ba-lashon ha-ʻIvrit (Jewish Literature in the Hebrew Tongue), Yonatan Ratosh sought to differentiate between Hebrew literature and Jewish literature written in the Hebrew language. Jewish literature, Ratosh claimed, could be and was written in any number of languages. The ideas and writing style that characterize Jewish literature in Hebrew were not substantially different from those of Jewish literature in other languages. Ratosh and his fellow Canaanites (especially Aharon Amir) thought that Hebrew literature should be rooted to its historical origins in the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language. As an example, they noted American literature, which in their mind was newly created for the new American people.
Canaanite verse is often obscure to those unfamiliar with ancient Ugaritic and Canaanite mythology. One of the principal techniques used by the Canaanites to produce Hebrew literature was to adopt words and phrases (especially hapax legomena, which the Canaanites regarded as traces of the original, unedited Hebraic Tanakh) from the Tanakh and use them in a poetic that approximated biblical and Ugaritic verse, especially in their use of repetitive structures and parallelism. The Canaanites did not rule out the use of new Hebrew words, but many of them did avoid Mishnaic Hebrew. It should be noted, however, that these characteristics represent only the core of the Canaanite movement, and not its full breadth.
The late literary scholar Baruch Kurzweil argued that the Canaanites were not sui generis, but a direct continuation (albeit a radical one) of the literature of Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Shaul Tchernichovsky.
[edit] Scope and Influence
Among the avowed Canaanites were numbered the poet Yonatan Ratosh, and thinkers such as Edya Horon. Uri Avnery published the booklets, Shem (1940), BaMa'avak (1946) and HaMinshar HaIvri (1958). A series of articles which Horon published in the journal "Keshet" in 1965 were compiled after his death into a book and published in 2000. These articles constituted political and cultural manifestos that sought to create a direct connection between Semitic culture from the second millenium BCE and contemporary Israeli culture, relying on advancements in the fields of archeology and research of Semitic languages in linguistics.
The political influence of the Canaanites was limited, but their influence on literary and intellectual life in Israel was great. Some of the artists who took after the movement were the sculptor Yitzhak Danziger (whose Nimrod became a visual emblem of the Canaanite idea), novelist Benjamin Tammuz, writer Amos Keynan, journalist Uri Avnery, novelist and translator Aharon Amir, thinker and linguist Uzi Ornan, and many others.
The idea of creating a new people in Palestine, different from the Jewish life in the diaspora which preceded it, never materialized in purist Canaanite conception, but nevertheless had a lasting affect on the self-understanding of many spheres of Israeli public life.
[edit] Criticism
The Canaanite movement, since soon after its inception, has met with heavy criticism. Already in 1945, Nathan Alterman published the poem Merivat Kayitz (later included in the collection Yr HaYona, published in 1958), which took issue with the central tenets of the Canaanite movement. Alterman and others claimed that so many years in the diaspora cannot be simply expunged. Alterman argued that no one should coerce the Jewish settlement to adopt an identity; its identity will be determined through its experience in time.
Ratosh responded with an article in 1950, in which he claimed that Alterman was dodging important questions about Israeli identity. He argued that a return to ancient Hebrew traditions is not only feasible but necessary.
Alterman, however, was not the only person to speak out against the Canaanites. Among the important critics of the movement was Baruch Kurzweil, who published The Roots and Quintessence of the 'Young Hebrews' Movement in 1953, which analyzed and sharply criticized Canaanite ideas. Kurzweil argued that the Canaanite ambition to motivate the variegated ethnography of the region in a single direction was not as easy as the Canaanites believed. Kurzweil believed the Canaanites replaced logos with mythos, producing a religious delusion:
| Since it itself neglects the historical continuity of its people, introduces obscure concepts into their political vision in its declarations of a 'Hebrew Land on the Euphrates', and relies on increasingly irrational argumentation, the movement is liable to find itself an escape into the realm of myth.
The Young Hebrews are not the first to launch themselves into the task of mythic renewal. Their original contribution is rather stale. For over a hundred years, the world has pined for a return to the lap of myth. The escapes into various myths have hitherto inflicted disasters upon humanity. In the spirit of good faith, it is best to assume that the whole chapter of mythic renewal in European thought is unclear to them. For the moment, we shall content ourselves with this quotation from Huizinga: "Barbarization sets in when, in an old culture… the vapors of the magic and fantastic rise up again from the seething brew of passions to cloud the understanding: when the mythos supplants the logos."[2][3] |
In the same article, Kurzweil argues that if no viable alternative was found, the Canaanite movement might become the leading political ideology in Israel. Ultimately, this omen did not transpire, primarily because of the effect of the Shoah on the Israeli psyche. Nevertheless, to this day Canaanite influences are still pronounced in many aspects of Hebrew culture.
[edit] External link
- Two Brief Introductions to Hebrew Canaanism by Ron Kuzar.
[edit] References
- ^ Ratosh, Yonatan. "Ktav el hanoar haivri".
- ^ Huizinga, Johan. Barbarism. Retrieved on 1 August 2006.
- ^ Kurzweil, Baruch (1964). Sifrutenu ha-ḥadashah--hemshekh o mahapekhah?. Shoḳen.
