A History of Zionism (14 page)

This was a revolutionary thesis. For several generations Jewish assimilationist spokesmen all over Europe had maintained precisely the opposite. They had argued that antisemitism could be reduced or even eradicated altogether by patient reasoning and argument, by explaining time and time again that Jews did not commit ritual murder, that they were willing to accept civic responsibilities and were capable of making positive contributions to the economic, social and cultural life of their countries. This had been the basic belief of the various leagues and associations for combating antisemitism which came into being during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was also shared, with some slight modifications, by most Jewish Socialists. Writing about antisemitism in the 1890s, Bernard Lazare, a fervent Socialist, one of the main figures in the campaign to rehabilitate Dreyfus and later on a Zionist, still maintained that mankind was moving from national egotism towards a spirit of brotherhood. Under Socialism, even during the transition towards Socialism, the Jews were bound to lose some or all of their own particular characteristics. Antisemitism was in the last resort a revolutionary agent, working towards its own ruin, for it paved the way for Socialism and Communism, and so for the elimination of the economic, religious and ethnic causes which had engendered antisemitism.
*

Pinsker did not share the optimism of the liberals and Socialists. The anomaly of Jewish existence, he claimed, was such that the disease could be cured only by getting at its roots. Having lost their independence and fatherland, the Jews had become a spiritual nation. The world had come to see in them the frightening spectre of the dead walking among the living. Everywhere they were guests, nowhere at home. Thanks to their adaptability they had usually acquired the alien traits of the people among whom they dwelt. They had absorbed certain cosmopolitan tendencies and lost their own traditional individuality. They had deliberately renounced their own nationality, but nowhere had they succeeded in obtaining recognition from their neighbours as citizens of equal rank. All this was no mere accident or misfortune. There was a certain logic in it. No people, Pinsker wrote, has any predilection for foreigners. But the Jew was subject to this general law to an even greater degree than other foreigners precisely because he had no country of his own, because he was the stranger
par excellence.
Other foreigners had no need to be, or to seem to be patriots. They could claim hospitality and repay it in the same coin in their own country. The Jew, having no country, could make no claim to hospitality. He was a beggar rather than a guest.

Relentlessly Pinsker went on to destroy illusions in which only a few years before he had shared: that Jews had lived in a certain country for many generations did not change the fact that they remained aliens. True, they were, or would be, legally emancipated and accorded civil rights, but they would not be socially emancipated and accepted as equals. Emancipation was always the fruit of a rational cast of mind and enlightened self-interest, never the spontaneous expression of the feeling of the people. Therefore the stigma attached to the Jews could not be removed even by legislative emancipation imposed from above ‘as long as it is the nature of this people to produce vagrant nomads, as long as they cannot give a satisfactory account of whence they come and whither they go, as long as the Jews themselves prefer not to speak in Aryan society of their Semitic descent and prefer not to be reminded of it - as long as they are persecuted, tolerated, protected, emancipated’. Pinsker concluded his analysis of antisemitism with a definition of the image of the Jew:

For the living, the Jew is a dead man; for the natives an alien and a vagrant; for property holders a beggar; for the poor an exploiter and a millionaire; for patriots a man without a country; for all classes, a hated rival.

Having described the etiology of the disease, Pinsker went on to discuss possible treatments - if not total cure. Jews were foolish to appeal to eternal justice and to expect of human nature something which had always been in short supply - humanity. What they needed was self-respect. They had waged a long and often heroic war for survival, but for survival not as a nation with a fatherland, but as individuals; in this struggle they had been forced to adopt all kinds of dubious tactics detrimental to their moral dignity, sinking even further in the eyes of their opponents. What they lacked was not genius but self-respect and dignity.

