Zionism: The Creation of a Jewish State in Pictures

By Norbert Schiller

Introduction:
Modern day Zionism or Jewish nationalism was a political movement founded by Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jew, at the end of the 19th century. At that time, Jews living in Eastern Europe and Russia were fleeing persecution in droves and settling in Ottoman-administered Palestine. Herzl concluded that the reason Jews were susceptible to persecution was that they were scattered all over the world with no homeland of their own. Consequently, the first World Zionist Congress was convened in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, Herzl declared Jerusalem and the “Promised Land” (Eretz Israel) to be the homeland for the Jewish people.

I recently acquired a collection of images that were used by the Zionist movement to attract Jewish settlers to Palestine. The compilations was put together shortly after the end of WWI and consists of 108 postcard-size photogravures preserved in an album with captions in Hebrew, and English. The photos were taken between 1910 and 1916 by the photographer Shlomo Narinsky, a Russian immigrant who showed beautiful, almost dreamlike landscapes of a gentrified Palestine. Even when Narinsky included shepherds and farmers in his photographs, they looked far more European than Palestine’s indigenous people.

The album was created to shed light on the Holy Land as a Jewish homeland and also to attract Jewish immigration. The following story analyzes the most relevant images in the collections to show how photography can be manipulated to fuel an ideological agenda.