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ZIONISM BEFORE 1905

THE SIXTH ZIONIST CONGRESS, THE FIRST JABOTINSKY ATTENDED, had a powerful effect on him. There he encountered Herzl, and the influential meeting drew him deeper into the movement. The conference, Herzl’s last, took place in Basel in 1903, and became known for the debate over the Uganda proposal.¹ Although Jabotinsky insisted in his autobiography that he voted against Herzl and the Uganda proposal “just so,” because he felt like it, in fact he understood the issues very well. We can gauge the extent of his knowledge in three articles that he published in August 1903, reporting from the conference for Odesskie Novosti.² The first article contained a general discussion of Britain’s Uganda offer and its significance for the Zionist movement; the second was devoted to the Mizrachi, religious Zionists; and the last to Herzl and the Russian opposition to Uganda. The last article also contained Jabotinsky’s own credo.

The Sixth Congress was extremely contentious. The British government’s offer of a colony for Jews in Uganda (land within the borders of present-day Kenya), split the movement into those who thought Eastern European Jews needed an asylum (these were the days following the murders in Kishinev), and those focused solely on the struggle for Palestine. Herzl defended the need for an alternative to Palestine, since it was not available for mass immigration due to Ottoman opposition, when Britain invited him to consider a Jewish center in Uganda. Max Nordau, second in the movement, argued in favor of Uganda as a “Nachtasyl,” an asylum for the Jewish people until a Palestine charter could be attained.³ Significantly, there was opposition to Uganda from those who did not want to compromise on the main precept of Zionism, settlement in Palestine. Many of the so-called Nein-Sagers came from Russia.

Two issues frame Jabotinsky’s experience of the Congress: his observations about Herzl and his own position. He began by lauding Herzl as the sole authority in the movement. “The entire administration, the entire leadership, and the entire responsibility for the movement rests with Theodor Herzl. When they talk about Zionism, they think of him.”⁴ Herzl’s presence stimulated Jabotinsky to give thought to leadership qualities.

I know all the good and all the bad that those around Herzl think of him, and I look at him entirely coldly and soberly, and I think that in his person there stands before us one of the most wonderful individuals of our time. It is difficult to define what constitutes his strength. He is not at all a first-class writer, but he is a fine stylist and transmits clearly and incisively what he needs to say, and precisely in the way that is needed. He is amazingly harmonious and controlled; he gives the impression of a person incapable of a falsely calculated gesture—a person who of course can lose his way, but cannot stumble. He is never sharp, but always gets his way. Many claim that he hypnotizes them. In every detail this gentleman is an average man, but on the whole he is a great figure, a great individual who needs great levers—maybe not talented, but also, maybe, a genius.⁵

This is a typical description of Herzl at the time.⁶ Many wrote about his unsuspecting genius, his amazing success in creating a movement seemingly out of nothing. Jabotinsky watched and analyzed Herzl and was astounded by the latter’s success in resolving the split in the movement. After a small majority sided with Herzl in favor of funding an investigation of East Africa, many of the Nein-Sagers burst into tears. Their emotional response, a symbolic allusion to the Jews of ancient Babylonia, who were described as weeping for the loss of Jerusalem, reflected the degree of their alienation from their own movement.⁷ Zionism, which once embodied all their dreams, had now betrayed them. Jabotinsky, having voted with the Nein-Sagers, was present at the meeting where the group was deciding how to proceed. Jabotinsky’s article provides a transcript of sorts of what happened at the meeting, and also presents his own perspective.

At the time when “angry Russians” were fulminating at Herzl and considering various tactics to delay the colonization of East Africa, Herzl arrived and demanded the opportunity to explain.⁸ He spoke about his failure with the Ottoman Sultan and the lack of support among the wealthy and powerful Jews. When everything looked grim, hope burst out in the form of an offer from Great Britain. Uganda was not a retreat from Zion, Herzl exclaimed, but a detour. In fact, who knows, maybe this initiative would help the movement gain a foothold in Palestine. In any case, Herzl said that he would resign outright if he ever gave up on Palestine; he wouldn’t need this group to help him understand that. In the moment at hand, however, it would be impolite and impolitic to reject Britain’s offer without proper consideration. The opposition felt pacified, and the threat of a break had passed. The leaders and the rank and file decided to remain in the movement and continue the struggle for Palestine together.

Jabotinsky was deeply impressed by Herzl’s poise, control, and delivery, as well as his sentiments. He understood Herzl’s attempt to appear one among equals.

It was precisely here, where he appeared without his formal jacket, without the gavel and the stage and the whole pompous apparatus that separates him from the public, that he appeared simply as a delegate from one of the Kishinev clubs to explain himself and almost to justify himself. Precisely here, it piqued my curiosity to find out how he would behave, how he would win over his audience, whether he would lose control of his tone, whether he would stumble. Herzl spoke, as always, calmly, expressively, without any rhetorical devices, entirely in control of himself. In each word one could hear self-assurance, and standing before his opponents, he did not hesitate to speak to them sharply, and at the same time with condescension, as one in power, almost as an elder with a child. There were moments when I thought that now the protesting voices would break in, but the voices didn’t. Starting from his first words, from the expression that appeared on almost every face in this hall, in the extraordinary quiet that had now taken shape, I understood the entire meaning of Lomonosov’s historic utterance: “It would be easier to take the Academy from me than to take me from the Academy.”⁹

Lomonosov, the great figure of the Russian Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, represented for Jabotinsky an original thinker who gave his life to the Russian Academy that was founded by Peter I. Herzl showed the same complete identification with his institution, the Zionist movement. Of course, his readers at Odesskie Novosti would know Lomonosov and therefore could understand what Herzl meant to the Zionist movement.