Nor were they justified in making the outside world responsible for their misfortunes. They had no providential mission among the nations, but should seek their own salvation in the struggle for independence and national unity. They were a sick people, for many of them did not even feel the need for an independent national existence, in the same way as a man affected by disease did not feel the desire for food and drink. But there was no other way out. The Russian Jews would have to emigrate unless they wanted to remain parasites and thus exposed to constant pressure and persecution. But since no other country was likely to open its gates to a mass immigration, they needed a home of their own. They were now passing through an important historical moment which might not recur. The consciousness of the people was awake, the time was ripe for decisive action - if only they were willing to help themselves. The Jewish societies already in existence, Pinsker suggested in conclusion, should call a national congress to purchase a territory for the settlement of several millions of Jews. At the same time the support of the powers should be obtained to ensure the perpetual existence of such a refuge. He did not expect that the entire people would emigrate to the new state; western Jews would probably remain where they were. But there was a saturation point in every country beyond which the number of Jews could not increase without exposing them to persecution, which might recur not only in Russia but also in other countries. Only in this way would it be possible to secure the future of the Jewish people, now everywhere endangered. He implored his fellow-Jews not to allow the great moment to pass. Self-liberation was the commandment of the hour: help yourselves and God will help you!

Pinsker’s appeal received wide notice from Jewish writers in Russia but hardly any attention from the people for whom it had been intended and from whom he expected leadership, namely western, and more particularly German, Jewry. When he discussed his views with Jellinek, the chief rabbi of Vienna, he was advised to take a rest in Italy to restore his obviously shattered nerves.
*
Most Russian-Jewish writers commented that there was little new in
Autoemanzipation
; similar ideas had been propagated in the Russian-Jewish Press for a number of years. A little patronisingly, Smolenskin wrote that
Autoemanzipation
could perhaps fulfil a useful function among German Jews, for whom such views were novel. Others criticised Pinsker for his ambiguous attitude towards Palestine. In his pamphlet he had stated that they should ‘above all not dream of restoring ancient Judaea. … The goal of our present endeavours must be not the “Holy Land” but a land of our own.’ Elsewhere he mentioned a territory in North America or a sovereign
pashalik
in Asiatic Turkey as alternative possibilities. He was preoccupied with the immediate political problem facing Russian Jewry. The religious-national longing for Palestine was for him, as for Herzl fifteen years later, not the primary concern. When he wrote his pamphlet he was a territorialist, not a Zionist. Only later, under the influence of Lilienblum, Max Mandelstam (an ophthalmologist from Kiev), and Professor Herman Shapira (a mathematician at Heidelberg, of Russian origin), was he converted to the Zionist cause. During his last years - he died in 1898 - he took a leading role in the ‘Lovers of Zion’ (Hoveve Zion), the forerunners of political Zionism. Like Herzl after him, he has been criticised for largely ignoring what others before him had written and done about a Jewish state. This criticism is justified. When Pinsker wrote
Autoemanzipation
he was not aware of Moses Hess and Kalischer, nor even of the proto-Zionist groups that had sprouted a few years earlier in various Russian cities. Herzl in his turn was not aware of Pinsker and other predecessors of Zionism when he wrote the
Judenstaat.
But it is doubtful whether a knowledge of these various activities on behalf of Palestine would have induced Pinsker to modify his basic beliefs, that the leadership of the new national movement had to come from central and west European Jewry. He did not have a very high opinion of the political and organisational ability of his fellow Russian Jews, and his scepticism was, as subsequent events were to show, not unfounded. By the time Pinsker died the Lovers of Zion had failed in most of their endeavours, and with the rise of political Zionism the centre of gravity moved to Vienna and Berlin, to Cologne, and subsequently to London.

When Pinsker wrote
Autoemanzipation
he was past sixty, and much as Zionism became the centre of his life, he lacked the dynamism of youth, and also the ambition and vanity which were so characteristic of Herzl. The time was ripe, but he could not and would not be the new Moses. ‘History’, he once wrote, ‘does not grant a people such guides repeatedly.’ Pinsker’s name figures larger in the history of ideas than in the history of Jewish politics. The immediate political impact of his work was limited; not many were converted to Zionism as the result of reading
Autoemanzipation
, but those few constituted the nucleus of the Zionist movements in eastern Europe in the 1890s. Without their support it is doubtful whether Herzl and Nordau would have been able to accomplish what they did.

