Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz
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Isaiah Berlin’s well-known dichotomy). But I also found a brilliant political tactician who played the weak hand of Zionism in the early twentieth century astoundingly well. Whatever one’s politics, it is undeniable that Jabotinsky made a successful career as a political leader with little in the way of connections or advantage. Much of what he attained was the result of relentless commitment and shrewd tactics. Although he found himself in a crowded race, he was not afraid of change or contradiction, and he had a gift for changing tactics and outwitting rivals. His rise was neither quick nor easy, but by the mid-1930s, he stood among Zionism’s top leaders, with Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann.
Although he was the head of his party, HaTzoHar (Zionist Revisionists), one should ask what he really achieved, since he never became head of state or held operative political power. His outsize image deflates considerably when one compares him to Ben-Gurion, for example. At the same time, many have claimed that his struggles for Jewish sovereignty and Jewish dignity changed real people in innumerable ways.1 He became a popular figure worldwide, but especially in Poland and Palestine in the mid- to late-1930s.
I became interested in this subject because I wanted to answer important questions. Was Jabotinsky a liberal posing as a reactionary, a reactionary with liberal residue, a democrat with dictatorial leanings, or a dictator with a nostalgia for democracy? I have tried to explain his zigzag trajectory by claiming that Jabotinsky should be understood as a political actor in the early decades of the twentieth century. In fact, we must connect Jabotinsky, and Zionism more generally, to the political history of that period, with its displays of power, political performances, cultural innovations, and emphasis on destruction of the old world. We should shift the focus from coincidence—Jabotinsky’s policies happen to share qualities with the radical right—to an acknowledgement that he consciously shaped his self-image and conceived his own trajectory.2
Jabotinsky’s right-wing politics stimulated my curiosity: how did the young man, a committed liberal, become associated with the political right? After dismissing the initial falsehood that antisemitism prevents Jews from supporting the political right, I wondered about Jabotinsky’s shift. When, where, and how did he move from the left of center, from liberalism, to militant Zionism, and almost Jewish fascism? What was the connection with his experience in Russia?
I discovered that he was strongly influenced by the Russian context. In “Reactionary,” an article from 1912, Jabotinsky confesses that he learned a great deal from Polish ethno-nationalists.3 While such extremists were intolerant, they nevertheless provided lessons in how to liberate one’s own nation from the yoke of another. In addition, Jewish weakness taught him lessons. To be a sovereign nation, one needs strength—an army prepared to use force—as well as a majority status in the population. Jabotinsky remembered these truths in his pronouncements about Jewish Palestine (“The Iron Wall” [1923]) while also expressing “liberal” principles, such as political autonomy for national minorities.
Jabotinsky differed in profound ways from Ben-Gurion and the Second Aliyah representatives in Palestine, so one naturally wonders what might explain the difference. It seems that Jabotinsky’s Zionism emerged from a different experience than Labor Zionism. Jabotinsky’s political views were bound up with a European urban cultural experience, not the pastoral dreams of the Second Aliyah. The additional years he spent in tsarist Russia inculcated a different position toward Palestine, British rule, and the Arabs; he took a tougher line on all three. By comparison, Second Aliyah members left Russia around 1905. Jabotinsky’s extra years in Russia affected who he became, because he saw the rise of nationalism throughout Europe.
Nonetheless, I show that Jabotinsky was not the embodiment of the statist idea (mamlachiut), as was Ben-Gurion. In fact, his pronouncements on the role of the state and minority rights come closer to Russian populism (belief in the Jewish people) or American-style civic engagement. He maintained that the Jewish right to Palestine would be secured on the basis of a Jewish majority, not absolute control over the state’s political apparatus. From this it followed that minority nations have certain rights and responsibilities. Since Jews were not a majority, and he accepted (at least potentially) the need for violence to attain his goals, Jabotinsky appears different, further to the political right, than the liberal that he imagined himself to be.
Moral questions also whetted my interest. Can Revisionist Zionism be morally defended? How? As I read and researched, I came to see that many of Jabotinsky’s pronouncements and attitudes seemed ethically questionable. However, the historical events of World War II and the Holocaust complicate judgments regarding Jabotinsky’s belligerence vis-à-vis the Palestinian Arabs. The fact that the world closed its doors to Jewish immigration in the 1930s, when Eastern European Jewry needed a refuge, and that England largely bowed to Arab wishes to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine, contributed to the deaths of many thousands.4 In a crisis like that unfolding in Europe of the 1930s, Jabotinsky’s struggle for open immigration to Palestine feels appropriate. Facing such a dilemma, how do moral experts distinguish right from wrong?
Posing the problem in such a way suggests a related question: were there other alternatives for Jews in Palestine besides building a nation state? Here, one should recall that Jabotinsky planned for Palestinian Arabs to remain in Eretz Yisrael, but under the condition that they were a minority. They would have civic rights, perhaps even national rights, but they would lack sovereignty. They would lose their former majority status and have a subordinate political position, though their lives might improve economically. Again, what would a moral philosopher say? Should such a fate be regarded as an earth-shattering tragedy for a people, or something less terrible? These turned out to be difficult questions.
In addition, the history of the period inspired me. Scholars have written so much about contemporary Zionism, but few delve into its origins in Russia. In fact, there are only a few reliable books about Russian Zionism, all written decades ago.5 Can we expand that knowledge by consulting new sources? Moreover, scholars of Jabotinsky usually focused on the later period of his political life (1925–1940), and neglected his development as a Zionist in Russia. Maybe they lacked Russian (Jabotinsky’s primary linguistic instrument) or knowledge of Russian culture. In any case, as someone who has been studying Russia for decades, I thought I could go deeper than the superficial platitudes about Russia that one hears repeated in any Jabotinsky biopic. It seemed worth remembering that Russia was one of the centers of European culture in the epoch before World War I. Russia was at the forefront in dance, music, poetry, and art. But what about politics? There, too, the revolutionary atmosphere produced a plethora of thinkers and theories. Jewish national life existed in the Russian Empire: the masses lived there; the rabbis, laymen, and women had created a Jewish civilization, with schools, synagogues, clubs, and organizations. It was a large, organized community, well aware of its potential and vulnerabilities. Indeed, all that was needed for the emergence of a national movement was a spark. Western education and acculturation, combined with an awareness of antisemitism, ignited it.
Jabotinsky’s Russia was very different from the Russia portrayed in Cold War propaganda and in Jewish religious sources. Russia acquainted Jabotinsky with writers from around the world—Shakespeare, Dante, Edgar Allen Poe, the Russian classic poets, Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, and many more. Jabotinsky himself was a writer of some repute, a poet of considerable talent. Russia was also the site of Russian-Jewish journalism, the home of Odesskie Novosti, Evreiskaia Zhizn’ (Rassvet), Russkie Vedomosti, and the other journals where Jabotinsky got a political education and learned the discourse of politics and Zionism. Russia was the home of fellow Zionists, friends and foes, with whom he became involved and from whom he learned a great deal. Any attempt to understand Jabotinsky without Russia will be futile.
The story of Jabotinsky’s development in Russia begins in Odessa, situated on the Black Sea. It was an ethnically mixed town populated primarily by Greeks, Italians, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews. It boasted a rich cultural tapestry that included Western opera and literatures in Southern Russian dialect, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. The city’s Jews were involved in a variety of businesses—Jabotinsky’s father bought and sold grain. In a sense, Odessa represents a paradox. The city was a multilinguistic universe