“A huge national assemblage”: Tel Aviv as a pilgrimage site in Purim celebrations (1920–1935)

The Tel Aviv Purim carnival was the largest public event in Mandatory Palestine. However, due to its capitalistic character, the carnival has been ignored in the scholarship on the Zionist civil religion, which was regarded as having been created by the Zionist socialist/agricultural ethos alone. This article employs an anthropological methodology, analyzing the carnival as a pilgrimage event and revealing its ideological nationalist contents, which positioned Tel Aviv as a symbolic center of the Yishuv and thus powerfully presented the emerging nation in a visible manner. By exploring some common values shared by capitalism and nationalism, the analysis uncovers the ideological world of urban Zionism, which had far more impact on the sociocultural than on the political-institutional level.