Read Palestine

Bezalel

Properties2
tags
aliases

2 min read

Summary

The Jerusalem arts and crafts school founded with CEP and German Jewish cooperation, presented in Altneuland (journal) as a vehicle of Jewish national art, German work discipline and tourism income (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.213-216).

Details

  • Bezalel was founded in Jerusalem by the CEP with Boris Schatz, the Hilfsverein and other German Jewish organizations; influenced by the anti-industrial Arts and Crafts movement, it taught handicrafts to low-income city dwellers dependent on philanthropy, its founders considering rapid industrialization extremely low in prospect and its target group of intellectual religious Jews unsuitable for industrial labour (PDF p.213-214).
  • Franz Oppenheimer, a strong advocate of the Arts and Crafts movement, held handicrafts to be the next step after agriculture in intensifying labour in the settlement cooperative, providing additional income in winter, especially for women and children (PDF p.214).
  • Its carpets were adorned with Hebrew calligraphy inspired from Arabic ornamentation, and its sculptors created human images despite traditional Jewish aniconism, albeit not explicitly religious icons (PDF p.215).
  • Altneuland emphasized that Jerusalem’s religious community accepted Bezalel, not banning it as it did other nonreligious schools, repeating that four hundred women competed for the forty-five available openings in the spinnery; inside, Orthodox Jews were described as silently labouring and punctually following the teacher, adopting German discipline without changing their religious convictions (PDF p.215-216).
  • Otto Warburg envisioned Bezalel graduates teaching arts and crafts in “various Jewish centers of the Orient”, and the school did provide advanced training to teachers from all over Palestine and Syria (PDF p.219).

Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Boris Schatz, Altneuland (journal), Franz Oppenheimer

Graph View

Backlinks