Читать книгу Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925 - Brian J. Horowitz - Страница 10

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A ZIONIST IN ODESSA, CIRCA 1900–1903

I found that Russia had a new face. Instead of “tedium and longing,” there was a nervous unrest, a general expectancy of something, a mood of spring. During my stay abroad, important events had taken place—the revolutionary parties had come out of the underground, and one or two ministers were killed; here and there disorders broke out among workers or farmers; and in particular there was excitement in the student milieu.

—Vladimir Jabotinsky in Story of My Life

THE STORY OF VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY’S TRANSFORMATION INTO A Zionist is somewhat confusing because, as we will see, claims from a later period give the impression of an early attraction to the movement. However, documents from the time show his intense desire to integrate into Russian culture. It would be wrong to concentrate on one event, such as his experiences in Italy in 1897–1900 (when he supposedly learned about Garibaldi and Italian nationalism), as motivating his attraction to Zionism or focusing only on Kishinev and the 1903 pogrom that occurred there, which radicalized an entire generation.¹ In contrast, I propose examining his commitment to Zionism as part of a personal and intellectual evolution.

The trajectory of his development, then, was a two-stage process in which Jabotinsky struggled for recognition in a purely Russian environment, and then, having succeeded as a Russian journalist, turned his energies to Zionism. Later, in his autobiography, he revised history, making it seem like he embraced Zionism earlier than he actually did. Perhaps he wanted to make himself seem more precocious or more zealous. But the truth was that the Kishinev Pogrom, in 1903, was the precipitating event. At the time, both Jabotinsky and other authors described the pogrom as a profoundly frustrating event that compelled them to endorse and participate in Zionism. Jabotinsky’s later claims were a crafty revision, as I hope to demonstrate through a close examination of the earlier documents.

Writing about the Kishinev Pogrom in 1936, Jabotinsky confesses: “It is a strange thing: I do not remember the impression this event made on me, the turning point in our whole life as a nation. In general, it made no impression. I was already a Zionist before it happened; I had also thought about [the possibility of a pogrom] before. Neither was the Jewish cowardice revealed in Kishinev a discovery for me, no more than for any Jew or Christian. I always had the feeling that there is nothing to learn from pogroms; they hold no surprise.” Then he adds, “I had always known that such would be the case, and it was.”²

The assertion “I was already a Zionist” piques one’s curiosity. In his autobiography Jabotinsky testifies to a commitment to Zionism long before he joined the movement. His evidence consists of conversations he reports he had with his mother, which he sentimentalizes: “One more decisive thing I learned from her brief answers: I was about seven years old or even younger when I asked her: ‘Shall we Jews also have a kingdom in the future?’ And she replied: ‘Of course, we shall—you silly boy!’ From then until today I did not ask anymore; I already knew.”³ Although this exchange seems trivial, it is intended to show that the absence of a traditional Jewish education was not necessarily a hindrance to his choice of political loyalties. He did not know much about Judaism, Hebrew, or Yiddish, but he imbibed his Zionism with his mother’s milk; Zionism was part of his upbringing.

In another attempt to give himself a Jewish pedigree, Jabotinsky tells the reader that at the time of his bar mitzvah, he studied Hebrew with Yehoshua Ravnitzky, one of the greatest Hebrew writers of the day and a Zionist, who happened to be a neighbor. It is hard to determine how much Hebrew he studied with Ravnitzky, but he repeated the claim many times, including in 1936, when he published Story of My Life.⁴ In a footnote the original editor, Shlomo Zal’tsman, writes that it was Ravnitzky’s “fate to be Z[eev] Jabotinsky’s first teacher of Hebrew, and he . . . helped us with useful and trustworthy advice in Hebrew in the first edition of Zeev Jabotinsky’s selected works.”⁵

In Story of My Life Jabotinsky continued to strain to provide tangible antecedents for his future as a Zionist leader. He focused his efforts on a speech he made in 1898 in Bern, when he was a university student. No transcript survives; all we have by way of documentation are Jabotinsky’s impressions of the reactions of the audience, which consisted of Jewish socialists.

But I remember that discussion well, because I gave the first speech of my life then, and it was a “Zionist” speech. I spoke in Russian, and the gist of it was as follows: I do not know whether I am a socialist—I didn’t know that doctrine well enough—but I am a Zionist, no doubt about that, because the situation of the Jewish people is very bad. Their neighbors hate them, and the neighbors are right: in the end the Jews in the Diaspora are bound to experience a general Bartholomew’s Night, and their only salvation is mass immigration to Eretz Yisrael.⁶

No evidence can be found that Jabotinsky made such a speech, so it is naturally difficult to ascribe significance to it. It is noteworthy that for the next few years, Jabotinsky apparently made no effort to acquaint himself with Zionism. These were important years for the movement, when Theodor Herzl promoted his book, The Jewish State, and annual Zionist congresses were convened for the first time, starting in 1897. During these years, debates broke out between Herzl and the Russian Zionists over political Zionism and Hibbat Tsion’s preference for infiltration into Palestine: Should Jews try to reclaim land in Palestine now, even without a charter from the Sultan?⁷ In 1898, Jabotinsky lived in Rome, a little over nine hundred kilometers from Basel. Had he felt the urge, he could have attended the Zionist congresses. Jabotinsky’s first attendance was registered in 1903. But, as he notes when describing his life in Rome at the time, he was occupied with other matters: socialism, anarchism, democracy—anything but specifically Jewish problems. In 1902, a congress of Russian Zionists was held in Minsk. Already back in Odessa, Jabotinsky did not attend and did not comment on it.

