Jabotinsky reversed biblical geography to locate Jewish vitality in the Mediterranean West

Evidence

In Samson, Jabotinsky went against this geographical theme; the most critical movement in his analysis of the formative period in ancient Israeli history was from West to East, from the heart of the Mediterranean to the its eastern shores. To Jabotinsky, it was not the cultural and theological progression of monotheism from East to West that formed the Jewish nation, but rather the opportunity that the ancient Jews were afforded to live independently and explore their true nature as a nation in its own land. The Philistines, who in the Bible were portrayed as the complete other of the Hebrew nation, were depicted by Jabotinsky as a source of the Hebrew nation’s vitality. It was the values that the Philistines brought with them from the Mediterranean West that are Samson’s key to an authentic and healthy life. And the message of the novel was unmistakable, the Philistines’ values are the heroic values that the Jewish nation must adopt. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 554

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapter material on the Philistines as ‘other’ and to classical diaspora studies of how nationalist movements re-read their own scripture against Western framing.
• QUESTION: How does this West-to-East reframing interact with Herzl and early Zionist geography of Europe vs. the East? Worth chasing.