Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz
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.
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