By Ari Weinstein
During our opening conference in Shefayim, we had the opportunity to learn about the founding of Tel Aviv with Jamie Salter, a Jewish educator and Israel tour guide, whose educational lens presented Tel Aviv as the “first Hebrew city.” The label of Tel Aviv as a Hebrew city, rather than an explicitly Jewish city, was a guiding principle for our tour. This distinction was put in place not to negate the Jewishness of Tel Aviv’s founding, but to plant the seed of Hebrew language as an evolution of Jewish practice and identity.
Our tour with Jamie began the night before the tour itself, with a session on choice as the backbone of all Jewish life and practice, and the question whether we (as Jews) chose God, or whether God chose us (a Jewish people). As this discussion developed, we delved into the notion of a chosen people simultaneously functioning as a choosing people, who in every generation must consciously decide to maintain Jewish beliefs and practices. This framework guided our study of Tel Aviv as a city that was built on principles of Jewish autonomy, independence, and proliferation, and the ways in which its founding reflected a self-assertion of Jewishness. This modern Jewishness highlights a choice to change the meaning of being Jewish from being a minority resisting assimilation to the founders of a city who designed a city that would, above all, feature Hebrew as the main language of the city. Such a concept presents an extreme example of Jews as a choosing, rather than chosen, people, as it represents the ability of Jews to revive a language suppressed by non-Jewish nation states and create a society in which the language of the majority was not necessary for Jews to use in day-to-day life.
We began our tour on Sderot Rothschild, first observing a relief that depicted images of Jewish histories in and around what is today Tel Aviv, followed by a visit to the Shalom Meir Tower down the street. At the Tower, we learned about the Herzliya Hebrew High School (or Herzliya Gymnasium) that once stood in place of the building. We discussed the degree to which a German-style gymnasium as the center of early Tel Aviv was at once an actualization of Jewish valuation of education as central to society rather than a courthouse or city hall; a representation of Jewish desires to shake off stereotypes of frailness, illness, and submissiveness through gymnastic exercise and muscularness; and a centralization of non-Jewish educational institutions as a means to place Tel Aviv on par with contemporary European cities. One central question this raises is whether the school is the replacement for the Temple as a center for Jewish life in a Jewish city, or whether the school as the center of Tel Aviv represents the modern Hebrew language and its flourishing through the school as a Temple-of-sorts for modern Jews. Additionally, I wonder whether or not it is possible to create a Jewish nation-state when a chief characteristic of global Jewish experiences have been minority survival, and whether the existence of a Jewish majority in Israel is negated by the role of the Jewish nation-state as a minority among nation-states on a global scale?
The tour of Tel Aviv was a valuable framework through which to think about the creation of a new Hebrew culture in what would become Israel as a piece of the building of a Jewish nation-state. I appreciated that the tour gave me a perspective on the thoughts that went into both the urban planning of Tel Aviv, as well as the construction of its culture. Overall, I find it interesting to examine Tel Aviv as a literal “old-new land,” as envisioned by Theodor Herzl in his book of the same name, Altneuland. The “first Hebrew city” is exactly that: a city that takes the anciency of Judaism and mixes it with the revival and blossoming of the Hebrew language to yield a Jewish metropolis that is as old in its Jewish uniqueness and new in its mirroring of modern European cities.
