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“WE ARE HERE TO BRING THE WEST, NOT ONLY TO OURSELVES”: ZIONIST OCCIDENTALISM AND THE DISCOURSE OF HYGIENE IN MANDATE PALESTINE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Dafna Hirsch
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Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paper Haʾaretz (The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the “entire backward Orient” but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column in Haʾaretz—played an important role.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , November 2009, pp. 577 - 594
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Which of us physicians cannot bring evidence for the people's ignorance in basic hygienic questions and especially in questions concerning the local climate and the new living conditions? If anyone doubts this, then the dirt, the lack of cleanliness, the lack of trees can demonstrate it. And let nobody shut our eyes by comparing us to our Arab neighbors, since it is not by their words that we live; we are here to bring the West—what is good and improved in it—not only to ourselves, but to the entire backward Orient which must rise to a clean hygienic life.Footnote 1

Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paper Haʾaretz (The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the “entire backward Orient” but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column in Haʾaretz—played an important role.

This project—a concerted effort by health institutions and professional groups to inculcate hygienic models of conduct among the Jews of Palestine during the British Mandate period—is at the center of the present article. I show how the popular-scientific discourse of hygiene conceived hygiene education as part of a larger project of modernizing and Westernizing Jewish subjects. In analyzing the discourse of hygiene, I have found useful the notion of “occidentalism,” which emerged from scholars’ critical engagement with the work of Edward Said. Out of the various conceptions of occidentalism found in the literature, I follow those suggested by anthropologists James Carrier and Fernando Coronil. Both Carrier and Coronil emphasize the uses to which essentialist representations of Orient and Occident are put. Both draw attention to constructions of the Occident that underlie essentialist representations of the Orient—to the ways in which constructions of Oriental otherness implicitly serve to produce a coherent image of the Occidental self.Footnote 2

In the last decade Zionist orientalism has received much scholarly attention.Footnote 3 Scholars have shown how the Zionist desire to distance itself from the East produced not only a distinction between Jews and Arabs but also between “Western,” that is, European Jews and “Oriental” Jews. Whereas earlier scholarship focused on the role of orientalist discourses in the construction of the category Mizrahim, literally Easterners (i.e., Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent), later studies focus on the production of (East) European Jewish identity in Palestine as Western, a process that involved orientalizing the Mizrahim. Aziza Khazzoom, for instance, looks at the orientalization of Mizrahi Jews in Palestine by East European Jewish settlers as a sequence within a larger process, which she terms “the great chain of Orientalism.”Footnote 4 In this process, Jewish groups that adhere to a Westernization project orientalize other Jewish groups that are perceived as not Western enough and therefore a danger to the project's success.

This type of analysis has much merit in that it regards orientalization as a dynamic and relational process, which structures relations within geopolitical units and not just between them.Footnote 5 However, in Khazzoom's analysis, people are classified as Western or Oriental according to their ability to perform practices that unambiguously signify either Westernness or Easternness. Yet it is precisely because the East–West opposition functioned as a dynamic and relational distinction that Occidental and Oriental were unstable and sometimes ambivalent categories in various Zionist discourses, including that of hygiene.Footnote 6 Not only was the value of the categories sometimes different (as Jews were depicted both as European settlers and as natives to the OrientFootnote 7), but also East European Jews—the majority of Palestine's Jewish population—appeared in this discourse both as objects and as subjects of a “civilizing mission,” as Goldstein's text clearly demonstrates. One consequence of this ambivalence was that the construction of difference between European or Western Jews and Orientals was not always grounded in different practices attributed to each of these groups but was instead sometimes grounded in different values attached to the same practices when performed by members of different groups.

It is not my intention to argue that the exclusive goal of hygiene education was to shape Western identity. Hygienists certainly sought to reduce mortality and morbidity by inculcating models of conduct that were considered—and sometimes indeed were—healthy. Moreover, people performed these practices in ways and for purposes not circumscribed by the terms of the hygienic discourse. Here, however, I limit myself to a discourse-analytical approach in order to demonstrate the tensions that characterized the Hebrew discourse of hygiene, an instance of the tensions inherent in the Jewish project of Westernization in the context of Zionist settlement in “Oriental space” more generally.

I mostly base this analysis on print materials of the 1920s and 1930s with some earlier and later examples: newspaper articles taken from two of the most popular daily newspapers, Haʾaretz and Davar (Word); hygiene manuals and school textbooks; and articles from popular and professional journals.Footnote 8 Archival sources, mainly nurses’ reports, supplement the other texts. Although the intensity and focus of education shifted in the course of the period under consideration, the structures analyzed in this article remained constant throughout the Mandate years.

