Shame, Rejection, and Rebirth

When humiliation is a daily experience, it often creates a desire for revenge, compensation, and restitution, leading to a rebellion against authority. When dreams of revenge are focused on external oppressors, aggression, in fantasy or reality, seems to emerge smoothly, with no ambivalence. What happens when the oppression seems to be the work of your own kin and your own culture?

The origins of rebirth and revitalization movements are often found in conscious feelings of shame, growing out of the wounds of what are seen as self-inflicted powerlessness and humiliation. Such movements express the rejection of past and present cultural life scripts. Shame is a powerful motivation, which leads to rebelling against tradition, and the re-invention of identity. When individuals feel ashamed of what their parents do and how their parents live, they often create a psychological or physical distance from them. Sometimes they wish to run away and totally escape the legacy of untold past generations and inherited cultural identity.

Modernity, which in reality means Westernization, appears to many in non-Western cultures as tied to power, freedom, self-actualization, and collective liberation. Tradition often means weakness, oppression, and ignorance. Sometimes a revitalization movement may not support total modernity but will still start with shame. An absolute revulsion with social reality may lead both religious prophets and secular leaders to dreams and actions of great cultural revitalization. Handsome Lake was a prophet who saw the deteriorating conditions of his tribe, the Seneca, in the late eighteenth century, and led a successful cultural revolution that combined tribal traditions with ideas drawn from White colonizers (Wallace, 1969).

The process of modernization in all traditional cultures, has meant shame and the rejection of tradition, tied to private and public shame about one's cultural history and identity, often rejected as a result.

Modernization and revitalization have meant rejecting the past, whether in Poland, India, Hungary, or in nineteenth-century Russia. Shame about the past and the present seems to have been shared by most of humanity over the last 300 years. It has been especially painful because it means rejecting one's parents or feeling pity for them. In both cases one feels superior, sitting in judgment. Modernization everywhere means rejecting ancestors and their traditions in favor of new collective and individual identities.

An essential element in the appearance of the Jewish Enlightenment was a sense of shame and inferiority on the part of Jews who were aware of the dramatic changes taking place in the world around them. The confidence felt by earlier generations of Jews about their superiority and election had been lost. The religious idea of a Jewish mission construes Judaism as God's pilot project, carried on by world Jewry on the cosmic stage. Jews were the chosen few, who, when the Messiah comes, would lead the rest of the world towards global salvation (Marmorstein, 1969). This notion is clearly not unique to Judaism, and is central to most, if not all, religious communities. A belief in the group's superiority and election may be found in secular movements as well. A gap between a group's hopes for itself and its objective conditions may be attenuated by the belief in mission and superiority. Believing in a collective mission for the Jewish people made it easier for individual Jews to understand, or at least accept, their individual destinies, but most modern Jews have rejected the idea of a special mission for the Jewish people, either religious or secular.

Shame and anger about the Jewish way of life were expressed stridently and vehemently by followers of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. They were repelled by their parents' traditionalism, tied to weakness and passivity. More and more Jews kept asking why the change and renewal occurring around them could not be theirs. Their criticism was total and consistent. Biale (2002, p. 101) described the intensity of the phenomenon as unique to Jews: “Perhaps never have movements of national regeneration held such disparaging views of their subjects: uncompromising criticism of tradition itself became a tradition.” Conscious and explicit shame about Jewish life at the time became generalized to all aspects of Jewish Diaspora existence. The extreme pain and shame experienced by young, modernizing, Jews in Eastern Europe fueled the budding Zionist movement and led to its eventual success.

Such criticism of tradition led to the accusation that Zionism has embraced Anti-Semitic stereotypes, and some of the Zionist diagnoses of Diaspora conditions are indeed devastating, but negative stereotypes and self-criticism are the starting point for many national revivals. Zionism is accused of agreeing with anti-Semitism, if not supporting it, by rejecting Jewish reality and traditions, but such rejections are found in all modernization and liberation movement. Liberation starts by rejecting present and past in favor of a glorious future free from the shackles of tradition.

