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 targeted as a people  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 where Herzl declared Jerusalem and the “Promised Land” (Eretz Israel) to be the homeland for the Jewish people.

The Zionist movement depicted a gentrified version of Palestine where the people and places looked European in order to attract Jewish immigration to the Holy Land..

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 more European than indigenous Palestinian.

The album was created to promote the Holy Land as a Jewish homeland and encourage Jews to emigrate to the promised land. The following story analyzes the most relevant images in the collections to show how photography can be manipulated to fuel an ideological agenda.