The Origins of Zionism.
by David Vital.
Oxford. 396 pp. $22.00.
In modern Jewish history, the year 1881 is the great divide. The publication in Germany in the fall of that year of Eugen Duehring’s Die Judenfrage als Racen Sitten und Kulturfrage heralded a new age of “scientific” racism, which in that country would reach its culmination in the death factories of Auschwitz and Treblinka. In Russia, the last hopes of liberal reform were dashed by the assassination in 1881 of the so-called Czar Liberator, Alexander II. More than one-half of the world’s Jews lived in Russia, herded into the Pale of Settlement, officially classed as “aliens” (inorodsty, those of another race) and subjected to severe repressive measures. Police-instigated pogroms swept the Ukraine in the spring of 1881, inaugurating the first great wave of the Jewish exodus from Europe.
It was in the history of modern Jewish thought, however, that 1881 had the most fateful consequences of all. That year marked the birth of Zionism, which established the Jews as a political nation.
Zionism owed more to the secular European milieu in the age of liberal nationalism than to the eschatological aspiration among Jews for a messianic End of Days. True, the movement derived some of its tenets from religious notions of redemption and return, but basically it was a risorgimento for Jews, conceived in the light of and after the national awakening of other European peoples—the Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Serbs, Letts, Finns, and Ukrainians. But more so than other national-liberation movements, Zionism was almost inextricably embedded in the tradition of liberal humanism. Its foundations were rational rather than romantic. Unlike other nationalisms it was based more on necessity than mystique. It was inspired by concrete and specific needs—chief among them the preservation of life—rather than by abstract notions of right. The fathers of Zionist thought were not interested in a national home for its own sake, not in sovereignty for the sake of sovereignty; rather, they believed that there would be no physical safety for Jews except within a country of their own.
The rational features of early Zionism clearly emerge from this new book, which traces the ideology and the embyronic movement that emerged from the events of 1881. One wishes there were more histories of this kind, for, although almost a century has passed since 1881, Zionism is probably the only national-liberation movement of the past one-hundred-fifty years that is still largely controversial, not merely in its present-day practice, but in theory as well. This is a strange and melancholy fact to ponder, especially in the aftermath of the UN General Assembly resolution that Zionism is a form of racism, but also because of apparent changes in public opinion generally on this question. People are notoriously lenient with success and harsh with failure. Zionism, which set out to “normalize” the Jewish condition and to establish a “safe” haven, cannot now be considered a “success” by any so-called normal standards. Perhaps even the opposite is true. In Israel the former pariah people live in a pariah state, paradoxically perhaps the only place left where Jews are in mortal danger precisely because they are Jews.
Such paradoxes are in one’s mind constantly as one reads David Vital’s book. Vital constructs his account of early Zionism on the basis of contemporary evidence, and he tends to see the men who were involved as they saw themselves, rather than how we in hindsight may choose to see them. Inevitably, therefore, his account of the Zionist dream is overcast by a certain air of tragedy. His book is a solid work and a welcome addition to the literature on Zionism, which, although immense, has been mostly polemical. Vital is best read as a sequel to Walter Laqueur’s seminal History of Zionism (1972). Laqueur’s book is more sweeping (at the price of detail) and better written, and brings the story up to the year 1948; Vital’s The Origins of Zionism delineates only the crucial formative years between 1881 and the first Zionist Congress of 1897. And in constrast to Laqueur, who is best at describing events in Central and Western Europe, Vital concentrates on Eastern Europe, Lenin’s great “prison of peoples” from which the Jews, like so many others, were trying to break out.
The Zionists were at all times a minority within the Jewish community, and Vital describes this minority well—its twin roots in socialism and Yiddishkeit; its enormous handicap as a semi-clandestine movement in Czarist Russia; the terrible in-fighting among rival factions that is today almost impossible to comprehend; the perennial shortage of funds; the lack of leadership. Nonetheless, the embryonic movement succeeded in creating a bridgehead in Palestine as early as 1882, a bridgehead that was eventually to become the basis of an independent state.
Vital draws extensively on relevant Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish, and German source material to etch his portrait of the Jewish crisis in Eastern Europe. The material from which he draws is still to some degree untapped, and it is an extraordinarily rich source. Zionism was a highly self-conscious movement—its leading figures were inveterate diarists who, from the first moment, saw themselves as participants in the making of history. Thus, Levontin, the founder of Rishon le-Zion, the first Zionist colony, wrote his memoirs in 1883, less than a year after its establishment. Herzl’s diaries are especially detailed and personally revealing in their candor. Most public men are complex, but few have had the courage to leave behind so rich a record of personal neurosis as Herzl, and in such a brilliant and lucid style.
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Four personalities dominate Vital’s book: the Odessa positivist Moshe Leib Lilienblum; the civilized elderly physician Leon Pinsker; Theodor Herzl, who came to Zionism from the outside, like Moses to the enslaved children of Israel; and, in a category all by himself, Ahad Ha’am, the acerbic critic from within.
There were vast differences among the four men—in background, in outlook, and in capability. What they had in common was their rejection of both immobilism and universalism. For their safety, for their future, all four agreed, Jews could rely neither on God nor on the Gentiles, but on what they themselves were prepared to do. Only those who were ready to help themselves could be helped. Another quality at least the first three had in common was an extreme Eurocentricity. To a European in the last quarter of the 19th century all that lay outside the confines of Europe seemed a political vacuum. Lilienblum, Pinsker, and Herzl overlooked the political potential of the Arab population of Palestine. By the same token all four, including Ahad Ha’am, obsessed as they were with the problems and sufferings of European Jews, never even contemplated the possibility that the Jewish state might eventually become a haven for oppressed Jews from the Afro-Asian countries as well.