HEALING THE NATION

During the British Mandate period, 1920–48, the Jewish community of Palestine underwent a swift process of social and political consolidation. The development of national institutions was manifest not only in politics but also in public health. In the latter, the Jewish community enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under British rule. With imperial commitment to the Mandates Commission to provide for the welfare of its subject populations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, British reluctance to invest, the Mandate government sought to delegate as much medical work as possible to other agencies—mainly Zionist organizations within the Jewish sector and medical missions within the Arab one. The influx of Jewish capital and scientific knowledge in the service of constructing a “national home” allowed the highly organized Jewish community to establish and maintain a comprehensive and developed system of healthcare services with only limited government financial support and supervision. Following the growth of the Zionist system, the government expanded its own network of preventive services in the Arab sector. Nevertheless, the gap between the two systems remained considerable throughout the period.Footnote 9

The central pillars of the Jewish healthcare system during this period were the Hadassah Medical Organization, founded by the American Zionist women's organization Hadassah in 1921,Footnote 10 and the Workers’ Sick Fund (Kupat Cholim), founded by Jewish agricultural settlers in the early 1910s. Mostly under the direction of these two organizations, a massive effort to educate the Jewish public in health and hygiene had taken place. Articles and columns on health maintenance appeared regularly in the daily press and in Hebrew periodicals; dozens of hygiene manuals were published; and various educational activities, such as lectures, exhibitions, public shows, and annual “health weeks” dedicated to spreading information, were organized. In addition, public health nurses labored to inculcate hygienic habits among children and mothers in schools and Infant Welfare centers.Footnote 11 Through these channels, educators aspired to reach each and every Jewish home.

Today we mainly associate the word “hygiene,” or the science of health maintenance, with cleanliness. However, until the middle of the 20th century, hygiene signified a much broader domain of knowledge, technologies, and practices. The hygienic repertoire provided models of conduct designed to achieve “rational” and “scientific” regulation of daily behavior in order to maintain good health. Within the framework of hygienic science, almost everything could be considered a potential factor of disease or health.Footnote 12 The hygienic repertoire contained models for washing, sleeping, eating, dressing, working, organizing time, and much more. Many of these models are no longer associated with physical health but rather with manners and civilized behavior (e.g., not talking with a full mouth, which hygienists said hampered proper digestion).Footnote 13

Given hygiene's centrality to definitions of Western modernity, hygiene education was integral to numerous modernization projects in Europe, the United States, and the colonial world.Footnote 14 Although educational projects varied from place to place, they exhibited similarities, notably, the perception of public health as an instrument of civilizing and controlling subordinate populations. Scholars of colonial medicine stress the role of public health discourses and practices in justifying colonial domination and in enforcing racialized distinctions.Footnote 15 Both were aspects of the Jewish hygienic project in Palestine. In the Hebrew medical discourse, however, hygiene was presented not only as an instrument of civilizing and controlling subordinate populations but also primarily as a means of shaping the way of life of the dominant, European group. Although educational efforts were extended to non-European Jewish groups as well, many of the initiatives, including the numerous educational texts that appeared throughout the period, targeted East European Jewish immigrants. Through these texts physicians taught immigrant audiences how to live “correctly” in the new land, with its unfamiliar climate and diseases.Footnote 16

The volume of educational materials published in the Jewish community during the Mandate years amounted to what Foucault would call “a veritable discursive explosion.”Footnote 17 The focus of education shifted over time. In the first decade it emphasized preventing infectious diseases. As sanitary conditions improved, other concerns gained in prominence, for example, nutrition, mental hygiene, and gymnastics. The scope of education changed too: during the 1930s, educational efforts increased due to the growth of the Jewish population, the expansion and consolidation of health institutions, and Kupat Cholim joining Hadassah in its preventive work. By the late 1930s, most of the Jewish population—which had grown from 56,000 people after World War I to 650,000 toward the end of the Mandate periodFootnote 18—had already been exposed to the hygienic discourse, mostly through the daily press and through other types of publications and public events.

Most educational materials that appeared in Hebrew during this period were original texts written by immigrant Jewish physicians. The most prominent physicians who made hygiene education a central aspect of their medical careers were born in Eastern Europe, mainly in the last two decades of the 19th century. Some of them—figures like Mordechai Brachyahu, Asher Goldstein, and Yosef Meʿir—had been educated in Jewish rabbinical institutions and after completing their secondary education traveled westward to study medicine, mainly in German-speaking countries. As their writings make clear, these men internalized the Western gaze on Jewish life in Eastern Europe and the conviction that it had to be reformed. They perceived themselves as part of a modernizing national elite in charge of educating the Jewish public to a “healthy” and “rational” way of life in the service of “national regeneration.”

Scholars have recently argued that health education was integral to the Zionist nation- building project and to the efforts to shape a new type of Jew through inculcating hygiene principles in the members of the national community.Footnote 19 Of most prominence, Sandra Sufian has shown how Zionist doctors attempted to disseminate public health principles in order to create “self-improving subjects” through personal hygiene as a way of nation building. She notes the anxiety of Zionist health officials in the face of groups like Mizrahi and Orthodox Jews reluctant to accept Western hygienic principles.Footnote 20

Sufian's innovative analysis of Zionist efforts to make Palestine a healthy space for Jewish settlers establishes the connection between Zionist health education, colonization, and nation building. Indeed, physicians often presented attaining good health as inseparable from the wider project of “national regeneration.” For example, at a 1919 convention of Zionist physicians in Jaffa, one participant, Dr. Goldberg, claimed that “[o]ur nation has returned to its country sick and deformed, and the idea of national regeneration should encompass its physical cure, the healing of its lungs and the raising of its stature.”Footnote 21