Under conditions of objective and subjective powerlessness, weakness, and insecurity, human dignity and manly dignity are easily wounded. The perception of Jewish masculinity in European culture is tied to strong experiences of doubt and inferiority (Gilman, 1991, 1993; Mosse, 1985). Were Jewish men real men? Sigmund Freud touched on this issue when discussing the views of non-Jews, especially in relation to the Jewish practice of circumcision. In the case of Jews in Europe, it was circumcision that made the metaphor of deficient masculinity more vivid. In Europe through the ages, Jews, that is Jewish males, were (quite correctly) perceived as genitally mutilated, and this made them less than full men. It was not just a matter of genital mutilation, which might have been psychologically significant. It was a question of masculine identity and behavior. There was a socially defined “effeminacy of the male Jewish body” (Bunzl, 1997, p. 74).

The emasculation metaphor has been used and is still being used in connection with many oppressed groups, including women (Greer, 1971). It reflects a male ideal which seems quite universal. While the feminine is judged to be weak and deficient, manliness images are everywhere tied to political and psychological empowerment. Masculinity remains a universal human ideal, not just because of its connotation of physical prowess and bravery, but also because it means reliability, steadfastness, and responsibility. Men are not only violent destroyers; they also help to build and maintain the world around them. Beyond the male physique, there are masculine behaviors and attributes, such as assertiveness, energy, power, and success.

The constant fear of humiliation, attached to the pain of being a powerless Jew, is expressed in Sigmund Freud's emblematic story of his

father's all-too routine encounter with an anti-Semitic thug: “At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show me how much better things were now than they had been in his days. When I was a young man, he said, I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace. I was well dressed and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap into the mud and shouted: ‘Jew! Get off the pavement!’ ‘And what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,’ was the quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of the big strong man who was holding the little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hanninbal's father Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my phantasies” (Freud, 1900, p. 197).

The incident Freud is relating shows that the issue is more than skin deep, or prepuce deep. It had nothing to do with circumcision or castration. Physical courage (or any courage) has nothing to do with the shape of one's penis, or of any other organ. Freud's father looked to him like a coward. Regardless of what gentiles or anti-Semites think, the question is whether Jewish males were cowards, as the visible weakness of Jewish fathers had a serious effect on their sons.

Freud's father was a failure, and was rejected in favor of Hannibal's father Hamilcar Barca, both ancient heroes of a culture which was very close to the ancient Hebrews, as attested by their names. Freud's real father, family ancestors, and the whole tribe were a source of shame. The solution might have been conversion and thus getting rid of the accursed identity, or joining Zionism through dreams of revenge and liberation, but Sigmund Freud chose neither (Bunzl & Beit-Hallahmi, 2002). In any case, Freud's readiness to share with us this painful story reflects his own courage in facing uncomfortable realities.

Jewish cowards were being denounced under much more tragic circumstance. In the spring of 1903, a pogrom took place in the then Russian

city of Kishinev (now the capital of Moldova), following the circulation of a blood libel, the common accusation that Jews killed a Christian boy to use his blood for ritual purposes. During the two days of the pogrom, April 6–8, 49 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded and raped, with incalculable damage to property. The Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, who was a member of a commission of inquiry that investigated the events, wrote two poems in response. One was an expression of outrage:

And cursed be the man who says:

Then, in a much longer poem, published in late 1904, which described the horrors of this pogrom, Bialik criticized the traumatized survivors of the pogrom for their cowardice. Describing how Jews were hiding while their daughters were being raped and their families slaughtered, he wrote:

Other Jewish leaders denounced the victims' passivity and called for self-defense by Jews. When another pogrom took place in Kishinev on October 19, 1905, the attackers encountered an armed defense organization. Twenty-nine Jews were killed, and scores wounded, but there

were some dead among the attackers as well.

