Hygiene,dirt and the shaping of a new man among the early Zionist halutzim

Introduction

Personal hygiene has pride of place in scholarly conceptualization of the modern body. Two such conceptualizations – those of Norbert Elias and of Michel Foucault – consider the increasing hygienization of society as an aspect of a larger process encompassing the entire human being. Whether conceived as a scientific justification for norms of civilized behavior which are considered the hallmark of modern man or as a disciplinary discourse, in their work hygiene is seen as instrumental in shaping a human being who is disciplined and self-controlled.

Education in hygiene became part of modernization projects throughout the world, especially in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Large-scale efforts to educate the population in health and hygiene took place in many countries in Europe, America and the colonial world, including the Jewish community of Mandate Palestine. Articles and columns containing instructions and advice on health and hygiene appeared in the daily press and Hebrew periodicals, dozens of manuals were published, and several organizations initiated educational activities such as lectures, exhibitions, radio programs and hygiene lessons in schools and Infant Welfare Centers (Hirsch, 2009; Shvarts and Shehory-Rubin, 2012; Sufian, 2007). In the Hebrew discourse on hygiene, the aim of hygiene was much broader than preventing disease; it was to shape a new type of Jew, healthy in body and mind, modern and Western.

Hygiene education projects have been the subject of many studies (e.g. Burke, 1996; Frykman and Löfgren, 1987; Lupton, 1995; Starks, 2008). Most studies focus on the work of educators. There are hardly any studies which consider the active appropriation, and sometimes violation, of hygienic models of conduct from a cultural perspective. This article seeks to address this lacuna, by analyzing hygienic practices among a specific social group: the Zionist halutzim (Hebrew for pioneers) who arrived in Palestine in the early 20th century.

The halutzim were mostly young men, and a smaller number of women, who arrived in Palestine primarily from Russia and Poland. They aspired to engage in manual labor, preferably agriculture, which was conceived as a means to achieve both personal and national transformation. The halutzim constitute an interesting test case not only because they were thought to embody the Zionist ideal of a new Jew, and because they played a constitutive role in the Zionist settlement project and in shaping Zionist culture, but also because they were engaged in conscious and deliberate efforts of self-fashioning.

By studying hygienic practices among the halutzim, my aim is not just to illuminate an understudied topic, but also to offer a critique of Foucault’s and Elias’ perception of a corporeal repertoire like hygiene as necessarily an instance of discipline or self-control. While hygiene can, and often does, function as a disciplinary technology, I suggest considering hygiene as a specific cultural repertoire (Even-Zohar, 1997; Swidler, 1986), which was open for appropriation and re-signification in various ways and for various purposes. Rather than taking formal discourse and its putative effects as the exclusive object of analysis, my approach pays attention to the heterogeneous ways in which it has been practiced by social actors.

Hygiene, discipline and self-control

Today we associate the word hygiene mainly with germ-free cleanliness, although we no longer think of dirt primarily as a cause for disease. Until the middle of the 20th century, however, hygiene, or the science of health maintenance, referred to a much broader domain of knowledge, technologies and practices (Sarasin, 2001). Hygiene was a practical science which provided instructions for ‘correct’ and healthy living, based on empirical research and rational principles. In the framework of the hygienic discourse, almost anything could appear as conducive to disease or good health: nutrition, living conditions, labor and leisure, clothing, water supply, sexual activity and more. Thus, the hygienic repertoire included models for eating and washing, for sleeping and dressing up, for organizing one’s time, and so on.

Two of the most seminal accounts of the emergence of modern man have granted hygiene an important place in their analysis. One is Norbert Elias’ (1994 [1939]) The Civilizing Process; the other is Michel Foucault’s (1991 [1975]) discussion of the disciplinary society. In Elias’ model, hygiene serves as scientific justification for socially desirable behavior, which has gradually become internalized and based on self-control. Through this process, the type of person who is able to function in modern societies, characterized by functional differentiation, which binds together large numbers of people in relations of interdependence, is formed. The stability of the social system depends on people’s ability to supervise themselves – to avoid any unpredicted behavior. In the course of the process of civilization, social prescriptions and proscriptions were gradually internalized and became a part of what the individual perceived as his or her individual nature. They became a superego – an internalized supervising agency.

While Elias’ model highlights the function of hygiene as a signifier of ‘civilized behavior’, Foucault is more interested in its disciplinary effects. For Foucault, discipline is a technology of power which produces the modern individual as a ‘docile body’. According to Foucault, discipline operates by training bodies, by observing and studying bodies, and by setting bodily norms, to which each individual is compared. Thus, it produces ‘the individual’ as an object and effect of a specific intersection of knowledge and power (1991). In Foucault’s (1980 [1976], 1984) work, the spread of hygiene is seen as a manifestation of the rise of bio-power – the power over life. With bio-power, medicine in general and preventive medicine in particular have become central instruments of power, integrating techniques for disciplining individuals with the bio-politics of the population.

