A History of Zionism (13 page)

The writers of that age are now remembered for their role as social critics and prophets of a national revival. To this extent their impact on Jewish circles is comparable to that of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, and there was a certain similarity with regard to the problems facing them. The Jews, like the Russians, had their ‘westernisers’ and their ‘Slavophiles’ in the 1860s and 1870s. The westernisers (assimilationists) had many supporters; later on the majority turned to the ideal of a national revival. The slogan of the Slavophiles, ‘pora domoi’ (literally: it is time to go home), had its equivalent among the Jews of eastern Europe.

One of the first to attack cultural assimilation in the name of the Jewish cultural idea was Peretz Smolenskin, born near Mogilev in 1842. At the age of twenty-five he settled in Vienna where he edited
Hashachar
(The Dawn), the most influential Hebrew newspaper of the time. He was also its main contributor, proof reader, distributor, and sometimes even typesetter. In a series of long articles he attacked the Berlin Haskala and, in particular, Mendelssohn (whom he called ‘Ben Menahem’) for having assumed that the Jewish nation was irrevocably dead and for preaching an ‘artificial cosmopolitanism’. The Jews, Smolenskin emphasised time and time again, were a people, a nation. They never ceased to be a people even after their kingdom was destroyed. They were a spiritual nation (
Am Haruach
); the Torah was the foundation of its statehood. It was the unforgivable sin of the German Haskala to have made the love of their own people unfashionable among Jews. Then they had proceeded to destroy the other pillar of Judaism - its religion - and as a result the house of Israel had completely collapsed.

The accusations were of course one-sided; Smolenskin, moreover, tended to forget that his own nationalism was by no means part of the Jewish tradition but stemmed from other spiritual sources, and that he too had advocated religious reform in his earlier years. He frequently quoted the evil precedent of the German Haskala in his struggle against both Russification and cosmopolitanism. He preached Jewish nationalism when it was not yet fashionable to do so and he was also one of the few to predict antisemitic outbreaks well before the riots of 1881. The source of antisemitism, Smolenskin maintained, was not primarily economic rivalry - though this too played a part - but the Jewish lack of self-respect and national honour, their low position among the nations. In a series of verbose essays (some running to several hundred pages)
*
which constantly digressed from his main theme, he developed his ideas - unsystematically, and, on the whole, not on a high level of intellectual sophistication. His criticism was often quite effective, his constructive proposals much weaker. Smolenskin believed that without Hebrew there was no Torah, and without the Torah, no Jewish people. For that reason he opposed all religious reforms, which could only further divide the Jewish people. The main task was to establish schools for teachers and rabbis who were to infuse new life into the young generation, to teach it Hebrew, and thus to promote national consciousness and loyalty to its people. Smolenskin had little hope that Hebrew would again become a spoken language, and up to 1881 he advocated a national revival in the diaspora rather than in Palestine. Only in his last essays did he express the idea that it would be best for the Jews to leave Russia, to migrate to Eretz Israel, to set up agricultural colonies there and thus to ‘re-establish the real unity of the Jewish people’.

Smolenskin’s writings, antiquated as they now appear, had a great impact on many young Jews. Groups of students in Moscow and St Petersburg gave him an enthusiastic welcome when he went back for a visit. Others were not so captivated by a religious romanticism which appealed almost exclusively to the emotions. A younger generation of intellectuals refused to take Jewish values and traditions for granted. Micah Joseph Berdichevsky, subjecting this heritage to searching criticism, complained about the narrowness of traditional Jewish life and its bondage to a system of outdated laws. He demanded a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of values’.
*
Shaul Hurwitz (who translated Moses Hess into Russian) maintained that Judaism could not satisfy the modern Jew who had become estranged from the ghetto.
†
Hurwitz and Berdichevsky were twenty years younger than Smolenskin. The issue was put with even more brutal frankness by a representative of an even younger generation, Joseph Chaim Brenner. Smolenskin once referred to the verse in Ecclesiastes about living dogs and dead lions. Brenner took up the comparison: true, the live dog was better off, but what was the worth of a ‘living people’ whose members had no power except to moan and hide until the storm blew over? Existence was pleasant, Brenner countered, but it was not a virtue in itself. It was not necessarily the noblest who survived: ‘Caravans come and go, as Mendele Mocher Sfarim put it, but the
Luftmenschen
of Kislon and Kabtziel go on forever.’ Jewish survival was indeed a mystery, but the quality of Jewish existence was not a source of great pride. Masses of them continued to live in a biological sense, but there was no longer a living people in a sociological sense, as a social entity: ‘We have no inheritance. No generation gives anything of its own to its successor. And what is transmitted - the rabbinical literature - were better never handed down to us.’
‡

