Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz
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death a year later in 1904. The event affected the entire movement.20 Chlenov wrote:
The completely unexpected news about his illness reached the organization and then the death of the beloved leader. We all experienced this blow with our heart and mind, and it was useless to speak about its significance. Now, it seems, everyone understood, how much we have lost in him. But only a close and objective study will show us how much we had in life, so much beauty, strength, truth, and purity. Doctor Herzl’s death revealed still more clearly how strongly attached the organization was to him. Many people have entirely loosened their grip, faith in success is broken, and energy for work has weakened.21
Herzl’s death made an indelible impression on Jabotinsky. In 1904, in a literary response, Jabotinsky described his unshakable love and admiration. He devoted a poem, “Hêsped,” and an article, “Sitting on the Floor” (“Sidia na polu”), to the event. Incidentally, Jabotinsky carefully shaped these works to produce the appearance of a personal connection with the leader. Both appeared in Evreiskaia Zhizn’ (Jewish Life) in April 1905.
In “Hêsped,” Jabotinsky immortalized Herzl. The first lines compare him to Moses, a trope that was gaining relevance at the time:
He did not disappear like ancient Moses,
On the edge of the promised land;
He did not reach his desired homeland
Far from her pining children;
He burned himself and gave his life to a sacred cause,
And “If I forget you, Jerusalem,”—
But he did not reach it and fell while still in the desert,
And on the best day, to our native Palestine
We will commit just the ashes of the tribune.22
The link with Moses, who led the people to the holy land, reflects Jabotinsky’s image of a prophet to whom a promise has been made. Hêsped as a generic type is a poem of mourning and a conventional hagiography. Formally, the poem appears conventional in the Russian context, although at the same time, there are distinct details from Herzl’s own life that Jabotinsky transfers into poetry, such as the famous line from the 1903 Zionist Congress, “I won’t forget you, Jerusalem.” Although there is much one could say about the poem, perhaps its most striking feature is its similarity with the “Lay of Igor” (“Slovo o polku igoreve”), the most important East Slavic saga written in the fourteenth century. For example, the following comparison of Herzl with an eagle is almost lifted from the epic tale.
Sometimes he was a titan with granite shoulders,
Sometimes he was an eagle with eagle eyes,
On his forehead an eagle’s sorrow.
By comparing Herzl and Igor, the author underscores the victory inherent in both texts. The defeat of ancient Rus’ leads to the realization that the East Slavic people constitute the Russian nation. Similarly, Herzl’s death contains a promise: the people will join together to regain their homeland. Despite the title, the poem diverges from a traditional Jewish memorial, but resembles a Russian ode.23
In “Sitting on the Floor,” a prose essay published in the same issue of Evreiskaia Zhizn’, Jabotinsky alludes to shiva, a week of mourning following the death of a close relative. Jabotinsky describes Herzl’s formidable talent: “His genius was not of an exclusive sphere, like the genius of an orator or writer or statesman: his genius was focused deeper, internally—in his great heart, a heart of tremendous sensitivity that could understand the spirit of each moment and prompted the orator, the writer and the leader with the necessary word. His primary and essential talent, perhaps, consisted in this amazing art of finding the necessary word at the right time.”24
Attachment to Herzl was a tactic that Jabotinsky used to enhance his own image in the Zionist movement. He depicted himself as altered forever by Herzl. He wrote, “We became different people, we came alive from touching the ground that he placed beneath our feet. Only recently have I truly felt the ground under my feet, and understood only from that minute what it means to live and breathe. And if tomorrow I would awaken and suddenly see that it had all been a dream, that my former self and the ground under my feet did not exist and never had existed, I would kill myself, because one who has breathed the air of the mountaintop cannot return in resignation and sit beside the ditch.”25
Throughout his life, Jabotinsky tried to draw parallels between himself and Herzl. Herzl appears numerous times in Story of My Life in various treatments, narrated in a serious as well as a jocular tone. For example, Jabotinsky relates what would appear to be an embarrassing scandal: Herzl threw him off the stage at the Congress. In the letter to Chukovsky cited above, Jabotinsky records the negative reception of his speech (“they ‘whistled’ at me”).
What Jabotinsky says transpired was the following: Jabotinsky devoted his speech at the Congress to a defense of Herzl’s travels to Russia and his meeting with Count Plehve, the hated interior minister. According to Jabotinsky’s account in Story of My Life, it was taboo to speak on the subject, and everyone knew it. When he raised the issue, a general tumult arose. In response to the noise in the hall, Herzl came out from the back and asked Weizmann what the young man was saying in Russian. Weizmann responded, “Quatsch. [Nonsense.]” And Herzl announced, “Ihre Zeit ist um. [Your time is up.]”26
Of course, the story reflects Jabotinsky’s preoccupations in 1936: his competition with Weizmann and his desire to underscore his love for Herzl, even facing the latter’s wrath in doing so. Nonetheless, it seems possible that Jabotinsky invented the story “from whole cloth,” as Michael Stanislawski has argued, although his letter to Chukovsky accurately describes the catcalls that he received.27
But Jabotinsky did not stop there. He continues in Story of My Life, solemnly announcing that
Herzl made a colossal impression on me—this word is no exaggeration, no other description would fit: colossal. And I am not one of those who will easily bow to any personality—in general, I do not remember, out of all the experiences I had in my life, any man who impressed me either before Herzl or after him about whom I felt that, truly, there stands before me a man of destiny, a prophet and leader by the grace of God deserving to be followed even through error. . . . And even today it seems to me that I hear his voice ringing in my ears, as he swore to all of us: “Im eshkahech Yerushalayim . . .” (“If I forget thee, Jerusalem . . .”).28
Jabotinsky never stopped trying to appropriate Herzl’s authority, often asserting that he alone retained a commitment to Herzl’s political Zionism, with its emphasis on a political breakthrough. Though in 1904 he embraced “Synthetic Zionism,” which included support for both political Zionism and practical settlement, by 1925 he was emphasizing his attachment to Herzl and calling his new party Revisionism (HaTzoHar), meaning a revision of Herzl’s original “Basel” Zionism. In a 1926 policy statement, What Do Revisionists Want?, Jabotinsky explicitly announced that he had embraced Herzl’s legacy. “With a firm belief, we call on the Zionist public to renew Herzl’s tradition—the energetic, systematic and peaceful political struggle to attain our demands.”29 And what were these demands? “The first goal of Zionism is the creation of a Jewish majority in Palestine, East and West of the Jordan [River]. That is not the last final goal of the Zionist movement which has several broader ideals, such as the solution of the Jewish Question in the whole world and the creation of a new Jewish culture.”30
In different ways Jabotinsky developed the image of father-son, mentor-student, and leader and successor, as though he photoshopped a picture of himself standing next to Herzl. In all these permutations, Jabotinsky conceived Herzl as a Nietzschean, one who exploited every moment and embodied the qualities of the ideal man. Although Herzl was superhuman and therefore impossible to emulate fully, nonetheless Jabotinsky believed that it was our task to try to do so. In fact, Herzl is the Nietzschean figure who inspires precisely because his example is unattainable. The virtues he possesses include confidence, discipline, ambition, prophetic vision, an ability