Canaanism

Canaanism was a cultural and ideological movement founded in 1939 that reached its peak in the 1940s among the Jews of Mandatory Palestine. It has had significant effect on the course of Israeli art, literature and spiritual and political thought. Its adherents were called Canaanites ( he, כנענים). The movement's original name was the Council for the Coalition of Hebrew Youth () or less formally, the Young Hebrews; "Canaanism" was originally a pejorative term. It grew out of Revisionist Zionism and according to Ron Kuzar had "its early roots in European extreme right-wing movements, notably Italian fascism". Most of its members were part of the Irgun or Lehi.Kuzar 13

Canaanism never had more than around two dozen registered members, but because most of these were influential intellectuals and artists, the movement had an influence far beyond its size.Kuzar 197 Its members believed that much of the Middle East had been a Hebrew-speaking civilization in antiquity.Kuzar 12 Kuzar also says they hoped to revive this civilization, creating a "Hebrew" nation disconnected from the Jewish past, which would embrace the Middle East's Arab population as well. They saw both "world Jewry and world Islam" as backward and medieval; Ron Kuzar writes that the movement "exhibited an interesting blend of militarism and power politics toward the Arabs as an organized community on the one hand and a welcoming acceptance of them as individuals to be redeemed from medieval darkness on the other."

The Canaanites and Judaism

The movement was founded in 1939. In 1943 the Jewish-Palestinian poet Yonatan Ratosh published an ''Epistle to the Hebrew Youth'', the first manifesto of the Canaanites. In this tract, Ratosh called upon Hebrew youth to disaffiliate themselves from Judaism, and declared that no meaningful bond united Hebrew youth residing in Palestine and Judaism. Ratosh argued that Judaism was not a nation but a religion, and as such it was universal, without territorial claims; one could be Jewish anywhere. For a nation to genuinely arise in Palestine, he maintained, the youth must uncouple from Judaism and form a Hebrew nation with its own unique identity. (The term "Hebrew" had been associated with the Zionist aspiration to create a strong, self-confident "new Jew" since the late nineteenth century). The birthplace and geographical coordinates of this nation is the Fertile Crescent.

The Council for the Coalition of Hebrew Youth calls upon you as a Hebrew, as one for whom the Hebrew homeland is a homeland in actuality: not as vision, nor as desire; and not as solution for the Jewish question, nor as solution to cosmic questions, and not as solution to the variegated neuroses of those stricken by the diaspora. As one for whom the Hebrew language is a language in actuality and practicality, a mother tongue, a language of culture and of the soul; the one and only language for emotion and thought. As one whose character and intellect were determined in the Hebrew reality, whose internal landscape is the landscape of the nation and whose past is the past of the nation alone. As one who, despite the best efforts of rootless parents, teachers, statesmen and religious leaders, could not be made to like and affiliate with the Shtetl and the history of the diaspora, the pogroms and expulsions and martyrs, and whose natural estrangement from all prophets of Zionism, the fathers of Jewish Literature in the Hebrew tongue, and the diaspora mentality and the diaspora problem, cannot be expunged. Whereas all these were conferred upon you by force, like a borrowed cloth, faded and tattered and too-tight.

Out of their estrangement from Judaism the Canaanites were also estranged from Zionism. The State of Israel ought to be, they argued, a Hebrew state, not a solution to the Jewish Question. Following the first Aliyah, a generation arose in Palestine that spoke Hebrew as a native language and did not always identify with Judaism. Designating the Israeli People as a "Jewish People", the Canaanites argued, was misleading. If it was possible to be a Jew anywhere, then the State of Israel was merely an anecdote in the history of Judaism. A nation must be rooted in a territory and a language—things which Judaism, in its very nature, could not provide.

Canaanites and history

The movement promoted the idea that the Land of Israel was that of ancient Canaan (or, according to others, the whole of the Fertile Crescent) in which ancient peoples and cultures had lived, and that the historical occasion of the reemergence of an Israeli people constituted a veritable revival of these selfsame ancient Hebrews and their civilization, and consequently a rejection of religious Judaism in favor of a native and rooted Hebrew identity.

Because the Canaanites sought to create in Israel a new people, they mandated the dissociation of Israelis from Judaism and the history of Judaism. In their stead they placed the culture and history of the Ancient Near East, which they considered the true historical reference. They argued that the people of the Land of Israel in the days of the biblical monarchs had not been Jewish but Hebrew, and had shared a cultural context with other peoples of the region. Citing contemporary biblical criticism, the Canaanites argued that the Tanakh