Sickness and degeneracy were central tropes in Zionist representations of European Jews. Although the association of Jews with degeneracy was not new,Footnote 22 its appropriation by Zionists was influenced by the growing popularization of the discourse on the “degeneration of civilized nations,” which coincided with the rise of the Zionist movement.Footnote 23 Due to the biologization of social and political discourses in Europe, especially after Darwin, terms like “degeneracy” were not only widely used metaphors but also accepted as scientific facts at the turn of the century. Although not unanimous in their position on this matter, most Zionist physicians agreed that even if the Jews were not yet degenerate, given their present ways of life and living conditions, their physical and mental stock was constantly deteriorating. However, all of them rejected a deterministic explanation that anchored degeneration in fixed characteristics of race and instead argued that improved living conditions and adoption of a healthy way of life would bring about Jews’ gradual improvement.Footnote 24

Shaping a “healthy nation” was not only an end in itself but was also a precondition for performing the physical task of building a Jewish “national home.” Physicians discussed sickness sometimes in terms of loss of labor power necessary for the success of Zionist colonization, sometimes in terms of waste of national funds. Dr. Brachyahu, for instance, in his popular Haye Adam: Perakim be-Fizyologiyah ve-Higyenah (Life of Man: Chapters in Physiology and Hygiene), estimates the financial loss caused by bad teeth and “quick and insufficient chewing” at 200,000 Palestinian pounds per year.Footnote 25 “How many farms, how many grand schools could we have founded each year had we known how to keep the health of the teeth, how to chew correctly, and so practice thrift with food expenditure and make sufficient use of the foods consumed,” he writes, connecting the seemingly trivial act of chewing with the success of the entire national endeavor.Footnote 26

What is usually underplayed in scholarship on Zionist health education, however, is how strongly physicians promoted hygienic conduct as “civilized” behavior.Footnote 27 Sufian, for instance, notes in passing that Zionist health activities were to “civilize” the Jews of Palestine, yet she does not sufficiently explore the tension between the nationalist project and the project of Westernization.Footnote 28 That Zionist health educators sought to shape a “healthy nation” cannot be considered in isolation from the fact that “the healthy human being,” far from being a mere scientific fact, was a sociocultural construction reflecting a socially, culturally, and ethnically specific ideal of a person.Footnote 29 By uncritically reproducing physicians’ portrayal of Mizrahi Jews as reluctant to adopt the hygienic repertoire, Sufian overlooks how the hygiene project both sought to impart a common cultural repertoire to all the Jews of Palestine and fostered distinctions within Jewish society.

ZIONIST IDENTITY IN THE HYGIENIC DISCOURSE: STRUCTURING OPPOSITIONS

Two sets of oppositions organized the construction of Zionist identity in the hygienic discourse: the “new,” hygienic Eretz Israeli (“of the land of Israel”) Jew versus the “old,” unhealthy Diaspora Jew and the modern, civilized, hygienic West versus the primitive, uncivilized, and unhygienic East. These oppositions confounded temporal and spatial notions, as the Diasporic was constructed as “old,” the Oriental as “primitive,” and both as static. As Johannes Fabian argues, the temporalization of the social world in 19th-century anthropological discourse rested on a conception of time that was not only secularized and naturalized but was also spatialized. This led to the perception of the differences between the West and its others in terms of temporal and spatial distance.Footnote 30 On the face of it, Zionist discourse conflated these oppositions, because both the Diasporic and the Oriental were represented in terms of a spatial and temporal distance from Zionist progress.

However, Zionists constructed themselves not only as Europeans but also as natives of Palestine. Jewish immigration to Palestine was portrayed not only as an exodus from Europe but also as a “return” to the ancient homeland as well as to an authentic national existence.Footnote 31 Therefore, Jews in Palestine were represented both as civilized Europeans (or Westerners) who had come to establish a perfected Europe in the Orient and as one of several “civilized nations” (ʿame tarbut) that had created the science of hygiene in the ancient Orient.

“Old, Diaspora Jews” Versus “New, Eretz Israeli Jews”

In 1931 public health nurse Rachel Pesach lectured to an audience of schoolchildren:

The entire world has its eye on us and our work. Can this nation, which has lived so many years in the Diaspora, become a healthy and free nation again? We must prove to the world that our forces are still with us . . . that we know how to live a clean and hygienic life, to remove the shame of exile, the neglect and the filth. We have enemies who photograph the dirt, spreading rumors that we are soiling the Holy Land, spreading disease and so on. But we know the opposite: we are disseminating culture. Nevertheless, we still have much to repair, we must strive that every corner in the country will become the symbol of cleanliness, that every shop will shine and please the eye, that all our houses and places will testify that the nation of Israel has indeed arisen to live a new, healthy life.Footnote 32

In Pesach's speech, “the shame of exile,” which is associated with “neglect and filth,” is contrasted with the “new, healthy life” in Eretz Israel, although there is still “much to correct.”