It is difficult to discuss the hygienization of society since the late 18th century without turning at least to one of these models. While Elias’ work has been more influential in studying the role of hygiene in the socio-cultural consolidation of the bourgeoisie (e.g. Frey, 1997; Frykman and Löfgren, 1987; Outram, 1989; Vigarello, 1988), Foucault has inspired accounts of the use of hygiene to civilize and discipline subordinate populations (e.g. Burke, 1996; Jones and Porter, 1994; Lupton, 1995; Petersen and Bunton, 1997), although some scholars have used Foucault’s later work to conceptualize hygiene as a ‘technique of the self’ (e.g. Sarasin, 2001). Both Elias and Foucault do not assume a natural and static body, with biologically predetermined needs, nor a human subject who acts in order to satisfy these needs. Instead, they focus on the ways in which the knowledge and practices of medicine and hygiene produce bodies and subjects.

Both Foucault and Elias have also been subjected to various critiques (e.g. Algazi, 2000; Hartsock, 1990; Outram, 1989; Shilling, 1993; Stoler 1995). Here I would like to discuss briefly two problems, common to both Elias and Foucault despite their different approaches. The first concerns Foucault’s and Elias’ respective notions of discipline/self-control. In Foucault’s work, disciplinary mechanisms develop in the framework of concrete institutions, such as prisons, schools and hospitals, and depend on these institutions for their operation. Although Foucault assumes a historical transformation through which these mechanisms have transcended the boundaries of particular institutions and spread across society, there is nothing in his work to account for the persistence of discipline once external supervision is removed. In Elias’ work, external social supervision is internalized and transformed into self-control. Self-control becomes part of the psychic structure of individuals, which guarantees its efficiency at any time and place, without being dependent upon the presence of supervising agents. For Elias, the process of civilization is a process of refinement and of increasing self-control. In this context, we may ask, why daily cleaning of the body or concealment of natural bodily functions necessarily attests to greater self-control? And why eating with one’s hand is less refined than eating with a fork? Rather than a necessary instance of refinement and self-control, such practices may attest to the mastery of a specific cultural code, which requires avoiding certain activities in specific contexts. As several critics have argued, Elias seems to identify the hegemonic bourgeois repertoire associated with refinement and self-control – central components in bourgeoisie self-perception – with an objective and universal concept of refinement and self-control (Algazi, 2000; Baumann, 2000; Goody, 2003).

A second, related problem is raised by Algazi in his discussion of Elias’ work, and may be applied to Foucault work as well: rather than regarding discipline/self-control as a repertoire of models which may be appropriated by social actors in diverse ways, they are regarded as a set of norms to be internalized (or else resisted). As Algazi writes, Elias reduces mastery and control of the self to the performance of norms of self-control and self-restraint, thereby adopting a liberal conception of power as repressive – a conception notoriously criticized by Foucault. Moreover, mastery and control of the self may not necessarily be manifested in obedience to norms of self-restraint, but rather in the ability to play with the norms, recognizing when it was permissible to violate them without having to pay a social price (Algazi, 2000: 78–79). Neither can this type of masterful playing with the norms be captured by Foucault’s notion of resistance.

Rather than regarding hygiene as necessarily an instance of discipline or self-control, a product of deep-seated dispositions, I suggest regarding hygiene as a specific cultural repertoire – one which evolved from a class-specific code into a scientifically legitimated and widely disseminated repertoire for proper behavior. By repertoire I refer to a structured set of signifying models for organizing human action and perception (Even-Zohar, 1997), or in Ann Swidler’s words, ‘a “tool kit” of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct “strategies of action”’ (Swidler, 1986: 273), to which we may add ‘perceptual strategies’, or strategies with which people ‘understand the world’ (Even-Zohar, 1997: 20–21). Inherent to the notion of cultural repertoires is the understanding that culture has a conventional nature, which allows for a relative autonomy of choices from available repertoires (Sheffy, 1997: 38). ¹ Moreover, the notion of models, or pre-organized options, suggests a relative openness and elasticity of cultural forms. It draws our attention to the heterogeneous ways in which cultural models may be actively appropriated and performed, and to the diverse ends – both practical and semiotic – to which they may be put to use. Such an approach is akin to theoretical conceptualizations of the body as an active subject and a cultural instrument, and not just as a site of discipline/self-control (Bourdieu, 1977; Crossley, 1995; Mauss, (1992) [1934]).

