Ulysses Essay 33 (52:11)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 4

“The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias”

Bloom stops for a moment to look desirously, almost erotically, at the pork sausages on display in the shop window of Dlugacz, the Jewish butcher: “He breathes in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pig’s blood.” Noticing that there is just one pork kidney still available for purchase, he quickly enters the butchery, only to find that his neighbor’s housemaid is ahead of him at the counter. Bloom silently hopes that she will not buy the lone remaining kidney and thus deprive him of his anticipated breakfast. But for the moment his erotic attention is drawn away from the pork display to the housemaid’s ”vigorous hips” and “strong pair of arms” as she requests some pork sausages from the “ferreteyed butcher”, pays him and takes her change. While this is going on, Bloom picks up a printed page “from the pile of cut sheets” in which the butcher wraps each customer’s meat purchase, and begins to read it; and although he finds the subject matter “interesting”, it does not distract him from continuing to fantasize about the housemaid, hoping that the butcher will deal with him quickly so that he will be able to “catch up and walk behind her, behind her moving hams. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines.”  Unfortunately for him, the housemaid takes off in the wrong direction: “He sighed down his nose: they never understand.” (It doesn’t seem to occur to him that maybe they understand too well). 

The sheet of paper that Bloom has taken up carries two advertisements seeking foreign investments in Zionist agricultural projects in Ottoman Palestine. As an advertising man (Bloom canvasses ads for two of Dublin’s daily papers) he reads the notices in great detail and finds them thought-provoking: they correlate with his ruminations about the Orient during his sunlit walk to the butchery, they remind him of his past occupation as a clerk superintending sales in the cattle market; but most of all they sharply reflect on his own life and his convoluted identity – Jewish and Irish, Catholic and Protestant – in a country dominated by hated English overlords. In this sense he is reminiscent of Moses, who on the birth of his firstborn son in the land of Midian where he had fled from the wrath of the Egyptians, named him “Gershom” (“an alien there”) explaining “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22), the unusual biblical tautology emphasizing Moses’ awareness of his confusion of identities (Israelite by birth, Egyptian by upbringing, Midianite by marriage) that eventually culminated in his leadership of the Israelite exodus out of Egypt with the aim of returning the people to the Promised Land of Canaan.  Similarly Herzlian Zionism, epitomized in the advertisements that Bloom is reading, sought to take the oppressed Jews out of the diaspora and resettle them in their ancient homeland with the express purpose of normalizing their status as self-ruling citizens of a recognized nation among the nations.

The first advertisement that catches Bloom’s attention depicts a model farm at Kinnereth (henceforth spelled “Kinneret” as it is now usually transliterated) in Ottoman Palestine. The Kinneret model farm really existed, although it was founded only in 1908, making it one of not a few anachronisms in Ulysses. The model farm can still be visited in the village of Kinneret where it is now known as “Chatzar Kinneret” (The Kinneret Courtyard”) having been rehabilitated as a historical museum illustrating the rise of Zionist agricultural settlement prior to the founding of the State of Israel. Kinneret is situated a few miles south of Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, known in Hebrew as Agam (“Lake”) Kinneret – the name popularly but probably erroneously attributed to the biblical term for a harp or lyre  (“kinor”) alluding to the lake’s harp-like shape. There are references to the “Sea of Kinneret” in the Tanach (e.g., Numbers 34:11 and Joshua 13:27) and in the New Testament where it is referred to as “The Lake of Genneserat (Luke 5:1) and the Sea of Tiberias (John 6:1), and of course it is the site where Jesus “walked on the water” as described in three of the gospels where the body of water is simply termed “the sea”, its geographical location being defined by references to the lakeshore towns of Genneserat (Matthew 14:34 and  Mark 6:53) and Capernaum  (John 6:16).

Joyce was probably not aware that while the original purpose of the declaredly socialistic model farm at Kinneret was indeed simply to train agricultural workers, over the years it attained major significance in the political, economic and military evolution of the yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine). Preeminent contemporary Israeli institutions that can trace their roots to the  Kinneret  “model farm” include the ubiquitous food co-operative Tnuva that still monopolizes meat and dairy production (albeit having been recently sold to a Chinese entrepreneur); Kupat Holim, the predominant Israeli socialized health system; Bank Hapo’alim – “The Workers’ Bank” – now the richest and most capitalistic bank in Israel, its majority shares being owned by Shari Arison, the heiress of luxury cruise shipping magnate Ted Arison; the Solel Boneh construction company (responsible for massive infrastructure  projects in Asia and Africa as well as in Israel itself); and the pre-state Haganah paramilitary organization which metamorphosed into the I.D.F with the establishment of the State of Israel.

But undoubtedly the most important sociological contribution of the farm at Kinneret was the genesis of the idea of the kibbutz. This form of agricultural communal living was to influence thinkers throughout the world, including Noam Chomsky and Bruno Bettelheim. The revolutionary idea that people could live and work in a totally egalitarian system based on “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” supposedly without any class or gender conflict, was first put to the test among seven young pioneers (among them Moshe Dayan’s father) who split away from Kinneret in 1909 to form the first kibbutz settlement (Degania), just a few miles to the south at the point where the Sea of Galilee has its outlet into the lower Jordan River.