Physicians, too, often contrasted recommended hygienic practices with Jewish customs and ways of life in the Diaspora. Representations of the Diaspora merged attributes conventionally associated with the East European ghetto, such as poverty, persecution, and “traditional” ways of life, with attributes associated with Jewish life in Western Europe, for example, nervousness and assimilation—one of the main predicaments of Western Jewry, according to Zionist discourse. Other faults were associated with both Eastern and Western Jewish life, for instance, Jews’ predilection for “intellectual work” and avoidance of physical labor and exercise. Physicians particularly emphasized Diaspora Jews’ distance from “nature,” which caused a whole range of pathogenic and pathological effects. As Dr. Asher Goldstein writes in Torat ha-Beriʾut (The Theory of Health), a textbook for late primary and early high school students,

In the Diaspora, too, Jews were excessive consumers of meat, fish, eggs and all kinds of foods made of flour, but somehow they never liked fruits and especially vegetables . . . The concentration of the Jews in cities and their distance from nature in the Diaspora led to their distance from natural foods . . . Such dietary habits cause various diseases of the stomach and the intestines as well as metabolic disturbances, which are particularly prevalent among the Jews, and now we must make big changes in our diet.Footnote 33

Goldstein does not explain why vegetables and fruits should be considered more “natural” than meat. Like “Diaspora,” “nature” was a term with a broad denotative range extending from “open nature” through “natural elements” like air and water to everything that was considered “normal.” “From abnormal life we would like to return to normal, natural, beautiful life,” writes Dr. Yaʿacov Sass in Ha-Higyenah shel ha-Guf ve-ha-Ruah (The Hygiene of Body and Mind), the chapters of which appeared as weekly columns in the daily newspaper Doʿar ha-Yom.Footnote 34

Physicians often lamented that Jews failed to adjust their habits to the conditions of the land. Identifying Jewish Diasporic life with everything unhealthy, they presented hygiene deficiencies as a remnant of the Diaspora in Eretz Israel. However, there were also cases when physicians invoked the unsanitary Diaspora to attest to the progress taking place in Palestine. Dr. Gordin, for example, in a piece published in Haʾaretz during “Health Week” 1937, compares the condition of Jewish apartments in the Diaspora with that in Eretz Israel: “In Eretz Israel we also keep our apartments cleaner. The reasons for this are: the Eretz Israeli sun, whose bright light does not let filth accumulate in our corners, getting close to mother-earth, to nature—all those taught us the doctrine of cleanliness.”Footnote 35

Yet even accounts focused on improved conditions in Palestine usually appeared as a preface to the contention that “there is still much to correct.” Although this contention can be partly attributed to the logic of the hygiene project qua a project of “perfection,” it also alluded to an ideal associated in the hygienic discourse with Europe or the West.

The Civilized, Hygienic West Versus the Uncivilized, Unhygienic East

Every once in a while, physicians reminded readers that recommended hygienic conduct was also “civilized behavior.” Dr. Benno Grünfelder writes, “Feed your child with your own milk, educate him to punctuality from the first moment, and nurture him from his first day of life according to the ways of advanced civilization.”Footnote 36 “One should definitely avoid the uncivilized and unaesthetic habit of lying in bed with clothes, sometimes even with work clothes and dirty shoes,” warns the anonymous author of a booklet titled “Horaʿot be-Higyenah la- ʿolim” (Hygiene Instructions for Immigrants).Footnote 37

Europe, America, and “the West” are presented in hygiene texts as homogeneous entities in which hygiene knowledge is the property of everyone. “In America any ignorant woman knows which foods are rich in necessary ingredients and which are poor, and here I spoke to people with a fair level of education, who have no knowledge whatsoever of the rules of nutrition,” writes Dr. Rubin in a nutrition article published in Haʾaretz in 1928.Footnote 38 A 1929 piece on the condition of Tel Aviv warns: “And this year . . . tens of thousands of tourists from the cities of Europe and America, where habits of improvement and cleanliness have become second nature, will visit us, and they will find us guilty for even the smallest spot that they will find on us.”Footnote 39

If “hygiene” signified “civilization” and “the West,” “Oriental” stood for sickness, primitiveness, and total disregard for hygiene. Dr. David Margalith writes, “We, the people of Europe and other regions with average cold climate, must get ourselves accustomed in a cinematographic speed to the warm climate and Oriental way of life, a negligent way of life, faltering and lagging in every area of life, and especially in the area of health. We cannot be secluded from the primitive environment, we do not live in a vacuum.”Footnote 40 Brachyahu warns that “[p]eople abroad must assume that hygienic work in schools is Oriental and neglected.”Footnote 41 Dr. Bezalel Praver, in his 1935 booklet on infant mortality, decries the hygiene of the Arabs:

The Arabs’ living conditions are primitive, they live amidst dirt, filth and flies, they lack any idea of hygiene and methodic childcare, their housing conditions are bad, their child-feeding method is absolutely different from the European method, which we carried to this country together with the rest of our cultural baggage, they lack medical care, and above all: a soaring birth rate, a birth rate which may be the highest in the world. And the result of all this is: infant mortality in the Arab sector too, mortality at the age of one and two years is very high, twice as high as in the Jewish sector.Footnote 42

In Praver's text, “the Arabs” figure as a homogeneous collective characterized by primitiveness, dirt, bad housing conditions, a soaring birth rate, and ignorance.Footnote 43 Praver contrasts “the Arabs” with “the Jews,” who “brought” hygiene to the country together with the rest of their “cultural baggage.” Thanks to the example set by the Jews, to the work of Jewish physicians and health institutions among the Arabs, and mainly to the establishment of Infant Welfare centers by the British government, writes Praver, the situation in the Arab sector started to improve in recent years.Footnote 44

Ancient Jewish Hygiene

In certain segments of the hygienic discourse, the relation between the poles of the equations Orient = unhealthy and Occident = healthy was reversed. Texts either represented the ancient Orient as a site of hygienic ingenuity or contrasted the healthy potential of some contemporary Oriental habits with the insalubrious effects of Western civilization.