Reading popular medical texts from early 20th century Palestine, hygiene appears as a paradigmatic disciplinary discourse, in the ways it dismantles the body into its constituent parts, in its effort to separate between people, in its attempt to regulate their actions and in its creation of a standard of normalcy. No doubt, in many contexts hygiene did, and still does, function as a powerful disciplinary technology. However, when we shift our attention to social actors and their practices, the practice of hygiene appears to be considerably more heterogeneous. People often obeyed the rules of hygiene, but they also sometimes violated them; sometimes they appropriated them in a creative fashion; sometimes they obeyed them for purposes other than those intended by hygienists. By this I do not mean to imply that people practiced hygiene in an individual fashion; rather, both compliant, dissident and creative uses were organized collectively.

In what follows, I will attempt to demonstrate why hygiene should be regarded as a cultural repertoire open for appropriation and re-signification in various ways and for various purposes. After a short historical introduction to the halutzim, I divide my discussion into two parts. First, I show how the violation of hygienic models of conduct, which signified in several ways, served to shape a specific self for the halutzim. Second, I show that the hygienic practices of the halutzim were not products of a coherent habitus, but rather relational and contextual social practice. Most of the examples concern cleanliness, although some examples pertain to other fields of regulation, such as eating or sleeping habits. Cleanliness was not just one field of regulation among others – it was an organizing principle, which cut across most other fields. Moreover, cleanliness, more than most other traits and practices, played a central role in the capacity of hygiene as a signifier of civilization.

The halutzim

The Hebrew term halutzim (singular, halutz, feminine, halutza) refers to a particular group of Zionist manual laborers: ideologically driven young men, and a smaller number of women, ² who perceived themselves as a national avant-garde, whose role was to conquer the land by labor in the service of the national project (Almog, 2000: 91). Although the term was first applied to workers who arrived in Palestine after World War I (WWI), as members of Zionist youth organizations, it was later applied retrospectively to those who arrived individually before WWI as well. ³ I use the Hebrew term halutzim, itself ideological, not in order to imply singularity but specificity: not all Jewish manual workers were halutzim. The halutzim may best be defined as a status group: a group bound together by shared values, way of life and style, which embodied the quest for a new Jewish society and a new Jewish man (Almog, 1993).

The halutzim discussed in this article arrived in Palestine mainly from Russia and Poland, in the pre- and post-WWI immigration waves (1904–1914 and 1919–1923, respectively). They numbered between 1000 and 2000 people in the pre-WWI immigration wave (Gorni, 1970), and some 7000 people in the post-war wave (Ben-Avram and Near, 1995: 19, 21; Giladi, 1973: 40). Most emerged from the middle class or lower middle class. The halutzim of the earlier immigration wave, many of whom were affiliated with one of the socialist movements that flourished in Russia before the war (Frankel, 1981; Shilo, 1988: 111), came to Palestine with the intention of becoming members of the agricultural proletariat in the Jewish colonies – agricultural settlements of private farms, which were formed by Jews since the late 1870s. Many of them formed labor collectives, following the Russian model (Smith, 2002), and moved from place to place in search of work. Passionate, restless and proud, they were not well received by the Jewish colonists (Shilo, 1988: 112). The latter preferred the more experienced and cheaper Arab workers. This led to the establishment of collective agricultural settlements of halutzim on lands purchased by the Zionist Organization, beginning in 1909, as a strategy to guarantee the Jewish hold of the land and monopoly over labor (Halpern and Reinharz, 1998: 186, 191, 197; Shafir and Peled, 2002: 39). While the halutzim of the pre-WWI immigration wave arrived on an individual basis and without any previous training, the halutzim of the post-war immigration wave, which arrived in Palestine after the institution of the British mandate, arrived in the framework of Zionist youth movements. Although all halutzim aspired to work in agriculture, due to labor shortages many had to undertake work in construction and public works provided by the government, such as road paving.

After WWI, the settlement movement had grown, developing branches which were affiliated with halutzi movements. The most important forms of settlement established by the labor movement – a general name for the various halutzi movements and political parties established by halutzim – were the kibbutz (plural, kibbutzim) – a communal settlement, and the moshav – a cooperative smallholders’ village. Out of the community of halutzim, only a small number joined one of the collective settlements, and an even smaller number survived in them: in 1922, there were about 1000 people in 21 kibbutzim and 500 in moshavim, out of a mostly urban Jewish population of 83,800. In 1931, the number of kibbutz members amounted to almost 4,400 (Ben-Avram and Near, 1995: 75, 94; Fogiel-Bijaoui, 1992: 224). However, the connection between the halutzi movements and the settlement movement became so tight that the title halutz almost became synonymous with a settler in one of the collective settlements, and especially in the kibbutz (Near, 1992: 244).

