ColEMP · Understanding the top-down and bottom-up development of emotional styles in a modern colonial context: The case of the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine

How do emotional styles develop in colonial settings? What are their roles in the construction of settler identities? Such processes happen both “from below”—in the daily and often casual behavior of ordinary men, women, and children; and “from above”—in discourses about the ideal and actual characteristics of a settler. As the early Zionists, looking to execute their national project in the colonial world, fully realized, a colony, regardless of its function, always provides an opportunity to produce “new people.” In the case of the Yishuv—the Jewish community that coalesced in Mandatory Palestine—the top-down direction of this process can be identified in the extensive Zionist literature about the desired “New Jew” as well as in the attempts to embed his or her traits using printed matter (such as parents’ manuals and children’s literature). Drawing on this feature of the Yishuv, the research analyzes both the Zionist project of top-down emotional transformation and the actual expression and experiences of emotions in the burgeoning settler society. By integrating these two levels, the research goes beyond the existing scholarship, which usually focuses on one or the other, and breaks new ground in understanding how emotions were mobilized and how new emotional styles emerged in a colonial context. The outgoing phase, which will last two years at Harvard University, under the supervision of Prof. Derek Penslar, has two aims: (i) to understand how the colonial context (within which early Zionism operated) impacted ideas about new emotional styles; and (ii) to survey the attempts to bring these ideas into the homes of (the mostly European) settlers at the time. The incoming phase, running one year at Bar-Ilan University, under the supervision of Prof. Hizky Shoham, will assess the impact—or lack thereof—of the emotional transformation studied in the outgoing phase on the everyday emotional practices of families in the mainstream urban sector of the Yishuv.