Associations of the Orient with health were anchored in two ways. First, they rested on the twofold conception of time in Zionist discourse. As Yael Zrubavel writes, Zionists divided Jewish history into two main periods based on the primacy of the people–land bond: antiquity and exile. While the exile period was characterized by lack and decline, antiquity stood for everything that Zionists aspired to recover, primarily, independent life in the homeland and proud national spirit.Footnote 45 Second, they rested on the ambivalence of Western concepts of “nature” and “civilization.” This ambivalence cast hygienic behavior both as “civilized” in opposition to the primitiveness and uncivilized behavior of the lower classes and inferior races and as “natural” in contrast to the debilitating effects of Western civilization.

Physicians often described Jewish life in ancient Palestine as a period of scientific creativity, including in medicine. Contrary to the standard narrative of the history of science as progress, they presented hygiene as an ancient Jewish lore whose rules were still valid in the 20th century. “Even today, after millennia of progress, [the laws of health maintenance legislated by our forefathers] do not require any correction and all scientists attest to their usefulness, correctness and necessity,” writes Dr. Sass.Footnote 46 Hygiene, and medicine in general, belonged to Jewish national culture. “We may conclude that medicine was not confined to the halls of science, as it was in other nations, was not isolated from the masses, but rather was a part of the popular cultural way of life,” writes Dr. Goldstein.Footnote 47

The discourse of Jewish medicine and Jewish hygiene emerged in Germany at the time of the Haskala, the late 18th-century Jewish enlightenment. In the face of certain currents in historical-theological discussions—which regarded Judaism as a barbaric and degenerate religion and Jews as an Oriental nation indifferent to modernity and progress—Jewish intellectuals, among them physicians, articulated a counterdiscourse that asserted Jewish doctrine and Jewish ritual not only as compatible with modern ways of life but also as a vanguard of modernity.Footnote 48 Because this discourse detached Jewish ritual from its religious significance and reconceptualized it as national culture, it appealed to Zionist physicians both in Europe and in Palestine.

Ancient Jewish scholars were cast as authorities on scientific questions, but the ancient Hebrews were depicted as a model of hygienic virtue. Here, again, is Dr. Sass:

We used to be a healthy, strong nation; shepherds, farmers, warriors; we lived a natural life, with harmonically developed body and spirit, with a strong, stubborn will, a nation with a high level of hygiene, with correct understanding of physical treatment, a nation with exemplary perseverance, strong power of action, with courage both physical and moral. The Diaspora dwindled our body and soul; it weakened and diminished our power of resistance . . . Footnote 49

Brachyahu contrasts the healthy way of life of “our forefathers” with the harmful dictates of “fashion and civilization”:

Our forefathers were well invigorated, since their flesh was always washed by waves of air. The children of the fellahin in our country still go around naked or half-naked. The living conditions in the cities make it difficult to even arrange air baths in places which are secure from the gaze of passersby. In addition we wrap our bodies with layers of heavy and close-woven clothes according to the demands of fashion and civilization, and they abolish the excellent property of the skin, its ability to regulate the internal temperature of the body according to the external temperature.Footnote 50

As this quote demonstrates, in certain areas Arab practices were deemed “healthier” than Jewish ones because they were seen as not yet touched by modern civilization. Dr. Meʿir comments, “Indeed, the Bedouin mother is lacking in many ways: she lacks education and necessary perception, she doesn't know when to turn to the doctor, but in one thing she is blessed: in the natural motherly instinct, which our mothers lack.”Footnote 51 Because hygienic behavior was both “civilized” and “natural,” implicit in such representations was the idea that through hygiene education, overly civilized Jews could become “natural” again.

Although physicians sometimes presented Arab habits as more adjusted to the conditions of the land than Jewish ones and described Jewish exile as a period of decline, still the “return” of the Jews to their homeland was said to carry a promise of hygienic redemption. Centuries of Jewish exile were deemed a period of hygienic recession not only for the nation but also for the land: “Our country is being gradually developed. Its swamps are being dried, its ruins are being rehabilitated, and the forsaken and desolate places, which were neglected for centuries for lack of inhabitants, are being resettled,” writes Dr. Arieh Boehm.Footnote 52 Jewish claim to the land was justified not only by recourse to ancestral merit but also on hygienic grounds: “[O]ur nation, which had perfected medicine in this land in ancient times and made it a model for other nations, and whose doctors today stand at the forefront of modern medicine in every civilized country—will know in forthcoming years to bestow its regenerating spirit on this ancient profession, on public medicine,” writes Brachyahu.Footnote 53

HYGIENE AND SOCIAL RELATIONS

According to the picture that has emerged so far, Jews in Palestine could become modern and Western by adopting a hygienic way of life. If identity were a static set of individual or group traits, we might stop here. Identities, however, are relational constructs. As identity signifiers, hygienic practices received their value within specific figurations of social relations. In this section I turn to the functioning of hygiene as an identity signifier in the social context of the Jewish community of Palestine.

