Gendered and National Identity through the Letters of Esther Raziel-Naor

• In Event: “I only knew to tell about myself?” Zionism and Gender in Egodocuments by Three Women in the First Half of the 20th Century (Hebrew)

Abstract

My lecture centers on the gendered and national identity of Esther Raziel-Naor, a Revisionist Zionist in Mandatory Palestine. I would like to analyze her gender-oriented perceptions of her function as a mother and wife alongside her national perceptions, as they are reflected in her letters to her husband.

Raziel-Naor (1911-2002) was born in Lithuania to a traditional Zionist family that settled in Tel-Aviv in 1914. In 1936 she joined the Irgun underground (ETZEL), served as a combatant, and became the highest-ranking woman in a command role – a Headquarter member.

On March 4, 1944, Esther was arrested by the British secret police with her husband Yehuda, due to their involvement in the Irgun. Esther was sent to the Bethlehem jail and released to house arrest after a year. Yehuda was moved between several jails in the country then sent to a detention center in Africa, returning only in July 1948. The couple did not see each other for four years, during which they corresponded regularly, under the British censorship restrictions. The letters preserved testimonies of Esther’s daily life, as well as the seminal events that the YISHUV lived through during the conclusion of the British Mandatory regime.

For the purpose of a critical reading of the letters and their analysis, I will be aided by the concepts “mother-tongue” and “nation-tongue”, as they are used by Hannah Naveh (1998) and Efrat Zakbach (2022). The term “mother-tongue” will be used to characterize the components and use of “natural” language in “daily life” and the rhetoric characterized by representations identified as “feminine” and “motherly”. The content of “mother-tongue” deals mainly with what takes place in the “private sphere” and accentuates the individual experience, whereas the content of “nation-tongue” deals with what occurs in the public-national sphere.

In examining the letters I will utilize the methodology of “micro-history”: Raziel-Naor’s story is a private example that tells the story of many women in the Yishuv who coped with similar issues. Therefore, I intend to discuss whether, and to what extent, this test case represents the notions of gender in the YISHUV in the period under discussion.

Author

• Naama Teitlbaum-Karrie, The Open University of Israel