This was the time, one should recall, when many Jews in Russia embraced russification in the hope that they could find a place in Russian society and a respectable livelihood for themselves even if the government imposed legal disabilities on them. There was no fear at this time of Russian nationalism. In fact, Russian culture was seen as reflecting universal values. Some people denied the idea that Jews composed a separate nation because Jews had no land to call their own and no common language uniting all of them, and their future appeared linked with the majority populations among whom they lived. The only realistic option was integration into the majority society and patience.⁸ Therefore Jews could either emigrate (usually to the United States) or acculturate and fight for improvements in their status. Progress, almost a substitute for religion in Europe’s nineteenth century, was viewed as inevitable; reason could be thwarted, delayed, ignored, but it would ultimately succeed and bring with it equality for Jews. Few knew of, understood, or accepted Zionism.

We can learn about Jabotinsky’s pre-Zionist attitudes from his writings in 1903, when he discussed the earlier years of 1898–1900. For example, although the majority of the people he knew in Rome were Jews, they had neglected to acknowledge the fact. He writes, “But during these three years I never recognized any Roman Jews, because they hid their Jewishness and avoided any mention of their ethnicity. During these three years I literally did not encounter the word ebreo a single time, either in print or in conversation, although I know now that the articles that I read were often written by Jews, and that there were Jews among the gentlemen with whom I discussed matters.”⁹

Jabotinsky’s recasting of his Italian period as connected with his Jewish identity seems exaggerated. In 1897, he went to Bern and then to Rome without any particular plan, and in neither city, it seems, did he seek out other Jews. His readings at this time were disparate: action novels, symbolist dramas, and works on socialism and Russian politics, among others. Nowhere in his writings of the time does he indicate an interest in Jewish religious texts or Yiddish fiction, although he grew up in the city where Mendele Mocher Sforim, Moses Leib Lilienblum, Ahad-Ha’am, and many others wrote their classic works. Thus, Jabotinsky could be said to embody cosmopolitanism; his Jews did not forget who they were, but they imagined that, outside of government oppression, being a Jew did not greatly matter.

In Story of My Life, Jabotinsky casts his transformation into a Zionist as a reclamation of identity. He argues that Italy’s Jews debated questions of universal significance while their own Jewish identity remained invisible. “And nonetheless, if there is no antisemitism, there is ‘something,’ some kind of indestructible tiny seed—not of evil or hate, but of discord, frigidity, and alienation—and this tiny seed, like the pea under the mattress, despite its size, does not let one rest comfortably and peacefully.”¹⁰ A fascinating coda to this acknowledgement of the vague presence of Jewish identity is that Jabotinsky describes his high-school Russian friends in the same way: Jews who discuss everything under the sun but never consciously recognize their Jewish identity.

It is nevertheless my duty to acknowledge that the spirit of antisemitism was almost entirely absent from these government schools: perhaps because in those days public opinion generally was dormant in Russia, left-wing as well as right; that is why the entire period up to the last years of the nineteenth century is referred to in Russian as “Bezvremennye”—a faceless epoch. We Jewish students suffered no persecution on the part of either the teachers or our classmates. The most astonishing thing about it was that, all this notwithstanding, we always kept apart from our Christian environment. There were about ten Jews in our class; we sat together, and if we met in a private house to play or to read or just to chat, all this was always and strictly among ourselves. At the same time several of us also had friends in the Russian camp. For example, I was bound by faithful friendship to Vsevolod Lebedintsev, a very fine fellow, whose name will appear in the course of this story. I visited him many times at his home, and he also came to mine, but it never occurred to me to introduce him to our separate circle, and neither did he introduce me to his group; I do not even know if he had a group. Stranger still was the fact that even inside our Jewish circle there was no Jewish spirit. When we read together, it was foreign literature, and discussions were concerned with Nietzsche and moral problems, morals in general or sexual morals—not the fate of Jewry, not even the Jewish situation in Russia, which was bothering every one of us.¹¹

Although Jabotinsky apparently gave little thought to his Jewish identity, nonetheless he projects his alienation from the Russian environment. As much as they tried, he and his schoolmates were not “cosmopolitans”; something like russified Jews is more appropriate. However, during the 1890s, Jews in Russia fell into a feeling of false security. There had not been pogroms since 1882, and although quotas for Jews in Russian schools and universities had been imposed in 1887, and Jewish economic life had become significantly worse for many, for Odessa’s Jews, life was predictable, and for wealthy Jews, there were still ways to avoid restrictions. To be sure, Jews were the objects of official discrimination, but life was not easy for others either.

