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$Title{Israel
Chapter 2A.   The Society}
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$Author{Richard F. Nyrop}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{jews
jewish
palestine
israel
yishuv
religious
first
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$Date{1979}
$Log{}
Title:       Israel
Book:        Israel, A Country Study
Author:      Richard F. Nyrop
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1979

Chapter 2A.   The Society

     Israeli society in 1978 was characterized by many unique features. It is
one of only two modern states (the other being Pakistan) founded as a homeland
for a religious group. The driving force for statehood was the doctrine of
Zionism, which evolved in the nineteenth century partially as a response to
the historical vicissitudes visited upon the Jewish people as minorities in
other societies (see Zionism: The Founding Fathers, ch. 1). Zionism was also
the specifically Jewish articulation of the strong nationalistic drives common
in the Europe of the mid- and late 1880s.

     The Jewish people had last ruled themselves in 63 B.C. when the Second
Jewish Commonwealth was conquered by the Romans (see table B, Preface). It was
in this region centuries before that the strong ethical impulse that
characterizes Judaism was developed and found expression in the Bible. At the
time of the Second Jewish Commonwealth Jews were already scattered throughout
the countries of the Mediterranean basin. The collapse of the Jewish state
flung Jewish emigres as far as India and China. During the centuries of the
Diaspora (see Glossary) the idea of returning to the land they once held was
nurtured by readings from the Bible and religioHs ritual. "If I forget thee O
Jerusalem let my right hand lose its cunning. If I do not remember thee, let
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I prefer not Jerusalem above my
chief joy" (Psalm 137). Both for those Jews who read the Bible as God's word
and for those who read it as a literature and a history of an ethnic group,
the association of freedom from oppression was closely tied to Zion, the name
they gave to the land or, as it increasingly began to be called in the
nineteenth century, Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel).

     Political events in modern Europe, particularly the bloody pogroms
against the Jews of Russia and of the Ukraine, prompted the development of
secular and religious organizations to send Jews to settle in what they
regarded as their ancestral homeland. There always had been a remnant of the
Jewish people in Palestina, the name given to part of the area by the Romans.
Sowing the seeds of future discord was the lack of awareness among many
Zionists who developed their ideology in Europe that Palestine was inhabited
by an indigenous Arab population who showed no signs of wishing to leave the
land they had cultivated for centuries. The Ottoman Turks who ruled Palestine
did not object to Jewish settlement, so that Jewish social, religious, and
political institutions developed alongside but not in concert with Arab ones.

     The major influx of Jews into Palestine did not begin until the late
nineteenth century. These immigrants were primarily of two kinds: those very
religious Jews who wished to study, pray, and die in the land made holy to
them by God's covenant, and the secular socialistic Jews of the Emancipation
or Enlightenment (haskalah) who wished to "rebuild the land and to be rebuilt
by the land." Between 1882 and 1939 thousands of Jews in five major waves
immigrated to Israel, mostly Ashkenazim (see Glossary), of East and West
European background.

     The horrors of the Holocaust (see Glossary) were a confirmation of the
worst fears of Zionist Jews and added fuel to the necessity of establishing
a Jewish state. After the establishment of the state a new kind of immigrant
arrived in Israel. Between 1948 and 1951 some 750,000 people immigrated to
Israel; the majority were Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and North
Africa. They were very different from the Ashkenazic Jews who preceeded them.
Sephardim (see Glossary) varied from sophisticated and highly educated
Egyptian Jews to Atlas Mountain cave dwellers. These Sephardim did have a
common denominator in that for the most part Western institutions, such as
those that existed in the new state, were foreign to them. By 1978 nearly
every Jewish group of the Diaspora was represented in Israeli society (see
table 3, table 4, Appendix A). The largest Middle Eastern group outside of
North Africa was from Iraq, including city dwellers as well as villagers from
Kurdistan. The next largest group was from the Yemen in south Arabia. Turkish
Jews were mostly of Sephardic origin from rural areas. Another group came from
Iran. Indian Jews came from Bombay and from the southwestern district of
Cochin; a third Indian group was originally of Iraqi origin. Other Jews came
from Syria, Lebanon, and Soviet Central Asia.

