{"id":73137,"date":"2020-04-08T16:11:19","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T13:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=73137"},"modified":"2020-04-08T16:11:19","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T13:11:19","slug":"the-old-new-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-old-new-city\/","title":{"rendered":"The Old-New City"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At the end of the nineteenth century, Theodore Herzl traveled far and wide to enlist support for his vision of a sovereign Jewish state as the solution to what many referred to as “the Jewish question.” Herzl realized that he needed to help people imagine what this reality could be like. So he wrote a utopian novel depicting daily life in the not-yet-born state some fifty years hence. He called his futuristic German novel <\/span>Altneuland<\/span><\/i> (“Old-New Land”), and published in 1902, it envisioned an “old-new” land for an ancient and renewing people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Altneuland<\/span><\/i>, was translated into Hebrew shortly thereafter, by another prominent Zionist thinker and writer, Nahum Sokolow. Perhaps<\/span> divinely inspired, Sokolow didn’t go for the sort of prosaic, hyper-literal title he could have chosen. Instead, he borrowed the highly poetic word pair <\/span>Tel Aviv<\/span><\/i> from the biblical phrase “And I came to the <\/span>golah<\/span><\/i> [the exile community] that dwelt in Tel Aviv by the Chebar Canal” (Ezekiel 3:15).<\/span><\/p>\n

Though this biblical Tel Aviv was located in Babylonia, Sokolow chose it both as a corrective\u2014the name of the Zionist vision being taken from a place of the first great exile\u2014and because he understood the phrase to mean exactly the same combination of “old” (<\/span>tel<\/span><\/i> = archaeological mound) and “new” (<\/span>aviv<\/span><\/i> = “spring”) that Herzl had intended with his original title, <\/span>Altneuland.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

But where did Herzl get his idea of <\/span>altneu<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> “old-new,” for his book in the first place? Chances are he was impressed by one of the oldest still functioning synagogues in all of Europe, the Altneuschul of Prague. Built in 1270, it was called “the New Shul” since at the time there was an even older one standing. But when a newer synagogue was built in the sixteenth century, the new one, of course, became “the New Shul.” And so the older “new shul” became known, as it is to this day, as the Altneuschul. That much is history.<\/span><\/p>\n

But there is a conjecture, fanciful but nonetheless lovely, among the Jews of Prague. According to legend, the original name comes not from the Germanic-Yiddish <\/span>alt-neu<\/span><\/i>, “old-new,” but actually from a purely Hebrew phrase that sounds very similar: <\/span>al-t\u2019nai<\/span><\/i>, meaning “on condition.” This version has it that stones for the synagogue<\/span> were miraculously brought from the Temple in Jerusalem itself, “on condition” that they be returned when needed there\u2014that is, when the Messiah comes, the Jews return to Israel, and the Temple is rebuilt.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the city of Tel Aviv, an ancient mound of the new spring, whose name originally had its roots in the Babylonian exile, has been renewed in the Herzlian vision of the “Old-New Land,” which is also connected to a messianic vision of return. And if Israel is the Alt-neu Land, then Hebrew becomes the “alt-neu-<\/span>langue<\/span><\/i>,” which has ancient roots entwined with the ancient roots of the people who call it their own, but whose revival has defied Herzl\u2019s pessimism over and over again since the state was founded.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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