Jabotinsky sought to redefine Jews as a Mediterranean rather than Eastern people

Evidence

The notion of a return to the Mediterranean world of the ancient Hebrews was the topic of a 1932 letter from Jabotinsky to Isaac Sciaki, one of the leaders of the Revisionist movement in Italy. In the letter, Jabotinsky stated that the Hebrew movement must undergo a radical change in its international orientation. Zionists can no longer rest their hopes on Great Britain, and must seek other allies that will better serve the movement’s goals. And this redirection, Jabotinsky claimed, cannot solely be based on political concerns, but has to be predicated upon cultural and spiritual considerations as well. The Zionist movement must adopt Mediterranean and Latin cultural models. It must, he wrote, “turn the masses into a Latin people (by means of a linguistic education). Beitarism [as the Revisionist program was called, after the Revisionist youth organization, Beitar] must be an educational program that brings new contents to the nation.” Jabotinsky and the Revisionists did not see the Jews as the people of the East and its cultural heritage (religion), but rather as a Mediterranean nation that returns to its glorious epoch as a regional political power. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 559

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did Jabotinsky’s Mediterranean turn interact with his earlier ‘iron wall’ realism about Arab-Jewish irreconcilability — was the cultural repudiation of the East and political realism toward it two faces of one stance?