Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Translators' Note
- Introduction
- PART I THE FIRST MIRROR
- PART II THE SECOND MIRROR
- PART III ATHENS IN JERUSALEM
- 12 Back to History: The Secularization of the Ancient Jewish Past
- 13 The Children of Japheth (Aryans) and the Children of Shem (Sernites): Race and Innate Nationalism
- 14 The People and its Land: Country, Landscape, and Culture
- 15 A ‘Polis' in Jerusalem: The Jewish State
- 16 The New Jewish Culture: Ideal and Reality
- Conclusion: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
- Bibliography
- Index
14 - The People and its Land: Country, Landscape, and Culture
from PART III - ATHENS IN JERUSALEM
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Translators' Note
- Introduction
- PART I THE FIRST MIRROR
- PART II THE SECOND MIRROR
- PART III ATHENS IN JERUSALEM
- 12 Back to History: The Secularization of the Ancient Jewish Past
- 13 The Children of Japheth (Aryans) and the Children of Shem (Sernites): Race and Innate Nationalism
- 14 The People and its Land: Country, Landscape, and Culture
- 15 A ‘Polis' in Jerusalem: The Jewish State
- 16 The New Jewish Culture: Ideal and Reality
- Conclusion: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I greet you sun and sea!
Do I not see Greece–Greece, the cradle of beautiful and noble souls?
No, for under this splendour, these roaring breakers,
the melodies of Homer blossomed,
the plays of Sophocles were composed.
SAUL TCHERNICHOWSKY, ‘Sirtutim’ (‘Sketches’)The land of Egypt—only if you work over it with mattock and spade and give up sleep for it [will it yield produce], if you do not, it will yield nothing. The Land of Israel is not like that—its inhabitants sleep in their beds while God sends down rain for them.
Sifre on Deuteronomy, 38 (ed. Finkelstein, 77)… in battle no other exhortation of the marshalled men is so effective as ‘You are fighting for your native land!’
LUCIAN, Patriae encomium, 14 (trans. A. M. Harmon)THE USES OF CLIMATOLOGY
MODERN Jewish nationalism was not only a return to history, or a rediscovery of the people and the nation, but also a return to geography, or rather to the natural native geography. According to the historical perception of the Zionist idea, the Jewish people had been uprooted from its natural geographical environment and had lived ever since in different surroundings, ‘against nature'; that is, without a natural environment of its own. In the Diaspora, the Jewish people adapted itself to the changing patterns of the ‘host civilizations’ and to the different natural environments, but nowhere did it develop a ‘natural’ attachment to the land and to its landscape. It is as if the course of Jewish history had run against the maxim that ‘a civilization cannot simply transplant itself, bag and baggage’. This Jewish alienation from Nature became a major theme in the Haskalah literature. While it usually described Gentile peasants as an almost integral part of the landscape, the Jews were described as strangers, alien to the land; they have no true feeling for the forest, the trees, the rivers, or the fields, a natural human feeling which all Gentile peasants possess. In contrast to this image, one of the main motifs in the literature of the national revival movement was the return to the soil and to the land, and, as an almost inevitable conclusion, the return to the natural homeland of the Jewish people: Palestine (Eretz Yisrael). Not all Jewish nationalists believed that the return to Palestine was a real possibility, and many rejected the idea, for different reasons.
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- Athens in JerusalemClassical Antiquity and Hellenism in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew, pp. 403 - 431Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997