Although in terms of social origins, ideological positions and organizational affiliation, the halutzim constituted a rather heterogeneous group, they nevertheless developed a shared cultural foundation (Almog, 1993). They regarded themselves as embodying the Zionist ideal of a new man, the antithesis of the uprooted, enfeebled and effeminate Jew of the Diaspora (Neumann, 2011: 116–123). Their culture placed masculine values such as self-sufficiency (in theory, if not necessarily in practice), honor, courage, endurance and abstemiousness at its center. Their sense of worth rested on the romantic admiration for ‘the working man’ as well as on the consciousness of elite – those who were not born farmers and laborers but chose a life of physical labor out of idealism, thereby sacrificing a life of comfort for national goals (Almog, 1993: 340).

A central aspect of the Zionist new man ideal was robust and healthy physicality (Gluzman, 2007; Presner, 2007). Physical strength was a central component of the masculine model around the turn of the 20th century, both in Western and Central Europe, and in Russia, where it gained heightened salience in the construction of a masculine authority among rural migrants to towns (Forth, 2008; Mosse, 1996; Smith, 2002). On the one hand, it was a common notion among the halutzim that those who survived in the settlements were not necessarily the better, more able-bodied workers, but rather the more committed ones, who were imbued with a sense of mission and determination (Shilo, 1988: 111). On the other hand, since the body functioned as a signifier for a masculine identity (Butler, 1990; Mosse, 1996), high premium was placed on robust physicality, which was seen as the desired outcome of physical work (Neumann, 2011: 126ff). ⁴ The gradual transformation of the body through labor is a popular topic in texts written by halutzim. However, in the vision promoted by Zionist leaders such as Max Nordau, who coined the phrase ‘muscle Jewry’, the new, healthy Jew embodied the bourgeois ideal of the civilized human being, in which personal hygiene occupied an important place. In contrast, the halutzim sought to fashion themselves after the image of the robust, yet rough and dirty manual worker, thus exposing a contradiction at the heart of modern masculinity (Forth, 2008). Although women were also part, albeit smaller, of the halutzi camp, and participated in its culture, the repertoire of practices discussed below was first and foremost a form of masculine distinction.

The polysemy of dirt

The halutzim occupied a unique position in the Hebrew discourse of hygiene. On the one hand, they were associated with a salutary life of physical labor in the open air. On the other hand, physicians often complained that the halutzim systematically violated the rules of hygiene and were therefore often ill. In 1933, the workers’ Sick Fund (kupat holim) – an organization which provided medical insurance and services for workers – initiated a sanitary action in the kibbutzim. According to the supervisor, Dr Frederick Lander, in most kibbutzim, the toilets were ‘very primitive’ and dirty. If they existed at all, the cesspits next to the kitchens and showers were neglected and overflowed, and no windows had mosquito nets. In general, there was dirt everywhere, including the kitchens (Lander, 1934). A year after the sanitary action had begun, Lander wrote that ‘prophylactic work in the kibbutzim is extremely hard, and advances very slowly’ (Lander, 1935b: 337). Lander claimed that in most kibbutzim, the members were indifferent towards hygienic and sanitary matters. In some places, he wrote, there had been some improvement, usually after frequent visits of kupat holim inspectors, persistent demands for improvement and even threats to cut off medical aid. However, in other places this was to no avail, and even after more than a year of preventive work, people continued to live in unhygienic and insanitary conditions (Lander, 1935b). In another article, where he discussed the sanitary condition of 65 settlements, Lander noted that most places mentioned in the article might serve as an example of how not to arrange showers. Even in settlements where the number of settlers had grown considerably, he reported, the number of showers remained the same, so that some people didn’t visit the showers for weeks. Except for two kibbutzim, none had running hot water or a bathtub. Lander writes,

Even in the remotest places in Galicia, Lithuania and Russia there is a bath-house, one cannot imagine a remote and miserable farmers’ village without it. And here in this country, with its specific morbidity, which devours so many efforts and means, both physical and financial, in civilized kibbutzim … there is no hot water in the showers and no bathtubs. (Lander, 1935a)

For Lander, the miserable hygienic and sanitary conditions in the kibbutzim were not reason enough to question the civilized status of the halutzim. As I have shown elsewhere (Hirsch, 2009), the social group whose function was equivalent to that of the lower classes in the hygienic discourse in countries like England, Germany and France was ‘Oriental’ Jews (i.e. Jews who descended from Arab countries). The Hebrew discourse of hygiene was organized around the East–West distinction. Whereas hygiene was associated with civilization and the West, the East was depicted as unhygienic and uncivilized. Both Arabs and Oriental Jews were depicted as the mirror opposites of the ‘hygienic human being’ – passive, lacking willpower, immoral and in general uncivilized. Thus, while both Eastern European manual workers and Oriental Jews were described as the two Jewish groups who often violated the rules of hygiene, only in the case of the latter were hygienic and sanitary habits seen as an index of level of civilization. In the case of the halutzim, poor hygiene was attributed to lack of understanding and to ‘Diaspora habits, which are difficult to uproot’ (Meir, 1933). This meant that violation of the rules of hygiene by the haluzim did not affect their social prestige.

