Background
Yonatan Ratosh, born Uriel Shelach, was born on November 18, 1908, in Warsaw, Poland. He was the son of Yechiel Halperin. He was brought up in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment. The family went to Palestine in 1921.
Jerusalem, Israel
Ratosh was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Yonatan Ratosh, born Uriel Shelach, was born on November 18, 1908, in Warsaw, Poland. He was the son of Yechiel Halperin. He was brought up in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment. The family went to Palestine in 1921.
Ratosh was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In the mid-1930s, Yonatan Ratosh worked on the staff of two daily newspapers, first Haaretz and then the rightwing Ha-Yarden. In 1938 he left Palestine to avoid imprisonment by the Mandatory authorities for his political activities but returned with the outbreak of World War II.
Ratosh published several volumes of poetry; the first, "Ḥuppah Sheḥorah" ("Black Canopy," 1941), caused a scandal because of its sensuality, its innovations of language, and the Canaanite motifs intrinsic to the writer's political-cultural thought. He translated many books into Hebrew, including such classics as "Cyrano de Bergerac" (1965) and the "Fables of La Fontaine."
Ratosh founded a political movement, originally called the Young Hebrews, but dubbed the "Canaanites" by its opponents, and he published articles on politics. He coined many new Hebrew words, worked in Hebrew literature and linguistics, and advocated the use of the Latin alphabet for Hebrew.
Attempting to organize his followers, Ratosh started a Canaanite magazine called Alef in 1950. The publication only lasted a few years and while the Canaanites failed in organizing a mass movement, they had a profound impact on Israeli culture. Ratosh continued publishing poetry and enjoyed a brief renaissance as an ideologue after the Six-Day War.
His collected poetry was published 1975-1977, followed by a number of collections, among them "Shirei Ahavah" (1983), "Ḥuppah Sheḥorah" (1988), and "Shirei Ḥeshbon" (1988), as well as the letters (1937-1980), which were edited by Y. Amrami (1986).
In 1939 Yonatan founded the Canaanite movement, which rejected both Judaism and Zionism in favor of a new "Canaanite" identity which was, as Yatosh believed, more organic to the Fertile Crescent, and which sought to liberate all who lived the region from the stranglehold of Abrahamic monotheism. He published an "Epistle to the Hebrew Youth," the first manifesto of the Canaanites. In this tract, Ratosh called upon Hebrew youth to disaffiliate themselves from Judaism and declared that no meaningful bond united Hebrew youth residing in Palestine and Judaism. Ratosh argued that Judaism was not a nation but a religion, and as such, it was universal, without territorial claims; one could be Jewish anywhere.
Ratosh was distinguished by his political-cultural philosophy. His insistence on being defined as a "Hebrew" rather than as a "Jew" reflects his conviction that the population developing an identity in Palestine/Israel is a new nation - as the descendants of immigrants in a country of immigration invariably become. Through its choice of the Hebrew language and culture, the new nation is defining itself as the cultural descendant of the ancient Hebrew-Canaanite nation, indigenous to what is generally known as the Fertile Crescent, which produced such cultural documents as the Ugaritic tablets and the body of literature that, extensively and tendentiously edited, has come down as the Hebrew Bible. The terms "Jew" and "Jewish" are, in Ratosh's opinion, to be reserved for the adherents of the religion of that name, developed by a group of Judean emigrés during the Babylonian Exile and imposed on the people of the land when part of them returned there in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. To apply the term now as a national determinant is in his view a distortion, and the resulting identification between the old-new Hebrew nation and the Jewish communities of different persuasions in the rest of the world runs counter to history. In addition, Ratosh believed that the identification is injurious to the Hebrew nation and to the role that it must play in the national revival of the lands of the Euphrates. Ratosh had considerable influence on contemporary Hebrew poetry.
There are three main dimensions of Ratosh's Hebrew vision: political - the urge to sovereignty, to be obtained if necessary through violence; cultural - a radical rejection of the Jewish religion and Diaspora communities; historical - using the Canaanite, pre-Jewish civilization in the land of Israel as a basis for a modern identity.
Yonatan had two sons: Saharon Shelah, a mathematician, and Hamman Shelah, a magistrate judge.