300 Yair Zakovitch
Th e hand that severed the Jewish tree of knowledge left a void between the
biblical period and our own and built an unsteady bridge across the vast
abyss. What moved the axe bearers to forgo the writings of generations and
to hold to the Bible alone? Th e beginnings of an answer can be traced to
the time of the Enlightenment, to the aspiration of Jews to establish their
culture on the component it shared with the surrounding Christian soci-
ety,2 to renounce the old image of the Jew, the world of the heder and the
yeshiva, and to erect in its place a new Jew who jumped directly through
time from the biblical period to the modern day.
Th e Zionist movement was happy to assume the ideal of this new-old
Jew who had returned to the ancestral land to live a healthy and ethical
life and who drew sustenance from that land through the sweat of his or
her brow. (Th e Zionist movement was dedicated to reestablishing a Jew-
ish homeland in the biblical land of Israel, from which the Jews had been
exiled almost two thousand years previously. It sought to transform Jews
from a weak, bookish people and a community of petty merchants to a
people who worked the soil and who would have their own national iden-
tity in their historical land.) Th is new-old Jew, who had embraced the Zi-
onist ideology, no longer speaking the languages of other nations or living
under foreign rule, had returned to the language of his people and would
reclaim sovereignty over the land, unprecedented since biblical times.3
Th is Jewish Zionist aspiration coincided with the romantic Christian
view of the Holy Land and its inhabitants and with its longing for the Ori-
ent and for days of old. Rabbinic law was viewed as a barrier that stood
between the new Jew and his land and was therefore disregarded, its roots
in biblical law failing to awaken feelings of affi nity. Th e new Jew in the land
of Israel preferred to identify with prophets preaching social justice rather
than with Leviticus’s laws concerning sacrifi ces. Indeed, the relationship
between the Zionist ideal and Protestant biblical criticism, which diff eren-
tiated between Israelite and Jew (the Israelite being from the First Temple
period, with roots deep in the land, the Jew an exile of a later and lesser
era) is fascinating. Christian biblical criticism fed from Christian sources,
which exalt prophecy over the Pentateuch’s laws.
Socialist, secular Zionism in its extreme form went so far as to de-
mand that the Bible conform to its beliefs and ideology. Th e confronta-
tion between Saul and Samuel, for instance, was viewed by Moshe Sister
of HaShomer HaTzair (an extreme left -wing, if not Marxist, Zionist youth
movement) as a struggle between an ideologically progressive, secular
leader and a religious reactionary.4 Here we glimpse the chasm between