In 1897, Jabotinsky went to Bern, Switzerland, for a few months and then traveled on to Rome, Italy, where he stayed three years. Although his motives are not entirely clear, adventure, experience, culture, and education played a role in his decision.¹² In the final years of the nineteenth century, Jabotinsky habitually published his reports from Italy in Odessa’s local press. He was also a budding playwright. However, as he describes it, he was unable to get his literary work published, and therefore he complained to the doyen of Russian literature, Vladimir Korolenko, in the hope of receiving help. Korolenko and other leading writers received hundreds of letters a year from provincial writers seeking advice and publishing opportunities. Here is a passage from Jabotinsky’s letter, dated 1898:

But here in Odessa, not only am I unable to get my story published, I did not even try—I cannot even find a competent person who would agree to read it and give me his opinion. Meanwhile, forgive me my overconfidence, but I cannot help but see in it a modicum of originality. . . . But, at least, having received your valuable review, I would know what I should do with it, and, if your evaluation is positive, I will try to send it to a journal. . . . A thousand times I beg your pardon. I have no right to bother you, but what else can I do?!¹³

He played the provincial card—“I cannot even find a competent person”—but that was just a gambit. No doubt he was hoping that Korolenko would invite him to write for his important thick journal, Russkoe Bogatstvo. However, in a letter to Korolenko a little over a year later, Jabotinsky suggested that his problems stemmed from the fact that his writings were out of step with the leading fashions; he did not fulfill the social demands of “critical realism”—that is, he was not sufficiently politically engaged. Even specialized journals, such as Mir Bozhii, rejected him for ideological reasons. Jabotinsky continues,

For two years the liberal journals in the cities have been regularly returning my works to me, mainly poems, rejecting them. . . . And what is more, Mir Bozhii sent one poem back to me only because “its idea was deeply false from the sociological point of view.” I considered such a treatment of the issue to be sui generis—and a very dangerous kind of censorship; so I wrote an open letter about it to Novosti. But since this letter is another of my works, it too was not printed. [As they say,] “They beat them and don’t even let them scream.”¹⁴

However, there is something disingenuous in Jabotinsky’s complaints, since he was a popular journalist with a decent salary, and his articles appeared regularly in Odesskie Novosti. Maybe he considered popularity in provincial Odessa beneath him, although he acknowledged that he enjoyed the attention he received from the locals, including the young ladies of the town.¹⁵

Jabotinsky had more luck as a journalist and dramatist with the Decadent crowd that was forming in the last decade of the nineteenth century than with populists like Korolenko. Already in 1892, Dmitry Merezhkovsky had shocked Russia’s elite with his lecture, “The Causes for the Decline of Contemporary Russian Literature and New Trends in It,” which inaugurated the Decadent movement in Russia.¹⁶ With Merezhkovsky came other writers, such as Zinaida Gippius and Akim Volynsky, whose work was published in the journal Northern Flowers (Severnye Tsvety).¹⁷ These and other writers condemned populism, social criticism, and the judgment of literature strictly for its political value. In contrast, these authors defended the individual’s right to ignore society’s problems and to give expression to beauty, love, and a person’s internal emotions—eros, joy, or sadness.

Jabotinsky strongly identified with this new movement. Although in his autobiography he insisted that he preferred adventure novels—apparently he was trying to give the impression that in his youth he was not an egghead or budding intellectual, but rather a “can-do” person—in fact, he read highbrow literature: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Pushkin, as well as Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov. Chekhov apparently had a huge influence on young Russians in the 1890s. Kornei Chukovsky, later a famous Soviet poet and a friend of Jabotinsky’s in Odessa, describes Chekhov’s omnipresence: “Chekhov’s books seemed the only truth about everything that was happening around us. You read a Chekhov story and then look out of the window and see a continuation of what you have just read. All the inhabitants of our city, all of them without exception, were, for me, characters from Chekhov. . . . And I perceived every cloud, every tree, forest path, every landscape, in the city or the countryside, as quotations from Chekhov. I had never before observed such an identification of literature with life; even the sky above me was Chekhovian.”¹⁸

While in Rome, Jabotinsky introduced Chekhov to an Italian audience.¹⁹ In all, Jabotinsky published a few articles in the Italian press, but in this, his first serious publication of literary criticism, he wanted to give a taste of the latest currents in Russia. Published in the literary journal Nuova Antologia (1901), the article concentrates on Maxim Gorky and Chekhov. In an article that pays tribute to “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” Ivan Turgenev’s famous portrayal of the intellectual’s dilemma in Russia, Jabotinsky portrays Chekhov as offering a diagnosis of society’s problems while Gorky provides the solution.²⁰ For Turgenev, both Hamlet and Don Quixote had embodied positive and negative qualities: Hamlet was plagued by contemplation and fear of action, while Don Quixote shot off into action without thinking.

Naming the new trend a “literature of moods,” Jabotinsky contrasts Chekhov and Gorky. Chekhov is the “singer of pain, preeminent creator of that grey and depressing emptiness that contemporary life has become.” Jabotinsky continues, “In Chekhov we have only a single feeling, a single note, to which all the melodies of his plays are attuned. . . . Real boredom will catch up with you later and you will be tortured for several days as if by a nightmare, by the terrible thought: ‘What is the damn point of life in this world!’”²¹

In contrast to the Chekhovian Hamlet, Jabotinsky presents Gorky’s protagonist, the barefoot wanderer (bosiak). “For Maxim Gorky’s tramps, morality does not exist. His wanderers do not shrink from committing crimes, even crimes that are savage—yet by no means petty in intent and execution.”²² Jabotinsky points out that the wanderer is misunderstood by many who want Gorky’s hero to represent their own political viewpoint. They interpret him as a member of the proletariat or representative of the simple people. In fact, the wanderer is neither. He is an individual, but one entirely indifferent to social issues or the problems of others. Nonetheless, the character’s appearance is timely because “the time has not come for contemplation, but for constructive action; yet in order to build, one must struggle. And to be able to struggle, one needs to have desire, passionate and bold desire.”²³ Jabotinsky prefers Don Quixote to Hamlet.

