katalog-overlapping voices - Ritesinstitute

art aS a projeCt of Changing the arChive…
A 60-YEAR-oLD ImmIGRATIoN STATE AND THE INTERGENERATIoNAL
PARADIGm
The State of Israel is an immigrant state par excellence. Its immigration has
featured distinct ideological characteristic, inasmuch as the establishment of
the state constituted expression and transformation of messianic patterns
that had pulsated throughout Diaspora jewry for generations. The founding
of the state was the apogee of the Zionist revival process in Europe, in which
converged imminent processes of secularization, self-determination, and reciprocal
marking of jews in Christian Europe. The issue of the states’ location
within the middle East was also interwoven within the question of the
Arabs of the Land of Israel; dynamics that occurred in the country were often
connected to its being perceived as empty space awaiting realization.
Directing the Immigration: Exclusion from the Book and Routing to
the Margin 1
The distinctly European establishment of the State set about the ingathering
of jews from all the lands of their dispersion. The project of this convening
of communities included several structured phases of manipulative immigration:
initial honing of tools for persuading and encouraging immigration,
and subsequently channeling immigrating communities within the country.
This routing included not merely directing them to specific geographical areas
– but also direction within ‘the second territory’ of the jew – which is the language
and the book.
Insofar as all that pertains to this ‘second territory’, the founders of the State,
who were engrossed in the European discourse and context, defined themselves
anew as laborers on fallow land: which of any type of writing would be
chosen as the graphic form of writing letters, which of all manner of accents
would be elected as the melodical sound of the language, which of the collective
of stories should be the historical narrative of judaism, which had existed
outside of history until that point, so to speak. At the levels of language,
decisions were made to integrate Ashkenazi [= jewish-european] script and
Sephardic [Sephardim = from Spain banished jews] pronunciation – at the
level of penultimate and ultimate emphasis – while eliminating the modes of
pronouncing guttural letters. on the historical plane, the response was most
clear. History was recited from the super-narrative of jewish existence in Europe,
amid complete correspondence to the accounting of the progress that
characterized modern literature and art and enlightenment. The upshot of
this was that entire populations arriving from oriental countries faced double
exclusion. Initially, many suffered manipulative assignment to the periphery,
and secondly suffered from a total lack of representation in the history books
that were written in the country – a phenomenon that I term: Exclusion from
the Book and Routing to the margin. 2
This clear state of oppression was most complicated due to the shared destiny
of jewry in all its fringes concerning the messianic dream of returning to the Land
of Israel. This natural, innocent commitment explains the initial success of the
melting pot and the interval of delay that passed until there arose in full force the
dissonance between the collective dream of redemption and the aspirations of
the subject for its self-expression and that of its culture. In this sense, the state
became the crown of implementing templates dividing between east and west
within a religion that embraces two giant cultures of human civilization, a creed
in which merging between both of these extremes is fundamental.
Implementing the process of reinstating the jew in history, i.e., founding the
State as an expression of returning to the history of peoples, entailed the eradication
of the orient, rendering it deridable, superfluous, expropriating it
from its past, creating the conditions for its being ashamed of itself, disinheriting
it of its own worth, denying it official, cultural, and institutional tools for
its spiritual needs, and its cultural heritage.
These developments echoed previous efforts of jewish intellectuals – already
in Europe – to restore jewry to a historical setting. Beginning as early as the
inception of the New Era during the expulsion from Spain, these efforts were
resumed in the 18th century, then accompanied by self-loathing, a drive to
archive the jew as another, and powerful sentiments of negating the Diaspora.
3 Subsequently, with the rise of jewish intellect in 19th century Germany,
these trends developed to the level that Gershom Scholem describes as aspiring
to bring judaism to a respectable burial: “… a Jew wishes to break free
from itself, and the science of Judaism is for him a ceremony of interment, in
the sense of liberation from a burden that weighs upon him.” 4
The act of the museum as an act of pre-meta – a development that constituted
the essence of the attitude of modern European intellectual jewry to judaism
– was again reduplicated within Israel in the Israeli attitude toward judaism,
in the Western attitude toward the orient. The orient underwent an
accelerated process of archivization in several forms: sometimes as the bisection
of organs and killing, and in certain instances the orient as a whole was
discarded completely from without the archivization process.
If in occidental lands the jew wished to be freed from ‘itself’, indeed, subsequent
to the birth of the State of Israel, the Israeli expanse began pressing
upon jews from oriental countries the same assistance techniques for being
freed from the ‘self’ and from the past. What jewish intellectualism attempted
to do for jews in Europe, the leaders and formulators of the young state’s
policy endeavored to do for the sake of oriental jews. In this context, we might
paraphrase as “and the science of studying the jews of the orient is for him
a ceremony of burial, freedom from a burden that weighs upon him”. It is
certain that within the same powerful spectrum of images, a technique that
is brought to bear upon the selfhood is self-destruction, whereas a similar
technique applied toward another is liable to be perceived as murder, the assassination
of remembrance.
The current project that is necessary for Israeli culture is a metamorphosis
of the moribund archive into a live archive, returning to the imaginary zero
point of the oriental being that will enable development of life and death in
memory to occur anew in a full and complete form.
Expanse and Memory: Geography as History and History as Geography
These distinct proceedings of the melting pot (a structure that is familiar from
the United States as an immigration project) were accompanied by two characteristics,
which are the cohesive material and the dividing substance of
the mixture that bubbled within the universal cauldron, which was in fact occidental
and was the cohesive material, and the Arabness – which was actually
conceptualized back at the turn of the century by way of the European
colonialist viewpoint as the orient – and was the propellant.
The simultaneous reading of the Arabness as a vacuum in the geographical
plane and of the Orientality as a vacuum in the hegemonial historical memory
heightened the denial of Judaism as a cultural civilization that also embodies
the Oriental extreme and the Land of Israel as a territory located in the Mediterranean
space. This reading in the eye of the establishers of the national pioneering
act exacerbated Oriental Jews’ ambivalence towards their roots and
their origin in Arabia, and accelerated the attempt to create themselves anew
in the West.
The symmetry between the creature of the historical project as containing
whole surfaces of empty pages whose fullness was perceived as irrelevant or
that was designated at best to be an archival project of the burying type and
the geographical project that perceived full surfaces as an empty, erased page
is obvious.
Orientality and Orient
In process of emptying the orient into the jewish Israeli existence in the new
state, the category of ‘Mizrahi’ (oriental) was created. The orient or East as
orientation (in many languages) the ‘mizrah’ wall plaque indicating jerusalem
as a prayer direction as a traditional decoration hanging in the typical
Ashkenazi jewish home in the Diaspora to signify yearnings for Zion (‘In the
Prime of Her Life’ by Agnon, for instance) – was transmogrified into oriental
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