The 1903 events were seen as proof, if such were needed, that Diaspora collective existence was a failure, and so was every individual Jewish life: a continuing, complete, defeat of will and character. A national revival movement offered a way of erasing the experience of deficient manhood. As Bialik reminded us, the cowardly Jews hiding from their attackers were supposedly the descendants of the legendary Maccabees. Knowing that made Jews feel even worse. Why are we so submissive, we that are the descendants of kings and heroes? This question is not unique to Jews, as countless tribal and national groups have made this lament. This claim to ancestral heroism has two uses. If I am powerless, I can console myself with the idea that my distant ancestors were kings and queens of great empires. Sometimes the idea inspires action, and dreams about recreating these mythical or real empires.

Zionism envisioned that the opposite of the Diaspora Jew will be a man of action, not of words and books, innocent of Diaspora dust and ghetto habits and tied to the land. He will develop a new kind of courage. Instead of the passive courage of Jewish martyrs, we will witness the active physical courage of fighting men and women. No longer victims of persecution, but fighters, they will resemble the mythological Saul and Jonathan, dying in battle. To die fighting became the ideal, as opposed to dying passively. Never again will Jews be slaughtered in pogroms and holocausts. The term Diasporic has come into use to mark the weakness and passivity of the ghetto Jew.

Zionism offered a dream of the New Jew, the exact opposite of the Old Jew, who would be visibly and clearly masculine. Jewish sovereignty was to create a new human type: in touch with nature, working on the land, productive, physical, renewed by the Hebrew language and by the encounter with pre-Diaspora geography, in short, the anti-Jew.

An important Zionist leader and intellectual, Vladimir Jabotinsky, wrote about the new Hebrew as follows:

“Because the Jid [the Russian derogatory term for Jew] is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum, we shall endow the ideal image of the Hebrew with masculine beauty, tall stature, mighty shoulders, vigorous movement, radiance of colors and complexion. The Jid

Page 252

is trodden upon and easily frightened and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to be proud and independent. The Jid is despised by all, and therefore the Hebrew had to charm all. The Jid had accepted submission and, therefore, the Hebrew ought to learn how to command. The Jid likes to hide himself, with bated breath, from strangers and, therefore, the Hebrew has to step with valor and greatness toward the whole world, and to look the world straight in the eye” (Quoted in Gover, 1986, p. 72).

In introducing his memoir of underground activities in the 1940s, Jabotinsky's disciple and future Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, stated that his book was written for both Jews and gentiles: “lest they be unwilling to realise, or all too ready to overlook, the fact that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes a new specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, ‘the FIGHTING JEW’” (Begin, 1979, p. xxv, capitals in original).

Erasing the shame takes true liberation from the past and from Old Jews, by creating in Palestine a new state, a new culture (in a new language), and New Jews (with new names marking the rebirth). Creating the conditions for a true rebirth implied a real distance from parents and ancestors. Liberation from Diaspora existence had to be radical, erasing the old language and the traditional identity markers. The rebirth of the new language, Hebrew, was made possible by the maskilim in Eastern Europe. The first step towards rebirth was rejecting the language of the ancestors.

A major factor in the definition and creation of most European nationalisms has been that of language. Groups of people have always been identified by the common language they spoke. The various ethnic groups of Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century intermingled to create a boiling cauldron of cultures and movements separated by language. There were speakers of German, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Yiddish, as well as other tongues. In European national movements, cultural nationalism and revival meant the dedication to a national spoken language, sometimes elevating it into a literary language and often collecting folktales that represented ancient oral traditions. Jews were the ones who spoke Yiddish and so defined by it. Although some Jews spoke Polish or Russian, and considered Yiddish only an

inferior dialect, it was unique to Jews. It served to unify them and mark off the boundaries of the community. Even today, when it has been disappearing from the world scene, a few words in Yiddish are all that many Jews have to show of their cultural heritage.