In time kibbutzim were established all over Palestine, especially after it became a British mandate with the conquest of the country by General Allenby in 1917. They played a leading role in the Jewish defense system in pre-state Palestine, and many of the political leaders of the yishuv were “kibbutzniks” who when free of official duties would return to their kibbutz homes from Tel Aviv or Haifa or Jerusalem and take up their agricultural roles in the cowsheds or the banana plantations, or as food servers according to the dining hall roster. Meals were eaten communally, and gender equality was attained by transferring the children after weaning to the care of “metaplot” (child-carers) in special age-stratified children’s homes, the parents only meeting their children for a couple of hours towards evening when the daily work was done. In more recent years communal dining (except on Shabbat and festivals) has largely been replaced by home cooking, and in most kibbutzim – except for a few ideological holdouts – children now generally sleep at home with their parents like their urban counterparts. The kibbutzim, peopled predominantly by pioneers from Eastern Europe (mainly from Russia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia), gradually became economically prosperous and established regional food processing plants as well as a medley of non-agricultural industries. But with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 a new challenge awaited the kibbutzim, due to the huge influx of oriental immigrants from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.

Many of these immigrants found themselves sent to live by the government in unlovely, rather Bolshevistic and quite slummy apartment blocks in speedily erected and dusty “development towns”. From these they looked with envy at the green lawns, red roofs and Olympic-sized swimming pools of the nearby kibbutzim, who ensured that their children would have no contact with the oriental immigrants by establishing their own selective kibbutz school system. However, the new immigrants had no option but to take up employment in the regional food processing plants established by the kibbutzim. Here a Marxian inversion took place: the “socialist” European kibbutzniks were suddenly the overseers of the often underpaid oriental workers. One of these workers at a food packing plant not far from Kinneret was a sophisticated, handsome and charismatic French-speaking young man from Morocco named David Levy, who led a revolt, persuading his fellow workers to ally themselves with Menahem Begins’s hyper-nationalistic and violently antisocialist right wing Herut party, which had until then been mainly supported by Israel’s urban petit bourgeoisie made up of the shopkeepers, factory-owners and professionals of Tel Aviv (who, like the kibbutzniks, also hailed from Eastern Europe, but unlike them were mainly of Polish origin). Levy campaigned against Ben-Gurion’s ruling Mapai socialist coalition which he labeled as oppressive, condescending and deculturalizing (and indeed Ben-Gurion strongly advocated a melting-pot philosophy of speedy Israelization of the new immigrants to be achieved mainly by universal conscription of both males and females into the army). The rule of Mapai at that time seemed to be immutable and it easily won Israel’s first eight general elections, probably in large measure due to the fact that it controlled all the instruments of economic and political power in the country: the giant Histadrut labor federation, the Kupat Holim health system, the huge Solel Boneh construction company, and of coursed the agricultural base of food production throughout the country. But after the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur War, the alliance between the bourgeois right wing Herut party and the oriental antisocialist and downtrodden oriental immigrants crystallized into a critical mass and brought Begin to power in 1977 (and David Levy to a senior cabinet position). The rest, as they say, is history, although the first policy move of the ostensibly super-bellicose Begin was to make an unprecedented about-face by signing a peace accord with Anwar Sadat in which he agreed to a total Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula that had been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six-Day War. (It remains to be seen whether Begin’s heirs can make an equally historic and courageous move by agreeing to withdraw from the West Bank so as to create a Palestinian State alongside Israel).

A postscript: In January 2017, Leor Grady, an Israeli artist of Yemenite extraction who had recently returned from New York to Israel, exhibited his work at the “Kibbutz Gallery” run by the Kibbutz Movement in the upscale “Old North” quarter of Tel Aviv. The exhibition, comprising videos and installations, dealt with the “Kinneret Yemenites” – a group of early twentieth century immigrants from Yemen who arrived in Ottoman Palestine in 1912, and were sent by the yishuv authorities to live and work at the Kinneret Farm. Grady named his exhibition “A Natural Worker”, based on a 1908 article in a Hebrew newspaper in Palestine (“HaZvi”) where the writer, discussing the generic characteristics of the Yemenite Jews, concluded that (in contrast to the Eastern European Jewish pioneers) the Yemenite is “a natural worker, capable of performing any form of labor, without embarrassment, without philosophizing, without singing…and is of greater utility even than our own idealistic workers …with all due respect to them.” And indeed the “socialist” members of the Kinneret Farm community housed the new Yemenite immigrant families in intolerable and overcrowded conditions, while virtually enslaving them to drain the surrounding marshes and to carry out backbreaking agricultural work in the intolerable heat of the Jordan Valley where temperatures exceed one hundred degrees Fahrenheit during most of the summer. When the Yemenites pleaded for improvement in their living and working condition (in beautifully composed letters in classic Hebrew), tensions between the two communities reached a boiling point, and eventually the yishuv authorities evacuated the Yemenite families in 1920 from the Kinneret Farm to a citrus producing settlement near the town of Rehovot in central Palestine where their descendants live to this day.

Thus Zionist/Israeli socialism since its earliest days – great in word, poor in action, and (to be euphemistic) highly ethnicized.