Canaanites (movement)

Canaanism was a cultural and ideological movement founded in 1939 that reached its peak in the 1940s among the Jews of Palestine. It has had significant effect on the course of Israeli art, literature and spiritual and political thought. Its adherents were called Canaanites (Hebrew: כנענים‎‎). The movement's original name was the Council for the Coalition of Hebrew Youth (Hebrew: הוועד לגיבוש הנוער העברי‎‎); "Canaanism" was originally a pejorative term. It grew out of Revisionist Zionism and according to Ron Kuzar had "its early roots in European extreme right-wing movements, notably Italian fascism" which was not as anti-Semitic as German fascism. Most of its members were part of the Irgun or Lehi, never had more than around two dozen registered members (but most of these were influential intellectuals and artists, giving the movement an influence far beyond its size), and believed that much of the Middle East had been a Hebrew-speaking civilization in antiquity. Kuzar also says they hoped to revive this civilization, creating a "Hebrew" nation, disconnected from the Jewish past, which would embrace the Middle East's Arab population as well. They saw both "world Jewry and world Islam" as backward and medieval; Ron Kuzar writes that the movement "exhibited an interesting blend of militarism and power politics toward the Arabs as an organized community on the one hand and a welcoming acceptance of them as individuals to be redeemed from medieval darkness on the other."

The movement was founded in 1939. In 1943 the Jewish-Palestinian poet Yonatan Ratosh published an "Epistle to the Hebrew Youth", the first manifesto of the Canaanites. In this tract, Ratosh called upon Hebrew youth to disaffiliate themselves from Judaism, and declared that no meaningful bond united Hebrew youth residing in Palestine and Judaism. Ratosh argued that Judaism was not a nation but a religion, and as such it was universal, without territorial claims; one could be Jewish anywhere. For a nation to genuinely arise in Palestine, he maintained, the youth must uncouple from Judaism and form a Hebrew nation with its own unique identity. (The term "Hebrew" had been associated with the Zionist aspiration to create a strong, self-confident "new Jew" since the late nineteenth century). The birthplace and geographical coordinates of this nation is the Fertile Crescent.

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