Jabotinsky was convinced that, despite his apparent push for Uganda, Herzl had not changed. In contrast to others, Herzl was persuasive not because he showed goodwill or had experienced some kind of psychological transformation in recent years, as Yehiel Chlenov, the Moscow Zionist leader, maintained.¹⁰ In contrast, Jabotinsky thought that it was Herzl’s personal ambition that drove him to Palestine. “I am convinced that Zion is terribly important for this person, more important than for many, many others, precisely because the prospect of Zion’s rebirth is far more tempting and infinitely more grandiose than the simple colonization of the first secluded corner that one finds. The rebirth of Zion would not have a precedent in history: to settle East Africa would mean to repeat Baron Hirsch.”¹¹

But Jabotinsky felt that Herzl’s East Africa gambit, even if forced, had a certain logic. Diplomacy made up his sole strength, and although diplomacy was not necessarily the best method, if one played that card, then Herzl was right to exploit every opportunity. Fate always depended on chance, but a great leader, Jabotinsky concluded, prepared for the moment when fortune might strike. Cultivating a relationship with Great Britain, the world’s greatest power, made sense. “History has its own laws, but to us, observing it from below, it will seem for a long time yet a chain of chance events. The same chance event that gave Herzl East Africa today might give him Palestine tomorrow. Politics is a game of ‘chance events’ in which the strong, smart person always has at least a fifty-percent chance, if only he wants to win.”¹²

It is hard to read this article without feeling surprised that the prediction came true—indeed, today, Uganda, but tomorrow, maybe, Palestine. Who knows the gifts Britain could bestow, like fate, on the leader ready to accept and exploit the moment? Lord Balfour’s letter in November 1917 was such a moment.

In his third article from Basel, Jabotinsky expressed his own views. He repeated Ahad-Ha’am’s division between “Western” and “Eastern” Jews: he disdained the Jews of Western Europe for craving comfort; but admired the Jews of Russia for retaining a strong collective identity. The Westerners, those “eminent professors,”¹³ thought that Jerusalem was equal or inferior to Wiesbaden, he wrote. But the East Europeans were different. They sought in Zionism spiritual goals—nothing less than the creation of a new Jewish civilization. “There is a different kind of Zionism in Russia. I consider Russia an amazing country: the best of the Slavs live here, and the best of the Jews: ‘best’ in the sense of the strongest and the least resigned to the submissiveness that Ahad-Ha’am called slavery in freedom among the Western ‘Izraelites.’ That is precisely why the Jewish masses in Russia are especially crowded together, why their desires and dreams—beneath the appearance of hopelessness—are so bold.”¹⁴

The sentiment about Russia having the “best” Jews and Slavs belongs to Vladimir Solov’ev, the Judeophile Russian thinker who belonged to the Slavophile tradition and repeated the claim that the material West was spiritually corrupt, whereas the East still embodied religious purity.¹⁵ The Eastern Europeans retained their Jewish complexion; they would not sell their Judaism or their love for Zion. That is why the Eastern Europeans stood with the Nein-Sagers, the representatives of artisans, various traders, workers, and students.¹⁶ For these people Zionism without Zion was unthinkable.

Jabotinsky adopted the position of Nein-Sager, but he based his decision on a populist premise. Instead of viewing himself as a novice who followed the more experienced and popular figures in the Russian camp, he imagined himself as a representative of the Jewish people in their steadfast unity for Zion. Jabotinsky explained, “In days of sorrow, in a foreign land, what can people dream of if not their homeland, glorified and blessed in all the holy books, endowed with miracle tales, preserving the ruins of the sacred places given to the ancestors, taken from the grandfathers and promised to the grandchildren? One has to want not to understand in order not to understand the necessity, the inevitable elemental necessity of this national dream.”¹⁷

In the months following the conference, Jabotinsky would join two seemingly contradictory positions, those of Herzl and Ahad-Ha’am, political and spiritual Zionism, politics and culture. He was attracted to Ahad-Ha’am’s view that Palestine had the potential to transform all of the Jewish people through the cultivation of a new Jewish society, economy, and culture in Palestine. At the same time, Jabotinsky wanted to spur emigration to Palestine. Other Russian Zionists—Yehiel Chlenov, Menachem Ussishkin, and Yaakov Bernstein-Kogan—supported infiltration, emigration, and land purchases in Palestine. At the same time Jabotinsky still romanticized Herzl and dreamed of attaining a legal charter through diplomacy.

Nonetheless, having come closer to the “Russian” position on Herzl, Jabotinsky revised his view of the great leader. In the first article, he affirmed that the movement had put all its money on a single bet: Herzl. At the end of the series, he took a different tack: if Herzl were to abandon the end goal of Zion, the “movement would simply walk over him” and “continue along its old path.”¹⁸ The movement superseded Herzl and would keep him only as long as he articulated its dreams.

In these articles Jabotinsky wanted his readers to view him not as a mere observer, but as someone who was involved, potentially a leader. He analyzed what it takes to be a leader and expressed respect, awe, surprise, and affection for Herzl. In this indirect way, Jabotinsky linked himself to Herzl, beginning a lifelong metonymic relationship meant to lend Jabotinsky credibility and political legitimacy.

