Zionist art invented an imagined local-oriental tradition to legitimize nationalist claims

Evidence

Bezalel presented a clear antimodernist approach backed by anti-industrial pro-handicraft ideals from Europe. The art objects, too, were made to appeal to a widespread taste for “oriental” ornaments that had developed in Europe during the nineteenth century. Any challenge offered by modern art and design was rejected at the outset. Similarly, the iconography of Bezalel art perpetuated themes that were already familiar in Jewish tradition—mainly Jewish symbols, and images of the holy places. Biblical themes and ethnic types that featured frequently in Bezalel were also recurrent in European orientalist art and photography. Apparently Bezalel had to invent itself as a carrier of tradition to establish its legitimacy in the national movement. To achieve this a certain local-oriental artistic tradition was imagined. In reality this was a mixture of styles and techniques from the Middle East and Europe; by adopting it Bezalel could proclaim success in creating the genuine art of Palestine. Pictures of local Jewish types, almost always of oriental origin, were particularly important for this purpose. These Jews were the most visually attractive to Western artists in Jewish Palestine and depicting their images was considered a fulfilment of Bezalel’s aspiration to create a Jewish art that draws on the Land of Israel. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the invented-traditions literature (Hobsbawm’s “Invention of Tradition”) and to how nationalist movements fabricate heritage retroactively for legitimacy.
• ADDENDUM: Parallel to ‘Grafting & Growth’ in showing how a national movement grafts imagined roots onto a landscape to claim belonging — the invented ‘local-oriental artistic tradition’ as cultural grafting.