Such an attitude would have been anathema to Smolenskin, with his fiery appeals for a national revival. During the 1860s and early 1870s he was very much a voice in the wilderness, but towards the end of the 1870s, and particularly after the riots of 1881, he was no longer fighting the battle alone. Among those who joined him was Yehuda Leib Gordon (Yalag), the greatest Hebrew poet of the time. He had been in favour of cultural assimilation. His saying ‘Be a human being outside and a Jew at home’, had been often and widely quoted. Moses Leib Lilienblum, the leading essayist of the period, had been in his earlier years one of the sharpest critics of the Talmud, and an advocate of Socialist ideas. He too now became a confirmed nationalist; so did Eliezer Perlman, better known under the pen-name Ben Yehuda, formerly a convinced
Narodnik
who had fully identified himself with the national aspirations of the Russian people and the southern Slavs.

By the late 1870s, Gordon no longer believed in cultural and political integration. In an anonymously published pamphlet he suggested the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine under British suzerainty.
*
For Lilienblum, the rise of modern antisemitism in the west, and the riots of 1881, were a shattering blow, and he too became one of the main spokesman of early Russian Zionism. ‘We need a corner of our own,’ he wrote in 1881. ‘We need Palestine.’
†
Ben Yehuda, under the impact of the Bulgarians and Montenegrins, reached the conclusion that the Jewish people, too, had to become again a living nation. The revival of Hebrew was to become his life work, but he realised very early that there was no future for the language in the diaspora; it could flourish only if the nation was revived and returned to its homeland.

The riots of 1881 put an end to many illusions and gave rise to much heart-searching among Russian Jewry. Was there a future for them in the empire of the tsars? If not, where should they turn? What were the causes of antisemitism? Lilienblum, in a remarkably astute analysis of antisemitism, had reached the pessimistic conclusion that ‘aliens we are and aliens we shall remain’. The progress of civilisation would not eliminate anti-Jewish persecution based on nationalism rather than on religious prejudice. The trend all over Europe was towards nationalism. Perhaps it was a progressive development but as far as the Jews were concerned it was the very soil on which antisemitism was flourishing. Nor should their hope be put in Socialism and the proletariat, as Lilienblum himself had done in earlier years. If the workers came to power they would regard the Jews as rivals who deprived them of their livelihood: ‘We will be regarded as capitalists and as usual we will fill the role of the scapegoat and the lightning rod.’ Antisemitism, Lilienblum maintained, was not a transient phenomenon, not an anachronism. A return to the Middle Ages seemed inconceivable to many Jews, but Lilienblum was less optimistic. The Jewish question could be solved only if the Jews were transferred to a country where they constituted the majority, where they would no longer be strangers but able to lead a normal life. Such a possibility did not exist in Spain
‡
nor in Latin America nor even in the United States, but only in Palestine. It was pointless to wait for an initiative on the part of the Jewish plutocrats; the impetus could come only from the ranks of the people.
*