In many of the agricultural settlements, living conditions were rough and tough for many years. Poor housing, water and food shortage, and lack of sanitary facilities like toilets and showers were the norm. These conditions, no doubt, affected the life options of the halutzim, including their hygiene. But more than material constraints determined the behavior of the halutzim. Often behaviors which did not comply with the norms of hygiene resulted from their intentional violation, and not from ‘indifference’ or ‘lack of understanding’. As sources referring to hygienic practices among the halutzim suggest, unhygienic behavior functioned as a polysemic sign. The hygienic conduct of the halutzim embodied a complex system of distinctions, which cannot be reduced to the distinction between civilized and uncivilized behavior.

First, unhygienic behavior symbolized the process of ‘proletarization’ for the halutzim (see also Almog, 1993; Frankel, 1981; Near, 2000). As one worker, named Tanchum, wrote

Some of the guys deliberately wore torn clothes and walked bare-footed, not out of coquetry, God forbid, but because they wanted to feel on their bodies their being workers. This manifested itself in bad housing, in the food they ate, and in their entire way of being, in order to express their transformation into proletarians. Many believed, that to live like a decent human being was fit only for bourgeois or kleinbürger. (Tzur et al., 1981: 89)

It seems that walking around and sometimes even sleeping in dirty work clothes was not an uncommon practice among the halutzim. Nachum Rosenfeld (b. 1895, Bessarabia) describes how he and his friend visited Degania, the first kibbutz, in 1920 and asked for a place to sleep. Their host let them into the single stone building in the kibbutz, where several members slept on the floor in their work clothes. He told the couple not to be too sensitive, since people were tired and would not notice them, and that is what they did (Tzur et al., 1981: 130–131). This form of sleep violated several hygienic requirements: sleeping in a bed, no more than one person per bed and not to sleep in one’s work clothes. The manual Hygiene instructions for immigrants was explicit that ’one should avoid the uncivilized and unaesthetic habit of laying on the bed with clothes, sometimes even work-clothes, and dirty shoes’ (N.A., 1930: 8)

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Figure 1.

Woman and man with geese: Degania A.

Second, although hygiene was considered a marker of civilization – and arguably because of that – in certain contexts, it signified excessive attention to the body, self-indulgence and even weakness. Yosef Aharonovich (b. 1877, Ukraine), who arrived in Palestine in 1906, recounts being told on the way to one of the colonies in Samaria, by the coachman, himself one of the first settlers, ‘I look at you, at your ironed collar, which does not testify to too much force, and I ask myself: what will a guy like you do here?’ (Havas, 1947: 163). In contrast, unhygienic behavior signified roughness, unruliness and endurance – qualities that were associated with masculinity (Forth, 2008; see also Belkin, 2012).

Scholars have shown how in the modern West and beyond, constructions of masculinity, and especially middle-class masculinity, were inextricably bound with the notion of civilization (Bederman, 1995; Forth, 2008). Civilization, however, was a contradictory concept, associated not just with human progress and white superiority but also with weakness and effeminacy. Developments which were central to the concept of civilization – such as a sedentary lifestyle, material comfort and luxury, refined manners and self-control – threatened to render men soft, cowardly and effeminate, and to erode the corporeal foundation of male claim to privilege (Forth, 2008: 4–5, 141). In contrast, men of subjugated groups like peasants, proletarians and some indigenous people, with their rough physicality and ‘primitive’ way of life, were sometimes seen as embodying the lost masculinity of civilized men (Forth, 2008: 14, 17, 89–91).

Although the desire to express the process of proletarization through the body was common to halutzim of both sexes, sources convey a clear gender distinction when it comes to hygienic practices, and particularly in maintaining cleanliness. For instance, a worker named Z. Dor-Sinai describes the differences between men’s and women’s tents in his kibbutz: whereas the women’s tents were spotlessly clean and tidy, some of the men’s tents were never cleaned, and were ‘horrifyingly littered and neglected’ (Tzur et al., 1981: 212). Dr Yechiel Noack (1928) noted in an article in the daily newspaper Davar the cleanliness of women’s farms compared to some of the agricultural settlements, which left one astonished in face of the condition of the toilets, the disorder and the flies (Noack, 1928). The women’s training farm at Kinneret trained women, besides in agriculture, in home economics, including hygiene (Gofer, 2009: 123). Gilat Gofer shows how doing domestic labor came to be regarded as part of the image of the Zionist woman (Gofer, 2009: 129). In general women, as those responsible for childcare and for the domestic sphere, were the primary target of educational initiatives in Palestine as elsewhere (Hirsch, 2011).