According to Jabotinsky’s biographers, when he returned to Odessa in 1901, he intended to return to Rome to finish his law degree.²⁴ However, he was offered a full-time position with Odesskie Novosti, a job that included a significant salary increase. Furthermore, he became the paper’s theater critic, a role that gave him access to the city’s opera and theaters free of charge. Though still a young man, he attained a prized status among Odessa’s bourgeoisie. He describes this position: “The sense of being popular . . . was sweet and pleasant at the age of twenty-one. ‘Journalist’ was an important title in the Russian provinces in those days. It was pleasant to enter the city theater, one of the most beautiful in the country, for free, with the usher dressed in the solemn attire of the time of Marie Antoinette, bowing and accompanying you to a seat in the fifth row, which was adorned with a bronze plaque engraved with ‘Mr. Altalena.’”²⁵ Only a few years earlier Jabotinsky’s theatergoing had entailed waiting many hours for a low-cost seat in the upper rows.

The themes of individuality and creativity that appealed to him in Italy found expression in his talks at the Literary Club in Odessa, in his newspaper columns, in his stories, and in the plays that he wrote and produced at the City Theater.²⁶ In all of these venues, he found different readers, but his message was the same: individualism. Two of his dramas were staged at the Odessa City Theater, Blood (Krov’, 1901) and It’s All Right (Ladno, 1902).²⁷ A typical monologue from It’s All Right conveys the timbre of his voice and the content of his thinking. The play is not rooted in any plot but patched together in monologues. The protagonist, Korol’kov (whose name comes from the Russian for “small king”), expresses the author’s preoccupations, especially the assertion that the individual has priority over the collective and has a right to purely personal goals. A typical monologue expresses Jabotinsky’s radical individualism:

I acknowledge one sole right

for myself alone—only one, but for all that,

vast, without limits. No one

must. There is no obligation. A child involuntarily

comes into the world, and life hits him cruelly and painfully,—

so is he not right to consume his whole life

in the struggle for happiness, for his own personal happiness? . . .

the right to oneself is given to all at birth.

No obligation to anyone. Chase after pleasure,

be happy, greedily believe your desire—

and be afraid to sacrifice yourself, because

never from sacrifice has

happiness been sown. Light your holy candle

before desire, call it your leader, wherever it would take you: for love,

art, knowledge, idleness, like a stone into the water

or on the old path of serving the people—

but you—bring onto the old road

your spirit, your new spirit, and again proclaim:

“In my struggle I respect not obligation, not an order—

I celebrate my sovereign desire!”²⁸

This message, embodied in such phrases as “no obligation to anyone,” or “greedily trust your own desire,” underlines the right of the individual to clear any obstacles to his happiness. Here we not only see Jabotinsky’s affirmation of Gorky’s heroes, but his commonality with Nietzsche, as well as with the heroes of such Decadent writers as Fyodor Sologub, Vasily Briusov, and Vasily Rozanov.²⁹ There is also a similarity with Sanin, the hero of Mikhail Artsybachev’s novel of the same name and a popular figure with the Decadent crowd. The novel, Sanin, which appeared in 1907, came to exemplify the Decadent worldview in which the will of the individual for personal gratification permitted one to transgress all moral prohibitions.³⁰

Needless to say, this message of individual freedom sharply strayed from the themes of conventional Russian-Jewish theater. Regarding these works, the scholar Viktoriia Litvina has commented, “In both these plays there is no national idea. Both are interesting only as signposts of Jabotinsky’s spiritual development.”³¹ According to Litvina, plays by Jewish authors ordinarily reflected the collective Jewish “problem”:

Take any Jewish play—they are astoundingly typical. In the fate of the characters is the fate of the people, in the plots are the conflicts of reality. The family of a cobbler killed in a pogrom; a son goes off to the revolution, a daughter is forced to become a prostitute. . . . The drama of a revolutionary who gives all his strength to the liberation of the Russian people, who see in him only a ‘kike.’ . . . Night-time ambushes of Jews . . . the apartments of conspirators . . . tears . . . blood . . . death. . . . The heroes’ thoughts are occupied by the highest problems of the life of their people. Their main anxiety, their life task is the search for a way out of this unendurable situation.³²

Jabotinsky’s commitment to individualism has additional support in his autobiography, where he notes that when he was arrested and imprisoned in the Alexandrovsk Fortress outside Odessa in 1903 for the possession of illegal literature, he gave lectures to his fellow prisoners on Decadence and individualism.³³ Incidentally, in autobiographical stories written about this period of his life, Jabotinsky described aesthetic problems and erotic and psychological issues—anything but politics.³⁴ Despite the overwhelming evidence of Jabotinsky’s affiliation with Decadence, some scholars still try to connect Jabotinsky with Marxism and political radicalism.³⁵ After all, he was arrested, and a police dossier on him exists.³⁶ However, if there is one thing we know about the tsarist police, it is that their investigations were as likely to mystify as enlighten. In fact, a police file should not constitute the sole proof of political allegiance. Furthermore, although Jabotinsky was a close friend of Vsevolod Lebedintsev (1881–1908), a leader in the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) movement who was executed by tsarist authorities, SRs were anti-Marxist. Additionally, this same Lebedintsev was also an opera buff and a science student. Ties going back to their school days united the two men. In short, Jabotinsky may have sympathized with Marxism, but party affiliation has not been noted in his own writings or in the memoir literature. On the other hand, the body of evidence connecting him in his youth to Decadence, Nietzscheanism, and literary modernism is overwhelming.