The “Diaspora Jew” Becomes an “Immigrant from Europe”

As Ussama Makdisi argues, “[In] an age of Western-dominated modernity, every nation creates its own Orient.”Footnote 54 Indeed, since the late 18th century, Christians cast Jews in Western and Central Europe as “the Orient within.”Footnote 55 By the late 19th century, West European Jews, or East European Jews who internalized the Western gaze on Eastern Europe, constructed their identity as “modern” and “Western” in opposition to the “Oriental” Jews of Eastern Europe.Footnote 56 This orientalizing of East European Jews was reflected in fin de siècle Zionist discourse that drew a distinction between the overly modernized Western Jews and the primitive Jews of Eastern Europe.Footnote 57 Zionist physicians in Europe likewise attributed degenerative symptoms to the entire Jewish Diaspora, but it was only in the case of East European Jews that they cited various signifiers of Oriental status—mainly poor personal hygiene, unsanitary living conditions, early marriage, and a high birth rate—as central factors in the etiology of their physical and mental deterioration.Footnote 58

The East–West distinction remained a central organizing opposition in the hygienic discourse in Palestine, but its referents changed: instead of East versus West Europe, it became Europe versus the East. Thus newcomers from both Eastern and Western Europe were referred to as “immigrants from Europe” and contrasted to “all ‘those’ non-Europeans”Footnote 59—both Arabs and Jews. Dr. Benno Grünfelder, the Hadassah chief pediatrician, writes in an article published in the women's magazine Ha-Ishah (The Woman) in 1929:

Before the immigration of the European Jews there was hardly any difference in the vital statistics between the Jews and the general population because the old Jewish settlement was almost identical in its living conditions and habits to the Arab population in the country. The inhabitants [sic] who came from Europe were on a significantly higher cultural level. Most of them brought with them the need for regular childcare, whereas only a small section of the Arab population is educated by the mandatory government in prophylactic treatment, the Jews are making giant leaps forward [sic].Footnote 60

Although the vast majority of Jewish immigrants in 1929 came from Eastern Europe, when contrasted with the “old Jewish settlement” and the “general [Arab] population” they were defined as immigrants from Europe. Note that Grünfelder does not describe the immigrants bringing the preferred cultural repertoire with them but rather bringing a “need”—a term that confirms acknowledgement of the importance of “regular childcare” and indicates the lack of such care at the same time.

The designation “old Jewish settlement” usually refers both to Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews and to Mizrahi Jews, including Sephardi Jews who had been living in Palestine for generations.Footnote 61 “Old” in this context is a cultural rather than a temporal designation. Most Orthodox Jews had immigrated to Palestine from Eastern Europe during the second half of the 19th century, and Jewish immigration from the Middle East and North Africa continued alongside Zionist immigration waves from Europe. Throughout much of the Ottoman period, the Sephardi community held political and economic dominance within Jewish society in Palestine. With the increase in Zionist immigration from Europe in the beginning of the 20th century and the consolidation of Jewish national institutions during the Mandate period, political power shifted to East European Zionists, who became the majority of Palestine's Jewish population. During the Mandate period, both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews were disproportionately concentrated in the lower and lower-middle classes and were generally unassimilated into Zionist society and institutions, with the exception of some, mainly Sephardi, groups.

In contrast to the general disregard for Mizrahi Jews by national institutions, Hadassah targeted Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews for its medical and health-educational interventions early on. In medical discourse they appear both as a group in dire need of reform and as a foil to the construction of Zionist identity as modern and Western. In a piece published in Haʾaretz during the 1924 “Health Week,” Dr. D. Deutsch writes:

The people of Israel, being scattered among the nations of the world, never established national agencies to care for the healing of their children. . . . And indeed we know that Jewish children were distinguished by many diseases which were not as prevalent in other nations . . .

Our national regeneration, by returning to the country of our ancestors, necessitates regeneration in the sense of healing our children . . .

And there's another important role that we face: we, who came from the countries of the West, came back to the land of our fathers, and here we joined our brethren, who remained in the countries of the East. As we know, these brothers lived in very tough and grim conditions and this kind of life adversely affected their health and physical development, and so we see that the health of their children is very bad as well. The children of the Yemenites, and the other Oriental parts of our nation, are very different from our children . . . We, who came here armed with modern science and the knowledge how to use it in order to heal our children, must come to the aid of other sectors of society. . ..Footnote 62

Once Mizrahi Jews make their appearance in Deutsch's text, the subject position of East European Jews shifts from those who lack knowledge of adequate childcare to “we who came here armed with knowledge,” and Eastern Europe turns into “the countries of the West.” And, as in the quote from Dr. Goldstein, East European Jews are positioned simultaneously as both subjects and objects of the hygienic mission.

Oriental children, writes Deutsch, “are very different from our children,” thus excluding Mizrahi Jews from the collective “our.” Deutsch does not mention in what ways they are “very different”; indeed, only two lines previous, he writes that “the health of their children is very bad as well.” In the hygienic discourse more generally, Middle Eastern, North African, and Sephardi Jews were all considered variations of a single “type.” Physicians and public health nurses described them as not only violating the most basic rules of hygiene but also constituting the antithesis of the “hygienic personality”: superstitious, ignorant, neglectful of their children, lacking a “sense of time” and “sense of balance,”Footnote 63 and, most reprehensibly, passive and devoid of agency and will to change.

