In a letter dated 26 September 1937, Hannes Meyer explored the prospect of a Jewish architectural style with his former student and protégé Arieh Sharon: "I would also be interested in the
character of the Jewish construction enterprise in your country. Are there any attempts to establish a distinctive Jewish-national style? Even if it were just exquisite kitsch of the highest order I would still be interested."
"Jewish style" remains a misnomer in architectural history, yet the Jewish national movement itself was very much preoccupied with its architectural approach. It finally found its "exquisite kitsch of the highest order" in what is portrayed in this article as "Pidgin Bauhaus", a delirium of white walls and flat roofs, erupting around 1930 and spreading across the Zionist divide for two formative decades. The instantaneity of this eruption and the unequivocal embrace of modernism are confounding. Until 1930, the search for a distinctive Jewish, Hebrew or quasi-Semitic style was at the core of local architectural practices and was connected to a larger discourse of Jewish cultural revival. During the 1910s and '20s there was hardly a trace, built or written, of Neues Bauen, let alone of Bauhaus. Practically every public edifice of the period had a revivalist allegory written on its walls and each residential building was dressed to the occasion in a pastiche of oriental motifs, Eastern European neo-classicisms and Jugendstil biblical fantasies.
After 1930, such semantic confusion and impromptu iconography were literally inadmissible and considered offensive to the national project. Architectural associations, city engineers, newspapers and periodicals, design competitions and Levant Fairs all enlisted to naturalize modern architecture as a casual dress code, adapt it as a spoken vernacular and propagate it as the ubiquitous marker of urban and rural Zionism.
Civil servants, ideologues, developers, poets, Beaux Arts architects - all acquired an instant modernist savoir faire, a cosmopolitan whiteness-infused agreeable ambience of education, acculturation and elsewhereness. A bric-a-brac of modified cubist, expressionist, Corbusian, Bauhaus, even constructivist effects created entire villages and cities of makeshift modernism. Exiled from Europe, New Objectivity was domesticated in the Levant as Yiddishkeit, a German-Hebrew vernacular, peculiarly eclectic, decidedly popular.
What was the secret charm and sudden grip of modern architecture on the Jewish imaginary? Why did it become endemic in Palestine like nowhere else, indeed without a manifest, formal theory, building industry, urban crisis or a "modern condition" to speak of?
The critic Julius Posener, arriving in Palestine in 1935 as a Jewish refugee, was perplexed by the modernist pidgin he found in Tel Aviv. In a letter to Le Corbusier he described the city as an awkward mise-en-scene of misappropriations and anachronisms:
Apartment buildings are crowded on plots of 15 × 50 square meters, facing towards narrow, dusty streets, but with a modern pretension; corner windows ... brutal openings ... Looking at these houses one would like to say: Your architect left Stuttgart (or Breslau) in 1926. He stopped at the latest trend of the day before yesterday. He never understood that Palestine is not Silesia, and that architecture has progressed since 1926.
In another derisive attack, Erich Mendelsohn portrayed Tel Aviv in the local Palestine Post (29 December 1940) as a caricature of occidental misfits hyperventilating in the "subtropical climate of Palestine". Mendelsohn's own project in Palestine was the articulation of a new "Semitic Architecture", an oriental modernism based on native Arab structures. This short-lived project resulted in several built projects, most significantly the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, but led to an esoteric cul-de-sac of pseudo-autochthonous modernism.
Julius Posener's writings in Palestine took a similar regionalist tenor. Three years after his impassioned letter to Le Corbusier, he published a conclusive essay on traditional and modern building in Palestine in the September 1938 issue of Das Werk. His earlier culture shock is replaced by indulging self-mockery and an introspective commentary on what he diagnoses as a Jewish taste for belated fashions and second-hand goods:
"In Germany, the architecture of flat roofs, ribbon windows, cantilever slabs, corner windows, stairwell slits and 'dynamic cornices' has been called 'Succoth Architecture' (Laubhüttenarchitektur) and an attempt was made to link it to our oriental bloodline. The truth is that here it appears foreign and European. But it is also true to say that the Jewish architects and the Jewish public are very fond of this architecture" (Das Werk 25, 09/1938, p. 257-271, quote p. 263).
Following Posener's polemics, the Jews took the blame, as it were, for modern architecture's nomadic origin and, in a sudden leap of faith, appropriated modernism as their collective mark of Cain. The act of self-stereotyping, of embracing the aesthetic deficiency of "Succoth architecture", is instrumental and works on several levels. First, it provides the Jews with an architectural myth of origin. Their alleged traceless nomadism finally has a proper object, a building culture, rudimentary as it may be. Second, the modern style - especially when already outdated - is an elegant way out of the visual ghetto of the shtetl and its reincarnation in the eclectic search for a Jewish national style in Palestine. In other words, expulsion from the homeland is also the exodus from the diaspora, the opportune obliteration of centuries of "minor" Jewish culture, and the eventual prospect of universal assimilation.
And finally, while the indigenous trope of Succoth authenticates the Jews as primal orientals, as epic returnees, the image of white architecture safeguards their otherness in the Orient. "It seems alien and European here", Posener comments on the spectre of the modern style in Palestine, only to inversely mirror the Nazi allegation that the modern style seems alien and Oriental on German soil.
A Trojan horse in Stuttgart becomes a flying camel in Tel Aviv, an outlandish fancy of liminality, masquerade and cross-breed. Patently derivative and outdated, the exiled object of the avant-garde is divested of its critical stance, technological competence and aesthetic climax, but finally gets a life of ordinary complacency, vernacular transmission, and popular affection.
