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The application of racial categories to the Jews by Zionist physicians and anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century has been the focus of several recent studies. In these studies 'nationalism' serves as the primary explanatory framework for Zionists' embrace of racial concepts. This article focuses on the discourse of Zionist men of science, both in Europe and in Palestine, concerning the repercussions of mixed marriages on Jewish racial qualities. It argues that Zionist racial discourse, and eugenic discourse in particular, cannot be interpreted in terms of 'nationalism' alone. In some contexts 'race' was used to establish Jewish unity, whereas in others it was used to establish diversity and hierarchy among Jewish groups. This contradictory use of 'race' is explained as stemming from the ambiguity of racial categories and from the tension between a nation‐building project and a cultural project of Westernization which took place in the context of Zionist colonization in the Orient.RésuméL'application de catégories raciales aux Juifs par les médecins et anthropologues sionistes de la première moitié du XXesiècle a fait l'objet de plusieurs études récentes. Dans celles‐ci, le « nationalisme » est le cadre principal d'explication de l'adoption des concepts raciaux par les sionistes. L'auteure se concentre ici sur le discours des hommes de science sionistes, en Europe aussi bien qu'en Palestine, à propos des répercussions des mariages mixtes sur les qualités raciales des Juifs. Elle avance que le discours racialiste sioniste, et en particulier le discours eugénique, ne peut être interprété uniquement en termes de « nationalisme ». Dans certains contextes, la notion de « race » a été utilisée pour établir l'unité des Juifs, mais dans d'autre elle a servi à diversifier et hiérarchiser les groupes juifs. Cet usage contradictoire de la « race » s'expliquerait par l'ambiguïté des catégories raciales et la tension entre un projet de création d'une nation et un projet culturel d'occidentalisation qui s'inscrivait dans le contexte de la colonisation sioniste au Proche‐Orient.

Thus wrote Dr. Asher Goldstein in the Hebrew daily paperHaʾaretz(The Land) in 1935, lamenting the disregard for hygiene among Palestine's Jews. In Goldstein's text, hygiene is metonymic to Western progress, which the Jews were to bring with them to Palestine. Yet the Jews in this text occupy an ambivalent position: they are not only to bring the West to the "entire backward Orient" but also to themselves. A hygienic way of life, far from being a secured component in their cultural compendium, is presented as a goal yet to be achieved. Indeed, it constituted a project in which Dr. Goldstein—author of several hygiene manuals and editor of the health column inHaʾaretz—played an important role.

Recent scholarship on Zionism has shown Orientalism to be a pregnant concept through which to study the formation of Jewish society and culture in Palestine and later Israel. As this body of scholarship suggests, Zionist self-perception as an outpost of Western civilization in the Orient has played a fundamental role in shaping both Zionism's relations to the Palestinians and to its "internal Others"—mizrahi, literally, Oriental Jews. Indeed, it was Zioinist Orientalism which created themizrahicategory in the first place, turning heterogeneous Asian, North African, and Palestine's Sephardic Jewish communities into a single, supposedly coherent group in need of modernization and civilization, against which the 'westernness' of EuropeanashkenaziJews was repeatedly asserted. What these studies often overlook is that the Zionist 'civilizing mission' was initially directed at (east) European Jews. Thus, for many of the "culture builders" who during the mandate years operated in theyishuv—the Jewish community of Palestine—Jewish westernness was deemed a project, something yet to be achieved.

"This edited volume offers a new critical approach to the study of Zionist history and Israeli-Palestinian relations, based on the encounter between history and anthropology. Informed by the anthropological method of setting large questions to intimate settings, the book examines processes of Zionist colonization, nation-building and Palestinian dispossession by focusing on encounters between members of different national, religious and ethnic groups "from below"-through paying close attention to life stories and reconstructing everyday practices and micro-histories of places and communities. Thus, it tells a complex story in which the practices of historical actors are not simply reducible to a single underlying logic of colonization, even as they participate in the production and reproduction of colonial structures. This approach effectively undermines the prevailing tendency to study national communities in isolation, projecting onto the past an essentialist and rigid separation. Rather than assuming two clearly bounded and monolithic national groups, caught from the start in perpetual conflict, this volume probes their historical production through their evolving relationships, and their varied and shifting political, social, economic and cultural manifestations. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in an array of fields, including the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations, anthropological perspectives on settler colonialism, and Zionism"--

In this article, we consider Connell's theory of masculinity through a phenomenon we encountered in our respective research projects, one focusing on the construction of masculinity among early Zionist ideological workers and the other focusing on present-day military masculinities and ethnicity in Israel. In both contexts, a bodily performance which marks the breach of "civilized behavior" is adopted in order to signify accentuated masculinity. In both, a symbolic hierarchy of masculinities emerges, in which Arabs—and in the case of Golani soldiers, also "Arab Jews," that is, Jews who descended from Arab countries—are marked as more masculine than hegemonic Ashkenazi men (i.e., men of European descent). Thus, while our case studies support Connell's argument that masculinity may be practiced in various ways, the hierarchical relationship between masculine styles appears to be more multilayered than Connell's theory suggests. We connect the tension between masculine status, understood as a location within a symbolic hierarchy of masculinities, and social status in our case studies to the contradiction at the heart of modern masculinity. We argue that in order to account for this tension, which may arise in specific interactional contexts, we need a concept of masculinity as a cultural repertoire, of which people make situated selections. The repertoire of masculinity is where the elements and models that organize both masculine practice and perceptions concerning masculinity are stored. While selections from the repertoire of masculinity cannot be conceived as voluntary, the conventional nature of cultural repertoires allows for some leeway in the selections that people make. Hence, it allows for a more flexible relationship between social positions and masculine styles.