His reportage reflected enthusiasm, but his private correspondence was more critical of the movement at that moment. A letter to his close friend Kornei Chukovsky presented a different perspective altogether, one grounded in the material reality of Basel. He complained about the wasteful expenditures for transportation, how he was harangued when he gave his short speech and almost got arrested for having sex in public. “I took the trip and it was boring and stupid and I wasted 500 rubles doing it. At the congress I got whistled at; however, I did not leave. And the next day, that is, at night, I was caught by a policeman in flagrante delicto with a Zionist lady on the cathedral grounds. I was almost given a summons!”¹⁹ Apparently Zionist congresses, like congresses everywhere, were characterized by extracurricular entertainments that often do not make it into the history books.

Jabotinsky had the opportunity to deepen the connection between himself and Herzl at the time of the latter’s death a year later in 1904. The event affected the entire movement.²⁰ Chlenov wrote:

The completely unexpected news about his illness reached the organization and then the death of the beloved leader. We all experienced this blow with our heart and mind, and it was useless to speak about its significance. Now, it seems, everyone understood, how much we have lost in him. But only a close and objective study will show us how much we had in life, so much beauty, strength, truth, and purity. Doctor Herzl’s death revealed still more clearly how strongly attached the organization was to him. Many people have entirely loosened their grip, faith in success is broken, and energy for work has weakened.²¹

Herzl’s death made an indelible impression on Jabotinsky. In 1904, in a literary response, Jabotinsky described his unshakable love and admiration. He devoted a poem, “Hêsped,” and an article, “Sitting on the Floor” (“Sidia na polu”), to the event. Incidentally, Jabotinsky carefully shaped these works to produce the appearance of a personal connection with the leader. Both appeared in Evreiskaia Zhizn’ (Jewish Life) in April 1905.

In “Hêsped,” Jabotinsky immortalized Herzl. The first lines compare him to Moses, a trope that was gaining relevance at the time:

He did not disappear like ancient Moses,

On the edge of the promised land;

He did not reach his desired homeland

Far from her pining children;

He burned himself and gave his life to a sacred cause,

And “If I forget you, Jerusalem,”—

But he did not reach it and fell while still in the desert,

And on the best day, to our native Palestine

We will commit just the ashes of the tribune.²²

The link with Moses, who led the people to the holy land, reflects Jabotinsky’s image of a prophet to whom a promise has been made. Hêsped as a generic type is a poem of mourning and a conventional hagiography. Formally, the poem appears conventional in the Russian context, although at the same time, there are distinct details from Herzl’s own life that Jabotinsky transfers into poetry, such as the famous line from the 1903 Zionist Congress, “I won’t forget you, Jerusalem.” Although there is much one could say about the poem, perhaps its most striking feature is its similarity with the “Lay of Igor” (“Slovo o polku igoreve”), the most important East Slavic saga written in the fourteenth century. For example, the following comparison of Herzl with an eagle is almost lifted from the epic tale.

Sometimes he was a titan with granite shoulders,

Sometimes he was an eagle with eagle eyes,

On his forehead an eagle’s sorrow.

By comparing Herzl and Igor, the author underscores the victory inherent in both texts. The defeat of ancient Rus’ leads to the realization that the East Slavic people constitute the Russian nation. Similarly, Herzl’s death contains a promise: the people will join together to regain their homeland. Despite the title, the poem diverges from a traditional Jewish memorial, but resembles a Russian ode.²³

In “Sitting on the Floor,” a prose essay published in the same issue of Evreiskaia Zhizn’, Jabotinsky alludes to shiva, a week of mourning following the death of a close relative. Jabotinsky describes Herzl’s formidable talent: “His genius was not of an exclusive sphere, like the genius of an orator or writer or statesman: his genius was focused deeper, internally—in his great heart, a heart of tremendous sensitivity that could understand the spirit of each moment and prompted the orator, the writer and the leader with the necessary word. His primary and essential talent, perhaps, consisted in this amazing art of finding the necessary word at the right time.”²⁴

Attachment to Herzl was a tactic that Jabotinsky used to enhance his own image in the Zionist movement. He depicted himself as altered forever by Herzl. He wrote, “We became different people, we came alive from touching the ground that he placed beneath our feet. Only recently have I truly felt the ground under my feet, and understood only from that minute what it means to live and breathe. And if tomorrow I would awaken and suddenly see that it had all been a dream, that my former self and the ground under my feet did not exist and never had existed, I would kill myself, because one who has breathed the air of the mountaintop cannot return in resignation and sit beside the ditch.”²⁵

Throughout his life, Jabotinsky tried to draw parallels between himself and Herzl. Herzl appears numerous times in Story of My Life in various treatments, narrated in a serious as well as a jocular tone. For example, Jabotinsky relates what would appear to be an embarrassing scandal: Herzl threw him off the stage at the Congress. In the letter to Chukovsky cited above, Jabotinsky records the negative reception of his speech (“they ‘whistled’ at me”).

