ABSTRACT
Utopias are products of intellectual construction. Typifying this is Eisenstadt’s early oeuvre (1947–1956), which reveals two interrelated approaches: utopianism and orientalism. Based on a Saidian interpretation of these corresponding tendencies, Eisenstadt’s early works are explained in relation to the Zionist ideological mechanisms which dominated Israel’s initial phase of statehood. Eisenstadt’s portrayal of Israeli society depicts its members as individuals who must assume an active role in the realization of their political salvation to redeem themselves from previous forms of “diasporic” existence (“negation of exile”). In this imagined utopia, individual identities attain significance by serving the needs dictated by the dominate collectivist ethos. Integration into the normative sphere is hence understood as taking a constructive social role in the Zionist nation-building project. Eisenstadt’s utopian perspective marks Self and Other boundaries between those engaged in the Zionist state-building project – namely European Jews – and the non-European Jews (the Arab Jews/Mizrahim) who were considered to be languishing in a state of “anomie”. Corresponding with Israel’s etatist period, Eisenstadt’s use of structural-functionalist sociological terminology and political myths were a means in reproducing existing hierarchization of Europeans and non-Europeans immigrants. The chapter concludes that the sociological othernization of non-Europeans enabled and was integral to imagining Israeli polity in utopian terms.