Journalism provides another source for tracing Jabotinsky’s development in his early years, and we find a similar pathway. He reveals his struggle for fame and then his boredom in Odessa’s Russian-language culture (in Odessa he could have joined other language groups—Hebrew, Yiddish, Ukrainian). In his autobiography he says that his journalistic pieces were often inspired by mockery and jest. However, he underestimates the role of journalism in shaping his worldview. One might come to the mistaken conclusion that his journalistic efforts were insignificant from the following account.

Most of the readers of [Odesskie] Novosti enjoyed reading my articles, but not one of them gave them serious attention, and I was aware of that. The only one of all my articles of that period that deserves to be saved from oblivion is the one in which I openly, in black and white, called myself and all the rest of my fellow journalists “jesters.” I devoted one of my articles to one of the writers of a rival newspaper—a decent, quiet, “neutral” man, neither clever nor stupid, anonymous in the full sense of the expression—of whom I had made a kind of dummy, and who I used to ridicule at every opportunity and even without one, just for the fun of it. That time I addressed myself directly to him, and I said: “Of course I have persecuted you without any reason or necessity, and I shall continue, because we are jesters for the reading public. We preach, and they yawn; we write with the bile of our heart’s blood, and they say, ‘Well written; give me another glass of compote.’ What is there for a buffoon to do in the circus but to slap the cheek of his fellow buffoon?”³⁷

The other journalist in the passage was likely A. E. Kaufman, who wrote for Jewish and Russian newspapers.³⁸ Jabotinsky apparently did write such an article, but in fact his depiction of it in his autobiography does not give a truthful rendering either of the importance of journalism in Russia at that time or of his own contribution to literary, political, and social discourse in Odessa and throughout Russia’s southwest in the early 1900s.

In that time period, journalists, and especially popular writers, were considered the conscience of society. Because there was no legally recognized political opposition to the tsarist government, journalists adopted this role. In fact, one definition of an “intelligent,” a member of the “intelligentsia,” encompassed the notion of political opposition.³⁹ The job of journalist resembled that of the muckrakers in the United States of the same era: to hold the government accountable, to expose corruption and immorality, and to use examples from real life to provide a model of proper thought and behavior. Although Jabotinsky did not express a party line, he did articulate an idea of morality and the ideals of humanism, while standing up for the independent value of art and creativity.

The real change in his life trajectory occurred sometime in 1902, when Jabotinsky began to make occasional allusions to Zionism. In his autobiography he observes:

My Zionism was also considered something frivolous. True, I did not join any group, nor did I even know who the Zionists were in the city, but several times I devoted one or two fragments in a feuilleton to the subject. In a big and decent monthly published in St. Petersburg, an article by a certain Bickerman appeared, couched in the style that was then called scientific, in which he demolished Zionism, demonstrating that Jews were a happy people, satisfied with their fate. I wrote a lengthy answer, using arguments that would satisfy me even now. The next day I met one of my acquaintances, [Yehoshua] Ravnitzky, also a “Lover of Zion,” no doubt, and he said to me, “What is this new plaything you are toying with?”⁴⁰

The article that Jabotinsky criticized had appeared in Russkoe Bogatstvo and was the work of Iosif (Joseph) Bickerman, who introduced a number of arguments to conclude that Zionism was utopian, and therefore unatttainable. He claimed that Palestine was far away and the Jewish masses—living traditional lives in the towns of Eastern Europe—were traders and artisans with no experience of farming. Thus, Zionism amounted to mere dreaming.

In his response Jabotinsky threw all he had against the article’s alleged pseudoscientific tone. He discussed Bickerman’s arguments as an example of the “cheapening of science.” As science became associated with convenience, it lost its value. For example, a book that costs half a penny cannot be esteemed, however brilliant it may be. Bickerman’s pseudoscience was like that—dirt cheap. Then Jabotinsky turned to the utopian claim, mocking Bickerman’s voice:

Whatever has not happened yet can never occur.

—That is,

—All the laws of historical development are known to us and whatever we have not yet seen or predicted, should therefore not happen.

I do not think that this could be scientific.⁴¹

Jabotinsky contrasted pseudoscience with “real” science. He pointed to millions of people who had traveled across the sea to new lands on ships with motors—that phenomenon would have seemed utopian a few decades earlier. Jabotinsky remarked that Zionism contained two main elements: “The first is mass emigration, which is hardly an innovation. The second is the guarantee of self-rule, also hardly an innovation.”⁴² About history, he writes,

Much that seemed utopian a hundred years ago has now become established fact—and it marches and attacks and conquers.

History does not know of utopias.

History is made not by the will of man, but by the force of events.

And when a mass of people is gripped, all in unison, by a single ideal, it means that it wasn’t the feuilleton writers who were whispering it to them.

It was the force of things that whispered to them.

Those ideals that are whispered by the force of things are not utopia. They are real necessity.

They are future reality.⁴³

At the end of his article, Jabotinsky waxes poetic about Zionism.

One can argue against Zionism, think it unattainable or undesirable.

But to speak about its reactionary nature, to see in its statesmen the traitors of the ideals of humanity’s well-being, this means not to argue against it, but to sully it, roughly and carelessly to sully a dream that was born from all the sobs, from all the sufferings of the Jewish people; this means to lure people into your gang by hook or by crook; this means to respond with curses to the tearful prayer of long-suffering Agaspher and blacken with torment and blasphemy his centuries-long protected ideal.