Third, in the context of Zionist colonization, violating the rules of hygiene stood for more than proletarian masculinity. For the halutzim, behavior which defied the rules of hygiene was associated with the Arabs and signified a native status. Julia Dushkin, a Hadassah dietician who in the early 1920s had joined a group of road constructors by the sea of Galilee in order to change their diet and lower the morbidity rate among them, noted that the halutzim refused to drink filtered water, since they wanted to be ‘exactly like the Arabs’ (Lichtenberg, 1995: 189). A halutz named Yosef Pikar (b. 1897, Bukovina) wrote in 1921,

In the kitchen in the corner – a kerosene stove with a big dirty pot, covered with a layer of soot, standing on top of it. We sit to eat around it. Obviously cleanliness in our place is very deficient. We drink stream water, live just like the Arabs.

He continued, commenting: ‘Our legs became tanned and dark like the Arabs’. We step on thorns, on burning sand, and do not feel any pain’ (Erez, 1964: 231). ⁵ Zvi Lieberman (b. 1891, Ukraine) told how most of the members of his collective sat at the table in the evening in their dirty work clothes, and sometimes with a filthy kerchief, ‘according to the habit of the Bedouins’ (Havas, 1947: 272). As several scholars have noted, the attitude of the halutzim towards the Palestinian Arabs was ambivalent. On the one hand, they were perceived as primitive and inferior; on the other hand, Palestinian men, and particularly the mythological figures of the Bedouin or the fellah (farmer), represented traits which were highly valued in the context of Zionist colonization, such as bravery, physical prowess, abstemiousness, endurance in the face of hard conditions and attachment to the land (Even-Zohar, 1990; Bartal, 1997).

Abstemiousness was attributed with another meaning by the halutzim: it signified the sacrifice of the pioneer, who endured difficult conditions and renounced personal comfort for national interests (Neumann, 2011). The following story demonstrates this. In kibbutz Tel Yosef, founded in 1921 by members of the Labor Battalion – a communal workers’ organization ⁶ – the first baby was put to sleep in an empty sugar box, which the baby’s parents had washed in boiling water, padded with clean sacks and covered with white sheets. Other kibbutz members, particularly women, argued that the group should provide the baby with a real crib, but her father refused, arguing that there was nothing wrong with the box. The former insisted, and the issue was raised in a meeting of the Battalion’s Central Committee, where it developed into a heated debate. Many members objected to buying a crib, arguing that it was a luxury, and that its purchase would amount to indulgence. A member named Simchoni banged on a table and yelled that this was not the purpose for which they received national funds, collected with great difficulty all over the world. Others supported the purchase of a crib, among them future Zionist leader and MP Yitzhak Tabenkin (b. 1888, Bobroisk), who stated that it was the workers’ role to raise a healthy generation, questioning how they are to do this, without creating the most elementary conditions necessary for this purpose. Eventually the decision was taken not to purchase a crib, to the parents’ satisfaction (Tzur et al., 1981: 185).

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Figure 2.

Pioneer buying soap: Halutz buying soap from a Jerusalem merchant, 1931.

Texts written by halutzim often express a manifest position of indifference towards the body. Phrases like ‘we did not notice’ or ‘we did not mind’ (the dirt, the pain …) are repeated in many texts. For example, a member of the Labor Battalion named Yitzhak Rochel, son of an industrialist from Kremnitz, wrote,

One cannot say that the sanitary and hygienic conditions in the tent, next to the camels’ stables, were the very best, but we did not notice it, as we did not notice many other things. The important thing was not one’s private life, but to take part in building the country, with our own hands …. (Ya’ari, 2004: 73)

Another worker named P. Tanpilov wrote,

We used to wake up for threshing at two o’clock at night, because the nights were cooler and one could make more progress at work. Rest during daytime wasn’t comfortable, due to the heat and the bothersome flies – but who would notice such things? (Havas, 1947: 440)

Degania founder Shmu’el Dayan (b. 1891, Ukraine) tells how members used to sneak to the storeroom at night in order to snatch some food. According to Dayan, the food shortage affected the work and the farm:

In the evening some 40 members registered for work and sometimes only 15 went, the others could not get up due to sickness and weakness. People asked for advice, gave advice, but more often than not used to dismiss these kinds of things out of lack of attention to such petty things, like caring about food … the few members did not use to insist on this matter, since they did not want others to suspect them of materialism, of concern for their stomachs. (Dayan, 1935: 75)

Obviously, one has to acknowledge hunger, dirt and flies in order to not notice them. These excerpts demonstrate the kind of cultivated indifference towards the body, and other material matters, which characterized the culture of the early halutzim.

