A History of Zionism (27 page)

Wolffsohn had accepted the leadership with great misgivings, which in the event proved only too justified. Zionists, Harry Sacher wrote, are not notoriously generous to their leaders, and Wolffsohn was the least appreciated of all. In those who fought against him he excited at best a depreciatory shrug – a mediocrity, a timber merchant. When he resigned, his health was shattered, and he died within two years. But the possibilities that opened up to the movement with the First World War could not have been used by a Zionist leader resident in Germany. Posterity has dealt with Wolffsohn less harshly than his contemporaries: ‘The role of successor is not dramatic: it calls for the prosaic rather than the heroic qualities. But when without salvage there will be a complete wreck, the tug master who brings the storm-battered ship home to port does a notable service. That service Wolffsohn rendered to Zionism, and no other could in the time and the circumstances have done it as well.’
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The struggle between political and ‘synthetic’ Zionism (first formulated by Weizmann in a speech at the eighth congress) was over. With Wolffsohn went Nordau. The keynote speech of the eleventh congress, the last before the war, had been given by Sokolow, since Nordau refused to come. Kann had dropped out even earlier. So had Alexander Marmorek and other members of Herzl’s inner circle. Representatives of east European Jewry now took over the leadership. It had been a fierce conflict, yet it seems in retrospect that its origins are to be sought at least as much in personal animosities and differences in style as in basic differences on policy. For the old leadership, despite its caution, had not altogether neglected practical work in Palestine; the new executive was not able to do much more. No one had been more critical of the diplomatic approach than Weizmann, but the opponent of political Zionism became the chief Zionist diplomatist only a few years later, and obtained the ‘charter’ of which Herzl and Nordau had dreamed. It was one of the many ironies in the history of the Zionist movement.

The new leadership was presided over by Professor Otto Warburg, a botanist of world renown and member of a well-known Hamburg banking family. A gentleman through and through, he was one of the very few leaders who did not have a single enemy in the movement. His interest was directed almost solely to colonisation and its problems. Politics he found boring and he was only too happy to leave this field to his colleagues.
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He came from an assimilated background and his interest in Palestine and the Zionist movement had been awakened by his wife’s family. He was habitually criticised by Wolffsohn, and even more sharply by Kann (who administered the property of the Dutch royal family), for engaging in costly experiments in Palestine which the movement could ill afford. These complaints were by no means unjustified. Yet how could agricultural settlement be encouraged without taking certain risks and suffering setbacks and disappointments? But for Warburg’s infectious enthusiasm and occasional foolhardiness, not much progress would have been made in agricultural settlement in Palestine between 1905 and the outbreak of the war.

Almost equally remote from practical politics was Shmaryahu Levin, the most effective propagandist of the movement, ‘teacher of a whole generation of Jewish educators and Zionist officials’. A native of Russia, he had been one of those in the Duma who signed the manifesto protesting against its dissolution. As a result he had to leave his native country in 1906. Like Weizmann, Motzkin and Victor Jacobson, he had studied in Berlin in the 1890s and had been among the founders of the Russian Scientific Association, whose members came to play leading roles in the Zionist movement. A restless man, forever agitated and agitating others, steeped in Jewish and western culture, he retired altogether from politics in later years as his interests shifted to cultural problems and education.

If Levin was the most effective orator of the movement, Nahum Sokolow was its most prolific and influential writer. He wrote gracefully and at great length on many subjects in several languages. His essays were not always models of profound thought, but he did a great deal to introduce western culture to east European Jewry. While Levin regarded himself as a disciple of Weizmann (although actually his senior), for Sokolow (born 1859) Weizmann (born 1874) always remained the upstart young man, talented but hardly capable of engaging in serious diplomatic conversation with leading statesmen. Sokolow was a man of impeccable manners. Sporting spats and a monocle, he ‘enjoyed life best when he moved in an atmosphere of diplomatic deportment. The born diplomat, he was at his best when dealing with the French and Italian diplomats.’
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Sokolow wanted to be president of the movement, but in fact he held this position only late in life and for but a short time. He was unfitted for leadership; temperamentally he was a cautious man, incapable of quick decision and inclined to stay above the battle. At the fateful Uganda debate he abstained from voting.