Curse it! Ideals stand above torment and do not fear blasphemy.⁴⁴

It is hard not to feel like Ravnitzky: What is this novice doing? Why of all people is he rallying to Zionism’s cause? What motivates him, someone who has never shown previous interest? Is it just the desire to mock specious arguments? Although one can hear an echo of Herzl’s faith in progress, one senses sincerity in his article. However, the question remained: was his interest in Zionism a one-off, or was it the start of something new?

Although Jewish issues had not bothered him earlier, something changed. Others gave it a sociological definition: a different Russia.⁴⁵ Jews and other minorities were no longer prepared to tolerate their low status but sought ways to show their discontent. Opposition groups were forming throughout the country. In the Northwest, the Bund gained popularity; in the Southwest, Zionism attracted support. Israel Trivus, a Zionist from Odessa, writes, “The beginning of the ’90s in Russia was a time of public awakening. Underground student groups, worker strikes, intellectual circles of diverse varieties, plays with ‘Aesopian language,’ tea-parties with endless political conversations, the unexpected ‘tsarism be gone!’ in the theater or at a concert. . . . The press came alive, despite strict censorship, and the tone of the protests became ever more decisive and sharp.” Trivus continues, “The average Jew caught the bug of the public mood of optimism and belief in a better future. But in the Jewish milieu still other factors were at work that transformed the average Jew into a citizen: the development of Zionism, and a bit later, the Bund.”⁴⁶

Jabotinsky too faced new questions about ethnic and political affiliation. By 1903, acculturated Jews were confronted with urgent questions: Who are you? Are you a Russian or a Jew? The disarming confidence that “the Russian people” included everyone, even those who felt oppressed, had disappeared; the age of cosmopolitanism was over. Although there was much hand-wringing and complaining, one had to choose. If you were Russian, that meant Russian language, Russian society, and perhaps even conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity. If one answered “Jewish,” then other consequences followed: even if one had no religious affiliation to Judaism and cared little about identity, a Jew was the object of social and governmental discrimination. Some russified Jews reacted by taking an interest in Jewish life and culture: Alexander Goldstein, Yuly Brutskus, Israel Trivus, Boris Goldberg, and others went in this direction. A russified intellectual and an atheist, Jabotinsky set his sights on politics.

Jabotinsky became actively involved with Zionists in early 1903. Rumors were circulating in Odessa that a pogrom would occur, and in response to the threat, Jabotinsky apparently sent letters to Odessa’s wealthiest Jews, requesting a secret meeting to decide how to meet the crisis. No one answered. His friend Israel Trivus explained to him that those to whom he wrote would never act, and besides, a self-defense organization was already in operation.⁴⁷ Trivus invited him to join the group, and Jabotinsky quickly became “indispensable.” Trivus describes Jabotinsky’s activities during the weeks before the Kishinev pogrom:

For entire days at a time, V[ladimir] E[vgenievich] Jabotinsky, together with M[eir] Ia. Dizengoff, drove around the city to collect money for the unusual task. Then came the worries about how to acquire arms and the like. V. E. took on all this work like a devoted soldier: he showed up, he asked what was needed and he fulfilled the task he was given without questions. . . . He studied intensively Hebrew language, history, literature, the history of various national movements, and the colonial systems of different peoples—everything that, directly or indirectly, might pave the way to overcoming exile. Few are aware what an enormous task he set for himself. He did not rely on his own natural talent, did not engage in irresponsible improvisations. Impossibly demanding of himself, he did not stop studying and it would not be an exaggeration to assert that there was no one in the Zionist ranks as prepared as he was for the role of leader of the people.⁴⁸

Although it is difficult to separate hagiography from biography, the memoir literature provides details about an early period where few other sources exist. In contrast to his belittling of Kishinev in his autobiography, others acknowledge the intense feelings elicited by the pogrom.

According to Kornei Chukovsky, “That savage event which horrified the civilized world marked the turning point in his life.” “Jabotinsky,” Chukovsky recalls, “stormed into the Odesskie Novosti offices late one spring afternoon and angrily upbraided us, the non-Jewish members of the staff, accusing us of indifference to that terrible crime. He blamed the whole Christian world for the Kishinev pogrom. After his bitter outburst he left, slamming the door behind him.”⁴⁹ Chukovsky gives more information to the poet Rakhel’ Margolina in 1965. “Volodya Zhabotinsky had completely changed. He started to study Hebrew, broke with his former environment, stopped his involvement in the Russian press. Previously I looked at him from the ground up: he was the most educated, most talented of my acquaintances, but now I grew even more attached to him. Earlier he tried to impress with his knowledge of English, and he brilliantly translated Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ but now he devoted himself to Hebrew literature and began to translate Bialik.”⁵⁰

The Kishinev pogrom had multiple echoes in Jabotinsky’s life and work. It became very important for Jabotinsky later, in 1911, with the appearance of the volume of his Russian translations of Bialik’s poetry, including “In the City of Slaughter.”⁵¹ The translations and the famous preface did a great deal to cement a connection in the public perception between Jabotinsky and Zionism.

Perhaps the entire point of diminishing the significance of Kishinev is to remove the suggestion, promoted by Chukovsky, that the pogrom “changed his life forever.” In this case, rather than acknowledging antisemitism as the stimulus for his Zionism, Jabotinsky prefers to emphasize other influences. For example, he attributes his initial acquaintance with Zionism to Shlomo Zal’tsman, a fellow Odessan Jew.

