Abstract
Historians have shaped key elements of Israel’s national habitus and contributed to the construction of its sovereign survival unit. This process reveals both change and continuity. It originates in the pre-state establishment of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1926–1928) where first-generation historians, born and trained in Central and Eastern Europe, rediscovered the biblical ‘Promised Land’ and disseminated nation-building paradigms. This generation was succeeded by historians identified with Israel’s early independence and its ‘civic republicanism’. Yet domestic contingencies and global trends soon engendered critical debates about memory, history, politics and identity. Revision and demystification of past events became a central feature of third-generation Israeli historians who overtly challenged the former ‘established’ generations. By using Eliasian concepts, the chapter contextualises the sociopolitical features of Israeli historians and detects the dispositions that have become intrinsic parts of Israel’s national identity, while shedding light upon the interdependencies between academia, society and politics.
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Notes
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Here we adopt Bourdieu’s definition of the concept: ‘[…] a field of forces, whose necessity is imposed on agents, who are engaged in it, and as a field of struggles within which agents confront each other, with differentiated means and ends according to their position in the structure of the field of forces, thus contributing to conserving or transforming its structure’ (Bourdieu 1998, 32).
- 3.
The two-way relationship is constructed between so-called objective structures (the social fields of autonomy and power) and subjective structures (the habitus) in order to trace socially relevant dispositions, together with the political power ratios that they have created. The goal is to combine the overlapping interpretations (both reflexive) by Elias and Bourdieu of the concept ‘habitus’ as principles of distinct and distinctive practices by individuals and as the widely accepted behavioural norms which derive from the national political culture and collective identity.
- 4.
The doctoral dissertation: ‘Engraving Identity: The Israeli National Habitus through the Historiographical Field’, supervised by prof. Gisèle Sapiro (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and prof. Marco Tarchi (University of Florence) was defended in viva voce in Turin on 28 November 2019.
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All interviewees were associate and full professors from different Israeli universities in order to facilitate career trajectories and long-term professionalisation. Interviews lasted from a minimum of 50 minutes to 145 minutes. All were held in Hebrew (except one interview that was partly conducted in English). Interviews were then registered, translated and edited by the author.
- 6.
On the definition and methodological value of such ‘ideal-types’, see Gaxie (2013).
- 7.
The term usually refers to Ben-Gurion’s dogmatic approach to guarantee political unity between different Zionist factions (Left\Right or religious\secular) in name of the Israeli and Jewish peoplehood. Not only did that approach mean the cōnūbium between socialist-oriented universalism and the centrality of religion in Israeli public rituality but it also meant the transition from a movement-based public system (e.g. welfare, health and education) to a state-based one (including party-related research institutions to be incorporated into universities).
- 8.
See Bareli and Kedar (2011). We adopt and use the term outside its original yet strict meaning that of institutional policy aimed to secure democracy, the rule of law, political participation and emphasise its weight as a source of shared civic values and collective identity.
- 9.
It is noteworthy to mention the philological approach to history studies imported from German universities, especially. Moreover, the division of the two history departments attest the twofold autonomisation of the discipline, since Jewish history not only wished to concentrate on national (Hebrew and Jewish in Diaspora and in Palestine) but it also wished to differentiate itself from Jewish theology, philosophy and archaeology. In the first decades of the Hebrew University, see Selzer (2013).
- 10.
The latter had only been preceded by Bar-Ilan University (founded in 1955) which was aimed to offer high education to the orthodox Jews in Israel.
- 11.
That is not to say that all these historians maintained Zionism and Israel as the sole object of research (as in-depth structured interviews attest, as long as the complete list of publication of each historian). The case of Bartal, the youngest member of the ‘Jerusalem School’ in the 1970, clearly shows a prevalent focus on diasporic Jewish history, while in Shavi’s case the list is eclectic (e.g. history of the political Zionist right, African-American social history, Jews and Darwin, etc.).
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- 13.
The article was published in the American Jewish magazine Tikkun 3/6 (1988) and soon became a book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 (1988, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 14.
The label refers to the group of scholars who have re-elaborated Zionist/Israeli history—once new archival materials became accessible in the 1980s. In addition to Benny Morris, we must mention, not exhaustively, historians Ilan Pappé, Simha Flapan, Avi Shlaim, as well as sociologist Baruch Kimmerling. Yet neither these scholars nor those who would be inspired by them later on (e.g. Idith Zertal, Shlomo Sand, Uri Ram, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin) can be labelled as a homogenous group due to biographical differences and very different career trajectories.
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Benny Morris later denounced the anti-Zionist approach of other new historians and identified himself a Zionist. He especially criticised Ilan Pappé’s inaccurate and ideologised analysis of events in the latter’s 2004 book A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Morris eventually abandoned the Israel-Palestine historiography and began focusing on late Ottoman and early Turkish history (see e.g. Morris et al. 2019. The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
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Helled, A. (2021). The Israeli National Habitus and Historiography: The Importance of Generations and State-Building. In: Delmotte, F., Górnicka, B. (eds) Norbert Elias in Troubled Times. Palgrave Studies on Norbert Elias. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74993-4_16
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