Mention has been made of Victor Jacobson, the first representative of the Zionist movement in Constantinople. In 1913 he was replaced as vice-president by Yehiel Chlenov. A Moscow physician and one of the leaders and founders of Russian Zionism, Chlenov was preferred to Ussishkin, his south Russian rival, because he was more conciliatory, a better diplomat and committee man. Lastly there was Dr Hantke, neither a great orator nor a prolific writer, but an ideal administrator without whose orderly mind and firm guiding hand the Berlin executive would have accomplished little.

It had been decided after Wolffsohn’s resignation that the Inner Action Committee, consisting of five to seven members, should be subject to the control of the Action Committee of twenty-five members, meeting not less than four times a year. These decisions were adhered to until, with the outbreak of war, Zionist activities were interrupted and international meetings on a large scale became virtually impossible. The Russian Zionist Federation no longer held back the funds it had collected; 127,000 Zionists throughout the world paid the shekel in 1912–13, more than ever before, even though collections in Russia fell that year as a result of police chicanery. The rise in revenue was badly needed, for the executive had to meet ever increasing expenses – £15,000 for salaries and office costs, for instance, in 1912–13.

The struggle for power had ended but the polemics between the political Zionists and the ‘practicians’ continued. The executive sent Professor Auhagen, an agricultural expert, to Palestine to report on the state of Jewish settlement and the progress of Warburg’s and Ruppin’s schemes. The official report sounded reassuring, but when Wolffsohn met Auhagen in private a less rosy picture emerged.
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In Wolffsohn’s eyes it was a tale of woe, of bad planning and mismanagement. He was proud to have put the movement on a financially sound basis. Unlike Herzl he had succeeded in accumulating funds that would serve as a substantial lever once a charter had been obtained, whereas the advocates of ‘synthetic Zionism’, as he saw it, wanted to squander the money, maintaining that what had been collected ought to be invested immediately in new plantations or settlements. For when the great day of the charter came, even the three or four million pounds of the Colonisation Bank would be altogether insufficient.

The political Zionists criticised the new leaders for lack of initiative in their foreign policy, for missed opportunities to press Zionist claims – such as the peace conferences after the Balkan wars in 1912–13 – and above all for the one-sidedly pro-Turkish inclination of the executive. Such criticism was however largely academic, for as long as Turkey ruled Palestine, there simply was no political alternative.

The last congress before the war was on the whole less turbulent than the previous meetings, but there was still plenty of tension and conflict. Wolffsohn was slighted by the new leaders. According to custom, the presidency at the eleventh Zionist congress in September 1913 should have been offered to him. When the executive suggested that there should be two presidents, Wolffsohn and Chlenov, the former declined. Eventually the executive retreated and offered the presidency to Wolffsohn to prevent a split. The ‘practicians’ did not have it all their own way. Jean Fischer, a Belgian Zionist leader, demanded in an impassioned speech the appointment of a special political committee to engage in diplomatic activities. He warned his audience that the preoccupation with small-scale colonisation schemes would turn the Zionist movement into a poor man’s J.J.J. – the non-Zionist Colonisation Association.

Ruppin defended himself against his critics in a long speech in which he stressed that deficits were inevitable in any form of experimental colonisation. He was worried about the pitifully small scale of Zionist activities: ‘It is essential that our beginnings shall not be too small and the foundations not too narrow, for it is the beginning which sets and determines the possibilities of expansion in the future.’ Ruppin, who first went to Palestine in 1907 and settled there the following year, provided a detailed survey of the work that had been done under his supervision and upon his initiative. He admitted that he had been mistaken in expecting the newly founded farms to show a profit at the end of the first year. There had been too many unforeseen and unproductive expenditures. There was a basic difference between the yardsticks applied in private business and in a large-scale enterprise of national importance. Only those petrified in a purely business attitude would insist on immediate cash profits. Paying big dividends could not be the sole criterion. ‘I can say with absolute certainty: those enterprises in Palestine which are most profit-bearing for the businessman are almost the least profitable for our national effort; and per contra, many enterprises which are least profitable for the businessman are of high national value.’ If the transformation of city-dwellers into land-workers was to be guided by considerations of dividends, was it not equally sensible to demand that schools should be run on a profit basis?

