The article offers an account of the role of moral censorship in the shaping of language and culture within the complex process of nation building. The author show how puritan Zionist ideology led to the suppression of erotic material and the adoption of a puritanical approach to literature that dominated Israeli culture well into the 1970s and 1980s. He draws parallels between this Zionist ideology and Victorian Puritanism. The article reveals the self-contradictory aspects of this form of censorship, which eventually undermined Zionism.