The question whether to emigrate and where to turn agitated Russian Jewry for many years. Smolenskin became a Zionist after the riots of 1881 and in his writings listed the advantages of Palestine over the countries of North and South America. He noted that only a few years earlier the very word Eretz Israel had been derided by almost all Jews except those who wished to be buried there. Now there was talk about establishing agricultural settlements; this in fact was becoming the chief topic of conversation among all those who loved their people. Other publicists were less sanguine about Palestine. These included Dr Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto; Dubnow, then a young historian; and even Sokolow, one of the future leaders of Zionism. They had serious doubts about the feasibility of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Was it not above all a practical question? Jews could migrate to America, whereas substantial numbers could not for the time being settle in Palestine. Palestine was not a solution for the acute problems facing Russian Jewry; moreover, they would not be safe or free there, but exposed to the unpredictable whims of the sultan and his local representatives. Yalag, on the other hand, who knew his rabbis, was more afraid of theocracy in a Jewish state than of the arbitrary rule of the sultan. The idea of a Jewish state in America was aired only to be dismissed. The Jew could not compete with the Yankee and there was no guarantee that European antisemitism would not ultimately infect America as well. Ignatiev, the Russian minister responsible for the May Laws, expressed a preference for Palestine because there, he told Jewish visitors, the Jews would be able to work on the land and could also preserve their national identity, which they could not do in America.

The Russian-educated Maskilim of Odessa and southern Russia, strongly affected by Russian culture, tended on the whole to choose America, whereas the more traditional Jews of Lithuania and White Russia were more attracted by the idea of a Jewish revival in Palestine.
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But it is also true that with a few exceptions the initiative for the establishment of a pro-Palestine committee also came from south Russia (Odessa, Kiev, Kharkov, Elizavetgrad). On the whole, the America vs. Palestine debate was not one of fundamental principles. Those who preferred America did so not from any aversion to Palestine, but because emigration to Palestine was in the given circumstances not a practical proposition. The tired, poor and huddled masses of Russian Jews (‘the wretched refuse of your teeming shores’), the hundreds of thousands who left during the 1880s and 1890s, could not wait.

Leo Pinsker

There existed in Odessa in the 1870s a society for spreading enlightenment among the Jews; its main assignment was the teaching of the Russian language and of secular subjects to the younger generation. At a meeting of this group in the summer of 1881 one of its oldest and most respected members announced in great agitation that he was resigning on the spot; it was pointless to discuss whether this or the other deserving student should be given a stipend at a time when the whole Jewish people was under attack and when what was needed was leadership and initiative to save the nation, rather than the chance for a few individuals to improve themselves. Leo Pinsker, who provoked this showdown, was then sixty years of age, a physician who had in the past been one of the leading advocates of cultural assimilation.
*
The son of a distinguished Hebrew scholar, Pinsker had graduated from Moscow University. For his services in the Crimean War he had been rewarded by the government. The Odessa riots of 1871 had first sown doubts in his mind about the future prospects of the Jews in Russia, and the attacks of 1881 finally convinced him that his life-work, propagating cultural assimilation, had been in vain. Out of this recognition grew a pamphlet which, published anonymously in German in Berlin, became a milestone in the development of Zionist thought.
†

Some of the basic ideas in Pinsker’s
Autoemanzipation
were not altogether novel, but never before had they been developed systematically, with such clarity and logic. Never before had it been said with such passionate conviction that unless the Jews helped themselves, no one else would. Before Pinsker it had been the rule among the Jews in both west and east Europe to explain antisemitism solely as the result of the backwardness of a given country and the evil character of its inhabitants. A dispassionate analysis, taking account of the anomaly of Jewish existence, had not been attempted before, with the sole exception of Hess’s forgotten book. Perhaps it was Pinsker’s training as a physician that made it easier for him than for so many of his contemporaries to face unpleasant truths. He was not satisfied to interpret antisemitism solely in terms of jealousy or obscurantism. He, too, regarded Judaeophobia as a psychic aberration, but in his view it was hereditary. Transmitted as a disease for two thousand years, it was incurable, at least so long as its cause was not removed. To combat this hatred by way of polemics he regarded as a waste of time and energy: ‘Against superstition even the gods fight in vain.’ Prejudice, subconscious notions, could not be removed by reasoning, however forceful and clear.