Canaanism was a cultural and ideological movement founded in 1939, reaching its peak among the Jews of Mandatory Palestine during the 1940s. It has had a significant effect on the course of Israeli art, literature and spiritual and political thought. Its adherents were called Canaanites (). 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 came out of Revisionist Zionism and had roots in European extreme right-wing movements, particularly Italian fascism.Kuzar 107, 12-13 Most of its members were former members of the Irgun or Lehi.Kuzar 13
Canaanism never had more than around two dozen registered members, but because most of them were influential intellectuals and artists, the movement had an influence which went 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 Ron Kuzar 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; Kuzar also says 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."Kuzar 13
In more recent years, the VISION Movement has generally been seen as the representative of Canaanism in the 21st century. It mostly focuses on building a peace process through creating a bi-national state through creating a dialogue between the Hilltop Youth and Palestinians. They refer to their ideology as Jewish liberation.
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).Shavit xiv 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.
As a result 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 that spoke Hebrew as a native language arose in Palestine and it did not always identify with Judaism. The Canaanites argued that designating the Israeli People as a "Jewish People" was misleading. If it was possible to be a Jew anywhere, then, the existence of 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.
Flag of the Hebrew Youth
In 1944, Yonatan Ratosh, one of the movement's leaders in the 1940s and 1950s, published "The Opening Message: At the Committee Session with the Messengers of the Cells", a fifty-page pamphlet containing the founding speech of the Hebrew Youth's movement. On the cover of the publication is pasted the image of the proposed flag for the Hebrew people. The golden symbol on the flag is based on the first Hebrew letter, aleph, in the Paleo-Hebrew script (𐤀), which symbolizes the horns of the bull. The golden symbol also symbolizes the rays of the sun at sunrise over the mountains in the east (in blue), which paint the sky red. This symbol was later used by the movement, and following it the movement's newspaper was also called "Alef". Ratosh attached great importance to this flag, which he called "the flag of Tekhelet (light blue), the Argaman (purple), and the golden rays", and in his speech he noted: "This flag is what will remain of our book with all our hearts, it is the essence of the essence of our first book, and whoever remembers this flag alone, also in it the writer did his mission. His day will also come, and he will follow this flag, in its shadow he will live and on it he will die."
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 reflected this ancient history, but only partly, since it had been compiled in the period of the Second Temple by Jewish scribes who had rewritten the history of the region to suit their world-view.
Much of the Canaanite effort was dedicated to researching the history of the Middle East and its peoples. The Canaanites cited approvingly the work of Umberto Cassuto, who translated Ugaritic poetry into Hebrew. (Ugarit was an ancient city located in modern-day northern Syria, where in the early 20th century many important ancient texts, written in the Ugaritic language, were discovered.) Ugaritic verse bore an uncanny resemblance to the language of the Tanakh. The Canaanites argued that these texts proved that the people of the Land of Israel had been much closer socially and culturally to other peoples of the region than they had been to Judaism.
Canaanites and literature
In his book, Sifrut Yehudit ba-lashon ha-ʻIvrit (Jewish Literature in the Hebrew Tongue), Yonatan Ratosh sought to differentiate between Hebrew literature and Jewish literature written in the Hebrew language. Jewish literature, Ratosh claimed, could be and was written in any number of languages. The ideas and writing style that characterize Jewish literature in Hebrew were not substantially different from those of Jewish literature in other languages. Ratosh and his fellow Canaanites (especially Aharon Amir) thought that Hebrew literature should be rooted to its historical origins in the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language. As an example they noted American literature, which in their mind was newly created for the new American people.
Canaanite verse is often obscure to those unfamiliar with ancient Ugaritic and Canaanite mythology. One of the principal techniques used by the Canaanites to produce Hebrew literature was to adopt words and phrases (especially hapax legomena, which the Canaanites regarded as traces of the original unedited Hebraic Tanakh) from the Tanakh, and use them in a poetic that approximated biblical and Ugaritic verse, especially in their use of repetitive structures and parallelism. The Canaanites did not rule out the use of new Hebrew words, but many of them did avoid Mishnaic Hebrew. However, these characteristics represent only the core of the Canaanite movement, and not its full breadth.
The late literary scholar Baruch Kurzweil argued that the Canaanites were not sui generis, but a direct continuation (albeit a radical one) of the literature of Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Shaul Tchernichovsky.
Canaanites and language Ratosh and his brother, Uzzi Ornan, also sought for the Romanization of Hebrew in order to further divorce the language from the older Hebrew alphabet. Writing articles in the Hebrew-language press in the 1960s and 1970s, they criticized the Hebrew alphabet for its graphical shortcomings and relationship with Judaism, and proposed for official Romanization of the language in order to further free secular Hebrew Israelis from the hold of religion and integrate them into the larger Levantine region.J. S. Diamond, Homeland or Holy Land? The ‘Canaanite’ Critique of Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Yaakov Shavit, The New Hebrew Nation (London: Frank Cass, 1987). Their proposals for wholesale Romanization met condemnation from various public figures due to the perception that Romanization was a means of assimilation and Levantinization.Esther Raizen, “Romanization of the Hebrew Script,” 1987. (University of Texas Press) pp. 41–61.
İlker Aytürk later compared the Canaanite proposal for Romanization to the more successful reform of the Turkish alphabet as undertaken by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey; the reform of Turkish spelling, which had previously been written in the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish alphabet for over 1,000 years until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, was similarly motivated by Atatürk's attempts to secularize and modernize post-Ottoman Turkish society.İlker Aytürk, "Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization," Journal of World History, Volume 21, Number 1, March 2010
Activities
The Coalition published a journal, Aleph, which ran from 1948–1953, featuring the works of several luminaries of the movement including Ratosh, Adia Horon, Uzzi Ornan, Amos Kenan and Benjamin Tammuz. It was edited by Aharon Amir, and the journal circulated erratically throughout its existence. The journal was named after a Young Hebrews' flag designed by Ratosh, that featured an aleph in the more figurative shape of an ox's head, as in the Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.