Dirty Arabs and timid Jews: Russian immigrants versus the Yishuv

Dylan Evans

25 November 2025

The old Yishuv

Theodor Herzl published Altneuland (The Old New Land) in 1902, six years after Der Judenstaat and four years after his first and only visit to Palestine. It is his utopian novel of return - a vision of what the land might look like after the Zionist movement has completed its civilising mission. But before Herzl unveils the gleaming future, he gives us the "old land" in its full Oriental decrepitude.

Before and after

Chapter Six is the crucial hinge in the narrative: the land as Herzl first saw it - backward, undeveloped, and populated by people who are stuck in the past. It is here that Herzl constructs the ideological architecture of his novel: the desolate ruin of a land, the backward natives, the contrast between the vigorous Russian Jews and the lazy Yishuv, and the proto-colonial logic that empowers one group by erasing the other.

In short, Herzl gives us the before that every utopian vision needs to contrast with its radiant after. And the way he paints this portrait is astonishingly revealing of his colonial assumptions, his European prejudices, and his ideological priorities. It is a chapter saturated with familiar Orientalist tropes: a barren land awaiting redemption, dirty and hopeless natives, and, above all, the noble arrival of the modernising settler who will lift the country out of its ancient slumber.

The plot is simple. Kingscourt and Friedrich Löwenberg, travelling companions on a world voyage, pause in Ottoman Palestine. Their first impressions are of decay. Jaffa is full of "dirty alleys," "vile odors," and "misery in bright Oriental rags". On their way to Jerusalem the travellers pass through miles of "sand and swamp", glimpse "blackish Arab villages", and notice "deforested hills". When they finally arrive, they find a city of "ragged people," "screeching women," and "hungry children" inside the walls.

In the midst of this desolation, they encounter two types of Jews: the timid, beggarly, indigenous Yishuv of Ottoman Palestine, who are virtually indistinguishable from the "dirty Arabs" and "poor Turks"; and the vigorous, cultured Russian immigrants who embody the future - rational, industrious, modern, and conscious of their national destiny. The contrast is not accidental. It is the foundation of Herzl's political argument.

The desolate land: Palestine as a blank canvas

Herzl opens the chapter with a visual assault. Palestine is rotting. Jaffa is "in a state of extreme decay," with filth, smells, and "forsaken" harbour works. The landscape is a picture of "desolation": fields "burnt over," villages peopled by "brigands," and hills stripped of trees. Even Jerusalem, under moonlight sublime enough to move Friedrich to tears, becomes by daylight "a flurry of dirty colors" and "musty lanes" full of "beggars" and "sick people."

This is Herzl's empty land trope in full force. Not literally empty, of course - there are bodies everywhere - but empty of value, empty of productivity, empty of meaning. It is a landscape awaiting its rightful stewards. The land's tragedy, Herzl insists, is not overpopulation or political oppression but neglect. What it needs is "water and shade," "forestation" - and, most importantly, the "people" who will finally cultivate it. That people, needless to say, does not include the Jews who already live there.

Orientalism without apology

Herzl's depiction of the locals is pure Orientalism, straight out of the travel literature of the period. Arabs are "dirty" and "brigands." Turks are poor and backward. Women screech; children run naked; misery wafts through the streets. These are not political actors, not historical subjects, but symptoms of a terminally stagnant civilisation.

What is striking is that Herzl extends this treatment not only to Arabs and Turks but to indigenous Jews as well. In Jaffa, "timid Jews lounged about - indolent, beggarly, hopeless." They are painted in exactly the same terms as the other natives.

This is the ideological sleight of hand on which the entire chapter depends. The Palestinian Jews - the Old Yishuv - are not just poor; they are portrayed as Oriental, as having been absorbed into the indolence of the East. They have lost the spark of the Jewish nation. They are Jews in name, but not in spirit. Their Judaism is exhausted, hollow, diminished.

This move allows Herzl to do something politically crucial: to argue that the land is empty of Jewish nationhood even when it is not empty of Jews. It lets him claim the necessity of a Zionist return not because there are no Jews in the land, but because there are no proper Jews in the land.

Enter the Russians

The ideological contrast arrives in the form of Dr. Eichenstamm and his daughter, the cultured Russian Jews who represent the beating heart of the true Jewish people. They speak in the language of national revival:

"We have a living tradition… a love of the past, and faith in the future. We are what our fathers were."

This is not a coincidence. Herzl casts the Russian Jews as the authentic nucleus of the Jewish nation - the ones whose Judaism is anchored in collective memory, suffering, and historical consciousness. These are the Jews who have resisted assimilation. These are the Jews who understand that nationhood is political and modern, not mystical or devotional.

