Shmarya Guttman

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Shmarya Guttman (1956)

Shmarya Guttman שמריה גוטמן (born January 15, 1909 in Glasgow ; died October 22, 1996 in Naʿan ) was an Israeli geographer and archaeologist .

Life

Shmarya Guttman's parents were Russian emigrants who stayed in Scotland for a few years before immigrating to Palestine in 1912, then part of the Ottoman Empire . The family settled in Merchawia . Guttman's father, a baker, was one of the organizers of Poale Zion . Shmarya Guttman, who had four siblings, grew up in an environment where there was great sympathy for socialism and secular Zionism. He studied at the agricultural school of Mikveh Israel and became a leading functionary of the youth organization Histadrut haNoʿar haʿOved wehaLomed . In 1930, at the age of 21, he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Naʿan. "The working life in this collective was not able to fulfill the amateur orientalists, geographers, historians and archaeologists."

On behalf of the Zionist youth organization Hechalutz he traveled to Lithuania in the 1930s to promote emigration to Palestine.

Before the establishment of the State of Israel, Guttman worked for the Arab section of the Hagana secret service. On behalf of the Mossad le Alija Bet , he worked in Iraq in the summer of 1941, together with Enzo Sereni and Ezra Kadoorie. A pogrom had taken place in Baghdad in June 1941 , which was a turning point in the history of the Jewish community in Iraq. Frustrated by their military defeat by the British Army, Arab nationalists murdered around 130 Jewish civilians. Many more people were injured and their property destroyed. The emissaries , including Guttman, trained Iraqi Jews in self-defense, provided them with Zionist education and organized their illegal emigration .

Guttman was a representative of the Jediʿat haʾAretz movement, which promoted intimate knowledge of the land of Israel as a form of possession; Hebrew ידיעת הארץ jediʿat haʾaretz is a loan translation of the German term Landeskunde . The traditional, text-based Jewish education was replaced by excursions . Borrowings from reform pedagogy and the contemporary European youth movement are clear. Geology, history, botany and other subjects were taught along the way, but above all an emotional relationship with the land . Guttman led numerous cultural excursions and cooperated with Berl Katznelson and Yitzhak Tabenkin , leaders of the Mapai . He had a personal friendship with Israel Galili, the organizer of the Hagana. In the early 1940s Guttman held no official office, but was part of the inner leadership of the Zionist movement. In 1942 he conducted a five-day Masada seminar with a group of pioneers, who then acted as multipliers for Masada excursions.

During the Palestine War, Guttman headed the Arab section of the Palmach . After his discharge from the army, Guttman began studying archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . He led numerous groups to Masada. 1953 Guttman led a group of the kibbutz movement ( Kibbutz HaMeuchad ), which undertook an exploration of the north palace of Masada; Guttman published the preliminary results in 1954 in the Bulletin of the Israel Exploration Society. This publication led in 1955/1956 to a scientific survey by Masada under the direction of Nahman Avigad and finally from 1963 to 1965 to the great excavations under the direction of Yigael Yadin .

During the 1955/1956 survey, Guttman was responsible for the team's safety, providing access to the various areas, and researching the irrigation system.

Guttman's contribution to the study of Masada was highlighted by Yigael Yadin: “He made Masada an attraction for Israeli youth. For years he devoted his time, energy, and inventiveness to studying Masada. Not only was he the first to correctly describe the snake path in 1954, but he also had it repaired, excavated the gate at which the path ends and carried out excavations in Roman camp A. In addition, he drove the research of the Herodian water systems. After all, it was he who repeatedly called on the scientific institutions in Israel to organize excavations in Masada. "

After the Six Day War , Guttman led emergency archaeological excavations in the Golan Heights and in the highlands south of Hebron . There he researched the ancient synagogue of Susija, which had already been identified as such in 1938 : in 1969 he excavated the ground monument on an experimental basis and from 1971–1972 he excavated and restored it together with Ehud Netzer and Zeʾev Yeivin . In the Golan, Guttman led several campaigns for archaeological digs in Gamla .

In 1991 the University of Haifa awarded Shmarya Guttman an honorary doctorate in recognition of his services to the archeology and geography of Israel.

literature

  • Nachman Ben-Yehuda: The Masada Myth. Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel , Madison 1995.
  • Nachman Ben-Yehuda: Sacrificing Truth. Archeology and the Myth of Masada , Amherst 2002.
  • Nachman Ben-Yehuda: Excavating Masada. The Politics-Archeology Connection at Work . In: Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, Nachman Ben-Yehuda (Eds.): Selective Remembrances: Archeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts . University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 2007. ISBN 978-0-226-45058-2 . Pp. 247-276.
  • Honora Howell Chapman: Masada in the 1st and 21st Centuries . In: Zuleika Rodgers (ed.): Making History: Josephus and Historical Method . Brill, Leiden / Boston 2007. ISBN 90-04-15008-0 . Pp. 82-102.
  • Ari Shavit : My promised land. Triumph and tragedy of Israel . C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2013. ISBN 978-3-570-10226-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ There are several spelling variants for the name: the first name also deviates from Shmaryahu שמריהו, the last name גוטמאן instead of גוטמן, which makes no difference in pronunciation.
  2. ^ Nachman Ben-Yehuda: The Masada Myth. Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel , Madison 1995, p. 71.
  3. ↑ a b c Ari Shavit: Mein Gelobtes Land , Munich 2013, p. 120.
  4. ^ University of Haifa: Honorary doctorate for Shmarya Guttman (1991)
  5. ^ Reeva Spector Simon: Iraq . In: Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, Sara Reguer (eds.): The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times . Columbia University Press, New York 2002, pp. 347-366, here p. 350. 364.
  6. ^ Nachman Ben-Yehuda: The Masada Myth. Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel , Madison 1995, p. 189 f.
  7. ^ Yaacov Shavit, Mordechai Eran: The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books. A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism , Berlin 2007, p. 444.
  8. ↑ Shaul Kelner: Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage, and Israeli Birthright Tourism , New York / London 2010, pp. 24-26.
  9. ^ Ari Shavit: Mein Gelobtes Land , Munich 2013, pp. 120-138.
  10. ^ University of Haifa: Honorary doctorate for Shmarya Guttman (1991)
  11. ↑ Michael Avi-Yonah , Nahman Avigad , Yohanan Aharoni , Immanuel Dunayevsky, Shmarya Guttman: The Archaeological Survey of Masada, 1955-1956 . In: Israel Exploration Journal 7 (1957), pp. 1-60. ( PDF ), here p. 10.
  12. ↑ Michael Avi-Yonah, Nahman Avigad, Yohanan Aharoni, Immanuel Dunayevsky, Shmarya Guttman: The Archaeological Survey of Masada, 1955-1956 . In: Israel Exploration Journal 7 (1957), pp. 1-60. ( PDF ), here p. 11.
  13. ↑ Yigael Yadin: Masada. The last battle for Herod's fortress . Hoffman and Campe, Hamburg 1967, p. 255. See ibid., Pp. 209–211: The floor plan of Roman camp A created by Guttman differs considerably from the plans by Schulten (1933) and Richmond (1962).
  14. ↑ Othmar Keel, Max Küchler: Places and landscapes of the Bible. A handbook and study guide to the Holy Land . Volume 2: The South , Göttingen 1982.
personal data
SURNAME Guttman, Shmarya
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Guttman, Shmaryahu
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Israeli geographer and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow
DATE OF DEATH October 22, 1996
Place of death Naʿan