Jewish art is a series of facts. For thousands of years we were a barren people. We shared the fate of our land. A fine, horrible desert sand blew and blew over us until our sources were buried and our soil was covered with a heavy layer that killed all young buds. The excess in soul power that we possessed at all times expressed itself in the exile merely in an indescribably one-sided spiritual activity that blinded the eyes to all the beauty of nature and of life. We were robbed of that from which every people takes again and again joyous, fresh energy — the ability to behold a beautiful landscape and beautiful people. The blossoming and growth beyond the ghetto was unknown to and hated by our forebears as much as the beautiful human body. All things, from whose magic the literature spins its golden veil, all things, whose forms are forged through art’s blessed hands, were something foreign that we encountered with an ineradicable mistrust. … The very thing in which the true essence of a nation expresses itself to the fullest and purest, the sacred word of the national soul, the artistic productivity, was lost to us. Wherever the yearning for beauty raised itself with tender shy limbs, there it was suppressed with an invisible, merciless hand. … A whole and complete Jewish art will be possible only on Jewish soil, just like a whole and complete Jewish culture as such.”[i]
[i] Gilya G. Schmidt (ed. and trans.), The First Buber: Youthful Zionist Writings of Martin Buber (Syracuse: 1999), 48, 50.
