A History of Zionism (82 page)

†
Ibid.
, p. 202.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 207.

*
Ibid.
, p. 211.

†
Ibid.
, p. 212.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 213.

*
Ibid.
, p. 246.

*
Zur Kritik der zionistischen Theorie und Praxis.
Resistentia
, Frankfurt, 1970, p. 39.

*
O. Oauer,
Die Nationalitaetenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie
, Vienna, 1907, p. 135.

†
Ibid.
, p. 366
et seq.

*
Quoted in
Leo Baeck Year Book
, 10, London 1965, p. 275.

†
Rudolf Springer [Karl Renner],
Der Kampf der oesterreichischen Nation um den Staat
, Leipzig, 1902,
passim.
E. Pernerstorfer, ‘Zur Judenfrage’, in
Der Jude
, 1916–17, p. 308.

‡
Neue Zeit
, vol. 15, 1896–7, p. 186; vol. 16 1897–8, p. 600.

§
Neue Zeit
, vol. 19, 1900–1, p. 324
et seq.

‖
Justice
, 21 October 1899; quoted in E. Silberner,
Sozialisten zur Judenfrage
, Berlin, 1962, p. 262.

*
Quoted in
ibid.
, pp. 89–90.

†
A. Szanto,
Der Zionismus — eine nationalistische und reaktionaere Utopie
, Berlin, 1930, pp. 52–3.

*
Neue Zeit
, vol. 11, 1891–2, pp. 236–7; J. Joses (ed.),
Die Lösung der Judenfrage
, Berlin, 1907,
passim; Neue Zeity
, vol. 32, 1913–14.

*
Lenin,
Sochineniya
(second Russian edition), vol. 17, p. 118.

†
Ibid.
, p. 141.

*
J.J. Jtalin,
Marxism and the National Question
, New York, n.d., p. 6
et seq.

†
Quoted in J. Jeftwich,
What Will Happen to the Jews?
London, 1936, pp. 137, 149.

*
Otto Heller,
Der Untergang des Judentums
, Vienna, 1931, pp. 173–4.

†
Ibid.
, pp. 21–2.

*
W. Wukerman,
The Jew in Revolt
, London, 1937, pp. 121–3.

*
Ibid.
, pp. 112–13.

†
Ibid.
, pp. 131, 236.

*
Ibid.
, p. 255.

*
Forward
(Yiddish), 28 January 1937; see also ‘On the Jewish Question’,
Fourth International
, December 1945.

*
See, for instance, N. Weinstock,
Le Sionisme contre Israel
, Paris, 1968.

†
A. Leon,
Conception materialiste de la question Juive
, Paris, 1946. Quotations are from the English edition,
The Jewish Question. A Marxist Interpretation
, Mexico, 1950, p. 210
et seq.

‡
Ibid.
, pp. 222, 228.

*
Zur Kritik der Zionistischen Theorie und Praxis
, p. 7.

†
I. Deutscher,
The Non-Jewish Jew
, London, 1968, pp. 111–12.

‡
Ibid.
, p. 126
et seq.

*
Ibid.
, p. 26.

PART THREE

9
THE WEIZMANN ERA

The First World War had disastrous consequences for millions of Jews living in eastern Europe. The Russian civil war and the troubles elsewhere in eastern Europe were accompanied by pogroms in which many thousands found their death. By 1921 there was peace again, but whatever other benefits the new order in Poland and Rumania offered, it brought no improvement to the political, social and economic situation of Jews. The anomaly of their life did not lessen. On the contrary, it became more acute, since emigration now was far more difficult than before the war. The strong appeal of Zionism in eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s can be understood only against the background of pauperisation, of persecution both officially inspired and spontaneous, of general deterioration and growing despair.

The worst pogroms occurred in the Ukraine and in White Russia between 1918 and 1920. The main culprits were the nationalist Ukrainian forces under Petliura, but prominently involved were also Denikin’s volunteer army and certain Cossack regiments such as the one under Ataman Grigoriev who joined the Whites after having served with the Reds. Other private armies did their share, some of them right wing, others ‘populist’ in character. The first major pogroms took place in Zhitomir and Berdichev, old Jewish centres, whence they spread to Proskurov (where fifteen hundred Jews were killed) and neighbouring places. Altogether about fifteen thousand were killed in these attacks and many more wounded. Much Jewish property was destroyed. The number of deaths was far higher than in the prewar pogroms. Human life had become very cheap after 1914, and whereas the death of a few dozen victims in Kishinev had aroused a storm of protest in the civilised world, the murder of thousands in 1919-20 caused hardly a ripple.

With the establishment of the Soviet régime the pogroms ceased. Jews throughout the Soviet Union obtained equal rights, and anti-semitism was outlawed. Among the Bolshevik leaders there were many Jews, a fact which was exploited by the propagandists of the extreme Right. That these Bolsheviks of Jewish extraction had not the slightest interest in the fate of the community into which they had been born, by accident so to speak, that they regarded themselves as the representatives of the Russian proletariat and not of the Jewish working class, was of course ignored. Jews were prominently represented in both camps: their part among the emigrés was also much higher than in the country at large. Of those who stayed, many lost their livelihood as a result of economic and social changes, but they were helped by the Soviet government to find other, more productive employment. While Soviet Jews did not receive full recognition as a national minority, they were given their own schools, theatres, publishing houses, and, here and there, even low-level regional autonomy. Religion was persecuted, Zionism outlawed, but the physical safety of individual Jews was more or less guaranteed.