What Jabotinsky says transpired was the following: Jabotinsky devoted his speech at the Congress to a defense of Herzl’s travels to Russia and his meeting with Count Plehve, the hated interior minister. According to Jabotinsky’s account in Story of My Life, it was taboo to speak on the subject, and everyone knew it. When he raised the issue, a general tumult arose. In response to the noise in the hall, Herzl came out from the back and asked Weizmann what the young man was saying in Russian. Weizmann responded, “Quatsch. [Nonsense.]” And Herzl announced, “Ihre Zeit ist um. [Your time is up.]”²⁶

Of course, the story reflects Jabotinsky’s preoccupations in 1936: his competition with Weizmann and his desire to underscore his love for Herzl, even facing the latter’s wrath in doing so. Nonetheless, it seems possible that Jabotinsky invented the story “from whole cloth,” as Michael Stanislawski has argued, although his letter to Chukovsky accurately describes the catcalls that he received.²⁷

But Jabotinsky did not stop there. He continues in Story of My Life, solemnly announcing that

Herzl made a colossal impression on me—this word is no exaggeration, no other description would fit: colossal. And I am not one of those who will easily bow to any personality—in general, I do not remember, out of all the experiences I had in my life, any man who impressed me either before Herzl or after him about whom I felt that, truly, there stands before me a man of destiny, a prophet and leader by the grace of God deserving to be followed even through error. . . . And even today it seems to me that I hear his voice ringing in my ears, as he swore to all of us: “Im eshkahech Yerushalayim . . .” (“If I forget thee, Jerusalem . . .”).²⁸

Jabotinsky never stopped trying to appropriate Herzl’s authority, often asserting that he alone retained a commitment to Herzl’s political Zionism, with its emphasis on a political breakthrough. Though in 1904 he embraced “Synthetic Zionism,” which included support for both political Zionism and practical settlement, by 1925 he was emphasizing his attachment to Herzl and calling his new party Revisionism (HaTzoHar), meaning a revision of Herzl’s original “Basel” Zionism. In a 1926 policy statement, What Do Revisionists Want?, Jabotinsky explicitly announced that he had embraced Herzl’s legacy. “With a firm belief, we call on the Zionist public to renew Herzl’s tradition—the energetic, systematic and peaceful political struggle to attain our demands.”²⁹ And what were these demands? “The first goal of Zionism is the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine, East and West of the Jordan [River]. That is not the last final goal of the Zionist movement which has several broader ideals, such as the solution of the Jewish Question in the whole world and the creation of a new Jewish culture.”³⁰

In different ways Jabotinsky developed the image of father-son, mentor-student, and leader and successor, as though he photoshopped a picture of himself standing next to Herzl. In all these permutations, Jabotinsky conceived Herzl as a Nietzschean, one who exploited every moment and embodied the qualities of the ideal man. Although Herzl was superhuman and therefore impossible to emulate fully, nonetheless Jabotinsky believed that it was our task to try to do so. In fact, Herzl is the Nietzschean figure who inspires precisely because his example is unattainable. The virtues he possesses include confidence, discipline, ambition, prophetic vision, an ability to convince and inspire, and a sense that the real and unreal are not far apart.

Today we may be used to adulation of Herzl, but it is worth recalling that Russian Zionists in 1903 had ambivalent feelings toward him.³¹ They did not begrudge him his greatness as an organizer and genuine leader, nor did they deny his brilliance as an orator, but they faulted Herzl for a lack of Jewish spirit, a complaint first raised by Ahad-Ha’am.³² They also opposed his exclusive emphasis on political Zionism, preferring the expansion of settlements and pioneers. The democratic faction within the camp (including Martin Buber, Weizmann, and many Russian Zionists) criticized Herzl’s authoritarian approach to guiding the movement. For example, most Russian Zionists expressed anger at Herzl’s trip to Russia to meet Viacheslav Plehve, which they felt was unseemly after the events in Kishinev.

If the meeting with Plehve without proper consultation with his Russian colleagues showed insensitivity, Russian Zionists were more shocked by Herzl’s Uganda proposal. Chlenov writes that “[Uganda] brought in our ranks an extremely strong tumult, from which the movement has not yet calmed down. Not just one of the foundation stones has been shaken, but the whole building has cracked.”³³ It seemed to take the movement in the direction of Territorialism and away from Zionism. Furthermore, they had long expressed skepticism about Herzl’s dream of a quick diplomatic breakthrough and maintained that his public proclamations harmed the cause because they brought unwanted attention and raised suspicions among the Ottomans.

These debates harkened back to the East-West divide in which Herzl wanted to employ diplomacy to secure for the Jews a charter, or the legal right to immigrate to Palestine.³⁴ The East-European Jews often found Herzl’s go-it-alone attitude naïve and self-destructive. Far more could be achieved, they maintained, if one harnessed the collective efforts of the entire movement.

Though he admired Herzl, Jabotinsky was less enamored of his politics than his personality. Jabotinsky would remember that the leader’s personality, his effect on others, did not always coincide with the wisdom of his politics. In fact, Jabotinsky counted himself among those who favored the Russian position:

We will create a beautiful program consolidating our influence in our irredentist land, and we will realize this program day after day, step by step, stubbornly and relentlessly. The work for Palestine will revive in us an ancient organic connection with the beloved little homeland of a great tribe, and even those among us today who once subscribed to the ranks of those indifferent to their origins will love her once again. This is the only path that can unify the disparate elements that nothing can unify, except for the living work on the living task dear to our heart.³⁵

This and other expressions of sympathy for Palestine won him friends among the Russian leaders, Ussishkin, Chlenov, and Bernstein-Kogan.

