Summary
Kibutz Nahshonim, established on September 13, 1949 at Migdal Tzedek, near Petah Tikva, by the Egyptian gar’in of ha-‘Ivri ha-Tza’ir together with an Israeli gar’in, whose history Chapter 5 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry uses to show the Egyptian Hashomer Hatza’ir founders assimilating into Ashkenazi Israeli norms and subsuming their Egyptian pride into pride in their Francophone culture (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2297-2325).
Details
- The founding gar’in left Egypt in three contingents of about 30 members each between 1945 and 1947; its members were recruited into the Palmah, joined the Negev Brigade at Hazali on November 14, 1947, held the besieged settlement through the 1948 war — four of them losing their lives — and were demobilized in April 1949, after which about fifty to sixty remaining members of the Egyptian gar’in and an Israeli gar’in established the kibutz on the border between Israel and Jordan (Chapter 5, note 12) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2297-2307).
- Nahshonim served as a gathering point for many French-speaking Jews, including those from Egypt and North Africa, but, under the 1950s-60s melting-pot ideal, its members saw assimilation into Israeli Jewish culture as an important Zionist task, so it did not try to preserve the distinctive cultural characteristics of its founding members nor make a distinctive political contribution drawing on their origins in the Arab world (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2314-2325).
- In 1964, when Egyptian Jews still composed 40 percent of the membership, Ezra Talmor marked the kibutz’s fifteenth anniversary by writing that it had “still not succeeded in realizing the dream of our youth: a kibutz that is active in the political arena mainly among Eastern Jews and Arabs,” and could specify only folkloric attributes — “Here beats a wide and good Eastern heart which gives the settlement its special character” (Chapter 5, note 13). Asked in 1993 what distinguished Nahshonim, Talmor named only its food culture, and founder Lazare Giv’ati named “Language and Western culture”: for these veterans, being Egyptian meant being more Westernized than the majority of Israeli Jews (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2314-2325).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Ezra Talmor, Hashomer Hatza’ir, Kibutz ‘Ein-Shemer, Mapam