     Morocco yielded the largest group from North Africa. Algeria and Tunisia
contributed a large group, mainly French speaking. Egypt and Libya were also
sources in Africa. A few immigrated from South Africa, but they were largely
of European origin. A small group came from Ethiopia.

     Polish Jews constituted the largest European group, followed by Jews from
Romania and the Soviet Union. Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary
also contributed substantial numbers. Many Sephardic Jews came from Bulgaria,
Greece, and Yugoslavia. Relatively few Jews had immigrated from North and
South America or from Australia.

     Reflecting this diversity of origin, there exists among Israeli Jews
widespread disagreement with respect to the importance of religious precepts
and practices in everyday life, a difference in perspective that divides the
basic structure of the society. On the one hand, there are the members of the
Orthodox community, estimated by Shene'ur Z. Abramov at approximately 35
percent of the Jewish population, who see as crucial the requirement that life
patterns in Israel adhere strictly to Judaic law and tradition. Others among
the Orthodox do not recognize the secular state. On the other hand, are
Israeli Jews who identify themselves as secularists and as such attach little
or no importance to the observance of ritual law (halakah) in their daily
behavior or are completely nonobservant.

     As a major world religion, Judaism itself incorporates two other
perspectives-the Reform and Conservative movements-whose adherents occupy a
middle ground on the matter of the importance of law and tradition, retaining
some Orthodox customs but reducing much of the ritual and rejecting many of
the restrictions of the law. Few Reform and Conservative Jews, however, have
immigrated to Israel, and neither form plays a significant role in the
society.

     While the secular Ashkenazic Jews who founded Israel intended that the
values developed and amplified during the long period of the Diaspora would be
realized in Israeli society, they did not anticipate the difficulties that
would encumber that expression. Orthodox Jews in the mid-1970s represented
approximately 35 percent of the Jewish population and within that group the
ultra-Orthodox perhaps 6 percent, with the Conservative and Reform Jews and
the secularists making up the remainder. Yet the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel
has virtual control of marriage, divorce, and conversion and was the ultimate
arbiter of the question that has formed an estimated one-fifth of all Knesset
(parliament) debate, "Who is a Jew." Many groups within the Orthodox community
reject the idea of the Third Jewish Commonwealth created without the
intervention of a messiah yet nevertheless feel the necessity of protecting
religious values and of promoting the passage of religious law. There was
growing resentment among many of the secular Jews in 1978 at the interference
in their personal lives and of the pressure tactics of the Orthodox.

     A continuing social concern in 1978 was the condition of the Sephardim.
Although many individual Sephardim had experienced tremendous vertical
mobility, as a group their educational, social, and economic attainments were
significantly below that of the average Jew of Ashkenazic background.
Sephardic Jews constituted the majority of Jews in Israel, but very little of
their culture had found expression in the public life of Israel, a source of
rising dissatisfaction to them in 1978. Attempts at easing the assimilation
of the Sephardim were hampered by their high birthrate, their low literacy
level, and the fact that they were in their second generation of poverty (see
The Sephardim: A Disadvantaged Majority, this ch.).

     Fifteen percent of Israeli citizens in 1978 were not Jewish. The majority
of the non-Jewish population was Arab. There was as well a statistically
insignificant number of European and Circassian (non-Arab) Muslims. The Arab
minority of Muslims, Christians, and Druzes was little integrated into Israeli
society. While their standard of living had risen they experienced a condition
similar to that of Sephardic Jews-inadequate housing, low income, and a low
level of literacy. The situation of the Arabs was worsened, however, by their
non-Jewish status. They do not have access to the many specifically Jewish
social welfare institutions. Moreover, because of their ethnic association
with Israel's perceived enemies, they are subject to a wide range of civic
and political restrictions, although de jure they have full rights with other
citizens. The Arab population of 1978 appeared to be in the process of
radicalization, venting its opposition to its low status and the
discrimination its numbers felt by casting half its votes in the 1977
elections for Rakah (New Communist) party (see Other Parties, ch. 3).

