New Culture Will Emerge from “jewish Meeting Pot” in Israel, Anthropologist Predicts

“The emergence of a new, original and indigenous culture in Israel is dependent upon the successful solution of the problems presented by the meeting and merging of fifty different racial communities from all over the world that make up the population of Israel,” declared Professor Raphael Patai, well-known Hebrew anthropologist, who is a member of the faculty of Dropsie College’s-newly established Institute for Israel and the Middle East. Dr. Patai spoke last night in the second of a series of lectures sponsored by the new Institute.

Speaking on the subject, “Israel, the Jewish Melting Pot,” Dr. Patai, who is the recipient of the first Ph.D. from the Hebrew University, said: “The mixed makeup of the population of Israel is a highly charged dynamic situation, in which opposing forces and trends can easily turn contact into conflict. Each community brings along to Israel its own traditional culture, its language, outlook, character and personality, widely differing from one another. In the cultural and social situation in Israel, one can observe the working of certain forces making for the continued segregation of these communities and for the perpetuation of their differences.

“On the other hand, equally potent, but probably even stronger, forces are at work in the opposite direction; common schools, common newspapers, social and economic contacts, common ideals and aspirations, all these tend to obliterate, or at least to diminish rapidly, the heterogeneous character of the various Jewish communities,” Prof. Patai pointed out.

Emphasizing that a certain amount of intermarriage exists between the various groups in the Israeli population, Prof. Patai concluded: “But it is still a question whether these ‘mixed’ marriages will assure proportions necessary to merge them effectively into one ethnic group. Thus, for some time to come, there will continue to be some element of conflict between the forces making for continued segregation and the maintenance of differences and the even stronger cultural, economic, and social forces that will inevitably make for development of a single people.”