In contrast to ethnicity, social class was never mentioned as a possible explanatory factor for hygienic differences. For example, as Hadassah's “traveling ophthalmologist,” Dr. Nathan Dobzinsky, writes in the journal of the Jewish Medical Association, Ha-Refuʿah (Medicine):

In contrast to twenty years ago, the problem of trachoma in our country is a problem of the Oriental communities, whose places of settlements are the last nests and strongholds of trachoma. . . . I didn't know these settlements twenty years ago, but it seems to me that this is the same dirt and poverty, the same flies, the same dust. Indeed there is water in each one of these locales, but it is also necessary for people to have the will to use it. And what concerns the burning “will” of the patients to “be cured of this severe disease”—this is a sad affair. It is my opinion that this kind of lack of any will is one of the main obstacles in our fight against trachoma.Footnote 64

Although Dobzinsky mentions poverty, he does not relate it to the unsanitary living conditions in Mizrahi neighborhoods. Instead, “dirt” and “poverty” appear as essentialist characteristics of Mizrahi Jews. He attributes their high rate of trachoma to their “lack of will to cure themselves,” although later in the article he reports that in some places visits to the local clinic in the high season of trachoma number 800 a day!Footnote 65

Other writers emphasize that the poor health conditions of Mizrahi Jews did not stem from poverty but rather from lack of will and lack of culture. In a 1946 article on underweight babies, for instance, nurse Rachel Pesach writes that a large percentage of them are found not among poor families in the slums but rather among families who lack culture and sufficient responsibility toward their children. Although Pesach does not state explicitly that she is referring to Mizrahi Jews, her language, and her reference to the high birth rate “among these groups,” leaves no room for doubt.Footnote 66

The unhealthy and primitive Oriental was not the only construction of Mizrahi Jews in the Hebrew cultural repertoire. A different construction, found mainly in late 19th- and early 20th-century representations, presents Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews in particular as the mirror image of the degenerating “ghetto Jews.” Sephardi Jews are healthier, taller, stronger, and more attentive to cleanliness and aesthetics than their East European brothers, not only in Europe but also in some of the East European workers’ collectives in Palestine.Footnote 67

As Jewish settlement in Palestine and the Westernization project progressed, especially after the institution of the British Mandate, this positive construction gradually disappeared, replaced by the “primitive Oriental.” The hygienic discourse both reflected and reinforced this process: almost no Mizrahi (including Sephardi) Jews were depicted as healthier than European Jews although contrary representations abounded. Moreover, nonmedical portrayals of Mizrahi groups often included references to their unhygienic ways of life. Many texts presented them not only as a primitive, degenerate group but also as a threat to the physical and moral well-being of the entire Zionist community.

Civilized Neglect

I do not mean to argue that there were no differences between hygiene practices prevalent in different social groups. Indeed, real differences in group practices made the hygienic discourse, with its conflation of the normative and the descriptive, along with its guise of objectivity, an effective instrument of identity construction. However, differences in practice did not overlap with the distinction between East and West, between Mizrahi Jews and Arabs on the one hand and European Jews on the other. Therefore, hygiene texts did not always ascribe different practices to different groups but sometimes provided competing interpretations of the same practices, depending on the group under observation.

Although physicians and public health nurses more often scrutinized the daily habits and living conditions of Mizrahi Jews, their attention occasionally turned to a European group, such as rural settlers. Contrary to the image of the healthy and vigorous pioneer, who attains physical and mental redemption by working the land, physicians often lamented settlers’ utter disregard for hygiene. One example can be found in Brachyahu's “The Teaching of Hygiene,” which appeared in 1921 in Ha-Hinukh (Education), a journal dedicated to pedagogy and psychology. Brachyahu begins with an account of his visit to one of the temporary settlements near Jerusalem. What starts as an expression of his admiration for the young “pioneers” and their work (“in one word: they create values and culture”) ultimately turns into a lament about poor hygienic conditions:

These fine young men, imbued with new culture and building a new life on the desolate Judean hills—why do they still carry the tradition of neglecting matters of purity and health? Everything is new and fresh, without the burden of routine—and why does the curse of the ghetto still hover over their sanitary habits?Footnote 68

When it came to rural settlers, then, the equation of “hygiene” with “culture” dissolved: Brachyahu does not attribute the poor sanitary and hygienic condition of the pioneers to their “cultural level.” On the contrary, he describes them as both “imbued with culture” and “creating culture.” In order not to disrupt the coherence of that image, poor hygienic conditions are projected on ghetto life and presented as vestiges of the past destined to disappear through education.Footnote 69

As this example demonstrates, poor hygiene and unsanitary living conditions were not always generalized into statements about the “cultural level” of the group in question. “With all due respect to the cultural level of our public—we have to admit that it has not yet acquired knowledge, consciousness and habits of a hygienic life and it still needs instruction in this respect,” writes Kupat Cholim physician Dr. Tova Berman.Footnote 70

