Zionism's Maritime Revolution

The Yishuv's Hold on the Land of Israel's Sea and Shores, 1917–1948

Kobi Cohen-Hattab

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110629965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

Research on Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel in the modern era has long neglected the sea and its shores. This book explores the Yishuv's hold on the Mediterranean and other bodies of water during the British Mandate in Palestine and the Zionist "maritime revolution, " a shift from a focus on land-based development to an embrace of the sea as a source of security, economic growth, clandestine immigration ( haapala ), and national pride. The transformation is tracked in four spheres – ports, seamanship, fishery, and education – and viewed within the context of the Jewish/Arab conflict, internal Yishuv politics, and the Second World War. Archives, memoirs, press, and secondary sources all help illuminate the Zionist Movement's road to maritime sovereignty. By the State of Israel's founding in 1948, the Yishuv had a flourishing nautical presence: a national shipping company, control over the country's three active ports, maritime athletics, fish farming, and a nautical training school.

Chapter 1:
Historical Background

The Sea and Mediterranean Culture

In examining the links between man and the sea over time, a number of categories can be assessed: the sea as a biological space offering financial gain (in, for example, fishery); seas and oceans as secondary, alternate, or primary transport pathways for goods and people; the sea as the arena of maritime powers’ struggle for control, influence, and defense of maritime interests; the sea as a geographic space in climate theory, ocean geography, and the like; the sea as a space in which unique technologies are used, as in the development of seagoing vessels; the sea in the leisure culture that develops along the beaches—swimming, sailing, and yachting; and the sea as a source of inspiration for culture and art.19 All of these features were clearly expressed during the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth-century era of colonial imperialism. Aside from the growing study of the sea’s different features, the period also witnessed an especially large technological evolution in shipping and the absolute control of superpowers—foremost Great Britain—was evident in the existing sea routes.

An examination of the sea’s significance and the reciprocity that developed between it and human culture throughout different periods in history reveals that the first and central locus of the relationship between the two was the Mediterranean Sea, which was, for thousands of years, a hub of cultural development for the civilizations along its coasts. The Mediterranean connects three continents, three religions, and thousands of years of civilization; as such, it was a channel of great mutual influence and cultural exchange. Historian Fernand Braudel’s book The Mediterranean is considered one of the first and most essential in modern historical research. Braudel attempts to capture all possible dimensions of research surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. He includes approaches from sociology and anthropology to economics, psychology, geography, and cultural research, all of which contribute to the development of in-depth explanations for the variability of Mediterranean society over time. Braudel believed that similar natural and climate conditions in the entire Mediterranean Basin yielded a Mediterranean civilization.20 Historian Joshua Prawer defined Mediterranean culture as the religions and cultures created on the shores of the Mediterranean or proximate to them which influenced one another until a symbiosis, a—sometimes uncomfortable—cohabitation, developed between them.21 The unity of the Mediterranean Basin is also the point of origin of historian Shelomo Dov Goitein, whose monumental five-volume study, A Mediterranean Society, describes a Middle-Ages Jewish society situated within Mediterranean geography and culture. However, the idea of the Mediterranean as a unifying space has had many detractors, most prominently Belgian historian Henri Pirrene. Pirenne emphasized the infiltration of Islam to the Mediterranean Basin as early as the seventh century and the closure—if partial—of the Mediterranean to the transport of merchandise as a primary reason for the lessening importance of southern Europe, the decline of international commerce, and the crumbling of classical culture. From the eighth century to the eighteenth, the Mediterranean was divided. Its southern, Muslim, shore opposed its northern, Christian, one, and it was characterized by tensions between nations, cultures, and religions.22

The Sea and Colonialism

Beginning in the nineteenth century, as a result of colonialism, rapid industrialization, and the rise of the importance of global trade, conquest of the sea was accorded a central role in the growing colonialist processes taking place. However, no less importantly, it took center stage in particularistic nationalistic processes. One common definition of colonialism sees it as the political policy with which superpowers—primarily European ones—attained control over other territories in the world, transforming them into colonies under their rule.23 The firm establishment of the superpowers and their growing colonial influence relied in no small part on the strength of their advanced navies. European states, with England at their head, took over vast swaths of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. On the eve of the First World War, at the height of the imperial period, Britain ruled over approximately one quarter of the world’s terrestrial space.24 Britain’s imperial strength was bolstered by steamships and the telegraph, new technologies that made it possible to expand and entrench its reign in the colonial space under its rule; in 1902, for example, the entire British Empire was connected by telegraph networks.25

The European nations, and France and Britain in particular—world leaders and among the strongest superpowers in the nineteenth century—had marked advantages over the world’s countries economically, technologically, and militarily. Europe had a developed ironworking and weapons production industry (guns and canons), and the building of ships and oceangoing navigation developed there. These fields were reinforced, granting the countries a considerable advantage with the beginning of the use of steam at the end of the eighteenth century. This disparity, along with the imperialist aspirations of European countries, created a fertile breeding ground for the development of colonialism.26 Movement of people and goods between different colonies and states took place primarily by sea, leading to the development of ships as well as large port cities on the European continent. Alongside the development of the ports themselves and the extensive commerce that accompanied it, a wide-scale industry grew around the raw materials that arrived by sea. The large ships were perceived the world over as an expression of statehood and economic might.27

In the state of international affairs in the late nineteenth century two developments were evident: on one hand, the hegemony of the European superpowers; on the other—to a certain extent, as a response to the colonial reality—early signs of decolonization and the eruption of local nationalism. These processes would later become a force that undermined the foundations of great empires and superpowers. Thus the academic literature that analyzes the underpinnings of modern culture gives pride of place to the evolution of modern nationalism.