In 1904, Jabotinsky decided to leave Odessa for St. Petersburg, where he had been invited to join the editorial board of Evreiskaia Zhizn’. He arrived in time to contribute to the paper’s inaugural issue. At the same time, he was also invited to write for Rus’, a liberal newspaper edited by Aleksei Suvorin Jr., the son of the conservative publisher Aleksei Suvorin. In his autobiography, Jabotinsky claims that he fled to St. Petersburg in order to escape an arrest warrant in Odessa.³⁶ Although the police in Odessa did seek his arrest (Svetlana Natkovich described Jabotinsky’s fear of imprisonment), like so many provincials he also yearned for fame and a bigger stage in the capital city.³⁷

Jabotinsky’s stay in St. Petersburg was problematic because as a Jew, he did not have a legal right to live in the capital. Only so-called “privileged Jews” had the right to live in St. Petersburg—for example, Jewish members of the first merchant guild, Jews with a diploma, and certain other categories of “useful Jews.”³⁸ Nikolai Sorin, the editor of Evreiskaia Zhizn’, found Jabotinsky a hotel where it was possible to bribe the police so that he could live without fear of arrest. Jabotinsky lived in St. Petersburg on and off for the next several years.

To understand Jabotinsky at this time, we need to examine Rassvet, also known as Evreiskaia Zhizn’. One can not exaggerate the importance of the newspaper for the propagation of Zionist ideas in Russia. It was printed in the Russian language and was expressly devoted to the idea of Zionism, a Jewish home in Palestine. Its readership rivaled the most popular newspapers in Russia.³⁹

In contrast to the hands-on experience of the Second Aliyah figures—Ben-Gurion, Berl Katsenelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin, and others who went to Palestine to promote agricultural settlements—the character of Rassvet (Evreiskaia Zhizn’) was elitist, urban, and intellectual. Nikolai Sorin, a wealthy businessman, founded the journal by paying the government a fee for a license and then set about attracting a team to help him run it. The contributors were talented individuals: Yuly Brutskus, Daniil Pasmanik, Shlomo Gepstein, Alexander Goldstein, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Arye Babkov, Arnold Seiderman, Max Soloveichik, and an engineer, Moshe Zeitlin.⁴⁰ This group acquired the name Halastra, which means “group” or “club” in Polish, reflecting the bohemian assembly of young intellectuals.

Admittedly, the newspaper was something of a strange bird, a Zionist weekly in the Russian language, published in the country’s capital, a city that most of the contributors could not live in, at least not lawfully.⁴¹ The first editor, Moisei Margolin, articulated the goals of the journal, declaring, among other things, the right to Jewish self-consciousness, self-preservation, and a land of their own.⁴² “Enough! It is time to finish our wanderings, time for the landless Jewish people to get its own piece of land, time for the European peoples to acknowledge the heavy guilt of their millennia-long persecutions of the wandering people, and give them the opportunity to stop being a foreign body in an alien organism and to live freely on their own land.”⁴³ Margolin continued his argument: for the past two thousand years, the Jews had devoted themselves to the well-being of other countries and peoples; now they had to change course and concentrate on themselves.

Zionist theory was important, but praxis—what was happening today—was paramount for a weekly newspaper. And the watchword of the moment was “crisis.” The political shake-up in Russia itself was leading to excitement and political awareness. Yehiel Chlenov predicted positive changes on the horizon. Externally things seemed negative, but Zionism was growing stronger and building a broader constituency:

In the last two years, life has been far from normal. It abandoned direct practical questions because forces passed over to the ideological struggle, spiritual work. Zionism turned inward, into itself; it experienced and experiences to this day a period of internal birth, the formation of new ideas, new foundations and new forces. It would therefore be wrong to define the true pulse of Zionist life only by means of external indicators. One should go deeper, examine the internal life of the clubs. And we will see in almost all the regions three analogous phenomena: the weakening, in places the death of existing forms, the strengthening of those who survived, and the planting of new kinds of new forces.⁴⁴

In 1905, the number of shekel-payers in Russia surpassed seventy thousand, which was significantly lower than earlier, although in his calculations Chlenov acknowledged that communication with the provinces was unreliable, and therefore membership numbers could be higher.⁴⁵

After two issues, the editorship of Evreiskaia Zhizn’ passed to Avram Idel’son, who was more dynamic and envisioned a vital, popular, and intellectually vibrant paper. Idel’son decided to face the crisis directly in order to solve it. But first one needed a diagnosis. What was the crisis?

According to Idel’son, Herzl had directed the movement single-handedly, but his imperious attitude had thwarted grassroots and local initiatives. For one thing, the total dependence on diplomacy hindered efforts to colonize Palestine. Also, Herzl’s conception of his own role left little space for developing new leaders from among the younger generation. Finally, Herzl had not attained a charter or a promise of rights to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Thus, Zionism found itself at a crossroads: the political movement Herzl had established was exhausted. If it was to be revitalized, it would need to pursue new directions. Idel’son had some idea of how to escape the cul-de-sac.

As is well known, Ahad-Ha’am formulated the idea that the Galut (Jewish Diaspora) was objectively negated, although subjectively there was no escaping the fact that millions of Jews lived and would continue to live outside of Eretz Yisrael. Therefore, theory had to surrender to praxis; it was unclear when or if the Diaspora would ever come to an end.⁴⁶

Calling his idea Synthetic Zionism, Idel’son advocated a reevaluation of the Galut, asking whether participation in the political life of host societies should be encouraged.⁴⁷ Idel’son argued that Diaspora life was far from merely a wasteland. At a minimum, it offered educational opportunities and preparation for life in Palestine.