If the Soviet leaders had a long-term perspective as to the future of Russian Jewry (a problem that did not figure high among their priorities) it was based on the assumption that they would gradually become completely assimilated, lose their specific character, and generally become indistinguishable from the rest of the population. This was the tacit understanding during the early, internationalist phase of Soviet rule. Later, with Stalin’s rise to power and the gradual upsurge of (Russian) nationalism, Jews were deprived of cultural autonomy. Many leading Jewish Communists lost their positions. Once again the Jewish question became acute.
*

The situation of Jews in Poland was precarious from the very beginning of the establishment of the Polish state. In spontaneous pogroms in Lvov, Vilna and other cities hundreds were killed during the interregnum of 1918-19. While they enjoyed minority protection by law, Polish nationalists had always insisted on a national state rather than a state of minorities and they were, as a rule, antisemitic. Jews were accused of being either pro-Russian or pro-German. Dignitaries of the Catholic Church maintained that Jews were fighting the Church and in general exerting an ‘evil influence’. It was the declared policy of the
Endeks
, and later on of
Ozon
, to promote Polonisation and to reduce Jewish influence in economic and political life. Jewish merchants and professional people were boycotted, a
numerus clausus
was introduced in the universities, and the number of Jewish lawyers and physicians was systematically reduced. There were frequent small-scale pogroms, spreading a climate of fear. The introduction of state monopolies in commodities such as tobacco deprived thousands of Jewish families of their livelihood and the institution of licence fees for hawking hit many others who could not afford to pay. As a result of these and other measures, and of the effects of the world economic crisis, Polish Jewry, never very affluent, were rapidly becoming pauperised. By the early 1930s most were no longer able to pay the (nominal) community tax. More than one-third were destitute, living on the verge of starvation and dependent on communal aid.

There were no major pogroms in Rumania, where before 1914 anti-Jewish persecution had been more blatant than in any other European country. In 1920 the Jews of Rumania too received full rights of citizenship. But, the legal position quite apart, there existed in Rumania what Zionist ideologists sometimes called an ‘objective Jewish question’. Few lived in the countryside, wheras in cities such as Czernowitz, Jassy, Radaut, Oradea-Mare, they were in the majority. To an even greater degree than in Poland they constituted the middle class, the intellectual elite. Leading banking houses, insurance companies, transport enterprises were in their hands. Many journalists and a high percentage of lawyers and physicians were Jewish. Few Rumanians considered this a natural state of affairs, and with the emergence of a native middle class the Jews were bound to suffer. At the same time the Jewish artisans of Moldavia and Bessarabia (where they constituted a majority) were facing growing competition.

A strong anti-Jewish movement, The National Christian Defence League, emerged with the declared aim of driving the Jews out of Greater Rumania. Even more extreme was the Iron Guard, a fascist organisation which saw in the Jews the main enemy of the Rumanian people. Even the more moderate Rumanian parties regarded them as unassimilable. Before the First World War, Rumanian Liberals like Bratianu, pupils of Mazzini and Garibaldi, had not hesitated to promulgate anti-Jewish laws.

There was in Rumania, as in Poland, an element of solid hatred of the Jews. While some of the governments used them as scapegoats for their own failures, antisemitism was a popular sentiment. To put the whole blame for its spread on the ruling classes would be a gross oversimplification. The social structure of the Jewish population in Poland and Rumania was such that it was bound to create tension and conflict between the minority and the host people. A substantial part of Polish Jewry was not gainfully employed and the Warsaw government felt under no obligation to provide training and work, while the Jewish communities were too poor to help. An objectively dangerous situation was further aggravated by the intense nationalism of the newly independent nations, their intolerance of minorities, and by the effects of the economic depression. Instead of improving with time, the problem became steadily more acute. Each new government seemed that bit more antisemitic than its predecessor.

The anti-Jewish measures which were adopted did not, on occasion, lack a certain originality. In Rumania, Jewish students of medicine were required to do their research only on Jewish corpses. In Lithuania, truck drivers and servants had to pass a difficult language examination to get a labour permit. In the city of Plotsk, Rabbi Shapira, the local
Zadik
, was sentenced to death by a Polish court and executed in 1919 for having, it was alleged, given secret light signals to the advancing Red army. The cardinal sin of the Jews was that there were too many of them. As an editor of the semi-official
Gazeta Polska
once wrote: ‘I like the Danes very much but if there were three million of them I would pray to God to take them away. Perhaps we would like the Jews very much if there were only fifty thousand of them in Poland.’
*
Forty years later there were forty thousand Jews left, but the Poles still did not like them.