Among East European Jews there was a cultural revival movement, which meant elevating the spoken language of the masses into a literary language as was being done with other cultural nationalisms. In this case, the spoken language was Yiddish, but Zionism was not going to offer it either a new home or a new respect.

The Haskalah movement, and later Zionism, rejected Diaspora culture. This rejection covered not only the traditions of rabbinical Judaism, but also the language spoken by European Jews for at least 800 years. The authentic spoken language of Jews in Europe, the language of lullabies and everyday life, was despised by Zionism as symbolizing ignorance and oppression. Many well-educated Jews in the nineteenth century considered it not a real language but a “jargon,” an inferior dialect used by the uneducated masses.

Yiddish was rejected by Zionism as the language of oppression and suffering, part of the Diaspora identity. It had to be eliminated because it was a creation of the Diaspora and any Diaspora attachment had to be extinguished. Yiddish was a bridge to the past and present Diaspora and this bridge had to be burned. It also quickly became identified with movements which opposed Zionism and were based on Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora, socialism or “cultural autonomy.” Moreover, it was, and it remains, the language of the Orthodox, who have always opposed Zionism and preserved historical Jewish culture.

The choice of Hebrew did not reflect a return to religion but just the opposite—turning away from it. In Rabbinical Judaism, Hebrew was the language of prayer and religious ritual, not the language of life. Used in the Diaspora mostly as the language of ritual, it had to become secular and modern. In terms of ancient history, Hebrew was pre-Rabbinical. Talmudic and rabbinical literature was written mostly in a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic—and in the Middle Ages in Arabic as well. The return to Hebrew was an expression of relative secularization.

The end of Yiddish and the revival of Hebrew were a great triumph of

Zionism and another consequence of the Holocaust. In 1939, there were 11 million native speakers of Yiddish in the world. By 2010, there might have been less than 1 million left. The revival of Hebrew as a spoken and written language used by a whole nation seemed like an impossibility less than 100 years ago but was an integral part of the Zionist dream. This was not just the revival of Hebrew, but its revival as a spoken language, pronounced in a way different from the Eastern European pronunciation which was closer to Yiddish. The victory of Hebrew may be Zionism's greatest achievement and a possible basis for Israeli identity.

Jews, and members of other stigmatized groups, sometimes coped with shame through acts that they considered instrumental, but in reality were also magical gestures, with some psychological effects. Thus, changing the name given to you at birth is both a magical gesture directed at the self and a social act directed towards all observers. Choosing names and changing names are laden with aspirations, dreams, and visible or hidden meanings Sometimes people have fantasies about plastic surgery, or so-called sex-change operations that would solve their personal problems and are sorely disappointed. Individual names are a cultural code. Words have power, and naming is both performative and symbolic, but it does not change your situation or make you into a new person. It can only establish one segment of social identity.

If in the Diaspora changing names and choosing non-traditional first names for children represented assimilation, blending in with the crowd, in Zionism it has become an expression of rebirth. We can easily point to the well-known cases of famous Jews who decided to use such protective coloration. Nathanael West started life as Nathan Weinstein, just as Ayn Rand did as Alisa Rosenbaum. In every case, whether in Israel, where new names are designed to move individuals away from Old Jews, or in the Diaspora, where individuals decide to embrace a more comfortable, less Jewish, or non-Jewish cover, the act is a rejection of one's ancestors.

Traditional Jewish last names, such as Shapiro, Landau, Sachs, or Kovner, reflect Jewish history (and geography) in the Diaspora. Jewish family names teach a history and geography of exile and wanderings. These names reflect old realities, and do not mean anything to speakers of Hebrew. For New Jews, Diaspora names, evidence of exile and alienation, of weakness and oppression, of Jewishness and otherness, had to

be erased. The foreign geography had to be forgotten.