Idel’son’s style of argumentation was paradoxical. He started with an antinomy—for example, that Marxism denied the reality of nationalism. Then he claimed that Marxism was wrong because nationalism was a powerful force that energized capitalism. Capitalism, however, competed with nationalism and sought the assimilation of minority nations because a single unified nation-state provided the most effective means of producing and consuming products and services. Assimilation was therefore inevitable. Concretely, the Jews of Russia would ultimately be forced to integrate due to economic pressures. For Jews, therefore, the only solution was emigration to Palestine, where Jews would compose the hegemonic culture to which others would need to assimilate.⁴⁸ Paradoxically, in Idel’son’s view, Jews in Russia must fight to promote Jewish interests, all the while knowing that efforts to retain Jewish difference in the Diaspora were doomed to failure.⁴⁹

Jabotinsky described Idel’son’s position this way:

Our ideal consisted in preserving only what is alive in Judaism, the energy that at one time was transferred into our workshops; i.e., they shook the dust of the Diaspora from their feet. That [ideal] is still true. But now we bend down and pick up from the ground the clumps of this ‘dust’ and try to analyze them. We immediately see that it is full of valuable organic ingredients that turn out to be productive when used properly. Let us analyze the ghetto. A terrible institution that has poisoned us physically and morally—but at its base is found the healthy principle of estrangement, and it is worth cultivating this principle [albeit] in a different form. At the same time, take assimilation: an indisputable illness, moral gangrene—but it put into our hands the whole cultural arsenal of modernity without which we would not even be able to dream of any building. Take the Jew’s cowardliness and physical passivity, his response to a pogrom, “the dark cellar.” It is shameful and an invitation to other pogromists, but in certain conditions it is precisely the very best method for a weak minority’s self-defense.⁵⁰

While Jabotinsky promoted the conclusion that one needed to empty the Galut and move the Jewish people to Palestine to create a Jewish majority there, the other parts of Idel’son’s program appealed to him too. Jabotinsky was strongly tethered to the Galut and well prepared to engage in Russian politics with his expert knowledge of Russian language and culture. In fact, this was a vital point because Jabotinsky was weak in Jewish subjects—Hebrew and Jewish ritual practice. However, his knowledge of Western culture gave him “the arsenal” with which to dream of liberation. Jabotinsky began to espouse Synthetic Zionism and engagement with political life in the Diaspora.

Idel’son played a vital role in Jabotinsky’s career as an ideological lodestar and mentor. Everyone who met Idel’son acknowledged his brilliance. Jabotinsky lauded Idel’son as a rare genius.

I am sure that it is no exaggeration if I say that to describe the value of Idel’son the word “talent” is inadequate—that man stood on the border of “genius.” “Acid all-corroding brain”—[Osip] Gruzenberg once said to me speaking of Idel’son, and he was right. But that was merely one face of a multifaceted crystal. His “acidity” consumed only the shells; into the kernels he knew to inject vivifying magic fluids. The curse of his destiny, the fate of a pauper—as were most of the members of our circle—or perhaps also, and to a certain extent, the self-neglect originating in the same “acidness,” prevented him from explicating his ideas in the form of a definite treatise. . . . But to us youngsters, even without his “works” his company was like a university.⁵¹

In early 1905 the Revolution erupted, and Jabotinsky, like many others, got caught up in the political wave. In “Sketches without a Title,” Jabotinsky wrote:

But when we grow old, and the question is raised for us by the next generation—how will we justify ourselves and on what will we rely? Our time is not like that of our fathers. A somnolent quiet enveloped them, while we are surrounded by noise and rumbling: something is falling apart, something is being built, thousands of guides seek thousands of new paths, new banners are flashing in the air and new words are rattling—“the ice is coming,” thundering, striking, breaking into pieces everything that succumbs to pressure. Whoever has been fated to live in this roar of life and nevertheless lives to old age, what will he say on Passover night with empty hands to both his children in response to their questioning and justified “Ma”? [“What?”]⁵²

At this time Jabotinsky called on young men and women to devote three years to service in Palestine, coining for the first time the name, “Monism,” which he defined as the obligation of a Zionist to devote all one’s strength and energy exclusively to the Zionist project.⁵³ Jabotinsky compared this commitment with army service. “This is military duty. For many centuries the Jewish people did not have their own soldiers; now the time has come for them. He who becomes a soldier in times of war, if he loves his homeland, he will not ask questions about whether he will be well fed and warm during the campaign. We are in wartime too, and let our warriors be ready for heavy work and for hunger and cold.”⁵⁴ One can hear the voice of the future recruiter for the Jewish Legion here. Regarding the comment that the Jewish people did not have soldiers, it is essential to note that Jews were not only enlisted in the Russian army but were overrepresented at this time.⁵⁵

