Bezalel’s founding merged nationalist art aims with charity-based work productivization under an orientalist frame.

Evidence

In the founding of the Bezalel School of Art and Crafts in Jerusalem in 1906 two separate concepts regarding the future prospects of the Jewish people converged. On the one hand there was the will to define and create national art and the belief in the positive contribution of the arts to the development of the Jewish people. These views were held primarily by artists and their supporters who were involved in Bezalel. On the other hand there was the urge to supply work to the Jewish community in Palestine and the desire to encourage what was called “the productivization of the Jews.” This view was stressed primarily by the German Jews who supported the founding of Bezalel. That the two tendencies did not sit very well together is evident from the constant problems and difficulties that accompanied Bezalel from its first days. What these rather different ideological frameworks had in common, however, was an image of Palestine, the focus of Zionist aspirations, that was imbued with preconceptions about the ancient undeveloped and yet enchanting nature of the Orient. By and large, an orientalist approach dictated the major structural principles of the Bezalel school and workshops, the ethnic constitution of its students and employees, and the styles and subjects of its artistic products. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 590

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s overall thesis on orientalism and Jewish identity, and to the standing article on how infrastructure/organizations encode ideological assumptions.