The Lovers of Zion

Associations for the promotion of Jewish emigration to Palestine were founded during 1881-2 independently of each other in a number of Russian cities. The first was set up in Suvalki near the Polish-Lithuanian border, another in Kremenchug, while Rabbi Mohilever of Radom was instrumental in establishing several such associations in Poland. They were a mixed lot. Some consisted mainly of orthodox Jews, others of radical students who got their inspirations largely from the then fashionable
narodnichestvo
(populism). Some took the question of emigration very seriously, preparing themselves for immediate departure, while others were mainly philanthropic in character, collecting money for the support of the few Jewish colonies already in existence. At first there was hardly any coordination among them; the various groups sent emissaries to Palestine to find out about conditions there. Those who went on behalf of the Suvalki group had instructions to get the answers to no fewer than twelve hundred queries. The most active group was that founded by high-school and university students in Kharkov in 1881; it called itself Bilu (
Bet Yaakov lechu ve nelcha
- ‘O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us go’, Isaiah II, 5). They decided upon immediate emigration and some of them left for Odessa on their way to Constantinople and the Holy Land. The history of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine usually dates from their arrival - the first
aliya
(immigration wave). Their subsequent fate is typical of the whole movement. Out of three hundred members, a third set out for Odessa, but only forty reached Constantinople. About sixteen ultimately arrived in Palestine. They first established a working group on Socialist lines, predating the efforts of the Kibbutzim and Kvutzot. For a start they went to work at Miqve Israel, the agricultural school which had been established a decade earlier. Later they established Gedera, an agricultural settlement south of Jaffa which still exists, though it ceased to be run on Socialist lines a long time ago.

The enthusiasm of the Biluim was matched only by their lack of preparedness. They knew nothing about agriculture, and found the work in unaccustomed climatic conditions almost unbearable. Above all, they had no money to buy land and equipment, and there were no funds for the construction of houses. Since, according to a contemporary account, they had neither horses nor oxen nor agricultural implements, they had to work the stony land with their bare hands. The orthodox Jews of Jerusalem were far from enthusiastic about these new arrivals, in whom they saw both dangerous subversive elements and also rivals for the distribution of the money sent each year by Jewish communities abroad for use in Palestine (
Halukka
). Occasionally they showed open hostility towards the Bilu, informing on them to the Turkish authorities. There was not a single pair of
Tefilin
(phylacteries) in the whole colony, the rabbis complained. Young men and women were dancing together: ‘It would be preferable that the land of our forefathers should be again an abode of jackals than become a den of iniquity.’ This was how the orthodox for many years viewed the activities of the ‘Russian anarchists’.

The Turks too were suspicious of the newcomers, in whom they saw potential agents of a power threatening the very existence of their country. The Bilu members, who had set up a central office in Constantinople, waited therefore in vain for a
firman
(official permit) to establish a series of settlements in Palestine which would create the basis for mass immigration. The Turkish government put many obstacles in their way, and in 1893 banned altogether the immigration of Russian Jews into Palestine and the purchase of land. These orders were frequently circumvented by registering the land that was bought in the name of Jews from western Europe and by distributing baksheesh among the local administration. In this way a few settlements were established, but these were hardly the conditions envisaged by Pinsker for mass immigration, let alone the establishment of a Jewish state.

Among the first agricultural settlements established during that period were Zikhron Ya’akov, south of Haifa, and Rosh Pina, built by new immigrants from Rumania. Petah Tiqva, north of Jaffa, had been founded as early as 1878 by young Jews from Jerusalem, but they had to leave because most of them were affected by malaria. They returned after a year and in 1883 Yessod Hama’ala, and in 1884 Mishmar Hayarden, were founded, both in Galilee. Other colonies organised before the turn of the century included Rehovot (1890), Moza and Hadera (1891), Metulla and Har Tuv (1896). Everywhere the new colonists faced harrowing trials and not a few perished of exhaustion or disease; malaria claimed the heaviest toll at Hadera. Only after the draining of the swamps was it possible to envisage normal agricultural work. In Russia, meanwhile, attempts were being made to coordinate the activities of the various local Lovers of Zion groups. At a conference in Kattowitz in Upper Silesia in 1884, a central organisation was established. Pinsker was elected president, and stressed in his opening address the importance of a ‘return to the soil’. The conference decided to establish two main committees, one in Warsaw, the other in Odessa, as executive bodies of the movement. The former soon ceased to exist but the latter remained up to the outbreak of the First World War the main centre of Zionist activity in Russia.