| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the processes of selecting human figures on banknotes since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Given Israel’s relative youth, along with the permission to read all proceedings and correspondence of the Bank of Israel Banknotes and Coinage Planning Committee from its inception in 1955 to 2012, we will decipher the selection of 33 human figures and the ideological motivations behind it. We will contextualize the discussions of the committee in Israeli social and political history; explain the belated, 1969, selection of human figures for illustrations on banknotes; depict the ideological outline of the committee; assess its level of independence; and reveal the working dynamics of a hegemonic body that is compelled to reflect the central personas of a society in the process of founding and institutionalizing a nation state – in this case, the State of Israel.
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