Telling the Story of a Hebrew City

Yaacov Shavit

Tel-Aviv Did Not Want to Be a City

Tel-Aviv did not want to be a city. In fact, it was afraid to be a city. The fear arose from the anti-urban trend and the negative image of the city—"the dark city"—in the nineteenth century, as well as the Zionist concern that the city would attract most of the new immigrants and would compete with the agricultural settlements for resources. Only in the 1930s did Tel-Aviv realize that it was becoming a city after all.

What it really meant to be was a suburb, or a modern small town, but certainly not something on the order of the average European city. Even today, Tel-Aviv, with 390,000 residents, is certainly not a large city.

Why Is Its Hundredth Anniversary Noteworthy?

From the perspective of the world outside Europe, there is nothing special about the founding of Tel-Aviv one hundred years ago. During the nineteenth century, outside the continent, and especially in the United States, many cities were established, and not as a result of government initiative. Within Europe, however, the situation was different; the only new city in the last 200 years is Odessa, which was founded by the Czarist government at the end of the eighteenth century. Within Eretz-Israel the situation was also different. Tel-Aviv is the only new city since Ramle was established in 717 BCE by the Umayyad caliph Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik. It is the first so-called "Jewish city" since King Herod built Caesarea in 20-10 BCE and Tiberias was founded by King Herod Antipas in 22–17 BCE. Thus Tel-Aviv was the first city founded in Eretz-Israel in 1,200 years, and it was the first Jewish city founded there in some 2,000 years.

What Does Tel-Aviv Have in Common with Other Cities?

Although cities have much in common, each has its own history, character, and image. What does Tel-Aviv, with its brief history, have in common with other cities, and what makes it unique? Its uniqueness lies in its being the first city established by Jews for Jews, and more so, it was the first opportunity in general for Jews to found a city and to shape its character.

Meir Dizengoff, the head of the neighborhood committee and later the city's first mayor, declared in 1921,

We are conducting the most important experiment in the entire period of our exile. We want to prove how we will behave in a new, modern city, that will be totally Jewish, that we will light by ourselves, guard by ourselves, improve by ourselves, and keep clean and wholesome [by ourselves].

He referred to a city in the urban-physical sense, as well as to the character of urban life.

The history of Tel-Aviv offers a unique opportunity to see how Jews built a city, what kind of city they wanted to build, and what kind of city grew from under their hands. If Tel-Aviv did not want to be a city, how does this statement fit with the declarations and texts that, already in the first decade of its existence, and certainly after that, seemed to predict the development of the Ahuzat Bayit neighborhood into a city?

These declarations were just rhetoric. A pamphlet dated 31 July 1906 raised the idea of establishing a Jewish neighborhood outside Jaffa. Its author, Akiva Arieh Weiss, who was the most important promoter of the neighborhood, wrote that it would be "the first Hebrew city" and that it would eventually become "Eretz-Israel's New York." He did not mean New York as a model for a city, but its role as the port of entry for immigrants. Weiss described this "modern" city:

In this city we will build the streets [so they have] roads and sidewalks [and] electric lights. Every house will have water from wells that will flow through pipes as in every modern European city, and also sewerage pipes will be installed for the health of the city and its residents.

Weiss's vision still lacks many of the elements of a modern city, and certainly of a metropolis. S. Y. Agnon wrote in his novel Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), "Sixty houses aren't sixty cities, but we who do not aim too high, even smallness is great for us." The widespread use of the word "city" (stadt) should not mislead us; Tel-Aviv had no intention of becoming New York, Odessa, Vienna, or Berlin.

Other urban visions were expressed. The writer A. A. Kabak, for example, wrote in 1914 that Tel-Aviv would become a large city in which "a rich culture will flourish, large shops [will have] splendid display windows, electric streetcars will pass by with a clatter, locomotives will shriek, [and] factory smokestacks will blast." Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor, predicted in 1924 that TelAviv would become a metropolis and a great Jewish cultural, commercial, industrial, and political center.

However, as some of the city's first residents stated, In truth, no one foresaw the coming of Tel-Aviv, ... when we drove the first stake in Kerem Jebali ["vineyard"—the first 85.5 dunams that were purchased by the first residents of Ahuzat Bayit] we never dreamed that our little neighborhood would grow into a big city and that the city would become the heart of the country, and if someone had predicted generations ago that within twenty-five years a big city would be built on the sandy desert north of...