It is a commonplace that Israel is a country of immigrants: this is the only way in which the country’s Jewish population could increase from some 25,000 to around 5.25 million in only 120 years. Zionism was based almost completely on an ideology of immigration. The simultaneous emptying of the Diaspora and the ‘filling up’ of the old/new homeland was a brave, unique idea that almost everyone thought doomed to failure from the outset. The truth is, however, that Zionism – in this first phase – succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founding fathers. Israel now boasts the second largest Jewish population in the world (after the United States); according to demographic projections, it will not be many years until it becomes the largest center for Jewry. It is estimated that Jews from over a hundred different countries have made their home in modern Israel. This extraordinary success has come at a high price, however, as this essay will now show.

Zionism was a product of 19th and early 20th-century Europe: only the ideological ferment produced by the strange confluence of nationalistic and socialistic forces could have produced a movement so driven by idealism. Its earliest followers fervently believed that they possessed the blueprint for a better world for the Jews – in fact, for all humankind. The early generations of Zionists brought a passionate zealotry to the pursuit of their ideal – underpinned by a secularized version of Isaiah’s “light unto the nations” – and to the attempt to turn an abstract set of principles into a real way of life. Without such fervor, such an impossible enterprise would undoubtedly have ground to a halt. It was the enthusiasm – indeed, the fanaticism – of the Zionist faithful that enabled the young society to grow and develop. It was inevitable, however, that a society born of such passion should have an Achilles heel.

Together with this enthusiasm and drive came a narrowness of vision that was acceptable as long the vast majority of the population of the Yishuv shared the same ideals. There was an inner contradiction in Zionism, however. This modern, nationalist ideology had developed entirely out of a confluence of forces that existed only in Europe. At its heart lay the idea that Jews from all over the world must come to people the new society or State. When that began to happen, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the stage was set for deep conflict.

One of the first decisions of the young State was to open the doors to all Jewish immigration. The Jewish population doubled in the first four years of the country’s existence, but most of the newcomers did not share the ideological assumptions upon which the State had been founded. The new immigrants of these early years came from two main sources. Many were Holocaust survivors, most of whom were broken and passive, with few demands on the State. They wanted a shelter and were generally grateful for whatever they found. Most of the other immigrants were very different, however. They came from the Arab world – North Africa and the Middle East; while they made few demands on the new society they were migrating to, they certainly had expectations. These Jews were predominantly religious, holding conservative ideas regarding the character of a Jewish State; their family structure and way of life were traditional. Their migration to the new State was mainly motivated by Messianism.

Given the passion and uncompromising certainty of the secular, European, Ashkenazi Zionist establishment regarding the character of the country that they intended to build, their clash with the traditional Jews from the Eastern countries was inevitable. The full force of the backlash was not felt for a full generation, but when it did come, the Zionist establishment felt insulted: they considered the Eastern Jews ungrateful for the efforts that had been made to help them. They did not understand that their paternalistic outlook had itself insulted many of the immigrants and their children. The stage was set for confrontation.

This is not the place to detail the story of that confrontation, although it still fuels the political and social arena of Israel in some very deep-rooted ways. Suffice it to say that almost every substantial wave of immigration has suffered many of the same tensions, despite its unquestioned centrality in Zionist ideology. This conflict has arisen out of the feeling that the needs of each group were neither sufficiently understood and nor adequately attended to. The other main Aliyah – that of the Russian-speaking immigrants in the 1980s and 90s, (in addition to the smaller, but important, earlier Soviet immigration of the early 70s) caused further tensions. Many of the members of the earlier mass immigration wave of the 1950s felt resentment toward the newcomers for being offered benefits that had not been available to them at the time of their arrival.

These social tensions have found expression in Israeli creative culture. For decades, Israeli culture was a product of the Ashkenazi European society: most of the literature, music and art was created by Europeans. It is possible to point to a number of Eastern motifs in the early art of the country but generally it reflected the European idea of the East rather than a living acquaintance with the Jewish products of that region.

Early art and architecture in the country certainly represented ‘the Orient’. Eastern-style arches and cupolas can still be seen adorning some of the early houses in modern Tel Aviv. In those places where early Bezalel tiles continue to decorate the exteriors and interiors of the early houses, the so-called ‘Hebrew Eastern’ style still dominates, replete with palm trees and other symbols of the region. Much early Israeli painting exhibits the same influences.

An exception to this trend is evident in early Israeli music, both classical and popular. While a number of composers were influenced by their encounter with Yemenite Jewish culture in Palestine, incorporating rhythms and melodies from that culture into their music, this was not the general tendency. The Yemenites of the Yishuv were themselves an atypical story of Eastern immigration. There were Yemenite waves of Aliyah at the end of the 19th century and then again in the early 20th century. These early Eastern immigrants held an exotic attraction for some musicians and artists of the Yishuv.

Once the mass immigration of the post-State period began, however, attitudes began to change. Presented with the harsh, much less attractive reality of the misery of mass immigration, the exotic attraction tended to decrease. The European Jewish establishment looked down on the new immigrants and their culture. They believed that the Eastern culture of the East was backward and that the immigrants should relinquish it.

They did not expect the immigrants to replace their way of life and culture with those of Europe, but rather that they should transmogrify into model citizens of the new Hebrew nation and that their culture should be Hebrew culture. The reasoning was clear. The earlier Zionist immigrants had done just this: they spoke Hebrew rather than Yiddish and their way of life – far from being a copy of European Jewish life – was instead a rebellion against it. If they could thus transform themselves, so should the new Oriental immigrants, dropping in the process all vestiges of the ‘Arabic’ lifestyle that they had brought with them.

