Pursuing Universalism Through the Particular: Zionism and Transnational Modernism in Arieli's "In the Light of Venus"

Abstract

Two methodologies dominate recent scholarship on early twentieth-century Hebrew literature—discourse analysis and the transnational approach. These approaches' proponents disagree about this literature's political character. While pointing to how the discourse analysts' work accords more effectively with historical research and how early twentieth-century Hebrew literature can be better understood in relationship to its political function, this article stresses how scholarship employing a transnational approach nonetheless contributes to more effective understanding of this literature. In fact, through analysis of Levi Aryeh Arieli's 1911 novella In the Light of Venus, this article will explore how the national, the transnational, the aesthetic, and the political are interwoven in early twentieth-century Hebrew literature, with these elements finding variant expression in different Hebrew works, even the works of individual authors. Despite this crisscrossing, Zionist objectives proved highly significant to Hebrew writers looking to contribute to the development of textual and spatial locations where Jews, especially Jewish men, could fully express their cosmopolitan character and universal beliefs and desires. Thus, while Arieli draws on the transnational literary milieu to aesthetically depict the modern individual's quest for religious experience, his engagement with gender and sexuality to promote Jewish gender and sexual norms considered best able to aid in promotion of Zionism aims in Palestine constitutes his novella's center of gravity. Such a reading offers a new way to look at Arieli and his literary work, as well as early twentieth-century Hebrew literary works with overlapping aesthetic and political aims.