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- Convenors:
-
Miriam Szamet
(The Hebrew Univeraity of Jerusalem)
Adi Livny (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem )
Yonatan Shiloh Dayan (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
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- Location:
- Sala 0.06, Edifício I&D, Piso 0
- Start time:
- 15 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
A diverse overview of Mandatory Palestine/young Israel as a locus of immigration of cultural knowledge stemming from Central Europe and transmitted by Jewish immigrants born or educated in German speaking countries.
Long Abstract:
In the first half of the 20th century Palestine became a site of massive immigration: not only of people, but of ideas, political traditions and cultural knowledge. This panel wishes to explore cultural products which originated from Central-Europe in the 1920s-1940s, and were transmitted to Palestine by immigrants born or educated in German speaking countries. Though stemming from various fields and traditions, cultural knowledge immigrating from Central-Europe to Palestine was often considered radical or marginal within the normative context of the Jewish Yishuv at the time, dominated quantitatively and politically by Eastern European Jews. This was manifested, for example, in the field of pedagogy and education, as will be demonstrated in Miriam Szamet's lecture on the attempts to establish new schools following the ideas and spirit of the German Reformpädagogik; as well as in the cultural sphere, as Yonatan Shiloh-Dayan's discussion of the periodical Heute und Morgen: antifaschistische Revue as a locus of an exiled community will suggest. Both these lectures will not only illustrate how knowledge immigrated from Central-Europe to Palestine, but also expose the platforms that enabled its spreading and reproduction. Adi Livny's lecture will reveal the complex encounter of Central European cultural traditions with the periphery of Israeli society, dealing with the absorption of Mizrachi Jews. The panel offers critical accounts of parallel transactional processes, addressing, among other things, means of opposition, modes of compliance and struggles for implementation
Accepted papers:
Session 1Tal Alon Mozes (Technion Israel Institute of Technology)
Paper short abstract:
Since the 1920s, landscape gardeners transferred the culture of landscape design from urbanized Europe to Palestine. Struggling against physical, social and cultural obstacles, they managed to create a unique garden and landscape culture both in the agricultural settlements and the Hebrew towns.
Paper long abstract:
Since the early 1920s, European landscape gardeners immigrated Palestine after graduating Western European vocational and academic horticultural schools (the "Israelitische Gartenbauschule" in Ahlem, Germany, was the most prominent among them). They established a professional community which aspired to shape the landscapes of the Hebrew towns, the agricultural settlements, neighborhoods, and gardens. Familiar with the period's codes of design, they asked to plant the modern European garden on the sand dunes of Tel Aviv, and to apply the rules of landscape planning amid the wheat fields of Jezreel Valley.
The paper examines the transfer and the mechanism of implementing modern European landscape design concepts and schemes in the newly built town of Tel Aviv and the modest pioneer landscapes of the Kibbutzim. However, this transfer was not just about knowledge transfer but rather a transfer of culture - a set of repertoires for occupying the outdoor environments. Through design competitions, professional literature, and built model gardens (such as Bialik's private garden and Meir municipal park) European ideas were tested on the Levant grounds. The implementation was influence by various obstacles such as the unique Palestinian geography and climate, the poor local technological and horticultural knowledge, the local culture of Palestinian gardening, and the attitude of the Zionist ideology toward the land of Israel.
On the eve of statehood, Hebrew gardens and design landscapes became a distinctive example of modern landscape architecture design, on the margin of the European center. It was neither European nor local but rather a creative unique phenomenon.
Dana von Suffrin (University of Munich)
Paper short abstract:
My talk will focus on a group of German (or German-trained) botanists who tried to settle Palestine by the implementation of botanical knowledge and methods: I will show how botany and plants illustrate processes of transfer of knowledge over geographical, cultural, and disciplinary borders.
Paper long abstract:
I will try to explore the transfer of knowledge and the importance of transnational scientific discourses in the first third of the 20th century when a group of German or German-trained scientists decided to "create facts" in Palestine by the implementation of botanical methods. They founded (German-inspired) experimental stations, university departments, museums, and botanical gardens - all of these institutions serving both ideological and practical goals.
The protagonists of "Botanical Zionism", the people who sought, collected, classified, planted, rated, and bred plants considered their profession as a necessary substrate for successful Jewish settlements. I wish to research plants and their connection to scientific, mainly botanical and agricultural, but also geographical, cartographical, zoological, and cultural practices, which were all more or less rooted in colonial science.
The "Botanical Zionists" were obsessed with scientific explorations and expeditions; they searched for the "Urweizen" and the origin of the biblical manna. Botany and agriculture were therefore systematic for a science that pretended to be objective but was nevertheless shaped by ideology. I will try to document the evolution of plants and plant science in Palestine: How did colonial-scientific practices institutionalize? How did plants arrive at the lab, the field, the curriculum? Was knowledge also circulating inside Palestine? Did the Zionist botanists implement native knowledge? Which knowledge is considered "scientific" at all? By dealing with these questions the scientific background of the "Botanical Zionists" and the transfer of knowledge that they fostered will be further examined.