     Israeli society, which produces more periodical literature per capita
than any other in the world, continued to be self-analytical in 1978 and to
explore relentlessly the more critical and controversial social issues. For
many, emigration (yerida- literally, going downward) of Jews from Israel was
a major concern, particularly in view of the high birthrate among Israeli
Arabs. Much discussion occurs in conversations and in print as to the causes
of emigration and what might be done to discourage it. Immigration
(aliyah-literally, going up-see Glossary) from the West rose after the Six-Day
War of June 1967 but had declined by 1970. Immigration continued to decline
while emigration was increasing. In 1978 immigrants barely replaced those who
left the country.

     Despite the pluralism of Israeli society and its groupings differentiated
by background, culture, and attitudes toward ideology and religion, the
dominant Jewish majority is cohesive. It is united in its dedication to the
state, in its overriding if not precisely defined awareness of mutual
Jewishness, in its pride in the accomplishments of the state in peace and war,
and in its common perception of having no alternative.

The Jewish Society

     When the United Nations (UN) on November 29, 1947, called for the
partitioning of Palestine, foreign diplomats presumed that there would be a
degree of unanimity among the new citizens as to the ways in which, and extent
to which, the State of Israel would be Jewish. Since the state was founded,
however, there has never been a consensus on the issue. Some scholars perceive
it as Israel's fundamental internal problem. Norman and Naomi Zucker have
concluded that:

Israel's ongoing religion-state controversy goes to the core of the nation's
political system and also has implications for Jews in the Diaspora. Always
smoldering, theopolitical issues erupt precipitously, threatening to topple
the government, or worse, create a Kulturkampf. It is the omnipresent portent
of war, sadly, that has encouraged political compromise for the sake of
national unity.

Background to the Secular-Religious Controversy

     Most Israeli Jews are secularists, and the prominence of halakah (see
Glossary) in the lives of Israeli citizens is therefore disproportionately
large. For many citizens, laws emanating from halakah are merely an annoyance,
such as Sabbath (Shabbot) regulations that prohibit public transportation or
the opening of places of entertainment. For some the literal interpretation
of halakah has had serious and sometimes tragic repercussions. Many others
resent the political power wielded by those political parties that represent
Orthodox views, which they perceive as often not in the best interests of the
security or economic development of the state.

     Arguments between secularists and the Orthodox over the question of
religion in a Jewish state began in the late nineteenth century, considerably
before the establishment of the State of Israel, in a response from some
members of the Ashkenazi Orthodox communities in Europe to the various
doctrines of secular Zionism. The author Samuel Leslie quotes an Orthodox
rabbi speaking in 1900 as an example of the total opposition the Orthodox in
the East European ghettos had to these ideas:

For our many sins, strangers have risen to pasture the holy flock, men who say
that the people of Israel should be clothed in secular nationalism, a nation
like all other nations, that Judaism rests on three things, national feeling,
the land and the language, and that national feeling is the most praiseworthy
element in the brew and the most effective in preserving Judaism, while the
observance of the Torah and the commandments is a private matter depending on
the inclination of each individual. May the Lord rebuke these evil men and may
he who chooseth Jerusalem seal their mouths.

The Old Yishuv

     During the same period and from the same religious impulse that prompted
intense reactions against the doctrines of secular Zionism, a small but
steady influx of religious Jews had been immigrating to Palestine. These
immigrants were not motivated by the ideals of Zionism but rather were
following rabbinical injunctions to return to Zion. Many of the immigrants
were advanced in age and hoped to fill the remainder of their days in prayer,
in the study of religious texts, and in fulfilling the 613 mitzvoth (religious
injunctions regarding daily life-see Glossary). The younger immigrants were
also extremely pious. They were motivated by a desire to escape the spreading
influence of haskalah, part of the manifestation of which was Zionism, to
which they were intensely opposed.

