Jewish Peopolehood in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Narration and Imagined Identity in Herzl’s Altneuland

• In Event: Reading, Representing, and Creating the Nation—Zionism and Literature

Abstract

Altneuland’s reception portrayed Hertzl’s vision of the future state of Israel as if he were ignoring questions of Jewish cultural identity to focus instead on logistic, technologic, social and political questions. My reading of Altneuland emphasizes the changes Herzl expects Jewish identity to undergo. Following Anderson’s sense of imagined national identity, I will examine the way in which Altneuland proposes to transform the ways in which the Jewish national story is textualy imagined especially in terms of genre and medium.
The novel, Altneuland, is made of layers of narration inside one another. My reading follows different techniques of narration that complement each other to form a modern national way of imagining identity through narrative. The novel is framed by a well-known prologue and epilogue that are concerned with questions of genre, namely: is this a legend (usually translated as a ‘dream’ but the origin is: märchen) or something else? Apparently it was very important for Herzl to insist that his story does not have to be a legend, but what is the alternative genre that Herzl looks for? Answering the question of genre I will connect it to an interesting narrating medium that appears in the inner story that is told on Pessach, and compares the traditional oral way of telling the national story with the recording, mechanical narrative transmission, as a modern alternative to the oral Seder. Recording pose a different setting for addresser-addressee relationships that complements the choice of genre in modernizing the way in which the Jewish story should be told. They have in common a certain characteristic of a modernized Jewishness that seems to be important for Herzl.
Understanding the way Herzl chooses to imagine nationality may contribute to the debate on the nature of Zionism as a modern national movement by illuminating in greater depth the textual means by which nationality is imagined. It can also shed light on problems of genre and reality representation that were vital for Zionist Hebrew literature.

author

• Amit Assis, McGill University