Miriam Szamet (The Hebrew Univeraity of Jerusalem)
Paper short abstract:
The influence of German educational approaches on Zionists schools in Mandatory Palestine was significant and led to a dialectic process which shaped the comprehension and perception of education. This lecture will present the selective character of the cultural transfer made by Jewish teachers.
Paper long abstract:
The Reformpädagogik, the Jugendkultur, and the psychoanalytic movement were manifestations of a new approach to education as well as a new understanding of childhood and its import in adult life. As they originated in the late 19th century in areas defined by German culture and language, all three partook in an individualistic new ideology. These new trends then exerted a profound influence on Jewish educators who developed the educational system in the Jewish community in mandatory Palestine. And yet, since nationalism was then central to the Zionist institutions that oversaw education, such institutions did not welcome these individualistic approaches. The teachers, carriers of knowledge, had to find a different channel where they would be able to apply and adapt these German innovations.
Focusing on two figures in the history of Hebrew education, this lecture demonstrates the process of cultural transfer, its roots, along with its successes and failures. Polany and Idelsohn were two young students when they were first introduced to the new pedagogy developed in Germany in a German-Jewish Seminar for teachers' training in Jerusalem in 1906. Over the next decades, they then traveled a few times to Germany, taking courses in pedagogy and psychology in local universities and observing reformative schools. They worked together trying to implement the new pedagogy in the new Jewish society until 1929. Following their challenges and vicissitudes, I examine their considerations in choosing different professional directions in the 1930s. Using this micro-historical method reveals new aspects of the educational discourse in Palestine.
Yonatan Shiloh Dayan (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Paper short abstract:
The paper offers a glance at a marginal community in mandate Palestine of the 40's, consisting of Central-European leftist intellectuals, through close examination of a cultural and political initiative of theirs: a periodical issued between the years 1943 and 1945.
Paper long abstract:
Between April 1943 and June 1945 a German-written periodical named 'Heute und Morgen: antifaschistische Revue' appeared in Erez-Israel. The unique group responsible for its establishment consisted of fellow figures rendered exceptional within the general population of the Yishuv: They were Central-European leftists, exiles in their own eyes who regarded Erez-Israel as a Refuge. Though stemming from various geographical and social backgrounds, shared by all were a sense of detachment, continuous affinity to their homelands as well as variable reservations towards the Zionist movement and its leadership in Erez-Israel.
Rooted out of their cultural and linguistic sphere, members of the group sought to constitute an alternative 'field of belonging' in the ever-foreign Levant, within which they could face conflicting components in a split identity, formulate and utter controversial political stands, preserve and further cultivate their affinity to the language of their homeland and to its culture, and maintain bonds with fellow exiles dispersed throughout the globe.
The paper aims at highlighting the roles played by the German language as a 'cultural carrier' in achieving the goals ascribed to the periodical by its founders; evaluating the political observations manifested in the bulletin, based on a careful observation of the manifold term 'Anti-fascism'; and clarifying ambivalent stands introduced in the volumes with regards to topics such as: the 'Jewish Problem' and the Zionist solution, the uniqueness of the Jewish suffering, the question of German guilt and the future of the European continent inclusive of the roles of (Jewish) intellectuals within it.
Jan Kühne (Hebrew University Jerusalem)
Paper short abstract:
Sammy Gronemann is a key figure among German-Jewish Immigrants to Palestine (Yekkes). His lasting contributions to the Hebrew theater also mark him as one of the most successful contributors to Israeli culture. Gronemann's drama serves a vessel to continue a broken German humanist tradition in Palestine.
Paper long abstract:
Biblical death penalty becomes practically inapplicable through talmudic legislation, though it is supported by the authority of the Torah. Consequently, death penalty remains a potential means of punishment, at least theoret- ically so, constituting a motif in the dramatic texts of the German-Jewish Zionist, lawyer and writer Sammy Gronemann (1875-1952). Following his immigration to Tel Aviv in 1936, difficulties in the application of this topos and of »Talion« in general become apparent in his dramatic works, particularly with regard to Germany. In face of the emerging horrors of the Shoah, Gronemann struggled to preserve the humanist-talmudic moment of the suspension of death penalty. He did so despite Zionist attempts to return to the biblical origins of Judaism, with its implied denial of cultural achievement in the Diaspora.
Amit Levy (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem )
Paper short abstract:
Leaving to Palestine after the rise of the Nazi party, the textual encounter of the German-Jewish orientalist Martin Plessner with the Orient became a physical one. This paper deals with this scholar's efforts to separate the scientific and political spheres in the new context of the local conflict.