“In Moshe Lilienblum,” Vital notes, “life and letters combined to produce what is beyond doubt the most vivid and instructive epitome of the social and moral crisis of Russian-Polish Jewry in the latter half of the 19th century.” Lilienblum was a fallen talmudist who in the 1870’s had come under the influence of the Russian positivists Pizarev and Chernishevsky. Having lost all religious faith, he moved to Odessa, the mecca of Russian modernism, and (at the age of thirty-eight!) was attending a gymnasium in order to acquire a secular Russian education when, on May 6, 1881, a pogrom broke out. Lilienblum hid in the cellar of his barred-up house while outside in the streets the howling rioters milled in the rubble and debris. At that moment he underwent the remarkable intellectual transformation that was to make him into one of the fathers of modern Zionism, the man who would inspire the first pioneers to embark in 1882 for Palestine.
Lilienblum was shocked not so much by the pogrom itself as by the fact that “cultured” Russians participated in it: university students, seminarists, and supporters of the populist Narodnaya Volya movement. He concluded it was not lack of Jewish participation in Russian culture that had caused the tragedy but the fact that Jews—assimilated or not—remained strangers. During the pogrom Lilienblum had seen a drunken Russian woman dancing deliriously in the street. Her companions were putting Jewish homes to the torch, and he heard the woman cry, “It’s our country!”
“Can we say that?” Lilienblum asked himself. His answer was, “No.” Jews were strangers not only in Russia but everywhere in the Diaspora. Hence, they must prepare to evacuate Europe and reassemble under their own flag in their own country. The exodus might take a century, but a beginning had to be made. And they must begin their return to the ancient land of Israel, not to America where they would again be strangers. The land of Israel was theirs by historic right, and there they would be at home and safe.
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No less significant was the reaction to the same pogrom of Leon Pinsker. He was sixty years old at the time, a distinguished, well-to-do physician in Odessa, a thoroughly assimilated man who had been decorated by the Czar for service in the Crimean war. For Pinsker too the pogroms of 1881 marked a turning point. He too was shocked by the participation of “cultured” elements. He resigned from the Society for the Promotion of [Russian] Culture Among Jews. What was the use of cultural assimilation when, it was clear, the non-Jewish majority would never permit it? Anti-Semitism was a disease; its only cure was to put an end to the perennial homelessness of the Jew.
Out of this recognition grew a pamphlet, Autoemancipation—A Warning to his Kinfolk by a Russian Jew, that became a milestone in the development of Zionist thought. A homeless people, Pinsker argued, was like a man without a shadow, an ogre, a fearful phantom. “Thus, to the living, the Jew is a corpse; to the native-born, a foreigner; to the long-settled, a vagabond; to the rich, a beggar; to the poor, an exploiter and a millionaire; to the patriot, a man without a country; to all classes—a hated rival.” The only solution was a collective one: the recreation of full Jewish nationality on its own territory. Pinsker did not propose a return. It was not necessarily the Holy Land that the Jews needed, but a land. Only in later years did his disciples convert him to the cause of Palestine and Palestine only.
His pamphlet was published anonymously in German, in Berlin, possibly because he was aware it might never pass the Russian censor. A more important reason was probably this: while the main problem was in the East, the political initiative to save the Jews, as Pinsker saw it, had to come from the enlightened Jews of the West, who were at least free to act. At first Pinsker’s appeal was not heeded, but that he was correct in his assessment became dramatically evident fifteen years later when a new man arose on the scene: Theodor Herzl, a charismatic, Moses-like figure, a Jew so secure in his Viennese milieu that for him Zionism clearly answered no immediate personal need but was rather a noble historical cause to be pursued for moral reasons. Herzl’s very appearance on the Zionist scene changed it almost overnight into a serious international political movement.
The simple message of Herzl’s pamphlet, Der Judenstaat—“We are a people, one people”—while dismissed by the Jews of the West, in the East fell like a torch on dry straw. Vital’s chapters on Herzl are the best in the book. Herzl comes across as a mixture of genius and gambler, a man capable of confronting “his” problem as a Jew and making it the starting point for an extraordinary essay of historic proportions. During his lifetime he was derided as a madman, a political Jules Verne, a would-be King of the Beggars. His achievement took immense courage and tenacity and equally immense powers of self-transcendence.
Herzl was the only “hero” the Zionists had, and they clung to him even when they disagreed. “He had a hero’s flaws,” Vital observes succinctly, “some so deep and plain to see that, on inspection, it becomes hard to understand the sources of his evident power for action . . . [yet] Herzl’s achievement was immense and unique. Zionism as a true political movement and as an international force—however weak and uncertain—is to all intents and purposes his invention and his creation.”
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Vital’s comprehensive accounts of Herzl, Pinsker, and Lilienblum are well complemented by his treatment of Ahad Ha’am, the Hebrew essayist and critic whose preoccupation with the cultural and spiritual legacy of Judaism insured that Zionism would be more than a movement of political liberation alone. In all, Vital has made fair use of the rich documentation at his disposal; his judicious choice of issues and personalities, and his skillful alternations between straightforward narrative and the discussion of ideas make for an interesting portrait of one of the most extraordinary revolutions of modern times.