New names, invented with the coming of Zionism, carry clear meanings, reflecting new realities and ideals. Popular Israeli last names, replacing familiar Jewish names such as Rosenthal, Rosenberg, Goldberg, Goldstein, Schwartz, Greenberg, Silberberg, Hirschfeld, and Finkelstein reflect local geography, the return to nature, and the ideal of strength and forcefulness. They include Golan and Galili (of the Galilee), Sella (rock), Even (stone), Gazit (rock), Shaham (granite), Shamir (rock), Tamir (tall), Peled (steel), Regev (clod), Telem, (furrow) and Nir (furrow).

Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was born in 1886 in Plonsk, Poland, as David Grün. When he went to Palestine in 1906, he found a new last name in stories about the commanders of Jerusalem in the Great Rebellion against the Romans between 66 and 73CE. One of the last commanders was Yossef Ben-Gurion.

In Israel, as among assimilated Diaspora Jews, last names have been dropped because “they sounded too Jewish.” In some cases, this included such classical Hebrew names as Cohen and Levy, which still sounded too Jewish. And so, somebody named Cohen (“priest”) changed his name to Keidan (“spear”) and somebody named Levy (Levite, supposedly descended from a class of ancient priests) changed his name to Lavi (“lion”).

First names are intimately tied to personal identity. The choice of a first name for a child place that child, and his or her parents, in the flow of history, be it the history of the family, the tribe or the whole of humanity. By choosing a name for yourself (unlikely) or for your children, you are locating yourself in social space, an imaginary map of belonging. Traditions of naming within human groups are quite persistent over generations.

The Jewish Rabbinical tradition has used a relatively limited onomasticon (list of names). For 1,500 years, Jews used a fairly limited number of names and were known by them. The rules were very clear. First names were selected from among mythical Biblical and Talmudic figures who deserved to be remembered as religious models. Biblical figures involved in misdeeds, or simply lacking in religious distinction, were never the namesakes of Jewish children. The onomasticon of Diaspora first names expressed a commitment to Judaism; this has been replaced by Zionism

with new national ideals. To Zionism, Diaspora names symbolized an existence that was shameful, and so a new vocabulary of personal identity had to be created. Because traditional Jewish names were seen as weak, new names had to express strength. The old vocabulary represented identification with religious models of devotion and righteous living. The new names represented a return to nature and physicality, and a growing distance from tradition.

The changes in naming traditions since the beginnings of Zionism have included two elements:

1. Rejecting traditional Jewish names which came to symbolize Diaspora culture. Getting rid of the old onomasticon, the list of common and approved Jewish names, all of them representing loyalty to rabbinical Judaism and its ideals, has been part of cultural revitalization. Traditional Jewish names became stigmatized, and the most stigmatized were names actually created in the Diaspora, some in Yiddish, which were part of Jewish life in Eastern Europe for generations.

2. Using stigmatized Jewish or non-Jewish names from the Hebrew Bible or totally new Hebrew terms. This was started already in the first Hebrew novel, Ahavat Zion, published in 1853, where some of the imaginary Judean heroes had names that were totally stigmatized. The names of Amnon and Tamar, representing an incestuous and cursed princely couple (Samuel 2, 13) were not used by Jews for more than two millennia, but were chosen by Abraham Mapu, the author, in an act of blasphemous defiance for a couple of lovers in his book.

These changes in the pattern of naming children appear in the Zionist settlements of Palestine in the 1880s. By reading the new names, we can conclude that the settlers wanted their children to grow up into heroes. We can observe then, together with the revival of Hebrew, the reappearance of ancient names that were never in use in the Diaspora, such as Gideon, Yoav (mythical Hebrew Bible hero), Boaz (mythical ancestor of David) and the historical rebel known as Bar-Kochva. The rejection of Diaspora names meant a rejection of historical Jewish identity and a re-entry into another kind of history. The Zionist leap over 2,000 years

of Diaspora history took the form of children bearing names from the glorious imagined past, tied to mythological heroes and sovereigns. For the new colonial settlers in Palestine, a commitment to Zionism meant painful shame about the immediate past in the Diaspora, and great pride in the imaginary continuity with the distant historical (Bar-Kochva) and mythological (Yoav) past.

