Author Hagar Yanai lamented in a 2002 essay in the daily Haaretz that “Faeries do not dance under our swaying palm trees, there are no fire-breathing dragons in the cave of Machpela [the Cave of the Patriarchs], and Harry Potter doesn’t live in Kfar Sava.” Local fantasy is so weak, she declared, that an original series like the Harry Potter books “couldn’t be published in the state of the Jews.”[3]
Hence a paradox: In a nation whose very existence was inspired by an SF/F vision, SF/F was until recently completely beyond the pale, and even now most cultural luminaries shun it. This despite the fact, pointed out by scholar Danielle Gurevitch, that “in early Jewish tradition, fantasy literature… [involving] marvelous acts, magic, and miracles aimed at hastening the Redemption, as well as a rich diversity of unbelievable stories of journeys to the Holy Land… was a driving force in the nation’s history and thinking.”[4]
Scholar Adam Rovner reminds us that whatever value they place on imagination, and however much they may have stigmatized some forms of fantasy, all nations and countries become the incarnations of fabulous stories told by their inhabitants or their invaders. This was certainly true of England, for instance, which took its cue from Arthurian legends, and it is also true of the early incarnations of the biblical Jewish homeland, which derived inspiration from the Book of Joshua. “Zionist historiography and literary history,” says Rovner, “have long demonstrated the intimate bond between what is now alliterated as nation and narrative.”[5]
On the other hand, in present-day Israel, as during the nation’s prestatehood years, “willingness to open the door to weird strangers and unusual occurrences that benefit nothing but the spirit of whimsy is minimal,” says author Gail Hareven.[6]
How come? Where did this allergic response to imaginative fiction come from?
Several explanations have been offered. One is the simple importation of the aversion to SF/F from abroad. After all, we must admit that for many a year, Western culture had regarded SF/F with mild condescension, to say the very least. Until quite recently it was not culturally accepted as High Literature: fit for teenage boys (not girls!), lacking in veritable literary qualities, ignoring the exigencies of ordinary life, or worst of all, escapist—choose or add your favorite condemnation—for which alleged faults it has not historically passed universal muster. It was (and often continues to be) ghettoized, relegated to special-interest shelves in bookstores and libraries. This attitude was carried forward to and prevailed in prestatehood Israel, thoroughly unmodified. Furthermore, since cultural influences tended to spread rather slowly to and through the Jewish state, it has persisted well after the attitudes towards SF/F in the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, became more congenial.
Yet another explanation hinges on the unusual contempt normative Judaism held even for its own nondidactic and lighter-hearted forms of literature. The Hebrew word for “imagination,” dimion, did not appear in this sense in the Hebrew language until the twelfth century, in Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, despite the fact that seminal biblical and postbiblical Jewish texts often resorted quite freely to narrative embellishment. Frequently they crossed over into outright fantasy, either to fill in gaps in the original Torah narrative or to resolve textual contradictions.
Such imaginative works included Midrashim (exegetic tales); Meshalim (parables and fables); Aggadot (rabbinical legends); and medieval apocalyptic literature, including hagiography, Ma’asei Merkavah (mystical theories of creation), or apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Heikhalot texts describing heavenly journeys, such as the maqama—rhymed prose narrative—by Abraham Ibn Ezra (twelfth century), Hai ben Mekitz, about a journey to the six planets of the medieval solar system and their imaginary inhabitants. The sages nevertheless dismissed this massive corpus as “mere stories and profane matter.”
It is possible, of course, that outright faith even in the most outlandish events trumped whimsy, obviating any acknowledgment of the fantastic. Magic and sorcery, despite the miraculous deeds of Moses, Elijah, and other biblical figures, were and continue to be considered off-limits by most observant Jews. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” commands the Bible (Exodus 22:18).
While admitting the existence of grains of truth in both these explanations, we would prefer to emphasize the inherent tension between having a dream and actually living it. Forging a semblance of Herzl’s Altneuland vision in a long-ravaged ancestral homeland very nearly forced the nascent Jewish republic, by dint of human cost alone, to deplete its imaginative reserves. “If you will it,” the latter-day prophet (depicted on the cover of his book in his role as space-bound SF/F writer cum ideologue) famously declared of his proposed Jewish state, “it is no fairy-tale.”[7]
The publicistic intent implicit in Herzl’s choice of classical late-nineteenth-century science-fictional romance as a vehicle for proposing the Zionist enterprise to the masses, however, probably added an inconvenient literary fillip to the nation-building effort—one that, although inherently fanciful, regarded unfettered imagination as anathema. The very idea that Israel might have been inspired by a science fiction novel would have rankled. Consequently, Altneuland was deliberately misconstrued by Zionist ideologues as sui generis.
Creating a nuts-and-bolts nation, whether or not inspired by a literary fantasy, called on resources of faith of a much more practical nature. This task proved totally consuming, utterly grueling, costly in blood as well as resources, and fraught with calamity. Implementing the Zionist project left little capacity and even less taste for imaginatively unfettered ventures, whatever their pedigree. An avowedly pragmatic lot, the Zionists remained painfully wary of pie-in-the-sky schemes and stars-in-your-eyes stories.
The Zionist enterprise, moreover, was from the outset an all-out effort: each individual was expected to make his or her contribution to the fulfillment of the joint dream to the utmost of their abilities, regardless of personal cost, desire, ideal, or proclivity. It was a dream of a new nation, a rightful member of the world community, living in peace and harmony with its neighbors; of a new, just, vibrant society, where everyone has equal rights and duties and works for the common good; of a newly revived language, Hebrew, used for any and all purposes, lofty or mundane, to replace the various languages spoken by Jews in the Diaspora; and of a new person, the sabra: an independent, strong-willed, prickly, hard-working, idealistic individual, the diametric opposite of the downtrodden Diaspora Jew. Epitomized in the character of Uri, the hero in Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel (later a play, then a movie) He Walked through the Fields, and depicted in numerous other stories, poems, novels, plays, and films, this idealized new breed of Jew became perhaps the greatest hope and ultimate achievement of Zionism.[8]
3
Quoted in Michael Weingrad, “Riding Leviathan: A New Wave of Israeli Genre Fiction,”
4
Danielle Gurevitch, “What Is Fantasy?” in
5
Adam L. Rovner,
7
Usually, this is rendered in English as “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl, however, used the German word
8
Leon Uris’s protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan (Exodus), was a feeble caricature of this idealized image.