Vladimir Jabotinsky's Russian Years, 1900-1925. Brian J. Horowitz
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of Zionism and the revival of modern Hebrew—the home of Ahad-Ha’am, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, Yehoshua Ravnitsky, Semyon Dubnov, and Joseph Klausner.6 There was a sizeable Jewish intelligentsia involved in journalism, politics, and culture. Like many young people of the fin de siècle, Vladimir was not initially attracted to politics; his first love was literature. In his teens, he translated Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” into Russian. Just before finishing high school, Jabotinsky left for Bern and then Rome, where he spent three years studying at the university, while supporting himself by writing for Odessa’s newspapers. In 1900, at age twenty, he returned to Odessa. That is where his life as a Zionist began.
In 1904, Jabotinsky moved to St. Petersburg, the capital city in the northwest. It was a very different place, with a smaller Jewish population due to special anti-Jewish restrictions. The Jews who had permission to live there—rich notables and highly educated professionals—gave Jabotinsky a perspective on class levels and power. Jabotinsky lived there illegally from 1904 to 1907, and during the critical Revolution of 1905 he wrote and edited Russia’s first Zionist newspaper in Russian, Rassvet (known also at times as Evreiskaia Zhizn’).
During this “Petersburg period,” Jabotinsky and other nonsocialist Zionists were drawn to Russian liberalism. He witnessed the rise of Russian and Polish nationalism, and observed how difficult it was for minorities to gain power via the democratic process, through elections to the First and Second Dumas (parliaments) (1906–1907). He tried to design a system of autonomy for Jews and other minorities, a system that would guarantee social control over resources, and innovations in education. He was involved in the League for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jews of Russia, and participated in the so-called Cherikov Affair (1907–1909), in which some Russian intellectuals singled Jews out as alien to Russian culture. From 1909 to 1910, Jabotinsky traveled to Istanbul to work as an editor of Zionist journals during the Young Turk Revolution. He returned to Russia in time to witness the Mendel Beilis Affair (1911–1913), in which the government put Beilis, a Jewish factory worker, on trial for ritual murder.
During World War I, Jabotinsky joined Joseph Trumpeldor, Pinkhas Rutenberg, and Meir Grossman, all Russian Jews, and formed the Jewish Legion, a Jewish fighting unit under British command. The Legion brought him to Palestine in 1918, but Britain decommissioned his unit shortly afterward, and he was left unemployed. In 1920, he was arrested for defending Jerusalem during the Arab Riots. The British government sentenced him to three years in the Acre prison, but he was soon released, and shortly afterward, Chaim Weizmann appointed him to the Zionist Executive and then sent him to America as a representative of Keren Hayesod, the Zionist fund for the purchase of land in Palestine. After Jabotinsky’s resignation from the Zionist Executive in 1923, he moved to Berlin and then Paris. From 1923 to 1925, he traveled around Europe giving talks and laying the groundwork for his own political party, HaTzoHar, which he started in 1925. Though small at first, with few members, it grew into a popular opposition party within Zionism. In 1935, as much out of frustration as hope, Jabotinsky withdrew his party from the World Zionist Organization and established the New Zionist Organization (NZO). Jabotinsky died in 1940, in Hunter, New York, where he was inspecting a Betar camp.
For the intellectual historian, this project has opened many paths: Russia with its great literary tradition, the 1905 Revolution, and its period of democratic experimentation (1907–1916), Zionism and Jewish politics, the Russian emigration, and then the explosive historical contexts of the first half of the twentieth century (World War I, the interwar period, and then World War II). It seemed to me that no one yet had been able to bring all these dimensions together properly or find the right emphasis.