In many ways, this was an unfair expectation – even in theory. While it is true that the Ashkenazi immigrants generally had transformed themselves into a new type of Jew, they had done so voluntarily, in keeping with their ideology. Moreover, the Hebrew culture that they had created was still a variation of European culture. (This idea will be enlarged upon in Section 13.) Such demands on the new Eastern immigrants were thus doubly harsh, and the resentful immigrants were in no hurry to comply.

It was with the second generation that the cultural backlash began. Buoyed by the new ethnic pride that followed the temporary success of the Black Panther protest movement of the early 1970s, a number of poets, writers and musicians began to express a positive consciousness of their background. Rather than ‘apologizing’ for it, they began to proudly call themselves Mizrahim (‘Easterners’ or ‘Orientals’). This process has continued until the present day; indeed, the last thirty years have witnessed the coming-of-age of Oriental culture in Israel.

Some of the more significant names and developments of this period can be mentioned here. The first noteworthy voice was Erez Biton in the 1970s. With his poems of praise for the North African Jewish past and his sharp presentations of the alienation of the Oriental Jew in Israel, he foreshadowed a wave of later poets such as Roni Someck, Bracha Seri and Tikva Levi. In prose, Eli Amir, Sami Michael and Dan Bania Seri have enjoyed great success; a younger generation that includes such names as Ronit Matalon and Dorit Rabinyan is enjoying widespread popularity.

Rabinyan is a particularly interesting case. Along with Avi Shmuellian, she is a leading representative of a new kind of Israeli novelist: both have published novels presenting the mystery of Jewish life in Arab lands – in these cases, Persia/Iran – in a fresh manner. Both of these writers have used a semi-surrealistic style in a way that elevates the subjects delightfully. Whether this will become a strong new trend in Israeli literature remains to be seen.

A.B. Yehoshua, who has been counted among the first rank of Israeli writers for decades, occupies a unique place in his representations of Sephardi culture. Coming out of the Zionist mainstream, he has taken a different path. Although his work is not built entirely around Sephardi or Eastern characters, his recent novelJourney to the End of the Millennium is a proud, fascinating look at the Sephardi past.

There has been a parallel tendency in music. Riding the wave of ethnic pride of the mid-1970s, a wave of musicians developed – e.g., Zohar Argov and Haim Moshe of the first generation – who created a genre of Oriental/Hebrew popular music that comprised a mix of Arabic and Greek musical motifs. While the critics initially looked down on this phenomenon, it proved extremely popular with the listening public. Others would follow, with singers like Zehava Ben and Eyal Golan at the forefront. Ofra Haza and Boaz Sharabi sang more mainstream, less overtly Oriental music to reach their audiences. Groups such as Ethnix and Tippex garnered great popularity with their mix of Oriental motifs, rhythms and instrumental sounds and Western musical styles. The extraordinarily talented group HaBreira HaTiv‘it brought together musicians from widely differing musical backgrounds who produced a type of Eastern music that celebrated the experience of the North African Jews.

Then there was the phenomenon of a generation of musicians and singers (whatever their own ethnic backgrounds) who had grown up playing Israeli music with Western influence: regardless of each individual’s ethnic background, these artists began to produce music that fused Eastern and Western motifs. Perhaps this was the most interesting of all the trends in Israeli music, in terms of its social commentary. Musicians such as Yehuda Poliker, Meir and Ehud Banai, Alon Olearchik and Etti Ankari produced authentically Israeli music in the sense that they drew their inspiration from Israeli society as a cultural meeting-point.

Dance and cinema should also be mentioned. The Inbal dance company may be the best-known ‘ethnic’ dance company in Israel. Over the years, their repertoire has expanded from folkloristic motifs to free interpretations of ethnic motifs. They are not the only company, however, that now unashamedly draws on the East for artistic inspiration.

The Israeli cinema has not produced a large number of serious films on ethnic issues. On the other hand, several light comedies and dramas with an ethnic slant have proved popular with some sectors of the public. In recent years, a few films such as Schur have started to explore issues of Eastern ethnicity although this can hardly be called a trend. The best drama so far about the ethnic tensions within Israel is the excellent TV film from 1986, Lehem (Bread), which explores social conflict in a southern development town during a period of economic hardship.

The widespread popularity of all these forms combined truly can be called a cultural revolution. Like all real cultural revolutions, it has been underpinned by a number of socio-political changes, without which the innovations in cultural expression would not have occurred.

So far, this essay has only discussed cultural expressions relating to the Oriental immigration of the fifties. The influx of Russians and Ethiopians is still too recent for its cultural impact to be judged fairly. Based on the experience of the Aliyah of the 1950s, it may be a considerable time before the fruits of these waves of immigration become evident in the Hebrew-speaking population. However, it may be presumed that, because the Russian immigrants comprise a population who are used to expressing themselves in modern cultural media, their impact will be felt more quickly. At the moment, though, their main cultural expression remains in the Russian language, causing this vibrant culture to be consumed by Russians alone. A few Hebrew language films – e.g., Coffee with Lemon (1994) and Yanna’s Friends(1999) – have explored aspects of the Russian Aliyah, but these are not large-scale productions.

The most prominent and important Hebrew-language expression of the mass Aliyah from the former Soviet Union is undoubtedly the Gesher theater company. Originally composed entirely of Russian immigrants, the company has recently accepted Israeli actors into its ranks. It has been very widely praised for its work over the last few years, some perceiving it as Israel’s most innovative theater company. At the moment, however, this seems to be the only such group.