Practices in context

As I argued in the previous section, for the halutzim, unhygienic behavior signified a range of meanings, which were bundled in their specific version of ‘proletarian masculinity’. However, as I will demonstrate below, the practices of the halutzim did not form a coherent whole. Regarding hygiene as a cultural repertoire, rather than as the product of a coherent habitus, does not rule out the existence of specific dispositions among the halutzim; rather, it directs us to examine hygienic conduct as involving relational and contextual practices deriving from available repertoires or in other words, as social practice.

First, while in certain areas of life the halutzim were wont to break the rules, in others, they made sure to keep them. One of these areas was childcare. Despite high levels of morbidity in the agricultural settlements, infant mortality rates were particularly low. For instance, during the years 1929–1931 mortality rate among babies in the Jezreel Valley (Marj Ibn ’Amer) was 27–33 per thousand, compared to 73 deaths per thousand in 1931 in Tel Aviv. ⁷ When epidemics broke out in various kibbutzim, they often skipped over the children (Fishel, 1936; Sandler, 1945; Strauss, 1946). As we saw above, even the parents who refused to accept a crib made sure to wash the box with boiling water and pad it with clean sacks. The importance attributed to keeping the rules of hygiene in the context of childcare may be gauged from kibbutz members’ reactions to their violation by Miriam Baraz (b. 1889, Kiev) upon the birth of her son Gideon, the first child in Degania, in 1913. Given the lack of any childcare arrangement which would allow her to return to work, Baraz took Gideon with her to the cowshed, where he was licked by the cows and bitten by mosquitoes and flies. Degania members fiercely protested, arguing that the baby might get ill, and that Baraz must be more committed to taking care of him, but to no avail (Baraz, 1959: 67–68; Sinai, 2003: 80; Tzur et al., 1981: 80–81).

As both Baraz’s and the crib’s story demonstrate, rather than embodying an oppositional or resistant way of life, the community of the halutzim sustained a tension between two options, which became particularly salient in the context of childcare: that between violating the rules of hygiene in the context of shaping a ‘proletarian way of life’ and obeying the rules of hygiene in order to raise a ‘healthy generation’ (itself not disconnected from internalized notions of the proper way of life). With the progression of the Zionist settlement process and the development of kibbutz education, this tension was gradually resolved in favor of the second option.

Second, not all rules of hygiene were violated by the halutzim. For instance, sources suggest that many halutzim actually liked to wash. Yitzhak Rochel, whose claim not to have noticed the dirt was quoted in the previous section, actually dwells on the bathhouse at the Jaffa pioneers’ house in a letter to his parents written shortly after his arrival in Palestine: ‘There is also a good bath house’, he wrote, ‘to which we were taken right upon arrival, and we washed from ourselves all the filth of the Diaspora, and entered the new life in Eretz Israel [the land of Israel] pure and refined’ (Ya’ari, 2004: 68). If dirty clothes signified proletarianization, the dirty and sweaty body often required frequent washing. Chaya Tanpilov, the wife of Tanchum Tanpilov (b. 1888, Romni), one of the founders of Degania, tells how Tanchum used to return from work, wipe the sweat off his forehead, take off his sweaty clothes, get clean ones and walk to the distant shower. The same ritual was repeated even on the day his son was born. After taking a silent, happy glance at the baby, she tells, he left to take his daily shower (Ben Ya’acov and Sion, 1981: 15).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Beds: Sde Eliyahu group, 1939