For 2,000 years there was no Jewish Omri or Yoram (the name of two kings who “did evil in the sight of the Lord”). Names rejected by Jewish tradition became desirable among Zionists, as the guiding principle became a rejection of that tradition. A more dramatic form of the same process can be observed when Zionist immigrants with foreign-given names selected Hebrew names for themselves, thus consciously placing themselves in Jewish history. If we look at typical Israeli names more than a century after this process started, we find such combinations as Ayelet Sella (Gazelle Rock), Orly Oren, Aviv Orni, Yoram Eshet, Yael Segev, Idan Agmon, Shahar Ram, Ran Meydan, Netta Moran, Yael Sagi, Ran Ziv and Anat Admati. These names, expressing the admiration for power and nature, belong to Israeli-born individuals. Oren Aviv (oren is pine tree and aviv is springtime), Amir Peled (amir is treetop and peled is steel), and Orna Amir (feminine form of pine and treetop) are authentic New Jews.

When first encountered, they will sound to most Westerners as Turkish or Indian. If we look at them as text to be read and interpreted, one clear message in all of these names is “We are not Jewish.” And, indeed, no one will suspect at first sight that these names have anything to do with Jewishness. Israeli names are not Jewish, which is why they stand out when met with in a community with many traditional Jewish names. Orna Amir, Eyal Arad, Oren Aviv or Amir Peled are names that have nothing in common with Diaspora Jewish culture. They represent the New Jew, created in a deliberate attempt to erase any Diaspora connections. Psychological research has shown that traditional Jewish first names, and especially Yiddish names, are perceived by young Israelis to be ugly, weak, and passive. New Israeli names are perceived as attractive and powerful. Today we may find such names as Tom, Guy, Dean, or Shirley. All these names have the advantage of sounding both American and Israeli, and definitely not Jewish.

The legacy of shame felt by nineteenth century followers of the Jewish Enlightenment, who dreamed of a generation of New Jews with new names, has been very much in evidence for several generations among Hebrew-speaking New Jews. When young, Hebrew speaking, Israelis have to choose names for children, what can be observed is a great fear of any names vaguely reminiscent of the past, even that of 30 years ago. If in traditional Jewish society, as in many cultures, children were named after ancestors, and first names ran in families for many generations, here using ancestral names is inconceivable. These names are perceived as tied to the painful history of oppression and weakness.

The question of naming one's children has become a clear indication of the level of felt shame about ties to historical Judaism. Those who are satisfied with their identity do not seek to change it or redefine it or re-invent it. For them there is no need for renewal or utopia. Those Jews who reject Zionism feel no shame about Jewish tradition. They are ready to face the world as different, subject to ridicule, or out of place in modern life, because they believe in the ancient ideas of superiority and election and are proud of every element of tradition. Today, it is among the Orthodox, and the ultra-Orthodox that historical Jewish names are found. The ultra-Orthodox never had any problem with naming their children Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Moshe because they never had any problem with being just Jewish. Those who are not ashamed will give their children Jewish names and not hide their commitment to Rabbinical Judaism. Many will also speak Yiddish.

Jews without feelings of shame or inferiority, and who identify without reservations with historical Jewish traditions, now make up less than 15% of world Jewry. They follow the 613 commandments and keep the purity rules. They look at non-practicing Jews, not to mention gentiles, with feelings of confidence and superiority. Many are indifferent or hostile to Zionism. Some may accept Zionism pragmatically, but without enthusiasm. Still, the majority of world Jews have shared the cultural revolution initiated in the eighteenth century, are far removed from historical tradition and readily identify with Zionism and its dream of the New Jew.