     Only a small remnant of the Jewish population had remained in Palestine
after the crushing of the Jewish revolt in A.D. 135 and the razing of
Jerusalem (see Hellenism and the Roman Conquest, ch. 1). This small but
well-organized community persisted through Roman, Byzantine, Persian, and
Muslim rule. Meager though it was, the community was very nearly annihilated
by the massacres by the Franks during the First Crusade (see table B,
Preface). The embryonic Jewish community that survived the collapse of the
Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was increased by an immigration of 300 English and
French rabbis in 1211. By the late fifteenth century there were only seventy
Jewish families in Palestine, but the Jewish Yishuv (literally, settlement-see
Glossary) increased more ramatically in the late fifteenth and sixteenth
enturies as Jewish Spanish and Portuguese refugees fled from the persecutions
of the Inquisition. Many of these Sephardic Jews were highly educated and had
substantial business experience (see Life Under Islam, ch. 1). They and their
descendants formed the majority of the Yishuv, which was concentrated in Safed
(modern Zefat) and the surrounding villages. The Turks, who had ruled
Palestine from 1517 until 1917, were not opposed to Jewish immigration, but
the Yishuv remained small and, on the whole, impoverished.

     Early in the seventeenth century the population, numbering approximately
1,200, again began to increase as the Yishuv began to receive financial
assistance through the Jewish relief system called halukkah (literally,
distribution; not to be confused with halakah). European Jews, anxious to
share in the spiritual fulfillment of those who had returned to Zion,
regularly contributed funds for the Yishuv in Palestine. There had been
sporadic attempts at larger scale immigration to Palestine, most of which
had ended in failure. From the middle of the eighteenth century, however,
organized groups of Hasidic (see Glossary) Jews, most of them followers of
their greatest religious leader, the Baal Shem Tov, immigrated from Galicia,
Russia, and Poland (see Introduction, ch. 1). They concentrated in an area
of Safed, forming the matrix of the Ashkenazic community. The Hasidic Jews
were soon followed by bands of mitnagdim (literally, opponents, i.e., of the
Hasidim) who were Talmud and rationalist-oriented and contemptuous of the
Hasidic emphasis on emotionality and of its cult of tzaddikim, rabbis believed
to possess magic powers.

     Nevertheless in 1770 the majority of the 5,000 Jews in Palestine was
still Sephardim. Due to the rivalry between the Hasidim and their many
opponents, however, immigration received a new impetus as each group
endeavored to be equally represented in Palestine. A new steamship service
from Odessa to Jaffa (modern Yafo) facilitated the arrival of ever-increasing
numbers of Ashkenazim so that by 1820 numbers were sufficient to found the
first Ashkenazic community mostly comprised of Hasidim of the Habab school, in
Hebron. In 1837 a severe earthquake left only a few thousand survivors in
Safed, which lost its preeminence as a Jewish center from that time. Of the
12,000 Jews in Palestine in 1845, half resided in Jerusalem, 1,500 lived in
Tiberias, the majority Ashkenazim of whom only nineteen persons were not
supported by the halukkah; Hebron, 400; Haifa, 100; Jaffa 400; and the
remainder in Safed.

     In 1839 Sultan Abdul Majid initiated a series of economic and civil
rights reforms in Palestine. Additionally foreign consulates located in
Palestine were allowed legal jurisdiction over all foreign residents,
including those not of their country of origin. Anxious to gain influence
where possible among the population, the British and Russian consulates,
particularly, also offered protection to the Jewish community. The British
considered it ironic that while the Russians were persecuting their own Jews
at home, they afforded Jewish nationals in Palestine the full array of their
consular services. As a result of the governmental reforms, backed by the
further security of the consulates, immigration, predominantly of Ashkenazic
Jews, doubled between 1856 and 1880, by which time the Old Yishuv (as
distinguished from the New Yishuv of the Zionist settlers yet to come) had
taken shape: it had a 60-percent majority of Ashkenazic Jews, the majority
of whom were students of the Torah and financially dependent on halukkah.

Halukkah

     The distribution of halukkah funds served to widen the gap between the
Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The Sephardim were officially in charge of halukkah
funds because they were officially recognized by the Turkish government and
had a central authority in the person of the hakham bashi, the chief rabbi
of Jerusalem. Because of the rivalry and divisiveness within the Ashkenazic
community they had no central organization and complained that they did not
receive their proper allocation of welfare. For a short time the various
groups of Ashkenazic Jews sent their own representatives (meshullahim) to the
Jewish communities in Europe to solicit funds for them. This system was
severely criticized because of its lack of organization and its wastefulness.
Eventually at the instigation of Dutch Jews, the institution of Officials and
Overseers (Pekidim ne Amarkalim) was begun to collect and distribute funds to
both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities. Disagreement continued,
however, and finally an organization called Kolel Hod was established by
German Jews with the object of collecting monies from specific countries for
the use of their national counterparts in Palestine. Ashkenazic kolelim
(communities-see Glossary) proliferated as each national group established
its own kolel for the maintenance of the national group. Eventually, due to
the disparate amounts of money brought in and to avoid further dispute, all
kolelim were organized under a central committee called the Vaad Kelali.