This and other examplesFootnote 71 unsettle the opposition between “nature” and “civilization” in the hygiene discourse: “civilization,” which the hygienic discourse associated with a specific repertoire that therefore could be acquired, was at the same time portrayed as “natural” to a collective.Footnote 72 Thus, physicians and nurses described East European immigrants both as actively acquiring hygienic models of conduct as a result of a conscious will to learn and as acquiring them “naturally” and unintentionally. “[In the beginning of public-health work] we were missing the type of young mother whom we often meet today . . . who listens to our instructions with open ears and unintentionally creates a tradition of correct care and education which passes from mother to mother and from environment to environment,” writes Pesach.Footnote 73

In contrast, Mizrahi receptivity to modern medicine and hygiene was never taken as a sign of a “will to be cured,” as Dr. Dobzinsky puts it. In a similar vein, Mizrahi mothers’ high attendance at Infant Welfare centers, often reported by public health nurses, did not significantly alter their image as essentially neglectful.Footnote 74

In the colonial context of the Zionist nation-building process, “culture” was associated with Europe (or the West) and, by extension, with European Jews. The latter's failure to comply with the rules of hygiene did not signify inherent lack of culture as it did in the case of Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. In contrast, groups deemed “Oriental” could adhere to the rules of hygiene and still be categorized as uncivilized and unhygienic. As this case study suggests, in trying to account for the formation of ethnic boundaries, it is not enough to study either practices or representations. Rather, it is to the complex interaction between the use of signifying practices as a means of distinction and the ethnically differentiated models for their perception and interpretation that we should attend.

CONCLUSION

From its inception, the Zionist movement sought not only to acquire a territory for the Jews but also to shape its future inhabitants. Although there were various models of the New Man within the Zionist movement, the human ideal promoted by physicians, nurses, and public health officials embodied modernity, civilization, and the West. For these hygiene educators, the association of hygienic models of conduct with Western modernity made their inculcation among the Jewish population of Palestine particularly urgent.

The Jewish Westernization project was not unique to Palestine, yet in Palestine it received particular characteristics because of the colonial context of Zionist society and culture building. As the discourse of hygiene demonstrates, on the one hand, East European Jews, who were orientalized by West European Jews and Christians, could appear as immigrants from Europe or from the West who brought civilization from Occident to Orient. Representations of European Zionists as carriers of Western progress and civilization, who came to save the land from its present state of barbarism and neglect, often served in Zionist discourse as justification for Jewish colonization. On the other hand, Westernness was a precarious status. Because the East–West distinction was not a static distinction referring to homogenous bounded units but rather a dynamic and relational one, East European Jews occupied an ambivalent position: “Western” compared to “Orientals” but “not quite Western” compared to “Europeans,” “Americans,” and other fictions of identity.

In this context, the threat of being associated with the Orient in Western eyes had made dissociation from everything Oriental, both without and within Jewish society, all the more pressing. The discourse of hygiene described Mizrahi Jews and Arabs not only as unhygienic but also as the mirror image of the human ideal associated with hygienic conduct: a rational, active, self-possessed, and self-transforming human subject. Zionist occidentalism, then, refers to the ways in which constructions of Oriental otherness were used to produce a coherent image of an Occidental Zionist self.

Norbert Elias, and later Pierre Bourdieu, has shown how everyday signifying practices are used as a means of distinction between social groups: group members perform certain practices and perform them in a certain way in order to distinguish themselves from groups that occupy a lower social position.Footnote 75 However, the distinction between European Jews and “Orientals” did not always occur on the level of practice but sometimes on the level of interpretation: hygienic practices were assigned a different meaning depending on which ethnic group performed them.

Signifying practices receive their value in specific contexts of recognition and interpretation. Children taught hygiene in school, for instance, learned not only how to clean up but also what cleanliness and dirt meant in different contexts and in relation to different people. They also learned when it was possible, and even necessary, to regard individuals’ conduct as a manifestation of the cultural level of the group to which they belonged. Because the East–West distinction did not simply map on to the distinction between “civilized” and “primitive” but was, instead, constitutive of it, definitions of what constituted civilized/uncivilized behavior were never detached from the ethnicized contexts in which it was performed. Although failure to comply with the rules of hygiene signified primitiveness and inherent lack of culture in the case of Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, hygienic breaches by European Jews were regarded as remnants of their previous Diasporic existence. These were destined to disappear through education, which would impart to them the culture that was already “theirs” all along.

Footnotes

ibid.
Ibid.

References

NOTES

Author's Note: Funding for research included in this article was received from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University, the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach Foundation, the Women Studies Forum with the National Council of Jewish Women, Tel Aviv University, the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, and the Tel Aviv University School of History. I am grateful to all these institutions for their support.

The article is based on my dissertation research on hygiene education within the Jewish community of Palestine during the Mandate period. I thank my supervisors, Billie Melman and Deborah Bernstein, for their devoted guidance and support. Special thanks to Gadi Algazi, Jennifer Robertson, Natalie Rothman, Smadar Sharon, and the three anonymous IJMES reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. All translations from Hebrew are mine.

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61 My use of Mizrahi is anachronistic. Contemporary designations varied. Most common was bene ha-ʿedot ha-Mizrahiot, literally, “of the Eastern communities,” which today carries derogatory connotations.

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