Third, the rejection of the bourgeoisie repertoire was not only a matter of ideology. In spite of physicians’ claims concerning the persistence of Diaspora habits, for many of the halutzim, the hygienic repertoire, or rather components of it, was what they were required to comply with back home. In contrast, life in groups of young men, in an environment considered wild, far from the supervision of the family and ‘decent’ society, allowed them to adopt a relaxed attitude towards the demands of hygiene. Thus, the arrival of women in the groups sometimes affected the hygienic condition not only as labor power, but as a supervising eye. Studies have shown that the gendered division of labor did not skip over the communities of the halutzim. Despite the ideology of gender equality which became associated with kibbutz society, childcare and domestic labor were women’s tasks (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 1992). In fact, domestic labor was one area in which the halutzim functioned as employers. The first collectives used to hire women (halutzot) to perform tasks such as cleaning, washing and cooking. These women, who were called ‘collective housewives’, were paid directly by the halutzim, and were not considered equal members in the group (Gofer, 2009: 94; Tzur et al., 1981: 65). Shimon Ben Zvi (b. 1890, Minsk) tells how a beautiful and kindhearted woman, A., arrived to work in the kitchen of his collective, which previously included only men, and revolutionized their ‘bachelor way of life’. According to Ben Zvi, before the arrival of A., group members did not use to clean the shack’s floor, which was always covered with sand: ‘on the face of it, what’s there to clean? The sand will still be there after cleaning as well’. The beds were also left unkempt: ‘The bedding used to lie disordered on the stools, since [members] were certain that a stranger’s eye will not look into the shack. And anyway, what’s the use of making the beds in the morning, when you have to make them again in the evening?’ The situation changed after A’s arrival: A. only needed to threaten that she would clean the floor, and immediately volunteers were found to do it. Members also began to make their beds on a regular basis, and ‘everyone made an effort to decorate his bed in white sheets, inherited from home, which at first wallowed in boxes and cases like useless objects’. The habit of wearing work clothes the whole day changed too: work clothes were replaced with Sabbath clothes – a code word for clean shirts and trousers, and the bare feet were covered with shoes, even polished shoes (Havas, 1947: 474–475). As this story demonstrates, hygienic practices are not necessarily products of deep-seated dispositions. Rather, they take shape, and attain meaning, in the framework of specific social interactions.

The hygienic conduct of the halutzim seems to have manifested a particular way of life, specific to a certain time, place and life circumstances. It gradually disappeared as they went through a process of ‘bourgeoisification’. It was not only the bourgeoisification of individuals, but the consolidation of the kibbutz education system, especially from the mid-1930s, which caused a gradual change in ways of life, including hygiene, in the kibbutzim, although even towards the end of the Mandate period, various epidemiological and public health studies presented deplorable hygienic conditions in some of the kibbutzim. During the 1930s and 1940s, the kibbutz population grew considerably, agricultural production was modernized and the standard of living rose. The number and share of women in the kibbutzim grew as well – in some of the older kibbutzim, they amounted to 50 percent of the members. The birthrate also rose from less than one child for two couples in the 1910s and 1920s to 1.3–1.76 children per couple. Since the mid-1930s, children’s caretakers received a special training course, organized by Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) and the Sick Fund (Berman, 1936: 122). The kibbutz education system developed as well, and was characterized by the strong involvement of educational experts (Fogiel-Bijaoui, 1992: 224–225). All these developments contributed to the hygienization of kibbutz society.

Conclusion

Contrary to the Zionist image of the healthy and vigorous pioneer, who attains physical and mental redemption by working the land, physicians often lamented the utter disregard for hygiene among the halutzim – behavior which they attributed to the latter’s ignorance and indifference in matters of physical health. The halutzim, for their part, construed their hygienic misbehavior as signifying ‘proletarization’ and defiance of bourgeoisie norms. However, a close examination of their practices, and the meanings which they attached to them, reveals a complex and contextual repertoire, shaped by such factors as anti-bourgeoisie sentiments coupled with middle-class sensibilities, economic constraints and making do, gendered dispositions and division of labor, self-fashioning and breaking loose of social norms.

Rather than being the products of a deeply entrenched disposition for self-control, as Elias’ model suggests, hygienic practices, and their meanings, are contextual. As I have argued in this article, hygiene is best regarded as a cultural repertoire – as a structured set of models, which may be performed in various ways, and for various purposes. As the case study of the halutzim suggests, these ways do not always comply with the rationalizations and subject positions offered by official discourse.

The halutzim themselves sometimes referred to their way of life as manifesting self-control, or, in their words, ‘conquest of the self’ (e.g. Kaniel, 1997: 108); however, the set of practices which they associated with self-control was quite different from the one which Elias associated with it. Dayan, for instance, wrote, ‘You must … conquer your civilized and urban drives, the legacy of the Diaspora and the middle ages’ (Dayan, 1935: 35). And Labor ideologue Berl Katznelson (b. 1887, Bobroisk) wrote, ‘Our work is secondary conquest: we conquer first and foremost ourselves, educate ourselves in work and experience, make ourselves an instrument worthy of its cause’ (Kaniel, 1997: 108). Conquest of the self, then, meant not succumbing to the desire for comfort associated with a hygienic way of life, but rather putting up with the hardships of physical labor and life on the frontier, as a form of personal sacrifice for national goals. Seen in this way, conquest of the self was not a property of the civilized bourgeois but rather of the ‘dirty worker’.