Herzl's hierarchy becomes unmistakable. On the one hand, the Yishuv, the degraded and apolitical indigenous Jews - Jewish in name and ritual only, not in nationhood. On the other, the politically awakened Russian Jews - the vanguard of the future, communally organised, and ready to rebuild.

The modernisation mission

The next trope is even more familiar in the context of European imperialism: the modernising mission. Dr. Eichenstamm and his daughter are in Palestine to study eye diseases - an implicit reminder that the country is diseased, neglected, and in need of Western scientific intervention. "Dirt and neglect revenge themselves," he says. Everything is "in ruins," but it "could be beautiful," for "it is a golden land!"

This is the logic of colonial modernisation dressed in Jewish clothing. The settlers bring not only labour but medicine, education, sanitation, and European modernity itself. They will cleanse the land of its dirt, its blindness, its backwardness. They will save the natives from themselves.

And when they visit the new Jewish colonies - Rishon-le-Zion, Rehobot, and Katrah - the message becomes unmistakable. The colonies are "oases" in a desert of neglect. The fields are "well-cultivated," the vineyards "stately," the orange groves "luxuriant." The "cultured men working in the fields" - university students turned pioneers - are the new Jewish ideal. This is the birth of the New Jew: muscular, agricultural, modern, cultivated, a master of nature and a vehicle of national rebirth.

Colonial inversion

This is an inversion of the colonial trope in which the indigenous population is romanticised as pure and unspoiled. Herzl views the Jews who stayed behind not as ancestral custodians but as failures of Jewish history. In Herzl's vision, the Jews who never left the land are portrayed as Oriental natives, degraded and passive. The Jews who arrive from Europe - Russians, above all - are portrayed as the only authentic Jews, heirs to a national tradition, bearers of modernity and civilisation. The Arabs, by contrast, are background figures, politically irrelevant, lacking agency, and destined to welcome (or at least not resist) their own supersession.

Herzl takes another colonial dichotomy - civilised Europeans versus backward natives - and applies it within the Jewish people itself. The Jewish settlers are not returning to their long-lost kin. They are replacing them. In this logic, Palestine is not the home of the Jewish people. It is the home of people who happen to be Jewish but who no longer embody Jewishness. The true Jewish nation exists in Russia and Europe, and it must reclaim the land from its own co-religionists. This is an extraordinary ideological operation, and one with profound consequences.

Fatal consequences

The rhetorical structure of Chapter Six did not remain confined to the pages of Herzl's novel. Its tropes became embedded in the political imagination of Zionism. The land is desolate until the settlers make it bloom. The natives - Arab and Jewish alike - are backward and politically inert. The immigrants are the true Jews, the carriers of modernity, the rightful inheritors of the land. The indigenous population is irrelevant - mere human scenery.

If you believe that the land contains no real political subjects - only "dirty Arabs," "timid Jews," and "misery in bright Oriental rags" - then the building of a Jewish state looks like an act of benevolent modernisation, not displacement. And if you believe that the authentic Jewish nation comes from abroad, not from within Palestine, then the existence, desires, and historical claims of the Old Yishuv become an inconvenient footnote.

These discursive moves had real consequences. They justified ignoring Palestinian political agency, and they justified sidelining indigenous Jews who did not fit the national template. They helped create a political culture in which the settler's vision superseded the lived reality of the inhabitants - Arab and Jewish alike.

And there is one last irony worth lingering over. When the early Zionists founded a new settlement on the dunes north of Jaffa in 1909, they named it Tel Aviv - a Hebrew rendering of the German Altneuland, half-resurrected from Ezekiel (the "mound of spring") and half-lifted from Herzl's novel (the "old-new land"). It was meant to signal rebirth: antiquity fused with modernity, the ancient dust quickened by European imagination. But as with everything in Altneuland, the symbolism cuts both ways.

Tel evokes an archaeological mound, a civilisation built upon the rubble of earlier ones. Aviv, the fresh spring, insists on renewal. Together they capture the tension Herzl never resolved: the desire to build something dazzlingly new on land already thick with memory, presence, and competing claims. The ghost of Altneuland haunts both the name of Israel's first capital and the political imaginary - the ethnic strife between Jewish Israelis and Arab Palestinians whom Herzl rendered invisible, and the cultural estrangement between the heroic "New Jews" and the "Old Jews" whom Herzl dismissed as timid Orientals.

Tel Aviv stands today as both monument and warning: a testament to the half-forgotten dream of an "old-new land," and a reminder of the unresolved fractures which that dream carried within it from the very beginning.

Jerusalem towards the end of the 19th century.