The training of workers was an obvious case in point; it certainly would not show any profits in the ledger at the end of the year, but who would deny that it was an enterprise of essential national importance? Towards the end of his speech Ruppin made yet another point in justification of ‘practical Zionism’ which had never been made so clearly: ‘For a long time to come our progress in Palestine will depend entirely on the progress of our movement in the diaspora.’
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This was a far cry from the early visions of Herzl and Nordau, the idea that there would be a wave of mass migration resulting in the establishment of a Jewish state, and that thereafter the state would be in a position to solve the Jewish question.

Ruppin was not a great orator, but his case was forceful and convincing and he got a big ovation. Compared to other Zionist leaders his background was unconventional. Born in eastern Germany, he had worked his way up against heavy odds. The extreme poverty of his boyhood was movingly described many years later in his autobiography.
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Forced to leave high school at the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to a firm of grain merchants, but he had already decided that he would reach the top of the ladder within a few years, earning enough money to finance the continuation of his studies. Having graduated from university in economics, philosophy and law – and having incidentally won a major prize for a study on genetics – he entered the legal profession. Later on he became interested in the sociology and demography of the Jews, a field little cultivated at the time. After some preliminary research he published a number of studies which remained standard works for many years. This was the man who at the age of thirty-one had been picked by the executive to be its representative in Palestine – hardly a dreamer, a visionary, an impractical intellectual. It was in some ways an unlikely choice: Ruppin was not even a committed Zionist at the time of the appointment. Yet no better man could have been selected. For more than three decades he showed an astonishing measure of foresight, initiative and humanity in all his actions. He was never in the limelight, but Jewish settlement in Palestine owes more to him than to anyone else.

At the congress which witnessed his first appearance there was also a long debate on cultural problems. Weizmann reported on the preparations for the establishment of a Jewish university in Jerusalem, following a resolution that had been passed in Herzl’s days by the fifth congress. For some Zionists this was an issue of paramount importance. Ahad Ha’am had declared at the first conference of Russian Zionists that one university was as important as a hundred settlements. A plot on Mount Scopus was acquired in 1913, a national library had been started in Jerusalem, and it was now proposed to establish a special commission to pursue the project. This aroused much enthusiasm: Bialik spoke of the great vista of the cultural revival. It was a relatively calm, unhurried congress after the storms of the previous years. Those present looked forward to years of steady, peaceful, constructive work in Palestine. ‘See you again at the next congress’, Wolffsohn said in his concluding address. But the following summer the war broke out, and the leaders of world Zionism were not in fact to see each other again for eight years, and when they next met the charter in which they had lost belief had become an established fact. Wolffsohn did not live to see that day; the second president of the Zionist movement died in September 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war.

‘What can be done in Palestine?’ Dr Ruppin asked after his first visit, and at once answered his question: ‘We must liquidate the
Halukka
system, which still provides most of the Jews with the largest part of their income, by the substitution of work.’
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The second big immigration wave began the year Herzl died. Between 1905 and 1914 tens of thousands of new immigrants entered the country. In the year between the Vienna congress and the outbreak of war six thousand new arrivals were counted. As a result substantial changes took place in the social composition of the Jewish population, and a new impetus was given to economic and political development. It was only in 1908, with the establishment of the Palestine Office in Jaffa under Dr Ruppin, that the Zionist movement had begun to adopt a systematic colonisation policy. Until then plots had been acquired haphazardly by the Jewish National Fund (near Tiberias, Lydda, and along the Jerusalem-Jaffa railway). On the whole, Zionism had been preoccupied with criticising previous methods of settlement, mainly those of Baron Hirsch’s J
CA
rather than pointing to a clear alternative.