The Founding of Tel Aviv
On the eleventh day of the month of Nisan in the year five thousand six hundred and sixty-nine, when the wind of the sea blew across the dunes north of the old port of Jaffa, sixty-six families of the Ahuzat Bayit…
Biblical Narrative
On the eleventh day of the month of Nisan in the year five thousand six hundred and sixty-nine, when the wind of the sea blew across the dunes north of the old port of Jaffa, sixty-six families of the Ahuzat Bayit society gathered on the empty sand and stood upon a rise. There was no road. There were no trees. There was no water save what they had carried in jugs. Akiva Aryeh Weiss, the watchmaker from Lodz, brought with him a pile of seashells and a pile of pebbles, white and gray, and he said: we will draw lots, and the Lord shall apportion the land.
He laid sixty-six gray seashells on one side and sixty-six white seashells on the other. On the gray he wrote the names of the sixty-six families. On the white he wrote the numbers of the plots. Then a child pulled a gray shell, and a child pulled a white shell, and a name was matched to a number, and so it went, sixty-six times, until each family had its plot. There was no contention. There was no haggling. The poorest tailor and the richest merchant trusted the chance of the seashells, and the photographer Avraham Soskin pressed the shutter, and that picture became the founding icon of the first modern Hebrew city.
They named it at first Ahuzat Bayit — the homestead — but in the next year, on the suggestion of Menahem Sheinkin and after some debate, they took a name from the prophet Ezekiel, who had spoken of a place called Tel Aviv where the exiles by the river Chebar had sat in their grief. Tel — the mound of the ancient past. Aviv — the spring of the new beginning. The name itself was a verse of poetry, and it was carried home from the city that Theodor Herzl had imagined in his utopian novel Altneuland, where Nahum Sokolow had translated 'Old-New-Land' as Tel Aviv.
The first house rose, and the second, and the streets were laid in straight European lines. The first Hebrew gymnasium, the Herzliya, was built in the dunes; its students walked to school through the sand. The first Hebrew theater rose. The first Hebrew newspaper. The first Hebrew bank. By the time the British army marched in to expel the Ottomans in 1917, three thousand Jews lived in Tel Aviv. Today the lottery photograph hangs in city halls and in classrooms, and every child who looks at it sees the moment when ordinary people drew shells from a heap and made themselves the first generation in two thousand years to build a Hebrew city of their own.
We were going to build a city — a Hebrew city, a Jewish city, the like of which had not stood in the world since the destruction.Akiva Aryeh Weiss, founding speech of Ahuzat Bayit, 11 April 1909
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The founding of Tel Aviv on 11 April 1909 is reconstructed in detail in Barbara Mann's A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space (Stanford, 2006), Maoz Azaryahu's Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (Syracuse, 2007), and Anat Helman's Young Tel Aviv: A Tale of Two Cities (Brandeis, 2010). The Ahuzat Bayit (Homestead) housing society had been founded in Jaffa in July 1906, when sixty Jewish families pooled funds to purchase land north of Jaffa from a Greek landowner, Mustafa Kassar, with assistance from Ya'akov Hankin and the Anglo-Palestine Bank.
The plot, of approximately 11 hectares of dunes known as Karm al-Jabali, was paid for in stages between 1906 and 1908. Architect Wilhelm Stiassny of Vienna had drawn up an initial street plan; Akiva Aryeh Weiss, the society's chair, then revised it on the European garden-city model that Patrick Geddes would later refine in his 1925 master plan for the city. The seashell lottery of 11 April 1909 distributed sixty-six plots; the Soskin photograph is preserved as glass-plate negative number 1004 in the Eretz Israel Museum collection.
The neighborhood was renamed Tel Aviv on 21 May 1910 at a general meeting of the society. The Hebrew name combined tel (archaeological mound, signifying continuity with antiquity) and aviv (spring, signifying renewal); it had been used by Nahum Sokolow as the title of his 1902 Hebrew translation of Theodor Herzl's Altneuland. The first municipal council was elected in June 1910 with Meir Dizengoff as chair; he would serve as mayor (with one interruption) until his death in 1936. The Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium opened in 1909 with 200 students; it was the first secondary school in the world conducted entirely in Modern Hebrew.
Tel Aviv received independent municipal status from the British Mandate authorities under the Tel Aviv Township Ordinance of 11 May 1921, separating it administratively from Jaffa. The city's population grew rapidly: 2,084 in 1914, 15,185 in 1922, 46,101 in 1931, 150,000 by 1936. The Bauhaus refugees arriving from Germany after 1933 — including architects Arieh Sharon, Zeev Rechter, and Genia Averbuch — designed over 4,000 buildings in the International Style, the largest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world. UNESCO inscribed the 'White City' on the World Heritage List in 2003 in recognition of this ensemble.
Tel Aviv was the first Jewish city in modernity not to be founded by religious immigration or by capitalist enterprise but as a deliberate cultural project — the urban form of the Hebrew renaissance.Maoz Azaryahu, Tel Aviv: Mythography of a City (2007)