Early Stage

One of the hidden dilemmas accompanying the development of propaganda media for all the JNF target populations over a long period was the quandary of written as against visual propaganda, ‘the written word versus the picture’. In the development and application of propaganda means such as books, games, and booklets of different sorts, the JNF Propaganda Department worked with conventional means, the chief innovation being in the areas of content, design, and distribution methods. The Department’s belief in the written word did not falter: the staff assumed that the Jewish target population would be moved by a written text because of their religion, which indeed was manifested through the written word. The JNF staff continued to develop and distribute written forms of propaganda. In these cases they were on solid and familiar ground, as distinct from the case with other forms, such as visual propaganda, which had developed rapidly since the beginning of the twentieth century. The improvements and technological innovations in printing pictures in newspapers and books, and the different forms of projecting images, were not lost on the JNF people. From the very creation of the organisation there had been awareness of the existence of visual media and the possibilities of exploiting it for the purposes of Zionist propaganda. In the period under study we do indeed detect attempts to develop a new approach to the Jewish and Zionist world of the time through the exploitation of visual propaganda in its various forms: pictures, stamps, transparencies, filmstrips, movies, and the like.

The visual propaganda of the JNF, like that of other Zionist organisations, was intended to serve defined ideas through pictures of narrow range of subjects: the landscape of Eretz Yisrael, which represented both the Zionist dream and its realisation, and the countenances of the illustrious leaders and personages who had worked for that realisation. The leaders of the Zionist movement were made aware of the use of such pictures as visual propaganda in a set of proposals published in November 1899 in the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, written by Avraham Neufeld, although several other investigators had suggested it too.