Re-evaluating Antiquity: Archaeology as Theme and Metaphor in Israeli Fiction, 1950-1991

Yael Chaver

Zionist culture, basing itself on the Land of the Bible, adopted local archaeology as one of its prooftexts. Archaeology is a major theme and a metaphor in mainstream Hebrew literature of the 1940s and 1950s. The gradual demystification of the communal Zionist ethos, of which archaeology was a part, was manifested in the literature as early as the 1950s, decades before its onset in the culture as a whole. This paper explores the shifts in attitude towards archaeology which occurred in Israeli literature in the decades following independence in 1948. The theme of archaeology is analyzed in four works of fiction written between the 1950s and the 1990s. In each of these works archaeology as a reification of the past is a major theme, manifested through the setting and the characters. This analysis shows a consistent interrogation of the mainstream Zionist values attached to archaeology. The issue is addressed differently by the writers, yet they all tend towards the same conclusion: skepticism towards traditional Herzlian Zionism. These literary works foreshadow a massive and fundamental cultural shift in Israeli society: an interrogation of the hitherto unquestioned function of the past.

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