Zal’tsman is first described in the autobiography as an “elegant gentleman with a black moustache and Western manners.”⁵² The two were introduced by Lebedintsev at an Italian opera that Zal’tsman attended as “the special correspondent for a Milanese review of music and opera.”

Afterward I met him at the house of Miss Degli Abbati. We spoke French, and when we left together, I continued the conversation in the same language.

“We can speak Russian, too,” he told me. “I too am from Odessa, like you, although born in Lithuania.”

I knew already that he was a Jew—“Signor Zal’tsman.” It was clear who and what he was. Now he suggested that I call him Solomon Davidovich; he revealed that his position as correspondent with the Italian magazine was only a hobby, and that his main occupation was commerce, as was every Jew’s. He also told me that he was a Zionist.⁵³

Zal’tsman, with his Italian credentials, his command of French, and his Russian-Jewish origins seemed the ideal friend for Jabotinsky. Zal’tsman was also a publisher. Jabotinsky describes how Zal’tsman introduced him to a Zionist circle of wealthy Jewish businessmen in Odessa, and how he arranged for Jabotinsky to represent the group at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903, where the famous Uganda issue would be discussed. Incidentally, Zal’tsman’s version of these events differs from Jabotinsky’s; Zal’tsman reports that the invitation to meet the members of the Zionist club was not immediately accepted. Jabotinsky apparently consulted with Lebedintsev about whether he should join the national Jewish cause so far from general Russian problems.⁵⁴ Lebedintsev gave his blessing, and Jabotinsky went to Basel.

Vsevolod Lebedintsev, who was hanged in 1908 for revolutionary activity, appears to be much closer to Jabotinsky and more influential in his early political development than Zal’tsman. But in the long run, Zal’tsman would become a central figure in Jabotinsky’s life, coming to the rescue any number of times with cash, publication opportunities, and advice; he was instrumental in the publication of Jabotinsky’s translation of Bialik’s poetry in 1911.⁵⁵ Zal’tsman apparently masterminded the plan to recruit this well-known, talented, and interesting young man to serve the Zionist cause. At the same time, Zal’tsman played many other roles in Jabotinsky’s life; a Pygmalion, he helped Jabotinsky realize wide-ranging and ambitious plans.

Thus, it is something of a conundrum that the handmaiden to bring Jabotinsky to Zionism was not a Jew, but a Russian aristocrat and revolutionary. But perhaps there is logic in it; many Jews came to feel alienated from Russian culture and attracted to their own people. In fact, such Jewish artists as Mark Antokol’sky or Ilya Ginzburg were directed to Jewish culture by Vladimir Stasov. Ultimately, however, Zal’tsman played the greater role. Jabotinsky provided his energy, his knowledge of literature, and his vision to Zal’tsman, who contributed his capital and organizational acumen. Despite his attempt to give himself a longer Zionist pedigree, his Jewish feelings before 1903 were unformed, generalized, and spliced with others; after 1903, they took shape and became his life credo.

Notes

1.Steven Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright, 2018); Arye Naor, “Mavo,” in Leumiut liberalit, ed. Ze’ev Z’abotinski (Tel Aviv: Jabotinsky Institute, 2013), 11–56.

2.Vladimir Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, eds. Brian Horowitz and Leonid Katsis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 66.

3.Ibid., 42.

4.Michael Stanislawski has discovered that Story of My Life has a problem with facts. At times the autobiography departs from fact altogether, while in other instances Jabotinsky manipulates facts to score various political points. However, it is not unusual that political autobiographies reflect the time they were written as much as—and in some cases more than—the times they describe. Nonetheless, I caution the reader not to jettison this text as a factual source because it provides information that often corresponds with reliable sources and adds to our overall knowledge.

5.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Sippur yamai,”in Golah ve-hitbolelut (Tel Aviv: Sh. Zal’tsman, 1936), 16.

6.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 49.

7.Israel Klausner, Opozitsiya le-Herzl (Jerusalem, 1960). Hibbat Tsion refers to the organization in the Russian Empire that offered support for settlement in Palestine between 1882 and 1897. They stood for “infiltration” and small-scale colonization of Jews in Palestine.

8.Jewish liberals envisioned integration as the ultimate solution for Jews in Russia. Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 81–86.

9.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Vskol’z: Antisotsial’noe uchrezhdenie,” Odesskie Novosti, November 2, 1903, 4.

10.Ibid.

11.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 43.

12.Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 127, 132.

13.Vl. Jabotinsky to Vl. Korolenko from April 26, 1898, in V. Zhabotinskii, “Pis’ma russkim pisateliam,” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve 1 (1992): 203.

14.Vl. Jabotinsky to Vl. Korolenko from August 28, 1899, ibid., 204–205.

15.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 58.

16.Dimitry Merezhkovskii, “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury,” O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniiakh sovremennoi russkoi literatury (Moscow: Direkt-Media, 2010).

17.Helen Tolstoy, Akim Volynsky: A Hidden Russian-Jewish Prophet, trans. Simon Cook (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 6–8.

18.Kornei Chukovskii, “Kak ia stal pisatelem,” Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo Korneiia Chukovskogo: Sbornik (Moscow, 1978), 143.

19.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Anton Cekhof e Massimo Gorki: L’Impressionismo nella literature russa,” Nuova Antologia (1901): 96. See also S. Gardzonio, “Zhabotinskii ital’ianskogo perioda,” in V. (Z.) Zhabotinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 9 tomakh (Minsk: Met, 2008), 2:6–18.

20.Ivan Turgenev, “Gamlet i Don-Kikhot,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), 5:330–348.

