The Fourth Aliyah arrived in Palestine en masse between June 1924 and June 1926. This was the first popular, mass Aliyah in the history of Zionism. It was dubbed ‘the bourgeois Aliyah’, or ‘The Polish Aliyah’. During these years, the immigration from Poland amounted in total to 48.47 percent of the total (32,911 of 67,886 immigrants).
One of the most significant socio-cultural motifs in the history of Zionism, is that of the ‘New Jew’. Was this ‘Polish Aliyah’ the desirable type of Jews —in terms of realizing Zionist ideals—for immigration to the Land? Did they merit the material rewards for their labour and achievements as well the accrual of social and national prestige? My paper will deal with these topics.
Based on documentary and journalistic material, the main argument of my paper will be that the immigrants who arrived in the period of the Fourth Aliya were not perceived as appropriate participants in the Zionist revolution, which sought to create a new brave, heroic and manly person, able to overcome any physical and mental challenge, who with his own hands would establish a new and productive society. They were not considered as idealized Zionist ‘new Jews’, but rather as typical of the long-established, exilic, petit-bourgeois, weak, Yiddish-speaking Jews. More than that, they were described as Jews who don`t aspire to liberate themselves from the chains of religion and tradition and to blend into the Middle Eastern landscape, and all their actions were guided by personal utility.