Jabotinsky’s early articles in Evreiskaia Zhizn’ showed the influence of Menachem Ussishkin, who emphasized total sacrifice for the sake of practical achievements in Palestine. Ussishkin was an important model since he was the leader of the practical camp, a builder of institutions in Odessa who effectively organized people and money.⁵⁶ In 1905, Ussishkin published “Our Program,” a manifesto that outlined his solution to the crisis of Zionism. Ussishkin called for synthesis, intense movement on all fronts—practical, theoretical, and diplomatic. He pleaded for the fulfillment of the Basel program, including the resurrection of Hebrew as a living language, diplomacy with the Sultan and the European powers, and the purchase of tracts of land in Palestine to house the growing Jewish population. His main innovation, however, was the formulation of a “Jewish University Society of Workmen” (Weltarbeitergenossenschaft). He called on young men to devote three years of their lives to the cultivation of land in Palestine. A group of volunteers, “unmarried young men, physically and mentally sound, must be formed. It should be the duty of every member of this society to go to Palestine for three years, in order to perform his military duty to the Jewish people, not with musket and sword, but with plow and sickle. These thousands of young people will be obliged to present themselves in the colonies, in order to offer their services as laborers at the same wages that Arabs receive.”⁵⁷

Ussishkin’s goal was to instill a “bond between the Jews of Palestine and the Jews of the lands of the exile [so that it] will cease to be a paper one (prayers, books, periodicals), and . . . become a living one.”⁵⁸ He maintained that this experience would cultivate a new prophet, a new Herzl,

whose appearance our people has awaited for thousands of years. Neither the unemancipated nor the spiritual Ghetto of the lands of the exile will rear him, but the free spirit of the mountains of Judea and Galilee. He will open unto us the gates of our home not from without, but from within. He will unite in himself the courage and might of old Bar Kochba with the spirit and the charm of our contemporary Herzl. Boldly and proudly will he plant in the sight of the whole world the blue and white banner of liberated Israel upon Mount Zion.⁵⁹

By promoting similar practical efforts to Judaize Palestine, Jabotinsky borrowed from Ussishkin. Jabotinsky’s relationship to Ussishkin went beyond a shared love for active settlement of the land. In fact, Jabotinsky worked as a kind of apprentice, helping Ussishkin conduct his extensive schedule of meetings and serving as his personal ambassador. As their correspondence from 1904–05 shows, Jabotinsky kept Ussishkin abreast of his activities, where he went and whom he met.⁶⁰

It is worth mentioning that in Herzl, Ahad-Ha’am, and Ussishkin, Jabotinsky had created for himself a combination of three spiritual fathers—political, intellectual, and practical. Although he was still a novice in politics, he modeled himself on strong men who had a great deal to teach him.

Notes

1.Michael Heymann, ed., The Uganda Controversy: Minutes of the Zionist General Council. 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Hassifriya Haziyonit, 1977).

2.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: Congress sionistov. Ot nashego korrespondenta,” Odesskie Novosti (August 19, 1903); “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: ‘Mizrakhi.’ Ot nashego korresp.,” Odesskie Novosti (August 20, 1903); “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: Gertsl’ i Neinsager’y,” Odesskie Novosti (August 23, 1903).

3.Gur Alroey, Zionism without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 31–44.

4.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: Shestoi kongress sionistov” in Jabotinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh (Minsk: Met, 2007), 3:376–377.

5.Ibid., 377.

6.Yehuda Slutzky, Ha-itonut ha-yehudit-rusit be-reshit be-mea ha-esrim (1900–1918) (Tel Aviv: Ha-aguda le-haker toldot ha-yihudim, 1978), 204–218.

7.Yehiel Chlenov, Sion i afrika na shestom kongresse (Moscow: Poplavskii, 1905), 28.

8.A somewhat different impression was given by Yehiel Chlenov. See note 7.

9.Jabotinsky, “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: Gertsl’,” 399.

10.Ibid., 400.

11.Ibid., 402–403.

12.Ibid., 402.

13.Ibid., 391–92.

14.Jabotinsky, “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: Gertsl’,” 392.

15.There are many articles on Vladimir Solov’ev and the Jews, see Brian. Horowitz, “Vladimir Solov’ev and the Jews: A View from Today,” The Russian-Jewish Tradition: Intellectuals, Historians, Revolutionaries (Boston: Academic Studies, 2017), 198–214.

16.Jabotinsky, “Bazel’skie vpechatleniia: Gertsl’” 393.

17.Ibid.

18.Ibid., 403.

19.Letter of Vladimir Jabotinsky to Kornei Chukovsky, December 10, 1903. Jabotinsky Institute Archives.

20.Yitzhak Greenbaum, “Me-Varsha ad Helsingfors (shalosh veidot rishonot shel tsionim be-rusya),” Katsir: Kovets le-Korot 1:33.

21.Yehiel Chlenov, Polozhenie sionizma v Rossii: k vii-mu kongresu (St. Petersburg: Ts. Kraiz, 1905), 21.

22.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Hêsped,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 13 (April 3, 1905): 8. “Im eshkahech Yerushalayim”—the line in Hebrew from Psalm 137:5, “If I forget you Jerusalem.” The psalm continues, “May my right hand forget its cunning.” Herzl made this the cornerstone of his speech at the Sixth Zionist Congress in order to undercut those who accused him of indifference to Palestine for promoting East Africa as a possible place of settlement.

23.Jabotinsky called his 1927 memoir about the Jewish Legion Slovo o polku, again using the East Slavic saga for his own purposes.

24.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Sidia na polu . . .,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 6 (June 1904): 15.

25.Ibid., 17.

26.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 23.

27.Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 119.

28.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 23–24.

