RECENT TRENDS IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF ZIONISM: A REVIEW ESSAY

Abstract

A number of recent scholarly studies in Zionist history have broken important ground in the research and analysis of controversial episodes that eluded the earlier generation of historians of Zionism. Several of the latest studies are briefly marred by their authors' attempts to find lessons from the Zionist past to apply to contemporary political and religious problems. Nonetheless, the new scholarship does succeed in raising previously neglected questions, clarifying important issues, and enriching our understanding of Zionist history. Jeff Halper's Between Redemption and Revival: The Jewish of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century1 is a good example of useful historical analysis that goes awry when the author seeks to project contemporary political categories into an era where they cannot be comfortably applied. Halper presents his study as a corrective to the popular, but overly simplistic, assumptions about differences between the YishuvJewish society that was in place in the Holy Land and the New Yishuv that the Zionist pioneers began establishing in the late 1800s. Halper succeeds in correcting that stereotype, but he stumbles when he attempts to go further. Halper demonstrates that the conflict between the two cultures did not pit secular, rural, productive Zionists who earned their keep, against a religious, urban, Ashkenazi yeshiva community dependent upon halukah charity funds from abroad. The Yishuv was a pluralistic entity, with Sefardis as well as Ashkenazis, rural as well as urban residential patterns, and wage earners as well as yeshiva students. There were even some differences in religious behavior within the Old Yishuv, although Halper may be overstating their significance; he characterizes the Ashkenazis as ultraorthodox and the Sefardis as moderates