     The Sephardim continued to receive their funds through the hakham bashi.
Sephardic funds were used chiefly for poverty cases and for students of the
yeshivot (sing., yeshiva-see Glossary); whereas Ashkenazic funds (which were
far greater) were distributed to all Ashkenazim regardless of financial status
since it was felt that living in Palestine was itself a mitzvah and therefore
the Jews in exile (galut-see Glossary) had a duty to support them.

     The officers (gabaim) of the individual kolelim administered funds and
ordered certain spiritual exercises for those who wished to qualify for
receiving them. For instance, to receive an extra allotment one had to spend
the entire day in either a yeshiva or a house of study, a bet midrash; on
Fridays they were required to study either on the sunset to midnight or the
midnight to sunrise shifts; and had to assemble on Sabbaths and holy days.
The halukkah system received serious criticism from Jews of the haskalah.
They argued that it was creating a serious rift between the Sephardim and
Ashkenazim and that it encouraged idleness and a passive response to the
environment. The halukkah did provide the means by which the Jewish population
grew to 85,000 by 1914. Of this number fully 60,000 were supported. Abramov
notes that halukkah "also created a barrier between the Old Yishuv and the
incipient New Yishuv and led to their estrangement. In the process it shaped
the pattern of the religious life of Palestinian Jewry for the generations
to come and left an imprint that continues to be felt in modern day Israel."

Origins of the Power of the Orthodox

     In accordance with the Ottoman Empire's system of affording a large
measure of autonomy to minorities, the Jews in Palestine had as their official
representative the chief Sephardic rabbi, the hakham bashi-also called Rishon
L'Tziyon, First in Zion. The hakham bashi combined in his person the religious
office of chief rabbi and the secular office of political representative of
the Yishuv. In the exercise of his religious office he and the appointed
Supreme (or Chief) Rabbinical Council had jurisdiction and acted as a court
of law for marriages, divorces, and wills. As an official of the Turkish
government he was also required to collect taxes (haraj) from the Yishuv. And,
as previously mentioned, he distributed Sephardic halukkah.

     The Ashkenazim were not sufficiently united to select their own leader
and chose not to recognize the hakham bashi or his office. The Ashkenazim
organized themselves on the basis of their own kolelim, with individual
rabbinical courts (bet din) and officers. The decision of their courts was not
legally binding, from the point of view of the state, as in the case of the
courts of the hakham bashi, but the decisions of the Ashkenazic courts were
usually followed because of the moral weight of the rabbis and the fact that
they could withhold halukkah, and therefore livelihood, from individuals or
families. Further they possessed a potent weapon in the form of herem
(excommunication from the body of Jewry), which was followed by shunning by
the community. The self-containment of the Ashkenazim into the kolelim
reinforced and perpetuated group customs and made assimilation with Sephardic
Jews or Jews of other kolelim impossible.

     Herem was applied not only to members of individual kolelim but also to
other Jews in Palestine as well as to foreigners. Many notable figures were
excommunicated. Heinrick Graetz, the outstanding historian of Jewish history,
was excommunicated in 1872 for attacking the halukkah system. He observed that
in the small communities in Jaffa, Haifa, and Acre (Akko) where there was no
halukkah, Jews were productive and enjoyed the respect of the citizen body. In
1877 the editor of Havazelet, a Jewish periodical, was excommunicated for the
same reason. In 1878 a general herem was enacted against any parents who
permitted their children to learn languages other than Yiddish. Sir Moses
Montefiore, an advanced thinker and the leading Jewish philanthropist of his
time, was threatened with herem for proposing to build a girl's school.