Jewish Nationalism, Zionism, and the Sea

Within the approach that attributes great importance to modern nationalism in modern culture, the birth of the Jewish nationalist movement—whose most clear expression is the Zionist movement—served as the transition of the Jewish nation from an ethnic cultural-religious identity, which had characterized it for many generations, to a modern national one.28 In light of this, the identity of Jews would now be defined in nationalist-secular terms, rather than solely religious ones. This approach replaced the Jews’ traditional theocentric view with a value system that positioned the person and his or her desires at center stage, with the individual’s physical needs—and not only his or her soul and education—treated.29 One of the key conditions for this was, as stated, the desire to disconnect from the Jewish, exilic past and to adopt the image of the “New Jew,” the activist and revolutionary. No longer was the Jew a wilting, powerless Yeshiva student diligently studying Talmud; rather, he was a healthy, anti-exilic youth with athletic prowess.30 In this spirit, a central component of the preferred “New Jew” image was a transition to power and might, to physical education, and to the cultivation of physical abilities and appearance. In nineteenth-century Europe, physical education and group sports were wielded as a means to foster cooperation and teamwork, a mechanism contributing to the formation of evolving national identity—and this had an important impact on reinforcing national identity.31 As we will see in our discussion about maritime sports leagues, research on athletics in the growth and formation of national movements reveals that sport has an important symbolic role in the formation of national identities; it assists in the shaping of consciousness, national identity, and internal coherence.32

These ideas did not go unnoticed by the fathers of the Zionist movement- led by Herzl and Nordau—and they maintained the same theory with regard to the physical rebirth of the Jewish nation. They fashioned an unmistakable link between the Jewish nation’s national renaissance and the individual’s physical rehabilitation; moreover, they perceived body culture as a central tool in shaping the New Jew and as a condition for national rebirth.33 Herzl, who had been exposed to European culture with its emphasis on the centricity of body culture in the process of forming a national identity, spoke often in praise of athletics.34 He viewed the ways in which sport and student clubs were organized as a model for advancing the Zionist social-political idea; as a student, he was occupied with fencing and marksmanship. In fact, this is what he wrote to the Zionist Organization of America’s journal: “Friends, brothers, awaken and rise! We are in need of your assistance, not only your enthusiasm, which rises in smoke at your mass meetings and then disappears again. Organize! Establish local groups, association branches of all kinds for the uniting of men and also of women and young women, associations for sport, associations for singing…all under the banner of Zion.”35 Herzl disliked the weak and sickly exilic body, noting his aversion in his journal on an 1898 trip to the Land of Israel. He described a horseback riding demonstration conducted by the youth of the Rehovot moshava (colony), when tears stood in his eyes seeing the “quick and brave riders”; he recorded the great fulfillment and wonder he felt on seeing the large bodies and flexed muscles of three Jewish porters he met in Jerusalem.36 Herzl’s right-hand man, Max Nordau, a doctor, philosopher, and writer, also linked the bodily rebirth of the Jewish nation to its general national rebirth. In his opinion, the appropriate response for the ills of exile was summarized in the term “muscular Judaism” (Muskeljudentum), which he coined at the Second Zionist Congress in Basel (1898).37 In his words, “Zionism awakens the Jews to new life…. It acts morally by reviving the wishes of the nation, and bodily by the physical education of the young generation, which will recreate for us the lost muscular Judaism.”38 Herzl and Nordau, then, saw sport and physical activity as a crucial tool in helping shape a national consciousness and fashioning a new physical image for the inferior, exilic Jew.39

The emergence of the Zionist movement in Europe in the late nineteenth century took place, as stated, during the period when sea traffic was high and the development of ports was an important element in European life.40 It can even be conjectured that Herzl’s description in Altneuland, the utopian novel in which he prophesied the central role Haifa and its port where he saw ships arriving, was influenced by the reality of ports and shipping at the time: “A magnificent city had been built beside the sapphire blue Mediterranean. The magnificent stone dams showed the harbor for what it was: the safest and most convenient port in the eastern Mediterranean. Craft of every shape and size, flying the flags of all the nations, lay sheltered there.”41

But aside from Herzl’s dream about the Haifa port, no plan was made in which the Jewish nation could hold on to the sea. In Zionist ideology, which aspired to gather the scattered Jewish nation’s, the sea was used, initially, only as a means of transit. The sea in evolving Zionist ideology was a space to be traversed en route to the promised land, but it did not carry any inherent significance. One of the reasons for this, evidently, was that the sea generally—and shipping in particular—held, for many generations, a peripheral role in Judaism and Jewish history. This resulted from the Jewish physical and mental disengagement from seafaring professions and lifestyles. A more central role was attributed to the few Jewish marine tradesmen, to the growth of port cities, to the development of marine cartography, and even to piracy.42

The relatively periphe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Historical Background
• Chapter 2: Harbingers of Jewish Maritime Activity in the Land of Israel, 1917–1933
• Chapter 3: Expanding Jewish Maritime Activity in the Land of Israel, 1934–1939
• Chapter 4: Evolution during a Time of Paralysis: Jewish Maritime Activity in the Land of Israel during the Second World War, 1939–1945
• Chapter 5: The Road to Jewish Maritime Sovereignty, 1945–1948
• Conclusion and Discussion: The Sea in Zionist Thought and Endeavor: Inception, Evolution, and Ideology
• Bibliography
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Places