This book’s genre is intellectual biography. It traces the development of Jabotinsky’s Zionism in the context of his ideological, personal, and political experiences. In the history of Zionist thought, I view Jabotinsky as representing the end of one phase of Zionism and the beginning of another. He comes to the movement at the close of the age of theoretical Zionism, which had its origins in the Russian Empire and produced such inspired thinkers as Leon Pinsker, Ahad-Ha’am, and Micah Yosef Berdichevsky. In the next period, Jabotinsky joined Yehiel Chlenov, Avram Idel’son, Menachem Ussishkin, and others who dealt with practical politics in Russia. He began organizing Zionist groups, publishing literature about Zionism, running for a Duma seat, and participating in various political conferences.
What I have not done in this book is recount Jabotinsky’s thoughts and actions as they evolved day by day. Two biographies, one by Joseph Schechtman and the other by Shmuel Katz, do exactly that.7 Instead, I provide arguments and evidence to explain the arc of Jabotinsky’s development. Therefore, although the facts of his life matter, this book is not strictly speaking a biography. Ideas and contexts take precedence; I include details about his family, but sparingly, and only when they are relevant to his ideas.
In terms of sources, this book draws heavily on Jabotinsky’s large Russian-language oeuvre, which, though once thought to be lost, is now available.8 Similarly, I have immersed myself in Russian-language publications by and about Zionism in Russia. In this context one may mention the Russian-language Zionist newspaper Rassvet.9 There are also large archival holdings in the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv, as well as many sources on Jabotinsky in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, and English. Another deep well of materials is the extensive secondary scholarship on Jewish politics in Russia, especially scholarship that has appeared since the opening of Soviet archives.
My project relies on Michael Stanislawski’s earlier book, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle. Professor Stanislawski shows that Jabotinsky knew little about nationalism, much less Zionism, until he was nearly twenty years old. But Professor Stanislawski left it to others to figure out Jabotinsky’s development once he did embrace Zionism. That has been my task, and it drew my attention to a body of rare and unused sources about Russian Zionism and Zionists. Those sources have fueled this book.
Disagreements among historians are common and perhaps inevitable. Although Michael Stanislawski’s insights are important—that Jabotinsky’s autobiography diverged from the historical facts, that his Jewish education occurred belatedly, and that he was influenced by the fin de siècle culture that he encountered in Rome—they should not be overestimated.10 If we are interested in Jabotinsky primarily because of his Zionist ideas and activities, we need to focus on the history of Zionism in Russia and Russian politics and culture at the time when he participated in the Zionist movement. The cosmopolitan culture that influenced him before he joined the movement is of secondary significance. However, we should pay attention to Stanislawski’s insight that in his autobiographical writings, Jabotinsky mixed true events with myths.11 It cannot be doubted that Jabotinsky had a penchant for exaggeration. For these reasons, I use his autobiography with caution. However, rather than reject Jabotinsky’s fabrications, I analyze them as part of his political strategy, and I locate Jabotinsky within narratives that are larger and more complex than his sympathizers would allow. His stories are useful in helping to piece together a composite understanding of Jabotinsky against the backdrop of twentieth-century events.
For many years, ideology and tendentiousness characterized scholarship on Jabotinsky and Revisionism.12 Recently, however, a number of serious scholars of Zionism and Jewish history have attempted to go beyond the polemics of popular political history (Labor versus Revisionism) and take seriously Jabotinsky’s complicated position in the Russian ferment. Avi Bareli and Pinhas Ginossar have assembled a fine book of essays, In the Eye of the Storm (2004). Leonid Katsis and Elena Tolstaya have also published a collection of essays on the Russian Jabotinsky (2013), while Dimitry Shumsky, a professor of Zionism at the Hebrew University, has written a good deal about Jabotinsky’s theories of national autonomy.13 In his latest book, Beyond the Nation-State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (2018), Shumsky argues in favor of a tradition of Jewish autonomism, which endorsed sharing Palestine with its Arab inhabitants. Jabotinsky’s contradictory pronouncements, especially about the relevance of political autonomy for minorities, can be compiled to show his respect for tolerance and giving full rights to the Arabs in Palestine.14
Svetlana