Paper long abstract:
The case of German-Jewish orientalist Martin Meir Plessner (1900-1973) is an opportunity to examine the narrative of the transfer of Oriental Studies from Germany to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem through the eyes of an antihero: a scholar who never became a prominent figure, was generally left out of the decision-making circles and had to adapt to the reality rather than shape it.
Studying in Breslau and Berlin, for young Plessner the encounter with the Orient, Arabs and Arabic was a textual one. Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Plessner lost his recently-acquired position in Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and immigrated with his family to Palestine. By migrating from Germany to Palestine, Plessner had transformed the detached oriental encounter into a physical encounter at the heart of the emerging Arab-Jewish conflict. Drawing from rich archival material, this paper is an attempt to examine how this spatial shift has influenced Plessner's personal political views, on the one hand; his scholarly and professional work on the other hand; and above all, the link between the two.
The spatial shift, this paper claims, had not caused any significant change neither in Plessner's political views nor in his disciplinary approach. Science and politics continued to exist as two separate spheres, and Plessner did his best to keep it that way. Nevertheless, life in the Orient made collisions between the two worlds unavoidable. By transferring academic Orientalism to Palestine, Plessner was no longer able of truly and wholly keeping it 'neutral'.
Uri Cohen (Tel Aviv University)
Paper short abstract:
Centre-periphery relations in the global science and the establishment of conditions for continuous scientific creativeness was the most severe issue that Weizmann and Bergmann faced when they established the modest Daniel Sieff Chemistry Research Institute in Rehovot in 1934.
Paper long abstract:
How to establish effective patterns of management in a research institute in Israel so that it could successfully compete internationally and gain long-lasting recognition and prestige? And later, how the enforcement of management patterns could contribute to the establishment of new and original knowledge that will lead to the empowerment of the local industry and agriculture?
In this lecture i would like to discussed the quest for finding proper managerial models for managing the Daniel Sieff Institute during its formative period. Two models were implemented during its first decade: a centralistic managerial model, under the supervision and management of Bergmann and a pluralistic managerial model, under the management of an Executive Council. Both models failed to meet Chaim Weizmann's expectations of achieving a decent research level in comparison to leading scientific centres in other Western countries to which Weizmann aspired to compare the new institute. Weizmann felt that the scientific output of the Institute, in terms of academic productivity, was low and that its quality was poor, leading him to thoughts about closing down the Institute. In practice, the failure of these two managerial models led Weizmann to adopt a third managerial model where the Institute was under supervision and sponsorship of external scientific committees which were to rescue the Institute from its scientific periphery and insignificance
Adi Livny (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem )
Paper short abstract:
The lecture will deal with the encounter between center and periphery, making account of the part of Jewish immigrants from Central Europe in the absorption of Mizrachi Jews immigrating to Palestine and then Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Paper long abstract:
The lecture will deal with Israeli scholars from different disciplines, who dedicated their scholarly work to the Mizrachi immigrants who arrived to Israel from North Africa and Asia at the end of the 1940s and during the 1950s. Some of these scholars - immigrants themselves from Central Europe - became prominent policy makers in their fields; due to the determining moment in which they acted - in the founding period of the State of Israel- they had helped shape the new states' institutional infrastructures in fields such as education and immigrant absorption. The way in which these institutions were shaped and worked in Israel's early days still serves today as one of the most sensitive friction points of the "ethnic rift" in Israel, on the basis of the argument that these institutions served to constitute a structural discrimination concerning the allocation of resources between "Mizrachi" and "Ashkenzi" Jews.
Some of the scholarly work dealing with Mizrachi Jews in Israel's early days - especially those based on theories of "modernization" - had received since the 1970s critical attention. Their authors, on the other hand, had remained rather neglected. My lecture wishes to discuss a few of these scholars and in the context of their Central-European roots; despite the fact that they belonged to different disciplines and that they do not represent one stream of thought, it will still be argued that their Central European background can account for some of the fundamental assumptions underlining their scholarly work.
Irene Aue-Ben-David (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses the debates before the establishment of German Studies in the Israeli Academia in the 1960s/70s. It focuses on the reevaluation of the meaning of these topics and asks for the impact of the significant support from Germany for the implementation of this new field of study.
Paper long abstract:
The paper deals with the history of the establishment of "Germanistik" and German History in Israeli Academia in the 1960s/70s. Based on the long-lasting debate within the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, if German Literature and Language, these loaded national shaped topics, should become part of the regular course offer, the difficult process of a reevaluation of the former proximity or identification of many Central European Jews with German language and culture, which was disrupted by the Shoah, will be revealed.
The implementation of this new field of study took place with a significant financial and academic support from Germany. Considering this opportunity which was at the same time also a "burden", the paper will discuss the impact of this cooperation on the design and content of the new disciplines.