Nationalist ideology held that place alone could generate authentic national art

Evidence

More important, these images were thought to be the right way to create a national Jewish art. Schatz firmly believed that only in Eretz Yisrael could the Jewish artist find his “Jewish” themes. Because it was only there, “where every little stone tells him long-forgotten legends and where every hill awakens the memory of the former freedom of his people, where as an artist he draws the real Jewish types beneath the blue skies of his own land—in that Jew there awakens the slumbering spirits of the Jewish prophet of old.” Schatz imagined the students of Bezalel drawing Jewish models while hearing the sounds of Hebrew and thus inevitably “expressing in their works our hopes and national aspirations.” In his view, a genuine Jewish art would emerge naturally, by itself, as the result of the encounter of the Jewish artist with the historical sites and with the local Jewish population. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 610

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Schatz’s environmental determinism of national art — that landscape + language automatically produce authenticity — is a resonant premise to interrogate in fiction about colonized peoples inheriting the colonizer’s forms.