Education in the Old Yishuv

     Education in the Old Yishuv determined to a great extent the structure
of the religious educational system as it existed in Israel in 1978. There
were basically two institutions: Talmud Torah for elementary school boys and
yeshiva for older boys. They studied only Talmud and commentaries written by
rabbinical authorities on Talmud but did not study secular subjects, such as
mathematics and the natural sciences, nor Hebrew literature or the Bible.
According to Abramov, for the Orthodox this represented an important step
toward the fulfillment of the moral life, and certainly the opportunity for
large numbers to devote themselves exclusively to the law from childhood
without worry of earning a livelihood was unprecedented in Jewish history.

     Schools were founded in this period, however, usually after years of
bitter debate. In 1854 the Evelina de Rothschild school for girls opened in
Jerusalem. Strictly religious, it also included homemaking, the equivalent
of an elementary school education, and a small amount of English-language
training. The school had two Ashkenazic and forty-eight Sephardic pupils
thirteen years later. As a rule the hakham bashi approved of those schools
while Ashkenazic rabbis threatened herem and loss of halukkah to parents who
permitted their children to attend. When in 1857 an Austrian poet, Ludwig
August Fraenkel, founded a school for children, all the matriculating students
were Sephardim. When Mikveh Israel, the first agricultural school, was
founded in 1870 by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, it had great
difficulty attracting students as did its elementary school founded in
Jerusalem in 1882. The first Ashkenazi to attend this school was David Yellin,
the future orientalist. His father, formerly highly respected in the
community, was excommunicated, his halukkah denied, and his shop boycotted.

     Despite the unreceptive atmosphere during this period, Hebrew was revived
and made a living language again through the Herculean efforts of Eliezer Ben
Yehuda, an immigrant who changed his name from Perlman and became a Turkish
subject. He and Rabbi Yehiel Mikhal Pines, who had already been denounced as
a heretic for opening an agricultural school, founded Tehiat Yisrael, a
society dedicated to reviving and modernizing Hebrew and making it the
language of the Yishuv. In 1886 the publication of Ben Yehuda's weekly Hatzvi,
in which he advocated that yeshiva students learn crafts, led to his first
herem, followed by a second six months later. When his wife died she was
refused burial in the Ashkenazic cemetery until the Sephardim agreed to accept
her in theirs at which point the Ashkenazim relented. When in his Hanukkah
edition he praised the Hasmonaeans who were victorious in Palestine in the
second century, his article was deliberately mistranslated by the Orthodox to
make it appear treasonable and was shown to Turkish authorities with the
suggestion that Ben Yehuda was seditious. He was tried and jailed for one year
during which he began work on the Complete Dictionary of the Hebrew Language,
the monumental work that gave Israel its contemporary language.

The New Yishuv

     For nearly 100 years, beginning in the 1850s, Jews from Central and
Eastern Europe formed the majority of Jewish immigrants to Palestine. For
the first thirty years most of them were traditional religious Jews who had
little interest in developing a state. Beginning in 1882, however, a different
kind of Jewish immigrant began to appear in Palestine. The impetus for this
immigration was provided by the bloody pogroms and the general repression of
the Jewish communities in the Ukraine, in Warsaw, and in Odessa that
followed the reign of the reformist Czar Alexander II (1875-81) (see table B,
Preface). Alexander II's reforms had encouraged the Jews of the Enlightenment
to think that they would one day achieve a social and civil parity with other
Russian citizens. They assumed this process could be hastened by raising the
level of education among Russian Jews. To this end in 1863 they founded the
Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews of Russia. Influenced by
the ideas of Moses Mendelssohn, a German generally considered to be the
father of haskalah, their educational program included biblical and secular
Hebrew, the study of Jewish culture, and secular subjects such as languages,
mathematics, and science.

     All hopes for Jewish equality or anything approaching it were dashed
when Czar Alexander III came to power in 1881 and permitted, and finally
encouraged, the repression and eventually the massacre of Jews in the Ukraine
and in certain urban centers. In 1880 75 percent of the world's Jewish
population (the total estimated to be 7.8 million) lived in Eastern Europe.
The effect of the pogroms were therefore devastating. Those sympathetic with
the ideals of the haskalah now realized that it was vital to change the
direction of their movement. Abramov notes, "Instead of worshipping at the
shrines of European cultures, it [haskalah] placed itself at the service of
the national regeneration of the Jewish people."

