The First Queer Hebrew? The Enigma of Baruch Agadati

Baruch Agadati was an extraordinary dancer and filmmaker, one of the best-known and most enigmatic figures in Tel Aviv in the 1920s and 1930s. Today he is largely forgotten, except for “Hora Agadati,” the popular dance he created and whose steps can still be learned on YouTube. Now he is being brought back into the public eye by a new fiction book by Dr. Elik Mishori, “Hebraism Hurts” (Carmel), which describes a fictional plot based on real people and places.

Agadati was born in 1895 in Bessarabia as Baruch Kaușanski, and studied classical ballet in Odessa. When he immigrated to the Land of Israel as a teenager, he studied painting at Bezalel, and adopted the nickname “Agadati” after being introduced to Hayim Nahman Bialik with the words, “This is Baruch the Agadati.” He soon became a celebrity in the first Hebrew city. Tall and powerfully built, the dance performances he created as a choreographer and performed alone were a colorful avant-garde experience. Together with his brother Yitzhak, he also made two pioneering films, “The Adventures of Gadi ben Soshi” (1931), the first animated film directed in the country, and “This Is the Land” (1935), the first Hebrew talkie.

Studies emphasize the camp and gender-fluid character of his dances, which moved between masculinity and femininity in the characters he portrayed. These were liberated and daring explorations of movement and form, beyond the rigid conventions of the pre-state Yishuv. The assumption that he was probably attracted to men places him among the first known gay artists in the Land of Israel, and this is subtly woven into the book’s plot, alongside the loneliness and tragedy of his life and the understanding that he would always remain an unfulfilled and misunderstood artist.

In the 1920s, Agadati used to astonish Tel Aviv with expressive dances, almost ecstatic in their intensity, in the guise of an Arab, a Yemenite, or a Hasid. He accompanied the dances with European piano music or new Hebrew music, strange and unfamiliar, and many viewers were left frustrated, not understanding what they had seen. In the 1930s, Agadati organized the Adloyada and the festive Purim balls in Tel Aviv, including the “Queen Esther” ceremony, the first version of the Hebrew beauty pageant. Because he made money from it, his rivals, who competed with him for organizing parties for the working class, spread rumors with an implied homophobic edge, saying that on trips to perform in Paris he led a decadent lifestyle, took part in orgies, or ate with gold cutlery. In the spirit of the time, in the poor labor Zionist Land of Israel, these were accusations that could justify a boycott.

“I wanted to know who Agadati was and why people admired him,” says Mishori, a veteran historian of Israeli art and visual culture. “I created dialogues between Agadati and other figures, and although they are fictional, I am sure they existed in one form or another, because I based them on research and archival documents.”

“There is no conclusive proof that Agadati was attracted to men,” he explains, “but it can be understood between the lines, from what was written at the time. So in the book this is described implicitly, in a dance lesson for an Arab boy from Jaffa, in a meeting in Paris with his childhood friend from Odessa, and in a photograph I found, in which Agadati is photographed in his hut very close to a man named Yitzhak Hazin, with the words ‘soul friend’ written on the back.

“Based on dozens of photographs, I also reconstructed his dance steps in the book, since no filmed or written record of them remains. Although Agadati was a dancer with an impressive physical presence, in the photographs we almost never see his body. Even when he is photographed by the seashore with bare-chested friends, he is wearing a long coat, buttoned up to the collar. He is always dressed and covered, even while dancing. To me, that is a beautiful mystery. I discovered depths in him, and also how he was forced to create dances and popular events for the emerging Israeli collective, even though he was the embodiment of the avant-garde in Tel Aviv. In his time he was not understood, and in my book he is seen as having failed as an artist. And I think that is still true today, the more advanced and profound an Israeli artist is, the harder it is for him to remain that way in this country. No prophet is recognized in his own city.”