29.Vladimir Jabotinsky, Was wollen die Zionisten-Revisionisten (Paris: Polyglotte, 1926), 16.

30.Ibid., 3.

31.Israel Klausner, Opozitsiya le-Herzl (Jerusalem: Akhiever, 1960), 6–7.

32.Chlenov, Sion i Afrika, 28.

33.Jabotinsky, Polozhenie sionizma, 19. Information on Yehiel Chlenov can be found in Yehiel Tchlenov: Perkei hayav u’feulato, zichronot, ktavim, neumim, mikhtavim, 1863–1918 (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel, 1937).

34.Shlomo Avineri, Herzl’s Vision and the Foundation of the Jewish State (New York: BlueBridge, 2017), 12.

35.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Sionizm i Palestina,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 2 (February 1904): 219.

36.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 73.

37.Svetlana Natkovich, Ben aneney Zohar: Yetsirato shel Vladimir (Ze’ev) Z’abotinski ba-heksher ha-hevrati (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015), 95. It is worth wondering why the Petersburg police did not have authorization to arrest and send him to Odessa. The tsarist secret police, Okhrana, had a file on Jabotinsky that apparently continued until 1915. In 1905, Jabotinsky was tracked, as were other Zionists and revolutionaries. Matityahu Mintz, “Al shum ma hithakta ha-Okhrana’ ha-tsarit al tse’avdav shel Z’abotinski?,” in Ish be-sa’ar: Masot u’mekharim ‘al Ze’ev Z’abotinski, ed. Avi Bareli and Pinhas Ginossar (Ber-Sheva: Universitat Ben-Guryon ba’Negev, 2004), 450–455.

38.Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 17.

39.Slutzky, Ha-itonut ha-yehudit rusit be-mea ha-esrim, 203–267. On subscriptions to Jewish newspapers see Vladimir Levin, “Verbreitung jüdischer Zeitschriften in Rußland: Sprache versus Geographie,” in Die jüdische Presse im europäischen Kontext, 1686–1900, ed. Susanne Marten-Finnis and Marcus Winkler (Bremen: Edition lumière, 2006), 101–116.

40.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 74.

41.It might be noted that a Yiddish newspaper, Der Fraynd, began publishing in 1903 in St. Petersburg.

42.M. M. Margolin, Osnovnye techeniia v istorii evreiskogo naroda: etiud po filosofii istorii evreev (St. Petersburg: Severnaia Skoropechatnia, 1900).

43.M. M. Margolin, “O zadachakh Evreiskoi Zhizni,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 1 (1904): 1.

44.Chlenov, Polozhenie sionizma, 17.

45.Ibid., 9.

46.“Negation of the Galut” means the idea that Jews needed to leave the Diaspora and form a new commonwealth in their historic homeland. Robert Seltzer, “Ahad-Ha’am and Dubnow: Friends and Adversaries,” At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad-Ha’am, ed. Jacques Kornberg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 67.

47.Although Idel’son is hardly remembered now, émigrés published two volumes dedicated to him. Sefer Idelsohn: Divre ha-arakhah ve-zikhronot, toldot hayav u’khetavav (Tel Aviv: Omanut, 1946); Yu. D. Brutskus et al., ed., Sbornik pamiati A. D. Idel’sona (Berlin: Lutse & Bogt, 1925).

48.Avram Idel’son, “Marksizm i evreiskii vopros,” Evreiskaia Zhizn’ 8 (August 1905): 86.

49.Certainly this differed from Ber Borochov’s position that neither assimilation nor equal rights are possible since a loss in economic competition is foreordained.

50.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “U kolybeli Gel’singforskoi programmy,” in Brutskus, Sbornik pamiati A. D. Idel’sona, 90. “Ma” refers, of course, to the first of the Hebrew “Four Questions,” recited on Passover.

51.Jabotinsky, Story of My Life, 75.

52.Vladimir Jabotinsky, “Nabroski bez zaglaviia,” Khronika Evreiskoi Zhizni 14 (February 10, 1905): 8.

53.The concept comes from Leibniz and refers to a closed system, such as a person whose perception of the world is limited to the five senses.

54.Jabotinsky, “Sionizm i Palestina,” 69.

55.Yochanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 202.

56.At this time Ussishkin headed the Zionists in Odessa, having recently relocated from Yekaterinoslav. Yossi Goldshtein, Ussishkin biografiya: ha-tekufa ha-rusit, 1853–1919, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), 1:211.

57.M. Ussischkin, Our Program: An Essay, trans. D. S. Bondheim (New York: Federation of American Zionists, 1905), 27.

58.Ibid., 28.

59.Ibid., 36–37.

60.See, for example, this letter from Jabotinsky to Ussishkin from May 28, 1906: “Regarding the congress: a) a large one in Odessa is impossible; b) a medium-size congress is almost impossible, c) a small, private conference by invitation is not necessary. But as commissioners they are simply obliged to hold a congress of the Union [of Zionist journalists]. It was acknowledged that the initiative should not come from the official leaders. The commissioners will unanimously bless us (Evreiskaia Zhizn’ and Glos Żydowski) to sign the invitation.” See Jabotinsky’s letters to M. Ussishkin, located in Jabotinsky Institute Archives. Some of these letters are also available in Zeev Zabotinski, Igorot, ed. Daniel Carpi (Jerusalem: Hassifriya Haziyonit, 1995), vol. 2.