Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 39

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Israel: A History
By: Anita Shapira
Israel: A History. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012. 502 pp. $35.00. ISBN: 978-1611683523.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Seth J. Frantzman, PhD
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Israel
Soon after the creation of the State of Israel, large numbers of Jewish immigrants began arriving from Arab countries such as Iraq and Yemen.
Many of these Jews came from relatively traditional religious families. The Israeli government’s bureaucrats however were mostly European-born
secular Jews who sought to mold these immigrants into a new image. “The teachers did not hesitate to tell students to cut off their [traditional]
sidelocks, throw away their hats, and turn their backs on religious tradition. Boys and girls sat together in the same classroom and learned not to
respect the traditions of their forbears” (p. 241). Yemenite Jews took this especially harshly. This controversy, over whether Jews from Arab
countries should be “modernized” or educated in a system more closely resembling the one they were used to was at the heart of a Kulterkampf in
Israel’s early years.
Anita Shapira, a Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University, has set out in Israel: A History to present an accessible, one volume account of the
country that can be accessible both— to a popular audience, and students of Israeli history. In the opening sections she notes “most histories of
Israel focus on the Arab-Jewish conflict…without shying away from examining the conflict, the history should encompass internal Jewish politics,
immigration and nation building” (p. xi). This history book therefore sets out to provide a more social history of a country whose history has been
told previously in one volume accounts by Martin Gilbert and Howard Sachar.
From the first chapter it is obvious that a history of Israel in Shapira’s conception is in fact a history of Zionism. This sets up a paradigmatic
problem. If Israel’s history is primarily tied into Zionism, then what should be made of the people who were already in Israel before the advent of
Zionism, namely the Arab population and the religious Jewish groups? Any new country faces this issue. Does a history of Turkey involve the story
of Troy, the Armenians and Byzantine Christianity, or is it just a history of the Turkish people and the country they built up? Shapira’s narrative
follows the traditional Zionist history of Jewish emancipation in Europe in the 19th century and the writings of Theodore Herzl, the father of the
Zionist movement. Although the Zionist movement, which sought a national home for H