21.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Anton Chekhov i Maksim Gor’kii,” in V. Jabotinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Minsk: Met, 2008), 2:676–678.

22.Ibid., 683.

23.Ibid., 686.

24.Joseph B. Schechtman, The Life and Times of Vladimir Jabotinsky: Rebel and Statesman, The Early Years (Silver Springs, MD: Eshel Books, 1986), 64.

25.Altalena in Italian means “seesaw”; it was Jabotinsky’s nom de plume.

26.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 56.

27.“The first pacifist play, Blood (in three short scenes) was staged in 1901 by one of the best provincial theaters, the Odessa theater, and gave two performances with no particular success. The next play (in one act), infelicitously named ‘Ladno’ by the author, was passed by the censor on October 16, 1902. It was shown in the same theater, only a single time, which was a scandal, on November 5, 1902.” Viktoriia Litvina, “. . . i evrei, moia krov’”: Evreiskaia drama—russkaia stsena (Moscow: Vozdushnyi Transport, 1991), 239.

28.Ibid., 260–261.

29.Viktor Kel’ner, ed., “Vladimir Jabotinsky i russkie pisateli,” Vestnik Evreiskogo Universiteta v Moskve 1 (1993): 215–255.

30.Mikhail Artsybashev, Sanin (Moscow: Zhizn’, 1907).

31.Litvina, “. . . i evrei, moia krov’,” 239.

32.Ibid., 51.

33.“I too was invited to lecture on my professional subjects—the Decadents, Italian revival (in honor of the aforementioned ‘Garibaldi’), and of course individualism. But after this lecture they did not invite me to speak anymore.” Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 72.

34.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 61–63.

35.Natal’ia Pasenko, “Zhabotinskii i politicheskie partii,” Moriia 12 (2011): 6–20.

36.Mitiyahu Mintz, “Al shum ma hitehakta ha-Ohrana’ ha-tsarit al tse’avdav shel Jabotinsky?,” Ish be-sa’ar: Masot u’mekhkarim ‘al Ze’ev Z’abotinski, ed. Avi Bareli and Pinhas Ginossar (Ber-Sheva: Universitat Ben-Guryon ba’Negev, 2004), 449–457.

37.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 60.

38.Abram Evgen’evich Kaufman (1855–1921), who grew up in Odessa, was a noted Jewish journalist and editor. For more about him, see Viktor Kel’ner, “Redaktsionnyi chernorabochii,” in A. E. Kaufman, Za kulisami pechati: Iz vospominanii starogo zhurnalista (St. Petersburg: Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka, 2011), 5–18.

39.Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008), 2–3.

40.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 60. The term “lover of Zion” refers to Hovevei Tsion, the name of the adherents of Hibbat Tsion, the proto-Zionist group organized in post-1882 Odessa. Iosif Menassievich Bickerman (1867–1942) was the author of the article, “O sionizme i po povodu sionizma,” Russkoe Bogatstvo 7 (1902): 27–69. Jabotinsky answered Bickerman in an article, “O sionizme,” Odesskie Novosti (September 8, 1902). Jabotinsky characterized him as an assimilationist.

41.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “O sionizme,” Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2b:367–368. Original in Odesskie Novosti, (September 8, 1902).

42.Ibid.

43.Ibid., 367.

44.Ibid., 373.

45.There are many books on Russia in the period leading up to the 1905 Revolution. These include Terrence Emmons, “Russia’s Banquet Campaign,” California Slavic Studies 10 (1977), 45–86; Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); A. Kizevetter, Narubezhe dvukh stoletii, Vospominaniia, 1881–1914 (Prague, 1929), 167–171; Gregory Freeze, “A National Liberation Movement and the Shift in Russian Liberalism, 1901–1903,” Slavic Review 28 (March 1969): 81–91.

46.Israel Trivus, “Pervye shagi,” Rassvet 42 (October 19, 1930): 17.

47.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 65.

48.Trivus, “Pervye shagi,” 19.

49.Quoted in Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, (New York: Barricade Books, 1996), 1:46.

50.Rakhel Margolina, Rakhel Pavlovna Margolina i ee perepiska s Korneem Ivanovichem Chukovskim (Jerusalem: Stav, 1978), 11. In the same letter, Chukovsky describes meeting Jabotinsky in London in 1916: “The last time I saw Vladimir was in London in 1916. He was dressed in a military uniform entirely engrossed in his ideas—completely different from the person I knew in my youth. Concentrated, despondent, but he embraced me and spent the entire evening with me.” Ibid., 14.

51.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Vvedenie k pesniam i poemam Bialika,” Pesni i poemy Bialika (St. Petersburg: S. D. Zal’tsman, 1911), 7–55. Jabotinsky published the poem in his translation, along with an introduction, in Evreiskaia Zhizn’, November 11, 1904, 160–62. The poem was published many times thereafter, including in a collection of Bialik’s poems in Russian translation: Kh. N. Bialik, Pesni i poemy: Avtorizovannyi perevod s evreiskogo i vvedenie Vl. Zhabotinsky (St. Petersburg: S. D. Zal’tsman, 1911).

52.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 64.

53.Ibid.

54.Shlomo Zal’tsman, Min he-avar: Zichronot u’reshumot (Tel Aviv: Sh. Zal’tsman, 1943), 241.

55.Bialik, Pesni i poemy: Avtorizovannyi perevod s evreiskogo i vvedenie Vl. Zhabotinsky.