The situation elsewhere in eastern Europe was less critical. In Lithuania immediately after the war the position of the Jewish minority was better than at any time before or since. They enjoyed full minority rights and there was a minister for Jewish affairs. But subsequently in Lithuania, as in Latvia, the tendency towards reducing the part of the Jews in the main branches of the national economy and in cultural life became stronger and caused great hardship. The economic situation of Hungarian and Czechoslovak Jewry was not bad on the whole, with the exception of some major islands of stark poverty (such as the Subcarpathian region). But the political status of Hungarian Jewry was in a state of uneasy balance. Some of them had taken a prominent part in the short-lived Communist régime of 1918-19. After the victory of the anti-Communist forces the community as a whole was made responsible for the actions of Bela Kun, Tibor Szamuely and their comrades.

In Austria and Germany there was no official discrimination against Jews after the First World War. Victor Adler and Julius Deutsch became cabinet ministers. In Germany, the republican constitution was written by a Jew (Hugo Preuss) and Jewish social democrats such as Hilferding and Landsberg served as members of the central government. Jews rose to prominence in almost every field and in some, such as the press and cinema, they wielded considerable influence. But if the opportunities increased, so did antisemitism. The fate of Walther Rathenau, German foreign minister in 1921-2, and a German patriot second to none, was in many ways symbolic: he was shot in a Berlin street by youthful members of a right-wing extremist group. Antisemitism, latent in Germany and Austria, received a fresh impetus during the First World War. After the economic crisis of 1921-3 had been overcome, it seemed to decline. But this eclipse was temporary and in any case more apparent than real. The writing on the wall was seen by some far-sighted observers, even in the midst of prosperity, as antisemitism spread to western Europe.

What were the reasons underlying this new outburst? After many years of peace and prosperity the general optimism of Europe had been severely shaken. To many, the war came like a bolt from the blue. Millions had died in senseless slaughter and there had been unprecedented material destruction. Many Europeans found themselves at the end of the war without means and without much hope for the future. The war was followed almost everywhere by unrest, revolution, civil war, inflation and mass unemployment. In these circumstances many looked for a clear and easily intelligible answer to their questions about the causes of these catastrophes and of the unrest in the world in general. They found an answer in documents such as the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, the new Bible of the antisemites, a web of fantastic fabrications which, originally published in Russia well before the war, reached central and western Europe in 1919-20. Following this and similar publications, writings about a Jewish world conspiracy attracted many avid readers in England and the United States, even among politicians and otherwise sane public figures. In Britain and America the impact of the ‘hidden hand’ bogey was short-lived, but elsewhere in Europe it fell on more fertile ground and became part of the ideology underlying popular antisemitic movements. This, in briefest outline, was the situation facing European Jewry after 1918. It was in the general context of pauperisation, social unrest and growing political persecution that the Zionist movement had to re-examine its policy for the future.

Palestine during the war

The small Jewish community in Palestine suffered severely during the war. When Turkey became a belligerent Jewish leaders were subjected to systematic harassment by local Turkish officials pursuing a policy of thorough Ottomanisation. The Anglo-Palestine Bank was closed, and leading Zionists were put on trial, one of the main accusations being that they had authorised the use of National Fund stamps seven years earlier. The American Relief Committee, providing vital help to thousands of destitute persons, was dissolved by order of the local Turkish commander. All young Jews were made liable to conscription, though for the most part they were not put on active service but assigned to various labour battalions, the pariahs of the army. Many of them never returned, falling victim to disease or starvation.
*

A new wave of spy trials started after the detection of a pro-allied organisation in Zikhron Ya’akov (
NILI
), headed by members of the Aaronson family, which gathered intelligence and transmitted it to Egypt. But for the intervention of the German government through its representatives in the Turkish capital and the local commander, General Kress von Kressenstein, the fate of Palestinian Jewry might have resembled that of the Armenians. The Turkish currency collapsed in winter 1916-17, and during the next spring, to top it all, immense swarms of locusts appeared. The entire population was enlisted to save the crops. Schools were closed and, equipped with tin vessels and sticks, the children chased the locusts away. But much damage had already been done: the year’s vegetable crop was lost, and many orange groves, too, were affected. Shortly before the arrival of the British troops, Jaffa was evacuated by order of the Turkish authorities and mass searches were carried out to apprehend deserters from the army, numbering tens of thousands, most of them Turks and Arabs but including also a certain number of Jews.

When British units entered Jerusalem on the first day of Hanukkah 1917 they were welcomed by a depleted and impoverished Jewish community. From eighty-five thousand in 1914 its numbers had fallen to fifty-six thousand, a mere 8 per cent of the total population of Palestine. Only in Jerusalem and Tiberias were they in the majority. These cities were the centres of the old, non-Zionist yishuv. The new arrivals, the Zionists, were concentrated in Tel Aviv with its six thousand inhabitants, and in Haifa, which counted then only 2,500 Jews. The biggest agricultural colonies were Petah Tiqva with three thousand inhabitants, Rishon Lezion (fifteen hundred) and Rehovot (one thousand). The other Jewish rural settlements, fifty-seven altogether, were much smaller, numbering in all about twelve thousand souls, little islands among the eight hundred-odd Arab villages.