Shai Ginsburg points to the complexity of the rhetoric of the nation, especially the Jewish nation, and of Zionist rhetorical, textual construction in particular. A rich study that closely examines various aspects of Zionist national rhetoric, it is a historical work of extensive scope that moves between essays and articles by ’Aḥad Ha-‘am, Herzl, Pinsker, and Berdyczewsky and reaches to contemporary Israeli literature and literary criticism. The national rhetoric that emerges from this timely book is, therefore, not only discourse reflecting and constructing the national situation in time, but a multigeneric rhetoric, expressing itself in a variety of ways.
As we learn in the introduction and conclusion, the entire study seeks to show that the rhetoric in which national narrative is anchored is not homogeneous. It might be conscripting or aimed at encouraging solidarity; it may be acting in the name of the national movement or aspiring to help realize the national movement's political goals. Ginsburg deliberately chooses major, canonical national texts, in order to show that unlike the solidarity-inducing, foundational status of these texts, the rhetoric of the national canon is not homogeneous; it does not carry a clear, unified message. It is in fact heterogeneous and torn at its center.
The chapter on “Hawaja Nazar” by Moshe Smilansky, who Ginsburg tells us viewed himself as ’Aḥad Ha-‘am's successor, describes the gap between Smilansky's reception by Hebrew literary critics and the narrative and rhetoric of the story. Smilansky's stories were seen as reflecting national norms and ideas and the values of the Zionist settlement of ’Ereẓ Yisra'el, for which they supposedly demonstrated unmitigated support. Ginsburg's close reading of “Hawaja Nazar,” however, shows that it reflects tensions in the link between nation, language, and territory. The story, as Ginsburg reads it, deals with questions of nationalism about which members of the First and Second Aliyot disagreed: how the right to territory should be obtained, whether it is a historical religious right or one earned by physical labor. Ginsburg reveals that this question is bound up in the story with another major issue: the choice of national language. He shows that in contrast to the received view, the story creates tension and even a rift between territorial issues and the matter of national language. The story's eponymous hero, Hawaja Nazar, is free of all negative traits of the Old Jew. His Judaism, like his marginality, is not forced upon him; rather he craves to be Jewish even though his mother is not. He insists on building his home in ’Ereẓ Yisra'el, the land of the Bible, and more than anything else wishes to identify with the territory through the language of the Bible, with which he is entirely unfamiliar. Ginsburg argues that the story reflects the difficulty of the move from Nazar's mother tongue, Russian, and its accompanying imagery, to speaking every day in the language of the Bible, which was not yet current as a vernacular. The most unbridgeable gap, however, is between language “as the dwelling place of national ideals and images” and national territory. This is a rift between the utopic combination of language and territory and concrete reality and identity. Nevertheless, Ginsburg claims, the hegemonic power of this story is set precisely at the site of this rift. For Ginsburg, hegemony is not an expression of unity but of division, anxiety, and disintegration.
In an intriguing chapter on “The Eretz Israel Genre and Its Accoutrements,” Ginsburg exposes Yosef Ḥayim Brenner's claim as torn, broken, and ambiguous. Indeed, anyone attempting to understand Brenner's article in any depth is doomed to confusion. It is important to remember, however, that in both “Hawaja Nazar” and “The Eretz Israel Genre and Its Accoutrements” the influence of literary discourse was sharp and clear. Despite the fact that Smilansky's work includes representations of the significant rifts between language and territory, and between myth and reality, it is seen as reflecting Zionist ideology and hence has been marginalized because of it. As the most important critic and writer of his day, Brenner succeeded in rejecting generic literature and embracing national literature. Despite its contradictory rhetoric, it set up a mainstream and its margins. When Menachem Brinkner writes about Brenner's rhetoric of honesty, he is referring to precisely this manipulation. Brenner demands a certain style of honesty and reportage, but at the same time creates a national literature whose fictive element is much more significant. This literature requires a complex narrative and characters who can change, experience self-discovery, return home, and fail. Brenner's fictional works, as well as those of S. Y. Agnon and others, created over time a national textual and cultural community. Brenner thus succeeded in marginalizing First and Second Aliyah literature, which stuck to a generic poetics. His rhetoric was ambiguous, but the message was eventually clear and powerful, and accompanied by procedures of publication and acceptance that created a fiction literature ultimately boasting a universal national style.
Two principal questions arise from this study's choice (and others’ choice, including my own) to examine the rhetoric of major national texts in Zionist culture. Rhetoric and Nation shows that national rhetoric is not unified, that it conveys complex messages. Nevertheless, we see that in reality, political decisions, nationalist practice, and the accompanying public discourse are not as disparate. The first question, therefore, is whether rhetorical and literary complexity produces a single or a double message in the end. The choice of Hebrew as the national language, for example, was accepted and implemented in practice, despite the existence of communities speaking other languages, in which marginal literature is still written in Israel to this day. One might, perhaps, conclude that the complex position vis-à-vis Hebrew as a national language ultimately served to strengthen it and to forcibly repress other linguistic and cultural possibilities.
The second question arising from this study, which is indubitably linked to the first, has to do with the distinction it makes between various kinds of texts. When lecturing on my research, which is also concerned with literature and nationalism, and treats nonfiction texts, I am often asked what, if any, is the value of belles lettres. We are used to thinking of belles lettres as meeting very different human needs from those met by essays or other cultural texts. This question is raised in the book in the context of the debate between ’Aḥad Ha-‘am and Berdyczewsky. I must admit that when I am asked the “value of fiction” question, it makes me uncomfortable and seems to me irrelevant since the answer is obvious. Nevertheless, reading Ginsburg's study I find myself pondering this very question. It is usually asked by literary scholars who believe that literature plays a purely aesthetic role in culture, with politics playing only a secondary role. Literature is meant to enrich people's consciousness, we enjoy it, and read in other languages than our native tongue about matters other than the fate of our own nation, so that discussion of literature in the national context is perforce limited and reductive.
Is there a difference in the way the new, national Jew is constructed in fictional texts such as Moshe Smilansky's (themselves different from the fiction of S. Y. Agnon, Moshe Shamir, or Yaakov Shabtai) and publicist texts by Leon Pinsker or Max Nordau? True, the national text is composed of reversals and contradictions but do the two types of text operate similarly for the reader? Ginsburg's book tells a complex narrative of Jewish national construction. It selects major Zionist texts, situates them in the national culture and exposes their complexity through fruitful and profound theoretical discussion. The study articulately and convincingly demonstrates how varied, contradictory, alive, and dynamic national rhetoric is. How did such narratives influence the definition of the Jewish nation as opposed to other nations and populations? In fact, what is the influence of a variety of genres on the construction of the national subject altogether?