The First Aliyah

     Societies called Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) were quickly formed to
encourage the immigration to Palestine of pioneers willing to form
agricultural settlements. The movement attracted many university students who
called their organization Bilu (pl. Biluim) and referred to themselves as
Biluim, the Hebrew acronym for "House of Jacob, come let us go." These
students plus many Orthodox Jews were part of the 20,000 to 30,000 immigrants
that made the First Aliyah (1882-1903). Refusing to seek help from the
halukkah system and having no prototypes as models nor much personal
agricultural experience, these new immigrants settled on land purchased for
them by various groups in Eastern Europe.

     The first settlement, Rosh Pinah (the Cornerstone), was established in
Upper Galilee in the summer of 1882, followed by Zikhron Yaakov (Remembrance
of Jacob) in Samaria; Rishon L'Tziyon (First in Zion) near Jaffa; and Yeshod
Hamaalah (Foundation of Ascent) in eastern Upper Galilee. By 1900 twenty-two
settlements or villages had been founded with a total population of nearly
5,000; attrition by death and emigration were enormous due to the difficult
conditions.

     The task of the hulutzim (literally, pioneers; sing., halutz) of the
First Aliyah was great, troubled as they were by financial difficulties, the
adjustment to an agricultural life, the initial unfriendliness of the Turks,
and their continual harassment by the Orthodox communities of the Old Yishuv.
Even though many to the Jews of the First Aliyah were Orthodox, their
orientation of their environment was totally different from that of the Old
Yihuv. They repudiated halukkah and endeavored to become totally
self-sufficient. They farmed but also used Arab labor. They established an
educational system that included secular subjects and formed a system of
self-government. The First Aliyah may be considered a success from the point
of view that 5,000 halutzim remained in Palestine.

     The germ of the controversy between the very religious and the secular
elements of Israeli society, which has characterized its political system
since the foundation of the state, was in the confrontations between the Old
Yishuv and those of the First Aliyah. The point of view of the Orthodox may be
partially summed up in a proclamation against the educational plans of the New
Yishuv issued by Rabbi Joshua Diskin in 1880 in which he condemned those "who
presume to bring redemption by force," and who engage in farming, "an
occupation not needed in this land."

The Second and Third Aliyot

     Regardless of their break with tradition and their insistence on survival
over orthodoxy, the halutzim of the First Aliyah nevertheless are classified
as dati (religious people, as they are called, a word derived from dat,
meaning one who is faithful to the behavioral regulations deriving from
Talmudic law). It is not until the Second Aliyah (1904-14) that groups that
can be described as Hilonim (secularist; sing., Hilon) entered Palestine in
great numbers. Many of these immigrants were intellectual products of the
underground socialist and revolutionary fervor that emerged in Czarist Russia
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their radicalization
took the form of questioning, and often rejecting, not only prevailing
sociopolitical norms but also the religious point of view of their
forefathers. Chaim Weizmann in a letter to Theodor Herzl written May 6, 1903,
describes the impact of the situation: "Young Jews have turned
revolutionaries, thousands of them are in prison or exiled to Siberia. Almost
all students belong to the revolutionary camp.... The young make their
first step a search for freedom from everything Jewish. In one small town near
Pinsk, youngsters tore the Torah scroll to shreds. This speaks volumes."

     The secularistic orientation of these students found expression in
labor Zionism that had matured as an ideology by 1903 (see Zionism: The
Founding Fathers, ch. 1). They rejected what they perceived as the romanticism
of the First Aliyah whose members seemingly permitted themselves to be
absorbed into the indigenous social, cultural, and political system of the
Middle East. They were determined not to use Arab labor nor to function in a
traditional capital-intensive economy.

