Rehavia: the Israel that could have been and never was

The housing problem is neither new nor typical of Spain.

It was also suffered, for example, in Jerusalem in the 1940s, just before the founding of the State of Israel.

The family of the future novelist Amos Oz (born 1939) lived in a neighborhood called Kerem Abraham, that is, Abraham's vineyard.

It is a misleading name, which evokes wine-producing greenery and peasant luxuries, but in reality it was a poor or almost poor neighborhood, where thousands of Jews recently arrived from Eastern Europe spent a good part of their small salaries renting houses no larger than thirty square meters. , where three generations were huddled together on camp beds.

So the dream of Oz's father, who was a frustrated scholar, who wanted to be a university professor and had to settle for a librarian position, was to live in the neighboring neighborhood, Rehavia.

, the writer's father would have spent idle hours in the library

some bargain and calculating in case one day, with a stroke of luck and tightening their belts even more, they could move to the place of culture, to the neighborhood of the writers and philosophers.

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When they walked through Rehavia, the father pointed out some neighbors, whispering to his son, in an admiring tone: "Look, a prestigious intellectual."

And little Amos believed that "intellectual" was a disease of the legs, since almost all those his father pointed out were ailing gentlemen who walked with canes.

It could be the famous Kabbalist Gershom Scholem —who, at his late forties, looked older, not only from the look of a five-year-old for whom every adult is old, but because at that time people were older—, or the philosopher Martin Buber, yes, venerable and bearded, or the poets Else Lasker-Schüler or Kaléko Mascha.

A picture of the Rehavia neighborhood in Jerusalem in 1934. Liszt Collection (Sepia Times/Universal Images Gro)

They all had in common, in addition to the locomotor disease of the intelligentsia, having been born in Germany.

Because Rehavia was in Jerusalem, but it was actually a piece of the Weimar Republic that survived Nazism.

So, even if Oz's parents had managed to live there, they would still have felt like outsiders, being born in Lithuania and the Ukraine: when they didn't want their son eavesdropping on grown-up conversations, they spoke to each other in Russian.

In Rehavia, when Hebrew was put aside, everyone spoke German.

The Hamburg publisher and scholar Thomas Sparr got a glimpse of the remains of that world when he settled in Jerusalem in 1986.

He then heard about the

, the Jews of German origin who had dominated that neighborhood and who at that time were disappearing by biological imperative.

Their libraries and their belongings were sold in markets and sidewalks, dissolving an inheritance that was not only decisive for the origin of the State of Israel, but also a testimony and survivor of an annihilated culture in Europe.

In his book

(recently translated into Spanish in Acantilado), Sparr reconstructs the history of Rehavia through some of its most illustrious neighbors and with the help of memories (between curtains and envious) of Oz, who narrated that world from the neighborhood next door. in his novelized memoirs,

(Siruela).

One book inevitably leads to another, and from

he leaves with a dozen pending readings that refer to a lost and, to a large extent, betrayed world.

Cover of the essay 'Grunewald in the East: German-Jewish Jerusalem', by Thomas Sparr (Acantilado publishing house).

Sparr begins his story by imagining a gathering that never happened between Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Anna Maria Jokl, Hannah Arendt, Mascha Kaléko, Lea Goldberg, Werner Kraft and Else Lasker-Schüler.

He meets them at the Atara cafe, which was an Israeli version of the Berlin cafes where they met before Hitler adjourned him.

That particular discussion didn't happen, but it might as well have, since all the characters met more than once in Rehavia.

Not all of them came to Jerusalem fleeing Nazism, as the neighborhood was founded in 1920 on undeveloped land and following the philosophical and aesthetic ideals of the garden city, but Nazism turned them into the last representatives of an annihilated civilization that made Jerusalem reason, democracy and enlightenment their gods.

Some of these intellectuals, who made up the elite of German Jewish intelligence between the wars, also gave ideological and philosophical consistency to the project of the State of Israel, conceiving it as a much more pluralistic utopia than Zionism of a narrower nationalist path advocated, and far more liberal than the kibbutz socialists advocated.

The

Rehavian

In other words, it could give a safe home to the Jews who had been persecuted for so many centuries, and at the same time it could test an enlightened and open democracy like the one attempted in the Weimar Republic.

It was what Scholem, the greatest scholar of the Jewish esoteric tradition, called "humanist Judaism.

, which in the cafes and streets of the neighborhood (and in the Hebrew University, which was installed there) generated a "synthesis of modernity and orthodoxy".

In Starr's words: "A marriage of worldly way of life and faithfulness to the law,

, a fusion between faithfulness to Torah and the worldly laws of the land."

Aerial view of the Rehavia neighborhood, in an undated image.

Bettmann Archive

ultra-orthodox boom

If the first objective (to build a safe harbor for the Jews) was achieved, only the memories of a handful of families and the books in German that Starr himself saw piled up on the sidewalks of Rehavia while the heirs of those

emptied their houses.

Today, Rehavia, like so many other neighborhoods in Jerusalem, is eminently ultra-Orthodox, and the only law that is accepted is that of Moses.

Not even the smoke from the cigars remains from the gatherings at the Atara cafe.

It is inevitable to read

as the Israel that could have been and perhaps never was, a feeling that is accentuated when one, through reading inertia, is immersed in that narrative monument that is

, where Oz tells —by telling himself, whose life passes in the heart of the intellectual Zionism that gave birth to that State— the origin of Israel.

Perhaps everything was ruined with the Yom Kippur war, when the Israelis began to live a permanent mobilization and abandoned their pluralism of librarians and teachers to surrender to uniforms, phylacteries and ringlets, in relentless violence against Palestinians and neighboring nations that has led to the current country, authoritarian and delivered to the religious right.

Or perhaps utopias, by definition, fail as soon as they become contaminated with reality, and what sounded good in the after-dinner conversations at the Atara turned out to be impossible when they became laws and institutions.

We will never know what the Bubers or Lasker-Schülers would think of 21st century Israel,

German Rehavia lasted as long as its neighbors lived.

Towards the sixties, decisive in the future of Israel, the young Oz (at that time, an enthusiastic

devoted to the socialist ideal) no longer found himself with those intellectuals, since most of them had died.

The country they conceived grew on its own, free from their tutelage and their admonitions, and that world was preparing to disappear.

He today he only lives in the prose —splendid, elegant and wise— of Thomas Sparr, in this essay without pretensions to elegy, but as powerful as

Zweig's

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