     Cooperative effort (wherein each member regardless of social or
educational background shared in the physical maintenance of the groups'
needs) typified their first settlements and found expression in the kibbutz
(literally, group) movement. The prototype for the kibbutz was Deganya, a
cooperative settlement founded in 1909 at Umm Juni, on the Sea of Galilee, the
site where early Christians had formed a collective community. The two women
and ten men from Poland who founded Deganya were determined not to repeat the
mistakes of the Biluim, who eventually drifted back to urban occupations
typical of Jews of the Diaspora. The Biluim had failed largely because their
one season crop of wine grapes had led them to depend increasingly on Arab
labor while they functioned only as absentee landlords. The sons of the Biluim
were not attached to the soil but were trained as craftsmen and professionals.
In contrast, Joseph Brussel, one of the founders of Deganya, said that their
purpose was to "enable us to decide how to run our own lives and to create
economic equality and equality between the sexes." Attendant to these goals
were group guidance, mutual aid, simplicity of living standards, and equal
sharing of the profits of their labors. The ideas for communal child care and
the development of ulpanim (nationalization centers for immigrants, sing.,
ulpan) also originated at Deganya.

     The founders of Deganya and the approximately 23,000 immigrants of the
Second Aliyah as a whole have become legendary figures in present-day Israel
for their rigorous and uncompromising application of Zionist ideals. In 1969
Golda Meir praised "that wonderful band of the Second Aliyah. They were not
the first to revolt against Diaspora life, but they dared to turn rebellion
into a great action, the implementation by their own effort of a revolution
in the nation's life."

     The efforts of the Second Aliyah were reinforced by the Third Aliyah
(1919-23). Ideologically the immigrants of both aliyot were very similar,
although those of the third were more radical. The Third Aliyah improved on
early kibbutz design, refined its ideology, and began the moshav ovdim
(literally, workers' settlement) a smallholders' settlement based on
cooperation. Whereas the members of Deganya preferred to give up part of their
300 hectares rather than take new members, which would have enabled them to
cultivate all their land, the collectives established by the Third Aliyah were
based on the principle that all who wished to become members, or haverim
(literally, comrades), were acceptable. In addition to establishing large
kibbutzim the Third Aliyah was extremely important in the creation of Jewish
communities as urban socialist institutions, such as the General Federation of
Labor (Histadrut HaOvdim Haklalit, known as Histadrut-see Glossary).

     Together, the second and third aliyot made an indelible mark on the
Yishuv. Among the pioneers were two who became prime ministers and one who
became president of Israel. Their number and their determination overwhelmed
the traditional orientation to life of the Old Yishuv and created the climate
of secularism in which the state would be born.

The Fourth and Fifth Aliyot

     The immigrants of the fourth (1924-31) and the fifth (1932-39) aliyot
differed considerably in attitude, average age, and background from those of
the second and third aliyot. There was an absence of a developed ideology
among them. Most were fleeing the horrors of Nazi Germany. Many had sought to
emigrate to West European countries or the United States but had been denied
entrance. Palestine was a refuge for them, where they could survive and resume
the normal courses of their lives.

     Because there were relatively few Zionists or socialists among them, they
disturbed the initial socialist homogeneity of the Jewish community. They were
unsuited to and cared little for agricultural life; most became urban dwellers
and private entrepreneurs or professionals. They functioned within a
traditional nuclear family household and on the whole sought to establish in
Palestine cultural and educational institutions modeled after familiar
European ones. Their life-style differed markedly from that of the kibbutzim,
but there were common denominators in the world view of both-they shared a
belief in the importance of continuing the revival of Hebrew as the language
of the whole Jewish community and the need for that community to transform
itself into a modern state based on Western models.

     The opposition on the part of the native Palestinian Arabs to
displacement by the Jewish olim (sing., olah-see Glossary) meant that the olim
had to be prepared to defend their interests by force (see Security: A
Persistent National Concern, ch. 5). Although the immigrants of the second and
third aliyot were more prominent in the militia groups or Hashomer (literally,
the watcher, the guarder) formed in the early part of the twentieth century,
those of the fourth and fifth aliyot were active and willing to participate in
any of a wider variety of organizations, which were perceived as being in the
best interest of the Jewish community. Their unique contributions to the New
Yishuv included the beginning of a diversified economy and the establishment
of prototypes for the future state's cultural and educational institutions.